Steven Tester is a Ph.D. student in the German department. He completed his B.A. in English Literature at the University of Oregon and has since taken courses in Philosophy and Comparative Literature at DePaul University, Charles University in Prague and Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. His interests include problems of Temporality, Hermeneutics and Illusion in Phenomenology, Critical Theory and Aesthetics. He has published an essay on Deleuze’s theory of time and participation entitled Erwarten des Echos: Zeit- vertreib und Zeit- vertrieb mit Deleuze (Zum Zeitvertreib, Aisthesis, 2004). At the moment he is thinking about problems of identity and relation in Walter Benjamin’s theory of language.