Forces of Education: Walter Benjamin and the Politics of Pedagogy

by Dennis Johannßen (Editor), Andrew Benjamin (Editor), Dominik Zechner (Editor)

Overview

Bringing Walter Benjamin into dialogue with the urgent issues facing educational institutions today, this is the first comprehensive exploration of his philosophy of education and pedagogy.

In recent years, problems concerning the practice of education have become central to the critical discourse in the humanities: from debates regarding “deplatforming” and the redefinition of free speech on campus to the digitization of learning and the ethics of mentorship. But where do we go from here? This volume argues that Walter Benjamin's writing offers critical tools to rethink the purposes of education and the institutional forms it should assume.

Reaching from his earliest writings during his involvement with the antebellum German Youth Movement to his late essays on history, theatre, and new media, the authors here explore how Benjamin argued against education as an institutional task subject to a scientific discipline. They show instead how he took his cue from language as a medium of subtle understanding to critically analyze the forms of violence inherent in the concept and history of education. For Benjamin, education was the lever to political reform. For him, the experience of youth should always be at the centre of considerations.

Written by leading international scholars, Walter Benjamin and Education both contextualizes Benjamin's pedagogy in the trajectory of his own thought and also offers an astute analysis of the value and relevance of his student-focused ideas to the institutional and political challenges of today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350274167
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	12/01/2022
Series:	Walter Benjamin Studies
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

Dennis Johannßen is is Assistant Professor of German in the Department of Languages and Literary Studies at Lafayette College, USA. His work has appeared in MLN, The German Quarterly, Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie, and Anthropology and Materialism.

Dominik Zechner is Assistant Professor of German at the Department for German, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and a Post-doctoral Research Associate at Brown University, USA.

Table of Contents

Foreword, Michael Jennings (Princeton University, USA)
Introduction: Forces of Education, Dennis Johannßen (Lafayette College, USA) and Dominik Zechner (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA)

Part I: Genealogies of Learning
1. The Child in Benjamin: An Enduring Lesson, Henry Sussman (Yale University, USA)
2. Infans, Clemens-Carl Härle (University of Siena, Italy)
3. A Lesson in Pedagogy: From Moral Instruction to Communist Pedagogy, Charles Gelman (New York University, USA)
4. Leitmotif Siegfried, Laurence A. Rickels (Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin, Germany)

Part II: The Language of Youth
5. Speaking Silence: Historical Subjectivity in Nietzsche and Benjamin, Ian Fleishman (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
6. Conversational Pedagogy in Benjamin and Nietzsche, Natasha Hay (University of Toronto, Canada)
7. Transmission, Medium, and Silence: Benjamin's Metaphysics of Language and Youth, Adi Nester (University of Colorado Boulder, USA)
8. Against the Law: Youth and the Critical Pedagogy of Eternal Rebellion, Michael Powers (Macalester College, USA)

Part III: Mediations of the Pedagogical
9. Improvision, Thomas Schestag (Brown University, USA)
10. Unfulfilled Historical Time and the Self-Pedagogy of Critique, Gerhard Richter (Brown University, USA)
11. “In Voice Land:” Benjamin on Air, Ilit Ferber (Tel Aviv University, Israel)
12. Walter Benjamin and the Anthropocene, Nitzan Lebovic (Lehigh University, USA)

Index

Editorial Reviews

Recent scholarship on Benjamin has found new urgency in his writings on childhood, education, and pedagogy. The current collection of essays is a significant contribution to this growing body of literature. Anyone who reads Forces of Education will undoubtably recognize Benjamin himself as an angel of history, gazing upon the ruins of our educational institutions while nevertheless remaining in flight, propelled by the idea of education's potential redemption.” —Tyson E. Lewis, Professor of Art Education, University of North Texas, USA

From the Publisher