Faculty

Ben Kafka

Associate Professor, Departments of Media, Culture, and Communication; History

Ben Kafka


Email:
Office Hours: On sabbatical through 2013

 

Ben Kafka is an associate professor of media theory and history at NYU and a candidate psychoanalyst at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR), a component society of the International Psychoanalytical Association. His first book, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Zone Books, 2012) investigates the historical, material, and unconscious sources of our troubles with bureaucracy. He is currently working on a second book, a history of graphology from the early seventeenth century to the present, with the support of an Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. 

Kafka has been a member of the Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts; the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study; the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM) at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar; and, since 2007, the New York Institute for the Humanities, where he currently serves as Chair of the Executive Committee. He also serves on the board of the Feminist Theory Archives at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University. He is an editor of History of the Present and an editorial advisor to Grey Room.

He received his B.A. in History and Modern Culture and Media from Brown and his Ph.D. in History from Stanford. 


Reviews of The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Zone Books, 2012)

 Demon of Writing

Awards

  • Charles A. Ryskamp Fellow, American Council of Learned Societies (2012)
  • Senior Fellow, Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM Weimar) (2012)
  • Member, School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study (2009-10)
  • Member, New York Institute for the Humanities (2007-present)
  • Cotsen-Perkins Fellow, Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts (2004-07)
  • Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities (2003-04)
  • Fulbright, Paris (2001-02)
  • International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Social Science Research Council (2001-02)

Selected Publications

  • The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Zone Books, Fall 2012) (link)
  • "Medium/Media" in Emily Apter, Barbara Cassin, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood, eds., Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton University Press, forthcoming) (link)
  • "The Administration of Things: A Genealogy," West 86th (May 2012) (link)
  • "From the Desk of Roland Barthes: Putting Mater (and Pater ) Back in Materialism," West 86th: Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 18:2 (Fall-Winter 2011) (link)
  • "Only a Layman: Psychoanalysis and History," DIVISION/Review: A Quarterly Psychoanalytic Forum vol. 1 no. 2 (summer 2011) (link)
  • "No, Oedipus Does Not Exist" (with Jamieson Webster), Cabinet #42 (summer 2011) (view)
  • "The Radical Cure," Psychoanalytic Dialogues 21:3 (2011) (view)
  • "Paperwork Explosion," West 86th (May 2011) (link)
  • "Pushing Paper: A Reconsideration of Melville and Flaubert," Lapham's Quarterly vol. IV no. 2 (spring 2011). French. Polish. (link)
  • Review of Craig Robertson, The Passport in America: The History of a Document (Oxford University Press), Bookforum (Sept/Oct/Nov 2010)
  • "Red Tape Measures," In Media Res (June 2010) (link)
  • "Paperwork: The State of the Discipline," Book History #12 (2009) (link)
  • Review of Vincent Denis, Une histoire de l'indentité: France, 1715-1815 (Ed. Champ Vallon), The Journal of Modern History 81:4 (December 2009)
  • Review of Franz Kafka, The Office Writings (Princeton University Press), Bookforum (April/May 2009)
  • "Power Hungry," Cabinet #32 (winter 2008-09) (view)
  • "Hunting the Plumed Mammal: The History of 'Bureaucracy' in France, 1750-1850," in Becker and Von Krosigk, eds., Figures of Authority: Contributions Towards a Cultural History of Governance (Peter Lang, 2008)
  • "The Demon of Writing: Paperwork, Public Safety, and the Reign of Terror," Representations #98 (spring 2007) (link)
  • "Sabotaging the Committee of Public Safety," Cabinet #22 (summer 2006).
    [Anthologized in Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine (Cabinet Books, 2012)]     (link)

Selected Presentations

Courses

  • History of Communication (udg)
  • Print Media and Modernity (grad) / Print: History and Form (udg)
  • Media Archaeology (grad) / Dead Media Research Studio (udg)
  • Psychoanalysis: Desire and Culture (udg)
  • Marxism and Culture (udg)
  • Special Topics in Critical Theory: Hermeneutics of Suspicion (grad)
  • Special Topics in Critical Theory: Fetishism (grad)
  • Psychic Life of Media (grad)
  • Doctoral Core Seminar: Theory 1 (grad)

Other Research Interests

Freudo-Marxism and the search for a "grand unified theory of unhappiness"; the role of schisms, interpersonal conflict, fallings-out, and grudges in the formation of modern thought (socialism, feminism, psychoanalysis...); forms of magical thinking in late capitalism; the preconscious in psychoanalytic theory and technique; Marie Bonaparte; Robert Lindner.