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With his powerful thought image of the constellation, Walter Benjamin provides a method for the core practices of the Humanities: reading, writing, and thinking. This collection of provocative essays demonstrates how thinking in constellations with Walter Benjamin leads us towards a new understanding of the critical task of the Humanities today: it goes beyond disciplinary boundaries and challenges assumptions of linearity, coherence, and progression inherent in our scholarly praxis. The volume brings some of the most articulate young voices in international Benjamin scholarship together, and takes an interdisciplinary approach, covering wide-ranging fields of knowledge - quantum physics, postcolonial studies, natural philosophy, psychoanalysis, film theory, literature, and the arts. Benjamin's texts are re-considered in light of thinkers and poets, such as Theodor W. Adorno, Sigmund Freud, Gottfried E. Leibniz, W. G. Sebald, Franz Kafka, or Carlos Martínez Rivas. The critical potential of constellations in Benjamin's work and beyond will be of the highest interest for researchers and students in all areas of the Humanities. Intro -- Table of Contents -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction -- I: The Starry Skies of Philosophy -- From Kant's Starry Skies to Kafka's Odradek -- The Name as the Navel -- II: A Firmament of Ideas -- Constellation and Expression in Leibniz and -- Constellation and Configuration -- III: Capitalism's Mourning Play and the Rags of History -- The History of Production and the Production of History -- The Poetics of The Rag Collector -- IV: Directing Constellations -- Distracted Images -- Surviving Civilization with Mickey Mouse and a Laugh -- V: Reading (in) Constellations -- The Gothic Third World -- "Ins Romantische zurück und ins Politische voran" -- Contributors.
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