THE TENTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE

“REAPPROACHING WALTER BENJAMIN:

THE TASK OF THEORY TODAY”

WESTERN UNIVERSITY
LONDON, ONTARIO, CANADA
April 19-20, 2024

CSTC Conference Committee

Avery Dawson, Co-Chair

James Van Schaik, Co-Chair
Suhyang Baek
Paria Rahimi
Elric Pauww
Antonia Stan
Skyler Izzard

CSTC Graduate Director

Joshua Schuster

Administrator

Melanie Caldwell
 Table of Contents

Program at a Glance…………………………………………………………………………….2

Conference Information………………………………………………………………………...3

Conference Schedule……………………………………………………………………………5

Presentation Abstracts…………………………………………………………………………..9

Author Biographies……………………………………………………………………………20

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 CSTC CONFERENCE PROGRAM AT A GLANCE

FRIDAY SESSION I: 12:30-1:30 PM

UC 2110 Politics and Marxism: Perceptibility, Mediation, and Dialectics
UC 2105 Film Phenomenology and the Politics of the Thought-Image

FRIDAY SESION II: 2:00-3:00 PM

UC 2110 Allegory, Aura, Image-Sound
UC 2105 Understanding Time and History

OPENING KEYNOTE: 3:30-5:00 PM

CONRON HALL Peter Fenves, Northwestern University:
“Walter Benjamin’s Second Program for the Coming Philosophy”

CSTC RECEPTION 5:00-6:00 PM

UC 3100

SATURDAY SESSION I: 9:00-10:00 AM

UC 2110 Benjamin and Psychoanalysis
UC 2105 Law, Violence, Power

SECOND KEYNOTE: 10:15-12:00 PM

CONRON HALL Rebecca Comay, University of Toronto:
“Petrified Unrest / Restless Petrifact” (VIRTUAL)

SATURDAY SESSION II: 1:30-2:30 PM

UC 2110 Autoethnography and the Politicization of Aesthetics
UC 2105 Art and the Spectacle in Contemporary Consumer Society

SATURDAY SESSION III: 2:45-3:45 PM

UC 2110 Intersections between Benjamin and Fanon
UC 2105 Applications of ‘Montage’

SATURDAY IV: 4:00=5:30 PM

UC 2110 Political Cosmogony, Theology, and Eschatology
UC 2105 Revolutionary Forms

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Local Arrangement and Logistics Contact
Suhyang Baek ([email protected]) is our logistics contact. Please contact her regarding hotel
accommodations and local travel.

All sessions will take place in University College on campus at Western University located at
1151 Richmond Street, London, Ontario, N6A 3K7, Canada. A map of the campus can be found
at https://www.uwo.ca/parking/find/pdf/Parking_September_2021.pdf

Hotel Accommodations
We were able to negotiate a reduced rate at the Delta Hotels London Armouries in Downton
London (starting at $149 CAD/night for a standard room). For reservations, please book online at
http://www.marriott.com/YXUD for a reduced rate starting at $149 CAD/night. Do so entering
Corp/Promo Rate “UO8” under ‘Special Rates’.

Note: Room reservations at the Delta Hotels London Armouries are on a first come, first
serve basis. Rooms at the reduced rate are limited and are not guaranteed.

Travel Information

London airport (YXU) is the closet airport to UWO (about twenty-minutes away); Pearson
International Airport in Toronto (YYZ) is about two and a half hours by car. To get to Delta
Hotel London Armouries you can take a taxi, BlaBla Car, VIARail, or Bus Service. For those
opting for bus service, there are two major low-fare bus companies in Ontario. Ontario Express
Bus (Onexbus) travels directly between YYZ and Western’s campus (as well as Downtown
London). FlixBus travels between the Union Bus Terminal in Toronto, Downtown London, and
Western’s campus (as well as many other Ontario cities).

Local Travel

London has a reliable local bus system that frequently services busses between Downtown
London and Western University (2, 106). Through funding graciously provided by the Faculty of
the Arts & Humanities the conference committee is able to offer participants a limited amount of
bus tickets to offset the costs of local travel, which are included in welcome folders upon the
registration. For further information on bus routes, find the “local bus routes” information sheet
included in the welcome folder.

Publication Notice

The CSCT Conference Committee strongly encourages authors to submit their paper presented at
the annual meeting for consideration for the Chiasma: An International Journal of Theory and
Philosophy Benjamin Special Issue edited by members of the conference committee. To be
considered, please submit your paper after the conference via their online submission system
at https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/chiasma/about/submissions by July 8, 2024. The online
system will guide you through the steps to upload your submission. Papers submitted should be
no longer than 6000 words inclusive of notes. Papers should be formatted according to the
Chicago Manual of Style and in MS Word format (no pdfs).

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Notes of Appreciation

The conference committee would like to extend a special thank you to Maxwell Hyett for
helping with the Call for Papers and Final Flyer. The conference committee would also like to
recognize Peter Heft, the Chief Editor of Chiasma: An International Journal of Theory and
Philosophy, for agreeing to partner with us in making the Special Issue happen.

A big thank you too to our moderators and volunteers and the Centre for the Study of Theory and
Criticism student and faculty for their continuous hard work and dedication to growing our
department post-pandemic. We are who we are because of the students who pass through and the
faculty members who mentor us. The Co-Chairs would especially like to thank Melanie
Caldwell, Joshua Schuster, John Vanderheide, and Antonio Calcagno for their contributions,
wisdom, and guidance. Without them this conference would not have come to be.

Lastly, a note of appreciation to Arts & Humanities and the Joint Fund for their generous support
for the conference.

Land Acknowledgement

Western University is located on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee,

Lūnaapéewak and Chonnonton Nations and all the treaties that are specific to this area: the Two
Row Wampum Belt Treaty of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy/Silver Covenant Chain; the
Beaver Hunting Grounds of the Haudenosaunee NANFAN Treaty of 1701; the McKee Treaty of
1790, the London Township Treaty of 1796, the Huron Tract Treaty of 1827, with the
Anishinaabeg, and the Dish with One Spoon Covenant Wampum of the Anishnaabek and
Haudenosaunee.

We acknowledge and recognize the three Indigenous Nations in this land: the Chippewas of the
Thames First Nation; Oneida Nation of the Thames; and the Munsee-Delaware Nation who all
continue to live as sovereign Nations with individual and unique languages, cultures and
customs.

With this, we respect the longstanding relationships that Indigenous Nations have to this land, as
they are the original caretakers. We acknowledge historical and ongoing injustices that
Indigenous Peoples endure in Canada such as the residential school system and the “Sixties
Scoop”, and the ongoing injustice surrounding missing and murdered Indigenous women and
girls, and we accept responsibility as a public institution to contribute toward revealing and
correcting miseducation around these issues as well as renewing respectful relationships with
Indigenous communities through actionable teaching, research, and community service. We also
acknowledge and respect the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the ongoing need to
respect and implement its 94 calls to action and the conventions and responsibilities contained
within the United Nations Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
This Land Acknowledgement is a first step towards reconciliation. It is the work of all citizens to
take steps towards decolonizing practices and bringing our awareness into action. We encourage
everyone to be informed about the traditional lands, Treaties, history, and cultures of the
Indigenous people local to their region.

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FRIDAY, APRIL 19th (University College, Western University)
12:00pm Registration Begins
Session I: Panel Title: Politics & Marxism
12:30pm -1:30pm Moderator: TBA
UC 2110 Speaker: Dominic Pizzolitto, University of Toronto, “Benjamin’s
2nd Floor Esoteric Marxism”
Speaker: Mang Su, Temple University, “The Concept of Natural History
and the Mediation through the Extremes: On Adorno’s Alleged Critique
of Benjamin”
12:30pm -1:30pm Film Phenomenology and the Politics of the Thought-Image
UC 2105 Moderator: TBA
2nd Floor Speaker: Daniel Mourenza, Universität de Barcelona, “The Haptic
Quality of Film: Walter Benjamin and Film Phenomenology”
Speaker: Xue Jiang, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, “Between
Proximity to the Market and Political Influence of a Left-Wing Outsider:
Walter Benjamin’s Feuilletonistic Literary Writings”

Break: Sandwiches / Coffee

Session II: Allegory, Aura, Image-Sound

2:00pm-3:00pm Moderator: TBA
UC 2110 Speaker: Hong Liu, Centre for Comparative Literature at University of
2nd Floor Toronto, “Image and Sound: Revisiting Walter Benjamin’s Theory of
Allegory in the Trauerspielbuch”
Speaker: Yijing Li, Western University, “Re-define Chinese Aesthetic
Terminology ‘yi 意’ through the Lens of Walter Benjamin’s Theory”
UC 2105 Understanding Time and History
2nd Floor Moderator: TBA
Speaker: Jürgen Lipps, University of California, Los Angeles, “The End
of All Things (And the Beginning of Nothing!)”
Speaker: Tyla Stevenson, Massey University, “Walter Benjamin for
Fashion Studies: Understanding Time through Fashion”

Break

3:30pm-5:00pm
Conron Hall, 3rd Floor

Moderator: John Vanderheide, Centre for the Study of Theory & Criticism at Western University

“Walter Benjamin’s Second Program for the Coming Philosophy”

Peter Fenves

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 Northwestern University
__________________________________

CSTC Reception to Follow

Generously Funded in Part by the Academic Joint Fund
UC 3100
5:00pm-6:00pm

SATURDAY, APRIL 20th (University College, Western University)

8:30am Registration Begins
Session I: Benjamin and Psychoanalysis
9:00am-10:00am Moderator: TBA
UC 2110 Speaker: Ali Ghasemibarghi, Centre for the Study of Theory & Criticism
2nd Floor at Western University, “Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Destructive Character’
Revisited: From Theology to Ethics through a Lacanian Interlude”
Speaker: Veronika Nayir, York University, “The Burden of the Critic
and the Task of Resuscitating Carthage”
UC 2105 Law, Violence, Power
2nd Floor Moderator: TBA
Speaker: Bogdan Ovcharuk, York University, “Baroque Sovereignty in
Walter Benjamin’s ‘Natural History’ of Fascism”
Speaker: Natasha Hay, Toronto Metropolitan University, “Becoming a
Queer Heir: The Sexual Politics of Sovereign Power and the
Contemporary Legacy of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’”

Break: Coffee / Pastries

10:15am-12pm
Conron Hall, 3rd Floor

Moderator: John Vanderheide, Centre for the Study of Theory & Criticism at Western University

“Petrified Unrest / Restless Petrifact” (Virtual)

Rebecca Comay
University of Toronto

Lunch: Sandwiches / Assorted Vegetable / Coffee

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Session II: Autoethnography and the Politicization of Aesthetics
1:00pm-2:00pm Moderator: TBA
UC 2110 Speaker: Sarah Burgoyne, Concordia University, “‘History is Time in
2nd Floor Drag’: Benjamin and the Quétaine in Montreal’s Arcades”
Speaker: Jason Stocker, Centre for the Study of Theory & Criticism at
Western University, “Ecological Allegory and the Politicization of
Aesthetics”
UC 2105 Art and the Spectacle in Contemporary Consumer Society
2nd Floor Moderator: TBA
Speaker: Ulysse (Maxim) Sizov, Memorial University of Newfoundland,
“Reimagining New Potentialities for Art and Revolution in Consumer
Society”
Speaker: Fernando Garcia, Centre for the Study of Theory & Criticism at
Western University, “The Body-Brand: A New Phantasmagoria?”

Break: Coffee

Session III: Intersections between Benjamin & Fanon

2:15pm-3:15pm Moderator: TBA
UC 2110 Speaker: Jeremy Arnott, Concordia University, “Violence and
2nd Floor Metaphysics: Benjamin and Fanon”
Speaker: Jiantao Liang, Concordia University, “Redeeming History with
Fanon and Benjamin: Theorizing the Decolonization of Time and
Possibilities in between the History of Refusal and Messianic Time”
UC 2105 Applications of ‘Montage’
2nd Floor Moderator: TBA
Speaker: Deepro Roy, Centre for the Study of Theory & Criticism at
Western University, “The Post-Colonial Montage against the National
Allegory: Benjamin, Brecht, and Epic Theater in India”
Speaker: Cory McConnell, York University, “Trauma: Shock-Experience
in Hip-Hop”

Break

Session IV: Political Cosmogony, Theology, and Eschatology

3:30pm-5:00pm Moderator: TBA
Conron Hall Speaker: Brendan Brown, CSTC at Western University, “Towards a
3rd Floor Constellation of an Origin/al Cosmogony”
Speaker: Joseph Palmeri, CSTC at Western University, “Benjamin,
Theology, and Messianic Joy: Theorizing Benjamin’s Theology as a
Politics of Revolutionary Joy”
Speaker: Lingyu Jing, McMaster University, “From the End of History
to the History of the End: Walter Benjamin’s Innovation of Political
Eschatology”

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UC 2105 Revolutionary Forms
2nd Floor Moderator: TBA
Speaker: André Babyn, McGill University, “Revolutionary Form:
Benjamin, Fourier, and the Necessity of the Cosmic Imagination”
Speaker: Olivier Dorais, Université de Montréal, “Profane Illumination
and the Task of Revolutionary Intellectuals: The Use of a Notion from
Walter Benjamin to Friedrich Kittler”
5:00pm
Conron Hall Closing Remarks
3rd Floor

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 Abstracts

Dominic Pizzolitto, “Benjamin’s Esoteric Marxism”

Adorno once remarked in a letter to Benjamin that, oftentimes, only “initiates” are capable of
grasping the theoretical questions latent in his work. But Benjamin is not an obscurantist; the
opacity that veils his work is a by-product of his unique mode of presentation. This presentation
attempts to unpack Benjamin’s esoteric Marxism by exploring the problem of the Darstellung of
history in Benjamin’s late work. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin speaks of the need to
“conjoin a heightened graphicness [Anschaulichkeit] to the realization of Marxist method.” He
also argues that “the expressive character [Ausdruckscharacter] of the earliest industrial
products, machines, and architecture” aected Marxism in decisive ways. This presentation will
argue that Benjamin’s desire to add “graphicness” to Marxism, or render history “perceptible” is
indicative of a political economy of aect at play in his work. To that end, Benjamin’s recourse to
Freudian psychoanalysis–particularly in his Baudelaire essays–will be explored to question how
aect might function as a combinatory force capable of constellating historical fragments.

Mang Su, “The Concept of Natural History and the Mediation through the Extremes: On
Adorno’s Alleged Critique of Benjamin”

This essay is yet another attempt to approach Adorno’s infamous (notorious) critique of
Benjamin’s thinking as “not dialectical enough.” Instead of arguing that Adorno misunderstands
or misrepresents Benjamin, or that Benjamin has an underestimated counter argument against
Adorno, like the existing literature tends to do, I proceed instead from Adorno’s own work,
especially on the concept of mediation, which he accuses Benjamin of lacking. I will argue that
Adorno’s concept of mediation, which draws on both Hegel and Benjamin, is in fact more akin
to Benjamin’s dialectical image than to Hegel’s self-mediating spirit. This is the case because
without Hegel’s commitment to the system, which alone warrants the mediation in every
moment of the dialectic, Adorno’s micrology of mediation falls under the same accusation that
he makes against Benjamin. Hence, Adorno’s critique of Benjamin brings about the dilemma of
the “micrology” for both Benjamin and Adorno—what they both believe to be the last reservoir
of metaphysics. I will conclude that Adorno’s critique of Benjamin should be best understood as
an internal alert to the predicament that any micrological-metaphysical speculation will face. In
particular, I will examine Benjamin’s and Adorno’s notions of natural history in relation to the
notion of redemption, through which their similar but different treatments of materialistic and
negative-theological themes are to be made explicit.

Daniel Mourenza, “The Haptic Quality of Film: Walter Benjamin and Film
Phenomenology”

In the Work of Art essay, Benjamin borrowed the concept “taktisch” from Alois Riegl to
describe the transmission of tactile qualities through optical means. The term has been
controversial in Benjamin studies. For example, the editors of the Gesammelte Schriften
considered the word baffling and used taktil instead, whereas Tobias Wilke has defended the
polysemy of taktisch as both tactile and tactical. I will argue, however, that Benjamin should
have used the term haptisch. As early as 1902, Riegl discarded the word taktisch as ambiguous

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and argued that from then onwards he would use haptisch. Haptics has become a widely used
concept in film phenomenology, especially since Laura Marks published The Skin of Film
(2000), to refer to moving images that appeal not only to sight but also to touch. Although
Benjamin is widely cited by these authors, his theory on film’s reception in distraction is
surprisingly missing from their debates. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it seeks to
reclaim Benjamin’s film aesthetics as a film phenomenology avant-la-lettre, for it anticipated
ideas such as embodied spectatorship and haptic reception. Secondly, it aims to contribute to
current debates in film phenomenology about the relationship between spectators and film.

Xue Jiang, “Between Proximity to the Market and Political Influence of a Left-Wing
Outsider: Walter Benjamin’s Feuilletonistic Literary Writings”

Benjamin not only wrote literary-philosophical proses for newspapers as a creator, but also
reflected as a theorist on the development of the newspaper/feuilleton and their relationship to
literature. In literary-philosophical creation, Benjamin, on the one hand, tailored his work to the
market by adopting “Kleine Form” and an approach that connects with the public, on the other
hand, exerts his political influence as a “left-wing outsider” through avant-garde techniques. In
terms of theoretical reflection, Benjamin inquired as early as 1928 into “why the art of
storytelling is in decline”. In his view, this issue is closely tied to the integration of literature into
journalism and the related phenomenon of “literary production being assimilated into commodity
production”. The investigation of newspapers and feuilletons is a part of Benjamin's reflection on
modernity, and his expectations for both entail his intentions to rescue modernity from its crisis.
By analyzing Benjamin’s feuilletonistic literary experiments and his theoretical reflection on
newspapers, this article aims to explore whether his strategy in literary creation was caught in a
precarious position of being “between two chairs” and assess the applicability of Benjamin’s
ideas on newspaper in today’s media landscape.

Hong Liu, “Image and Sound: Revisiting Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory in the
Trauerspielbuch”

In the Origin of the German Trauerspiel, Benjamin recuperates allegory as a mode of expression
that resists hegemonic meaning and the logic of symbolic identity, signaling instead an
alternative, fragmented, and heterogeneous relationship to knowledge and history. Scholarship
has often thematized the visual nature of the Benjaminian allegory– from the emblem to the
Schriftbild –an emphasis warranted by the profusion of visual metaphor across Benjamin’s
oeuvre. However, Benjamin’s lengthy discussion on speech sound, onomatopoeia, and the
phonetic language of nature has received little attention, and sound is rarely considered in
relation to allegory. This paper revisits Benjamin’s theory of allegory from the perspective of
sonorous mimesis. With reference to Benjamin’s early writing on language and the mimetic
faculty, I discuss how the structure of allegory is grounded in the unfulfilled linguistic unity
between sound and script. Responding to Benjamin’s own call for new apperceptions in the
“Work of Art” essay and informed by recent approaches to Benjamin from Sound Studies, this
paper looks beyond the seen to further reconsider the dialectic of sound and silence, utterance
and muteness, in Benjamin’s thinking on tragedy, history, and nature.

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Yijing Li, “Re-define Chinese aesthetic terminology “yi意” through the lens of Walter
Benjamin’s
theory”

German philosopher Walter Benjamin came up with an artistic terminology “aura” to to explain
the originality and unreproducible feature of certain artworks—Only the original artworks
contained aura because of its unique existence in certain time and space (The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction,1935). Using this as an entry point, my presentation will
attempt to re-define the aesthetic of “yi意” in Chinese calligraphy through the lens of Walter
Benjamin’s theory. Using Wang, Xizhi’s calligraphy work, Orchid Pavilion Preface, as a case
study, I will explore how the artist could perceive “aura” in his artworks through numerous
imitations of other calligraphy works. I will also discuss the similarity shared between this
unique Chinese aesthetic terminology “yi意” and the term “aura” proposed by Walter Benjamin,
in terms of its definition as uniqueness and “one and only” in Chinese calligraphy.

Jürgen Lipps, “The End of All Things (And the Beginning of Nothing!)”

Walter Benjamin’s writings on history contain numerous references to the arresting or standing
still of time, more specifically, of the historian’s need for a concept of the present that is not a
transition, but in which time “takes a stand and has come to a standstill” ([Der] Begriff einer
Gegenwart […] in der die Zeit einsteht und zum Stillstand gekommen ist). It is incredibly
difficult to know what to think of these statements, much less how to think them at all. What
does it even mean for time to take a stand and come to a standstill? Furthermore, why is such a
concept of the present indispensable to the historian? I seek to answer these questions via an
engagement with Kant’s late essay Das Ende aller Dinge (1794) and a peculiar passage on
intelligible intuition from the Kritik der prakitschen Vernunft (1788). My claim is that the
concept of the present moment that Benjamin takes to be indispensable to the historian can be
thought using the Kantian idea of a duration outside of time. I argue that the sought-after
advantage of writing history from within a moment outside of time is that historical perception
from within such a moment would be unlimited by the form of time, much like Kantian
intelligible intuition. As such, it would permit a kind of historical cognition devoid of temporal
concepts like progress. I interpret Benjamin’s call for the development of such a conception of
the present as an attempt to conceptualize, make possible, and ultimately to instantiate a kind of
divine intelligible intuition for the practice of materialist historiography.

Tyla Stevenson, “Walter Benjamin for Fashion Studies: Understanding Time Through
Fashion”

The concept of fashion is inescapable from time. Fashion can be considered fast or slow, aligned
to a strict cycle dedicated to arbitrary seasons and associates what is in fashion with the ‘now’
and what is out of fashion with the ‘past’. Fashion scholars, including myself, turn to Walter
Benjamin and his work on the Arcades Project and essay On the Concept of History to
understand fashion and its relationship to time. Benjamin explored the speed in which styles
change to appeal to the spirits of the modern times, the way fashions would reference history and
repeat and recontextualise previous styles and trends. Although not limited to an association with
modernity, fashion for Benjamin, was a phenomenon and model for rethinking temporal

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articulation in general. Fashion's reiteration of previous styles for Benjamin could be politically
revolutionary as it implements the dialectical image as a tool to awaken the collective from a
dream state. For my presentation I will explore the way in which Benjamin has been used in
Fashion Studies, his relevance today and common critiques of limiting a definition of fashion to
a particular conceptualisation of time. I advocate that his works are imperative for a
revolutionary study of fashion design and its encompassing system.

Ali Ghasemibarghi, “Walter Benjamin's 'The Destructive Character', Revisited: From

Theology to Ethics through a Lacanian Interlude”

In this article, I venture into pinpointing an ethical kernel which lies, as shall be demonstrated, in
one of Walter Benjamin's personages, the ‘destructive character’ which seems at first glance to
carry an undeniable nihilistic and rather anti-moral tenor. Along with Benjamin’s other
personages such as ‘the collector’, the ‘ragpicker’, ‘the destructive character’ manifest specific
character traits that may be perceived as virtues as they constitute a subjectivity attentive to the
exigencies of a political struggle which occurs within what Benjamin calls 'Natural history'
(Naturgeschichte). However, considering Benjamin's uncompromising rejection of any ethical or
moral assessment of the notion of 'character', speaking of a Benjaminian (virtue) ethics of sorts
would seem totally misleading and illegitimate. The fact that the primary sources of normativity
in Benjamin's thought are either theological or political leaves little room for the possibility of
spotting an ethical core in his thought. Drawing upon Irving Wohlfarth's authoritative
interpretation of the text which linked the fundamental demeanor of this figure to his liberation
from subjection to the law and guilt/debt, and supplementing this constellation with a rather
digressive reference to Lacanian teachings about the ethical status of subject's desire which is
basically formulated by Lacan as structured in the subject's relation to the Other qua 'the
symbolic order' and 'Law', I will try to reconstruct the ethical valences of this figure. I will argue
that the destructive character, in his indifference towards 'being misunderstood', his 'blithe'
manner, and his embracement of radical contingency manifested in his maxim "readiness at all
times to recognize that everything can go wrong" embodies a basically ethical moment which is
termed by Lacan as 'traversing the fantasy', reached when the subject comes to recognize the
fundamental inconsistency/inexistence of the big Other (the symbolic law) and breaks free from
the neurotic dialectic of guilt/debt-generating Law and its obscene jouissance. moreover, through
a supplementing reference to Benjamin's other personage, 'the collector', I will demonstrate how
the Lacanian notion of 'subjective destitution' could shed light on the destructive character's
untiring will to self-obliteration which was also highlighted in Wohlfarth's insistence on the
'facelessness', 'anonymity' and 'characterlessness' of this Benjaminian creature.

Veronika Nayir, “The Burden of the Critic and the Task of Resuscitating Carthage”

In a footnote to his Theses on the Philosophy of History Benjamin offers us a quote from
Flaubert: “Few will be able to guess how sad one had to be in order to resuscitate Carthage”
(Thesis VII). My presentation explores the curious chronology of this statement – it seems as
though sadness is a condition of possibility, rather than an affective response, to the burdensome
effort of resuscitation: one “had to be” sad “in order to…”. In this presentation, I examine the
affective attachments Benjamin identifies in this thesis as belonging to a historicist position, and
move onto an exploration of the general status of sadness in Benjamin’s work, and in his own

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capacity as a theoretician involved in tasks of redemption and rehabilitation. This will entail an
engagement with the resources of psychoanalysis and affect theory – Carthage is but a
placeholder for forgotten, blotted out, and buried pasts, pasts we are all interested in. I argue that
Benjamin offers us a way of negotiating a theorist’s melancholia – that structure of desire
fundamentally attached to the past – while maintaining a commitment to hope and possibility.
Alongside a reading of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, which I bring to bear on Benjamin’s
Theses, I consider the tendency toward necrophilia and speculative “returns” that we find
existent in the emotional economy of our present moment. I conclude with some of the affective
difficulties of my own work as a theorist who works on trauma studies, loss, and the history of
the Armenian genocide.

Bogdan Ovcharuk, “Baroque Sovereignty in Walter Benjamin’s “Natural History” of

Fascism”

In his most accomplished work, Origin of German Trauerspiel, Walter Benjamin analyses the
genre of trauerspiel within the historical conditions that gave rise to it: 17th-century European
absolute monarchy. It is within this context that his engagement with Carl Schmitt’s legal theory
of sovereignty occurs. Benjamin demonstrates how Schmitt’s Fascist theory of sovereignty
originates from the absolute monarchy’s ‘Baroque sovereignty.’ This paper will focus on
Benjamin’s history of trauerspiel in the context of the contemporary debate on constituent power.
First, I discuss how Benjamin’s approach to the trauerspiel, “natural history” (Naturgeschichte),
provides a perspective on constituent power that historicizes the notion of sovereignty.
Subsequently, I explore the second, most difficult aspect of natural history: Benjamin’s analysis
of the Baroque depiction of nature as fallen - contingent and transitory. In considering the
significance of Benjamin’s portrayal of this fallen nature, I argue that Baroque sovereignty marks
the beginning of a regressive modern political tendency, extending from absolute monarchy
through Bonapartism to Schmitt’s Fascism. The paper concludes with a critical examination of
the theory of ‘destituent power,’ ascribed to Benjamin by thinkers like Agamben, in relation to
the theoretical task of today — the task of confronting neo-Fascism.

Natasha Hay, “Becoming A Queer Heir: The Sexual Politics of Sovereign Power and the
Contemporary Legacy of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’”

My presentation will bring together the figure of the child and the critique of legal violence in
Benjamin’s corpus to elucidate the contested status of queer and trans subjects in contemporary
life. While the reception of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” has privileged the paradigm of
sovereign decision suspending the law, it has not scrutinized the significant reversals of specific
Weimar laws concerning sexuality and gender that express the legislative agenda of populist
reaction to a liberal culture. However, Benjamin’s critique of reproductive sexuality from “The
Life of Students” to the Arcades Project indicates his apprehension of the neuralgic point of sexual
politics omitted from current reconstructions of the nexus between sovereign power and bare life.
The entangled threads of gender, sexuality, and eros in Benjamin’s corpus also substantially differ
from the Foucauldian approach to power, resistance, and discourse that shapes queer theory and
Agamben’s influential view of biopolitics. Taking up Dianne Chisholm’s call for a queer return to
Benjamin’s corpus, I want to parse out ways that his analyses of the historical violence of legal

13
systems and the creative potentialities of childhood could address the symptomatic targeting of
queer youth and align his legacy with an intersectional materialism.

Sarah Burgoyne, “‘History is Time in Drag’: Benjamin and the Quétaine on Montreal's
Arcades”

Essentially a mall with covered walkways, Montreal's Saint-Hubert Plaza, represents a kitschy
(or, in Québécois, quétaine), 21st-century version of the Arcades Benjamin loved to loiter in.
Like theParis Arcades, it presents in its arrangement of storefronts and objects fruitful
juxtapositions and dialectical images to explore and unpack. Dialectical images are a means of
penetrating past correlations to “put the truth in present action to the test" (Edinborough, 2016)
and of situating critical thinking in an experiential and materialist framework. According to its
website and temporary signage during its 2018-2022 refurbishment project, which read, “ma
plaza se transforme” (“my plaza transforms itself”), the Plaza St-Hubert is an evolving and self-
actualizing space whose ownership can be reduced to a singular possessive pronoun (“my”). An
autoethnographic exploration of the question that this slogan introduces, namely, who are the
imagined clients who the shopping strip is “transforming” for versus the people who currently
and historically claim space there, introduces a Benjaminian disequilibrium to traditional
academic methods of “knowing” and “writing” a place. Both dialectical image and somatic urban
practice share a similar logic in treating the process of layering time and space as a politicized,
deliberate act of radical history, and tapping the potential of the present moment in order to
mobilize a better future.

Jason Stocker, “Ecological Allegory and the Politicization of Aesthetics”

This talk explores Benjamin’s distinction between the aestheticization of politics and the
politicization of aesthetics, focusing on its implications for relations with nature and ecological
crises. Briefly, the aestheticization of politics masks the violence of politics and promotes
fascism, while the politicization of aesthetics calls us to exhaustively address such political
violence, even where oft neglected, in aesthetics. We will consider this distinction by comparing
Benjamin’s conceptions of divine symbols, aesthetic symbols, and allegory, interpreting each
through their respective ecological orientations. Divine symbols give way to immediate
transcendental relations with nature, while aesthetic symbols offer mediate plastic relations. Both
symbols, however, suggest assimilations of nature which mask or fail to account for political
violence, and thus risk an aestheticization of politics. Allegory, in contrast, explicitly attunes us
to the violent ruptures at play in our current and historical relations with nature. Drawing on
Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” allegory offers a more nuanced, cautious, and ecological
approach to what Benjamin terms divine violence, as it forbids settling means/ends, and thus
good conscience, in our relations with nature. In this sense, allegory offers a politicization of
aesthetics particularly apt for addressing the violence of ecological crises.

Ulysse Sizov, “Reimagining New Potentialities for Art and Revolution in Consumer
Society”

Revolution as art. The artist and the revolutionary share this in common: they frame the chaos of
the world, transcribing into reality their visions of the world (Grosz, 2008). The Van Gogh

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‘Sunflower’ activists attempted to realize this commonality by throwing a can of soup at Van
Gogh’s Sunflowers painting; looking to frame the chaos of a world run amok by capitalism, thus
bringing to light the prescience of global warming and the possibility of a new world. This action
(de)territorialized the line between vandalism, art, and revolution (Deleuze, 1987). However,
their actions failed— in attempting to break spectacle, they became spectacle. Their message of
revolutionary action became absorbed for pointless back-and-forth consumption through the lens
of media (Debord, 1983). In light of fulfilling the demands Walter Benjamin once gave art – that
in the age of mechanical reproduction of culture all art must necessarily be political (Benjamin,
2005) – we seek to use their failure as a launching platform. Thus, through understanding
revolutionary action as art – while avoiding the fascistic aestheticization of politics – the
dimensions of art as political action, how revolution becomes spectacle, and what comes of
seeing revolution as art we hope to bring hope to art and theory.

Fernando Garcia, “The Body-Brand: A New Phantasmagoria?”

This essay departs from the shift in the industry’s business model and how it has led to a new
form of capital accumulation known as “body rentierism”. In this model, musicians transition
from selling labor power to renting their bodies as images or brands, with the body becoming a
primary source of profit as a brody-brand. The essay delves into the legal and economic aspects
of this shift, emphasizing the role of copyright and image rights in generating surplus value
through the exchange value of scarcity. Moreover, the analysis extends into the broader context
of cognitive capitalism, with marketing strategies and legal frameworks playing crucial roles in
building a cultural phantasmagoria out of the body-brand. Focusing on capturing attention in a
society dominated by spectacle. The essay concludes by suggesting a potential for a critical trope
within the cultural phantasmagoria of the body-brand. It posits that a different use or engagement
with the cultural product, particularly in the inherent tension of the body-brand, may offer
political potential for transforming the phantasmagoric condition of domination.

Jiantao Liang, “Redeeming History with Fanon and Benjamin: Theorizing the
Decolonization of Time and Possibilities In Between the History of Refusal and Messianic
Time”

In this presentation, through examining Frantz Fanon and Walter Benjamin’s notions of history
and the past, I argue that they orient the task of theorists towards decolonizing temporal
possibilities. In Peau noire, masques blancs, Fanon declares that one must “rework (reprendre)
the whole past of the world”, which is followed by an expression of identifying himself with all
the oppressed who refuse subjugation. He diagnoses ‘affective ankylosis,’ or the White’s
inability to liquidate the colonial past and the ‘affective tetanisation’ of the colonized as the
result of the temporal violence that they experience, which results in what Alia Al-Saji calls the
‘dismembered possibility’ of the colonized. Colonial temporality and ‘progress’ are dialectically
violent and regressive. Fanon attempts to locate one of the possible remedies to the colonial
pathologies of temporality in rearranging what I would call the ‘historical scenes of refusal.’ For
Benjamin, historical materialists’ task is also to ‘brush history against the grain’ beyond the
linear progress of the victors. The unfulfilled happiness in the past possibilities, particularly in
the oppressed, can be constructive through their realization in the ‘Jetztzeit’. They both orient us
to theorize re-experiencing the past and its possibilities in an a-teleogical way.

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Jeremy Arnott, “Violence and Metaphysics: Benjamin and Fanon”

This paper will explore the philosophical valences of the concept of violence in Walter Benjamin
(1892-1940) and Frantz Fanon (1925-1961). For both thinkers, violence serves as both a political
and metaphysical tool, and, as such, can be employed as a prism to reflect upon the relationship
between both domains. Taking up Benjamin’s “On the Critique of Violence” (1921), in
conjunction with “The Destructive Character” (1931), I will chart the polyphonic role played by
violence in Benjamin’s oeuvre. Primarily, I will consider the violence at the heart of political
sovereignty, which Benjamin outlines in “Critique of Violence.” Further, I will consider
Benjamin’s violent interpretation of the avant-garde, which he describes as “making room”
through the destruction of the cultic “aura.” Benjamin’s considerations will be supplemented by
Fanon’s “On Violence,” from The Wretched of the Earth (1961), bringing Benjamin into
conversation with de-colonial theory. For Fanon, violence is inherent in the “colonial situation,”
and is equally necessary for any identity formation (following Hegel), along with resistance to
the colonial situation. This constellation of thinkers allows one to pose broader questions
regarding the (potentially violent) relationship between theology and politics. Both theorists
allow for an interrogation of political theology, highlighting the forceful basis of the law, along
with the violent of any state formation. Further, one can consider metaphysical questions relating
to violence, considering the potentially violent nature of judgment.

Deepro Roy, “The Post-Colonial Montage against the National Allegory: Benjamin, Brecht,
and Epic Theatre in India”

Brecht’s “Third World” reception and legacy raises vital questions at the heart of post-colonial
theory. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s theoretical attitudes, for instance, by her own admission,
are shaped by an early familiarity with the Indian People’s Theatre Association (or IPTA), a
Brecht-inspired cultural wing of the Indian communist movement. Benjamin’s reflections on
Brecht help account for the energies and events defining Indian post-colonial theatre. The
colonial moment and its aftermath demanded a theatre that may be considered Brechtian in two
respects: it was, firstly, an activist, didactic, popular theatre, and secondly, against what
Benjamin calls the “sublime but barren massif of [Western, Tragic] classicism.” The form was
sought in the pre-modern past. For Fredric Jameson, Brecht’s “method” overcomes a tension
between, on the one hand, a modernism of shocks and exciting scientific praxis, and, on the
other, a pre-modern didacticism, a sage-like embrace of a pre-capitalist temporality. A more
stubborn tension appears between two competing uses of “the Folk” in Indian post-colonial
theatre. Left cultural movements (IPTA, Badal Sircar’s “Third Theatre”) recovered folk idioms
for didactic efficiency. An equally decolonial “theatre of the roots” (K.N. Panicker, Girish
Karnad, etc) pursued something authentically Indic. Benjamin, with his Messianic theory of
temporality, explains Brecht’s use of the past. Benjamin’s recovery of Baroque allegory and
modern montage (that Brecht perfects) deepens our sense of how the Brechtian Indian cultural
Left differed from the allegorical “theatre of roots.” I revisit, finally, the post-colonial outcry
over Jameson’s controversial declaration that Third World cultural production takes the form of
“national allegories.” I argue, using Benjamin, that allegorical readings do apply to one current
of post-colonial modernism. There is, however, another revolutionary Brechtian-Benjaminian
current that subverts the national.

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Cory McConnell, “Trauma: Shock Experience in Hip-Hop”

In this paper, I take up Benjamin’s discussion of ‘shock-experience’ as a traumatic structuring of

modern experience in dialogue with hip-hop as it engages in critical testimony about political
violence. By working through this resonance of Benjamin’s thought with hip-hop, I argue hip-
hop might be considered a contemporary move in the same direction as Benjamin’s analysis of
montage as a contemporary medium apt for capturing shock-experience in the former’s use of
the scratch to articulate inarticulable trauma. Against attempts to recuperate testimony by the
state testimony in hip hop is always already a critique of traumatic political violence. Critical
testimony relies on what Benjamin calls our ‘weak, messianic power’ to redeem the past by
transmitting a ‘tradition of the oppressed’ through the use of sampling and lyrical content to
layer meaning onto histories of oppression and resistance which remain alive to us now. Through
such citational practices rappers are able not simply to argue that anti-black violence is genocidal
but rather to consider its genocidal character to be self-evident thus circumventing the how the
history of the victors precludes such by relegating anti-black violence to a past mistake away
from which the nation has moved on together.

Brendan Brown, “Towards a Constellation of an Origin/al Cosmogony”

This presentation thinks the ‘cosmological’ across three figures: Walter Benjamin, Georges
Bataille, and Sylvia Wynter. Rarely, if at all, is Benjamin’s work brought into conversation with
Wynter and little is theorized about Benjamin’s relationship to Bataille. As such, this
presentation seeks to find a common ground between these three thinkers on their respective
theorization of the role of ‘cosmogony’. I take the cosmological to be important not only for
theorizing this hereto for unthought constellation, but also for thinking through the category of
agency in relation to being and praxis, and, more importantly, the praxis of being human.
Cosmogony names a relic of human capacity which sought to divine the role of praxis for each
of these thinkers. Reading Benjamin’s “To the Planetarium”, Bataille’s Accursed Share and The
Limits of the Useful, and Wynter’s triptych on humanism “The Ceremony Must Be Found”,
“Unsettling the Coloniality of Being…”, and “The Ceremony Found”, I will show how
cosmogony is a crucial cipher for understanding the limits of praxis and agency in the context of
anarchy. I will conclude by arguing that anarchy for each is predicated upon a re-interpretation
and unleashing of cosmogony as ushering in a new way of being human.

Joseph Palmeri, “Benjamin, Theology, and Messianic Joy: Theorizing Benjamin’s

Theology as a Politics of Revolutionary Joy”

Walter Benjamin is clear about his belief of the Messianic. He begins the Theologico-Political
Fragment saying, “Only the Messiah himself consummates all history, in the sense that he alone
redeems, completes, creates its relation to the Messianic.” In this short fragment, and with this
short sentence, Benjamin cuts against the grain of history, even against the grain of traditional
historical materialism. Adorno and Horkheimer, for their part, spend the better part of Dialectic
of Enlightenment arguing that Man has not yet overcome myth, and that the optimistic
affirmation of culture presents nothing but the psycho-political victory of fascism after World
War Two. Though Benjamin is also critical of the telos-trap within capitalism and the ideology

17
of progress, even within this fragmentary work, he nevertheless unsettles the reservations
articulated by Adorno and Horkheimer on three fronts: 1) Benjamin favors what he calls
‘transient totality’ as opposed to nonidentical consistency; 2) This transient totality requires an
affirmation, indeed even one that believes in immortality, that is not only resilient but optimistic
in the face of profanity; 3) Benjamin, in favor of a materialism which is also divine, rolls the dice
with the hand of the Messiah. He conveys an optimism which goes undetected for those reading
him as a purely anarchic figure who makes metaphoric use of theological language. On the
contrary, Benjamin’s theology is one of Messianic joy, a joy only found in transient totality,
where ruptures are also glimpses of immortality, and where even profanity is violently divine
and imminently paradisiacal.

Lingyu Jing, “From the end of history to the history of the end: Walter Benjamin’s
innovation of
political eschatology”

The paper situates Walter Benjamin in the tradition of political theology and views his
philosophy of history as an innovation of political eschatology. In the 1920s, Marxist- Leninists
created a teleological worldview that treated the communist party as the vanguard of progress
towards the end of history to justify revolutionary violence and the founding of the Soviet Union.
I will argue that from Benjamin’s perspective, the traditional Marxist view of history is a
secularized Christian eschatology, which does not bring history to the end time but only
perpetuates mythical violence and political idolatry. I treat his Jewish Mysticism as an
innovation of political eschatology that creates a new historical consciousness of revelation,
redemption, and revolution. First, I draw on Theologico-political Fragment to discuss the
dialectical relationship between the political and the theological, and show why theology should
not be used to justify political power as in the case of the Soviet Union. Second, I connect
Critique of Violence and Theses on Philosophy of History to interpret divine violence as the
temporal and corporal manifestation of the Messiah and how his Judaic theology reorganizes
eschatology as a history of ruptures to reveal the timing of revolution and the rule of the divine.

André Babyn, “Revolutionary Form: Benjamin, Fourier, and the Necessity of the Cosmic
Imagination”

With his invocation of anti-lions, tails covered in eyes, and oceans turned to lemonade, Charles
Fourier’s radical visions of planetary harmony are certainly startling. More curious still is why
Walter Benjamin makes such central use of Fourier in the Arcades Project. Benjamin
dedicates—in addition to a full convolute and various other references throughout—a section to
Fourier in each of the 1935 and 1939 prefatory exposés, making explicit a connection between
the revolutionary potential of Fourier’s project with the arcades as symbol of both the city in
miniature and the technological progress that made them possible: “The phalanstery becomes a
city of arcades” (AP 5). But in giving Fourier such a central role in his project, Benjamin does
not make a point of separating out Fourier’s rational project from his bizarre fantasies, as so
many of even Fourier’s most sympathetic critics tend to do (Pearson 2005). Benjamin realizes
that Fourier’s fantasies are crucial to understanding the consumerist and capitalist dream that
overtakes Paris, and the entire Western world, in the nineteenth century. Even more importantly,

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their cosmic influence will help Benjamin discover “the constellation of awakening” that is the
stated goal of the Arcades Project.

Olivier Dorais, “Profane illumination and the task of revolutionary intellectuals: The use of
a notion from Walter Benjamin to Friedrich Kittler”

The pivotal importance of the 1929 essay on Surrealism in Benjamin's work cannot be
overstated. Against the backdrop of a critical discussion of the Surrealists' political evolution as a
symptom of the crisis of the European intelligentsia, Benjamin outlines the tasks of revolutionary
intellectuals from a perspective he calls anthropological materialism. At the same time as it takes
up certain key elements of his theory of literary criticism, this perspective provides a materialist
and political basis for his own theoretical practice of the 1930s, particularly in Kunstwerk-
Aufsatz and Passagenwerk. – Through the presentation of the notion of profane illumination,
reconstructed from the complex conceptual constellation that gives it meaning (Bildraum,
Leibraum, anthropological materialism, the dialectic of intoxication, the bodily collective
innervation), I would like to highlight Benjamin's contribution to the question of the task of
revolutionary intellectuals and what this task imposes on the very form of theory as immanent
critique, aiming to produce a transformative experience, and its relationship to cultural heritage.
– From there, I'd like to conclude by contrasting the theoretical and political ambition that
Benjamin placed in the notion of profane illumination with the slight but symptomatic reworking
of it, in a different historical context, by media theorist Friedrich Kittler in his book
Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986). By highlighting what remains and what is lost, I intend to
question the actuality of the perspective of anthropological materialism for contemporary
theoretical tasks.

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 Author Biographies

Dominic Pizzolitto is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University
of Toronto. His research interests include: Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Critical Theory of the
Frankfurt School, German Idealism, modernism, and nineteenth and twentieth century literature.
He is currently working on a dissertation about Benjamin’s theory of experience as it relates to
The Arcades Project.

Mang Su is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Temple University. His interests originate in

aesthetics, especially on the problematic but seemingly indispensable desire for the transcendent.
He is fascinated by critical theory (especially the “first generation Frankfurt School” thinkers
such as Adorno and Benjamin), because the emphatic ambivalence of a socially conditioned but
socially transcending force of thinking is thematized and developed, along with a radically
imaginative but utterly serious way of thinking about the relation between history, nature, and
what could be thought to be beyond. Interdisciplinary by nature, critical theory then leads me to
the threads of thoughts from German Idealism, negative theology, to psychoanalysis. He is
currently working on his dissertation, which is on the concept of semblance (Schein) in Adorno’s
late thinking, through the lens of the problematic of metaphysics in German Idealism and
Romanticism.

Daniel Mourenza is an Assistant Professor at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen/Radboud Institute

of Culture & History (RICH) and a María Zambrano postdoctoral fellow at the Universitat de
Barcelona. He holds a PhD in Cultural Studies (2014) from the University of Leeds, with a thesis
on Walter Benjamin’s film writings. Mourenza is the author of Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics
of Film (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), co-editor of a special issue of the cultural studies
journal parallax and of the volume Contemporary Argentine Women Filmmakers (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2023). He is currently working on a project about the role of the senses in women’s
cinema, in which he tries to reconcile Benjamin’s film aesthetics with film phenomenology.

JIANG Xue is research assistant at the institute of Foreign Literature, Chinese Acadamy of Social
Sciences, where she has been since 2018. She received her Ph.D. in German Literature from Peking
University in 2018. Currently she works as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Stuttgart. Her
research focuses on the theoretical aspects of modern German literature, with a recent emphasis
on Walter Benjamin and Thought-Images of Frankfurt School Writers. She has translated Walter
Benjamins Einbahnstraße and his biographie Walter Benjamin into Chinese and published several
papers on Walter Benjamin in academic journals in both Germany and China.

Hong Liu is a PhD candidate at the center for comparative literature at the university of Toronto.
Her dissertation project considers Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory and the entanglement of
history and tragic theater, both modern and early modern. She was a member of the Ekphrasis
reading group at the university of Toronto and was involved in the organization of the group's
2021 international Workshop: the Scene of Writing the Seen. Her research interests include text-
image relationship, allegory and melancholy, sound and memory, phonocentrism and national
literature.

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Yijing Lin is a first year Ph.D. student in Art and Visual Culture at Western University under
her supervisor, Prof. Sarah Bassnett. Shr obtained her honours bachelordegree and master degree
at University of Toronto. During my undergraduate studies, She fortunately participated in the
project of art exhibition curation, Reading Revolution: Art and Literacy during China’s Cultural
Revolution under the supervision of Professor Jenny Purtle. During her graduate studies, under
the supervision of Professor Deepali Dewan, she has engaged with case studies from the Family
Camera Network archive at Royal Ontario Museum (ROM)’s photo collection. Through the case
study, she examined the cultural, social and technological practices that produce family
photography and learned to understand its aesthetic and discursive dimensions. Her current
research is focused on using family portraits to study the reconstruction of “family time” through
generations. Her article Family Portraits: The reconstruction of “Family Time” Through
Generations is under the final publication procedure at University of Toronto Art Journal.

Jürgen Lipps is a PhD student in Philosophy at University of California, Los Angeles. He

studied Philosophy and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, receiving his BA in 2021.
His current research interests include Kant’s practical philosophy and philosophy of history,
early critical theory, and literary theory. He also have lesser interests in the philosophies of
language and mind. His current research is on the emergence, development, and decline of
theories of universal history in German philosophy from the 18th century to the early 20th. He is
also interested in theories of linguistic change and development on both sides of the
analytic/continental gap. In seeking to bridge this gap, he is currently organizing a conference
that puts Werner Hamacher’s philological works into conversation with recent work in the
analytic philosophy of linguistic change.

Tyla Stevenson is a PhD candidate pursuing Fashion Studies at The College of Creative Art,
Massey University. Her background is in Fashion Design (BDes(Hons)) and Media Studies
(MA). Her research interests are in the intersections of fashion studies, new media and critical
theory focusing on the developments of virtual fashion in online environments.

Ali Ghasemibarghi is a second-year Ph.D. student at Western University's Centre for the Study
of Theory and Criticism. He studied Persian Language and Literature (BA) and Sociology (MA)
at the University of Tehran, Iran. His theoretical interests mainly include Walter Benjamin's
thought, with a specific focus on the notion of Natural History (Naturgeschichte), and the Lacanian
tradition in Psychoanalytic Theory. His scholarly path includes translating books like Žižek and
Theology (by Adam Kotsko) and Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of The Game (by
Todd McGowan) into Persian. In his recent book-length research, published electronically in
Persian (2021), titled: The Afterlife of Ashura: The Mournfulness of Ruined Spectacles and the
Theology of Silence, he explored the representations of Ashurā, the founding event of Shi'i political
theology, within contemporary Persian drama, fiction, cinema, and theological scholarship in post-
revolution Iran, in an effort to construct a critical constellation capable of dismantling the unholy
marriage between the epic-tragic aura of the Imam with the sacralised figure of the sovereign in
the ruling Shi’i political theology. Furthermore, the motif of ruin deeply fascinates him wherever
it appears, from its material presence in ruinous cityscapes to its narrative and visual
representations in photography, literature, historiography and cinema. Here at the CSTC, he has
enjoyed the opportunity of studying under instructors specialized in Benjamin’s thought, and thus
continued to be engaged with Benjamin’s constellations.

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Bogdan Ovcharuk is a PhD candidate in Political Science at York University, Canada, where he
is pursuing a dual major in Political Theory and International Relations. Concurrently, he is
working towards a Diploma in European Studies, broadening his understanding of the
sociopolitical and intellectual landscape of the continent. His academic interests encompass
Continental political philosophy, international theory, theories of law and ethics, and the aesthetic
approaches of the Frankfurt School to social critique. Bogdan’s most recent publication appeared
in the Journal of International Political Theory. Bogdan's dissertation project involves an
application of Gillian Rose's critique of neo-Kantianism to international theory, an endeavor that
reflects his commitment to bridging critical philosophical thought with practical issues. In addition
to his academic pursuits, Bogdan has professional expertise in the fields of human rights and
peacekeeping honed during his tenure as a researcher and media worker amidst the Russia-Ukraine
conflict.

Natasha Hay holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto. She is
currently a Sessional Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Music at Toronto Metropolitan
University. She is working on a book manuscript, Freedom of Learning: Walter Benjamin and the
Contested Legacies of Liberal Education, based on her dissertation. In the tradition of the Frankfurt
School’s pathbreaking retrieval of nineteenth-century German thought for political theory, her
dissertation reconstructs the young Benjamin’s creative inheritance of Kant’s concept of academic
freedom and Nietzsche’s critique of cultural education to shed light on why learning has been
structurally devalued in the neoliberal university. Her research on Benjamin has been published in
Forces of Education: Walter Benjamin and the Politics of Pedagogy (Bloomsbury Press, 2022)
and is forthcoming in New Benjamin Studies (Issue 1.3). Her other research interests include
contemporary continental philosophy, queer and feminist theory, and translation studies.

Sarah Burgoyne is an experimental poet whose practice is based in somatic play and
collaboration. She is currently enrolled in Concordia’s Humanities Interdisciplinary PhD
program where she is researching the history and complex social articulations of the Saint-
Hubert Plaza, a contemporary arcade. An exciting part of this research involves developing an
audio walk about this commercial glass-canopied shopping centre which runs from Jean-Talon to
Bellechasse, seen by many as merely “a bizarre strip of formal-wear shops touting bargain
basement prices on ’80s-style prom and wedding gowns.”

Jason Stocker is a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, Western
University. Engaging in a dialogue across deconstruction, post-structuralism, and critical theory,
his research explores ways in which philosophies of nature yield normative orientations, and vice
versa. His current focus is on the relationship between colonial-capitalism, rivers, and allegory.
He completed his MA in philosophy at Concordia University, where his thesis examined the
relationship between Derrida's concept of carnophallogocentrism, Kantian dignity, and
movements recognizing the rights of nature.

Ulysse Sizov is a fifth-year philosophy honours, sociology major, and German cultural studies
minor undergraduate student from Memorial University (MUN). They are the head editor for our
philosophy department’s journal Codgito and have typesetting and layout experience with Janus
Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies. They have been the undergraduate philosophy

22
department’s president for four years running and have been instrumental for organizing the
philosophy department’s Public Lecture Series in Philosophy since 2022. They have also been
involved with the university’s student union and worked both outside of and within the
organization to raise student voices. Their studies at MUN have led them to: 20th Century
European Philosophy (focused on Deleuze and French Poststructuralism), German Idealism
(focused on Schelling), Art and Aesthetics, Political Philosophy, Marx and Marxism, Media and
Culture, and the French Situationists. Their research focuses on re imagining art and its
potentiality in a world where art is an onto-commodity. To effectively do so they look to the
present and to the tradition, as well as those who the tradition has forgotten or left aside, and
combine novel thinkers and ideas to address the very real problems of creative expression and its
failure today.

Fernando Garcia is a first year PhD student at the Centre for the Study of Theory & Criticism at
Western University. He is a graduate of the Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology and the Master’s
Degree in Humanities from the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos (Autonomous
University of the State of Morelos) and member of the permanent seminar “Entreveramientos:
Semiótica, Literatura y música” (Interweavings: Semiotics, Literature and Music) of the
Department of Humanities of the Autonomous Metropolitan University. His areas of study
revolve around Cultural and Media Studies, Philosophy, and Marxism. His research focuses on
how cultural production and consumption (mainly music) within capitalist society generates
moments of tension in the Society of “Spectacle”. Therefore, how the resolution of these tensions
can articulate new subjectivities that strengthen or weaken commodity fetishism. Some of the
results of this research have been reflected in conferences such as “Music Scene vs Outsider
Music: The Canon and its Possible Profanation” in the Autonomous Metropolitan University, or
“Music Industry and Identity Production: Jazztón as a New Subjectivizing Model”.

Jintao Liang is a master’s student in the Department of Philosophy at Concordia University. He

did his undergraduate studies in philosophy at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is
interested in the critical philosophy of race, decolonization, critical phenomenology, and social
and political philosophy. His recent presentation includes “Feminist Liberation and Cultural
Racism, Saba Mahmood and Frantz Fanon on the Feminist Subject and the Phenomenon of the
Veil.” He is working on topics related to decolonizing temporality, the reformulation of
ecological justice and climate change with the notion of environmental racism, and on a project
about the existential ethics of the facticity of race as well as Levinas’s phenomenology and
ethics.

Jeremy Arnott holds a PhD in Theory & Criticism from Western University. He is an
interdisciplinary researcher and instructor who specialises in critical theory and continental
philosophy. My current research is focused on speculative approaches the Frankfurt School (in
particular Benjamin and Adorno). He is also interested in discourses of ecology and philosophies
of nature. He currently teaches at both Concordia University and Western University.

Deepro Roy is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Theory and Criticism, University of Western
Ontario. He works on Modernism, Futurism, Speed, and Excess as experienced from the Global
South.

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Cory McConnell began their post-secondary education studying the Great Books at the
University of King’s College, Halifax in the Foundation Year Program. They built on their
undergraduate study of philosophy and contemporary studies by completing a Master of Arts in
Philosophy at Toronto Metropolitan University. After completing their MA, they began a PhD in
Social and Political Thought at York with the intention of continuing their research on political
theology and hip-hop as forming a uniquely apt constellation for working through the continually
renewed relevance of Walter Benjamin’s thought in dialogue with the Black radical tradition and
political theology (especially Jewish and Christian messianism). From the standpoint of their
interdisciplinary background in continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory and
religious thought, they confront questions at the intersection of art, politics, and religion paying
special attention to the political uses and abuses of history, memory and trauma as their
evocation undermines and/or reinforces state sovereignty with a focus on how hip-hop develops
what Benjamin calls the “tradition of the oppressed”.

Brendan John Brown is a PhD student at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at
the University of Western Ontario. They primarily are engaged in and write on the relationship
between metaphysics and anarchy with influences from the Black Radical Tradition. Their
current work stresses the influence of Jacques Derrida on Sylvia Wynter as she investigates the
racial fault lines of Western metaphysics.

Joseph Palmeri is a PhD student in Theory & Criticism at Western University. He holds a
Master’s degree in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory from McMaster University, and an
undergraduate degree in English and Cultural Studies. His most recent presentation at the
LABRC conference on Shakespeare was based on a previous, undergraduate publication titled:
Multiplicity and Macbeth. Currently, he is building upon the work done in his masters, which
seeks to locate intersections between theory and theology.

Lingyu Jing is a second-year PhD student in political science at McMaster University. He holds
a MA degree in political science with Cultural, Social and Political Thought specialization
(CSPT) from the University of Victoria. He also holds an MA degree in political from the
University of York and a management bachelor’s degree from Dalian Maritime University. He
specializes in political theory and international relations with an interdisciplinary perspective of
religious studies. His research interest covers state sovereignty, international law, critical security
studies, Jeudo-Christian political theology, monotheism, apocalypticism and eschatology,
sacrifice and the political meaning of blood, the aesthetics of horror, the political thought of Carl
Schmitt, Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben. His doctoral project explores the mystical
construction of state personhood from the perspective of sacrificial rituals and theological
discourses. It examines the creation of the state’s body politic from the mimesis of Christ’s
mystical body and political transubstantiation of the flesh of martyrs.

André Babyn holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Toronto and currently
teaches at McGill University. His dissertation focuses on the intersection between love, lack,
religious mysticism, medieval literature, and translation in the work of Marguerite Porete. His
short stories and poetry have been published in Poetry, Maisonneuve, Grain, and The Fanzine,
and his first novel, Evie of the Deepthorn, was called “a powerful and promising debut” by Quill
and Quire.

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Olivier Dorais is currently a doctoral student in philosophy at the Université de Montréal,
working on a thesis co-supervised by Iain Macdonald (Université de Montréal) and Emmanuel
Alloa (Université de Fribourg, Switzerland) on Walter Benjamin's aesthetics and media
philosophy from a critical anthropological perspective. Their research focuses more generally on
critical theory, aesthetics, philosophy of culture and media theory. More specifically, they are
interested in the reciprocal contribution of critical theory (especially in the Marxian tradition)
and aesthetics. They are the author of a monograph on the form of philosophy in Benjamin: Un
regard sobre. Révélation et histoire chez Walter Benjamin, published in 2023 by the Presses de
l'Université de Montréal. – They completed their undergraduate and master's degrees in
philosophy and German studies at the Université de Montréal and the Centre canadien d’études
allemandes et européennes (CCÉAE). Finally, from 2020 to 2023, they were a member of the
Montreal-based artists' collective la lumière collective, where they became familiar with
contemporary experimental film practice.

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