Today's Topics:
Re: BLAKE & BENJAMIN?
Re: BLAKE & BENJAMIN?
Re: BLAKE & BENJAMIN?
Re: BLAKE & BENJAMIN?
Re: BLAKE & BENJAMIN?
Re: BLAKE & BENJAMIN?
Re: BLAKE & BENJAMIN?
Re: BLAKE & BENJAMIN?
Re: BLAKE & BENJAMIN?
two are better than one: Manchester
Blake Archive Update
RE: Blake Archive Update
Re: BLAKE & BENJAMIN?
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Date: Tue, 5 May 1998 11:03:30 -0400
From: bert@kvvi.net (Bert Stern)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: BLAKE & BENJAMIN?
Message-Id:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Ralph,
You might find interesting also this passage from Susan
Buck-Morss's "The Dialectics of Seeing" (p. 13):
"If [Benjamin] rejected from the start the Hegelian affirmation of
history itself as meaningful, he believed the meaning which lay within
objects included their history most decisively. . . . . This qusi-magical
cognitive attitude toward historical matter remained basic to Bejamin's
understanding of materialism. Scholem recorded his 'extreme forulation':
'A philosphy that does not include the possibility of soothsaying fro;m
coffee grounds and cannot explicate it cannot be a true philosphy.' As
Bloch has commented, Benjam proceeded 'as if the world were language.' The
objects were 'mute.' But their expressive (for Benjamin, 'lingusitic')
potential became legible to the attentive philsopher who 'named' them,
translating this potential into the human language of words, and thereby
bringing them to speech."
For Benjamin's own words on the subject, you might want to look at
the essays "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man" and "On the
Mimetic Faculty," both in
Bert Stern
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Date: Tue, 5 May 1998 11:10:35 -0700 (PDT)
From: Ralph Dumain
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: BLAKE & BENJAMIN?
Message-Id: <2.2.16.19980505130702.2d0750ca@pop.igc.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Thanks Bert. I believe those Benjamin essays were referenced in the Jay
book I cited. I have put these items on my reading list. Luckily, I have
REFLECTIONS.
Though Benjamin has been all the rage of late, I could not figure out what
he was all about and I saw no reason to look into him until now. Only
reading about Adorno's relation to Benjamin has piqued my interest, esp.
this business about Adamic language. Perhaps there is some interesting
affinity to Blake to be explored. If so, there must be more critical
literature connecting Blake and Benjamin.
I passed up one chance to buy Buck-Morss' THE DIALECTICS OF SEEING on sale,
but it is still available. You think I should get it?
At 11:03 AM 5/5/98 -0400, Bert Stern wrote:
>You might find interesting also this passage from Susan
>Buck-Morss's "The Dialectics of Seeing" (p. 13):
>For Benjamin's own words on the subject, you might want to look at
>the essays "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man" and "On the
>Mimetic Faculty," both in
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Date: Tue, 5 May 1998 17:20:13 -0400
From: bert@kvvi.net (Bert Stern)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: BLAKE & BENJAMIN?
Message-Id:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Ralph,
From what I know of your itnerests I think that you SHOULD get--or
at least look at--the Buck-Morss book. It's an attempt to reconstruct
Benjamin's Arcades Project, which was itself an attempt to anlyze the
foundations of consumerism, or, in Buck-Morss's words, to take "seriously
the debris of mass culture as the source of philosphical truth" (compare
Benjamin's own remark about how "A philosphy that does not include the
possibility of soothsaying from
coffee grounds and cannot explicate it cannot be a true philosphy."
You might also enjoy Susan A. Handelman's work. In she extends that work. How all this may
finally bear on Blake I can't say, probably less as a matter of influence
than as a kind of parallel play.
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Date: Tue, 5 May 1998 21:29:07 -0700 (PDT)
From: Ralph Dumain
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: BLAKE & BENJAMIN?
Message-Id: <2.2.16.19980505232530.2e5f88b2@pop.igc.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
At 05:20 PM 5/5/98 -0400, Bert Stern wrote:
>From what I know of your itnerests I think that you SHOULD get--or
>at least look at--the Buck-Morss book. It's an attempt to reconstruct
>Benjamin's Arcades Project.....
I have WALTER BENJAMIN'S PASSAGES by Pierre Missac (MIT Press, 1995), which
I haven't read either. Any comments on this one?
>You might also enjoy Susan A. Handelman's work. In Moses: the Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory
>she finds parallels between "ancient modes of rabbinic exegesis and recent
>trends in modern literary criticism, especialy as practicee by secularized
>Jewish thinkers such as Freud, Derrida, and Harold Bloom."
She is talking only about parallels, right, rather than direct influence?
Did any of these three seriously study the Talmudic tradition and take their
inspiration from it? There are a lot of Jews around who know nothing about
the Talmud, including me. But parallels I can believe.
>In the more
>recent Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in
>Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas"> she extends that work. How all this may
>finally bear on Blake I can't say, probably less as a matter of influence
>than as a kind of parallel play.
Which reminds me. If ancient hermeneutic techniques can be used for modern
purposes, this may have implications for the meaning of the immersion of
modern people in archaic belief systems. For example, this theme that keeps
cropping up about Blake's relation to the Kabbalah. I don't do this
professionally, so I have no vested interest to defend, but it seems to me
that the intrinsic job of the critic is to attempt some kind of causal
explanation where appropriate. Without some twisting of causes and
consequences, there is no real criticism as a remotely "scientific"
enterprise; there would only be an explanation of one mythology by means of
another. So the linkage of Blake to the Kabbalah is only half of the
intellectual battle. To attempt to absorb Blake into s