...Carlo Salzani New German Critique, Inc. 2007 The City as Crime Scene: Walter Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective Carlo Salzani Theorie des Kriminalromans In 1930 Benjamin published in the Literaturblatt der...

...Helena M. Tomko In October 1931 Walter Benjamin published a “shattering review” of Virgil, Father of the West , by Theodor Haecker, a Catholic cultural critic. Though most critical interest in this review has seen it as a footnote to Benjamin’s intellectual development, the present article argues...

...Tom Vandeputte In an unpublished fragment from the late 1930s, Walter Benjamin famously calls for a recasting of the idea of catastrophe and its relation to the progression of history. Catastrophe, Benjamin contends, is not to be understood as an exception to the regular course of history; rather...

...Tyson E. Lewis This article contributes to the growing literature on Walter Benjamin as an educational philosopher. In particular, it reassesses the claim made by prominent Benjaminian scholars that education can be defined as a form of awakening. To further develop this central educational claim...

... of perceptual standardization and the consequent devaluation of unique aesthetic experience. A comparison of the work of Friedländer, the philosopher-artist, with that of Walter Benjamin, the cultural critic, reveals the limits and the potentials in their attempts to recover and to celebrate the diversity...

...Daniel Weidner Walter Benjamin has always been both a fascination and an obstacle for intellectual history. He seems to relate to nearly every discourse of early-twentieth-century German history, but in a peculiar, even idiosyncratic, way that makes it difficult to circumscribe his own position...

...Jessica Nitsche One aspect of Walter Benjamin’s approach that can undoubtedly be described as visionary is the high value he accorded film among the arts. Today time-based, audiovisual media is viewed as an integral and extraordinarily important part of the art system, but when Benjamin’s essay...

...Alison Ross This article gives a critical account of the prevailing interpretation of Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence” essay. It argues that the position Benjamin's essay defends regarding violence is not cogent within the terms of the essay itself and that the opaque formulations...

...Annie Pfeifer Rather than establishing literary relations with Russian intellectuals or securing the affections of his Latvian love interest, Walter Benjamin spends most of his 1926–27 Soviet sojourn shopping for toys. Benjamin’s habits present an interesting counterpoint to his communist...

...Matthew Charles Abstract Walter Benjamin refers to the “idea of revolution as an innervation of the technical organs of the collective” as one article of his politics. Drawing on some of the debates and tensions generated by the work of Miriam Bratu Hansen, the article analyzes lesser-known...

...Brian Britt Walter Benjamin’s ambivalent engagement with anarchist thought extends beyond well-known works from the early 1920s such as “Critique of Violence” (1921). Contemporary anarchist thinkers, including Gustav Landauer and Georges Sorel, influenced Benjamin and many of his associates...

...Robyn Marasco This article considers Walter Benjamin’s portrait of the gambler in light of his critique of bourgeois culture and view of modernity. Benjamin’s gambler reveals a distinctive relationship to time, political and economic history, and the pathos of a class society. To illustrate...

...Christopher Conti Walter Benjamin's great essay on Franz Kafka exemplifies his philosophical praxis, which exhumes the prehistoric substrate of modernity to expose the myth of progress in modernity's claim to epochal legitimacy. Benjamin's physiognomic thinking endows Kafka with the features of his...

...Olivia Landry At a contemporary moment of sweeping scholarly interest in and interrogation of the archive, this brief essay returns to Walter Benjamin. Formulating the archive as a fugacious site of ruin and excavation, Benjamin’s approach presents an early counterposition to the modern view...

...Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky In his book The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans , Giorgio Agamben states that the famous hunchbacked dwarf from Walter Benjamin's first thesis on the philosophy of history was none other than Paul. Unlike Agamben, Benjamin was a reader...

... as with Balázs's fellow Marxist Walter Benjamin, this article outlines key aspects of both right-wing and left-wing physiognomics. While Balázs did share with reactionary physiognomists the problematic idealist tendency to view the body as materialized soul, his views on physiognomy evaded racial essentialism...

...Tom Gunning Relating Sigmund Freud's essay “Mourning and Melancholia” and Walter Benjamin's work on the Trauerspiel as well as his discussion of cinema in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Gunning discusses the idea of testing as part of cinema's relation...

...Bill Brown Through archaeological, conceptual, and rhetorical insights, Miriam Hansen puts play ( Spiel ) to work in Cinema and Experience . When she engages Walter Benjamin's treatment of film in the “Artwork” essay, she retrieves Spiel from Spielraum , naturalizing a somewhat idiosyncratic...

... at the heart of Walter Benjamin’s early discussion of tradition. His peculiar reference to “Talmudic wit” and to Kant as a tradendum in letters to Scholem, alongside related Jewish sources, and his engagement with Kant in “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy” are used to address these questions. Thus...

...Matthew Noble-Olson Abstract This essay reads Walter Benjamin’s description of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus through Theodor Adorno’s theorization of art’s contradictory sociality. In this analysis, the object that is illustrative of Benjamin’s imagined angel of history takes on the characteristics...