Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Conceptual foundations of early Critical Theory
- 2 Benjamin, Adorno, and the decline of the aura
- 3 The dialectic of enlightenment
- 4 The marriage of Marx and Freud
- 5 Dialectics and the revolutionary impulse
- 6 “The dead speaking of stones and stars”
- 7 Critique, state, and economy
- 8 The transcendental turn
- 9 The politics of Critical Theory
- 10 Critical Theory and the analysis of contemporary mass society
- 11 Critical Theory and poststructuralism
- 12 The very idea of a critical social science
- 13 A social pathology of reason
- Select bibliography
- Index
2 - Benjamin, Adorno, and the decline of the aura
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Conceptual foundations of early Critical Theory
- 2 Benjamin, Adorno, and the decline of the aura
- 3 The dialectic of enlightenment
- 4 The marriage of Marx and Freud
- 5 Dialectics and the revolutionary impulse
- 6 “The dead speaking of stones and stars”
- 7 Critique, state, and economy
- 8 The transcendental turn
- 9 The politics of Critical Theory
- 10 Critical Theory and the analysis of contemporary mass society
- 11 Critical Theory and poststructuralism
- 12 The very idea of a critical social science
- 13 A social pathology of reason
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
In 1931, three years after the publication of The Origin of German Tragic Drama, the obscure masterpiece that he had intended as his habilitation thesis, Walter Benjamin wrote about it to the Swiss editor, Max Rychner:
[W]hat I did not know at the time of its composition became more and more clear to me soon after: that, from my very particular position on the philosophy of language, there exists a connection - however strained and problematic - to the viewpoint of dialectical materialism.
The location of that connection – whether, indeed, it can be said to exist at all – remains deeply problematic. Nor should this be in the least surprising. What could be further removed from what one would normally understand by “materialism” than Benjamin’s early writings, with their predilection for mystical theories of language and unblushingly antiscientific metaphysics? To put them together with the ideas of Marx and Engels can only, it would seem, undermine the latter: the connection appears at all plausible only if Marxism, its scientific pretensions notwithstanding, rests upon a mystical view of the world.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory , pp. 40 - 56Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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