One of America's foremost literary and media critics gives a wide-ranging disquisition that touches on subjects in aesthetic criticism, critical theory and contemporary politics--including a discussion of his landmark study of Walter Benjamin. A student of Paul de Man and Theodor Adorno, Weber is the Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University and co-director of the Northwestern's Paris Program in Critical Theory. He has published works on Balzac, Lacan and Freud; co-translated Adorno's Prisms and Jacques Derrida's Limited Inc.; and served as dramaturge for theater and opera productions in Germany, leading to a comprehensive study entitled Theatricality as Medium. His most recent publications engage the politics of "The War on Terror" in Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking and the complex, multifaceted Benjaminian oeuvre in Benjamin's-abilities--issued by Harvard University Press last year. Weber's talk is introduced by Sande Cohen and James Wiltgen.