Few twentieth-century thinkers have proven as influential as Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural and literary critic. Richard Wolin’s book remains among the clearest and most insightful introductions to Benjamin’s writings, offering a philosophically rich exposition of his complex relationship to Adorno, Brecht, Jewish Messianism, and Western Marxism. Wolin provides nuanced interpretations of Benjamin’s widely studied writings on Baudelaire, historiography, and art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In a new Introduction written especially for this edition, Wolin discusses the unfinished
Arcades Project, as well as recent tendencies in the reception of Benjamin’s work and the relevance of his ideas to contemporary debates about modernity and postmodernity.
Few twentieth-century thinkers have proven as influential as Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural and literary critic. Richard Wolin’s book remains among the clearest and most insightful introductions to Benjamin’s writings, offerin
Table of Content
PREFACE
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
About the author
Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History and Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center. His books include The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (1990) and The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism (1992).
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