Esther Leslie

Walter Benjamin: overpowering conformism

Book synopsis: Esther Leslie’s path-breaking study of Walter Benjamin is unlike any other book presently available in English on Benjamin, in seeking to make a case for a more politicised reading of Benjamin’s oeuvre. In looking at the entirety of Benjamin’s work - rather than the four or five essays available in English which tend to form the Benjamin ‘canon’ - Leslie offers powerful new insights into a key twentieth-century political thinker, correcting the post-structuralist bias that has characterised so much Benjamin scholarship, and repositioning Benjamin’s work in its historical and political context. In her examination of Benjamin’s commentary on the politics and aesthetics of technology - from Benjamin’s work on nineteenth-century industrial culture to his analyses of the Nazi deployment of the bomber - Esther Leslie recontextualises Benjamin’s writings in a lucid and cogently argued new study.

Colonial and Communist Pedagogy.

Abstract Walter Benjamin wrote about pedagogy from the start of his writing life to its close. He was also an activist in the youth movement in Germany. This essay explores the importance of childhood, play, toys and education to his wider body of work – including his interests in photography, literary form, language acquisition and use, modern art. The opening up of these areas in relation to questions of pedagogy enables the organisation of his thought in relation to two complexes: ‘colonial’ and ‘communist’ pedagogy. What these mean, what determines them and how they further Benjamin’s project of emancipation, which begins with youth, is scrutinised here.

Fashion Remains: The Epistemic Potentials of Fashion Ephemera, Doctoral Thesis in Stockholm Fashion Studies

Fashion trades on ephemerality. Today’s glitzy fashion is tomorrow’s dull cast-off. Fashion’s rhythm is such that what is ‘in’ today is ‘out’ tomorrow. A highly subdivided industry of designers, ma...

Satanic Mills: On Robert Kurz

A critical overview of the contribution of German Marxist Robert Kurz (1943–2012), focussing in particular on The Black Book of Capitalism: A Farewell to the Market Economy (first ed. 1999) and War for World Order: The End of Sovereignty and the Transformations of Imperialism in the Age of Globalisation (2003). This review explores the genesis and the main tenets of Kurz’s theory – especially his concept of value, the automatic subject, crisis and anti-Semitism – and tracks how they are mobilised in his writings over time. It also touches on the legacy of these ideas in political groups such as the Anti-Germans.

Loops and joins: Muybridge and the optics of animation

Film is rightly understood to be an art of movement, but stasis plays a role too, from the first films which cranked into seeming life out of stillness to the mechanisms of contemporary animation, which is pervasive in cinema today. This article explores the relationship of stillness and movement in early cinema and pre-cinematic optical technologies, which demand a flick of the wrist to produce movement out of stasis. Muybridge’s sequential photographs found their way into some of these early and later technologies and provided the basis for such demonstration of the emergence of movement out of stillness. If mobility and stillness are concentrated oppositions in Muybridge’s work, so too are the related themes of animation and inanimateness, a partnering that relates less to the analytical dissection of life and more to the evocation of a spirited magic.

Benjamin's 'Arcades': An Unguided Tour

Preface: Beginnings Acknowledgements 1. Encounters 2. Arcades 3. Method 4. Judaism 5. Modernity 6. Magic 7. Empathy- Einfuhlung 8. Insurrection 9. Angel of History 10. Awakening 11. Advertising 12. Nations 13. Jeux/Joie/Jouissance 14. Idleness 15. Night 16. Nazis Index

Jameson, Brecht, Lenin and Spectral Possibilities

Fredric Jameson’s star rose in the late 1980s when theorists located within the discipline of cultural studies latched onto his essay ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’. This essay became a guiding text for what was perceived as a new epoch. It appeared at a moment when epochalism was rife, and its proclamation of so many endings, and definitions were eagerly sought. The essay claimed to outline this new stage of world history and world culture, dependent on a new scenario in world economics. ‘Postmodernism…’ did not just define a new scene: it was taken as a certain conferment of legitimisation to the new postmodern epoch, tantamount to a justification. Now named and outlined, the new epoch could be lived and affirmed. There was no going back — going back was understood to be a return to ‘modern’ concepts, which were bound up with ‘old style’ Marxist politics and economics and high art elitism, and these two seemingly opposite principles were cast aside as co-dependents in an old, excessively hierarchical world. Despite its critical animus and stance towards the new postmodern world, the essay attested to postmodemity’s existence — if negatively. It became its map. The map turned into a gazetteer. It inflated and became a baggy book of encounters with contemporary culture, which attempted to ‘cognitively map’ comprehensively the era of multinational late capitalism.