Abstract

This chapter reconstructs Walter Benjamin's youthful physiognomy as part of the antebellum youth movement in Germany in order to delimit the role that Nietzsche played in this stage of Benjamin's career. The chapter identifies the dialogic nature of Benjamin's thought, the explosive nature of Nietzsche's, and the centrality of death in relating these thought to one another. It registers both thinkers as activists, who understood thought as intellectual activity designed to alter the world in fundamental ways.

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