Suchergebnisse

Moving between autobiographical and biographical reflections on Lukács and the embeddedness of lives, his and briefly mine, in historical time, the persistent influence of his readings of culture and questions of form, science and a philosophy of praxis is to be reflected on. There is, in some quarters, a dominant Lukácsian reading of modernism, which he apparently dismisses as fragmentary and debilitating. However, there is much to be said about the ways his writings, especially the ones from the 1920s, leave traces and recurrently propel inquiry lines in less discussed areas: namely, thermal analyses of alienation and reification as picked up in Frankfurt School and Situationist thinking; synthetic color production, and communist self-activity. To observe this persistent generativity in the name of self-organization and dialectics is to value something under attack in the revival of anti-Semitism and anti-Communism in Hungary today.

Abstract
Avant-garde filmmakers in the Soviet Union argued over the merits of the played film and the documentary film. They argued about the duration of shots, long or short. They questioned what constituted filmic material, camera subjectivity, the objective fact and whether film extended the eyes, and the capacity to see, or whether it wielded a fist, augmenting or bashing feelings. Shub contributed to these discussions, not least through her own film work, produced out of a combination of commitment and necessity. This paper traces these discussions and Shub's role within them through a focus on two objects and the way in which they come to appear in film and film-discourse: strawberries and cream. The strawberries are drawn initially from Shklovsky's comments on the inequities of US agriculture in his Journey to the Land of Movies (1926) and the cream stems from Eisenstein's mechanical separator in The Old and the New (1929). Shub's particular take on the object in her film work will emerge through the dialectical tensions of two objects.

A critical overview of the contribution of German Marxist Robert Kurz (1943–2012), focussing in particular on The Black Book of Capitalism: A Farewell to the Market Economy (first ed. 1999) and War for World Order: The End of Sovereignty and the Transformations of Imperialism in the Age of Globalisation (2003). This review explores the genesis and the main tenets of Kurz's theory – especially his concept of value, the automatic subject, crisis and anti-Semitism – and tracks how they are mobilised in his writings over time. It also touches on the legacy of these ideas in political groups such as the Anti-Germans.

This paper seeks an urban poetics under the pressures of flux, polyglot babble and the rise of technoculture. In so doing it traces the intertwinements of aesthetics and politics as they manifest over the last 150 years. Charles Baudelaire's poetry is characterised as a delirious response to the delirium of capitalist modernity, in which 'words rise up', as he puts it, but it is a also a barometer, which measures the degrees of entwinement of aesthetics and revolutionary politics in the subsequent years, for one in Walter Benjamin's interpretation in the 1930s and in the wild translations of the poet by Sean Bonney in 2008 in the collection 'Baudelaire in English'.

Under the influence of Freud's dream analysis, Benjamin writes down a dream about Goethe's house, which he has visited before and in whose visitor's book he finds his name 'already entered in big, unruly, childish scrawl' and at whose dinner table he finds places set for his relatives, ancestors and descendants. This leads him to exclaim: when the 'house of our life…is under assault and enemy bombs are taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations!'. Benjamin's other homes, his exile homes, real and those imaged—such as the cave-like arcades—are considered in this essay as repositories of 'perverse antiquities' and spaces inhabited by ghosts not just the ghosts of Goethe, but of friends who committed suicide in protest at war. These ghost-filled homes are set alongside those of a fellow exile, Kurt Schwitters, who built for himself three 'Merzbau' home-museums, each one as incomplete as Benjamin's Arcades Project, each one wrecked by war, like that project too. Schwitters addresses the ghosts of the cities head on in his stories and artworks from exile—these are read alongside the effort to produce a safe domestic space, at whose centre is the death mask of his son.

Introduces correspondence between social & political philosophers Theodor Adorno & Herbert Marcuse from 1969 that relates to the German Student Movement including their experiences & responses to it. The context of the creation of a lecture series for Marcuse during a June visit to Frankfurt, a summer spent in Italy, & the heightened student activism in Frankfurt are presented. Marcuse's position as a "prophet" of the student revolutionary movement is contrasted to students' rejection of the apolitical theorists for theory's sake such as Adorno & Horkheimer. Tensions between professors, protests & boycotts over university reforms, Adorno's cancellation of lectures, & Marcuse's cancellation of his Frankfurt visit conclude the review. R. Rodriguez