Live Rats or The Art of Poverty
This is a version of an invited guest lecture given to first year Fine Art students at the Edinburgh College of Art.
Papers and Talks
Remarks Concerning Walter Benjamin’s Stockings
An introduction to a seminar session on ‘The Stocking’, ‘Hiding Places’, ‘The Sewing Box’, and ‘Colours’, from Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood Around 1900 at a conference on Matter/Materie in Benjamin’s philosophy, held at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of London,…
Adorno’s Essay on Ideology: A Commentary in Three Parts
An extended commentary on Adorno’s ‘Contribution to the Theory of Ideology’ published in Volume 4 of Selva: A Journal of the History of Art – also accessible on the Selva website
Towards Pure Machines: A Benjaminian Footnote
Published in Refuse to Collaborate, for an exhibition by Sophie Carapetian, February 2022, Stadtgalerie Bern
Notes to Sean Bonney (1969-2019)
Written December 2019, soon after Sean’s death. A part of this essay was published in 2022 in Slovenian in the journal Maska, alongside Sean’s Lamentations.
Walter Benjamin with Crosses and Without: Marginalia on the Symbol
Talk at seminar on Intensität in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy, April 2018, at Forschungsinstitut für Philosophie, Hannover, Germany. I. I want to ask three short but complicated questions. But more than this I want to address them not merely with regard to…
Conversations with Flowers and Landscapes: A Reader
A reader for a failed reading group, including new translations of some of Adorno’s letters with Paul Celan.
Six Notes on Reading ‘The Destructive Character’ in Palestine
Conference paper at Walter Benjamin in Palestine: On the Place and Non-Place of Radical Thought, December 2015, International Art Academy of Palestine and Birzeit University.
Adorno’s Dream: Interpretation After Auschwitz
Lecture at Marxism in Culture Seminar, November 2015, University of London.
Angelic Satire: Marx on Movement and Benjamin on Standstill
Paper given at Historical Materialism Conference, November 2015, University of London.
Catastrophe
A short piece published in Bad Feelings, ed. Arts Against Cuts, Book Works, 2015.
Thinking Need in California: The 1942 Seminars of the Frankfurt School and the Brecht Circle (Quotations in English)
Paper given at ‘Um Abschied geht es ja nun… Exil und Kein Ende’ July 2014, at Department of Communication and Cultural Studies, Freie Universität, Berlin.
Thinking Need in California: The 1942 Seminars of the Frankfurt School and the Brecht Circle (Quotations in German)
Paper given at ‘Um Abschied geht es ja nun… Exil und Kein Ende’ July 2014, at Department of Communication and Cultural Studies, Freie Universität, Berlin.
The Interior without Children: Adorno and the Kindertotenlieder
Paper given at Historical Materialism Conference, November 2013, University of London
On the Physiognomy of Judges and Militant Poetics
Paper given at Militant Poetics and Poetry Conference, May 2013, Birkbeck College, University of London
Memories of origination: Survival, Prison, and the Kant-Freud Complex in Adorno’s Aesthetic of Natural Beauty
Conference paper delivered at Historical Materialism Conference, November 2012, University of London
History in Darkness: Seven Fragments on Siegfried Kracauer’s The Salaried Masses
Talk given at Angish Language symposium, at ZKU Berlin. Later published in the collection Anguish Language, eds. Cunningham, Iles, Mattar, and Vishmidt, (Berlin: Archive Kabinett, 2015), pp. 173-202.
Alarm Clocks, Awakening, And Capitalist Time
Paper presented at the London Conference of Critical Thought, June 2011, Birkbeck College, University of London