Aby Warburg’s Atlas
Time of the Magicians by Wolfram Eilenberger – book launch
The Frankfurt School – articles
The Naysayers: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and the critique of pop culture
by Alex Ross, The New Yorker, September 15, 2014
The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming
by Alex Ross, The New Yorker, December 5, 2016
Why a forgotten 1930s critique of capitalism is back in fashion
by Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian, September 9, 2016
The Arcades of Paris: lecture by Frank Cunningham
Benjamin on Kafka: failure
“To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty, one must never lose sight of the one thing: it is the figure of a failure. The circumstances of this failure are manifold. One is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream. There is nothing more memorable than the fervor with which Kafka emphasized his failure” (Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, pg 566, Letter to Gerhard Scholem, June 12, 1938)
Judith Butler: Kafka and the Poetics of Non-arrival
Judith Butler: Benjamin and Kafka
Judith Butler: The Philosophy of History
Angelus Novus
“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” (Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History)