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oapen-20.500.12657-255152023-02-24T13:23:52Z Theory Is Like a Surging Sea Munro, Michael philosophy critical theory aesthetics poetics bic Book Industry Communication::H Humanities::HP Philosophy::HPC History of Western philosophy::HPCF Western philosophy, from c 1900 - In a 1917 letter to Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin writes, “Theory is like a surging sea.” This small book takes more than its title from that line—it takes that line as a point of departure in Erich Auerbach’s sense, an Ansatzpunkt, as a compositional principle so that what follows can be read in its entirety as a gloss on the remainder of Benjamin’s sentence: “Theory is like a surging sea, but the only thing that matters to the wave […] is to surrender itself to its motion in such a way that it crests and breaks.” That motion, in the pages to follow, takes up in its sweep two threads: it folds an episodic meditation on the negative and the problematic into a series of singular interrogations exemplary of the positive being of the problematic, the objective being of problems and questions, in a movement of implication and explication between poetry and philosophy in the tradition of what’s come to be known as theory. Theory is like a surging sea because it’s as part of a revolutionary tradition that it crests and breaks. 2019-03-26 23:55 2020-01-23 14:09:07 2020-04-01T10:42:06Z 2020-04-01T10:42:06Z 2015 book 1004580 OCN: 945783353 http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/25515 eng application/pdf Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International 1004580.pdf punctum books 10.21983/P3.0108.1.00 10.21983/P3.0108.1.00 979dc044-00ee-4ea2-affc-b08c5bd42d13 ScholarLed 104 Brooklyn, NY open access
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In a 1917 letter to Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin writes, “Theory is like a surging sea.” This small book takes more than its title from that line—it takes that line as a point of departure in Erich Auerbach’s sense, an Ansatzpunkt, as a compositional principle so that what follows can be read in its entirety as a gloss on the remainder of Benjamin’s sentence: “Theory is like a surging sea, but the only thing that matters to the wave […] is to surrender itself to its motion in such a way that it crests and breaks.” That motion, in the pages to follow, takes up in its sweep two threads: it folds an episodic meditation on the negative and the problematic into a series of singular interrogations exemplary of the positive being of the problematic, the objective being of problems and questions, in a movement of implication and explication between poetry and philosophy in the tradition of what’s come to be known as theory. Theory is like a surging sea because it’s as part of a revolutionary tradition that it crests and breaks.
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