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Catastrophe and Survival: Walter Benjamin and Psychoanalysis Reprint Edition
Author(s): Elizabeth Stewart (Author)
- Publisher: Continuum
- Publication Date: 21 Jun. 2012
- Edition: Reprint
- Language: English
- Print length: 240 pages
- ISBN-10: 1441116834
- ISBN-13: 9781441116833
Book Description
Catastrophe and Survival addresses a blind spot in Benjamin scholarship: namely the way that Benjamin s thoughts regarding mental space, the mind-body problem, and the individual s experience of the material object world make significant contact with post-Freudian psychoanalytic confrontations with similar issues. Recent work on Benjamin s representations of the individual subjected to modern shock draws basic correlations between Benjamin and Freud. Still lacking is a discussion of a possible dialogue between Benjamin and Lacan and an account of the historical connections between Benjamin s work and contemporaneous post-Freudian psychoanalytic trends. This book supplies both. Elizabeth Stewart shows that all of these theories were deeply preoccupied with the mutual embeddedness of subject and object, with materiality, and with power. At stake are new ways of envisioning the ethical and political subject in and for the twenty-first century.
Editorial Reviews
Review
‘In this collection of essays, Stewart interprets responses to modern existence by Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), German-Jewish philosopher, sociologist, literary critic, and translator; psychoanalysts including Freud, Klein, Lacan, Ferenczi, and Milner; and others. She points out that Benjamin dedicated The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) to Carl Schmitt, the German political theorist who helped legitimize Hitler’s totalitarianism, because they shared a concern with the anomie of modern life. Mimesis, with its connotations of mimicry, the act of expression, and presentation of the self, is at the core of discussions of these perspectives on the body, materiality, psychosis, the literary and political. Illustrations include art by Paul Klee and patients.’ —-Eithne O’Leyne, BOOK NEWS, Inc.
About the Author
Elizabeth Stewart is Associate Professor of English, Yeshiva University, New York, USA. She teaches courses in European modernism, post-colonial literature, literature and philosophy, and literary and cultural theory. She is the translator and editor of Lacan in the German-Speaking World (SUNY 2004).
