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List of contents
Introduction: Perverse Antiques
1. Criticism, Transdisciplinarity and Transcriticism: Walter Benjamin and the Kantian Tradition
i. Literary Criticism and Aesthetic Judgement
ii. Transcriticism and Non-Synthetic Judgement
iii. Contingent Criticism and Teleological Judgement
2. Weak Messianism in German Romanticism
i. Literary Criticism as Messianic Reflection
ii. Weak Messianism: Formalism, Affirmationism, Singularity
iii. Aestheticentricism and Problems of the Romantic Imagination
3. Strong Aesthetics in Goethe’s Tender Empiricism
i. Aesthetics of Science: Critique of Sensibility
ii. Teleological Pessimism: Ephemerality and Multiplicity
4. Pure Content: the Ephemerality of Colour
i. Goethe’s Colour Theory: Nature
ii. Benjamin’s Colour Theory: Phantasy
iii. Expressionist Colour (I): Grünewald and Marées
iv. Expressionist Colour (II): Klee and Turner
5. Pure Expression: the Violence of Criticism
i. Translating the Pure Word
ii. Expressionist Language (I): Goethe’s Elective Affinities
iii. Expressionist Language (II): T. E. Hulme’s Imagist poetry
6. Pure History: the Untimeliness of Technology
i. Goethe’s Untimeliness: Nietzsche, Koselleck and Benjamin
ii. Expressionist Technology (I): Klages, Marx and the Soviet Avant-Garde
iii. Expressionist Technology (II): Cinematic Modernism in Goethe’s Faust
Afterword: All that is ephemeral… becomes an Event
About the author
Matthew Charles is a senior lecturer in cultural and critical theory at the University of Westminster, UK. He is the co-author of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Walter Benjamin and several articles and chapters on critical theory and education.
Summary
Widely regarded as one of the foremost cultural critics of the last century, Walter Benjamin’s relation to Modernism has largely been understood in the context of his reception of the aesthetic theories of Early German Romanticism and his associated interest in avant-garde Surrealism. But this Romantic understanding only gives half the picture.
Running through Benjamin’s thought is also a critique of Romanticism, developed in conjunction with a positive engagement with the philosophical, artistic and historical writings of J. W. von Goethe. In demonstrating the significance of these Goethean elements, this book challenges the dominant understanding of Benjamin’s philosophy as essentially Romantic and instead proposes that Goethe’s Classicism, conceived as the counterpoint to Romanticism, permits a corrective to the latter’s deficiencies. Benjamin’s Modernist concept of criticism, it is argued, is constituted in the movement between these polarities of Romanticism and Classicism.
Conversely, placing Goethe’s Classicism in relation to Benjamin’s practice of literary criticism reveals historical tensions with Romanticism that constitute the untimely – indeed, it will be argued, cinematic – Modernism of his work. Adopting a transcritical approach, this book alternates between Benjamin and Goethe in relation to the experiences of colour, language and technology, assembling a constellation of philosophical and artistic figures between them, including the writings of Kant, Nietzsche, Cohen, Deleuze, Koselleck, Klages, and the work of Grünewald, Marées, Klee, Turner, Hulme, Eisenstein, Tretyakov, and Murnau.
Foreword
Lays out the theoretical development of modernism from Goethe and his transcritical strand of modernism, through to the cultural criticism of Walter Benjamin, and the early 20th-century intellectual figures which influenced Benjamin's thought.
Additional text
In this well-informed and wide-ranging investigation, Matthew Charles presents a complex Goethean perspective for the reading of Walter Benjamin and for modernist studies generally. His is a Goethe who has passed through the afterlives of Romanticism, making possible a post-romantic classicism positioned beyond the classical antinomies.
