CFP: «Filosofia», No. 72, 2027: Intellect in General. Mass, Metropolis, and Utopia from Kracauer and Benjamin
Submission deadline: October 15, 2026
Details
Call for Papers:
Intellect in General. Mass, Metropolis, and Utopia from Kracauer and Benjamin
Guest Editors: Alessandro Carrieri and Massimo Palma
Taking the constellation of Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin as its point of departure, this issue explores a range of questions and critical practices central to twentieth-century philosophical, aesthetic, and social thought. The intellectual proximity between the two authors—marked by affinities, divergences, reciprocal readings, resonances, and disjunctions—will be approached neither solely as an object of historical and philological reconstruction nor as the basis for a unified theoretical lineage. Rather, it will serve as a field of problems from which to rethink the relations between philosophy and mass culture, criticism and public writing, intellectual labour and politicisation, narrative forms and social configurations, law and justice, history and utopia.
At different moments and from perspectives that only partly overlap, Kracauer and Benjamin turned to objects, forms, and modes of writing often relegated to the margins of academic inquiry: cinema, the feuilleton, detective fiction, cultural journalism, white-collar workers, urban spaces, travel, everyday architecture, collective images, and apparently minor phenomena of modern experience. These materials are neither mere examples nor peripheral counterparts to their major theoretical works. They show instead how criticism can take shape through short forms, non-canonical objects, intermediate social figures, and decentred points of observation.
The discussion will extend beyond Kracauer and Benjamin to include figures such as Adorno, Sohn-Rethel, Bloch, Mannheim, Simmel, Lukács, Brecht, and other thinkers who examined modernity through its cultural, social, and political structures. The focus of the issue will therefore not be exclusively historical. One of its aims is to ask whether these methods of interpretation, forms of writing, and theoretical objects still retain their critical force, and whether they can help us understand contemporary transformations in labour, images, mass culture, the public sphere, law, and political imagination.
Contributions may address the following thematic areas:
• Mass and Cinema
Cinema was one of the primary sites through which Kracauer and Benjamin examined modernity. It allowed them to bring technology, spectatorship, mass culture, and new forms of collective visibility into a shared theoretical framework. Contributions may approach cinema as an aesthetic object, a social form, a language of modernity, or a field of interaction among criticism, audiences, and cultural institutions. Particular attention may be devoted to the relationship between technical images and mass society, to changes in the status of the image, and to the different ways in which cinema emerged as a theoretical problem in the work of Kracauer and Benjamin and in the debates of their time.
• Salaried Employees, Intellectuals, and Critical Labour
The study of the salaried middle classes and of white-collar forms of intellectual labour offers a particularly productive perspective on the social transformations of the twentieth century. The Kafkaesque figure of the employee, the ambiguous position of the intellectual, their economic and symbolic dependence, their politicisation, and their relationship with the public sphere all raise questions about the connections among knowledge, class, institutions, and ideological and literary production. Contributions may begin with Kracauer and Benjamin, but may also engage with the broader debate on the sociology of intellectuals, including Mannheim, in order to assess the persistence of these issues in contemporary forms of cognitive and cultural labour under accelerated capitalism.
• Journalism, the Feuilleton, and Short Forms
A substantial part of Kracauer’s and Benjamin’s work was produced outside traditional academic genres. Reviews, feuilletons, short essays, urban chronicles, journalistic interventions, and occasional writings were not merely minor or preparatory texts, but distinct forms of thought. Through them, philosophy entered into contact with historical contingency, public debate, the circulation of texts, and the everyday experience of modernity. Contributions may examine the theoretical function of these forms, their historical relationship with the cultural market and with economic or party-political forms of patronage, and their ability to generate critical knowledge from unstable, ephemeral, or non-canonical objects.
• Detective Fiction, Law, and Justice
Detective fiction offers a privileged perspective on modern forms of investigation, evidence, and fact-finding. As Fredric Jameson has also shown in more recent work, the figure of the detective, the crime scene, the rational reconstruction of clues, and the legal order underlying the narrative provide a framework for examining the relationship between truth, law, and justice. Starting from Kracauer’s theory of detective fiction, Benjamin’s sustained interest in the genre during his work on the Paris Arcades, and both authors’ engagement with the question of legal violence, contributions may consider detective fiction as a narrative form in which modernity stages both its demand for order and the aporias of the procedures designed to secure it.
• History and Utopia
The critique of progress and an attentiveness to unrealised possibilities run through the works of Kracauer and Benjamin in different ways, as they do through many other strands of twentieth-century thought. From this perspective, utopia cannot be reduced to the construction of a model of the future. It may instead be understood through its relationship with memory, historical ruptures, and collective images of desire. Contributions may explore the connections between historical experience and utopian imagination, catastrophe and transformation, and the alienated forms of the present and possibilities that have not yet been exhausted. The contemporary relevance of these questions may also emerge through discussions of the current crises of futurity, political agency and planning, and historical transmission.
• The Southern Constellation
A specific thematic area will be devoted to the Neapolitan and Southern constellation that runs through the intellectual trajectories of Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno, Bloch, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Asja Lacis, and other figures associated with critical theory. Naples, Capri, Positano, and journeys through Italy more broadly may be approached as theoretical sites rather than merely biographical or picturesque settings. From this perspective, Southern Italy becomes a space of observation in which social, political, aesthetic, and anthropological categories are redefined: a field of experience in which the archaic and the modern, collective life and economic forms, religious structures and unconventional ethical practices enter into a particularly significant tension.
Preference will be given to contributions that combine historical and textual rigour, close attention to concrete objects, and theoretical inquiry. The call welcomes proposals on Kracauer, Benjamin, their relationship, other figures of the period, or specific problems consistent with the broader framework of the issue. Particular interest will be given to contributions showing how the methods and objects of twentieth-century criticism may still contribute to our understanding of the present.
Submission Guidelines
1. Proposal Submission
Abstracts of approximately 200 words, in either Italian or English, should be sent to:
Abstract submission deadline: October 15, 2026
Notification of acceptance: October 30, 2026
2. Article Submission
Accepted articles should be sent to:
Submissions may be written in Italian, English, French, or German.
Articles must not exceed 40,000 characters, including spaces, footnotes, and bibliography.
Each submission must include:
a) An anonymised .doc file prepared for blind peer review. PDF files and other formats will not be accepted. The article must be preceded by an abstract of approximately 150 words in English and five keywords in English;
b) A separate .doc file for editorial use, containing the author’s name, academic affiliation, where applicable, and an active email address.
Submissions that do not comply with the journal’s editorial guidelines will not be accepted. The guidelines are available at the following link:
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/filosofia/author
Article submission deadline: February 15, 2027
Blind peer-review process: February–April 2027. Authors will be informed of the outcome of the evaluation.
The editorial board reserves the right to reject submissions that do not meet basic standards of clarity and scholarly rigour.
For further information, please contact:
[email protected]