The Dialectical Screen

Exploring the meanings of media technologies through Walter Benjamin’s thought

Walter Benjamin’s prime years as a cultural critic coincided with the rise of televised broadcasting in Europe and North America, a unique period of rapid expansion in a new technological medium. So why would such a subtle and sensitive critic of media, known for his cultural criticism across genres, seem to have ignored or even missed the entire phenomenon of television? This book reveals how television, as a concept and a metaphor, in fact structures Benjamin’s philosophy.

Through a careful reading of Benjamin’s work across various media—literature, photography, cinema, radio, and television—Roland Végső reconstructs a powerful vision of media technologies as not merely tools of communication but as forces that shape how we imagine and construct the world as a conceptual totality. The Dialectical Screen provides a timely and provocative framework for understanding how media continue to shape our political, cultural, and existential horizons, recasting Benjamin’s understanding of historical materialism in fundamentally tele-visual terms as a theoretical orientation that makes visible the perishing of the world itself.