By Noa Levin

published 2025, Bloomsbury

ISBN 978-1-350-41421-1

For Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, who both authored seminal theoretical works on early cinema and photography, the history of modern media begins much earlier, in Baroque culture and science. Benjamin, Deleuze and the Baroque argues that their media theories were informed by their respective readings of the philosophy and mathematics of G.W. Leibniz, and the Baroque can thus be seen as the locus of modern media.
By critically comparing Benjamin and Deleuze’s interpretations of the Baroque, Levin demonstrates the extent to which their theories of visual culture are intertwined with critiques of Enlightenment historiography and politics. Using a hermeneutic comparative approach, this book argues that the juxtaposition of Benjamin’s reception of Leibniz with Deleuze’s highlights the extent to which both authors’ theories of image and media were informed by Leibniz’s concepts of expression and perspectivism, themselves inspired by ground-breaking evolutions in optics and perspective.
Providing close readings of Deleuze’s The Fold and Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel, which remain understudied in the English language, it explores how, in their dual roles of philosopher and cultural critic, the pair may illuminate our own age of multiple crises through the Baroque.

Illusion and Fetishism in Critical Theory. A study of Nietzsche, Benjamin, Castoriadis and the Situationists

Carolin Duttlinger and Daniel Weidner (Eds.): Der Journalist als Produzent. Walter Benjamins publizistische Texte und die Medienlandschaft der Zwischenkriegszeit

Special Issue, Monatshefte, June 2023, 115 (2)

US ISSN 0026-9271/ e-ISSN 1934-2810

https://mon.uwpress.org/content/115/2/147

Since the eighteenth century, literary authors have been dependent on journalism while also contributing to this field; these mutual links become particularly pronounced in the Weimar Republic, when many writers turn to journalistic writing to supplement their income and enhance their public profile. This essay sets out the vibrancy of the Weimar journalistic landscape, where the feuilleton, or review section, shaped public debate and where literary and cultural magazines offered authors unprecedented scope to publish ambitious texts for a wide readership. One of the most versatile and prolific such voices is Walter Benjamin, whose journalism is inextricably linked to his ‘serious’ large-scale projects. And yet his journalistic publications are rarely studied in their own right and even less so within their original contexts, where they form part of a network of authors, texts, and media. This special issue undertakes such contextual readings, looking at Benjamin’s strategic links both within the Weimar Republic and beyond its geographical and temporal borders.

• Carolin Duttlinger, Daniel Weidner: ‘The Journalist as Producer: Mapping the Scene’, pp. 147-155.
• Hansjakob Ziemer: ‘Der Journalist als Menschentypus. Walter Benjamin und der Professionalisierungsdiskurs um 1930’, pp. 156-169.
• Sophia Buck: ‘Walter Benjamin and Ssofia Fedortschenko: Intercultural and Intermedial Aspects of a “Failed” Transfer’, pp. 170-188.
• Meindert Peters: ‘Benjamin in i10: Journalistic Networks, Exchange, and Reception behind a Dutch, Multi-Lingual, Avant-Garde Magazine’, pp. 189-203.
• Kevin Drews: ‘Benjamins zeitdiagnostische Rezensionstätigkeit zwischen Text und Kontexten. Exemplarische Analysen eines Spannungsverhältnisses’, pp. 204-222.
• Tom Vandeputte: ‘Writing at the End: Benjamin, Kraus, and the Image of Journalism’, pp. 223-235.
• Matthew Handelman: ‘Walter Benjamin and the Networks of the Frankfurter Zeitung’, pp. 236-256.
• Sofia Cumming: ‘Berlin—Paris—Marseille: Walter Benjamin and Les Cahiers du Sud’, pp. 257-271.