Bridging Benjamin Volume 68
A Philosophy of Technology, Place, and Education
Format:Hardback
Publisher:University of Minnesota Press
Publishing:24th Mar '26
£83.70 was £93.00
This title is due to be published on 24th March, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£19.79was £21.99(9781517919658)
Walter Benjamin reimagined through the forgotten power of radio
Philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) has long been recognized for his influence on the fields of literature, film, media studies, critical legal theory, and philosophy. Bringing fresh attention to an often-overlooked aspect of his oeuvre, Bridging Benjamin examines the dozens of radio broadcasts he produced, primarily for children, between 1927 and 1933. Delivered after the academic rejection of his notoriously complex Trauerspiel, these shows became a testing ground for Benjamin's developing ideas and experimental pedagogy. Though they were cast off as inconsequential by both Benjamin and his contemporaries, Dominic Smith reveals the broadcasts to be a fruitful site for a novel, "derailed" interpretation of Benjamin's larger body of work.
Reading Benjamin's radio production as a dynamic site of philosophical experimentation, Smith uses it as a channel and amplifier for three integral but underappreciated aspects of Benjamin's work: his philosophies of technology, place, and education. Showing how he used broadcast media to explore the increasing "virtualization" of place in networked society, Bridging Benjamin encourages an embrace of Benjamin in contrast to his divisive historical counterparts in the philosophy of technology, such as Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt.
Interpreting Benjamin's broadcasts as a form of peripatetic thinking - deeply embedded in place, yet mobile and mediated - Bridging Benjamin offers a compelling model for reassessing attachments to the technologies and practices shaping our contemporary worlds.
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"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
ISBN: 9781517919641
Dimensions: 216mm x 140mm x 14mm
Weight: 482g
280 pages