[Download] "Giving to the World Its Own Magic Back: Language, Mimesis and Art in Walter Benjamin's Thought/ Dunyaya Buyusunu Geri Vermek: Walter Benjamin'in Dusuncesinde Dil, Mimesis Ve Sanat (Report)" by Interactions " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Giving to the World Its Own Magic Back: Language, Mimesis and Art in Walter Benjamin's Thought/ Dunyaya Buyusunu Geri Vermek: Walter Benjamin'in Dusuncesinde Dil, Mimesis Ve Sanat (Report)
- Author : Interactions
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 98 KB
Description
The criticism of modernity is the leitmotiv of Walter Benjamin's thought. In its most acknowledged sense, modernity is a process of changing the relationship between man and nature radically. Its basis, as a scientific, social and political project, lies in Descartes' mathematical and dualistic worldview. This world view, depending on a set of dichotomies such as human and nature, the sacred and the profane, the self and the other, is established through the application of the principle of destroying the magic of nature; that is to say, cleaning all mystical, ethical and aesthetical elements from all realms of life. In this respect, the project of modernity is, in fact, a paradigmatic change; to describe it with Foucault's terminology, this break appears in the order of discourse. Foucault thinks that the order of discourse of the seventeenth century, which he calls The Classical Age, is established by an epistemic change in the structure of language and the order of discourse (43). Accordingly, the modern episteme is constituted through the substitution of the order of the binary representation of artificial mathematical languages for the order of ternary resemblance of the Renaissance. This substitution, in fact, implies the hegemony of the scientific episteme; the most dangerous results of such an uncontrolled hegemony in the political realm appeared and experienced by humanity throughout the catastrophes of Nazi regime and the atomic bomb in the first half of the twentieth century. Having lived and written between the two world wars, Walter Benjamin, before Foucault, is a thinker who conceives of modernity as the linguistic grounds and describes it as the crisis of experience. For modernity leads to a gap between the sacred and profane, Benjamin describes it as "the increasing atrophy of experience [die zunehmende Verkummerung der Erfahrung]" and sees this as the sign of a catastrophe coming very soon ("Uber einige Motive", GW I.2 611).