Morning News

“The newspaper reading of the early morning is a kind of realistic morning prayer,” Hegel writes in one of the notebooks kept during his years in Jena. This apparently marginal remark serves as a point of departure for the introductory chapter, which begins by developing an interpretation of the comparison presented here as an early condensed expression of Hegel’s mature philosophical position. As in the case of Kant, whose occasional remarks on newspaper reading are discussed in the remainder of the chapter, this motif, however, never makes its way into Hegel’s published philosophical work. Reflecting on the anxieties surrounding philosophy’s encounter with the novelty of the newspaper, the chapter outlines the problematic that will be central to the book, namely that of thinking time and history in the aftermath of German Idealism and the crisis of the modern philosophies of history.

Last Days

“The subject of this book,” Benjamin writes in the last exposé of his Arcades Project, “is an illusion expressed by Schopenhauer in the following formula: for the one who wants to seize the essence of history, it suffices to compare Herodotus and the morning newspaper.” In this chapter, I examine the place of journalism in Benjamin’s philosophical reflections on time and history through a close reading of his great essay on Karl Kraus, the Viennese writer who, for him, embodied journalism’s “most paradoxical form.” In his physiognomies of Kraus, Benjamin develops a critique of modern journalism as the expression of a wholly reified experience of history while also trying to retrieve the elements for a different kind of journalism: a writing that rids itself from a belief in progress and instead strives after an “actuality” (Aktualität) that is both close to and infinitely distant from the novelty of the newspapers.

Idolatry of Facts

“What is precisely most valuable about philosophy,” Nietzsche writes in one of his early notebooks, “is to constantly teach the counter-doctrine to everything journalistic (die Gegenlehre alles journalistischen zu lehren).” This hyperbolic remark serves as a starting point for this chapter, which examines the preoccupation with journalism that runs throughout Nietzsche’s work, ranging from the writings of the early 1870s, when he was working on the Untimely Meditations, to the period in which he wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where acerbic caricatures of newspapers readers and an “idolatry of the factual” occur alongside images of a different, archaic kind of news and rumors of an unknown future. As this chapter demonstrates, Nietzsche’s critical engagement with journalism is interwoven with key themes in his work, such as his reflections on language, rhetoric and reading, the death of God and the “last human being,” and untimeliness and the “eternal return.”

Afterword

The afterword situates the encounter between philosophy and journalism against the background of the ancient conflict between the philosopher and the sophist. Drawing on a remark by Kierkegaard, the afterword explores the thought that philosophy may be understood as a “radical journalism”: an attempt to take a question that lies at the root of journalism, its radix, and to follow this through in the most uncompromising manner. This thought is further elaborated through a commentary on a remark in the work of Derrida, who, in a commentary on his newspaper articles of the early 1990s, refers to challenge posed by “the day, precisely, the question or reflection of the day, the resonance of the word today.” This remark is taken as a point of departure to ask what it could mean to do justice to this word, “today,” and attend to an unforeseeable future imminent in the present.

Talking Machines

Journalism plays a decisive role in Kierkegaard’s early work, especially his largely neglected early writings. The “age” is presented in these writings in the form of a comedy whose main protagonists are reporters and newspaper readers, phrases and hearsay, and mistaken announcements and errant messages. Through a close reading of his newspaper articles of the 1830s, this chapter shows that this farce revolves around a certain “confusion” that, for Kierkegaard, finds an emblematic expression in the language of journalism. The scrutiny of the language of the newspapers undertaken here does not only form the basis of Kierkegaard’s early critique of philosophies of progress and development; as this chapter shows, it is also key to understanding his later attempts at developing a new theory of historical time—one that would crystallize in his concept of an “instant” (Øieblik) in which the flow of time is interrupted and exposed to an unforeseeable future.