Technique as a Pure Means. On Walter Benjamin's non-instrumental concept of technique between his early metaphysical and later anthropological materialist writings

Abstract 0

In this paper I will outline a central aspect of Walter Benjamin's concept of technique throughout his work, namely its non-instrumental character. In order to do this, I will look at a shift that occured in Benjamin's thinking around the mid 1920s – the shift that Benjamin himself called a political turning point in his work – and which separates as well as connects his early metaphysical-theological and his later materialist writings. Here we can see a continuity as well as a discontinuity ...