Category Archives: Walter Benjamin

John Schad, Walter Benjamin’s Ark: A Departure in Biography – UCL Press, November 2025 (print and open access)

John Schad, Walter Benjamin’s Ark: A Departure in Biography – UCL Press, November 2025 (print and open access) In July 1940, amidst fear of Nazi invasion, HMT Dunera left England. On board were a few British soldiers guarding over 2000 interned male … Continue reading

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Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900 – trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Verso, November 2025

Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900 – trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Verso, November 2025 An elegant new translation of Benjamin’s moving evocation of the experiences of his urban childhood Composed in exile in the 1930s and pub­lished as a whole only after … Continue reading

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Books written by French professors while prisoners of war in World War II, and the Université de Captivité in Oflag XVII-A

There are many famous books written in prison, from Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy to Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Socrates’ final words in prison are dramatized by Plato in the Crito. The Marquis de Sade wrote some of his books in prison, and Miguel … Continue reading

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Antonio Negri, Étienne Wolff, Emmanuel Levinas, Fernand Braudel, François Ellenberger, Georges Canguilhem, Hannah Arendt, Jean Cavaillès, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Raymond Ruyer, Sunday Histories, Uncategorized, Walter Benjamin | 6 Comments

Mathelinda Nabugodi, Shelley with Benjamin: A Critical Mosaic – UCL Press, January 2023 (open access)

Mathelinda Nabugodi, Shelley with Benjamin: A Critical Mosaic – UCL Press, January 2023 (open access) *Yet what surprises me most of all at this time is that what I have written consists, as it were, almost entirely of quotations. – … Continue reading

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Walter Benjamin, On Goethe – ed. Susan Bernstein, Peter Fenves and Kevin McLaughlin, Stanford University Press, April 2025

Walter Benjamin, On Goethe – ed. Susan Bernstein, Peter Fenves and Kevin McLaughlin, Stanford University Press, April 2025 Thanks to Tim Howles for the link.

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Books received – Eilenberger, Durkheim, Lorenzini, Pietz, Culcasi, Guyau

Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger and the Great Decade of Philosophy; a somewhat battered copy of Émile Durkheim, Lettres à Marcel Mauss; and four books I’ve mentioned here before – Daniele Lorenzini, The Force of … Continue reading

Posted in Ernst Cassirer, Marcel Mauss, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Territory, Walter Benjamin | 2 Comments

Translation and the Archive in the Continental Tradition workshop, Senate House, London, 19 May 2023 – organised by Henry Somers-Hall with Julia Ng, Alan Schrift, Daniel Smith, Charles Stivale and Stuart Elden

On 19 May 2023 I’ll speaking at a workshop on Translation and the Archive in the Continental Tradition, organised by Henry Somers-Hall for Royal Holloway, University of London. It will be held in central London at Senate House. Registration is … Continue reading

Posted in Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Dumézil, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Uncategorized, Walter Benjamin | Leave a comment

Walter Benjamin’s translators on translating Walter Benjamin

Esther Leslie, Sam Dolbear, Sebastian Truskolaski on Translating Walter Benjamin In 1923 Walter Benjamin published The Task of the Translator, a seminal essay in which he considers what is obscured and what is elucidated through the process of literary translation. The … Continue reading

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Books received – Blanchot, Lévi-Strauss, Hollier, Jackson, Barthes

Mainly second-hand books bought for the Indo-European thought project, but also Mark Laurence Jackson, Diagrams of Power in Benjamin and Foucault: The Recluse of Architecture, in recompense for review work.

Posted in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mapping Indo-European Thought in Twentieth Century France, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin | Leave a comment

The Frankfurt School and Shakespeare, Garrick’s Temple, Hampton, 25 June 2022 [now taking place online]

The Frankfurt School and Shakespeare, Garrick’s Temple, Hampton, 25 June 2022 Update: due to rail strikes this is now taking place online. Registration free, but required. 09.30: Coffee (Temple Pavilion) 10.00: Chair: Jennifer Rust (Saint Louis University)  Paul Kottman (New School … Continue reading

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