Product Description
Studies on contemporary art and culture by one of the most original, critical and analytical minds of this century. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (13)

Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductions
Benjamin, unlike other contemporary philosophers, offers jargon-less, clear, yet profound commentary on contemporary society (and art in particular). The reading isn't painful and difficult to get through. The only reason it took me 3 days to get through 25 pages was because I had to put the book down and soak up his thoughts and weave them in with my own.

The essay I was most fascinated with was the last one in the book, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Therein he examines how mass reproduction has affected contemporary art. He not only looks at the effects on the production of art, but also at how art is now received by the masses. For example, Benjamin writes, "Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art...A painting has always had an excellent chance to be viewed by one person or by a few. The simultaneous contemplation of paintings by a large public, such as developed in the nineteenth century, is an early symptom of the crisis of painting, a crisis which was by no means occasioned exclusively by photography but rather in a relatively independent manner by the appeal of art works to the masses. Painting simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience, as it was possible for architecture... " (234).

He raises questions of what is authenticity? How has art become absorbed? How has art evolved to fit the means of mechanical reproduction that are so pervasive?

All in all, I would highly recommend this book. It is intriguing for art-enthusiasts and non-art-enthusiasts alike.

Of Benjamin, Dwarfs and Angels
The depth of Benjamin's pessimism has, I think, been underestimated.

"The story is told of an automation constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet's hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called "historical materialism" is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight." Walter Benjamin, First "These on the Philosophy of History", p 253.

One can measure how far the contemporary Marxist (better said, the post or semi-Marxist) left has fallen by how many books have appeared, since the fall of the USSR, enthusing over the radically Universal and allegedly 'Progressive' nature of early Christianity. Walter Benjamin, who was first to place the wise but ugly dwarf (Theology) in the beautiful puppet (Historical Materialism) would be amazed (or perhaps not, see the letters between Benjamin and Scholem) to learn that puppet and dwarf are on the verge of switching places! That is, now the ugly dwarf (historical materialism) wants to hide in (and of course direct) the beautiful puppet of Christian theology. ...Crazy, you say? But even Habermas, the Keeper of the Flame of Critical Theory, has on occasion made somewhat similar noises. The best place, btw, to start reading about this new 'political-theology' probably remains Jacob Taubes.

But perhaps this emergent trend is really not so crazy after all. The only reason the Church became so cozy with Capitalism was its fear of Atheism. The collapse of the Soviet Union ended that fear. Now Christianity faces Capitalism alone. Or not, if the detente being proposed between the left and the Church is actually consummated. But every detente is a conspiracy of enemies to destroy an even greater enemy. The Church was with Capitalism because it had to defeat atheism. Now it is likely that the Church will join (a moderate) Socialism in trying to contain the 'soul-destroying' ravages of capitalism. This is only another move on the chessboard of History. ...But what did Benjamin think of History?

"A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." BENJAMIN, Ninth Thesis on History, p 257.

Picture this Angel, wings pinned back by the wind, shoulders forced back because of that - the Angel of History is almost in the position of the Crucified Christ; except that this crucification does not end. It is this tone of almost ontological despair that was new to the left. This Crucified Angel is the perfect image of the left-wing theoretical pessimism pioneered by not only Benjamin but also Adorno and Horkheimer that split the intellectual left into two camps: the revolutionary and the cultural. And though no one is likely to admit it, the cultural left has quietly come to think of revolution itself as but another 'progressive' force piling up bodies.

It is one of the little ironies of history that this despairing fantasy described contemporary reality exactly. The Angel of History is the image of dialectical knowledge. Rather than seeing disconnected events this Dialectical Knowledge grasps History as One (single catastrophe). Always facing the past ('the owl of Minerva takes flight at night', Hegel said; meaning that dialectical knowledge is retrospective) the 'contemplating' Angel is overwhelmed by historical action - the storm that has been blowing since the expulsion of humanity from paradise - and can never Himself achieve effective action. His knowledge grows in lockstep with the accumulating horror, but each new historical event only results (i,e., gets 'caught in the wings' of our Angel) in more contemplation. So we see how theory (our Angel) is 'irresistibly' propelled into the future. And we also see that the Knowledge dialectical theory gains is precisely equal to the debris the storm hurls at our Angel's feet. With an irony that strives to be equal to the wind blowing from Paradise Benjamin ends this meditation by calling this storm progress.

This is perhaps why Benjamin insisted over 50 years ago that the dwarf Theology must guide the puppet Historical Materialism. Theory can never be equal to action; circumstance piles upon circumstance so rapidly that theory cannot effectively act, and if it does act (presumably) it only adds to the debris. Thus theology (myth) must guide materialism's hand because theoretical knowledge is powerless to help. Benjamin quotes the following remarks of Willy Haas, with approval, in his large Kafka essay;

"'The object of the trial', he writes, 'indeed, the real hero of this incredible book is forgetting, whose main characteristic is the forgetting of itself [...] The most sacred ... act of the ... ritual is the erasing of sins from the book of memory.'
What has been forgotten - and this insight affords us yet another avenue of access to Kafka's work - is never something purely individual." (Benjamin, Franz Kafka, p 131.)

(The last sentence was Benjamin's own.) Theology is a non-individual forgetfulness. Thus myth (theology) is the only forgetfulness worthy of the name. What needs to be forgotten by all of us is the unsurpassable fact of the futility of theory...

It is difficult for most to look such despair in the face.

Clarity and Brilliance
In 1940 Walter Benjamin committed suicide at the Franco-Spanish border fearing that he would be unable to escape the grasp of Hitler's regime. He left behind perhaps one of the finest collections of literary theory of his era, complete with lucidly brilliant essays on Kafka, Proust, Baudelaire, and general Marxist theory.

In this wholly excellent collection of essays, a remarkable introduction to Benjamin's life and work is provided by the late philosopher Hannah Arendt, who overviews his political formations and literary output. It's a model form of critical essay writing.

Perhaps the most famous essay in this collection is Benjamin's `The Task of the Translator,' widely regarded as one of the most important and thoughtful contributions to the field.

"No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no sympathy for the listener."

He argues that translation is a mode, and that the translatability of the work is the primary concern in the process.

Also included is an analysis of the philosophy of history.

Just a quick note
I have nothing to add to the reviews below except to note for scholarly interest that the essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' included in this collection is not Benjamin's final version. (Neither is this title a good translation of the German: 'Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit'. Zohn's translation in the selected writings is better: 'The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility'.) The text in this collection is the 1935 manuscript, as originally published in 1936; the text collected in the Selected Writings, Vol. 4 is the final 1939 version that, as far as I can tell, was not published in Benjamin's lifetime. The difference between the two texts is slight, consisting mainly of some additional sentences here and there and some changed words. At least one of these revisions is, I hypothesize, the result of Adorno's criticisms of his letter to Benjamin of 18 Mar 1936.

Otherwise, for most purposes, this is the best collection of Benjamin's essays available for an introduction to his thought. This volume collects some of the best of his essays that are otherwise spread throughout the selected writings published by the Harvard U.P.

Brilliance
I picked up this book primarily for the purpose of reading Benjamin's critically acclaimed essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", as well as for his darkly poetic - and even apocalyptic - "Theses on the Philosophy of History".These essays are among Benjamin's most highly esteemed and are the last two selections in the book; regardless of whether you start with them or with the first essay, "Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting", you are likely to be drawn into Benjamin's literary world quite quickly.

In many ways, Benjamin's writing style is quite unassuming; reading even his most profound insights is like reading a letter from an old friend.His writing comes in layers; one must make time to savor his presence.This book covers a range of subjects, from critical literary essays (the aforementioned "Unpacking My Library", as well as essays on Kafka, Baudelaire and Proust), to more hermeneutical reflections ("The Task of the Translator"), to straight up philosophy/theory ("The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and "Theses on the Philosophy of History").

The 51 page introduction by Hannah Arendt is absolutely fantastic.It does not simply provide an overview of Benjamin's life, but sets that life within the culture of early 20th century Germany, focusing especially on the time between the two World Wars.She notes the influences of Zionism and Communism (and Marxism) on Benjamin's thought, as well as the broader cultural influence of a quasi-secularized Judaism in a culture where non-baptized Jews were still kept out of university teaching posts.Her introduction, like Benjamin's own writing, contains deep touches of the intimately personal (she selected the various essays that make up this volume).

In many ways, Benjamin was a deeply religious thinker.A friend of Gershom Scholem's (the founder of the modern-day study of Jewish mysticism), Benjamin and Scholem corresponded for a number of years.Although this particular volume pays little attention to his religious thought, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (the final selection in the book which, in light of Benjamin's suicide, gives Illuminations a bit of a haunting finale), witnesses to Benjamin's poetic-religious insights:

"The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homogenous or empty.Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance - namely, in just the same way.We know how the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future.This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment.This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogenous, empty time.For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter."

Highly recommended. ... Read more

Product Description
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. (20021201) ... Read more

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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.

Product Description
"This book is just that: reflections of a highly polished mind that uncannily approximate the century's fragments of shattered traditions." - Time ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Criticism at its best
Benjamin is an extremely powerful writer. I bought this book specifically for Zur Kritik Der Gewalt, but I've enjoyed other essays.

A Portable Benjamin
There is much to love about Walter Benjamin. His is a supple, syncretic, synthetic mind, and his prose just sings-even in translation.Because Benjamin roamed about in whole territorities of thought, it's nearly impossible to draw together a representative selection of his essays without overlooking something important.The collection Illuminations is a delgith; Reflections, a kind of companion volume, includes much material that reflects the Benjamin corpus from a non-Illuminations trajectory.

Benjamin's essay "Critique of Violence" is worth the price of the book on its own; while I disagree with his idea that a state must have a monopoly on violence (more likely that a state desires such a monopoly but has to play make-believe because it can't complete a monopoly...), Benjamin's analysis is crisp and precise. It's as good as the "Treatise on Nomadology" of Deleuze and Guattari, which covers the same kind of ground.

This sounds cheesy, but I really think Benjamin's example of ranging far and wide and deep into detail when inquiring into something, not letting his hang-ups hinder his thinking, is something for an intellectual to aspire to.And he's a joy to read.

Wise and witty, with a keen eye for detail
This collection of Benjamin essays was selected and introduced by Peter Demetz based on an order prepared by Hannah Arendt. It is a companion piece to Illuminations, a siimilar volume prepared and introduced by Arendt in the late sixties. Unlike Illuminations, which focuses on the literary essays Benjamin wrote, Reflections is intended to present a wide variety of subject and style.

In his introduction, Demetz urges the reader to listen to Benjamin in a musical rather than a literary way. Indeed, this book works very well if you approach it as an impressionistic meander through the style and range of thought present in the essays. I would be hard-pressed to describe how to rationally link the autobiographic travel writing of "A Berlin Chronicle" with the aphorisms of "One Way Street" or the Marxist thought in the essays on Brecht. All the same, they feel linked as a reading experience. That linkage may be more on the sound than the subject-- the sound of a very smart man thinking very hard and with great elegance.

Benjamin is never a dry writer. Some other reviewers have remarked on his humor, which definitely exists. It is also worth highlighting his keen eye for detail, his openness to self-examination, his practical advice about writing, and his distinctive turn of phrase which somehow survives through the translation process.

It would be difficult to find a book that I would recommend more highly.

"A Highly Polished Mind"
Reflections presents for the reader the great range that Benjamin had as a writer, critic and occidentalist. This collection further demonstrates Benjamin's acute awareness of the literatureof his time, as evidenced by his essay on 'Surrealism', which is as fine a reflection on its themes as the manifestos of Andre Breton. Furthermore, his writings and conversations with Bertolt Brecht show Benjamin to be very close to the thinking of the author himself. Also included is his celebrated essay on Karl Kraus,"the Jewish Swift of Vienna". But what I like most about this collection are the amorphisms and autobiographical sketches of 'Marseilles' and 'One-way Street'. In his images of Marseilles Benjamin creates an "exegesis of the city" that is as fine as any poet could offer; spellbinding, acute, and beautiful. As well, his wit and insight into social phenomena is detailed in 'One-Way Street', and also in the piece on Moscow, which lets the western reader experience a rare witnessing of the Russian city in the years after the Revolution in a way that recalls Dziga Vertov. Finally, the inclusion of several pieces of Benjamin's philosophical-theological speculations show that he was a man of great breath and wisedom, and further showcase the wide range of his highly polished mind.

Reflections:
I think that this book is a forgery by appenine fascist youth. Like most of this book's readers, they took their master plan far too seriously.It's this inability to laugh which makes the work canonical, but nonetheless a product of unknown authorship. ... Read more

Product Description

"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 the transmogrification 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.

Customer Reviews (1)

The letters of two geniuses
Walter Benjamin and G. Scholem are two of the most important thinkers of this century. And in this book we can listen to their voices and thoughts. In my opinion the most interesting part of the book are the letters related to Franz Kafka. In fact, I think the way they understand and illustrateKafka is still unsurpassed, and just for that is really worth to read thisbook. ... Read more

Product Description
"Quite simply, the Passagen-Werk is one of the twentieth century's great efforts at historical comprehension--some would say the greatest."--T. J. Clark, author of The Painting of Modern LifeThe Arcades ProjectWalter Benjamin Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin"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," "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.Howard Eiland is Lecturer in Literature at MIT and the author of essays on Nietzsche and Heidegger. Kevin McLaughlin is Assistant Professor of English at Brown University and the author of Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Literature.Belknap Press61/2 x 10 46 halftones 960 pp.Amazon.com Review
You could spend years trying to read Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project--after all, he spent much of the last 13 years of his life doing the research. When he committed suicide in 1940, he destroyed his copy of the manuscript, and so for decades the work was believed lost. But another copy turned up, and Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin have translated it into English. It is a complex, fragmentary work--more a series of notes for a book than a book itself--which probes the culture of the Paris arcades (a cross between covered streets and shopping malls) of the mid-19th century and the flaneur ("the man who walks long and aimlessly through the streets" in an "anamnestic intoxication [that] ... feeds on the sensory data taking shape before his eyes but often possesses itself of abstract knowledge--indeed, of dead facts--as something experienced and lived through"). The Arcades Project is, frankly, so dense a work that one hardly has enough time to glimpse fleetingly at its sections--over 100 pages of notes on Baudelaire alone!--before mentioning it to you, though one certainly looks forward to the opportunity to peruse it at leisure. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

This is not a book!
The English edition of Benjamin's huge construction site has an advantage over the original German: the title 'Arcades Project' is so much more honest than 'Passagenwerk', i.e. the 'oeuvre about the arcades'.
The book description here in amazon says that WB spent the last 13 years of his life doing the research for this project. That leads us straight into the conundrum: circumstances prevented the completion of the Werk. Benjamin was a Jewish German intellectual with a name as a literary critic. He absolutely had to emigrate from Germany and then to try and escape from France. He failed with the latter and gave up in despair, a suicide in sight of the uncrossable Spanish border. (I remember a very good American fictionalization of this event, called 'Benjamin's Crossing'. Forgot the author. Look it up!)
But: the way that amazon puts it is as if WB finished the book after those 13 years. Absolutely not! What we have here is a huge pile of bits and pieces: cuttings, copies, quotes, notes, aphorisms, reminders, thoughts, brainstorms..
Circumstances prevented the completion of the monster, but do the heaps of material show us the way that the whole would have taken? The editors like to make us believe that this thing would have ended up in a grand theory about capitalist esthetics, about art in the age of reproduction. I am very sceptical here.
My personal theory is that WB had nothing substantial to say about his subject, that's why he never got anywhere. He was losing himself in the vastness of his subject. Another 13 years, and he would not have been anywhere else. The essay about Paris as the capital of the 19th century is put at the beginning of the publication. The arcades of Paris were an invention of the 2nd empire (see Zola's verdict on the period). Is the essay leading anywhere? I do not see any substantial insight that would illuminate things on the scale that would justify the paper mountain.
The comments here are mostly enthusiastic, in line with the glory that WB amassed after 1960 among leftist intellectuals, 20 years after his death. One lonely single fighter dared to talk about the emperor's new clothes. Let's be more generous and give the benefit of doubt. (But I really doubt that the emperor had clothes.)
Is this a book? In the simplest technical sense that it is produced and sold as such: yes, of course. But actually, what we have between the book covers is material without structure and perspective.

Walter Benjamin's masterpiece
The Arcades Project was Walter Benjamin's mammoth, lifelong project. The book is not complete, not because Benjamin did not finish it (which he didn't), but because the book is organized like a collage or montage, and these "art forms" are always works-in-progress. Benjamin tried to document life in XIX century Paris through the eyes of a historian/archeologist. Along with Simmel and Kracauer, Benjamin tried to make a sociological, micro-history of the habits, ideologies, and dreams of the main actors of Parisian life -politicians, leaders, revolutionaries, journalists, poets. What is more important, however, is Benjamin's conception of history that we can find in Chapter N of this book. Benjamin studied XIX century Paris from a unique perspective of history as a discontinuous chain of events. For Benjamin, there is no progress in history from A to B. B is not superior to A; both points are subsumed in the same history of domination and catastrophe. Still, what he tried to see in Paris were those events or actors that broke out from this sad universe: the Commune, the Utopians, the Rebels. Benjamin did this to discover the revolutionary potential of past societies that can be useful for the present. This book is so rich and long, that there is almost everything for anyone who is interested in cultural history, philosophy, and theology.

The Capitalist-Fascist Dreamscape, Interpreted
As the U.S. begins more and more to embrace a cultural, if not yet explicitly political fascism, it's particularly important to look at the response earlier generations made to fascism.Walter Benjamin is a good place for us to start now, and not just because of his fascinating life and tragic death (read about it in the apparatus to The Arcades Project). Benjamin is at his best in examining the allegoric and metaphoric qualities of commercial objects and trends.He tries to understand what products and displays mean.We now live in a culture of declaration rather than fact (WMD in Iraq, the morality of torture, the chorus of creationists on the school board...); even our public discourse works like declarative advertising copy, like propaganda.

Walter Benjamin's interpretation of 19th century Parisian commerce gives us some tools with which to crack the contemporary code.

Stylistically, The Arcades Project works brilliantly. The layering of quotations and themes evokes a dream world, which is part of Benjamin's point: capitalism lulls whole social bodies to sleep, like a narcotic, like an addiction, and provides a phantasmagoria complete enough to keep consensus reality in place.Benjamin's prose sparkles; ideas pop from the page.More good news: you can effectively read around in The Arcades Project; you don't have to read through it cover-to-cover to get the point.

Finally, if you want to understand the impulses of those who are actively transforming the beautiful United States into styrofoam Walmartistan, I humbly suggest that the reader seek out Deleuze and Guattari's study Anti-Oedipus, which examines in detail the ways in which one can desire fascism (and desire in a fascist manner).

Fragmentary Epic
In the fifth of his "Theses on History" Benjamin mentions that "every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disapear irretrievably." This work represents a significant way of not forgetting. It is fragmentary...but it reminds us that the texts we read are all fragmentary, and we assemble and contextualize them as we read them.

Humbug
This book is a nihilistic, incoherent work, and I dare anyone who reads this review to argue to the contrary.Admiration for this book is humbuggery in action.The emperor has no clothes. ... Read more

Product Description
For students of modern criticism and theory, Walter Benjamin's writings have become essential reading.His analyses of photography, film, language, history, allegory, material culture, the poet Charles Baudelaire, and his vast examination of the social, political and historical significance of the Arcades of nineteenth-century Paris have left an enduring and important critical legacy. This volume examines in detail a substantial selection of his important critical writings on these topics from 1916 to 1940 and outlines his life in pre-war Germany, his association with the Frankfurt School, and the dissemination of his ideas and methodologies into a variety of academic disciplines since his death. David Ferris traces the development of Benjamin's key critical concepts and provides students with an accessible overview of the life, work and thought of one of the twentieth-century's most important literary and cultural critics. ... Read more

Product Description
An absorbing selection of Walter Benjamin's personal manuscripts, images, and documents.

The work of the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin is an audacious plotting of history, art and thought; a reservoir of texts, commentaries, scraps and fragments of everyday life, art and dreams. It comprises myriad smaller archives, in which Benjamin gathered together all kinds of artefacts, assortments of images, texts and signs, themselves representing experiences, ideas and hopes, each of which was enthusiastically logged, systematized and analyzed by their author. In them, Benjamin laid the groundwork for the salvaging of his own legacy.

This unique book, produced in association with the Benjamin Archive, delves into these archives. They include carefully laid-out manuscripts; photograps of a home with luxurious furniture, arcades, Russian toys; picture postcards from Tuscany and the Balearics; meticulous and unconventional registers, card indexes and catalogs; notebooks, in which every single square centimeter is covered; a collation of his son's first words and sentences; riddles and enigmatic Sibyls. Everything here is subtly interlinked with everything else.

Intricate and intimate, Walter Benjamin's Archive leads right into the core of his work, yielding a rich and detailed portrait of its author.

Customer Reviews (2)

Stuff
Amazon's star rating system goes askew on this book.

If you are a devoted fan of Walter Benjamin, then it is essential. On the other hand, if you are like me---who has never read Mr. Benjamin's works ---then it won't be such a useful purchase.

Without a flowing textual narrative, this book provides detailed examples of the scraps and notes kept by Mr. Benjamin, who was a compulsive hoarder of all mundane things tied to his highly intellectual pursuits during most of the first half of the last century

A Book of Books
It's always wonderful to look into a book or magazine that consists largely of photographs of pages from other books, partly because nothing photographs better,and partly because you are seeing the page in something both like and unlike its native habitat, like an animal in the better kind of zoo.

Because the texts are presented this way, as photographs ofautographs (notebooks, postcards, trial drafts of essays, collected photographs with notations), the distance between reader and author is inescapable. Often, when we see a famous text (sometimes,e.g when it's newly translated into contemporary language), we will remark on how contemporary the story feels, how the writer, long dead, feels like someone you know or could know. But with pages like these, the patina of time is present, and so is all of the strangeness of the writer, as much as is left. There's nothing like a trip to the archives to get your bearings relative to a writer; to locate him/her in time, and to feel the presence of time, both as the writer felt it in gathering these scraps together, and as you feel it now.

My favorite image from Benjamin's writing is the Angel of History, who is pinned in the air, blown back and upright by a wind from Paradise (from the Beginning), while all the garbage of every passing moment piles up at her feet. Something like a librarian.Being the angel of history makes movement difficult if not impossible, even when you have to leave Germany to save your life. You can read about that, but it's wonderful to have a chance to see pages from those books. If you're a Benjamin completionist, you will need to buy this book, but even if all you've read are the essays in Arendt's little collection, you will enjoy the added sense of the presence and loss of their author, just the same. ... Read more

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Called "the most important critic of his time" by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin has emerged as one of the most compelling thinkers of our time as well,his work assuming a crucial place in current debates over the interactions of art, culture, and meaning.A "natural and extraordinary talent for letter writing was one of the most captivating facets of his nature," writes Gershom Scholem in his Foreword; and indeed, Benjamin's correspondence reveals the evolution of some of his most powerful ideas.Published here in English for the first time, these letters offer an intimate picture of Benjamin himself and the times in which he lived.Written in a day when letters were an important vehicle for the presentation and development of intellectual matters, Benjamin's correspondence is rich in insight into the circumstances behind his often difficult work.

Writing at length to Scholem and Theodor Adorno, and exchanging letters with Rainer Maria Rilke, Hannah Arendt, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Max Horkheimer, Max Brod, Bertolt Brecht, and Kafka's friend Felix Weltsch, Benjamin elaborates his ideas about metaphor and language.He reflects on literary figures from Kafka to Karl Kraus, the "Jewish Question" and anti-Semitism, Marxism and Zionism.And he expounds his personal attitudes toward such subjects as the role of quotations in criticism, history, and tradition; the meaning of being a "collector"; and French culture and the national character. ... Read more

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Unique English-language edition of brilliant letter-writer
The most complete English-language edition of Benjamin's letters reveals the German author dealing with characteristic and unrelenting vigour and insight in a wide range of issues from Jewishness and Zionism to European literature, book-collecting and, of course, letter-writing. Yet, with the beginning of each of the 332 letters included in the volume, the reader is brought a little closer to Benjamin's tragic suicide, as he attempts to escape the consequences of the second world war ... Read more

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From our finest radical literary analyst, a classic study of the great philosopher and cultural theorist.“Eagleton is second to none among cultural critics writing in the English language today.” --Guardian ... Read more

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Benjamin's most sustained and original work, considered one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century.Cited by Lukács as a principal source of literary modernism, Walter Benjamin’s study of the baroque stage-form called Trauerspiel (literally, “mourning play”) is the most complete document of his prismatic literary and philosophical practice. Engaging with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German playwrights as well as the plays of Shakespeare and Calderón and the engravings of Dürer, Benjamin attempts to show how the historically charged forms of the Trauerspiel broke free of tragedy’s mythological timelessness. From its philosophical prologue, which offers a rare account of Benjamin’s early aesthetics, to its mind-wrenching meditation on allegory, The Origin of German Tragic Drama sparkles with early insights and the seeds of Benjamin’s later thought. ... Read more

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binding issue
Does anybody know if Verso bothered to improve the binding on the 2009 reprint edition? My first copy started falling apart the day I bought it too--annoying, although I suppose you could say it's rather fitting as well...

Mine too, bad glue
I found this book interesting.But my book, like that of a previous reviewer, completely fell apart upon the first reading.Frustrating to have to treat my NEW book like some loose sheaf of sibylline leaves bound together with rubber bands.

Excellent book/poor edition
Benjamin has written a highly valuable book here. My concern is with Verso's treatment of it. The binding is horrible -- my edition literally fell apart on the first read. There are no annotations which, in a book as wide-ranging and dense as this, is a gross oversight. In short, a horrible edition of a great book. Find another version.

Essential reading for students of critical theory
While it concerns baroque Trauerspiel (literally, "mourning play" or "lamentation play," not "tragic drama") this book is necessary reading for students of critical theory who don't have literature as a primary field of interest.In it, Benjamin develops his critique of allegory (which he later amended in his work on Baudelaire and would play a major role in The Arcades Project) as well as his method of philosphical history, which would decisively influence Theodor Adorno (see, for example, Adorno's book on Kierkegaard and his lecture "The Idea of Natural History").Don't let the notoriously opaque prologue dissuade you from reading beyond the opening pages--the rest of the book has more stylistic and conceptual clarity (which doesn't mean it's easy!).In fact, you may want to skip the prologue and return to it after reading the body of the text.In any case, this book will give you a solid grounding for understanding the foundations of Benjamin's work--it should not be slighted.I deduct a star not because of Benjamin but because of the translation (less than sterling) and Steiner's introduction which, despite correcting the title's translation, restricts itself to literary concerns. ... Read more

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This is the first comprehensive introduction to Benjamin's unfinished "Arcades Project" - one of the most significant cultural documents of the Weimar Republic and Nazi era. Walter Benjamin's unfinished "Arcades Project" has had a remarkable impact on present-day cultural theory, urban studies, cultural studies and literary interpretation. Originally designed as a panoramic study chronicling the rise and decline of the Parisian shopping arcades, Benjamin's work combines imaginative peregrinations through the changing city-scape of nineteenth-century Paris with passages that read like a blueprint for a new cultural theory of modernity. "Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project" provides the first comprehensive introduction to this extraordinary work accessible to English-language readers. The diverse range of issues explored include the fl and No. 226; neur, the physiognomy of ruins, the dialectical image, and modernity and architecture. The contributors include: Susan Buck-Morss, Stanley Cavell, Brigid Doherty, Stathis Gourgouris, Barbara Johnson, Esther Leslie, Gerhard Richter, Beatrice Hanssen, Detlef Mertins, Elissa Marder, Tyrus Miller, Max Pensky, and Irving Wohlfarth. ... Read more

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An attempt to analyze the changed experience of art in modern capitalist society. ... Read more

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You Wanna Be Smarter Obviously, You're Thinking Of Buying This Book
Your first step in that direction would be not to buy this book. This essay is available in "Illuminations" along with a host of others for just a little more money. $9.95 for a 36 page essay? Prove how smart you are. ... Read more

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If Walter Benjamin (with an irony that belies hisseemingly tragic life) is now recognized as one of the century's mostimportant writers, reading him is no easy matter. Benjamin opens oneof his most notable essays, "The Task of the Translator," with thewords "No poem is intended for the reader, no image for the beholder,no symphony for the listener." How does one read an author who tellsus that writing does not communicate very much to the reader? How doesone learn to regard what comes to us from Benjamin as something otherthan direct expression?

Carol Jacobs' In the Language of Walter Benjamin is an attempt to cometo terms with this predicament. It does so by teasing out suchguidelines for criticism as Benjamin seems to offer in The Origin ofGerman Tragic Drama. Jacobs reminds us of Benjamin's distinctionbetween truth and knowledge. She above all insists on his method ofphilosophical contemplation as performance, on a performance thatdemands precise immersion in the minute details of subject matter.

In what follows, Jacobs practices this immersion in the details ofBenjamin's performance as she reads some of his key works: theautobiographical Berlin Chronicle, the apparently biographical studyof Proust, the fictional autobiographical story of"Myslowitz—Braunschweig—Marseille," and those essays on thetheory of language so crucial to an understanding of Benjamin, "TheTask of the Translator," "Doctrine of the Similar," and "On Languageas Such and on the Language of Man." ... Read more

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Follows the life and work of Walter Benjamin, tracing his influence on modern aesthetics and cultural history, as well as his particular focus on the tension between Marxism and Zionism, and between word and image in modern art. ... Read more

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Offering a comprehensive introduction to the thought of Walter Benjamin, the highly influential twentieth-century critic and theorist, this Companion examines different significant aspects of Benjamin's work. Topics of contributions include Benjamin's relationship to the avant-garde movements of his time; his theories on language, mimesis and modernity; and his relevance to modern cultural studies.Additional material includes autobiographical writings, a guide to further reading and a chronology. ... Read more

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Great collection of essays that needed more editing
If you've found your way here, chances are you already know a bit about Walter Benjamin, so I won't spend much time talking about his work in this review.Suffice it to say, however, that Benjamin's writings, even more than those of other cultural theorists (heck, more than those of most other writers) become more rewarding the more widely you read through them.As he might say, each particular work is like an individual piece of a mosaic - put them together and the orchestrated whole is (much, much) greater than the proverbial sum of the parts.

In light of this, a general overview of Benjamin's work for the invested beginner is an essential aide, and in English-language criticism this book is one of the best commonly available sources you'll find (the forthcoming translation of Uwe Steiner's book, "Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to His Work and Thought," promises to be a valuable counterpoint to this collection).The essays are all by well-known critics of Benjamin's writings - as far as I can tell, only Susan Buck-Morss is missing, but at least she already wrote her own book - so you don't need to worry about being steered wrong here.Personally, I found the essays on language and mimesis (Hanssen), cultural history (Caygill), Romanticism (Comay), and Benjamin's relationships with Brecht and the Frankfurt School (Nägele), as well as the introduction, particularly illuminating.Only the essay on Benjamin and psychoanalysis seemed lacking (if you have to use psychoanalysis to explain why Benjamin didn't use much psychoanalysis, maybe it's time to throw in the towel) - though in all fairness, I'm not much a fan of psychoanalytic theory myself, so take this complaint with a grain of salt.

My only criticism of this volume - and the only reason I withheld a star - is that it really seems to have been rushed through the press, or at least not carefully edited.I spotted a few typos here and there, which ordinarily wouldn't be an issue.However, some of these typos involve references to collections of Benjamin's essays, and if a reference points you to volume 1 of the Selected Writings, but should have pointed you towards volume 2, that could be a problem, especially in Benjamin's case.Besides, it just seems rather careless.If you're reading this, however, I'm guessing you have Benjamin's Selected Writings (published by Harvard's Belknap Press, vols. 1-4) either available or close at hand, so just keep your tables of contents at the ready for easy reference and it shouldn't be too much of a problem.Somewhat more annoyingly, the index is only partially helpful in locating discussions of individual works.For example, I was particularly interested in The Origin of German Tragic Drama while reading through this collection, but while the index doesn't cite any mention of it past page 67, Caygill's essay on Benjamin and cultural history (pp. 73-96), as I found out, has much to say on this particular work.

On the bright side, as I've mentioned already, the real benefit to this volume is the general overview that it gives of Benjamin's writings, so the best idea is to read it cover to cover, which means you'll get to find all the important bits yourself.As long as you're ready for these editorial mishaps, this book should serve you very well. ... Read more

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Walter Benjamin's posthumously published collection of writings on hashish is a detailed blueprint for a book that was never written--a "truly exceptional book about hashish," as Benjamin describes it in a letter to his friend Gershom Scholem. A series of "protocols of drug experiments," written by himself and his co-participants between 1927 and 1934, together with short prose pieces that he published during his lifetime, On Hashish provides a peculiarly intimate portrait of Benjamin, venturesome as ever at the end of the Weimar Republic, and of his unique form of thought.

Consciously placing himself in a tradition of literary drug-connoisseurs from Baudelaire to Hermann Hesse, Benjamin looked to hashish and other drugs for an initiation into what he called "profane illumination." At issue here, as everywhere in Benjamin's work, is a new way of seeing, a new connection to the ordinary world. Under the influence of hashish, as time and space become inseparable, experiences become subtly stratified and resonant: we inhabit more than one plane in time. What Benjamin, in his contemporaneous study of Surrealism, calls "image space" comes vividly to life in this philosophical immersion in the sensuous.

This English-language edition of On Hashish features a section of supplementary materials--drawn from Benjamin's essays, letters, and sketches--relating to hashish use, as well as a reminiscence by his friend Jean Selz, which concerns a night of opium-smoking in Ibiza. A preface by Howard Eiland discusses the leading motifs of Benjamin's reflections on intoxication.

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A revolutionary contact high?
Benjamin aptly describes the bipolar nature of his own intoxicated illumination when he writes that, in "the imagination put in thrall to thinking during hashish intoxication," there are two "different sorts of powers:a genius of melancholy gravity, another of Ariel-like spirituality."Here, first, is an illustration of Benjamin's genius for melancholic heaviness:"In the end, things are merely mannequins, and even the great moments of world history are only costumes beneath which they exchange glaces of complicity with nothingness, with the petty and the banal.Such nihilism is the innermost core of bourgeois coziness -- a mood that in hashish intoxication concentrates to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm..."Here, next, an example of his more uplifting, "Ariel-like spirituality":"Versailles, for one who has taken hashish, is not too large, nor eternity too long.Against the background of these immense dimensions of inner experience, of absolute duration and immeasurable space, a wonderful, beatific humor dwells all the more fondly on the contingencies of the world of space and time."In the end, sadly, the darkness seems to have won out over the light in Bejamin's own life, but one wonders whether that fate would have been averted had he not lived through such dark days?Still, Benjamin believed in the revolutionary potential of the experiences he describes in this book to lighten the times, and he came to advocate a "profane illumination" that would be capable of recapturing the transformative insights hashish (and also opium and mescaline) afforded without continually requiring the drugs themselves.Such ideas seem to me to be well worth pondering.

This is wonderful, nostalgia-inducing, provocative collection of Benjamin's waking dreams and wandering reflections.

Metaphysical Giggles
I bought this book because it came as a bit of a shock to me that the uptight highbrow metaphysician, Walter Benjamin, had experimented with hashish.I knew, as one does, about his suicide by taking a morphine tablet.But I imagined that this was a one time thing, done as a way of escaping Nazi arrest.

Well, what do we get when a rather tedious, uptight German metaphysician smokes some pot? An uptight, convoluted, ponderous description of it.German philosophers tend to write this way you know, as any reader who has had to plough through Kant and Hegel is well aware.

In today's era, when every other suburban housewife smokes a joint from time to time, all these "insights" cited by the editorials seem more than absurd.They rise to the level of high camp.All this convoluted, philosophical introspection to describe the increase in appetite-You know, getting the "munchies"-almost made me titter aloud, as Benjamin does when he ingests the drug, and acts as if this is some profound revelation about the absurdity of existence.I'm sure we all remember those dorm room giggles.

Yes, one can argue that this is a jaded age and that our familiarity with all these effects does not vitiate a profound philosopher's insights.I wouldn't want to argue it though.
This age is not any more jaded than the one in which Benjamin took his life rather than be captured by the mass murderers unleashed throughout Europe at the time.And his insights are not profound.They're typical of German metaphysical twaddle, and, as such, excruciatingly tedious and boring.

Maybe there is somebody out there who would appreciate this book, some pale admirer of the German metaphysicians who is still rereading Hegel to unlock his insights. They don't exist - that goes for Benjamin as well as Hegel.
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