Walter Benjamin Archives - Public Seminar

Democracy

It May Be the Last Time

Lithuanian art and culture resisting a takeover at the height of hybrid warfare

November 10, 2025 • by Edvardas Šumila

Recent developments in Lithuanian politics have produced a decisive, immediate, and spontaneous resistance from culture workers in various fields. The formation of a new coalition government led to the populist political project Nemuno Aušra (NA)—headed by the antisemitic politician Remigijus Žemaitaitis—being given control of the Ministry of Culture. Žemaitaitis has ...

North America

A Martyr and a Meme

After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Walter Benjamin’s politics of spectacle should serve as a warning to Trump’s America

September 17, 2025 • by Benjamin Andrew Schupmann

Within minutes of the deadly shot, millions of viewers across the digital public sphere saw right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s last moments in full graphic horror, from multiple angles. Each clip was pared down to shareable content. His death made him at once a martyr and meme. German philosopher Walter Benjamin, writing ...

Migration

Instead of Comparing

Six thoughts about engaging with a post-historical past

October 19, 2020 • by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

“History” as an academic discipline – and I am trying to articulate a possible vanishing point of Reinhart Koselleck’s life work here – “History” as a discipline would never have come into being without the existence of the “historical world view” as a specific social construction of temporality (we can ...

Migration

Being Ahead of All Departures

October 19, 2020 • by Rahul Pandita

In Paris in the 1920s, Hemingway has returned from the bookstore run by the lovely Sylvia Beach, who is very nice to him, letting him borrow books without a deposit. It is with that goodness in his heart that Hemingway returns to his cramped flat and tells his wife about ...

Feature

Michael Taussig | The New School

2017 ICSI Public Lecture

July 15, 2017 • by Public Seminar

Sponsored by The New School for Social Research. The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry will open part of its programming to the public – a series of lectures taught by this Summer's faculty cohort of K. Anthony Appiah (Professor of Philosophy and Law, NYU), David Harvey (Professor of Anthropology and Geography, CUNY), ...

Feature

Leaderless Crowds

Reflections on the Power of Affects, from Gustave Le Bon to Frédéric Lordon

July 5, 2017 • by Léa Barbisan

In his book The Politics of Crowds, Christian Borch notes that even though “crowds and masses... seem to sustain themselves in the margins of contemporary sociological thinking... the mass media recurrently reports on new mass events, explicitly labeled thus, typically in the form of mass protests, mass disasters such as ...

Feature

The Tragic, Enduring Relevance of Arendt’s Work on Statelessness

September 2, 2016 • by Siobhan Kattago

While Hannah Arendt is most known for her reflections on totalitarianism and the banality of evil, eighteen years of statelessness (1933-1951) brought her philosophical questions of how one might be at home in the world into sharp relief. The fact that she was Jewish and German during the first half ...

The Tragic, Enduring Relevance of Arendt’s Work on Statelessness

Feature

Theses On The Philosophy Of The FKA-Anthropocene, Feat. Shia LaBeouf, Part II

March 25, 2016 • by Jonty Tiplady

Something of Shia LaBeouf’s name stands in, perfectly, controversially, for what is now happening to us, across us, as a kind of general FKA-transing of all available terms. Around the time Caitlyn Jenner came out, there was talk of an intersectional “trans-”: a trans for race and class ...

Feature

Theses On The Philosophy Of The FKA-Anthropocene, Feat. Shia LaBeouf, Part I

March 23, 2016 • by Jonty Tiplady

Walter Benjamin’s strategy in the Theses on the Philosophy of History was to focus on a non-human moment in human time and to present this instance on blast in his prose style. What I mean by “blast” here is the fact that the message had to be pirated past ideological ...

Theses On The Philosophy Of The FKA-Anthropocene, Feat. Shia LaBeouf, Part I

Uncategorized

Benjamin in Jerusalem

The Middle East as crisis and critique

December 1, 2015 • by David Kishik

This month, two conferences and one exhibition dedicated to Walter Benjamin’s legacy are descending on Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. Because of an unhealthy mix of political considerations, security measures, and academic snobbery, I will partake in none of them, despite my deep roots in this troubled land and my ...

Uncategorized

Benjamedia

August 27, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Benjamin thought that there were moments when a fragment of the past could speak directly to the present, but only when there was a certain alignment of the political and historical situation of the present that might resonate with that fragment. Applying this line of thought to Benjamin himself, we ...