Based on a conference held at the Center for Literary Studies at Harvard University, this collection of essays from the leading scholars in literature, philosophy, politics, and medicine casts new light on the wide range of ethical debates raging today, from bioethics and the ethics of political action to the ethics of reading and making distinctions between morality and ethics.

Based on a conference held at the Center for Literary Studies at Harvard University, this collection of essays from scholars in literature, philosophy, politics, and medicine seeks to shed new light on the wide range of ethical debates raging today; from bioethics and the ethics of political action to the ethics of reading and making distinctions between morality and ethics.

"Critique of Violence" is a highly original and lucid investigation of the heated controversy between poststructuralism and critical theory. Leading theorist Beatrice Hanssen uses Walter Benjamin's essay "Critique of Violence" as a guide to analyze the contentious debate, shifting the emphasis from struggle to dialogue between the two parties. Regarding the questions of critique and violence as the major meeting points between both traditions, Hanssen positions herself"between" the two in an effort to investigate what critical theory and poststructuralism have to offer each other. In the course of doing so, she assembles imaginative new readings of Benjamin, Arendt, Fanon, and Foucault, and incisively explores the politics of recognition, the violence of language, and the future of feminist theory. This groundbreaking book will be essential reading for all students of continental philosophy, political theory, social studies, and comparative literature.

Series Information:
Warwick Studies in European Philosophy

One of the most significant cultural documents of the Weimar Republic and Nazi era, Walter Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project has had a remarkable impact on present-day cultural theory, urban studies, cultural studies and literary interpretation. Originally designed as a panoramic study chronicling the rise and decline of the Parisian shopping arcades, Benjamin's work combines imaginative peregrinations through the changing city-scape of nineteenth-century Paris with passages that read like a blueprint for a new cultural theory of modernity. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project provides the first comprehensive introduction to this extraordinary work accessible to English-language readers. The diverse range of issues explored include the nature of collecting, the anatomy of melancholy, the flaneur, the physiognomy of ruins, the dialectical image, Benjamin's relation to Baudelaire, the practice of history-writing, and modernity and architecture. Contributors include Susan Buck-Morss, Stanley Cavell, Jonathan Culler, Brigid Doherty, Barbara Johnson, Esther Leslie, Gerhard Richter, Andrew Benjamin, Howard Caygill, Beatrice Hanssen, Detlef Mertins, Elissa Marder, Tyrus Miller, and Irving Wohlfarth

This is the first comprehensive introduction to Benjamin's unfinished "Arcades Project" - one of the most significant cultural documents of the Weimar Republic and Nazi era. Walter Benjamin's unfinished "Arcades Project" has had a remarkable impact on present-day cultural theory, urban studies, cultural studies and literary interpretation. Originally designed as a panoramic study chronicling the rise and decline of the Parisian shopping arcades, Benjamin's work combines imaginative peregrinations through the changing city-scape of nineteenth-century Paris with passages that read like a blueprint for a new cultural theory of modernity. "Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project" provides the first comprehensive introduction to this extraordinary work accessible to English-language readers. The diverse range of issues explored include the fl and No. 226; neur, the physiognomy of ruins, the dialectical image, and modernity and architecture. The contributors include: Susan Buck-Morss, Stanley Cavell, Brigid Doherty, Stathis Gourgouris, Barbara Johnson, Esther Leslie, Gerhard Richter, Beatrice Hanssen, Detlef Mertins, Elissa Marder, Tyrus Miller, Max Pensky, and Irving Wohlfarth.

Walter Benjamin and Romanticism explores the relationship between Walter Benjamin's literary and philosophical work and the tradition of German Romanticism, as well as Hlderlin and Goethe. Through a detailed and scholarly analysis of the major texts, the book explores the endurance of Benjamin's relationship to Romanticism, the residual presence of Romantic Goethean and Hlderlinian motifs in Benjamin's subsequent writings and how Benjamin's understanding of the relationship between criticism and Romanticism can still play a vital role in contemporary philosophical and literary practice.Contributors: Andrew Benjamin, Josh Cohen, David Ferris, Beatrice Hanssen, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Charlie Louth, Bettine Menke, Winfried Menninghaus, Anthony Phelan, Sigrid Weigel>

"Hanssen's exacting, expansive study of the ways Benjamin reconceives history and nature in one another's presence, or distance, is part of the increasing recognition of what it must take intellectually and imaginatively to come to terms with this thinker's soaring innovations."--Stanley Cavell, Harvard University

"In this profoundly learned book Hanssen interprets Benjamin's "The Origin of German Tragic Drama as the key to understanding his entire corpus. . . . Many books about Benjamin are impenetrable. This one is not." --S. Gittleman, "Choice

"Beatrice Hanssen has provided an arresting new reading of Benjamin, based on a wide range of materials and a subtle understanding of theoretical issues, both in his time and our own. Her interpretation is informed by contemporary deconstructionist approaches to the fundamental questions raised by Benjamin's texts, which she demonstrates anticipate many of the concerns of Derrida, Levinas and other recent thinkers."--Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley

"Beatrice Hanssen elaborates Benjamin's extremely novel and complex notion of 'history' with unparalleled thoroughness, cogency, and clarity."--Samuel Weber, University of California, Los Angeles