Podcasts about Walter Benjamin

In this episode of the Podcast for Social Research Anna Kornbluh and Kate Wagner consider the aesthetics of contemporary American fascism in a conversation moderated by BISR's Audrey Nicolaides. The fascism of the moment merges violent delight in destruction with nouveau riche vulgarity, middle class mediocrity, and internet meme culture. Despite incessant callbacks to the 1930s and continued deployment of classic fascist themes, contemporary fascism distinguishes itself from its historical predecessors by its speed, virulence, sites of production, and mode of distribution: the big, beautiful slop machine, hyper-capitalized, decentralized, and algorithmically determined. How does the aesthetic regime of contemporary fascism function? How is it rewiring the libidinal economy of the present, and stacking the deck for capital? What's specific to fascism in the age of polycrisis? What does it mean now to resist by "politicizing aesthetics," as Walter Benjamin once enjoined us to? You can download the episode by right-clicking here and selecting "save as." Or, look us up on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. This episode was produced by Gil Morejon from live audio recorded at Chicago's Twelve Ten Gallery. If you like what you've heard, consider supporting the podcast by becoming a BISR member or subscribing to Brooklyn Institute's Patreon page, where you can enjoy access to all past and future episodes of the Podcast for Social Research.  

In this episode of See See by Ceci, N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA, James B. Duke Professor Emerita at Duke, Guggenheim Fellow and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, joins us from the rare crossroads at which she has worked for forty years: literature, science, technology and, now, artificial intelligence. Trained as a chemist at Rochester and Caltech before crossing into literary scholarship, she is a foremost authority on the relations between literature and computational media, and the author of How We Became Posthuman (1999) and, most recently, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts (University of Chicago Press, 2025). In this rich and demanding conversation, Hayles redefines cognition as the interpretation of information in contexts that connect with meaning, a capacity she ascribes to bacteria, plants, fungi, animals and, increasingly, AI. She walks us through her integrated cognitive framework and the SIRAL criteria (sensing, interpreting, responding adaptively, anticipating, learning); through von Uexküll's umwelt, the world each species spins for itself; through cognitive assemblages in which humans, microbes and machines decide together; and through her sharp distinction between actors and agents. As a literary critic, she also turns her gaze on AI-produced literature, on hallucinations as imagination, and on Walter Benjamin's aura in the age of the deep fake. With reflections from neuroscientist John Cryan on the gut microbiome, historian Richard Bourke on the Kantian self, classicist Richard P. Martin on AI and imagination, and choreographer Alexander Whitley on embodiment. This is an episode about the uncoupling of cognition from consciousness, Hayles' most crucial move. About a posthuman in which the human itself is being rewritten. And about the very determined optimism of a thinker who insists that hope is not the reward at the end of the work, but the precondition for it. N. Katherine Hayles is the author of twelve influential books, including the landmark How We Became Posthuman, widely regarded as a seminal foundation for posthumanism, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005), Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (2017), and her latest, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts (University of Chicago Press, 2025). A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Foundation, Hayles has transformed our understanding of the digital age.

The ACFM crew gather for a close reading of Walter Benjamin’s foundational contribution to 20th century cultural and media theory. Download the short text and follow along as Nadia, Keir and Jem consider The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, published in 1935. Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

The ACFM crew gather for a close reading of Walter Benjamin’s foundational contribution to 20th century cultural and media theory. Download the short text and follow along as Nadia, Keir and Jem consider The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, published in 1935. Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Is digital media preventing us from accessing the most exciting part of culture? Final episode of the hiatus special series: it's a new era! It's a new episode structure with new segments!Find out more about:the unacknowledged difference between wonder and wander – wonderment: what is it?A poem by Wordsworth & Agnes Martin's writingsart etiquettethat time when I went viral and Snoop Dog (or his team) reposted my performance showand more... (author and podcaster Katy Hessel (Great Women Artists Podcast), author Lauren Elkin...)Visit Worlding online and sign up to our newsletter or follow us on Instagram: @worldingprojecthttps://www.worldingproject.comSmall donations are great! "Buys us a book": https://buymeacoffee.com/exhibitionistaDonate: https://exhibitionistaspodcast.com/support-usTo know more about our guests and our ideas → ⁠SIGN UP TO THE EXHIBITIONISTAS FILES.https://joanaprneves.substack.com/s/exhibitionistasMy definition of wonderment is actually taken from the noun ‘wonder': https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/wonder Hollis Frampton's text: Digression on the Photographic Agony, Artforum, November 1972: https://www.artforum.com/features/digressions-on-the-photographic-agony-209932/Agnes Martin's photo credits: Agnes Martin in the mesas near Cuba, New Mexico, 1974. Photo Gianfranco Gorgoni.Pliny the Elder's mention of the origin myth of art is in Natural History Book XXXVMy strange viral experience article Going Viral: if your exhibition is reposted by Snoop Dog, does it matter? https://substack.com/home/post/p-157358364The article where I mention Katy Hessel's strange Art Self Help Book, Art as Function, Automatic Education, and Self-Care: the Politics of Culture Replaced by the Commodification of Creativity: https://substack.com/@joanaprneves/p-190450394Find Walter Benjamin's first “read Walter Benjamin with me” here” https://joanaprneves.substack.com/s/your-crazy-aunt-book-shelfDiscover other podcasts regularly: https://www.womenwhopodcastmag.com/00:00 Introduction to Exhibitionistas and New Format01:30 Wonderment06:03 Reading Out Loud08:25 Agnes Martin on Joy12:58 Ekphrasis19:51 Digital Hygiene41:32 Build Exhibitionistas With Me!46:33 Brainstorm in a Teacup47:37 OutroFollow, Subscribe, Comment, or write joana@exhibitionistaspodcast.com

Florian Meinel, Professor für Staatstheorie an der Universität Göttingen, erklärt, wie das strafrechtliche Regime der Bundesrepublik entstanden ist und warum es heute zu einem dysfunktionalen System geführt hat, das niemanden mehr schützt, aber viele bedroht. Im Mittelpunkt steht der Streit um „From the River to the Sea," die Verpolizeilichung des Meinungsregimes und was Walter Benjamin damit zu tun hat.

Silvia Bortoli"Come il cane è arrivato tra noi ed è rimaasto"Quodlibetwww.quodlibet.it«Cedesi cane per il resto educatissimo e che alla parola Fermo! si fa statua di sale.»Ci sono decisioni che alle persone ragionevoli possono sembrare avventate, come accogliere un cucciolo di Jack Russell in una casa in cui la demenza mette già a dura prova l'equilibrio e la resistenza della famiglia. La quotidianità è già costretta e faticosa, le relazioni sociali praticamente svanite, la solitudine grande, e un cane di tre mesi con le sue intemperanze non può che complicare le giornate e aumentare la fatica, ma porta nuova vita e nuove relazioni che sostituiscono in parte quelle perdute, con altri cani, con altri ambienti, con padroni (o «genitori», come a volte chiamano sé stessi) di altri cani; si imparano cose che non si sapevano, non solo sui cani, ma sulle persone e su mondi ai quali la vita precedente la malattia non avrebbe dato accesso e che portano inaspettatamente amicizia e sollievo. E soprattutto, come dice Jon, uno dei passanti che si incontrano in questo libro, prendere un cane in una situazione difficile è forse un azzardo, ma in fin dei conti la cosa migliore da fare: «perché i cani ci parlano e ci consolano e ci guariscono dalle malattie dell'anima».Silvia Bortoli è nata a Venezia nel 1946, ha vissuto a lungo a Milano, a Napoli e a Benevento e da qualche anno è tornata a vivere a Milano. Ha pubblicato poesia (Tutti i fiumi), racconti e romanzi brevi (L'inesperienza, Percezioni variabili, Quattro giorni a marzo, Mentre il poeta si allontana piange, Come sono finita dove sono finita).Ha tradotto letteratura tedesca per le maggiori case editrici italiane; tra i suoi autori Heinrich Böll, Thomas Mann, Theodor Fontane, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Ingeborg Bachmann, Wim Wenders.Diventa un supporter di questo podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/il-posto-delle-parole--1487855/support.IL POSTO DELLE PAROLEascoltare fa pensarehttps://ilpostodelleparole.it/

El municipio gerundense acogerá un proyecto cultural para recuperar la figura del filósofo y reforzar la memoria histórica.

La question, c'est : est-ce qu'il marche ? Est-ce qu'il flâne ? Est-ce qu'il se promène ou est-ce qu'il vagabonde ? Oui, je viens de refermer le livre d'Edgardo Scott et je m'interroge à son sujet. Né à Buenos Aires en Argentine, il semblerait qu'il soit issu d'une lignée de grands marcheurs, que vous appelez migrants parfois. Il semblerait aussi que lui-même ait été pris de flânerie pour Paris. Avec Edgardo Scott, c'est aussi l'histoire d'un psychanalyste qui fait marcher sa « cabeza », Freud, Lacan, Foucault jamais très loin de sa plume. L'occasion faisant le larron, lorsque vous lirez Du flâneur au vagabond – un essai littéraire sur la marche qu'il publie aux éditions Riveneuve –, vous cheminerez aux côtés d'Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Cortázar, Borges.  Programmation musicale de l'invité : Edmundo Rivero – « Cuando Me Entres a Fallar »  Aparte – « Summerflight » The Divine Comedy – « To The Rescue »

La question, c'est : est-ce qu'il marche ? Est-ce qu'il flâne ? Est-ce qu'il se promène ou est-ce qu'il vagabonde ? Oui, je viens de refermer le livre d'Edgardo Scott et je m'interroge à son sujet. Né à Buenos Aires en Argentine, il semblerait qu'il soit issu d'une lignée de grands marcheurs, que vous appelez migrants parfois. Il semblerait aussi que lui-même ait été pris de flânerie pour Paris. Avec Edgardo Scott, c'est aussi l'histoire d'un psychanalyste qui fait marcher sa « cabeza », Freud, Lacan, Foucault jamais très loin de sa plume. L'occasion faisant le larron, lorsque vous lirez Du flâneur au vagabond – un essai littéraire sur la marche qu'il publie aux éditions Riveneuve –, vous cheminerez aux côtés d'Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Cortázar, Borges.  Programmation musicale de l'invité : Edmundo Rivero – « Cuando Me Entres a Fallar »  Aparte – « Summerflight » The Divine Comedy – « To The Rescue »

Lea YpiL'invention de l'Europe par les langues et les cultures (2025-2026)Collège de FranceAnnée 2025-2026Colloque : Socialisme et égalitarisme libéral : un dialogue nécessaireRevolutionary Redemption and the Socialist AfterlifeGabriel WollnerProfessor, University of BremenRésuméIn his famous and difficult essay "On the Concept of History," Walter Benjamin introduces the idea of revolutionary redemption. Through their actions, revolutionaries of the present can redeem those whose struggles for liberation failed in the past. According to Benjamin, class struggle is a redemptive intervention into the past. This idea raises a fundamental question: How can present events and actions have an impact on the past and redeem people who are no longer alive? I attempt to answer this question with a conception of emancipation as a temporally extended collective action. On this conception, we are struggling for the past's socialist afterlife.Gabriel WollnerGabriel Wollner studied philosophy, political science, and economics at the universities of Oxford and Harvard. He completed his doctorate in philosophy at University College London and has taught as an assistant professor at the London School of Economics and at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Most recently, he held the chair of political and social philosophy at the University of Bayreuth.-- Ce colloque se propose d'explorer un dialogue essentiel entre deux traditions majeures de la pensée politique contemporaine : le socialisme et l'égalitarisme libéral. Toutes deux visent à réduire les inégalités et à promouvoir la justice sociale, mais elles divergent sur les moyens et les principes qui doivent guider cette transformation. Alors que l'égalitarisme libéral insiste sur l'égalité des chances et la redistribution par des institutions démocratiques, le socialisme met l'accent sur la transformation des structures économiques et la remise en question des rapports de domination capitalistes. Ce symposium réunit philosophes, économistes et théoriciens politiques pour examiner comment ces deux approches peuvent se compléter et s'enrichir mutuellement. En confrontant la critique socialiste de l'accumulation capitaliste et les principes libéraux de liberté et de pluralisme, on cherche à ouvrir des pistes pour une société plus juste et démocratique, capable de répondre aux défis du XXIᵉ siècle.

Erin Stapleton researchs destruction, archival imperfection, material volatility, resistance and ambiguity in digital and visual cultures, identity and media. Her current project, Catastrophic Loss, investigates how colonial logics continue to inform everyday digital media cultures and practices, the fragility of these systems, and the losses they threaten and produce.We discuss her book, The Intoxication of Destruction in Theory, Culture and Media: A Philosophy of Expenditure After Georges Bataille, which was published in 2022 by Amsterdam University Press (and published in paperback by Routledge in 2025). In it, she takes destruction as the founding operation of culture and trace it through philosophy, the media of September 11 and disaster films, end-of-the-world narratives, execution and eroticism, before addressing the effects of the displacement of linear destruction on the culture and media produced in digital systems. In other words, it's got sex, death, explosions… and computers. And an unexpected amount of Walter Benjamin for some reason. And a joke that will only be funny to people who are intimately familiar with Australian slang and Georges Bataille.She completed her PhD with the London Graduate School at Kingston University, and my other qualifications at the University of Melbourne, where she now teaches in Media and Communications.Stapleton's site: https://drerinkstapleton.wordpress.com/Book link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Intoxication-Destruction-Theory-Culture-Media/dp/9463724532--- Become part of the Hermitix community: Hermitix Twitter - ⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/Hermitixpodcast⁠⁠⁠ Support Hermitix: Patreon - ⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/hermitix⁠⁠⁠ Donations: - ⁠⁠⁠https://www.paypal.me/hermitixpod⁠⁠⁠ Hermitix Merchandise - ⁠⁠⁠http://teespring.com/stores/hermitix-2⁠⁠⁠ Bitcoin Donation Address: 3LAGEKBXEuE2pgc4oubExGTWtrKPuXDDLK Ethereum Donation Address: 0x31e2a4a31B8563B8d238eC086daE9B75a00D9E74

&y & &ers celebrate weed's birthday with our annual reading of "Wally B" (Walter Benjamin)! This year, we read Leon Wieseltier's weasel-tier preface to Benjamin's Illuminations, then "Unpacking My Library" and a section of Berlin Childhood. For full ep and more bonus content subscribe to Patreon.com/poddamnamerica

In this episode of High Theory, Zac Zimmer talks to Kim about Decolonizing the Novum. The novum is a concept developed by Darko Suvin that names the new element of a science fiction or speculative fiction narrative. SF narratives from the Americas that rewrite archival material about colonization and first contact have begun an imaginative project of decolonizing that novum. In Zac's words, the "novum" has been part of our definition of science fiction since Darko Suvin first offered up the concept of part of his critical assessment of SF. This idea of "novelty" is linked to conquest and colonialism through the figure of the New World, i.e. the post-1492 Americas. Thus untangling the relationship between colonialism, novelty, and science fiction must pass through the historical record of the conquest. One way to do this is to focus on SF that deeply engages the archival record of the XVIth century in the Americas: texts and artworks that use speculation to depart from the knowledge that things didn't quite occur the way the dominant paradigms would lead us to believe, and to imagine other futures linked to past moments of historical contingency. In the episode, Zac references an incredible list of writers and theorists, including Edmundo O'Gorman and Walter Benjamin, Saidiya Hartman's “Venus in Two Acts,” You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, Destrucción de todas las cosas by Hugo Hiriart, and “Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. The transcript lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Zac's book, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas (Northwestern University Press 2025), is a comparative study of Latin American science fiction and narratives of the sixteenth century conquest of the Americas. It moves through a corpus of Mexican novels, Andean visual arts practices, and other cultural artifacts that have dramatized counterfactual narratives. Reimagining the early colonial period's historiography from a south-to-north directionality while inventing parallel realities, these texts, which are concerned with limit cases, alterities, and alternative temporalities, refuse any reliance on the imperial ontologies of European expansion. Zac examines these works to explore the slippage that exists between science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality and literary speculation as an aesthetic tool that can be used to imagine other possible worlds. You can read a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Zac Zimmer works as an Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. His research explores questions of literature, aesthetics, politics, and technology in the Americas.In addition to his current research on the cultural infrastructure of technosystems, he co-facilitates the Ethics & Astrobiology reading group, part of UCSC's Astrobiology Initiative. In the Literature department, he teaches classes on Latin American literature, science fiction, ethics & technology, and the poetics of California infrastructure. The image for this episode is the view from the Hubble Space Telescope, showing the birth of a sun-like star, retrieved from Flicker for High Theory by Lili Epstein. Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this episode of High Theory, Zac Zimmer talks to Kim about Decolonizing the Novum. The novum is a concept developed by Darko Suvin that names the new element of a science fiction or speculative fiction narrative. SF narratives from the Americas that rewrite archival material about colonization and first contact have begun an imaginative project of decolonizing that novum. In Zac's words, the "novum" has been part of our definition of science fiction since Darko Suvin first offered up the concept of part of his critical assessment of SF. This idea of "novelty" is linked to conquest and colonialism through the figure of the New World, i.e. the post-1492 Americas. Thus untangling the relationship between colonialism, novelty, and science fiction must pass through the historical record of the conquest. One way to do this is to focus on SF that deeply engages the archival record of the XVIth century in the Americas: texts and artworks that use speculation to depart from the knowledge that things didn't quite occur the way the dominant paradigms would lead us to believe, and to imagine other futures linked to past moments of historical contingency. In the episode, Zac references an incredible list of writers and theorists, including Edmundo O'Gorman and Walter Benjamin, Saidiya Hartman's “Venus in Two Acts,” You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, Destrucción de todas las cosas by Hugo Hiriart, and “Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. The transcript lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Zac's book, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas (Northwestern University Press 2025), is a comparative study of Latin American science fiction and narratives of the sixteenth century conquest of the Americas. It moves through a corpus of Mexican novels, Andean visual arts practices, and other cultural artifacts that have dramatized counterfactual narratives. Reimagining the early colonial period's historiography from a south-to-north directionality while inventing parallel realities, these texts, which are concerned with limit cases, alterities, and alternative temporalities, refuse any reliance on the imperial ontologies of European expansion. Zac examines these works to explore the slippage that exists between science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality and literary speculation as an aesthetic tool that can be used to imagine other possible worlds. You can read a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Zac Zimmer works as an Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. His research explores questions of literature, aesthetics, politics, and technology in the Americas.In addition to his current research on the cultural infrastructure of technosystems, he co-facilitates the Ethics & Astrobiology reading group, part of UCSC's Astrobiology Initiative. In the Literature department, he teaches classes on Latin American literature, science fiction, ethics & technology, and the poetics of California infrastructure. The image for this episode is the view from the Hubble Space Telescope, showing the birth of a sun-like star, retrieved from Flicker for High Theory by Lili Epstein. Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

In this episode of High Theory, Zac Zimmer talks to Kim about Decolonizing the Novum. The novum is a concept developed by Darko Suvin that names the new element of a science fiction or speculative fiction narrative. SF narratives from the Americas that rewrite archival material about colonization and first contact have begun an imaginative project of decolonizing that novum. In Zac's words, the "novum" has been part of our definition of science fiction since Darko Suvin first offered up the concept of part of his critical assessment of SF. This idea of "novelty" is linked to conquest and colonialism through the figure of the New World, i.e. the post-1492 Americas. Thus untangling the relationship between colonialism, novelty, and science fiction must pass through the historical record of the conquest. One way to do this is to focus on SF that deeply engages the archival record of the XVIth century in the Americas: texts and artworks that use speculation to depart from the knowledge that things didn't quite occur the way the dominant paradigms would lead us to believe, and to imagine other futures linked to past moments of historical contingency. In the episode, Zac references an incredible list of writers and theorists, including Edmundo O'Gorman and Walter Benjamin, Saidiya Hartman's “Venus in Two Acts,” You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, Destrucción de todas las cosas by Hugo Hiriart, and “Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. The transcript lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Zac's book, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas (Northwestern University Press 2025), is a comparative study of Latin American science fiction and narratives of the sixteenth century conquest of the Americas. It moves through a corpus of Mexican novels, Andean visual arts practices, and other cultural artifacts that have dramatized counterfactual narratives. Reimagining the early colonial period's historiography from a south-to-north directionality while inventing parallel realities, these texts, which are concerned with limit cases, alterities, and alternative temporalities, refuse any reliance on the imperial ontologies of European expansion. Zac examines these works to explore the slippage that exists between science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality and literary speculation as an aesthetic tool that can be used to imagine other possible worlds. You can read a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Zac Zimmer works as an Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. His research explores questions of literature, aesthetics, politics, and technology in the Americas.In addition to his current research on the cultural infrastructure of technosystems, he co-facilitates the Ethics & Astrobiology reading group, part of UCSC's Astrobiology Initiative. In the Literature department, he teaches classes on Latin American literature, science fiction, ethics & technology, and the poetics of California infrastructure. The image for this episode is the view from the Hubble Space Telescope, showing the birth of a sun-like star, retrieved from Flicker for High Theory by Lili Epstein. Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In this episode of High Theory, Zac Zimmer talks to Kim about Decolonizing the Novum. The novum is a concept developed by Darko Suvin that names the new element of a science fiction or speculative fiction narrative. SF narratives from the Americas that rewrite archival material about colonization and first contact have begun an imaginative project of decolonizing that novum. In Zac's words, the "novum" has been part of our definition of science fiction since Darko Suvin first offered up the concept of part of his critical assessment of SF. This idea of "novelty" is linked to conquest and colonialism through the figure of the New World, i.e. the post-1492 Americas. Thus untangling the relationship between colonialism, novelty, and science fiction must pass through the historical record of the conquest. One way to do this is to focus on SF that deeply engages the archival record of the XVIth century in the Americas: texts and artworks that use speculation to depart from the knowledge that things didn't quite occur the way the dominant paradigms would lead us to believe, and to imagine other futures linked to past moments of historical contingency. In the episode, Zac references an incredible list of writers and theorists, including Edmundo O'Gorman and Walter Benjamin, Saidiya Hartman's “Venus in Two Acts,” You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, Destrucción de todas las cosas by Hugo Hiriart, and “Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. The transcript lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Zac's book, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas (Northwestern University Press 2025), is a comparative study of Latin American science fiction and narratives of the sixteenth century conquest of the Americas. It moves through a corpus of Mexican novels, Andean visual arts practices, and other cultural artifacts that have dramatized counterfactual narratives. Reimagining the early colonial period's historiography from a south-to-north directionality while inventing parallel realities, these texts, which are concerned with limit cases, alterities, and alternative temporalities, refuse any reliance on the imperial ontologies of European expansion. Zac examines these works to explore the slippage that exists between science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality and literary speculation as an aesthetic tool that can be used to imagine other possible worlds. You can read a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Zac Zimmer works as an Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. His research explores questions of literature, aesthetics, politics, and technology in the Americas.In addition to his current research on the cultural infrastructure of technosystems, he co-facilitates the Ethics & Astrobiology reading group, part of UCSC's Astrobiology Initiative. In the Literature department, he teaches classes on Latin American literature, science fiction, ethics & technology, and the poetics of California infrastructure. The image for this episode is the view from the Hubble Space Telescope, showing the birth of a sun-like star, retrieved from Flicker for High Theory by Lili Epstein. Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode of High Theory, Zac Zimmer talks to Kim about Decolonizing the Novum. The novum is a concept developed by Darko Suvin that names the new element of a science fiction or speculative fiction narrative. SF narratives from the Americas that rewrite archival material about colonization and first contact have begun an imaginative project of decolonizing that novum. In Zac's words, the "novum" has been part of our definition of science fiction since Darko Suvin first offered up the concept of part of his critical assessment of SF. This idea of "novelty" is linked to conquest and colonialism through the figure of the New World, i.e. the post-1492 Americas. Thus untangling the relationship between colonialism, novelty, and science fiction must pass through the historical record of the conquest. One way to do this is to focus on SF that deeply engages the archival record of the XVIth century in the Americas: texts and artworks that use speculation to depart from the knowledge that things didn't quite occur the way the dominant paradigms would lead us to believe, and to imagine other futures linked to past moments of historical contingency. In the episode, Zac references an incredible list of writers and theorists, including Edmundo O'Gorman and Walter Benjamin, Saidiya Hartman's “Venus in Two Acts,” You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, Destrucción de todas las cosas by Hugo Hiriart, and “Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. The transcript lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Zac's book, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas (Northwestern University Press 2025), is a comparative study of Latin American science fiction and narratives of the sixteenth century conquest of the Americas. It moves through a corpus of Mexican novels, Andean visual arts practices, and other cultural artifacts that have dramatized counterfactual narratives. Reimagining the early colonial period's historiography from a south-to-north directionality while inventing parallel realities, these texts, which are concerned with limit cases, alterities, and alternative temporalities, refuse any reliance on the imperial ontologies of European expansion. Zac examines these works to explore the slippage that exists between science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality and literary speculation as an aesthetic tool that can be used to imagine other possible worlds. You can read a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Zac Zimmer works as an Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. His research explores questions of literature, aesthetics, politics, and technology in the Americas.In addition to his current research on the cultural infrastructure of technosystems, he co-facilitates the Ethics & Astrobiology reading group, part of UCSC's Astrobiology Initiative. In the Literature department, he teaches classes on Latin American literature, science fiction, ethics & technology, and the poetics of California infrastructure. The image for this episode is the view from the Hubble Space Telescope, showing the birth of a sun-like star, retrieved from Flicker for High Theory by Lili Epstein. Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In this episode of High Theory, Zac Zimmer talks to Kim about Decolonizing the Novum. The novum is a concept developed by Darko Suvin that names the new element of a science fiction or speculative fiction narrative. SF narratives from the Americas that rewrite archival material about colonization and first contact have begun an imaginative project of decolonizing that novum. In Zac's words, the "novum" has been part of our definition of science fiction since Darko Suvin first offered up the concept of part of his critical assessment of SF. This idea of "novelty" is linked to conquest and colonialism through the figure of the New World, i.e. the post-1492 Americas. Thus untangling the relationship between colonialism, novelty, and science fiction must pass through the historical record of the conquest. One way to do this is to focus on SF that deeply engages the archival record of the XVIth century in the Americas: texts and artworks that use speculation to depart from the knowledge that things didn't quite occur the way the dominant paradigms would lead us to believe, and to imagine other futures linked to past moments of historical contingency. In the episode, Zac references an incredible list of writers and theorists, including Edmundo O'Gorman and Walter Benjamin, Saidiya Hartman's “Venus in Two Acts,” You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, Destrucción de todas las cosas by Hugo Hiriart, and “Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. The transcript lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Zac's book, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas (Northwestern University Press 2025), is a comparative study of Latin American science fiction and narratives of the sixteenth century conquest of the Americas. It moves through a corpus of Mexican novels, Andean visual arts practices, and other cultural artifacts that have dramatized counterfactual narratives. Reimagining the early colonial period's historiography from a south-to-north directionality while inventing parallel realities, these texts, which are concerned with limit cases, alterities, and alternative temporalities, refuse any reliance on the imperial ontologies of European expansion. Zac examines these works to explore the slippage that exists between science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality and literary speculation as an aesthetic tool that can be used to imagine other possible worlds. You can read a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Zac Zimmer works as an Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. His research explores questions of literature, aesthetics, politics, and technology in the Americas.In addition to his current research on the cultural infrastructure of technosystems, he co-facilitates the Ethics & Astrobiology reading group, part of UCSC's Astrobiology Initiative. In the Literature department, he teaches classes on Latin American literature, science fiction, ethics & technology, and the poetics of California infrastructure. The image for this episode is the view from the Hubble Space Telescope, showing the birth of a sun-like star, retrieved from Flicker for High Theory by Lili Epstein. Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) is widely considered one of the most creative cultural critics of the twentieth century. Esteemed for his literary acumen and capacious imagination, he developed a unique style of criticism―his friend Hannah Arendt called it pearl-diving―that sought out fragments of redemption in the ruins of bourgeois civilization. In Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver (Yale UP, 2026), award-winning author Peter E. Gordon tells Benjamin's story in a vivid and poetic style, inviting the reader to look beyond the image of Benjamin as a tragic figure of German-Jewish history and portraying him as a complex personality of unique and multifaceted gifts. Tracing Benjamin's life from his Berlin childhood to his Parisian exile. Abe Silberstein is a Ph.D. student in the joint program in History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) is widely considered one of the most creative cultural critics of the twentieth century. Esteemed for his literary acumen and capacious imagination, he developed a unique style of criticism―his friend Hannah Arendt called it pearl-diving―that sought out fragments of redemption in the ruins of bourgeois civilization. In Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver (Yale UP, 2026), award-winning author Peter E. Gordon tells Benjamin's story in a vivid and poetic style, inviting the reader to look beyond the image of Benjamin as a tragic figure of German-Jewish history and portraying him as a complex personality of unique and multifaceted gifts. Tracing Benjamin's life from his Berlin childhood to his Parisian exile. Abe Silberstein is a Ph.D. student in the joint program in History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) is widely considered one of the most creative cultural critics of the twentieth century. Esteemed for his literary acumen and capacious imagination, he developed a unique style of criticism―his friend Hannah Arendt called it pearl-diving―that sought out fragments of redemption in the ruins of bourgeois civilization. In Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver (Yale UP, 2026), award-winning author Peter E. Gordon tells Benjamin's story in a vivid and poetic style, inviting the reader to look beyond the image of Benjamin as a tragic figure of German-Jewish history and portraying him as a complex personality of unique and multifaceted gifts. Tracing Benjamin's life from his Berlin childhood to his Parisian exile. Abe Silberstein is a Ph.D. student in the joint program in History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) is widely considered one of the most creative cultural critics of the twentieth century. Esteemed for his literary acumen and capacious imagination, he developed a unique style of criticism―his friend Hannah Arendt called it pearl-diving―that sought out fragments of redemption in the ruins of bourgeois civilization. In Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver (Yale UP, 2026), award-winning author Peter E. Gordon tells Benjamin's story in a vivid and poetic style, inviting the reader to look beyond the image of Benjamin as a tragic figure of German-Jewish history and portraying him as a complex personality of unique and multifaceted gifts. Tracing Benjamin's life from his Berlin childhood to his Parisian exile. Abe Silberstein is a Ph.D. student in the joint program in History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

durée : 00:58:07 - Avec philosophie - par : Géraldine Muhlmann, Nassim El Kabli - De la photographie à la radio, de Proust au polar, du cinéma à l'opéra, Walter Benjamin et Siegfried Kracauer, figures peu académiques, s'illustrèrent par leur extraordinaire curiosité pour les formes culturelles des nouvelles masses démocratiques, alors que guettait la catastrophe du nazisme. - réalisation : Nicolas Berger - invités : Michèle Cohen-Halimi Philosophe, professeure de philosophie à l'université Paris 8; Jean Tain Agrégé et docteur en philosophie de l'École Normale Supérieure de Paris

SD51 in collaboration with Dream Academy and SASUSU Radio Jakob Jakobsen “The Ghost of Jakob Jakobsen” For the first time publicly, we recorded Social Discipline live at Tromsø Kunstforening (TKF) on March 1, 2026, with Henrik Sørlid from Dream Academy and an engaged audience. We begin with Jakobsen's Letter of Resignation (2021), his farewell to the art scene, where he explains his motivations for the first time ever. However his practice has involved not only gestures of negation but also of affirmation. Deeply rooted in the punk ethos of DIY and unskilled practice, the underground industrial tape music networks of the 1980s, and strongly influenced by Dadaism, Surrealism, and Situationism, he has taken the radical proposition that “you can also do it” to the level of institutions, founding a university (Copenhagen Free University) and even a hospital (The Hospital for Self-Mediation). Over many years, he has been engaged in collaborative practices and self-organisation, for example through alternative television (tv tv), publishing initiatives (Infopool Magazine and Nebula), and activist spaces (Info Centre). Jakobsen might have abolished himself as an artist but following Walter Benjamin's conception of history, he understands these projects as unfinished struggles that can be reactivated as revolutionary tools for the present and future. In turn, he has excavated radical experiments that are often forgotten, such as Antiuniversity London and antipsychiatric movements like the Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, reactivating their potential. An eerieness frames these practices as animated by the ghosts of unrealised futures, traces of abandoned struggles and suppressed possibilities that continue to unsettle the present and open new possibilities within the limits imposed by the state and capitalism, in opposition to the prevailing sense of doom and gloom. At the same time, he interrogates the darker, exclusionary histories of the Danish welfare state, which he describes as a “work state.” He has a personal experience, specially in regards to mental institutions. He had lived with anxiety and depression since puberty and the last years he has been in and out of this institutions. His whole practice questions the state's production of subjectivity. Situated between activism, art, and everyday life, and informed by psychoanalysis, he engages in creating spaces where knowledge, relations, and forms of life are collectively produced, focusing on the construction of social relations, infrastructures, architectures, and modes of living. This podcast also contains sounds from unpublished tapes that Jakobsen recorded in 1985, a hauntological soundtrack against today's hopelessness. Thank you to the Dream Academy, SASUSU Radio and Tromsø Kunstforening (TKF)

Text: https://processthis.substack.com/p/not-perfect-just-forgiven-f1f Amid ICE terror and Epstein files in February 2026, my colleague Tripp Fuller asked if I'd write something on reactionaries, evangelicals, and fascism. Draws on critical theology, political philosophy, and psychoanalysis from Wilhelm Reich, Theodor Adorno, Gillian Rose, Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin, Slavoj Zizek, and Robert Paxton. Builds on some arguments from my 2019 book Against: What Does the White Evangelical Want?

“We read so as not to feel alone.” — C.S. Lewis (possibly)Dan Turello is a cultural historian of medieval Italy, a much published photographer, and the author of the new Connection: How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans. I'm sceptical. Especially the promise (or illusion) of better humans. But Turello's definition of technology goes back further than most — all the way to the original fig leaf. When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, the first thing they did, he reminds us, was cover their bodies. Technology, then, in Turello's framing, is everything that extends beyond the human body. Clothing is technology. Double-entry bookkeeping is technology. The iPhone is just the latest chapter of our technology story that began at the beginning.His most surprising argument is that our current tech anxiety has medieval roots. St. Francis of Assisi was what he calls a trust-fund kid “avant la lettre” — his father being a wealthy 13th century silk merchant at a time when northern Italy was Silicon Valley. Francis sold some of his dad's silk, gave the money away, stripped naked before a bishop, and founded a counterculture movement. The first tech backlash, Turello suggests, wasn't against AI. It was against double-entry bookkeeping. Dante, writing a generation later, idealised an earlier, simpler Florence — what scholars call “paleolithic chic.” No makeup, no ornate clothing, no fleeing to immoral cities. Sound familiar?On AI, Turello goes a bit Saint Francis on us. Large language models, he fears, generate material without lineage — you can't trace where the ideas came from, can't triangulate the sources, can't validate against reality. Technology is about power, Turello argues — about who controls the storyline. Making us better humans, then, requires recovering a sense of agency. Thus he argues that we should stop outsourcing our thinking, our writing, our photography to machines. Dante wrote the entire Divine Comedy without Claude. These days, we can barely write an email without a little help from our friends at ChatGPT. Machiavelli donned the robes of the past to think and write. We might try putting ours on too. But then isn't that a tech solution too? Five Takeaways•       St. Francis Was a Trust-Fund Kid Who Invented Counterculture: His father was a wealthy silk merchant in 13th-century Italy, at the dawn of Europe's commercial revolution. Francis sold his father's silk, gave the money away, stripped naked before a bishop, and founded an order that rejected the mechanisms of early capitalism. The first tech backlash wasn't against AI. It was against double-entry bookkeeping.•       Technology Is Everything Beyond the Naked Human Body: Turello's definition goes back to Genesis. When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, the first thing they did was cover their bodies. Fig leaves are technology. Clothing is technology. The iPhone is just the latest iteration of a metaphysical problem that's been destabilising us since the Fall.•       Dante Wrote the Divine Comedy Without Being Able to Edit: He penned an entire macrocosm of the medieval world from memory, without the ability to rewrite in any meaningful way. Turello thinks Dante would be concerned that we're losing our memories, our ability to tell a coherent narrative for our lives, and that our existence has become too fragmented. We can barely write an email without ChatGPT.•       LLMs Generate Material Without Lineage: Technology is about power — about who controls the storyline. Large language models produce text without traceable sources, without verifiable origins, without lineage. You can't triangulate where the ideas came from. That's not intelligence. That's a crisis of provenance.•       Agency Still Matters: Turello's hope for humanity is that we recover a sense of agency — the belief that our choices, friendships, relationships, and communities are ours to shape. The alternative is technological determinism: the machine decides. Machiavelli donned the robes of the past to think and write. We might try putting ours on too. About the GuestDan Turello is a writer, cultural historian, and photographer. A Technology and Humanity Fellow at Florida Atlantic University's Center for Future of Mind, AI & Society, his work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Connection: How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans is published by Columbia University Press.References:•       Connection: How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans by Dan Turello (Columbia University Press, 2026) — the book under discussion.•       Episode 2840: What Came First: Stories or Language? — Kevin Ashton on storytelling preceding language, a natural companion.•       Episode 2839: Have Our iPhones Eaten Our Brains? — Nelson Dellis on memory, cognitive atrophy, and outsourcing our minds.•       Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction — referenced in the conversation on technology and power.About Keen On AmericaNobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:(00:00) - Introduction: has technology made you a better human? (03:22) - The iPhone vs. the decisive moment: Bresson and photography (05:39) - The orange cushion: an ode to imperfection (06:27) - St. Francis of Assisi: the first tech critic (07:22) - 800 years of tech anxiety: from double-entry bookkeeping to AI (11:27) - Žižek, capitalism, and the love-hate relationship with technology (13:50) - Fig leaves to iPhones: technology as everything beyond the naked body (15:00) - Marinetti, Svevo, and the mammoth: technology as relationship (17:54) - Walter Benjamin, The Matrix, and who controls the storyline (20:51) - Bresson's decisive moment vs. Nietzsche's blow it up (22:25) - Agency under attack: reclaiming embodied experience (25:47) - Machiavelli donning the robes of the past (28:44) - Nost...

J.J. and Dr. Vivian Liska border on the sublime in their discussion of the life and thought of this German-Jewish thinker. If you or your business are interested in sponsoring an episode or mini-series, please reach out at  podcasts@torahinmotion.org Follow us on Bluesky @jewishideaspod.bsky.social for updates and insights!Please rate and review the the show in the podcast app of your choice.We welcome all complaints and compliments at podcasts@torahinmotion.org  For more information visit torahinmotion.org/podcastsVivian Liska is a Professor of German literature and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. She has published extensively on literary theory, German modernism, and German-Jewish authors and thinkers. Liska's recent books include Giorgio Agamben's Empty Messianism (2008), in German, translated into Hebrew (Resling 2010), When Kafka Says We. Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature (2008) and Fremde Gemeinschaft. Deutsch-jüdische Literatur der Moderne (2011). A Hebrew translation of this book is in the making with Hakibbutz Hameuchad. In 2012, she was awarded the Cross of Honor for Sciences and the Arts from the Republic of Austria. She is the (co-)editor of numerous books, among them the two-volume ICLA publication Modernism (2007), which was awarded the Prize of the Modernist Studies Association in 2008; Contemporary Jewish Writing in Europe: A Guide (2007); Theodor Herzl between Europe and Zion (2007); What does the Veil Know? (2009); The German-Jewish Experience Revisited (2015); and Kafka and the Universal (2016). She is the editor of the book series “Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts” (De Gruyter, Berlin), co-editor of the Yearbook of the Society for European-Jewish Literature, and arcadia. International Journal of Literary Studies. Her most recent book German-Jewish Thought and its Afterlife (Indiana University Press) was published in 2017. 

durée : 01:00:48 - Le Book Club - par : Marie Richeux - L'historienne de l'art Bénédicte Savoy a accepté de nous dévoiler sa bibliothèque. On y rencontre les travaux historiques de Laure Murat, Charlotte Guichard et Alexandre Kum'A N'Dumbe, ou encore les écrits radiophoniques de Walter Benjamin et la plume mélancolique de Mathias Enard. - réalisation : Vivien Demeyère - invités : Bénédicte Savoy Professeure d'histoire de l'art à l'Université Technique de Berlin, titulaire d'une chaire consacrée à l'« Histoire de l'art comme histoire culturelle »

Week 50 of Ted Gioia's Immersive Humanities List brings us to three mid-20th-century thinkers wrestling with art, media, and the modern world: Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, and José Ortega y Gasset.I begin with Susan Sontag's famous essay “In Plato's Cave” from On Photography. Writing in 1972, she asks how photography changes our relationship to memory and experience. At the time, photographs were printed objects. We saved them in albums, books, or wallets. Today we carry thousands in our pockets. If photographs once captured moments, now they seem to overwhelm them.Walter Benjamin's “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” pushes this further, asking what happens to art when it can be endlessly copied. Photography and film, he argues, transform not just art but perception itself.Finally, José Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses explores the rise of “mass-man”—a culture where opinions are everywhere but the pursuit of truth is optional.Taken together, these essays were more uncomfortable than I expected: the problems of our modern media world may have been visible long before smartphones, if only we'd paid attention.LINKTed Gioia/The Honest Broker's 12-Month Immersive Humanities Course (paywalled!)My Amazon Book List (NOT an affiliate link)CONNECTThe complete list of Crack the Book Episodes: https://cheryldrury.substack.com/p/crack-the-book-start-here?r=u3t2rTo read more of my writing, visit my Substack - https://www.cheryldrury.substack.com.Follow me on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/cldrury/ LISTENSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5GpySInw1e8IqNQvXow7Lv?si=9ebd5508daa245bdApple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crack-the-book/id1749793321 Captivate - https://crackthebook.captivate.fm

Sam Leith's guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the historian Jane Rogoyska, whose new book Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War tells the bloody story of the Second World War through the lens of Paris's Hotel Lutetia – following a cast of exiled intellectuals through the febrile 1930s, the increasing horrors of the war and occupation, through to the devastating aftermath as waves of prisoners returned from the camps. She tells Sam how she came to this unusual approach, how the connections between her cast of characters proliferated, how close Samuel Beckett came to a concentration camp – and about falling a little bit in love with Walter Benjamin.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the historian Jane Rogoyska, whose new book Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War tells the bloody story of the Second World War through the lens of Paris's Hotel Lutetia – following a cast of exiled intellectuals through the febrile 1930s, the increasing horrors of the war and occupation, through to the devastating aftermath as waves of prisoners returned from the camps. She tells me how she came to this unusual approach, how the connections between her cast of characters proliferated, how close Samuel Beckett came to a concentration camp – and about falling a little bit in love with Walter Benjamin. Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcastsContact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Philosopher and religion scholar Tad DeLay (author of Future of Denial) drops a guest essay on us this week, and it's a barn-burner. Tad brings together Wilhelm Reich, Walter Benjamin, Lacan, Althusser, and Adorno — yeah, the whole squad — to lay out a series of theses on how reactionary consciousness actually works, from repressed sexuality to theological cover stories for raw materialism. He makes the case that white evangelicalism is basically a half-century-old improvisation around whiteness and anticommunism, and that Trumpism is its perfected form — an ecumenical fascism where confessing the dear leader functions like a sinner's prayer. Along the way he unpacks Frank Wilhoit's devastating one-line definition of conservatism, explains why charging evangelicals with hypocrisy is a category error (they simply don't care what they believe), and uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to show how shame, guilt, and anxiety keep the whole machine running. Fair warning: Tad doesn't let liberals off the hook either — the essay's conclusion forces all of us to sit with the moral compromises we've made and what it means to keep breathing in hell. Tad DeLay, PhD is a philosopher, religion scholar, and interdisciplinary critical theorist. He has written four books, including his latest, Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change. He is a philosophy professor and lives in Grand Rapids. ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make? ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠This Lenten class ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠begins where all of Dr. John Dominic Crossan's has work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas' transformation of the "Sea of Galilee" into the commercial "Sea of Tiberias" mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John's baptism movement proclaiming God's Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus' parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ This podcast is a ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Homebrewed Christianity ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠production. Follow ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠the Homebrewed Christianity⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Theology Nerd Throwdown⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, & ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Rise of Bonhoeffer⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Substack - Process This!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Get instant access to over 50 classes at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.TheologyClass.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow the podcast, drop a review⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, send ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠feedback/questions⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or become a ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠member of the HBC Community⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why I Listened to 2,000 Minutes of Tchaikovsky Last YearWe are living in the age of "frictionless" music. The algorithms know what we want before we do, the dopamine is cheap, and the content is served to us on a silver platter. But as Charles Bukowski once said of classical music: "It washes the crap right out of me."Lately, it feels like there's a lot of crap to wash out.In this episode, I'm stepping away from the "business" of music to talk about the Aura and the Sublime. I'm breaking down why I spent more time with a 19th-century Russian composer than anyone in the Top 40, and why I believe the "smoothness" of modern digital life is actually making us bored, exhausted, and artistically numb.In this episode, we explore:The "Loss of Aura": Why music feels less valuable when it stops being a "hunt" and starts hunting you.The Sublime vs. The User-Friendly: Lessons from Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno on why great art should be a little bit terrifying.The Tchaikovsky Antidote: How complex, uncomfortable, and "loud" art reminds us that we aren't the center of the universe.Breaking the Algorithm: Why the most successful artists of the future will be the ones who refuse to be "mathematically certain."If you've been feeling a specific kind of creative exhaustion lately, this one is for you. It's time to stop trying to conquer the mountain and let the mountain conquer us.RESOURCES & LINKS

Filippo D'Angelo"Marthe, storia diuna prostituta"Joris-Karl HuysmansPrehistorica Editorewww.prehistoricaeditore.itTraduzione a cura di Filippo D'Angelo.Finalmente nelle mani dei lettori italiani Marthe, storia di una prostituta di Joris-Karl Huysmans, nella sontuosa traduzione di Filippo D'Angelo, che impreziosisce l'edizione con una postfazione d'autore.Orfana dall'età di quindici anni, Marthe lavora come operaia in una fabbrica di perle finte, nella Parigi di fine Ottocento. L'illusione di un destino migliore le spalanca le porte di una casa chiusa, gettandola in una vita fatta di eccessi, disgusti, umiliazioni. Proverà a estirparsi da quell'esistenza grazie a un ingaggio come cantante ottenuto in un teatro popolare e alla relazione con Léo, un giovane scrittore che ignora tutto del suo passato.Pubblicato nel 1876, questo primo romanzo di Huysmans esplora le speranze e i disinganni di due giovani in conflitto con la società spietata che li circonda. Scritto in uno stile già maturo e inconfondibile, fatto di metafore eccentriche e di immagini vividissime tratte dal quotidiano, Marthe, storia di una prostituta immortala le atmosfere e gli ambienti che, tra Baudelaire e Toulouse-Lautrec, fecero di Parigi, secondo la definizione di Walter Benjamin, la capitale del diciannovesimo secolo.Huysmans nacque a Parigi nel 1848 da una famiglia di origine olandese, ed è per richiamare queste sue origini nordiche che germanizzò il suo nome George-Charles in Joris-Karl. Frequentò studi piuttosto irregolari e per vivere divenne funzionario del Ministero degli Interni, mentre il suo amore per la Letteratura lo indusse a scrivere fin dal 1876 romanzi di impronta Naturalista. Nel 1880 entrò a far parte dell'esclusivo Gruppo di Medan, a cui faceva da capo Zola che lo considerava il suo allievo prediletto. Nel corso di pochi anni si sentì attratto dagli atteggiamenti estetizzanti dei simbolisti (fu amico di Mallarmé) che finì per codificare nel romanzo Controcorrente del 1884, prima di attraversare una profonda crisi mistica e abbracciare la religione cattolica, fino alla morte sopraggiunta nel 1907 (Parigi).Nato a Genova nel 1973, Filippo D'Angelo ha insegnato letteratura francese nelle Università di Limoges, Grenoble e Parigi 3. Oltre a traduzioni di autori francesi classici e contemporanei, ha pubblicato il romanzo La fine dell'altro mondo (Minimum fax, 2012) e La città del tempo (Nottetempo, 2024).Diventa un supporter di questo podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/il-posto-delle-parole--1487855/support.IL POSTO DELLE PAROLEascoltare fa pensarehttps://ilpostodelleparole.it/

Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual and philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School, who tragically died at 48 years old in 1940 as he fled the advance of the Third Reich on the French-Spanish border. Most writers and critics see Benjamin's work as fragmented, disjointed, esoteric and dispersed, with no clear narrative or cohesive philosophy. Duy Lap Nguyen, Associate Professor in World Cultures and Literatures at the University of Houston, paints a different picture of Benjamin's work. In Nguyen's revealing, latest book, Walter Benjmain and the Critique of Political Economy: A New Historical Materialism (Bloomsbury, 2024), he navigates through Benjamin's complex organon and meticulously puts together these apparently disperse philosophical threads into a cohesive whole. Nguyen argues that Benjamin's work demonstrated a holistic philosophical project, and he takes the reader through the latter's early critical engagement with anarchist praxis and Kantian thought, through to Benjamin's ‘Marxist' turn that put him in conversation with the Frankfurt School. The historical materialism of Benjamin, Nguyen carefully demonstrates, was centred on his critique of the ahistorical conceptions of time and history that were the foundation for popular, contemporaneous notions of ‘progress'. Benjamin rallied against neo-Kantians and early twentieth century social democrats alike for their adherence to the ‘infinite struggle', which posited the necessity for the continued, unachievable pursuit of the realisation of some ethical beyond, abstracted from historical conditions and forces of production, namely capitalism, that made their realisation impossible. Against these ahistorical conceptions, Benjamin's historical materialism saw modernism as a historically specific form of society, and not the eternal, fate-bound destiny that humanity was entrapped into. Duy Lap Nguyen's book offers a new insight into not only the crucial philosophy of Walter Benjamin, which demands resurrection in our historical juncture of overlapping crises and fascistic resurgence, but a richly detailed investigation into the ideas, people, and movements that surrounded Benjamin in his time. Nguyen's book, then, provides a holistic account of Benjamin's often forgotten philosophical contributions, how they were shaped, and what Benjamin can contribute to the critique of today's political economy. Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual and philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School, who tragically died at 48 years old in 1940 as he fled the advance of the Third Reich on the French-Spanish border. Most writers and critics see Benjamin's work as fragmented, disjointed, esoteric and dispersed, with no clear narrative or cohesive philosophy. Duy Lap Nguyen, Associate Professor in World Cultures and Literatures at the University of Houston, paints a different picture of Benjamin's work. In Nguyen's revealing, latest book, Walter Benjmain and the Critique of Political Economy: A New Historical Materialism (Bloomsbury, 2024), he navigates through Benjamin's complex organon and meticulously puts together these apparently disperse philosophical threads into a cohesive whole. Nguyen argues that Benjamin's work demonstrated a holistic philosophical project, and he takes the reader through the latter's early critical engagement with anarchist praxis and Kantian thought, through to Benjamin's ‘Marxist' turn that put him in conversation with the Frankfurt School. The historical materialism of Benjamin, Nguyen carefully demonstrates, was centred on his critique of the ahistorical conceptions of time and history that were the foundation for popular, contemporaneous notions of ‘progress'. Benjamin rallied against neo-Kantians and early twentieth century social democrats alike for their adherence to the ‘infinite struggle', which posited the necessity for the continued, unachievable pursuit of the realisation of some ethical beyond, abstracted from historical conditions and forces of production, namely capitalism, that made their realisation impossible. Against these ahistorical conceptions, Benjamin's historical materialism saw modernism as a historically specific form of society, and not the eternal, fate-bound destiny that humanity was entrapped into. Duy Lap Nguyen's book offers a new insight into not only the crucial philosophy of Walter Benjamin, which demands resurrection in our historical juncture of overlapping crises and fascistic resurgence, but a richly detailed investigation into the ideas, people, and movements that surrounded Benjamin in his time. Nguyen's book, then, provides a holistic account of Benjamin's often forgotten philosophical contributions, how they were shaped, and what Benjamin can contribute to the critique of today's political economy. Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual and philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School, who tragically died at 48 years old in 1940 as he fled the advance of the Third Reich on the French-Spanish border. Most writers and critics see Benjamin's work as fragmented, disjointed, esoteric and dispersed, with no clear narrative or cohesive philosophy. Duy Lap Nguyen, Associate Professor in World Cultures and Literatures at the University of Houston, paints a different picture of Benjamin's work. In Nguyen's revealing, latest book, Walter Benjmain and the Critique of Political Economy: A New Historical Materialism (Bloomsbury, 2024), he navigates through Benjamin's complex organon and meticulously puts together these apparently disperse philosophical threads into a cohesive whole. Nguyen argues that Benjamin's work demonstrated a holistic philosophical project, and he takes the reader through the latter's early critical engagement with anarchist praxis and Kantian thought, through to Benjamin's ‘Marxist' turn that put him in conversation with the Frankfurt School. The historical materialism of Benjamin, Nguyen carefully demonstrates, was centred on his critique of the ahistorical conceptions of time and history that were the foundation for popular, contemporaneous notions of ‘progress'. Benjamin rallied against neo-Kantians and early twentieth century social democrats alike for their adherence to the ‘infinite struggle', which posited the necessity for the continued, unachievable pursuit of the realisation of some ethical beyond, abstracted from historical conditions and forces of production, namely capitalism, that made their realisation impossible. Against these ahistorical conceptions, Benjamin's historical materialism saw modernism as a historically specific form of society, and not the eternal, fate-bound destiny that humanity was entrapped into. Duy Lap Nguyen's book offers a new insight into not only the crucial philosophy of Walter Benjamin, which demands resurrection in our historical juncture of overlapping crises and fascistic resurgence, but a richly detailed investigation into the ideas, people, and movements that surrounded Benjamin in his time. Nguyen's book, then, provides a holistic account of Benjamin's often forgotten philosophical contributions, how they were shaped, and what Benjamin can contribute to the critique of today's political economy. Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual and philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School, who tragically died at 48 years old in 1940 as he fled the advance of the Third Reich on the French-Spanish border. Most writers and critics see Benjamin's work as fragmented, disjointed, esoteric and dispersed, with no clear narrative or cohesive philosophy. Duy Lap Nguyen, Associate Professor in World Cultures and Literatures at the University of Houston, paints a different picture of Benjamin's work. In Nguyen's revealing, latest book, Walter Benjmain and the Critique of Political Economy: A New Historical Materialism (Bloomsbury, 2024), he navigates through Benjamin's complex organon and meticulously puts together these apparently disperse philosophical threads into a cohesive whole. Nguyen argues that Benjamin's work demonstrated a holistic philosophical project, and he takes the reader through the latter's early critical engagement with anarchist praxis and Kantian thought, through to Benjamin's ‘Marxist' turn that put him in conversation with the Frankfurt School. The historical materialism of Benjamin, Nguyen carefully demonstrates, was centred on his critique of the ahistorical conceptions of time and history that were the foundation for popular, contemporaneous notions of ‘progress'. Benjamin rallied against neo-Kantians and early twentieth century social democrats alike for their adherence to the ‘infinite struggle', which posited the necessity for the continued, unachievable pursuit of the realisation of some ethical beyond, abstracted from historical conditions and forces of production, namely capitalism, that made their realisation impossible. Against these ahistorical conceptions, Benjamin's historical materialism saw modernism as a historically specific form of society, and not the eternal, fate-bound destiny that humanity was entrapped into. Duy Lap Nguyen's book offers a new insight into not only the crucial philosophy of Walter Benjamin, which demands resurrection in our historical juncture of overlapping crises and fascistic resurgence, but a richly detailed investigation into the ideas, people, and movements that surrounded Benjamin in his time. Nguyen's book, then, provides a holistic account of Benjamin's often forgotten philosophical contributions, how they were shaped, and what Benjamin can contribute to the critique of today's political economy. Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual and philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School, who tragically died at 48 years old in 1940 as he fled the advance of the Third Reich on the French-Spanish border. Most writers and critics see Benjamin's work as fragmented, disjointed, esoteric and dispersed, with no clear narrative or cohesive philosophy. Duy Lap Nguyen, Associate Professor in World Cultures and Literatures at the University of Houston, paints a different picture of Benjamin's work. In Nguyen's revealing, latest book, Walter Benjmain and the Critique of Political Economy: A New Historical Materialism (Bloomsbury, 2024), he navigates through Benjamin's complex organon and meticulously puts together these apparently disperse philosophical threads into a cohesive whole. Nguyen argues that Benjamin's work demonstrated a holistic philosophical project, and he takes the reader through the latter's early critical engagement with anarchist praxis and Kantian thought, through to Benjamin's ‘Marxist' turn that put him in conversation with the Frankfurt School. The historical materialism of Benjamin, Nguyen carefully demonstrates, was centred on his critique of the ahistorical conceptions of time and history that were the foundation for popular, contemporaneous notions of ‘progress'. Benjamin rallied against neo-Kantians and early twentieth century social democrats alike for their adherence to the ‘infinite struggle', which posited the necessity for the continued, unachievable pursuit of the realisation of some ethical beyond, abstracted from historical conditions and forces of production, namely capitalism, that made their realisation impossible. Against these ahistorical conceptions, Benjamin's historical materialism saw modernism as a historically specific form of society, and not the eternal, fate-bound destiny that humanity was entrapped into. Duy Lap Nguyen's book offers a new insight into not only the crucial philosophy of Walter Benjamin, which demands resurrection in our historical juncture of overlapping crises and fascistic resurgence, but a richly detailed investigation into the ideas, people, and movements that surrounded Benjamin in his time. Nguyen's book, then, provides a holistic account of Benjamin's often forgotten philosophical contributions, how they were shaped, and what Benjamin can contribute to the critique of today's political economy. Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual and philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School, who tragically died at 48 years old in 1940 as he fled the advance of the Third Reich on the French-Spanish border. Most writers and critics see Benjamin's work as fragmented, disjointed, esoteric and dispersed, with no clear narrative or cohesive philosophy. Duy Lap Nguyen, Associate Professor in World Cultures and Literatures at the University of Houston, paints a different picture of Benjamin's work. In Nguyen's revealing, latest book, Walter Benjmain and the Critique of Political Economy: A New Historical Materialism (Bloomsbury, 2024), he navigates through Benjamin's complex organon and meticulously puts together these apparently disperse philosophical threads into a cohesive whole. Nguyen argues that Benjamin's work demonstrated a holistic philosophical project, and he takes the reader through the latter's early critical engagement with anarchist praxis and Kantian thought, through to Benjamin's ‘Marxist' turn that put him in conversation with the Frankfurt School. The historical materialism of Benjamin, Nguyen carefully demonstrates, was centred on his critique of the ahistorical conceptions of time and history that were the foundation for popular, contemporaneous notions of ‘progress'. Benjamin rallied against neo-Kantians and early twentieth century social democrats alike for their adherence to the ‘infinite struggle', which posited the necessity for the continued, unachievable pursuit of the realisation of some ethical beyond, abstracted from historical conditions and forces of production, namely capitalism, that made their realisation impossible. Against these ahistorical conceptions, Benjamin's historical materialism saw modernism as a historically specific form of society, and not the eternal, fate-bound destiny that humanity was entrapped into. Duy Lap Nguyen's book offers a new insight into not only the crucial philosophy of Walter Benjamin, which demands resurrection in our historical juncture of overlapping crises and fascistic resurgence, but a richly detailed investigation into the ideas, people, and movements that surrounded Benjamin in his time. Nguyen's book, then, provides a holistic account of Benjamin's often forgotten philosophical contributions, how they were shaped, and what Benjamin can contribute to the critique of today's political economy. Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The world's leading philosophers and psychologists were based in Germany and Austria during the rise of Hitler. They studied the darkest chapter of human history while trying to make sense of it and survive it themselves. Their teachings are an urgent alarm for us today: fascists seek endless conflict through domination, and it will never be enough. Drawing on George Orwell's analysis of Hitler, we see that while democracy offers the radical concept of "having a good time," fascism preys on a neurotic, broken need for "struggle, danger, and death." It is an addiction to conflict, often first learned in the childhood home, according to Erich Fromm, that views empathy not as a virtue, but as a target.  Walter Benjamin, before losing his own life to suicide to avoid the concentration camps, pointed out that fascists seek pleasure in their own demise. It is the fleeting, hollow glee of a bully kicking over a sandcastle because he doesn't know how to build one. Joy is how we win. The hate-fueled fascist high is a non-renewable resource. It requires a constant supply of new enemies to sustain a house of cards built on lawlessness and corruption. True joy, born of community, love, and creation, is sustainable energy, even in the unlikeliest of places, as our heroes who came before us also showed us. Stay safe. Stay defiant. And find some joy today: it's the best revenge. For our bonus episode this week, we sit down for a special Self Care Q&A with Vatican reporter Colleen Dulle, author of Struck Down, Not Destroyed: Keeping the Faith as a Vatican Reporter! To listen to the bonus, subscribe to our Patreon at the Truth-Teller level or higher. We are extremely grateful to our listeners who are keeping us afloat during very difficult economic circumstances. Every bit of support helps give us the freedom to tell the truth, so thank you again for making Gaslit Nation possible! Show Notes: Help Bring 5-Year-Old Liam Home https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-bring-5yearold-liam-home?attribution_id=sl:0f9224c0-2c25-4831-a70f-1357729d5d8c&lang=en_US&ts=1769049480&utm_campaign=fp_sharesheet&utm_content=amp17_control&utm_medium=customer&utm_source=copy_link Part I of Our Conversation with Colleen Dulle: MAGA's Vatican Cold War: https://gaslitnation.libsyn.com/magas-vatican-cold-war A Recent Gaslit Nation Salon Excerpt Giving the Bigger Picture of U.S. China-Panic Chaos under Trump from the Pentagon's Perspective: https://gaslitnation.libsyn.com/stay-sane-with-us-join-the-gaslit-nation-salon "An observer arrested in South Minneapolis. Photo by Richard Tsong-Taatarii/The Minnesota Star Tribune" https://bsky.app/profile/amreports.bsky.social/post/3mcxlw4ijx42p "Interesting scoop from Anna Giaritelli, who has good sources inside DHS. It suggests Noem and Lewandowski (seemingly still serving as a Special Government Employee despite having timed out months ago) are trying to push out the CBP Commissioner (former Border Patrol) because he's not harsh *enough.*" https://bsky.app/profile/reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3mcyd34k2v225 Immigration officers assert sweeping power to enter homes without a judge's warrant, memo says https://apnews.com/article/ice-arrests-warrants-minneapolis-trump-00d0ab0338e82341fd91b160758aeb2d The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/episodes-transcripts-20/2024/02/28/reparations-now 'That's Our Territory': Trump Uses Davos Speech to Push for Greenland https://time.com/7354005/trump-davos-speech-greenland/ You've Got to Read George Orwell's Review of 'Mein Kampf' https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a45897365/george-orwell-reviews-hitler-mein-kampf/ Police charge Trump campaign manager with assault https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/police-charge-trump-campaign-manager-with-assault#:~:text=Police%20in%20Jupiter%2C%20Florida%2C%20released,provided%20by%20Jupiter%2C%20Florida%20police. Ex-Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski accused of sexual assault https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/27/ex-trump-campaign-manager-corey-lewandowski-accused-of-sexual-assault  

In this episode we are joined by Wassila Abboud to discuss her essay, "The Dining Table and the Drone." Our conversation begins with her meditations on grief in Lebanon. We explore how people often name today's grief through the language of past griefs — and what this transference between past and present reveals about the psyche under domination. From there, we turn to Walter Benjamin's "angel of history" and why Abboud argues this analogy fails to capture Lebanon's relationship to catastrophe. We discuss why so many returns cluster around 1982, how that year fractured grief itself, reshaping collective memory, political imagination, and the vocabulary of resistance. We examine the paradoxical meaning of ceasefire, the choreography of repeated displacement, and the temporal logic of domination that ensures catastrophe is always waiting just beyond its declaration. Our conversation also situates Lebanon's grief in relation to Gaza's present devastation, asking what it reveals about the impossibility of stability in a regional order sustained by capital accumulation and the extraction of life. We trace the sequence of events between 1978 and 1982 — from Operation Litani to the Camp David Accords and Israel's full-scale invasion of Beirut — not simply as military maneuvers but as the crystallization of a regional order that fractured Lebanon's political landscape and redefined resistance. Wassila Abboud is a cultural worker and writer researching between Beirut and Amsterdam. Her work engages with critical theory, philosophy, and culture and takes on both a speculative and materialist approach, examining the conditions of past and present historical struggles. (Follow her on IG: @wassila_) If you like what we do and want to support our ability to have more conversations like this. Please consider becoming a Patron. You can do so for as little as a 1 Dollar a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism  

Starting from the observation that we increasingly treat the body as a maintenance problem, a fitness project, or an optimisation surface, the episode unfolds a deeper thesis: real thinking has weight. It needs fatigue, rhythm, resistance, time, and gravity.Together, Detlef and Sophia revisit philosophers who literally thought on their feet — Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Walter Benjamin, and Merleau-Ponty — and contrast embodied thinking with AI's frictionless, tireless cognition.At the heart of the episode lies a simple but radical sentence:“AI thinks without weight. Humans think with gravity.”The conversation moves from philosophy to everyday life, from West Cork landscapes to the ethics of limits, and from abstraction to movement as “epistemic hygiene.”The episode closes with a new song by Los Inorgánicos:“The Body Is Not a Side Project” — a minimal, rhythmic reminder that gravity needs a body.Detlef Schlich is a rock musician, podcaster, visual artist, filmmaker, ritual designer, and media archaeologist based in West Cork. He is recognised for his seminal work, including a scholarly examination of the intersections between shamanism, art, and digital culture, and his acclaimed video installation, Transodin's Tragedy. He primarily works in performance, photography, painting, sound, installations, and film. In his work, he reflects on the human condition and uses the digital shaman's methodology as an alter ego to create artwork. His media archaeology is a conceptual and practical exercise in uncovering the unique aesthetic, cultural, and political aspects of media in culture.WEBSITE LINKS WAW Official YouTube Channelhttps://www.youtube.com/@WAWBand"The Niles Bittersweet Song" WAW BandcampSilent NightIn a world shadowed by conflict and unrest, we, Dirk Schlömer & Detlef Schlich, felt compelled to reinterpret 'Silent Night' to reflect the complexities and contradictions of modern life.https://studiomuskau.bandcamp.com/track/silent-nightWild Atlantic WayThis results from a trip to West Cork, Ireland, where the beautiful Coastal "Wild Atlantic Way" reaches along the whole west coast!https://studiomuskau.bandcamp.com/track/wild-atlantic-wayYOU TUBE*Silent Night Reimagined* A Multilayered Avant-Garde Journey by WAW aka Dirk Schlömer & Detlef Schlichhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAbytLSfgCwDetlef SchlichInstagramDetlef Schlich ArTEEtude I love West Cork Artists FacebookDetlef Schlich I love West Cork Artists Group ArTEEtudeYouTube Channelsvisual PodcastArTEEtudeCute Alien TV official WebsiteArTEEtude Detlef Schlich Det Design Tribal Loop Download here for free Detlef Schlich´s Essay about the Cause and Effect of Shamanism, Art and Digital Culturehttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/303749640_Shamanism_Art_and_Digital_Culture_Cause_and_EffectSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/arteetude-a-podcast-with-artists-by-detlef-schlich/donations

The Frankfurt School's own legacy is best preserved by exercising an immanent critique of its premises and the conclusions to which they often led. By distinguishing between what is still and what is no longer alive in Critical Theory, Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School Under Pressure (Verso, 2023) seeks to demonstrate its continuing relevance in the 21st century. Fifty years after the appearance of The Dialectical Imagination, his pioneering history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay reflects on what may be living and dead in its legacy. Rather than treating it with filial piety as a fortress to be defended, he takes seriously its anti-systematic impulse and sensitivity to changing historical circumstances.  Honoring the Frankfurt School's practice of immanent critique, he puts critical pressure on a number of its own ideas by probing their contradictory impulses. Among them are the pathologization of political deviance through stigmatizing "authoritarian personalities," the undefended theological premises of Walter Benjamin's work, and the ambivalence of its members' analyses of anti-Semitism and Zionism. Additional questions are asked about other time-honored Marxist themes: the meaning of alienation, the alleged damages of abstraction, and the advocacy of a politics based on a singular notion of the truth. Rather, however, than allowing these questions to snowball into an unwarranted repudiation of the Frankfurt School legacy as a whole, the essay collection also acknowledges a number of its still potent arguments. They explore its neglected, but now timely analysis of "racket society," Adorno's dialectical reading of aesthetic sublimation, and the unexpected implications of Benjamin's focus on the corpse for political theory. Jay shows that it is a still evolving theoretical tradition which offers resources for the understanding of–and perhaps even practical betterment–of our increasingly troubled world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The Frankfurt School's own legacy is best preserved by exercising an immanent critique of its premises and the conclusions to which they often led. By distinguishing between what is still and what is no longer alive in Critical Theory, Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School Under Pressure (Verso, 2023) seeks to demonstrate its continuing relevance in the 21st century. Fifty years after the appearance of The Dialectical Imagination, his pioneering history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay reflects on what may be living and dead in its legacy. Rather than treating it with filial piety as a fortress to be defended, he takes seriously its anti-systematic impulse and sensitivity to changing historical circumstances.  Honoring the Frankfurt School's practice of immanent critique, he puts critical pressure on a number of its own ideas by probing their contradictory impulses. Among them are the pathologization of political deviance through stigmatizing "authoritarian personalities," the undefended theological premises of Walter Benjamin's work, and the ambivalence of its members' analyses of anti-Semitism and Zionism. Additional questions are asked about other time-honored Marxist themes: the meaning of alienation, the alleged damages of abstraction, and the advocacy of a politics based on a singular notion of the truth. Rather, however, than allowing these questions to snowball into an unwarranted repudiation of the Frankfurt School legacy as a whole, the essay collection also acknowledges a number of its still potent arguments. They explore its neglected, but now timely analysis of "racket society," Adorno's dialectical reading of aesthetic sublimation, and the unexpected implications of Benjamin's focus on the corpse for political theory. Jay shows that it is a still evolving theoretical tradition which offers resources for the understanding of–and perhaps even practical betterment–of our increasingly troubled world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

The Frankfurt School's own legacy is best preserved by exercising an immanent critique of its premises and the conclusions to which they often led. By distinguishing between what is still and what is no longer alive in Critical Theory, Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School Under Pressure (Verso, 2023) seeks to demonstrate its continuing relevance in the 21st century. Fifty years after the appearance of The Dialectical Imagination, his pioneering history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay reflects on what may be living and dead in its legacy. Rather than treating it with filial piety as a fortress to be defended, he takes seriously its anti-systematic impulse and sensitivity to changing historical circumstances.  Honoring the Frankfurt School's practice of immanent critique, he puts critical pressure on a number of its own ideas by probing their contradictory impulses. Among them are the pathologization of political deviance through stigmatizing "authoritarian personalities," the undefended theological premises of Walter Benjamin's work, and the ambivalence of its members' analyses of anti-Semitism and Zionism. Additional questions are asked about other time-honored Marxist themes: the meaning of alienation, the alleged damages of abstraction, and the advocacy of a politics based on a singular notion of the truth. Rather, however, than allowing these questions to snowball into an unwarranted repudiation of the Frankfurt School legacy as a whole, the essay collection also acknowledges a number of its still potent arguments. They explore its neglected, but now timely analysis of "racket society," Adorno's dialectical reading of aesthetic sublimation, and the unexpected implications of Benjamin's focus on the corpse for political theory. Jay shows that it is a still evolving theoretical tradition which offers resources for the understanding of–and perhaps even practical betterment–of our increasingly troubled world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The Frankfurt School's own legacy is best preserved by exercising an immanent critique of its premises and the conclusions to which they often led. By distinguishing between what is still and what is no longer alive in Critical Theory, Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School Under Pressure (Verso, 2023) seeks to demonstrate its continuing relevance in the 21st century. Fifty years after the appearance of The Dialectical Imagination, his pioneering history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay reflects on what may be living and dead in its legacy. Rather than treating it with filial piety as a fortress to be defended, he takes seriously its anti-systematic impulse and sensitivity to changing historical circumstances.  Honoring the Frankfurt School's practice of immanent critique, he puts critical pressure on a number of its own ideas by probing their contradictory impulses. Among them are the pathologization of political deviance through stigmatizing "authoritarian personalities," the undefended theological premises of Walter Benjamin's work, and the ambivalence of its members' analyses of anti-Semitism and Zionism. Additional questions are asked about other time-honored Marxist themes: the meaning of alienation, the alleged damages of abstraction, and the advocacy of a politics based on a singular notion of the truth. Rather, however, than allowing these questions to snowball into an unwarranted repudiation of the Frankfurt School legacy as a whole, the essay collection also acknowledges a number of its still potent arguments. They explore its neglected, but now timely analysis of "racket society," Adorno's dialectical reading of aesthetic sublimation, and the unexpected implications of Benjamin's focus on the corpse for political theory. Jay shows that it is a still evolving theoretical tradition which offers resources for the understanding of–and perhaps even practical betterment–of our increasingly troubled world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

We're still talking about Walter Benjamin's 1931 essay about collecting. In this episode, Aaron @Two2SportsCards jumps on the mic to discuss the Benjamin quote that most resonated with Aaron and his collecting: “… ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.”The Shallow End is hosted by Dave Schwartz @Iowa_Dave_Sportscards

In this episode of Explaining History, Nick is joined by acclaimed author Anne Weber to discuss her new book Sanderling (Indigo Press, 2025) — a deeply personal and philosophical exploration of family, identity, and the shadow of Germany's past.Through the story of her great-grandfather Florens Christian Rang — a theologian, lawyer, and close friend of figures such as Walter Benjamin and Martin Buber — Weber examines four generations of her family to ask profound questions:What does it mean to be German, then and now?How can one man's moral convictions coexist with his son's later embrace of Nazism?How do history and guilt pass through families and nations alike?Weber and Nick discuss Rang's life and writings, the moral tensions of Germany's unification and imperial period, and how Weber's narrative approach — blending travelogue, reflection, and history — reveals how the past extends into the present.The conversation also turns outward: to Europe's shared colonial legacies, the persistence of national myths, and the uneasy balance between remembrance and denial.“It's a little bit like discovering your father was a serial killer,” Weber says, describing the weight of Germany's historical consciousness. Yet through her writing, she transforms that burden into a journey of understanding — and of reckoning.