Catastrophe and Survival: Walter Benjamin and Psychoanalysis - by Elizabeth Stewart (Paperback)

About the Book

Shows how Benjamin's thoughts regarding the individual's experience of the material world make significant contact with post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory.

Book Synopsis

'Catastrophe and Survival' addresses a blind spot in Benjamin scholarship: namely the way that Benjamin's thoughts regarding mental space, the mind-body problem, and the individual's experience of the material object world make significant contact with post-Freudian psychoanalytic confrontations with similar issues.

Review Quotes

"Elizabeth Stewart's Catastrophe and Survival offers a unique appraisal of the relationship between the work of the philosopher Walter Benjamin and post-Freudian psychoanalysis... Much to her credit, the author explains the complex school of post-Freudian psychoanalysis succinctly, and yet she never misses out on crucial details... Stewart's work fills in important gaps in the existing body of work on Benjamin and other schools of thought...is a crucial book." - German Studies Review

"In this collection of essays, Stewart interprets responses to modern existence by Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), German-Jewish philosopher, sociologist, literary critic, and translator; psychoanalysts including Freud, Klein, Lacan, Ferenczi, and Milner; and others. She points out that Benjamin dedicated The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) to Carl Schmitt, the German political theorist who helped legitimize Hitler's totalitarianism, because they shared a concern with the anomie of modern life. Mimesis, with its connotations of mimicry, the act of expression, and presentation of the self, is at the core of discussions of these perspectives on the body, materiality, psychosis, the literary and political. Illustrations include art by Paul Klee and patients." -Eithne O'Leyne, BOOK NEWS, Inc.

"In Catastrophe and Survival: Walter Benjamin and Psychoanalysis, Elizabeth Stewart examines the crisis caused by the collision of the psyche with an incompatible internal or external reality. She uniquely combines philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches to understand the process of mimesis in the origin and development of the psyche. Like Benjamin, Lacan, and Bion, she finds the point of psychic origin in the clash between body and mind. Even when growth is positive, psychic survival comes from a capacity to make meaning out of the destruction of the old order. Stewart articulates the ineffable and incomprehensible, that unnamable source that enables one to find personal potential in the midst of unformed chaotic emotional experience." --Judy K Eekhoff, PhD, FIPA, Training and Supervising Analyst, and President of the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society.

"Elizabeth Stewart has done a virtuoso job of handling the intricacies not only of the work of Walter Benjamin but also of the late work of Lacan, and using them to give a startlingly original and convincing reading of Melanie Klein. The work of Klein and her followers has been shamefully neglected in literary and philosophical studies, and Stewart's book goes some way to rectifying that omission. In particular she shows the kinship between Benjamin's thinking and that of the catastrophe-oriented Wilfred Bion. Stewart presents a model of a Benjaminian psychoanalysis emphasizing 'pure language', corporeality and contingency that would be a collective and personal practice of 'redemption' and an antidote to totalitarian domination." -- Shierry Weber Nicholsen, psychoanalyst and author of Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno's Aesthetics

"Elizabeth Stewart's profound and original study of Benjamin transcends everything previously available on his relationship to psychoanalysis. The dialectics of Benjamin's intricate transfiguration of Melanie Klein and of Bion are made radiantly clear. This book is particularly useful for establishing both Benjamin's vision of Kafka and his effect, through Bion, on Samuel Beckett." -- Harold Bloom

"This is truly an engaging read and makes a fine and original contribution to the literature. It significantly advances Benjamin scholarship in ways hitherto unimagined. The productive force of combining a reading of Benjamin's Trauerspiel book with Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis, extended by drawing in applications of Klein and Milner, results in a powerful and fruitful answer to the very issue of modern alienation and catastrophe that these writers and theorists took up in their own efforts of social transformation. Stewart's book is a provocative and stimulating treatise on reading and writing the pathos of our modern condition." -- Jules Simon Chair & Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Texas at El Paso, USA

About the Author

Elizabeth Stewart is Associate Professor of English, Yeshiva University, New York, USA. She teaches courses in European modernism, post-colonial literature, literature and philosophy, and literary and cultural theory. She is the translator and editor of Lacan in the German-Speaking World (SUNY 2004).