Simmel Studies

On the Paradoxical Structure of the Concept of Style. A Theoretical Framework

Tim-Florian Steinbach — 2024-05-21

In addition to his famous concept of the style of life or lifestyle, Simmel develops a more general concept of style in his writings on art and aesthetics. He makes clear in this context that the concept of style has a paradoxical structure that mediates between the general and the particular and that it always stands for the general. This concept of style allows Simmel to apply it in different research fields: sociology and social philosophy, ethics, art and aesthetics or intellectual history. In developing a theoretical framework for understanding Simmel’s concept of style, we will need to cross these disciplinary boundaries. We will examine the fields of arts and aesthetics as well as intellectual history so as to illustrate how Simmel applies the concept of style. This will also make the paradoxical structure of this concept clear

Love and Migration: a Simmelian approach

Paulina Sabugal — 2024-05-21

This text proposes a reflection on relationships of love in today's society from a Simmelian perspective, with a focus on a specific phenomenon: migration for love. Since the 1990s love-motivated migration has emerged in the discussion of the growing importance of social networks and new technologies. Using this social phenomenon that links love and migration as a strating point, the aim is to discuss its relation to some Simmelian concepts such as bonding, cohesion and sociability. This work highlights that migration for love is a typical example of a modern society in which individuals have had to seek new ways to relate and to love, which in turn affect living as a couple and building sentimental projects.

Real Subsumption of Art to Capitalist Technical Reproducibility. Walter Benjamin and Bolívar Echeverría on Technology, Politics and Utopia under Capital

Javier Gómez Monroy — 2024-05-21

The objective of the present article is to analyse the examination carried out by Walter Benjamin on the transformation of art and the aesthetic experience in his work The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility. The analysis will be conducted departing from Bolivar Echeverría’s reception of Benjamin’s essay -that is informed by Karl Marx’s Theory of Subsumption- with the aim of precising and potentiating Benjamin’s critique to capitalist technology and stimulating the discussion on the post-capitalist technological alternatives. In addition to presenting the essential ideas of Benjamin’s argument on the modern technique of artistic production and the modern technique of production of goods in general, alternating them with Echeverría’s interpretations in which he remarks the critical utopian potential within them, the critical conceptual convergence between Walter Benjamin and Karl Marx around the analysis of the essence of modern technique and its historicity, is presented.

Chang, Hsiao-Shan, Simmel and Postmodern Social Theory, Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press (China), SSAP, 2020. 339 pp.

Wu Yu Shan — 2024-05-21

No abstract

Vázquez, J. (Coord.), Emociones, poder y conflicto. Perspectivas teóricas, género, resistencias y políticas de Estado, México: IBERO/UAM/Universidad del Rosario, 2023, p. 340.

Hilda María Cristina Mazariegos Herrera — 2024-05-21

No abstract

Fetishism and Modernity in Walter Benjamin. Text for launch ceremony of the book City and Modernity in Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin. Fragments of Metropolis by Vicenzo Mele

Carlos Herrera De La Fuente — 2024-05-21

No abstract