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A bold rereading of Mikhail Bakhtin’s groundbreaking theories
 
A century after Mikhail Bakhtin first began formulating his now-canonical reflections on freedom and literary representation, we often seem as confused as ever about the relationship between narrative form and what it means to live ethically. Focusing on the throughline of adventure in Bakhtin’s thought, we find a peculiar, yet no less ethically urgent challenge: not to imagine the literary hero as if they were a real person but to recognize how we are always imagining real people as if they were literary characters. This is a provocation with far-reaching consequences for how we understand ourselves, each other, and our situatedness in space and time.
 
In Bakhtin’s Adventure: An Essay on Life without Meaning, Benjamin Paloff argues that the major aesthetic, ethical, and sociological threads of Bakhtin’s thought intersect in his concept of adventure. Reading across a wide variety of media, from classic literature to contemporary film, Paloff demonstrates how, for Bakhtin and his interlocutors, the test of human freedom is whether narrative means nothing beyond its own adventure. Reframed in this light, Bakhtin’s most influential ideas (eventness, chronotope, heteroglossia, polyphony, carnival) form a cohesive model for how to maintain ethical relations in a world where we can never really know each other the way we know ourselves.

Walter Benjamin reimagined through the forgotten power of radio

Philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) has long been recognized for his influence on the fields of literature, film, media studies, critical legal theory, and philosophy. Bringing fresh attention to an often-overlooked aspect of his oeuvre, Bridging Benjamin examines the dozens of radio broadcasts he produced, primarily for children, between 1927 and 1933. Delivered after the academic rejection of his notoriously complex Trauerspiel, these shows became a testing ground for Benjamin’s developing ideas and experimental pedagogy. Though they were cast off as inconsequential by both Benjamin and his contemporaries, Dominic Smith reveals the broadcasts to be a fruitful site for a novel, “derailed” interpretation of Benjamin’s larger body of work.

Reading Benjamin’s radio production as a dynamic site of philosophical experimentation, Smith uses it as a channel and amplifier for three integral but underappreciated aspects of Benjamin’s work: his philosophies of technology, place, and education. Showing how he used broadcast media to explore the increasing “virtualization” of place in networked society, Bridging Benjamin encourages an embrace of Benjamin in contrast to his divisive historical counterparts in the philosophy of technology, such as Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt.

Interpreting Benjamin’s broadcasts as a form of peripatetic thinking—deeply embedded in place, yet mobile and mediated—Bridging Benjamin offers a compelling model for reassessing attachments to the technologies and practices shaping our contemporary worlds.

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