Walter Benjamins Tiere. Figurationen des Animalischen

Animals appear in Walter Benjamin’s works in a remarkable variety of forms. They are depicted as childhood playmates, hybrid boundary figures, media actors, allegories of history, and as counterimages to technological rationalization. They run through his texts, from his studies in children’s literature and his radio work to Berlin Childhood around 1900, One-Way Street, and the Origin of German Tragic Drama. Even so, Benjamin's engagement with the animalesque has received little systematic study thus far.

This workshop examines animal figures in Benjamin as epistemological and poetological figures of thought. It focuses on animals as mediators of playful modes of knowing, as agents of resistant perception, and as figures of transformation, mimicry, and creatureliness.

The workshop is funded by the Walter Benjamin Award for Young Researchers and supported by the Walter Benjamin Archiv (Berlin), the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (Berlin), and the International Walter Benjamin Society.

Fig. above: Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Walter Benjamin Archiv, WBA 1498; Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur.