Richard Langston is Professor of German Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Visions of Violence and translator of History and Obstinacy.

"Richard Langston has assembled a remarkable collection of essays and interviews by Alexander Kluge that introduces English-speaking readers to a different Kluge than they are familiar with. The excellent translations capture the incisiveness, range, and wit of one of the most intelligent, prolific, and creative minds in contemporary Europeean history."

• Translator InformationList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentPart I: IntroductionThe Guardian of Difference: The Essayist Alexander Kluge by Richard Langston, by Richard LangstonPart II: Literature1. The Difference: Heinrich von Kleist (1985)2. Storytelling Is the Representation of Differences (2001)3. The Peacemaker (2003)4. Companions in Now-Time (2007)5. Storytelling Means Dissolving Relations (2008)6. Theory of Storytelling: Lecture One (2013)7. What Is a Metaphor? (2016)Part III: Film8. Word and Film (1965) by Edgar Reitz, Alexander Kluge, and Wilfried Reinke9. Bits of Conversation (1966)10. The Realistic Method and the "Filmic" (1975)11. Film: A Utopia (1983)12. A Plan with the Force of a Battleship (2008)13. No Farewell to Yesterday: New German Cinema from 1962 to 1981 as Seen from 2011 (2012)Part IV: From Classical to New Media: Opera, Television, Internet14. An Answer to Two Opera Quotations (1983/84)15. On the Expressions "Media" and "New Media": A Selection of Keywords (1984)16. Medialization: Musealization (1990)17. The Opera Machine (2001)18. Primitive Diversity (2002)19. Planting Gardens in the Data Tsunami (2010)Part V: Theory20. The Role of Fantasy (1974)21. The Function of the Distorted Angle in the Destructive Intention (1989)22. The Political without Its Despair: On the Concept of "Populism" (1992)23. War (2001)24. The Art of Drawing Distinctions (2003)25. Critique, Up Close and Personal (2007)26. The Actuality of Adorno (2009)27. Inventory of a Century: On Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (2013)28. An Instance of Internet Telephony over the Himalayas (2016)Index