Walter Benjamin was one of the most original and important critical
voices of the twentieth century, but until now only a few of his
writings have been available in English. Harvard University Press
has now undertaken to publish a significant portion of his work in
definitive translation, under the general editorship of Michael W.
Jennings. This volume, the first of three, will at last give
readers of English a true sense of the man and the mans' theets of
his thought. A separate volume will consist of his book "The
Arcades Project," the magnum opus of his Paris years.
The writer Walter Benjamin emerged our of the head-on collision
of an idealistic youth movement and the First World War, which
Benjamin and his close friends thought immoral. He walked away from
the wreck scarred yet determined "to be considered as the principal
critic of German literature." But the scene as he found it was
dominated by "talented fakes," so-to use his words-"only a
terrorist campaign would I suffice" to effect radical change. This
book offers the record of the first phase of that campaign,
culminating with "One-Way Street," one of the most significant
products of the German avant-garde of the Twenties. Against
conformism, homogeneity, and gentrification of all life into a new
world order, Benjamin made the word his sword.
Volume I of the "Selected Writings" brings together essays long
and short, academic treatises, reviews, fragments, and privately
circulated pronouncements. Fully five-sixths of this material has
never before been translated into English. The contents begin in
1913, when Benjamin, as an undergraduate in imperial Germany, was
president of a radical youth group, and take usthrough 1926, when
he had already begun, with his explorations of the world of mass
culture, to emerge as a critical voice in Weimar Germany's most
influential journals.
The volume includes a number of his most important works,
including "Two Poems by Friedrich Holderlin," "Goethe's Elective
Affinities," "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism," "The
Task of the Translator," and "One-Way Street." He is as compelling
and insightful when musing on riddles or children's books as he is
when dealing with weightier issues such as the philosophy of
language, symbolic logic, or epistemology. We meet Benjamin the
youthful idealist, the sober moralist, the political theorist, the
experimentalist, the translator, and, above all, the virtual king
of criticism, with his magisterial exposition of the basic problems
of aesthetics.
Benjamin's sentences provoke us to return to them again and
again, luring us as though with the promise of some final
revelation that is always being postponed. He is by turns fierce
and tender, melancholy and ebullient; he is at once classically
rooted, even archaic, in his explorations of the human psyche and
the world of things, and strikingly progressive in his attitude
toward society and what he likes to call the organs of the
collective (its architectures, fashions, signboards). Throughout,
he displays a far-sighted urgency, judging the present on the basis
of possible futures. And he is gifted with a keen sense of humor.
Mysterious though he may sometimes be (his Latvian love, Asia
Lacis, once described him as a visitor from another planet),
Benjamin remains perhaps the most consistently surprising and
challenging of critical writers.
Review This Product
Wed, 27 Jul 2022 | Review
by: Maurice Faustrillo
First volume in a brilliant series. Indispensable for Benjamin fans and cultural studies enthusiasts.
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