Description
Book SynopsisIn this incisive new work, Eli Friedlander demonstrates that Walter Benjamin's entire corpus, from early to late, comprises a rigorous and sustained philosophical questioning of how human beings belong to nature.
Across seemingly heterogeneous writings, Friedlander argues, Benjamin consistently explores what the natural in the human comes to, that is, how nature is transformed, actualized, redeemed, and overcome in human existence. The book progresses gradually from Benjamin's philosophically fundamental writings on language and nature to his Goethean empiricism, from the presentation of ideas to the primal history of the Paris arcades. Friedlander's careful analysis brings out how the idea of natural history inflects Benjamin's conception of the work of art and its critique, his diagnosis of the mythical violence of the legal order, his account of the body and of action, of material culture and technology, as well as his unique vision of historical materialism.
Featuring revelatory new readings of Benjamin's major works that differ, sometimes dramatically, from prevailing interpretations, this book reveals the internal coherence and philosophical force of Benjamin's thought.
Trade Review"Friedlander's interpretative lens offers his readers a genuinely illuminating and deeply convincing way of appreciating both the local detail and the overarching significance of Benjamin's texts."—Stephen Mulhall, University of Oxford
"Friedlander's highly original study resituates the interpretation and evaluation of Benjamin's immensely fecund work within the context of the most advanced contemporary thinking on first and second nature. The book will have a considerable impact across the humanistic disciplines."—David E. Wellbery, University of Chicago
"Friedlander succeeds beautifully and convincingly in presenting Benjamin's seemingly heterogeneous oeuvre as a coherent philosophical effort. Timely reading for philosophers, Benjamin scholars, and all readers interested in the question of the human as a life-form in trying times."—Eva Geulen, Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: The Natural in the Human
Part I: Nature in Language
1. God, Nature, and Man in Language
2. Naming Beauty
3. The Life and Afterlife of Words
4. The Life of Forms
Part II: Life and Fate
5. The Guilt and Innocence of Life
6. Fate, Redemption, and Hope in Love
7. Myth, Law, and Life in Common
Part III: Body and Corporeality
8. The Language of the Body and the Body of Language
9. Acting Naturally
Part IV: Primal History
10. "From the Pagan Context of Nature into the Jewish Context of History"
11. Matters of Memory
12. First and Second Nature in Art
Part V: The Image of the Contingent
13. Distorted Life
Notes
Bibliography
Index
