Thinking in constellations : Walter Benjamin in the humanities / edited by Nassima Sahraoui and Caroline Sauter.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Sauter, Caroline, editor.

Sahraoui, Nassima, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940--Congresses.

Benjamin, Walter.

Philosophy--Germany--20th century--Congresses.

Philosophy.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xviii, 238 pages) : illustrations

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Newcastle upon Tyne, UK : Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018.

Summary:

With his powerful thought image of the constellation, Walter Benjamin provides a method for the core practices of the Humanities: reading, writing, and thinking. This collection of provocative essays demonstrates how thinking in constellations with Walter Benjamin leads us towards a new understanding of the critical task of the Humanities today: it goes beyond disciplinary boundaries and challenges assumptions of linearity, coherence, and progression inherent in our scholarly praxis. The volume brings some of the most articulate young voices in international Benjamin scholarship together, and takes an interdisciplinary approach, covering wide-ranging fields of knowledge - quantum physics, postcolonial studies, natural philosophy, psychoanalysis, film theory, literature, and the arts. Benjamin's texts are re-considered in light of thinkers and poets, such as Theodor W. Adorno, Sigmund Freud, Gottfried E. Leibniz, W. G. Sebald, Franz Kafka, or Carlos Martínez Rivas. The critical potential of constellations in Benjamin's work and beyond will be of the highest interest for researchers and students in all areas of the Humanities.

Contents:

From Kant's starry skies to Kafka's Odradek : Benjamin and the quantum of history / Eric Kligerman

The name as the navel : on refinding things we never had / Adam Lipszyc

Constellation and expression in Leibniz and Benjamin / Paula Schwebel

Constellation and configuration : language and reading in the "epistemo-critical prologue" / Tom Vandeputte

The history of production and the production of history : Benjamin on natural history and dialectical images / Yanik Avila

The poetics of the rag collector : on Benjamin's motifs of collecting and the collective of rags / Saein Park

Distracted images : Ablenkung, Zerstreuung, Konstellation / Benjamin Brewer

Surviving civilization with mickey mouse and a laugh : a posthuman constellation / Carlo Salzani

The gothic third world : photography and the poetics of exclusion / Javier Padilla

"Ins Romantische zurück und ins Politische voran" : Benjamin and Sebald / Nikolai Preuschoff.

Notes:

"The idea and initial impulse for this collection of essays on Walter Benjamin goes back to a seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association's Annual Meeting at the University of Toronto in 2013."-- Page xvii.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-5275-1567-2

OCLC:

1046633866