(10:55 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Walter Benjamin

1. Although normally I am skeptical of those who claim that some publication is inevitably not as good as it used to be, I don't think that The New Yorker is currently publishing anything of the caliber of a sixty-page essay on Walter Benjamin by Hannah Arendt. (The introduction to Illuminations was originally published in The New Yorker.) I don't think that the patronizing profile of Zizek from last year necessarily counts.
   
2. I read "Theses on the Philosophy of History" last night before I went to bed; you can expect me to begin quoting it at random soon. I hope that Benjamin's wave as the "go-to guy" of contemporary scholarship has not yet crested -- if it has, I'd appreciate it if someone could tell me who is taking his place. (Perhaps Adorno? Carl Schmitt?)

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.

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