(Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú - Departamento de Humanidades, 2022-12-22) Sarasola, Beñat
Materialism and Art in Walter Benjamin”. This paper analyses the issue of materialism and its relationship with art in Walter Benjamin’s thought. This is a controversial issue in the debates around Benjamin. The article examines in detail Benjamin’s two fundamental texts on this topic: The Author as Producer and The Work of Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction. Before this, the paper puts the problem into context, considering the times and, in particular, Benjamin’s relationship with Brecht, which was seen as one of the key elements to understand Benjamin’s material turn. This fact disturbed some of his colleagues —like Adorno, Horkheimer and Karplus— who saw Brecht as an excessively orthodox materialist. This paper argues, however, that, although Benjamin turned towards materialist positions throughout the decade of the 30s, his materialism was not like the one defended by the Marxist orthodoxy of the time, though, indeed, it went beyond Adorno’s modernist approaches.
(Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú - Departamento de Humanidades, 2022-12-21) Jurado-Castaño, Pedro Alejandro; Tobón-Velásquez, Sebastián
This paper presents the presuppositions that enable a critical reflection on the public sphere from a Marxist perspective. It begins by considering the contextof recent discussions concerning Marx’s political ideas, and the relevance of the concept of public sphere in order to show the importance of some of Marx’s critical concepts for political philosophy. The text is the result of a research project aimed at constructing a conceptual framework to develop a critical analysis of the public sphere today. This research has already established that some key issues, linked to the concepts of language and experience, were present in Marx’s work. In this sense, the paper presents a novel reflection to the extent that it deals with the actuality of Marx’s thought through the analysis of a contemporary political problem that allows to highlight the critical and radical implications that Marx’s philosophical-critical foundations have for contemporary discourse and politicalinstitutions such as the public sphere.
