#michael lowy

[raisongardee]

"Les romantiques ressentent douloureusement l’aliénation des rapports humains – la destruction des anciennes formes "organiques", communautaires de la vie sociale, l’isolement de l’individu dans son moi égoïste – qui constitue une dimension importante de la civilisation capitaliste, dont le haut lieu est la ville."

Michael Löwy et Robert Sayre, Esprits de feu. Figures du romantisme anti-capitaliste, 2010.

[lepertamar]

An illuminating comment by Jeanne-Marie Gagnebin on Benjamin’s ‘open history’ applies very exactly to Thesis V: she writes that Benjamin shared with Proust

the concern to rescue the past in the present, thanks to the perception of a resemblance that transforms them both: it transforms the past because the past takes on a new form, which could have disappeared into oblivion; it transforms the present because the present reveals itself as being the possible fulfilment of that earlier promise – a promise which could have been lost for all time, which can still be lost if it is not discovered and inscribed in the lineaments of the present.

Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's "On the Concept of History"

[grandpasessions]

Thesis II introduces one of the document's main theological concepts: Erlösung, which is correcdy translated here as redemption. Benjamin first situates this in the sphere of the individual: his personal happiness implies the redemption of his own past, the fulfilment of what could have been, but was not.

According to the variant of this thesis in The Arcades Project, this happiness (Glück) implies reparation for the despair and desolation (Trostlosigkeit, Verlassenheit) of the past. The redemption of the past is nothing other than this fulfilment and this reparation according to the image of happiness held by each individual and generation.

Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's 'On the Concept of History' Michael Lowy

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Capitalist Catastrophe

By Michael Löwy.

[surrealistnyc]

Two recent titles by the prolific Michael Löwy:

Kafka, Welles, Benjamin (French text)—read Michael Löwy's preface on cultural pessimism on his blog.

Redemption and Utopia, (English translation by Hope Heaney): "Towards the end of the nineteenth century, there appeared in Central Europe a generation of Jewish intellectuals whose work was to transform modern culture. Drawing at once on the traditions of German Romanticism and Jewish messianism, their thought was organized around the cabalistic idea of the 'tikkoun': redemption. Redemption and Utopia uses the concept of 'elective affinity' to explain the surprising community of spirit that existed between redemptive messianic religious thought and the wide variety of radical secular utopian beliefs held by this important group of intellectuals. The author outlines the circumstances that produced this unusual combination of religious and non-religious thought and illuminates the common assumptions that united such seemingly disparate figures as Martin Buber, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukács."

Thanks to Valery Oisteanu for recommending Redemption and Utopia.

[weil-weil-lautre]

Michael Löwy: Lukacs on Hölderlin. There is no greatness in Stalinism, a response to Zizek

In this article, Michael Löwy defends the original Marxist project against the pro-Stalinist criticisms of the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek Michael Löwy is director of research at the Centre…

[lepertamar]

“The moment of danger for the historical subject – that is to say, the oppressed classes (and the historian who has chosen their side) – is the moment when the authentic image of the past emerges. Why? Probably because in that instant the comfortable, lazy vision of history as uninterrupted ‘progress’ dissolves. The danger of a current defeat sharpens the sensitivity to preceding ones, arouses interest in the battle fought by the defeated, and encourages a critical view of history.”

—Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’

[lepertamar]

As we have seen, [Walter Benjamin's] relation to the Marxian heritage is highly selective and involves the abandonment of – rather than the explicit critique of, or a direct ‘settling of accounts’ with – all the moments in the works of Marx and Engels that have served as references for the positivistic/evolutionary readings of Marxism in terms of irresistible progress, ‘the laws of history’ and ‘natural necessity’. Benjamin’s reading stands in direct contradiction to this idea of inevitability, which from the Communist Manifesto onwards haunts certain texts by Marx and Engels: ‘What the bourgeoisie … produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable’.1 Nothing is further from Benjamin’s approach than the belief, suggested by certain passages in Capital, in a historical necessity of a ‘natural’ kind (Naturnotwendigkeit).2

The work of Marx and Engels doubtless has unresolved tensions running through it between a certain fascination with the natural scientific model and a dialectical-critical approach, between faith in the organic and quasi-natural maturation of the social process and the strategic vision of revolutionary action that seizes an exceptional moment. These tensions explain the diversity of Marxisms that were to dispute the Marxian heritage after the death of its founders.3

-- Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's 'On The Concept of History', Michael Löwy