Walter Benjamin's "Fate and Character": Introduction

As editors, we decided to not fight the obscurity of "Fate and Character" but work with it, in its spirit. Thus, rather than solicit standard research essays, we invited a wide range of scholars from across the humanities to write short, essayistic pieces. The goal was to produce theory in a different register—free-wheeling, consciously essayistic, eagerly associative, and, yes, "digressive"—in which a cast of concepts and characters serves to guide the issue's organization, in the hope to deliver a set of readings that are at once legible, digestible, and surprising in their different styles and approaches.