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This essay follows the productive discussion of Giorgio Agamben's "The Open: Man and Animal" that took place as part of the 'Openness in Medieval Culture' conference at the ICI Berlin. The essay attempts to develop a speculative notion of openness within Agamben's work, in particular by connecting the question of openness to the question of the promise: the promise of the resolution of the question of man and animal ("The Open"); the promise of the Franciscans' vow, or 'sacramentum' ("The Highest Poverty"); and the promise of language ("The Sacrament of Language").
Dante's "Inferno" and Walter Benjamin's cities : considerations of place, experience, and media
(2011)
When Walter Benjamin wrote his main texts, the theme of the city as hell was extremely popular. Some of his German contemporaries, such as Brecht or Döblin, also used it. Benjamin was aware of these examples, as well as of examples outside Germany, including Joyce's "Ulysses" and Baudelaire's "poetry". And he was - at least in some way - familiar with Dante's "Inferno" and used it, and in particular Dante's conception of hell, for his own purposes. Benjamin's appropriation of the topos of the Inferno has been seen as a critique of capitalism and as a general critique of modernism by means of allegory. In the following analysis, Angela Merte-Rankin takes a slightly different approach and, despite Benjamin's status as an expert on allegory, considers hell in its literal sense as a place and examines the issues of implacement that might follow from this standpoint.