Overview of all pages with the tags #Walter Benjamin

Critical authoritarianism

November 8, 2016 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Immanent critique WHENEVER APPROACHING ANY PHENOMENON, Adorno’s procedure is one of immanent dialectical critique. The phenomenon is treated as not accidental or arbitrary but as a necessary form of appearance that points beyond itself, indicating conditions of possibility for change. It is a phenomenon of the necessity for change. The conditions of possibility for change indicated by the phenomenon in question are explored immanently, from within. The possibility for change is indicated by a phenomenon’s self-contradictions, which unfold from within itself, from its own movement, and develop from within its historical moment. [Read More]

Article The Platypus Review /20th Century Marx Marxism The Platypus Review Theodor W. Adorno Walter Benjamin Authoritarianism Authoritarian Personality

Art And The Commodity Form, London

October 17, 2016 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Rex Dunn (Writer) Zhoe Granger (Director, Arcadia Missa) Peter Osborne (Professor Of Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University) Description If it is true that the ‘commodity-structure’ (Lukács) is the defining feature of modern capitalism down through the present, then it stands to reason that it has no less impacted the way art is produced, consumed, circulated, and exchanged. This shift in art’s character happened both objectively (e. [Read More]

Art Commodity Walter Benjamin

Horkheimer in 1943 on party and class

January 12, 2016 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Without a socialist party, there is no class struggle, only rackets HORKHEIMER’S REMARKABLE ESSAY “On the sociology of class relations” (1943)1 is continuous with Adorno’s contemporaneous “Reflections on class theory” (1942) as well as his own “The authoritarian state” (1940/42), which similarly mark the transformation of Marx and Engels’s famous injunction in the Communist Manifesto that “history is the history of class struggles.” All of these writings were inspired by Walter Benjamin’s “On the concept of history” (AKA “Theses on the philosophy of history,” 1940), which registered history’s fundamental crisis. [Read More]

/20th Century Capitalism Communist party Critical theory Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel History Vladimir Lenin Liberalism Karl Marx Marxism Max Horkheimer Political party Socialism Socialist Socioeconomic SYRIZA Theodor W. Adorno Walter Benjamin

Art, Culture, and Politics

Marxist Approaches

April 30, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Panel held as part of the third annual Platypus International Convention, on Saturday, April 30, 2011, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element A transcript of Bret Schneider’s remarks appears in Platypus Review #37 Panelists Omair Hussain Lucy Parker Pac Pobric Bret Schneider Description After its apparent exhaustion as a project of social transformation, Marxism seems to remain alive as a cultural and hermeneutic endeavor. [Read More]

Platypus International Convention 2011 Aesthetics Art Contemporary art Culture Leon Trotsky Marxism Politics Jacques Rancière Theodor W. Adorno Leon Trotsky Walter Benjamin

Egypt, or, history's invidious comparisons

1979, 1789, and 1848

March 1, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE UPRISING IN EGYPT, which followed soon after the toppling of the old regime in Tunisia, succeeded in bringing down Hosni Mubarak on February 11, the 32nd anniversary to the day of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. Already, before this timely coincidence, comparisons between the Iranian Revolution and the revolts gripping the Arab world had started to be made. But other historical similarities offered themselves: the various “color revolutions” in Eastern Europe and former Soviet Central Asian states and Lebanon in recent years, and the collapse of Communism in the Soviet bloc and beyond (the former Yugoslavia) starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. [Read More]

1789 1848 1917 Bonapartism Egypt Hosni Mubarak Iran Islamic Republic Karl Marx Marxism Revolution Walter Benjamin

The relevance of critical theory to art today

January 1, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2010, Platypus hosted a panel entitled “The Relevance of Critical Theory to Art Today” moderated by Chris Mansour at The New School for Social Research in New York. The panel consisted of Philosophy Professors J.M. Bernstein (The New School), Lydia Goehr (Columbia University), and Gregg Horowitz (Pratt Institute and Vanderbilt University), and Chris Cutrone (Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Member of Platypus. [Read More]

Art Marxism Art and culture Theodor W. Adorno Leon Trotsky Walter Benjamin

The Marxist hypothesis

A response to Alain Badiou's 'communist hypothesis'

November 6, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society • Other languages: Ελληνικά

Against Badiou ALAIN BADIOU’S RECENT BOOK (2010) is titled with the phrase promoted by his and Slavoj Žižek’s work for the last few years, “the communist hypothesis.”1 This is also the title of Badiou’s 2008 essay in New Left Review2 on the historical significance of the 2007 election of Nicolas Sarkozy to the French Presidency.3 There, Badiou explains his approach to communism as follows: What is the communist hypothesis? [Read More]

Alain Badiou Communism Karl Marx Marxism Slavoj Žižek Theodor W. Adorno Walter Benjamin

1933

The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century: Toward a Theory of Historical Regression

November 18, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society • Other languages: Deutsch, Ελληνικά

ON APRIL 18, 2009, the Platypus Affiliated Society conducted the following panel discussion at the Left Forum Conference at Pace University in New York City. The panel was organized around four significant moments in the progressive separation of theory and practice over the course of the 20th century: 2001 (Spencer A. Leonard), 1968 (Atiya Khan), 1933 (Richard Rubin), and 1917 (Chris Cutrone). The following is an edited transcript of the 1933 presentation by Richard Rubin. [Read More]

Left Forum Leon Trotsky Walter Benjamin

notes on Adorno in 1968-69

May 26, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

I am writing with some very brief notes on Adorno’s last writings from 1968-69, the “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” “Resignation,” “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society? (AKA “Is Marx Obsolete?”),” and the Adorno-Marcuse correspondence of 1969. The center of Adorno’s critique of the 1960s New Left was their romantic opposition to capitalism, found, for example, in their desideratum of the unity of theory and practice. Rather, Adorno asserted the progressive-emancipatory aspect of the separation of theory and practice. [Read More]

/20th Century Chris Cutrone crisis critical theory Discussion György Lukács Karl Korsch Vladimir Lenin Karl Marx Marxism Rosa Luxemburg the Left Theodor W. Adorno Leon Trotsky Walter Benjamin

notes on Lukács

March 9, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

I am writing with some brief, partial notes from our discussion at UChicago at yesterday’s (Sun. 3/8/09) reading group, on several essays from György Lukács’s 1923 book History and Class Consciousness. I want to emphasize and discuss in particular a couple of passages, from the (original, 1922) Preface, and the essay “What is Orthodox Marxism?” (1919). Specifically, I wish to discuss Lukács’s use of categories, “materialist dialectics,” and his meaning of Marxism as a “method,” which might otherwise prove confusing or tricky. [Read More]

Chris Cutrone Discussion György Lukács Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Hegelian Karl Korsch Vladimir Lenin Karl Marx Marxism Theodor W. Adorno Walter Benjamin