Through reading the early work of Walter Benjamin - up to and including the Trauerspiel book, Monad Rrenban brings forth a cohesive conception of the wild, unforgettable form, philosophy, as inherent in everything. Somewhat on the basis of existing philosophemes of Western metaphysics, Benjamin's well-known "esotericism" performs the transience of constraints of meaning. Both the form - free from duplicitous, authoritarian, and "rational" meaning - and the practice, of philosophy, enable production of the philosophical not only by so-called philosophers but also conceivably by everything - including art, poetry, and literature. In life and death, Walter Benjamin has and had the status of exile from departmental philosophy. Especially from Benjamin's early work, however, Monad Rrenban is able to elicit the force of the form, philosophy. Distinct in its analysis and depth of analysis, Wild, Unforgettable Philosophy in Early Works of Walter Benjamin elaborates the wild, unforgettable form - philosophy - in relation to language, the discipline and the practice of philosophy, criticism, and the politics of death.

Bringing together leading international and interdisciplinary scholars, this ground-breaking volume examines the theory and practice of philosophical health in contemporary contexts of care broadly understood, care for the self, care for the other, and care for the world. But what do we mean by philosophical health? Whilst this book does not seek to provide a normative definition, as it explores disparate perspectives and encourages pluralism in philosophical ways of life, one may envision philosophical health as a state of creative coherence between a person's or a group's way of thinking and their way of acting, such that the possibilities for a good life are increased, and the needs for flourishing satisfied. An idea central to philosophical health is the concept of 'possibility'. Without a sense of self-possibility and openness to the future, health loses meaning, and conversely, pathologies are defined by various kinds of impossibilities. As such, philosophical health reconsiders care as a process of cultivating or pruning the compossible in embodied, psychological, and social terms, of allowing things to re-generate, or in some cases to vanish. Drawing on the history of philosophy, phenomenology, new materialism, post-colonialism but also a wide range of contemporary approaches to philosophical practice, Philosophical Health sheds light on the understudied philosophical dimension of care and the healing dimension of philosophizing. Advocating philosophy as a lived practice, it uncovers the increasing relevance of philosophical health to contemporary debates on well-being, well-belonging, counselling, and development.

Philosophy and Kafka is a collection of original essays interrogating the relationship of literature and philosophy. The essays either discuss specific philosophical commentaries on Kafka’s work, consider the possible relevance of certain philosophical outlooks for examining Kafka’s writings, or examine Kafka’s writings in terms of a specific philosophical theme, such as communication and subjectivity, language and meaning, knowledge and truth, the human/animal divide, justice, and freedom.

In the past two and a half decades, Walter Benjamin's early essay 'Towards the Critique of Violence' (1921) has taken a central place in politico-philosophic debates. The complexity and perhaps even the occasional obscurity of Benjamin's text have undoubtedly contributed to the diversity, conflict, and richness of contemporary readings. Interest has heightened following the attention that philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben have devoted to it. Agamben's own interest started early in his career with his 1970 essay, 'On the Limits of Violence', and Benjamin's essay continues to be a fundamental reference in Agamben's work. Written by internationally recognized scholars, Towards the Critique of Violence is the first book to explore politico-philosophic implications of Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence' and correlative implications of Benjamin's resonance in Agamben's writings. Topics of this collection include mythic violence, the techniques of non-violent conflict resolution, ambiguity, destiny or fate, decision and nature, and the relation between justice and thinking. The volume explores Agamben's usage of certain Benjaminian themes, such as Judaism and law, bare life, sacrifice, and Kantian experience, culminating with the English translation of Agamben's 'On the Limits of Violence'.

Is there an acoustical equivalent to Walter Benjamin’s idea of the optical unconscious? In the 1930s, Benjamin was interested in how visual media expand our optical perception: the invention of the camera allowed us to see images and details that we could not consciously perceive before. This study argues that Benjamin was also concerned with how acoustical media allow us to “hear otherwise,” that is, to listen to sound structures previously lost to the naked ear. Crucially, they help sensitize us to the discursive sonority of words, which Benjamin was already alluding to in his autobiographical work. In five chapters that range in scope from Tieck’s Blonde Eckbert, which Benjamin once called his locus classicus of his theory of forgetting, to Alexander Kluge’s films and short texts, where he develops what he calls “sound perspectives,” this monograph discusses how the acoustical unconscious enriches our understanding of different media, from the written word to radio and film. As the first book-length study of Benjamin’s linguistic, cultural-historical, and media-theoretical reflections on sound, this book will be particularly relevant to students and scholars of both German studies and sound studies.

Tracing Walter Benjamin's convergences with, and divergences from, influential German legal theorist Carl Schmitt, this edited collection contextualizes Benjamin's thinking in the intellectual currents of his time, while also placing him in dialogue with traditions and thinkers from antiquity to the present. At stake is whether Benjamin presents the possibility of a distinctive political theology-a question which the collection addresses without collapsing the tensions internal to Benjamin's thought. Benjamin's thought has been a touchstone, explicitly or implicitly, in numerous efforts to conceive of a 'new' political theology that is not anchored in legitimizing and preserving power, but in justice and liberation. Benjamin interrogates the political-theological complex from what may be construed as a vantage point opposed to Schmitt. Whereas Schmitt excavates the theological elements in modernity in order to shore up liberalism's illiberal inheritance, Benjamin roots out these latent structures in order to dissolve them and liberate us from their oppressive legacy. This volume's multifaceted contributions explore why Benjamin has been such a fertile source for thinking about political theology beyond – and often against – Schmitt. Benjamin indicates how existing political theologies can be challenged or expanded. This book accordingly makes a wide range of relevant work available for study whilst also opening new perspectives on Benjamin's œuvre.

Textual Layering: Contact, Historicity, Critique sets out to rethink our relation to textual tradition against the background of several contemporary developments, including the emergence of digital culture, the increasing spectacularization of psychic as well as social life, the renegotiation of historical thinking, and the precarious position of the theoretical humanities within academia. To this end, the volume re-invests the concept of “layering,” a concept currently used in a wide range of fields, including metaphor studies and linguistics, cybernetics, the social sciences, art, and architecture. Drawing on existing definitions of “layering,” the chapters in this book return to and re-appraise some of the most crucial concerns in the post-1960s theoretical scene: that is, concerns over the strained interplay between writing and the body; textuality and history; critique, différance and the feminine; memory, trace, and the immemorial. The aim of the diverse—often polemical—analyses carried out in this volume is to reactivate the critical force of textual tradition today through a renewed appreciation of its historical embeddedness, its libidinal sources, as well as its complex economy of separation and contact, diachronicity and synchronicity, (re)layering and de-layering. This collection will be of interest to scholars of continental philosophy, literary theory, gender studies, architecture, film and visual culture studies, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, post-colonial studies, and political and social theory.

Kafka’s work has been attributed a universal significance and is often regarded as the ultimate witness of the human condition in the twentieth century. Yet his work is also considered paradigmatic for the expression of the singular that cannot be subsumed under any generalization. This paradox engenders questions not only concerning the meaning of the universal as it manifests itself in (and is transformed by) Kafka’s writings but also about the expression of the singular in literary fiction as it challenges the opposition between the universal and the singular. The contributions in this volume approach these questions from a variety of perspectives. They are structured according to the following issues: ambiguity as a tool of deconstructing the pre-established philosophical meanings of the universal; the concept of the law as a major symbol for the universal meaning of Kafka’s writings; the presence of animals in Kafka’s texts; the modernist mode of writing as challenge of philosophical concepts of the universal; and the meaning and relevance of the universal in contemporary Kafka reception. This volume examines central aspects of the interplay between philosophy and literature.

Explores philosophical ideas in the works of Neil Gaiman, including "American Gods," "Coraline," "The Graveyard Book," and "Neverwhere."

This book examines ethics at the intersection of law and justice. If law and justice are concerned with collectively establishing the general terms on which the plurality called "we" share the earth as social beings, then ethics concerns the individual Self’s particular moral relationship with the Other. Law, the acknowledged offspring of politics, represents the kind of might that most people accept as legitimate, at least most of the time. Justice, on the other hand, is supposed to vigilantly stand guard over law: to protect us against its biases and excesses, or, at the very least, to rise up and reproach the law whenever it permits or encourages injustice. But what if the belief that a particular legally-authorized state of affairs is "just" – a common enough feeling, especially amongst the privileged – or even "unjust" and in need of correction, were itself in need of a vigilant guardian? This book argues that ethics can and should stand guard over whatever image of justice and/or just law one happens to believe in. The book thus attempts to steer a perilous course between two looming moral hazards: ethics interpreted as the rational production of ethically correct behavior (as in Kant) and ethics interpreted as the spontaneous eruption of pre-rational compassion for the suffering of the Other, come what may (as in Levinas). In the end, the book characterizes ethical life in the law as the more-or-less constant experience of the paradoxical nature of this choice – a feeling of inescapable personal responsibility for the fate of the Other. Based on the author’s well-established expertise in the area, this book will appeal to students, scholars and others with interests in legal theory and moral and political philosophy.