Judge Dennis Davis
Walter Benjamin: A Renaissance Jewish Intellect of the 20th Century, Part 2
Summary
A close examination of the ideas of Walter Benjamin and their exploration of aesthetics, mass spectacle, and art in contemporary politics, drawing parallels with historical examples of fascist regimes, raising questions about how democracies can harness these tools to engage and counteract the influence of populism and mass diversion in political discourse. Part 2 of 2.
Judge Dennis Davis
Dennis Davis is a judge of the High Court of South Africa and judge president of the Competition Appeals Court of South Africa. He has held professorial appointments at the University of Cape Town and University of the Witwatersrand, as well as numerous visiting appointments at Cambridge, Harvard, New York University, and others. He has authored eleven books, including Lawfare: Judging Politics in South Africa.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
Benjamin phrases the aura in a religious context, he talks about the prophet and the religious experience. The aura of going and seeing the painting, of listening to the original of the Mozart piece or the Beethoven or the Bob Dylan. Or going to see the actual cave painting in the caves of 5,000 years ago. So that would have an aura for him, where it’s a singular relationship between the viewer and the artwork.
He saw what was going on from the late ‘20s into the early '30s, before the Nazis actually came to power in '33. He saw it and he was trying to understand it in his own era. Let’s also remember that these guys knew how Mussolini had established fascism in the early 1920s in Italy and other countries in Europe. It was happening first in politics, for the Italian fascists and the Nazis. And then I think he and others are trying to understand how it all works to get masses galvanised towards ultimate war and destruction and hell on Earth.