Benjamin and Fichte: on immediacy and mediacy concerning power, violence, law and justice

In this talk I want to examine some points of contact (of similarity, divergence, and contradiction) between J. G. Fichte and W. Benjamin regarding the systematic place that they give to immediacy and mediacy in theoretical and political sense and to the concepts of power/violence, justice, and law. I will focus on Benjamin’s well-known chapter on Fichte’s reflection and positing in his The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism and his Toward the critique of violence/power and on Fichte’s Foundation of Natural Law and his writings on the doctrine of science between 1794 and 1799.

Emiliano Acosta (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)