Walter Benjamin and the Culture of Revolt

Talk in the series “Philosophische Gespräche” at Helle Panke e.V. with AK Thompson, moderation: Falko Schmieder

For the past decade, AK Thompson has been demonstrating how Walter Benjamin’s ideas can be operationalized to further the aims of movements in struggle. Recently, this work was featured in his book Premonitions: Selected Essays on the Culture of Revolt. In this presentation, Thompson provides a critical summary of the secondary literature on Benjamin before demonstrating how Benjamin’s strategies of analysis and provocation might be applied in movement-based contexts.  

Lecture in English with simultaneous interpretation into German

Admission: 2 Euro

AK Thompson is a critical theorist, a movement-based scholar, and an award-winning educator. Currently based at College of the Holy Cross (Worcester, MA), he is the author and editor of numerous books including Sociology for Changing the World: Social Movements/Social Research (2006), Black Bloc, White Riot: Anti-Globalization and the Genealogy of Dissent (2010), Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle (2016), Spontaneous Combustion: The Eros Effect and Global Revolution (2017), and Premonitions: Selected Essays on the Culture of Revolt (2018).

Falko Schmieder is a cultural theorist and research associate in the project The 20th Century in Basic Concepts. A Dictionary of Historical Semantics in Germany.