Records de Walter Benjamin

En el número 45 de la revista L'Espill trobaràs un dossier monogràfic sobre "Història, ideologia, política. Al voltant del simposi «Espanya contra Catalunya»", amb contribucions de Joan Ramon Resina, Antoni Rico, Pau Viciano, Àlex Gutiérrez i Antoni Furió. A més, articles de Gershom Scholem, Josepa Cucó i Giner, Jón Karl Helgason, Eduard Cairol, Salvador Ortells Miralles, Arnau Pons, Antoni Mora, François Rastier i Iris Radisch, així com un full de dietari de Ferran Garcia-Oliver i converses inacabades amb Joan Fuster

Peraquin le-Toledot safrut Qabbalah : capítulos de historia de literatura kabalística

Copia digital. Madrid : Ministerio de Cultura. Subdirección General de Coordinación Bibliotecaria, 201

The relational ethics of conflict and identity

The contemporary psychoanalytically inflected vocabulary of relational ethics centres on acknowledgement, witnessing and responsibility. It has become an important code for efforts to connect with otherness across fractures of hurt, oppression and suffering. One can see the deployment of this vocabulary to challenge patterns of exclusion and dehumanisation in zones of intense political conflict in many situations in which destructive hatred reigns. This paper traces some of the use of and disputes over this ‘acknowledgement-based’ relational ethics in the recent work of Jessica Benjamin and Judith Butler. The field of application is their response to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, given their position as Jews. The challenge of the acknowledgement agenda leads back to an issue of general concern – the degree to which relational ethics can prise open apparently closed and defensive psychosocial identities

Active/Passive, ‘Diminished’/‘Beautiful’, ‘Light’ from Above and Below: Rereading Shekhinah’s Sexual Desire in Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim (Song of Songs)

In Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim, the Zohar’s reading of Song of Songs, Shekhinah, echoing themes associated with the Shulamite of the biblical text, consistently initiates cosmic union. Sexual desire in the zoharic texts is a form of capital necessary to facilitate sefirotic intercourse, although scholarly readings of the zoharic corpus often identify Shekhinah as a passive receptacle. This, however, is only true if the endemic contradictions within the texts are glossed over. In Song of Songs, the Shulamite’s sexual ‘initiative’ is core. This was not lost on the author(s) of Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim, who, in struggling to explain Shekhinah’s sefirotic role in line with the erotics of Song of Songs, inescapably echoed the ‘depatriarchalizing’ themes of the biblical text. As this article demonstrates, in Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim, Shekhinah is active and repeatedly encourages and frustrates cosmic sexual intercourse. Zohar al Shir ha-Shirim shows that it is possible to reread Shekhinah’s role beyond the androcentrism of the authors as well as scholarly assumptions about her passivity

Homes for ghosts: Walter Benjamin and Kurt Schwitters in the cities

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

«Quando Dio deciderà di redimere Israele»: vera e falsa Redenzione nel pensiero di Isaac Orobio de Castro

In the article some previously ignored aspects of Isaac Orobio de Castro’s messianic thought are investigated as well as the strong influence by Maimonides on one hand and the anti-Christian arguments on the other. To exemplify we analyze the author’s refutation of the thesis that the Jews’ return to Jerusalem and the building of the second Temple would constitute the fulfillment of the Jewish expectations of a temporal well-being. Such thesis would reject in a definitive way any idea of expectations oriented towards the future. This was the view espoused earlier by Girolamo de Santa Fe in Tortosa and by Philip Van Limborch at the time of Orobio. In rebutting this “false” redemption, Orobio spells out the features and times of the true “esperança” of the Jewish people.El presente artículo examina algunos aspectos, nunca antes estudiados, del pensamiento mesiánico de Isaac Orobio de Castro y destaca la profunda influencia que Maimónides, por un lado, y su polémica anticristiana, por otro, ejercen en el tratamiento de esta materia. A modo de ejemplo, se sigue la objeción del autor a la tesis de que el regreso a Jerusalén bajo Ciro y la Construcción del Segundo Santuario hubieran representado la definitiva realización de las esperanzas hebraicas de bienestar temporal, tesis que liquidaba para siempre una espera orientada hacia el futuro. Eso mismo había sostenido Jerónimo de Santa Fe en Tortosa y eso mismo sostenía todavía Philipp Van Limborch, contemporáneo interlocutor de Orobio. Respondiendo a esta “falsa” redención, Orobio precisa las características y los tiempos de la verdadera «esperança» del pueblo hebreo