Anthropology & Materialism, special issue on Walter Benjamin and philosophy
From the special issue’s editors:
We are very happy to announce the publication of Discontinuous Infinities, a special issue of the online journal Anthropology & Materialism, dedicated to the philosophy of Walter Benjamin. The issue, co-edited by Jan Sieber and Sebastian Truskolaski, features articles by international scholars, including: Yanik Avila, Léa Barbisan, Andrew Benjamin, Élise Derroitte, Phillip Homburg, Sami Khatib, Nassima Sahraoui, Jonathan Short, and Irving Wohlfarth. On the one hand, the pieces collected in this volume explore Benjamin’s relation to a range of canonical figures, whose work significantly influenced his own thinking (Kant, Fichte, Marx, Cohen, Husserl, Freud etc.); on the other hand, they put his philosophy into relation with a range of more recent thinkers (Saussure, Blanchot, Lacan, Derrida, Esposito, Hardt and Negri etc.) All the while, the volume seeks to cast into relief an image of Benjamin’s own philosophical programme, its limits and its possibilities, to probe the actuality of his thinking, and to assert his philosophy’s enduring significance at a time of renewed political crisis. On this basis, we hope that the pieces in the present collection will prove to be illuminating, and that our efforts may contribute – however modestly – to the understanding of Benjamin’s philosophical project.
