Bridging Benjamin Volume 68

Dominic Smith is senior lecturer of philosophy at the University of Dundee, Scotland. He is author of Exceptional Technologies: A Continental Philosophy of Technology and coeditor of Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies.

"Dominic Smith sheds crucial new light on Walter Benjamin's thinking – and, in the process, identifies key resources for the critical field more broadly. A powerful case for Benjamin's usefulness in discussions of our relationship with the challenge of technological thought, Bridging Benjamin is exemplary in its extensiveness, honesty, and immediacy." – Gerhard Richter, author of This Great Allegory: On World-Decay and World-Opening in the Work of Art"Dominic Smith's riveting study sets out the philosophical undergirding of Walter Benjamin's often belittled radio work, with its motifs of technological escalation and catastrophe elaborated as pedagogic devices that foster the imagination of potentiality. By unsettling the conventions of Benjamin's critical reception and patiently working through aspects of the philosophy of technology, Smith delineates how the scripted radio broadcasts undermine certainties of bordered spaces and discrete times, provoking reflection on the political potency of place and its displacement and replacement. Translation means to carry across: here, precious contents and methods are conveyed into present-day classrooms to mesh with contemporary technologies and practices, facilitating startling connections across and beyond Benjamin's work as a whole." – Esther Leslie, Birkbeck, University of London

• ContentsAcknowledgmentsAbbreviationsIntroduction: Benjamin Derailed1. Methodological Extremism2. Delicate Empiricism3. The Actuality of Place4. The Virtuality of Place5. Program Without Transmission6. Localizing Philosophy: An Educational PracticeConclusion: Benjamin AbridgedNotesBibliographyIndex