Alexander Kluge (1932–2026)

Abstract Alexander Kluge died on March 25 in Munich, where he had lived and worked for many years. Filmmaker, writer, philosopher, lawyer, interviewer, and artist, the polymathic Kluge was a major intellectual and creative presence in Germany for decades, but he is still not well known in the Anglophone world. October published a special issue on his work as long ago as 1988, and he wrote for these pages as recently as 2024 in a special issue on machine learning—just one more indication of his relentless curiosity, into his nineties, about new media and the critical concepts necessary to address them. October was headed to press when we learned of his death, so we asked two of his American friends to reflect on his life and work as speedily as possible: Ben Lerner, whose poetry inspired Kluge to write some of his sui generis prose pieces, which in turn inspired further poems by Lerner; and Michael W. Jennings, co-author of the definitive critical biography of Walter Benjamin, who is at work on a similar volume on Kluge. With the passing of Kluge just eleven days after the death of Jürgen Habermas, an era in critical thinking has come to a close, but this threshold is also an invitation to rediscover one of the most capacious minds of the past century, for whom critique and imagination always went hand in hand. ––Hal Foster, for the Editors