Books by Julia Ng
https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=7129
Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely in... more https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=7129
Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory.
The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context.
With its challenging argument concerning violence, law, and justice—which addresses such topical matters as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of religion—Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its publication in Weimar Germany a century ago.
https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=30564
Two Studies of Friedrich Hölderlin shows how the poet ... more https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=30564
Two Studies of Friedrich Hölderlin shows how the poet enacts a radical theory of meaning that culminates in a unique and still groundbreaking concept of revolution, one that begins with a revolutionary understanding of language. The product of an intense engagement with both Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, the book presents Werner Hamacher's major attempts at developing a critical practice commensurate with the immensity of Hölderlin's late writings.
These essays offer an incisive and innovative combination of critical theory and deconstruction while also identifying where influential critics like Heidegger fail to do justice to the poet's astonishing radicality. Readers will not only come away with a new appreciation of Hölderlin's poetic and political-theoretical achievements but will also discover the motivating force behind Hamacher's own achievements as a literary scholar and political theorist.
An introduction by Julia Ng and an afterword by Peter Fenves provide further information about these studies and the academic and theoretical context in which they were composed.
Special Issues of Journals by Julia Ng
CR: The New Centennial Review, 2021
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.21.issue-1
Modern Language Notes, 2012
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Volume 127, Number 3, April 2012-03-11
Special Issue: Walter Benjamin, Gersho... more TABLE OF CONTENTS
Volume 127, Number 3, April 2012-03-11
Special Issue: Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, and the Marburg School
Editors: Julia Ng and Rochelle Tobias
Editorial Assistants: J. Brandon Pelcher and Nina Tolksdorff
Julia Ng and Rochelle Tobias, Introduction to the Special Issue
DOSSIER: SCHOLEM’S NOTES ON KANT AND COHEN
Julia Ng, Walter Benjamin’s and Gershom Scholem’s Reading Group Around Hermann Cohen’s Kants Theorie der Erfahrung in 1918: An Introduction
Gershom Scholem, Über Kant
Gershom Scholem, On Kant
Gershom Scholem, Gegen die metaphysische Erörterung des Raumes
Gershom Scholem, Against the Metaphysical Exposition of Space
ARTICLES
Werner Hamacher, Intensive Languages
Peter Fenves, Diverging Correspondences concerning the Problem of Identity: Russell-Wittgenstein and Benjamin-Scholem
Julia Ng, Kant’s Theory of Experience at the End of the War: Scholem and Benjamin Read Cohen
John H. Smith, The Infinitesimal as Theological Principle: Representing the Paradoxes of God and Nothing in Cohen, Rosenzweig, Scholem, and Barth
Paula L. Schwebel, Intensive Infinity: Walter Benjamin’s Reception of Leibniz and its Sources
Pierfrancesco Fiorato, „Zeitlos und dennoch nicht ohne historischen Belang“. Über die idealen Zusammenhänge der Geschichte bei dem jungen Benjamin und Hermann Cohen
Gérard Raulet, Eine geheime Verabredung. Über Walter Benjamins Umgang mit Theologie
Marc de Launay, Messianisme et philologie du langage
Rochelle Tobias, Irreconcilable: Ethics and Aesthetics for Hermann Cohen and Walter Benjamin
BOOK REVIEWS
Isabel Kranz, Raumgewordene Vergangenheit. Walter Benjamins Poetologie der Geschichte (Alexander Gelley)
Paul North, The Problem of Distraction (Bryan Klausmeyer)
Peter-André Alt, Ästhetik des Bösen (Jeffrey Champlin)
Bethany Wiggin, Novel Translations: The European Novel and the German Book, 1680-1730 (Malte Wessels)
CONTRIBUTORS
Articles and Book Chapters by Julia Ng
Theory, Culture & Society, 2023
Beginning with a discussion of adaptations of François Jullien's understanding of 'potential born... more Beginning with a discussion of adaptations of François Jullien's understanding of 'potential born of disposition' and 'silent transformation' in two recent analyses of capitalist contemporaneity (by Bennett and Dufourmantelle), this essay argues that as a philosophical tool, 'China' bears within it a rich and underanalysed genealogy that reframes critical theory's approach to nature and its objects in a new geopolitical context. The remainder of the essay then unpacks the intellectual history and textual philology of one earlier and pivotal moment of critical theory's entanglement with 'China': Walter Benjamin's transformation of 'non-action', or wu wei, into a complex for thinking through possibilities of what he might, with Jullien, call not-being in debt to Being.
Paragraph, 2022
Paragraph, Volume 45 Issue 3, Page 267-284, ISSN 0264-8334
CR: New Centennial Review, 2021
CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 21, Number 1, Spring 2021, pp. 11-35 (Article)
diacritics, 2021
Diacritics, Volume 49, Number 2, 2021, pp. 25-32 (Article)
What resources does philosophy have at its disposal for a critical analysis of the role of viole... more What resources does philosophy have at its disposal for a critical analysis of the role of violence in a war of all against all? Faced with this question, Benjamin discovers that legal positivism, which believes in the capacity to derive how law ought to be from the sheer concept of a “correct” law, is constitutively blind to the possibility that values may be misaligned with law, and that the basic structures of law and consensus might come after the fact of power. Drawing on the work of contemporaneous legal theorist Leonard Nelson, this article argues that Benjamin developed a potent critique of the dialectic of recognition at work in the legitimation of violence, making way instead for an analysis of what remains unrecognizable to the normative order: power, loitering as a “nonvalue” in the gap between values and legal ends.
ISBN 9788822904317
This chapter focuses on two enigmatic expressions that link together "strivin... more ISBN 9788822904317
This chapter focuses on two enigmatic expressions that link together "striving" and "passing" in a way that is apparently paradoxical but, in fact, demands new conceptions of freedom and action that are commensurate with the reality of change. Such a "nihilistic" notion of the "task" of "world politics," I argue, entails a radical sort of freedom—a freedom that, in mourning loss, alters the very category of causality and therefore saves the reality of change—and is indebted to Benjamin's long-standing engagement with the work on mathematical physics by the French epistemologist and historian of science, Émile Meyerson. My chapter is the first extended account of Benjamin's reception of Meyerson across all of his works published and unpublished.
Philosophy Today, 2017
Death is ironic; as the archi-semiotician and first historian, death fixes object and meaning in ... more Death is ironic; as the archi-semiotician and first historian, death fixes object and meaning in a semiotic complex, separates non-sensuous meaning from bare physical existence, but thereby exposes meaning to the capriciousness of interpretation and tradition. The pause, however, conserves that which does not happen in repose, yet does not interrupt history, and lets history emerge in a movement in which all determination of meaning is suspended. This essay is written in memory of Werner Hamacher, whose life in writing shaped language around its distance and delay from the fixity of sound and sense, which, as he argued, are the subliminal conditions to every communication, presentation, and form in general: formative limits that separate and conjoin that which is and the surplus of un-actuality and incompletion that accompanies each instant of our intentional lives.
Agamben’s Philosophical Lineage, 2017
This paper argues that the principle of continuity that underlies Benjamin’s understanding of wha... more This paper argues that the principle of continuity that underlies Benjamin’s understanding of what makes the reality of a thing thinkable, which in the Kantian context implies a process of “filling time” with an anticipatory structure oriented to the subject, is of a different order than that of infinitesimal calculus—and that a “discontinuity” constitutive of the continuity of experience and (merely) counterposed to the image of actuality as an infinite gradation of ultimately thetic acts cannot be the principle on which Benjamin bases the structure of becoming. Tracking the transformation of the process of “filling time” from its logical to its historical iteration, or from what Cohen called the “fundamental acts of time” in Logik der reinen Erkenntnis to Benjamin’s image of a language of language (qua language touching itself), the paper will suggest that for Benjamin, moving from 0 to 1 is anything but paradoxical, and instead relies on the possibility for a mathematical function to capture the nature of historical occurrence beyond paradoxes of language or phenomenality.
Rivista italiana di filosofia del linguaggio 8.2: special issue on Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, and Language, ed. Tamara Tagliacozzo, Dec 2014
This article draws on several crucial and unpublished manuscripts from the Scholem Archive in exp... more This article draws on several crucial and unpublished manuscripts from the Scholem Archive in exploration of Gershom Scholem's youthful statements on mathematics and its relation to extra-mathematical facts and, more broadly, to a concept of history that would prove to be consequential for Walter Benjamin's own thinking on "messianism" and a "futuristic politics." In context of critiquing the German Youth Movement's subsumption of active life to the nationalistic conditions of the "earth" during the First World War, Scholem turns to mathematics for a genuine and self-consistent theory of action. In the concept of actual infinity (in Cantor and Bolzano) he finds an explanation of how mathematics relates to "the physical" without reducing the former to an "image" of the latter, and without relying on the concept of geometric intuition. This explanation, insofar as it relies on the notion of actual infinity, provides Scholem with a conception of mathematics (and the history of mathematics) that reconciles freedom and necessity—remarks on which he outlines in his diaries and communicates to Benjamin in early March 1916.
The [Oxford] Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2nd edition (ed. by Michael Kelly), 2014
Modern Language Notes 127.3 (German Issue)., Apr 2012
Modern Language Notes 127.3, Apr 2012
Provides an exposition for the first time of Benjamin's and Scholem's study of contemporaneous ma... more Provides an exposition for the first time of Benjamin's and Scholem's study of contemporaneous mathematics and its relation to their theories of language, history, and messianism.
Uploads
Books by Julia Ng
Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory.
The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context.
With its challenging argument concerning violence, law, and justice—which addresses such topical matters as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of religion—Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its publication in Weimar Germany a century ago.
Two Studies of Friedrich Hölderlin shows how the poet enacts a radical theory of meaning that culminates in a unique and still groundbreaking concept of revolution, one that begins with a revolutionary understanding of language. The product of an intense engagement with both Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, the book presents Werner Hamacher's major attempts at developing a critical practice commensurate with the immensity of Hölderlin's late writings.
These essays offer an incisive and innovative combination of critical theory and deconstruction while also identifying where influential critics like Heidegger fail to do justice to the poet's astonishing radicality. Readers will not only come away with a new appreciation of Hölderlin's poetic and political-theoretical achievements but will also discover the motivating force behind Hamacher's own achievements as a literary scholar and political theorist.
An introduction by Julia Ng and an afterword by Peter Fenves provide further information about these studies and the academic and theoretical context in which they were composed.
Special Issues of Journals by Julia Ng
Volume 127, Number 3, April 2012-03-11
Special Issue: Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, and the Marburg School
Editors: Julia Ng and Rochelle Tobias
Editorial Assistants: J. Brandon Pelcher and Nina Tolksdorff
Julia Ng and Rochelle Tobias, Introduction to the Special Issue
DOSSIER: SCHOLEM’S NOTES ON KANT AND COHEN
Julia Ng, Walter Benjamin’s and Gershom Scholem’s Reading Group Around Hermann Cohen’s Kants Theorie der Erfahrung in 1918: An Introduction
Gershom Scholem, Über Kant
Gershom Scholem, On Kant
Gershom Scholem, Gegen die metaphysische Erörterung des Raumes
Gershom Scholem, Against the Metaphysical Exposition of Space
ARTICLES
Werner Hamacher, Intensive Languages
Peter Fenves, Diverging Correspondences concerning the Problem of Identity: Russell-Wittgenstein and Benjamin-Scholem
Julia Ng, Kant’s Theory of Experience at the End of the War: Scholem and Benjamin Read Cohen
John H. Smith, The Infinitesimal as Theological Principle: Representing the Paradoxes of God and Nothing in Cohen, Rosenzweig, Scholem, and Barth
Paula L. Schwebel, Intensive Infinity: Walter Benjamin’s Reception of Leibniz and its Sources
Pierfrancesco Fiorato, „Zeitlos und dennoch nicht ohne historischen Belang“. Über die idealen Zusammenhänge der Geschichte bei dem jungen Benjamin und Hermann Cohen
Gérard Raulet, Eine geheime Verabredung. Über Walter Benjamins Umgang mit Theologie
Marc de Launay, Messianisme et philologie du langage
Rochelle Tobias, Irreconcilable: Ethics and Aesthetics for Hermann Cohen and Walter Benjamin
BOOK REVIEWS
Isabel Kranz, Raumgewordene Vergangenheit. Walter Benjamins Poetologie der Geschichte (Alexander Gelley)
Paul North, The Problem of Distraction (Bryan Klausmeyer)
Peter-André Alt, Ästhetik des Bösen (Jeffrey Champlin)
Bethany Wiggin, Novel Translations: The European Novel and the German Book, 1680-1730 (Malte Wessels)
CONTRIBUTORS
Articles and Book Chapters by Julia Ng
This chapter focuses on two enigmatic expressions that link together "striving" and "passing" in a way that is apparently paradoxical but, in fact, demands new conceptions of freedom and action that are commensurate with the reality of change. Such a "nihilistic" notion of the "task" of "world politics," I argue, entails a radical sort of freedom—a freedom that, in mourning loss, alters the very category of causality and therefore saves the reality of change—and is indebted to Benjamin's long-standing engagement with the work on mathematical physics by the French epistemologist and historian of science, Émile Meyerson. My chapter is the first extended account of Benjamin's reception of Meyerson across all of his works published and unpublished.
Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory.
The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context.
With its challenging argument concerning violence, law, and justice—which addresses such topical matters as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of religion—Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its publication in Weimar Germany a century ago.
Two Studies of Friedrich Hölderlin shows how the poet enacts a radical theory of meaning that culminates in a unique and still groundbreaking concept of revolution, one that begins with a revolutionary understanding of language. The product of an intense engagement with both Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, the book presents Werner Hamacher's major attempts at developing a critical practice commensurate with the immensity of Hölderlin's late writings.
These essays offer an incisive and innovative combination of critical theory and deconstruction while also identifying where influential critics like Heidegger fail to do justice to the poet's astonishing radicality. Readers will not only come away with a new appreciation of Hölderlin's poetic and political-theoretical achievements but will also discover the motivating force behind Hamacher's own achievements as a literary scholar and political theorist.
An introduction by Julia Ng and an afterword by Peter Fenves provide further information about these studies and the academic and theoretical context in which they were composed.
Volume 127, Number 3, April 2012-03-11
Special Issue: Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, and the Marburg School
Editors: Julia Ng and Rochelle Tobias
Editorial Assistants: J. Brandon Pelcher and Nina Tolksdorff
Julia Ng and Rochelle Tobias, Introduction to the Special Issue
DOSSIER: SCHOLEM’S NOTES ON KANT AND COHEN
Julia Ng, Walter Benjamin’s and Gershom Scholem’s Reading Group Around Hermann Cohen’s Kants Theorie der Erfahrung in 1918: An Introduction
Gershom Scholem, Über Kant
Gershom Scholem, On Kant
Gershom Scholem, Gegen die metaphysische Erörterung des Raumes
Gershom Scholem, Against the Metaphysical Exposition of Space
ARTICLES
Werner Hamacher, Intensive Languages
Peter Fenves, Diverging Correspondences concerning the Problem of Identity: Russell-Wittgenstein and Benjamin-Scholem
Julia Ng, Kant’s Theory of Experience at the End of the War: Scholem and Benjamin Read Cohen
John H. Smith, The Infinitesimal as Theological Principle: Representing the Paradoxes of God and Nothing in Cohen, Rosenzweig, Scholem, and Barth
Paula L. Schwebel, Intensive Infinity: Walter Benjamin’s Reception of Leibniz and its Sources
Pierfrancesco Fiorato, „Zeitlos und dennoch nicht ohne historischen Belang“. Über die idealen Zusammenhänge der Geschichte bei dem jungen Benjamin und Hermann Cohen
Gérard Raulet, Eine geheime Verabredung. Über Walter Benjamins Umgang mit Theologie
Marc de Launay, Messianisme et philologie du langage
Rochelle Tobias, Irreconcilable: Ethics and Aesthetics for Hermann Cohen and Walter Benjamin
BOOK REVIEWS
Isabel Kranz, Raumgewordene Vergangenheit. Walter Benjamins Poetologie der Geschichte (Alexander Gelley)
Paul North, The Problem of Distraction (Bryan Klausmeyer)
Peter-André Alt, Ästhetik des Bösen (Jeffrey Champlin)
Bethany Wiggin, Novel Translations: The European Novel and the German Book, 1680-1730 (Malte Wessels)
CONTRIBUTORS
This chapter focuses on two enigmatic expressions that link together "striving" and "passing" in a way that is apparently paradoxical but, in fact, demands new conceptions of freedom and action that are commensurate with the reality of change. Such a "nihilistic" notion of the "task" of "world politics," I argue, entails a radical sort of freedom—a freedom that, in mourning loss, alters the very category of causality and therefore saves the reality of change—and is indebted to Benjamin's long-standing engagement with the work on mathematical physics by the French epistemologist and historian of science, Émile Meyerson. My chapter is the first extended account of Benjamin's reception of Meyerson across all of his works published and unpublished.
Translator's Abstract: The right to have rights was never a right to be had. Hannah Arendt's famous formulation of the most elementary right of all, the right to participate in the definition of rights, is not a description of a given right that belongs to one or the other form of law, but an indictment of a deficit in the construction of legality on the basis of the right to withdraw legal protection from members of a community, and therefore to refuse rights. The one and only human right thus turns out to be ungrounded in anything but the idea of its being had: a " property right " that traces back to the legal, philosophical and linguistic definitions of " one's own " since antiquity. Only the gift of the incalculable and of that which cannot possibly be legitimated can ground the autarchic self-relation of having: ungrounded in the rationally organized nature of any given, possessing the right to membership in a political community turns out to be permission to freely transfer this possession to another, without expectation of a return.
Translator's Keywords: Arendt, the right to have rights, ontological possessivism, Augustine, human rights
Tuesday, 10 March 2015
11:00 - 20:00
Richard Hoggart Building, Cinema (11:00-16:00)
Whitehead Building, Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre (16:00-20:00)
Goldsmiths, University of London
Confirmed participants:
Michael Dutton | Peter Fenves | Colin Gordon | Leigh Jenco | François Jullien | Scott Lash | Julia Ng | Daniel Weiss | Sam Whimster
This day-long workshop brings together for the first time experts from sociology, political theory, cultural theory, German literary studies, philosophy, and Jewish studies in discussion of Daoism in contemporary political economy.
Jointly sponsored by the Centre for Cultural Studies, the Department of Art, and the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, and Max Weber Studies.
Free and open to the public.
Goldsmiths: http://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=8440
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/390215034493321/?pnref=story
Podcasts: https://soundcloud.com/goldsmithsuol/sets/daoism-and-capitalism-a-workshop-10-march-2015
Contact: j.ng@gold.ac.uk
---
PROGRAMME*
Richard Hoggart Building, Cinema
11:00-12:15
The Theory of (Non-)Action: Benjamin, Rosenzweig
Daniel Weiss (Divinity, Cambridge): Daoism and Messianic Non-Action in Rosenzweig, Benjamin, and Classical Rabbinic Literature
Julia Ng (CCS, Goldsmiths): The Action of Non-Action: Benjamin, Daoism, and the Image
1:15-2:30
Max Weber and Daoism: Contemporary Debates
Colin Gordon: Lebensführung and véridiction: Weber, Foucault.
Sam Whimster (Max Weber Studies): Weber on Daoism
2:45-4:00
Becoming Marxist
Leigh Jenco (Political Theory, LSE): New Pasts for New Futures in the work of Li Dazhao: A Temporal Reading of Global Thought
Michael Dutton (Politics, Goldsmiths): The Question of the Political
***
Whitehead Building, Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre
4:30-6:00
Benjamin, Studying, China
Peter Fenves (German, Northwestern)
Moderator: Julia Ng
6:15-8:00
Wan wu, or Ten Thousand Things
Scott Lash (CCS, Goldsmiths): Ten Thousand Things: Multiplicity without Identity
Francois Jullien (Philosophy, Paris 7): De l’être au vivre
*Further changes to the programme will be posted to the Event page on the Goldsmiths calendar.
Paradigmi. Rivista di critica filosofica, XXXV (2017), no. 1,
monographic issue on "Critical idealism and messianism. From Hermann
Cohen to Walter Benjamin and beyond", ed. by Tamara Tagliacozzo, Reinier
Munk and Andrea Poma.
For more information, see:
https://www.francoangeli.it/riviste/sommario.asp?IDRivista=153.
Ich möchte Sie auf die folgende neue Veröffentlichung hinweisen:
Paradigmi. Rivista di critica filosofica, XXXV (2017), Nr. 1,
monographisches Heft zum Thema "Critical idealism and messianism. From
Hermann Cohen to Walter Benjamin and beyond", hrsg. von Tamara
Tagliacozzo, Reinier Munk und Andrea Poma.
Näheres finden Sie unter:
https://www.francoangeli.it/riviste/sommario.asp?IDRivista=153.