Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is the author of Illuminations, The Arcades Project, and The Origin of German Tragic Drama.Blog
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Have Yourself a Merry Little Frankfurt School Christmas
Recently launched by the self-styled "sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction" aka Philosophy Football, comes their Adorno football t- shirt. Here was a philosopher who knew all about the necessity to endure defeat in order to truly enjoy the moment of victory.Philosophy Football have five of the t-shirts to be won in the December competition and one lucky winner will also receive a set of Verso titles by iconic names from, and inspired by, the Frankfurt School.
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To mean, and to desire to say: Boris Groys reviewed in the Guardian
In his essay on Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Groys highlights a French linguistic quirk; the phrase "to mean" is the same as the phrase "to desire to say". Reviewing Groy's new book Introduction to Antiphilosophy, in which the essay is contained, Stuart Kelly suggests this irony sums up "anti-philosophy's conundrum".
Kelly finds Groy's new book to be more than an introduction, but rather a book of provocative essays he "would recommend...to anyone already interested in critical theory and the avant garde", which tackle philosophers from Kierkegaard on whose "keynote, as Groys argues, is a commitment to Marx's dictum that philosophy had hitherto only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point was to change it."
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A Library for #Occupy: Part 4
After the Occupy Wall Street "People's Library" was brutally dismantled by the police, Paolo Mossetti of Through Europe asked some of his favourite writers, activists, and academics to help him compile a list of books that would recreate, though only virtually, the library's shelves.
Here is the fourth part, with contributions from Linda Martina Alcoff, Ariella Azoulay (author of A Civil Imagination) Milford Bateman, Norman Finkelstein, Bill Fletcher Jr, David Goodway, Ramsey Kanaan, Loop Magazine, Gigi Roggero.
