Walter Benjamin: The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940 (1994)

“Called “the most important critic of his time” by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin has only become more influential over the years, as his work has assumed a crucial place in current debates over the interactions of art, culture, and meaning. A “natural and extraordinary talent for letter writing was one of the most captivating facets of his nature,” writes Gershom Scholem in his Foreword to this volume; and Benjamin’s correspondence reveals the evolution of some of his most powerful ideas, while also offering an intimate picture of Benjamin himself and the times in which he lived.

Writing at length to Scholem and Theodor Adorno, and exchanging letters with Rainer Maria Rilke, Hannah Arendt, Max Brod, and Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin elaborates on his ideas about metaphor and language. He reflects on literary figures from Kafka to Karl Kraus, and expounds his personal attitudes toward such subjects as Marxism and French national character. Providing an indispensable tool for any scholar wrestling with Benjamin’s work, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940 is a revelatory look at the man behind much of the twentieth century’s most significant criticism.”

Edited and Annotated by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno
Translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1994
ISBN 0226042375, 9780226042374
674 pages

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Michel Serres, Bruno Latour: Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (1990/1995)

Although elected to the prestigious French Academy in 1990, Michel Serres has long been considered a maverick–a provocative thinker whose prolific writings on culture, science and philosophy have often baffled more than they have enlightened. In these five lively interviews with sociologist Bruno Latour, this increasingly important cultural figure sheds light on the ideas that inspire his highly original, challenging, and transdisciplinary essays.

Serres begins by discussing the intellectual context and historical events– including the impact of World War II and Hiroshima, which for him marked the beginning of science’s ascendancy over the humanities–that shaped his own philosophical outlook and led him to his lifelong mission of bringing together the texts of the humanities and the conceptual revolutions of modern science. He then confronts the major difficulties encountered by his readers: his methodology, his mathematician’s fondness for “shortcuts” in argument, and his criteria for juxtaposing disparate elements from different epochs and cultures in extraordinary combinations. Finally, he discusses his ethic for the modern age–a time when scientific advances have replaced the natural necessities of disease and disaster with humankind’s frightening new responsibility for vital things formerly beyond its control.

In the course of these conversations Serres revisits and illuminates many of his themes: the chaotic nature of knowledge, the need for connections between science and the humanities, the futility of traditional criticism, and what he calls his “philosophy of prepositions”–an argument for considering prepositions, rather than the conventionally emphasized verbs and substantives, as the linguistic keys to understanding human interactions.

Originally published in French as Eclaircissements by Editions Francois Bourin 1990
Translated by Roxanne Lapidus
Publisher University of Michigan Press, 1995
Studies in Literature and Science series
ISBN 0472065483, 9780472065486
204 pages

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David Toews: The Social Occupations of Modernity: Philosophy and Social Theory in Durkheim, Tarde, Bergson and Deleuze (2001)

“This thesis explores the relationship between occupations and the ontology of the social. I begin by drawing a distinction between the messianic and the modern as concentrated in the affective transformation of vocation into occupation. I then, in the Introduction, sketch an ontic-ontological contrast proper to the modern, between modernity, as the collective problematization of social diversity, and the contemporary, as the plural ground of need which provides a source for these problematizations. I argue that this distinction will enable me to shed new light on the occupational as a distinctly modern event.” (from Abstract)

PhD thesis
University of Warwick, Department of Philosophy, August 2001
Supervisors: Peter Wagner, Keith Ansell-Pearson
270 pages

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