TY  - BOOK
AU  - Munro, Michael
AB  - In a 1917 letter to Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin writes, “Theory is like a surging sea.” This small book takes more than its title from that line—it takes that line as a point of departure in Erich Auerbach’s sense, an Ansatzpunkt, as a compositional principle so that what follows can be read in its entirety as a gloss on the remainder of Benjamin’s sentence: “Theory is like a surging sea, but the only thing that matters to the wave […] is to surrender itself to its motion in such a way that it crests and breaks.” That motion, in the pages to follow, takes up in its sweep two threads: it folds an episodic meditation on the negative and the problematic into a series of singular interrogations exemplary of the positive being of the problematic, the objective being of problems and questions, in a movement of implication and explication between poetry and philosophy in the tradition of what’s come to be known as theory. Theory is like a surging sea because it’s as part of a revolutionary tradition that it crests and breaks.
DO  - 10.21983/P3.0108.1.00
ID  - OAPEN ID: 1004580
ID  - OAPEN ID: OCN: 945783353
KW  - philosophy
KW  - critical theory
KW  - aesthetics
KW  - poetics
L1  - https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/62f46309-1285-4d81-8d4f-bb63017058bd/1004580.pdf
LA  - English
LK  - http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/25515
PB  - punctum books
PP  - Brooklyn, NY
PY  - 2015
TI  - Theory Is Like a Surging Seanull
ER  - 
