Fellow in Research Area 3: "Future Perfect"

June – December 2022

Misadventures of Difference

Benjamin Brewer’s project, Misadventures of Difference, investigates how debates about temporality and relationality undergird those about national identity, violence and political community in post-Kantian German philosophy. The cornerstone of this project is a book manuscript (also titled Misadventures of Difference) which includes chapters on the link between historical time and what Jacques Derrida called "national humanism" in J. G. Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation; on Oskar Becker’s largely forgotten debate with Heidegger about the phenomenology of time and the essence of race; and on Jean Améry and Hannah Arendt’s conflicting receptions of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth in the 1960s. As a companion to the book manuscript, Benjamin is also translating Becker’s essays on what he called "paraontology" — his attempt to provide an extreme right-wing phenomenology of race. Essays and translations related to this project have already appeared or are forthcoming in Oxford Literary Review, Symposium and Critical Philosophy of Race.  

Benjamin Brewer obtained his Ph.D. in philosophy with a minor in comparative literature at Emory University in May 2022 with a dissertation titled Memory Remains: Poetry, Technology, and the Non-Closure of the Past in Heidegger and Benjamin. He holds an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Oregon, and a B.A. (summa cum laude) in philosophy with a minor in literature from Pacific University Oregon. His research focuses on the intersection of ontology, aesthetics and politics in 19th and 20th century European philosophy and literature.