Walter Benjamin and Shakespeare, Warburg Institute, Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB, 28-29 November 2018

One of the key figures in Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play is Hamlet; for Benjamin as for Schmitt and Agamben, Shakespeare’s tragedy is emblematic of a political theology as distinctive for the 17th century as for its latter day reception in the 20th century. There are, however, repeated references to Shakespeare throughout Benjamin’s writings. While a central part of the workshop will focus on Hamlet, the Baroque and Benjamin’s theory of the mourning play, the workshop will also seek to offer analyses of the constancy of reference to Shakespeare, both tragic and comic, in translation and in stagecraft. The workshop will open with a discussion of the new Italian translation of Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, presented by the translators Alice Barale and Fabrizio Desideri.

Speakers include: Alice Barale, Fabrizio Desideri,Julia Reinhard Lupton, Freddie Rokem, Howard Caygill, Julia Ng, Andrew Benjamin, Björn Quiring and Fabrizio Desideri.

This conference is organised by Andrew Benjamin, Professor of Critical Theory and Philosophical Aesthetics at Monash University, Australia and Julia Ng, Lecturer in Critical Theory and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London.

A full programme will be announced shortly. Free and open to all.

Further details and booking form here.