reface Madeleine Kasten This volume finds its origin in a conference titled Benjamin's Figures: Dialogues on the Vocation of the Humanities which took place at Leiden University, Netherlands, in August 2013. In the meantime, the theme that inspired the conference - the more or less permanent crisis in the humanities, reinforced by the economic crisis that hit the world in 2008 - has in no way lost its urgency. The opposite is true: far from having ended with the financial crisis, whose effects are still noticeable everywhere, the need for the humanities to defend their existence appears only to have increased. Two examples, one from the US and one from the Netherlands, will suffice to illustrate this point. In March 2017, US President Donald Trump presented his first federal budget plan, in which he proposed to end both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. It was the first time since the creation of the endowments in 1965 that a US president demanded their termination, and although the House later voted for a continuation of federal support at a slightly decreased level the proposal itself is a sign on the wall. A year before, Dutch conservative senator Pieter Duisenberg had already gained wide support for his view that academic study programmes in the Netherlands offering no job guarantees (so-called pretstudies literally 'fun studies', understood to include art, most of the humanities, and a considerable part of the social sciences) should be axed. Meanwhile Duisenberg has been appointed chair of the Co-operating Dutch Universities (VSNU), where he took up his duties on October 1, 2017. One of his stated aims is to create more incentives for universities to market their study programmes, and to link the allocation of budgets for tuition to performance agreements based on quantitative indicators between the government and 'internal stakeholders' (students and university staff) as well Madeleine Kasten xii as trade and industry. In addition, the allocation of research budgets is to be increasingly geared towards 'social relevance'. So the question remains: how can the humanities justify their existence in an academic environment facing ubiquitous cutbacks - an environment where, as Stanley Fish has argued, productivity, efficiency and consumer satisfaction appear to be the only relevant criteria anyway? Even if eloquent spokespersons such as Fish and Martha Nussbaum are perhaps overstating the case it appears that the humanities, more than ever, need to reconsider their specific role for our times. For on the one hand, the institutional call for more efficiency is seen to conflict with the humanities' insistence on academic freedom and interdisciplinary research as essential to the development of a critical perspective on the operations of culture as a whole. On the other hand, the notions of freedom and interdisciplinarity must themselves be constantly rethought to prevent the legacy of 'the cultural turn' from being reduced to an empty cliché. At Leiden University, we chose to address this need for reflection on the vocation of the humanities by organizing an international conference devoted to the thought of philosopher of culture Walter Benjamin (1892- 1940). In doing so, our aim was to consolidate an interdisciplinary initiative started in 2010, when we marked the recent fusion between our former faculties of arts, philosophy and religious studies with a conference on the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. A conspicuous feature of Benjamin's writing is its lack of any formal pretence to system building. In fact the bulk of his oeuvre is made up of short essays and notes on a wide range of seemingly disparate cultural phenomena, where philological commentary and criticism go hand in hand. The reason for this absence of closure and the frequent shifts in focus must not be sought in any incidental default. Instead, th