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Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential
essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition
presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated
translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of
modern political theory. The volume includes twenty-one notes and
fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the
contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus
encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about
law and violence advanced by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich
Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from
Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates
Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the
first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the
expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding
philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide
additional context. With its challenging argument concerning
violence, law, and justice—which addresses such topical matters
as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of
religion—Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its
publication in Weimar Germany a century ago.
"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works
weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire
lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when
Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in
German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously
constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as
Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas."
Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed
rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin
presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds
of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with
descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City,"
"Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution,"
"Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation
is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which
he locates the decisive shift to the modern age. The Arcades
Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the
bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so
doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the
ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and
interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic
distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from
what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost
time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.
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Aesthetics and Politics (Paperback)
Fredric Jameson; Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukacs, Theodor Adorno, …
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R323
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No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of
major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in
German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and
Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over
literature and art during these years are assembled in a single
volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous,
interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of
twentieth-century intellectual history.
Benjamin's famous "Work of Art" essay sets out his boldest
thoughts--on media and on culture in general--in their most
realized form, while retaining an edge that gets under the skin of
everyone who reads it. In this essay the visual arts of the machine
age morph into literature and theory and then back again to images,
gestures, and thought.
This essay, however, is only the beginning of a vast collection
of writings that the editors have assembled to demonstrate what was
revolutionary about Benjamin's explorations on media. Long before
Marshall McLuhan, Benjamin saw that the way a bullet rips into its
victim is exactly the way a movie or pop song lodges in the
soul.
This book contains the second, and most daring, of the four
versions of the "Work of Art" essay--the one that addresses the
utopian developments of the modern media. The collection tracks
Benjamin's observations on the media as they are revealed in essays
on the production and reception of art; on film, radio, and
photography; and on the modern transformations of literature and
painting. The volume contains some of Benjamin's best-known work
alongside fascinating, little-known essays--some appearing for the
first time in English. In the context of his passionate engagement
with questions of aesthetics, the scope of Benjamin's media theory
can be fully appreciated.
Walter Benjamin is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic
intellectual figures of this century. Not only was he a thinker who
made an enormous impact with his critical and philosophical
writings, he shattered disciplinary and stylistic conventions. This
collection, introduced by Susan Sontag, contains the most
representative and illuminating selection of his work over a
twenty-year period, and thus does full justice to the richness and
the multi-dimensional nature of his thought. Included in these
pages are aphorisms and townscapes, esoteric meditation and
reminiscences of childhood, and reflections on language,
psychology, aesthetics and politics.
In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid
economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter
Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic
and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of
the "Selected Writings" is now available in paperback in two
parts.
In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest
literary essays, "Surrealism" and "On the Image of Proust," as well
as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his
wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany's newspapers.
Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays,
"Franz Kafka," "Karl Kraus," and "The Author as Producer," the
extended autobiographical meditation "A Berlin Chronicle," and
extended discussions of the history of photography and the social
situation of the French writer, previously untranslated shorter
pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological
criticism and literary history, astrology and the newspaper, and on
such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and
Mickey Mouse.
The Origin of German Tragic Drama is Walter Benjamin’s most
sustained and original work. It begins with a general theoretical
introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar stage-form of
royal martyr dramas called Trauerspiel. Benjamin also comments on
the engravings of Durer and the theatre of Calderon and
Shakespeare. Baroque tragedy, he argues, was distinguished from
classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history. Georg
Lukacs, an opponent of Benjamin’s aesthetics, singled out The
Origin of German Tragic Drama as one of the main sources of
literary modernism in the twentieth century.
A beautiful collection of the legendary thinker's short stories The
Storyteller gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary
critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his
groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including
Illuminations, One-Way Street and The Arcades Project. His stories
revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold
between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance
of games, and delve into the peculiar relationship between gambling
and fortune-telling, and explore the themes that defined Benjamin.
The novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables and riddles in
this collection are brought to life by the playful imagery of the
modernist artist and Bauhaus figure Paul Klee.
"Every line we succeed in publishing today...is a victory wrested
from the powers of darkness." So wrote Walter Benjamin in January
1940. Not long afterward, he himself would fall prey to those
powers, a victim of suicide following a failed attempt to flee the
Nazis. However insistently the idea of catastrophe hangs over
Benjamin's writings in the final years of his life, the "victories
wrested" in this period nonetheless constitute some of the most
remarkable twentieth-century analyses of the emergence of modern
society. The essays on Charles Baudelaire are the distillation of a
lifetime of thinking about the nature of modernity. They record the
crisis of meaning experienced by a civilization sliding into the
abyss, even as they testify to Benjamin's own faith in the written
word.
This volume ranges from studies of Baudelaire, Brecht, and the
historian Carl Jochmann to appraisals of photography, film, and
poetry. At their core is the question of how art can survive and
thrive in a tumultuous time. Here we see Benjamin laying out an
ethic for the critic and artist--a subdued but resilient heroism.
At the same time, he was setting forth a sociohistorical account of
how art adapts in an age of violence and repression.
Working at the height of his powers to the very end, Benjamin
refined his theory of the mass media that culminated in the final
version of his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its
Technological Reproducibility." Also included in this volume is his
influential piece "On the Concept of History," completed just
before his death. The book is remarkable for its inquiry into the
nature of "the modern" (especially as revealed in Baudelaire), for
its ideas about thetransmogrification of art and the radical
discontinuities of history, and for its examples of humane life and
thought in the midst of barbarism. The entire collection is
eloquent testimony to the indomitable spirit of humanity under
siege.
Origin of the German Trauerspiel was Walter Benjamin's first full,
historically oriented analysis of modernity. Readers of English
know it as "The Origin of German Tragic Drama," but in fact the
subject is something else-the play of mourning. Howard Eiland's
completely new English translation, the first since 1977, is closer
to the German text and more consistent with Benjamin's
philosophical idiom. Focusing on the extravagant
seventeenth-century theatrical genre of the trauerspiel, precursor
of the opera, Benjamin identifies allegory as the constitutive
trope of the Baroque and of modernity itself. Allegorical
perception bespeaks a world of mutability and equivocation, a
melancholy sense of eternal transience without access to the
transcendentals of the medieval mystery plays-though no less
haunted and bedeviled. History as trauerspiel is the condition as
well as subject of modern allegory in its inscription of the
abyssal. Benjamin's investigation of the trauerspiel includes
German texts and late Renaissance European drama such as Hamlet and
Calderon's Life Is a Dream. The prologue is one of his most
important and difficult pieces of writing. It lays out his method
of indirection and his idea of the "constellation" as a key means
of grasping the world, making dynamic unities out of the myriad
bits of daily life. Thoroughly annotated with a philological and
historical introduction and other explanatory and supplementary
material, this rigorous and elegant new translation brings fresh
understanding to a cardinal work by one of the twentieth century's
greatest literary critics.
Radical critic of a European civilization plunging into darkness,
yet commemorator of the humane traditions of the old
bourgeoisie--such was Walter Benjamin in the later 1930s. This
volume, the third in a four-volume set, offers twenty-seven
brilliant pieces, nineteen of which have never before been
translated.
The centerpiece, "A Berlin Childhood around 1900," marks the
first appearance in English of one of the greatest German works of
the twentieth century: a profound and beautiful account of the
vanished world of Benjamin's privileged boyhood, recollected in
exile. No less remarkable are the previously untranslated second
version of Benjamin's most famous essay, "The Work of Art in the
Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," with its striking
insights into the relations between technology and aesthetics, and
"German Men and Women," a book in which Benjamin collects
twenty-six letters by distinguished Germans from 1783 to 1883 in an
effort to preserve what he called the true humanity of German
tradition from the debasement of fascism.
Volume 3 also offers extensively annotated translations of
essays that are key to Benjamin's rewriting of the story of
modernism and modernity--such as "The Storyteller" and "Paris, the
Capital of the Nineteenth Century"--as well as a fascinating diary
from 1938 and penetrating studies of Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka,
and Eduard Fuchs. A narrative chronology details Benjamin's life
during these four harrowing years of his exile in France and
Denmark. This is an essential collection for anyone interested in
his work.
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