...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...

... 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...

... of Technical Images , 1985). This work is of crucial importance for all critical theory on media, because Flusser both continues the Marxist tradition of German media theory (in particular of Siegfried Kracauer, Bertolt Brecht, and Walter Benjamin) and upgrades that legacy to contemporary media conditions...

...Carlo Salzani 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 Frankfurter Zeitung a short piece...

...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...

... 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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Jessica Benjamin This article gives a brief account of the influence of Anson Rabinbach on the work of his personal partner, Jessica Benjamin. Benjamin describes the significant points of convergence between the two thinkers' sensibilities in regard to critical theory, left-wing movements...

...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...

... 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...

... photography. Berlin Dada, of which Heartfield was an early member, achieved similar effects in its live performances, staged at precisely the same time these films were produced. The essay concludes by noting the parallel between Heartfield's animation and Walter Benjamin's later reflections on the subversive...

...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...

...Marit Grøtta Abstract The Nature theater of Oklahama in Der Verschollene is one of Kafka’s most enigmatic inventions, widely known through Walter Benjamin’s and Giorgio Agamben’s reading of it as a theater of gestures. This article explores the intertextual archive of Kafka’s novel, bringing...

...Benjamin Lazier This essay traces the origins of the contemporary interest in “political theology” and focuses on the work of Leo Strauss, Gershom Scholem, and Jacob Taubes in particular. They offer three competing instrumentalizations of the concept; they alert us to a dimension of the problem...