In September 1940, Walter Benjamin committed suicide in Port Bou on
the Spanish-French border when it appeared that he and his
travelling partners would be denied passage into Spain in their
attempt to escape the Nazis. In 2002, one of anthropology's - and
indeed today's - most distinctive writers, Michael Taussig, visited
Benjamin's grave in Port Bou. The result is "Walter Benjamin's
Grave," a moving essay about the cemetery, eyewitness accounts of
Benjamin's border travails, and the circumstances of his demise. It
is the most recent of eight revelatory essays collected in this
volume of the same name. "Looking over these essays written over
the past decade," writes Taussig, "I think what they share is a
love of muted and defective storytelling as a form of analysis.
Strange love indeed; love of the wound, love of the last gasp."
Although thematically these essays run the gamut - covering the
monument and graveyard at Port Bou, discussions of peasant poetry
in Colombia, a pact with the devil, the peculiarities of a shaman's
body, transgression, the disappearance of the sea, New York City
cops, and the relationship between flowers and violence - each
shares Taussig's highly individual brand of storytelling, one that
depends on a deep appreciation of objects and things as a way to
retrieve even deeper philosophical and anthropological meanings.
Whether he finds himself in Australia, Colombia, Manhattan, or
Spain, in the midst of a book or a beach, whether talking to
friends or staring at a monument, Taussig makes clear through these
marvelous essays that materialist knowledge offers a crucial
alternative to the increasingly abstract, globalized, homogenized,
and digitized world we inhabit. Pursuing an adventure that is part
ethnography, part autobiography, and part cultural criticism
refracted through the object that is Walter Benjamin's grave,
Taussig, with this collection, provides his own literary memorial
to the twentieth century's greatest cultural critic.
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