Ilit Ferber is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Tel-Aviv University. She is the author of Philosophy and Melancholy: Benjamin’s Early Writings on Theater and Language (Stanford University Press, 2013) and of Language Pangs: On Pain and the Origin of Language (Oxford University Press, 2019). She has co-edited four books on moods, lament and violence (in English, Hebrew and Spanish) and published widely on Benjamin, Freud, Leibniz, Heidegger, Scholem, Herder, Améry and others. (Photo credit: Yanai Yechiel)