On the conservatism of post-Jungian criticism: competing concepts of the symbol in Freud, Jung and Walter Benjamin

The renewed interest in analytical psychology by academics working in the humanities has led to the emergence of a post-Jungian field of cultural criticism, at the theoretical core of which stands Jung's theory of symbolism. This article examines the centrality of symbolism to both Freud and Jung's psychology and explains how the differing concepts of the symbol lead to their divergent theories of interpretation in psychology and art criticism. Acknowledging the advantages of Jung's more expansive account of the symbol, it argues that Walter Benjamin's critical engagement with Jung nonetheless provides a useful correction to the problematic conservatism inherent to his concept of the symbol and its contemporary application.

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.

Towards a Critique of Educative Violence: Walter Benjamin and ‘Second Education’

Although modern systems of mass education are typically defined in their opposition to violence, it has been argued that it is only through an insistent and critical focus upon violence that radical thought can be sustained. This article seeks to take up this challenge in relation to Walter Benjamin’s lesser-known writings on education. Benjamin retained throughout his life a deep suspicion about academic institutions and about the pedagogic, social and economic violence implicated in the idea of cultural transmission. He nonetheless remained committed to the possibility of another kind of revolutionary potential inherent to true education and, when he comes to speak of this in his Critique of Violence, it is remarkable that he describes it as manifesting an educative violence. This article argues that Benjamin’s philosophy works toward a critique of educative violence that results in a distinction between a ‘first’ and ‘second’ kind of education and asks whether destruction might have a positive role to play within pedagogical theories in contrast to current valorisations of creativity and productivity.