Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power explores Walter
Benjamin's seminal writings on the relationship between mass
culture and fascism. The book offers a nuanced reading of
Benjamin's widely influential critique of aesthetic politics, while
it contributes to current debates about the cultural projects of
Nazi Germany, the changing role of popular culture in the twentieth
century, and the way in which Nazi aesthetics have persisted into
the present. Lutz Koepnick first explores the development of the
aestheticization thesis in Benjamin's work from the early 1920s to
his death in 1940. Pushing Benjamin's fragmentary remarks to a
logical conclusion, Koepnick sheds light on the ways in which the
Nazis employed industrial mass culture to redress the political as
a self-referential space of authenticity and self-assertion.
Koepnick then examines to what extent Benjamin's analysis of
fascism holds up to recent historical analyses of the National
Socialist period and whether Benjamin's aestheticization thesis can
help conceptualize cultural politics today. Although Koepnick
insists on crucial differences between the stage-managing of
political action in modern and postmodern societies, he argues
throughout that it is in Benjamin's emphatic insistence on
experience that we may find the relevance of his reflections today.
Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power is both an important
contribution to Benjamin studies and a revealing addition to our
understanding of the Third Reich and of contemporary culture's
uneasy relationship to Nazi culture. Lutz Koepnick is an assistant
professor of German studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
He is the author of a book on the relationshipbetween power, art,
and modernity in Richard Wagner's Ring.
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