El artículo examina el conflicto formal que se produce en la descripción de Odradek al interior de “La preocupación del padre de familia” de Franz Kafka. En la voz de su narrador, Kafka se vale de un lenguaje de extraordinaria precisión para describir a su criatura (Odradek), produciendo una serie de paradojas. Prestamos atención seria a estas paradojas, mostrando las consecuencias que ellas plantean para los conceptos de “historia” en Kant y Benjamin, en sus respectivas relaciones con el concepto de (...) “naturaleza” en estos autores. (shrink)

This essay investigates the differences and points of contact between Walter Benjamin's concept of ‘constellation’ and the notion of ‘assemblage’ as theorised by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Both concepts address the entanglement of discourse and matter, bodies and devices, and raise questions regarding the historicity and temporality of different kinds of multiplicity. Presently, the term ‘assemblage’ figures prominently in the context of the new materialism, a theoretical movement which calls for a renewal of materialist ideas, proposing a break with (...) the historical materialism of the past. Against this backdrop, the essay has a twofold purpose: first, by focusing on the notions of constellation and assemblage, it seeks to highlight the differences and analogies between the materialisms of Benjamin, on the one hand, and Deleuze and Guattari, on the other. Second, by examining the new materialism's appropriation of Deleuzian ‘assemblage theory’, it will not only analyse what is ‘new’ about the new materialism, but also underline its conceptual errors and political problems. Eventually, what the essay argues is that our contemporary understanding of assemblages might indeed benefit from a more thorough engagement with the historical materialism of an author like Benjamin. (shrink)

In this study of Giorgio Agamben's pre-Homo Sacer work, I assess his idea of the ethical subject. Over the course of these early writings, he adopts a Walter Benjamin-inspired redemptive aim as he endeavours to uncover the circumstances of alienated subjectivity and possibility of authentic experience. However, while Agamben borrows from Benjamin to elaborate on the ethical potential of the nihilist pose, a more Kantian conception of idealist autonomy becomes increasingly pronounced. This Kantianism is at odds with the Benjaminian nihilism (...) that guides his redemptive prescription, leaving Agamben's ethical subject mired in a realm of meaningless authenticity. (shrink)

In Kafka’s unfinished story, The Burrow, an unidentified subterranean creature struggles while digging in a burrow, constantly engulfed in anxiety for potential intruders. His obsessive anxiety starts to be materialised in his hearing of a noise everywhere and at constant intensity. Incessantly speculating the cause of this noise, his dreadful imagination first finds it as a swarm of small fries, eventually growing into a single gigantic monster threatening his burrow, as if desiring an irresistible entity that goes beyond the idea (...) of the individual. Inspired by this story of a creature suffocating from his lonesome effort of nesting, this paper discusses how an individual sensation of dread could potentially transcend to an ability to imagine social totality, drawing on the philosophical readings of Kafka’s other character Odradek by Benjamin and Adorno. I further argue that this process is aesthetic, correlating Freud’s idea of the uncanny with Adorno’s theory of aesthetic experience which examine the negotiation between individuation and socialisation in an experience of desubjectification. By sketching out the anxious hearing in The Burrow in reference to the disturbing seeing of object-creature Odradek, I discuss the feeling of dread that marks the transformation of individual entities into a transcendent social/collective being. (shrink)