Description
Book SynopsisAn introduction to the life and work of Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and literary and cultural critic. The text offers insight into Benjamin's complex relationships with Adorno, Brecht, Jewish Messianism and Western Marxism.
Trade Review"The newcomer to Benjamin's work is here in excellent hands."
* Times Literary Supplement *
"A highly successful intellectual biography of Walter Benjamin . . . making an original argument concerning the works and addressing directly the issues raised by Benjamin that are still very much alive in our own time." * Theory and Society *
Table of ContentsPREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATIONS
A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY
INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED EDITION
Chapter One
ORIGINS
Childhood and Autobiography
Youth Movement
Romantic Anticapitalism
Chapter Two
THE PATH TO TRAUERSPIEL
Experience, Kabbalah, and Language
Messianic Time Versus Historical Time
Allegory
Chapter Three
IDEAS AND THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
Anti-Historicism
The Essay as Mediation Between Art and
Philosophical Truth
Constellation, Origin, Monad
Chapter Four
FROM MESSIANISM TO MATERIALISM
Radical Communism
One-Way Street and Dialectical Images
Surrealism
Chapter Five
BENJAMIN AND BRECHT
"Crude Thinking"
Epic Theater
The Author as Producer
Chapter Six
THE ADORNO-BENJAMIN DISPUTE
The Philosophical Rapprochement Between Benjamin
and Adorno in the Early 1930s
The Arcades Expose
Art and Mechanical Reproduction
Methodological Asceticism, Magic and Positivism
Beyond the Dispute
Chapter Seven
BENJAMIN'S MATERIALIST THEORY OF
EXPERIENCE
The Disintegration of Community: Novel versus Story
Baudelaire, Modernity, and Shock Experience
Nonsensuous Correspondences
Chapter Eight
"A L'ECART DE TOUS LES COURANTS"
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
