Inheriting Walter Benjamin

Gerhard Richter examines, in the work of Walter Benjamin, one of the central problems of modernity: the question of how to receive an intellectual inheritance. Covering aspects of Benjamin's complex relationship to the legacies of such writers as Kant, Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger, and Derrida, ...

Gerhard Richter is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature and Chair of the German Studies Department at Brown University, USA. He is the author of five previous books in critical theory, including Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics (2011).