PANEL 1: MOURNING AND MELANCHOLY
Gabriele Guerra (Sapienza University of Rome), Daniel Weidner (Universität Halle)
Starting out, as a general suggestion in cultural-historical terms, from Freud’s 1917 essay, this section is devoted to the recurrence and application of the two terms in Walter Benjamin’s entire thought, both as psychic labels with respect to his intellectual existence, and as concepts directly inherent to his thought, from the essay on German Baroque Drama to the theses on the concept of history; both to measure the distance from Freud’s thought, and to verify the occurrence of these terms in his production. Mourning and melancholy, loss and elaboration, ‘mortification’ as a specifically Benjaminian term, thus become constellative concepts that aim to elaborate a particular dialectical device, which constitutes Walter Benjamin’s specific intellectual performance.
17 SEPTEMBER — 14.30 – 16.00
Maria Enrica Giannuzzi -The Cosmic, the Catastrophic and the Melancholic. Walter Benjamin and the Styles of Mourning (EN)
Francisco Naishat – The Folds of the Idea of Natural History from Monadology to the Unconsciousness (EN)
Jakub Gorecki – Between Trauerspiel and Arcades Project: Allegory, Commodity and Unleashing of Affective Energies (EN)
17 SEPTEMBER — 16.30 – 18.00
José Rufino Belmonte Carrasco – Physiognomy of Decadence. A Related View of Melancholy in Gracián and Benjamin (IT)
Chiara Vita – The Mourning and Melancholy of Nature (IT)
Andrea Prizia – «Betray the world for the sake of knowledge». Prologues and Melancholy in Walter Benjamin (IT)
18 SEPTEMBER — 09.30 – 11.00
Klaus Mladek – Traurigkeit and Justice. Towards a Politics of Melancholia (GER)
Johannes Waßmer – Melancholy, Script and Typeface. On a Constellation in Walter Benjamin (GER)
Sebastian Kugler – The Popular Southern Counterpart to the Erudite Trauerspiel of the North (GER)
18 SEPTEMBER — 11.30 – 13.00
Steen Knudsen – «Beyond the Mourning Principle». Benjamin and Nostalgia (EN)
Alex Wai-Lok – Melancholy as Device of Thought. On Benjamin’s Trauerspiel Study (EN)
Francesco Simoncini – Languages of Inconsolability (EN)
18 SEPTEMBER — 14.30 – 16.00
Stefano Marchesoni - Collapsing Modernity. On Walter Benjamin’s Subversive Idea of Ruins (EN)
Turkuaz Benlioglu – A Counterpoint to Melancholy. Concerning Two Figures of the Sun in Benjamin (EN)
Garris Rogonyan – Childhood and Homesickness. Walter Benjamin and Stanley Cavell on Language and Forms of Life (EN)
18 SEPTEMBER — 16.30 – 18.00
Omer Oushia – Adam and the Prostitute. The Primacy of Listening in Walter Benjamin’s Early Conception of Language (EN)
Xiaoyao Guo – Constellating Melancholy. Star Media in Warburg’s Heidnisch-antike Weissagung and Benjamin’s Trauerspiel (EN)
Susanna Kampff Lages – On the Translator’s Melancholy and Luciferine Usurpation.
Haroldo de Campos and Walter Benjamin’s Transcreative Interpreter (EN)
PANEL 2 – REVOLUTION, UPRISING, MATERIALISM, MARXISM
Leonardo Distaso (Università di Napoli Federico II) – Chiara Giorgi (Sapienza Università di Roma)
Benjamin’s support for European Marxism in the 1920s and 1930s profoundly affected his production as a theorist of literature and art. Coming from a theoretical field in which the concept of uprising rather through Sorel’s suggestions was active, and beginning with his meeting with Asja Lacis and, from there, with Bertholt Brecht, Marxism became the key to the construction of an original materialistic-dialectical theory of literature and art, capable of responding not only to the pitfalls and dangers of that historical phase, but also of opening up a new revolutionary perspective able to oppose the positions offered by the declining capitalist bourgeoisie in late modernity.
18 SEPTEMBER — 09.30 – 11.00
Florian Telsnig - The Unconscious of Revolution. On Benjamin and Marx (EN)
Andrea Messner – Progress vs. Progress. Walter Benjamin’s Twofold Intervention (EN)
18 SEPTEMBER — 11.30 – 13.00
Chiara De Cosmo – Benjamin’s Traces and the Image of Revolutionary Uprising (EN)
Karolina Jesién – Walter Benjamin and the Popular Front. Universal Emancipation against the Politics of Reconciliation (EN)
Rolando Vitali – Art without Creation and Power without Decision. Revolution and the Critic of Aesthetic Forms in Walter Benjamin (EN)
18 SEPTEMBER — 14.30 – 16.00
Anna Nutini – The «greatest humorist» and the «teacher of satire». Benjamin, Brecht and the Art of Dialectic (IT)
Silvia Lorusso – From the Stage Audience to the Class Struggle. Cultural Production, Hegemony and Political Praxis in Benjamin and Brecht (EN)
Caterina Diotto – Asja and the Others. Images of the Revolutionary Feminine in Walter Benjamin’s writings (IT)
18 SEPTEMBER — 16.30 – 18.00
Isabel Jacobs – Morphological Materialism. Benjamin and Bogdanov reading Goethe in Capri (EN)
Jaime Cuenca – The Critic as Producer. Violence and the Task of a Materialist Criticism in Walter Benjamin (EN)
Clemens-Carl Härle – Benjamin on Haltung (EN)
PANEL 3 – PLAY, THEATRE, CHILDHOOD’S LITERATURE
Marina Montanelli (Università di Firenze) – Carolin Duttlinger (University of Oxford)
An almost magical attraction to the child’s world accompanied Walter Benjamin’s entire life, says Gershom Scholem. The first written traces of this interest date back to the twenties, however. The meeting with Asja Lacis is decisive in this respect. The following panel will focus on the concept of play in Benjamin’s work in all its philosophical, anthropological, aesthetic and political depth, thus, on the connection between the playful principle and the constructive one, between the former and technology, in the imagination of a world freed from exploitation. But “play” also names gambling and the hellish time of capitalism. Again, the theatre scene, that of Hamlet who makes redemption flash by playing with the antinomies of meaning, the proletarian one for children, that of Brecht which, thanks to the Verfremdung effect, allows a glimpse among the bundle of possibilities that have not yet happened also that of revolution.
19 SEPTEMBER — 09. 30 – 11. 00
Jeanne Marie Gagnebin – Spielraum, Poverty, South (EN)
Ludovica Picchi – Play as δύναμις of the Benjaminian Utopia (IT)
Rossana Menghini – Figures of the Threshold and Spaces of Play. The Phenomenon of the Neapolitan Femminielli investigated through Benjaminian Lenses (IT)
19 SEPTEMBER — 11.30 – 13.00
Everet Smith – On Childhood and the Productive (Un)conscious (EN)
Nina Rabuza – Ungebremste Erfahrung. Walter Benjamin’s Pedagogy of Play (EN)
Carmen Guarino – Ablenkung, Zerstreuung. At the Threshold of «die kleine Pforte» (EN)
20 SEPTEMBER — 09.30 – 11.00
Daniel Gönitzer – «They are not the goal, to be sure, but one cannot do without them». Animals in Walter Benjamin’s Thought (EN)
Mattias Engling – Sawed Clowns and Fallen Airmen. Bertolt Brecht’s The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent and the Cheerfulness of Destruction (GER)
Russel Stephens – Child’s Play in the Arcades Project (EN)
20 SEPTEMBER: 11.30 – 13.00
Benjamin Yazdan – Technology and Profane Play. Childhood and Re-enchantement in Das Telefon (1938) (EN)
Andrew Webber – Playing in the Haunted House. Spectres of Property with Benjamin and Disney (EN)
Clara Ramundo – «Ni la razón, ni la fuerza». Notes on South American cacerolazo following Walter Benjamin (IT)
Christian Ferencz-Flatz – Play as Critique. Benjamin and the Phenomenology of Queer Use (EN)
PANEL 4 – POROSITY, MEDITERRANEAN ARCHITECTURES, PASSAGES
Dario Gentili (Università di Roma Tre) – Maria Teresa Costa (Leuphana University Lüneburg)
Benjamin’s approach to Mediterranean culture is at the antipodes of ‘tourism’, his ‘images of cities’ are the opposite of postcards. Rather, he seeks to understand to the point of experience the forms of life of the most popular and subaltern classes (in Naples he exalts the sovereignty of misery only to find himself in Ibiza being nicknamed ‘the wretched’ by the islanders). Also fundamental is the attention he pays to the spaces of Mediterranean cities, to their architecture, but above all to their use. And it is precisely the use of urban spaces by the Mediterranean population – that ‘porosity’ of the tufa of Naples that permeates the very life of the city – that leads him to elaborate the notion of the ‘threshold’, according to which public and private are not distinguished, but merge into a common space. The question of the threshold can be found in his work on 19th century Paris and its passages, and Naples represents a gateway to it.
17 SEPTEMBER — 14.30 – 16.00
Nélio Conceição – Sobriety and Spielraum. Conceptual Passages in the Wake of Benjamin’s Travels to Southern Europe (EN)
Jeremy Rafuse – From Naples to Paris. Benjamin building a Poetic Sensibility (EN)
Gabriele Gallina – Paris, Naples and Berlin through the Mirror of Moscow (IT)
Markus Hennig – The Masses in Naples. About the Crisis of Experience and the Possibility of its Overcoming (EN)
17 SEPTEMBER — 16.30 – 18.00
César Adolfo Arceo-Arévalo – Residual Modernity. A Dialogue between Gómez de la Serna and Benjamin (EN)
Antonio Cerquitelli – The “Use” of Urban Spaces. A Comparison between Walter Benjamin and Michel de Certeau (EN)
Vincenzo Cerulli – Technological Porosity: on the Endless Re-combinatorial Possibilities of the Digital Editing (EN)
18 SEPTEMBER — 09.30 – 11.00
Valentín Díaz – Dialectics of Poverty. Porosity and Tension in Architectural Matter (EN)
Volker Bernhard – Porosity and Subjectivity. Dwelling as Catastrophe and Transformative Power (EN)
Antonio Roselli – On the Hidden Virtues of Porosity. From Walter Benjamin to Giancarlo de Carlo (and beyond) (IT)
18 SEPTEMBER — 11.30 – 13.00
Thomas Regehly – Katastrophen-Kompetenz. Walter Benjamin und die Ruinen Pompeijis (GER)
Sabine Schiller-Lerg – In merkwürdiger Verfassung. Walter Benjamins Gang durch Pompeiji (GER)
Christopher Johnson – Porous Metaphorics in Naples and Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (EN)
19 SEPTEMBER — 14.30 – 16.00: SOUTH OF THE TRAUERSPIELBUCH
Dario Gentili (Università di Roma Tre) – Maria Teresa Costa (Leuphana University Lüneburg)
Valentín Díaz – Dialectics of Secularization. Walter Benjamin and José Lezama Lima facing Resemblance (EN)
Daniel Weidner – Excentric Modernities. Allegory in Walter Benjamin and Severo Sarduy (EN)
Francisco Naishtat – Political Variations on Some Characters of the Trauerspiel. Benjaminian Calibanization of Calderon’s Sigismund and Latin-American Calibans (EN)
PANEL 5 – SOVEREIGNTY, HISTORY, MESSIANISM
Tamara Tagliacozzo (Università di Roma Tre), Adam Lipszyc (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warszawa)
This section is devoted to the recurrence and application of these three terms in Walter Benjamin’s thought. Reflection on Jewish messianism holds a central position in Walter Benjamin’s work, since 1916 he elaborates a messianic conception of music connected to lament which combines with nature, language, time and history. In human language, the world of the significance and of history are born at the same time, and mankind becomes the symbol of language that hardens into meaning. The sovereign in the Trauerspiel represents history and holds historical events in his hand like a sceptre; but he is unable to decide and falls, as a creature, into madness. The concept of History in 1940 is a construction where the messianic idea is present in every messianic “now of knowability” in which the “dialectical image” presents itself as the actualization of an unredeemed past that is redeemed in knowledge and in political revolutionary action, in order to realize the “real” state of exception.
18 SEPTEMBER — 09.30 – 11.00
Sebastian Truskolaski – The Centre of All Relations. Figuring Political Community with Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Hölderlin (EN)
Hannah Sabrina Hübner – The Force of Humanity towards Redemption. Reading Walter Benjamin’s Theological-Political Fragment (EN)
Georgy Layus – From Divine Violence to Allegory. Tracing the Transformation of the Concept from 1921 to 1925 (EN)
18 SEPTEMBER — 11.30 – 13.00
Leonardo Arigone – The Story of a Typical Friendship. Auerbach and Benjamin (IT)
Fulvio Rambaldini – Celebrating the Past. The Festival as Revolutionary Memory (EN)
Angelica Rocca - ”Heretic Benjamin”. Figures of Apocatastasis in German Baroque Drama (IT)
18 SEPTEMBER — 16.30 – 18.00
Minseok Kim – The Spatialization of the Temporal. Benjamin’s Concept of Secularization in the Origin of the German Trauerspiel (EN)
Santhia Velasco Kittlaus – Becoming Jewish. Benjamin’s Turn towards the Messianic Now (EN)
Anna Migliorini – State of Exception as Threshold (EN)
19 SEPTEMBER — 09.30 – 11.00
Luigi Casolino – Porous Sounds, Petrified Landscapes. Aesthetic Forms of Repetition in Benjamin and Adorno’s Philosophies of Music (EN)
Gregor Schäfer- The Revolution and its Rest. On the Time and the History of Revolution in Benjamin (EN)
Ludmila Fuks – Epistemological Rhythms. Walter Benjamin between Myth, Tragedy and Messianism (EN)
19 SEPTEMBER — 11.30 – 13.00
Mikel Molano – The Court of History : Sovereignty, Justice and Death. Towards a New Grammar of History (EN)
Monika Tokarzewska – The Question of the Preconditions for Political Agency in Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History (GER)
Piero Carreras – Historiography as Criticism of Myth. Jesi and Carchia Readers of Benjamin (EN)
19 SEPTEMBER — 14.30 – 16.00
Ori Rotlevy – The Fourfold Spatialization of History (EN)
Mariana Ruiz Verduzco – The Unraveling of Sovereignty. Benjamin, Fanon and the Critique of Colonial Law (EN)
Alexis Radisoglou – Sovereignty , History, Crisis. Thinking Contemporary Europe from the South, with Walter Benjamin (EN)
Sami Khatib – A Southern Concept of Barbarism (EN)
PANEL 6 – PROTESTANTISM, CATHOLICISM, CAPITALISM, MODERNITY
Elettra Stimilli (Sapienza Università di Roma) – Barbara Chitussi (Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia)
One of the first testimonies to Benjamin’s interest in the social effects of religion is the fragment Capitalism as Religion , where Max Weber is cited albeit in a critical tone. Starting from his youthful reflection, in this panel we will try to focus on ‘Benjamin sociologist of religions’. We will ask how the various souls of Christianity coexist in the German Tragic Drama , where a ‘geographical’ elaboration of the analysis of the baroque period takes place, from a more Protestant North to the Catholicism of the South. We will then try to focus on the developments of this path, leading up to the innovative investigation of Modernity and Capitalism in the Passages .
19 SEPTEMBER — 09.30 – 11.00
Elena Albanese – Desolation and Pomposity between Lutheranism, Paganism and Capitalism (IT)
Lorenzo Mizzau – «Theological Niceties». Walter Benjamin and the Warensprache between Allegory and Phantasmagoria (IT)
Valentina Napolitano – Benjamin’s Addolorata (IT)
19 SEPTEMBER — 11.30 – 13.00
Vinsent Nollet – From Heidelberg to Capri. Benjamin’s Sociological Enquiries into the Demonic Life of Money (EN)
Yu-jin Chang – Capitalism and Original Sin in Benjamin (EN)
Jacob Bard-Rosenberg – Inflationary Notes as Method (EN)
19 SEPTEMBER — 14.30 – 16.00
Andrés Arce González – The Forlorn Angel’s Thesis. Outlining a Baroque Eschatology (EN)
Stephanie Graf – Anachronic Modernities, Parasitic Temporalities : the Theological-Political Constellation of Walter Benjamin’s Baroque Plays (EN)
Suhyang Baek – Benjamin’s Dialectical Approach to Modernity and the Dead. From the Baroque to Capitalism Today (EN)
PANEL 7 – CITY IMAGES, IMAGES OF THE SOUTH
Massimo Palma (Università Suor Orsola Benincasa) – Sophia Buck (University of Oxford)
In 1955, Peter Szondi assembled for Suhrkamp publishing house the essays, articles and reportages Benjamin devoted to the cities he visited or lived in: Moscow, Weimar, Marseilles, Naples, San Gimignano… He gave the book the name Städtebilder – which constitute a literary genre in their own right, a genuine “physiognomy of cities” (to which the new Kritische Gesamtausgabe also dedicates an entire volume), where empirical and material observations mingle with theoretical and linguistic insights, as the best-known and most complex of these attempts, Berlin Childhood (with its twin Berlin Chronicle ), also widely shows. Many of these ‘city images’ are dedicated to the South. The panel intends to offer space for contributions that may deal with Benjamin as an observer of cities and the South, in order to investigate philosophical and political, anthropological and ethnographic, but also literary and aesthetic aspects.
17 SEPTEMBER — 14.30 – 16.00: CITY IMAGES AND TENDER EMPIRICISM
Caroline Adler – «Incidentally, I found it surprisingly easy to extract the city images from Moscow».
Hans-Christian Riechers – Peter Szondi’s Editorial Practice of Walter Benjamin’s Städtebilder (1963) (EN)
Elliott Niblock – What has Ibiza to do with Moscow? ob Stadt oder Strand, «Alles faktische schon Theorie» (EN)
17 SEPTEMBER — 16.30 – 18.00: BRAZILIAN BENJAMIN
Marc Berdet – Walter Benjamin in Brasilia. A Dormant City-Image (EN)
Patricia Andrade – The Drone as a Body in the City of São Paulo (IT)
Theo Fellows – Benjamin and Decolonial Studies (EN)
19 SEPTEMBER — 09.30 – 11.00: WALTER BENJAMIN AND MARSEILLE
Robert Krause – Of Seals or Phoenicians? Exploring Benjamin’s Marseille (EN)
Pavel Arsenev – The Wind and Ruins. Marseille Pre-text of one Popular Apocalyptic Image (EN)
Sajjad Lohi – «Similia similibus curantur»? Benjamin, Freud and the Experience of a Self-Analysis without a Self (IT)
19 SEPTEMBER — 11.30 – 13.00: THE STYLE OF THE SOUTH
Agata Kobylska – Journey Through Style. City Images and Walter Benjamin’s Style Evolution (EN)
Juliana Lugão – Scenes of Remembering, Traces of Forgetting. The Visual and the Acoustic in Benjamin’s Berlin Texts (EN)
Tom Vandeputte – «A New Deluge». Nature and History in Benjamin’s Images of Mitteleuropa and Pompeii (EN)
20 SEPTEMBER — 09.30 – 11.00: NORTH AND SOUTH INTERPENETRATING
Sara Fadabini – Walter Benjamin and the Underground Souths (EN)
Francesco Restuccia – Where the New interpenetrates the Old. Northern Perspectives on Southern Collectivities (EN)
Alex Taylor - White Island, Cool Conduct. Shadows of Bachofen and Gracián in Benjamin’s Ibiza (EN)
20 SEPTEMBER –– 11.30 – 13.00: BENJAMIN’S ITALY
Elenio Cicchini – Porosity. Genealogy of a Material Concept (IT)
Carla Damião – Walter Benjamin’s Italian Journeys (EN)
Vincenzo Mele – Metropolis as Tragedy. Metropolis as Trauerspiel. Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin and Italy’s Historic Cities (IT)