Deutsches Haus at NYU presents a discussion between David Kishik and Eric Jarosinski on Kishik's book The Manhattan Project: A Theory of a City.

Walter Benjamin did not commit suicide in 1940. Escaping the Nazis, he managed to sail to New York, where he lived a long and solitary life until his death in 1987. During his anonymous, posthumous existence, while he was haunting and haunted by his new city, Benjamin composed a sequel to his Arcades Project. Just as his incomplete masterpiece revolved around Paris, capital of the nineteenth century, his spectral text was dedicated to New York, capital of the twentieth. This, at least, is the premise of The Manhattan Project: A Theory of a City (Stanford University Press, 2015). A sui generis work of experimental scholarship or fictional philosophy, it is a study of a manuscript that was never written. Part sprawling literary montage, part fragmentary theory of modernity, part implosive manifesto on the urban revolution, The Manhattan Project paints the city as a landscape built of sheer life, set somewhere in between heaven and hell, the private and the public, the real and the ideal.

David Kishik is assistant professor of philosophy at Emerson College. His previous books are Wittgenstein's Form of Life (Continuum, 2008, paperback 2012) and The Power of Life: Agamben and the Coming Politics (Stanford University Press, 2011). He is also the co-translator of Agamben's What Is an Apparatus? (Stanford University Press, 2009) and Nudities (Stanford University Press, 2010). These days he is trying to write a commentary on the book of Genesis. 

Eric Jarosinski is a #FailedIntellectual based in New York. A former professor of modern German literature, culture, and critical theory, he recently left academia to devote himself to his post as founding editor of Nein.Quarterly, the Internet's leading compendium of utopian negation. On Twitter @NeinQuarterly has gained a highly diverse global audience, currently numbering over 100,000 readers in more than 125 countries. Nein. Quarterly also appears in a four-line print format, with its trademark scowl gracing the opinion page of Die Zeit in Germany and the NRC Handelsblad in the Netherlands. His first book, Nein. A Manifesto., has been published this fall 2015 in the U.S. (Grove Atlantic), Canada (House of Anansi), Germany (S. Fischer), Italy (Marsilio), the Netherlands (Lebowski), Spain (Anagrama), Finland (Gummerus), the UK, and Australia (Text).

The Manhattan Project: A Theory of a City will be available for purchase after the event.

Events at Deutsches Haus are free of charge. If you would like to attend this event, please send us an email to deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu. Space at Deutsches Haus is limited, please arrive ten minutes prior to the event. 

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