Elaborates the relationship between the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and the cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) through close readings of their respective texts as an example of the precariousness of cultural transmission in the present.

This title provides an extended exploration of the relationship between Walter Benjamin, the Weimar-era revolutionary cultural critic, and the radical philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

This book reconstructs the lines of nihilism that Walter Benjamin took from Friedrich Nietzsche that define both his theory of art and the avant-garde, and his approach to political action. It retraces the eccentric route of Benjamin's philosophical discourse in the representation of the modern as a place of “permanent catastrophe”, where he attempts to overcome the Nietzschean nihilism through messianic hope. Using conventions from literary criticism this book explores the many sources of Benjamin's thought, demonstrating that behind the materialism which Benjamin incorporates into his Theses on the Concept of History is hidden Nietzsche's nihilism. Mauro Ponzi analyses how Benjamin’s Arcades Project uses figures such as Baudelaire, Marx, Aragon, Proust and Blanqui as allegories to explain many aspects of modernity. The author argues that Benjamin uses Baudelaire as a paradigm to emphasize the dark side of the modern era, offering us a key to the interpretation of communicative and cultural trends of today.

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

Walter Benjamin and the Post-Kantian Tradition engages with Benjamin as a theorist of a historical and philosophical problematic, and demonstrates how Benjamin moves from an aspiring idealist philosopher to a politically engaged Marxist critic without abandoning the theoretical project he develops early on.

This book explores the conceptualization of time in early twentieth-century literature and thought, based on a transnational and translational model of literary history, focusing on Turkish, French and German literary traditions. Each from different cultural backgrounds, these modernists provide a radical critique of modern time regimes, which calibrate time in singular temporal narratives. The book traces the philosophical strand of this critical chronometry from Henri Bergson’s theory of time, through Walter Benjamin’s ambivalence towards decay of tradition, and finally to A.H. Tanpınar and Robert Walser’s modernist fiction. Negotiating regionally marked concepts and topoi of temporality, it discusses networks of cultural circulations and maps a revised intersection of Turkish and Western European literary histories. It is an essential read for scholars and students of comparative and world literature, modernist studies, and cultural history.

Travel, Art and Collecting in South Asia questions what are ideas of vertiginous collecting, art-making and museums as expanded fields, including wonder houses and missionary museums (or museobuses) in Britain and South Asia. If the historiography of British India has privileged photography and the 'Imperial Picturesque', the emphasis here is on the formation of a creole modernity, one that considers the relationship between art and labour, including pearlescence and pearl fishing in Sri Lanka, and the iconoclastic/fetish debates and forms of collecting amongst missionaries. Eaton explores these themes alongside the genealogies and modernities of white(ness) in contemporary curating and amateur female practice, and how the museobus or museum as a unique object has informed the work of contemporary artist group Raqs Media Collective. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, Asian history, and imperial and colonial history.