Walter Benjamin became a published writer at the age of
seventeen. Yet the first stirrings of this most original of
critical minds penned during the years in which he transformed
himself from the comfortable son of a haute-bourgeois German Jewish
family into the nomadic, uncompromising philosopher-critic we have
since come to appreciate have until now remained largely
unavailable in English. "Early Writings, 1910-1917" rectifies this
situation, documenting the formative intellectual experiences of
one of the twentieth century's most resolutely independent
thinkers.
Here we see the young Benjamin in his various roles as moralist,
cultural critic, school reformer, and poet-philosopher. The
diversity of interest and profundity of thought characteristic of
his better-known work from the 1920s and 30s are already in
evidence, as we witness the emergence of critical projects that
would occupy Benjamin throughout his intellectual career: the role
of the present in historical remembrance, the relationship of the
intellectual to political action, the idea of truth in works of
art, and the investigation of language as the veiled medium of
experience.
Even at this early stage, a recognizably Benjaminian way of
thinking comes into view a daring, boundary-crossing enterprise
that does away with classical antitheses in favor of the
relentlessly-seeking critical consciousness that produced the
groundbreaking works of his later years. With the publication of
these early writings, our portrait of one of the most significant
intellects of the twentieth century edges closer to completion.
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