Walter Benjamin “allowed me to survive Heidegger.”

One of his key ideas is “anomalous monism.”

He spurned all avant-gardes but his own.

Media, culture, and ideology are the battleground of the soul.

The first to see laughter as a weapon of the oppressed.

“An indescribable gamut of colors!” said the first cosmonaut.

Heroically engaged with his own alienation.

How to act right and focus in the face of meaning­lessness.

“Yale Scholar Wrote for Pro-Nazi Newspaper”

He urged an endless, playful agonistics of intellectual engagement.

He analyzed the motives of every act, including the act of analysis.

He wrote “The Philosophy of Breaking Through”

Theorizing in a style that must be described as cheerful despair.

He tracked the “lines of flight” that ideas can take up against power.

His slogan could be: To the appearances themselves!

Embod­ied conscious­ness and being-in-the-world…

GUY DEBORD (1931-94) was a founder and key intellectual figure in the…

Like Camus and Derrida, LOUIS ALTHUSSER (1918-90) came from Algeria. Unlike them,…

A self-described “physicist turned historian for philosophical purposes,” THOMAS KUHN (1922-96) was…