University of Toronto
Walter Benjamin’s Monadology
My dissertation interprets Walter Benjamin’s corpus through the lens of a previously unexplored theme: namely, his appropriation of Leibniz’s monadic metaphysics. Against the grain of mainstream Benjamin scholarship, which tends to regard Benjamin’s work as fragmentary, I argue that Benjamin ought to be read as a systematic thinker, but that this requires us to re-think the meaning of systematicity. Benjamin was critical of the totalizing system concept, prominently associated with German idealism in the idea that everything that is real must be derivable from a single, immanent principle. My claim is that Leibniz’s monadic metaphysics provided Benjamin with an alternative conception of systematicity: one that is more suitable for understanding a pluralistic world. For Leibniz, the universal cannot be grasped within a single totality; rather, the universe is refracted by a plurality of perspectives, insofar as each individual being (or monad) expresses the world from its own point-of-view.
Paula Schwebel is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is co-editor of Walter Benjamin and Political Theology (Bloomsbury, 2024), and Lament in Jewish Thought: Philosophical, Theological and Literary Perspectives (De Gruyter, 2014). She is also co-translator of the Correspondence of Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem (Polity, 2021), and author of several articles and chapters on Walter Benjamin, modern Jewish thought, and political theology.
Selected Publications:
Walter Benjamin and Political Theology, Co-edited with Brendan Moran (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).
Theodor W. Adorno & Gershom Scholem, Correspondence: 1939-1969, ed. Asaf Angermann, trans. Paula Schwebel and Sebastian Truskolaski (Cambridge: Polity, 2021).
Lament in Jewish Thought: Philosophical, Theological and Literary Perspectives, Co-edited with Ilit Ferber (De Gruyter, 2014).