Voigt , Frank
Walter Benjamin, Ant alter Benjamin, Antonio Gr onio Gramsci and the Pr amsci and the Problem of Elitist T oblem of Elitist Traditions aditions
The article sheds light on Walter Benjamin's and Antonio Gramsci's treatments of elitist traditions. It
provides a historical contextualization and brief comparison of the theoretical and political developments
of the two contemporaries under this aspect. In the Origin of the German Trauerspiel (1924/25),
Benjamin's historical-philosophical aesthetics are enriched by a history of concepts which increasingly
takes up socio-historical aspects. This approach goes beyond Benjamin's programmatic formulations at
the beginning of the 1920s, in which he regarded the work of art as a privileged medium of historical
insight that, in theory and method, had to be isolated from history. As for Gramsci, the article elaborates
an increasing mediation between social and literary history. This is done, on the one hand, by comparing
Gramsci's statements on Italian Futurism between 1913 and 1922 and, on the other hand, by tracing and
examining Gramsci's criticism of Benedetto Croce's assessment of the reasons leading to World War I in
his History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century (1932) in the Prison Notebooks (Quaderno 10). Despite
their differences, the examination of these developments in Benjamin and Gramsci shows three common
features in their works of the 1930s: Firstly, both of them change their relation to radical democratic,
Jacobin traditions. Secondly, they both display an increasingly historical understanding of concepts of
literary intelligence under the aspect of their relationship to the reading public. Thirdly, this understanding
led both of them to analyze the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany with regard also to 'elitist traditions'
in which intellectuals distance themselves from the public for various reasons and motives, but with the
consequence that an understanding of their participation in discourses and traditions becomes
impossible.
https://ro.uow.edu.au/gramsci/vol3/iss4/
| Language | eng |
| Names |
[author] Voigt , Frank |
| Subjects |
Giacobinismo
Benjamin, Walter
Jacobinism
Benjamin, Walter |
