Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

Thèse--Faculté des lettres--Université de Lausanne, 2001. / Bibliogr. p. 206-211.

Diss.--Osnabrück--Univ. / Bibliogr. p. 169-177.

Diss.--München--Hochschule für Philosophie, 2003. / Bibliogr. p. [187]-192. Index.

Dissertation--Uppsala, 1997. / Bibliogr. p. 371-406. Résumé en anglais sous le titre : "Tree : an attempt at a Lacanian reading of Walter Ljungquist's narratives, with special regard to the Jerk Dandelin series"

Reproduction de : Thèse de doctorat : Sciences économiques : Lyon 2 : 2006. Reproduction de : Thèse de doctorat : Sciences économiques : Université J.W. Goethe de Francfort-sur-le-Main : 2006. / Thèse soutenue en co-tutelle. Titre provenant de l'écran-titre. Bibliogr.

Inaug.-Dis.--Würzburg. / "Literatur": p. [76]-77.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 349-356). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

The following work deals with the idea of Beauty as seen in the work of Winckelmann and its influence on Walter Pater, the English critic. The concept of Beauty is to be analyzed chronologically. First of all, the concept of Beauty in Winckelmann’s work will be analysed and its particularities will be described. Further, the concept of Beauty will be analyzed in so far as it changes throughout time and influences the further development of aesthetic theory. Hegel takes up Winckelmann’s idea of Beauty and uses this idea in his own aesthetic theory. Walter Pater takes up and develops the idea of Beauty not only from Winckelmann, but also from Hegel. The influence of both art critics, Winckelmann and Hegel, on Walter Pater will be shown in this thesis. The latter, as this thesis shows, was to develop his own aesthetic theory, which is supported by the concept of Beauty in Winckelmann and Hegel.

This dissertation analyzes the early work of Walter Benjamin (ca. 1916 – 1926). The period under consideration falls between Benjamin’s break from the German Youth Movement (which also coincides with the beginning of the Great War) and his turn to Marxism. Benjamin’s life and work during this period is characterized by, on the one hand, an intensified interest in theological concepts and, on the other hand, the apparent refusal of concrete political engagement. It is the claim of the dissertation that what Benjamin elaborates – in the absence of a concrete political program and with the aid of theological concepts – is a metaphysical conception of politics: what I call a metapolitics of decay. This metapolitics is informed by a certain theological understanding of transience: the decay that attends to a creation which has “fallen” from its original condition. While Benjamin’s metapolitics is oriented towards redemption – to the lossless consummation of historical life – it pursues this goal, not by circumventing transience, but by concentrating on the decay of nature – and by extension, of history. The metapolitical limit upon concrete politics, however, does not foreclose the possibility of the latter. In 1919, in a text posthumously named the “Theologico-Political Fragment,” Benjamin does in fact spell out what I call a politics of transience. One of the major historical and conceptual trajectories that the dissertation traces, therefore, is the movement from the metapolitics of decay to the politics of transience. The political significance of transience and decay reveals itself in the profane and melancholic fixation upon the decay of nature and of history. And yet it is only with the concept of happiness that both the metapolitical and the political dimensions of Benjamin’s work become most clear. Happiness (Glück), which is manifestly not the bliss (Seligkeit) of the prelapsarian condition, is no escape from the melancholy situation of historical life. It remains definitively profane and capable of taking an “elegiac” form. But it is precisely by way of its profanity and its melancholy that happiness comes to signify the idea of redemption. The will to happiness, for Benjamin, is a (weak) messianic force.