Palgrave Walter Benjamin Handbook

Nathan Ross teaches interdisciplinary classes and philosophy at Adelphi University, USA.  He has written and published on 19th and 20th century philosophy, with interests that span a variety of areas in critical theory, art, political philosophy and literature. His books include: The Philosophy and Politics of Aesthetic Experience (2017) and Walter Benjamin’s First Philosophy (2021), as well as translations and edited volumes.

• Chapter 1: Introduction.- Section 1: Philosophical Starting Points.- Chapter 2: Walter Benjamin, Antifascism and Mimetic Education.- Chapter 3: On Redemptive Critique: The Metaphysics of Destruction and Experience in Walter Benjamin.- Chapter 4: Walter Benjamin and Romantic Critique.- Chapter 5: Presentation of Experience and Experience of Presentation: An Introductory Reading of the “Epistemo-Critical Foreword” to the Origin of the German Trauerspiel.- Chapter 6: Walter Benjamin on Concept Formation.- Chapter 7: Turns. On the Destruction of the Destruction of Philosophy.- Section 2: Literature.- Chapter 8: Extreme Life Revolts: Philosophical Refuge of “Objectivity” in the Trauerspiel-book.- Chapter 9: ‘The Sole Reign of Relation’: On Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Hölderlin.- Chapter 10: Baudelaire and Modernity.- Chapter 11: Allegory and the Commodity in Benjamin.- Chapter 12: Walter Benjamin and the Violence of Seal: Making History Legible by Interrupting Myth.- Section 3: States of Consciousness.- Chapter 13: The Phantasmagoria of Surrealism.- Chapter 14: ‘This hand is the hand of all’: Walter Benjamin on Drawing, On Walter Benjamin’s Drawings.- Chapter 15: Benjamin on Pain and Storytelling.- Chapter 16: Figures of the Collective Dream. Utopia, Dream and Waking in Walter Benjamin.- Chapter 17: Flashback as Flashforward: The Idea of Eingedenken between Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin.- Section 4: Theology.- Chapter 18: Surrealism, Messianism and the Occult: Toward a Modern Materialist Theology in Benjamin.- Chapter 19: Dimensions of the Bilderverbot in Walter Benjamin:  A Gravitational Reading of the “Theological-Political Fragment”.- Chapter 20: Divine Creativity in the Early Writings of Walter Benjamin.- Chapter 21: The Animal, The Creature, the Hunchback: Messianism and Distorted Life.- Chapter 22: Walter Benjamin’s Dwarfed Hunchback.- Chapter 23: De-Centering Capitalism within Theravada Buddhism through a Benjaminian Ethics of Merit-Making.- Section 5: Politics.- Chapter 24: Why is Benjamin the right thinker for our political moment?.- Chapter 25: Temporalities of Power: Re-reading Walter Benjamin’s essay Zur Kritik der Gewalt.- Chapter 26: From Myth to Life: Benjamin’s Biopolitics.- Chapter 27: Of Which There is History: The Thought of Survival (Benjamin with Lifton and Lyotard).- Chapter 28: Between the Serpent and the Sovereign: On the Perception of Divine Violence.- Chapter 29: Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’ and the Critique of Progress.- Section 6: Materialism.- Chapter 30: Walter Benjamin’s “Utopia of the Body”: Mystical Experience and Political Thought.- Chapter 31: Benjamin’s Materialism: Anthropological, Historical or Dialectical?.- Section 7: Technology.- Chapter 32: The Question of Technology in Benjamin’s Work.- Chapter 33: Walter Benjamin on Cinema: An Object of Human Innervation.- Chapter 34: On the Relation between the Collective and the Auratic in Benjamin's Artwork Essay: A Constructive Re-reading.- Chapter 35: “On the rhythm of today, which determines this work” or on Montage in Benjamin’s Theory of Knowledge.- Chapter 36: The Phantasmagoria of the Techno-City: Walter Benjamin’s Play-Space.- Chapter 37: Towards a Philosophy of Urban Life.