The paper develops a conceptual framework for understanding the work of ethical remembrance in the classroom. Using David Hansen’s recent example of using Sebald’s novels in his classroom to do the work or remembrance, the paper argues that the effect of Sebald’s novels is best understood using Walter Benjamin’s figure of the angel of history. That figure indicates a view of history that goes beyond the progression of everyday time, to one called remembrance. The paper suggests that the work of (...) mourning effects such remembrance, but simultaneously points to hope through the emergence of weak messianic power. (shrink)

Between 1910 and 1917, Walter Benjamin composed a range of philosophical works and fragmented texts all of which touch upon the concept of youth and its intersection with issues of modernity and theology, faith and political action, religion and secularization, God, and the world. Yet, while scholars have rather extensively discussed Benjamin’s early works on language, literature, and esthetics, less attention has been given to his work on youth. This paper focuses on Benjamin’s writings on youth from these early years. (...) Its aim is to demonstrate how these writings were intended as contributions to the composition of a comprehensive theory of youth, which itself was to combine philosophical discussion with theological imagination. More concretely, by using the example of Meister Eckhart, who is rarely discussed in connection to Benjamin’s thought, the paper shows how Benjamin draws on Christian mystical notions of time, transcendence, and divinity, albeit in a secularized and therefore transformed guise, and how Benjamin’s intellectual endeavor can hence be labeled a modern-mystical theory of youth. (shrink)

Vilém Flusser's Vampyroteuthis Infernalis reenacts and actualizes the time-honored tradition of a mental experiment that purports to efface the boundaries between man and animal. This ancient conceptual device, known in Baroque times as physica naturalis, seeks to illuminate the world of culture by means of its approximation with the world of nature. Instead of opposing poles, nature and culture become reflecting mirrors where man can acknowledge his ties to nature and the animal kingdom. More than just a rhetorical trope, the (...) so-called allegory of natural history comprises what could be defined as a "philosophy of animality," espoused by thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Gilbert Simondon and Jacques Derrida. In Vampyroteuthis, Flusser resorts to a strange marine creature in order to elaborate a sophisticated meditation on human existence and our relationship with the technological apparatuses we incessantly devise. The goal of this paper is to examine the recent history of the allegory, tracing its developments in the works of contemporary scholars, such as Siegfried Zielinski, Manuel de Landa and Vilém Flusser himself. Moreover, it investigates the applicability of the "philosophy of animality" within the field of film theory, suggesting an approach to filmic experience that focuses on the "material" aspects of cinema and regards the spectator's body as a site for the translation of images into affect and sensation. (shrink)

In a wide variety of publications,1 Johannes B. Metz programatically represented a new political theology of subject, society, history, and future. This theology participates intensely in the lively, ongoing discourse on the political and theological actuality and significance of the critical theory of society, religion and future set forth by the Marxist, Walter Benjamin.2 The purpose of this study is to illuminate several connections between Benjamin's critical theory and Metz's political theology, particularly with respect to the present stage of development (...) in advanced capitalistic society and to their future. (shrink)

Why has compulsive hoarding recently captured the American imagination? To what extent is hoarding a subtype of OCD or a discrete "disorder" in its own right? Can a cultural-studies and philosophical assessment of hoarding complement the medical model that has recently been offered by clinicians and the DSM IV? This essay tracks these and related questions in order to offer a theory of compulsive hoarding that pays particular attention to the sometimes distorted representation of hoarding in literature and the mainstream (...) media. (shrink)

The flâneur has remained little more than a hazy, nostalgic figure since first described in detail by Baudelaire in 19th-century Paris. Here, the work of Walter Benjamin, who did more than any other to advance the notion of flânerie post-Baudelaire, is considered alongside that of his friend and critic Theodor Adorno, in an attempt to conceive of a modern-day version of the type. The many critical exchanges between Adorno and Benjamin are envisioned as a moving dialectic: a constant interplay between (...) anticipation and suspicion. What results is a concept of flânerie that mingles a tentatively optimistic Benjamin with a perpetually sceptical Adorno, in order to conjure up an image of the individual strolling and wandering about the margins of contemporary urbanity, balanced on the cusp of hope and hopelessness. (shrink)

There are two dominant schools of thought addressing problems of cosmopolitanism and conflict: democratic national sovereigntism, inspired by Hegel, and global constitutionalism, inspired by Kant and reformulated by Habermas. This paper develops a third position by reading Adorno's critique of both theoretical traditions. Rather than compromising between these camps, Adorno triangulates between them. Critically illuminating their respective deficiencies in view of the changing conditions of a globalized modern world has critical implications for cosmopolitics. Although largely negative, Adorno's critique provides an (...) important framework for a contestatory reformulation of cosmopolitanism, one that is better equipped to confront societal and political global conflicts insufficiently reflected in sovereigntist and global constitutionalist models. (shrink)