Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Philosophy and the Occult, paperback

The book explores the aesthetic and political implications of the relationship between magic and mimesis in the work of those early twentieth-century writers, artists and filmmakers who were most self-consciously experimental, including James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein.

Walter Benjamin and the Inhumanities: Towards a Pedagogical Anti-Nietzscheanism

The following discussion is intended as a critical intervention into recent debates about the “crisis of the humanities,” reading the symptomaticity of crisis in the medical sense of a turning point. It does so from the perspective of the work of Walter Benjamin, whose own transdisciplinary practice of thought has been characterized as a “philosophy directed against philosophy” and a “philosophizing beyond philosophy,” and stands as a model for the kind of intellectual and para-academic activity evoked here. Historically re-situating Benjamin’s famous allegory of the Angel of History from the twentieth-century context of the “crisis of culture” to the contemporary “crisis of education,” it attempts to reconstruct a dialectical understanding of pedagogization within Benjamin’s work, which is used to sketch out the contours of a critically reimagined pedagogy of the Inhumanities.

Magna Charta and Parliament 1900-1914

In 1915 plans for the celebration of the 700th anniversary of Magna Carta had to be dropped following the outbreak of the First World War. Such celebrations marked a sense of Magna Carta as an event in the history of these islands. The usage of the term Magna Carta in Parliament in the run-up to the First World War, however, shows that its granting was not seen only as a significant historical event to be memorialised. During the period from 1900, opening with war in South Africa and ending in 1914 with war throughout Europe, the Great Charter was mentioned 85 times in Parliament. As a period marked by a lengthy constitutional crisis in 1909-11 and beset with problems in Ireland and the Empire, this seems like a good case study period to choose. This short paper attempts to analyse how and why it was invoked in Parliament in the years and what these various usages tell us about how Magna Carta was understood at the time.