Book Description
Walter Benjamin was one of the most original cultural critics of the twentieth century.Illuminations includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater.Also included are his penetrating study "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode, and Benjamin's theses on the philosophy of history.

Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and introduces them with a classic essay about Benjamin's life in dark times.Also included is a new preface by Leon Wieseltier that explores Benjamin's continued relevance for our times. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (12)

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. 3 is the final 1936 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.

Indispensable reading


Benjamin is arguably the twentieth century's most important thinker--if there is anything left to say about our lives, it is surely in this book. ... Read more

Book Description
An absorbing selection of Walter Benjamin's personal manuscripts, images, and documents from his own collection.

The works of the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin are a reservoir of texts, commentaries, scraps and fragments of everyday life, arts and dreams. This beautifully designed book gives an insight into Benjamin's habits of collecting and archiving through some of his most personal documents. From notebooks in which every conceivable space is covered with handwriting, and a heartfelt traveller's series of postcards, to a sequence of Benjamin's own photographs, and lists that include a collection of his son Stefan's early words and sentences, this wonderful collection testifies to Benjamin's complex and kaleidoscopic passion for the ephemera of human life. Illustrated throughout in color and b/w. ... Read more

Book 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.

Book Description

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.

Book 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. ... Read more

Book Description

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.

Customer Reviews (1)

Beware of the translation
Harvard is doing non-German speakers a great service by compiling all of these essential essays in chronological order. I am baffled, however, that some of the translations are so inaccurate. Non-German readers should know that there are egregious errors in some of these translations, especially those by Rodney Livingstone. I have compared one of his translations closely with the original German and was shocked to find so many inaccuracies. In one sentence Livingstone translates into English the *exact* opposite of what Benjamin actually writes. He doesn't just get the wrong word (as he does elsewhere); he composes a sentence that is the precise negation of what Benjamin wrote. This is very worrisome and does not bode well for the rest of the volume. I have not closely compared the majority of the volume to the original-- I don't have the time for that. But from the little evidence I found in just a few hours it looks bad indeed. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Do you really want to listen to a cranky old man ramble onabout his childhood, his heart surgery, his hobbies, his son, and the way things,in general, aren't what they used to be? It turns out you do. In Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Larry McMurtry comes the old pardner,and the result is a powerful elegy for the lost spaces in American life. He takes as his starting point an afternoon he spent at the Dairy Queen in Archer City, Texas, reading the pensées of early 20th-century Germanphilosopher Walter Benjamin. At the time Benjamin was writing, McMurtry's grandparentswere settling dusty reaches of west Texas, and McMurtry crosscuts neatly between Benjamin's spent, smoky Europe and his own grandparents' America:"While my grandparents were dealing with almost absolute emptiness, both socialand cultural, Europe was approaching an absolute (and perhaps intolerable) density." McMurtry demonstrates a confidence almost bordering onnaiveté in the way he appropriates the great thinking of Europe and applies itto his own history. He apologizes neither to the highfalutin Europeans nor to the down-home Americans, but makes them lie down together any way hesees fit. This brio makes Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen athrilling read.

McMurtry's book-length essay loops outward from Archer City to encompass a polemic against computers, a foray into the world of book collecting, a family biography, an account of his soul-loss after heart surgery, and finally an elegy for the cowboy. This last lament casts a shadow back over whatwe've read. Not just over this book, but over McMurtry's whole body of work. A man who's lived his whole life in print gives us a glimpse ofwhat has fed him, and, strangely, it's loss. "Because of when and where Igrew up, on the Great Plains just as the herding tradition was beginning tolose its vitality, I have been interested all my life in vanishing breeds." The master of storytelling is finally revealed as a master of melancholy. --Claire DedererBook Description
In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction -- as close to an autobiography as his readers are likely to get -- Larry McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a larger portrait of Texas itself, as it was and as it has become.

Using as a springboard an essay by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin that he first read in Archer City's Dairy Queen, McMurtry examines the small-town way of life that big oil and big ranching have nearly destroyed. He praises the virtues of everything from a lime Dr. Pepper to the lost art of oral storytelling, and describes the brutal effect of the sheer vastness and emptiness of the Texas landscape on Texans, the decline of the cowboy, and the reality and the myth of the frontier.

McMurtry writes frankly and with deep feeling about his own experiences as a writer, a parent, and a heart patient, and he deftly lays bare the raw material that helped shape his life's work: the creation of a vast, ambitious, fictional panorama of Texas in the past and the present. Throughout, McMurtry leaves his readers with constant reminders of his all-encompassing, boundless love of literature and books.

... Read more

Customer Reviews (31)

A literate and thoughtful "memoir"
Written when McMurtry was 62, WALTER BENJAMIN AT THE DAIRY QUEEN is probably best classified as a memoir, although it is not presented as such.Rather, the construct (perhaps "artifice" is the more apt word) is McMurtry sitting in the Dairy Queen in hometown Archer City, Texas reading an essay on storytelling by Walter Benjamin, which then prompts McMurtry to reflect on and then pass along some of the stories of his life.This Dairy Queen/Walter Benjamin construct comes across as a tad contrived, maybe a little too self-consciously "artsy," but on the whole the stories McMurtry tells are well worth listening to.

The two principle subjects of the book (tracking, one assumes, the two principle preoccupations of McMurtry's life) are (i) the American West -- including that pocket of the West local to Archer County, Texas where McMurtry grew up and his grandparents were pioneering settlers -- and (ii) books, reading, and writing.Throughout the book, seamlessly interwoven with reflections about larger themes such as the West, the doomed and mythical cowboy, and literature are themes or events personal to McMurtry, such as growing up on a hard-scrabble North Texas ranch, his father, going in his teens to the big city and later Rice University, returns to Archer City relating to "The Last Picture Show", and his quadruple-bypass surgery and its extended psychic aftermath.

I see that previous reviews have characterized McMurtry as "crusty" or "cranky," which in my view does him and the book a disservice.Without any obvious effort to ingratiate himself with the reader, McMurtry comes off as personable and likeable.It is not much of a stretch to envision him actually relating these stories and reflections after the meal around a dining room table or maybe even a campfire (albeit not any Dairy Queen of my experience). Yes, in such circumstances McMurtry probably would tend to monopolize the discussion, but he knows more than most of us and, as his fiction suggests, he is a better storyteller than most.

I vascillate between giving the book 4 or 5 stars.If possible, I would settle on 4.5.Because that's not possible, I am rounding up to 5.

My Nile
Larry McMurtry is, as Proust and Virginia Woolf are to him, my Nile of literature.The quality of his prolific output has been inconsistent, but I find myself constantly returning to his work.Like all writers, McMurtry has his faults.But he is the best I have encountered in warding off, to paraphrase Harold Bloom, that dark inertia to which we are all susceptible.

One of McMurtry's rare pieces of non-fiction, this is an intensely readable book - intentionally so, it seems, following the path of the oral tradition.McMurtry mourns the demise of this tradition, while at the same time seeking to find the positive in the historical developments that have killed it.McMurtry's yarns describe his childhood, his discovery of books, and his bouts with depression, including his ruminations on literature's place in his life, and his life's place in this country's physical, historical, and literary landscape.

All of the tributary themes of the book join together as the book progresses, through McMurtry's own White and Blue Nile of Proust (who I personally like) and Woolf (with whom I have never been able to connect)and into a general inspiration to literature.McMurtry says that he early identified books as the central and stable activity in his life.This book is a testament to the joys and comforts of doing the same.

As close to a personal memoir as we get with McMurtry
Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond by Larry McMurtry. Larry McMurtry was influenced by an essay he first read in a Texas Dairy Queen by Walter Benjamin. The essay he was reading was about the dissipation of memory and the loss of narrative power in fiction today.

Larry McMurtry writes about growing up on a ranch in Archer City, Texas. He shares discovering reading and books as a teen, going to college at Rice University, knowing virtually nothing about literature, transferring to North Texas State University to finish his bachelor's degree as a workaround for a troublesome Rice professor, and then doing his Master's at Rice University.

He tells some about writing, his love for books that leads to his becoming a book scout and antiquarian book dealer. Across from the Archer City court house he has a giant bookstore containing a quarter-million used books, and the dying legacy of the cowboy. He shares little about his personal life except his love for reading and his quadruple bypass surgery which was very traumatic. It may be as close to a personal memoir as we get with McMurtry. The work is well written, wide, but not deep. We do not get to know McMurty at a level most would like to experience.

Read and reviewed by Jimmie A. Kepler.

Very Enjoyable
This sat on my shelf for years and I finally pulled it down. I'm glad I did. He expounds on aging, the west, books, his own writing, and reading. His writing is conversational and comfortable. Very enjoyable!

A Life Explained in Detail.
In this melancholy memorir of sorts, he reminates about his life growing up on the Great Plains in small-town Texas, about the vast emptiness of the Texas landscape and it effect it has on the natives.There is a vast loneliness and he feels he has been born too late so he develops an interest in vanishing breeds.The Old West has come and gone.Some time ago, I reviewed his book, THE COLONEL AND LITTLE MISSIE.

He extolls the virtues of the Archer City Dairy Queen (no where else to go back then (we still have some of those places here in Knoxville) in the Eighties where he'd go to read as he drank a strasnge concoction of Dr. Pepper with lime. Now, you can get a lime Slushie with a real cherry at Sonic, the drive-in of today.

He'd started on a translation of the German philosophre, Walter Benjamin's 'Illuminations,' a group of essays.He particularly liked "The Storyteller," and refers to it often as he thinks back on his life "to think about place, his life, literature and his relation to it."For twenty-five years, he has been telling his stories in book form, some of which were turned into movies, like LONESOME DOVE, THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, BUFFALO GIRLS and TERMS OF ENDEARMENT.

He compares Benjamin's life in Europe with that of his grandparents settling in Texas, "while my grandparents were dealing with vast emptiness...Europe was approaching density (absolute and perhaps intolerable." There is no comparison, as they were on completely opposite polars.

He'd gone on a lifelong quest to study European literature to learn their culture that spawned his own pioneer family, a quest which comes full circle, with his reminiscences for this book.He loves to remind folks of the way things used to be and this erudite elegy for the lost paces in American life and of the cowboy" comes forefront.He doesn't care much for Paul Theroux's early mentor, V. S. Pritchett.

He gives an intelligent assessment of his career and the demise of oral storytelling.He promotes the need for reading and appreciated the works of Proust.He comes across as a bitter, cranky old man as he tells about his childhood and feeling 'soul-less' after his heart surgery.He's had a great career studing life and writing some strange novels.Some others are THE EVENING STAR, TEXASVILLE, and STREETS OF LOREDO. ... Read more

Amazon.com
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. Book Description

"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.

Customer Reviews (6)

Das Passagen-Werk (Spanish)
"La huella es la manifestación de una cercanía, por lejos que esté lo que abandona. El aura es la manifestación de una lejanía, por cerca que esté lo que la motiva.En la huella nos apoderamos de la cosa; en el aura ella nos domina." Esta sentencia de Walter Benjamin en LA OBRA DE LOS PASAJES/THE ARCADES PROJECT hace pensar en el proceso acelerado conque la industria a partir del siglo XIX instaura una época caracterizada por la manifestación de esta cercanía debido al consumo y a la accesibilidad masiva de los objetos considerados antes lejanos como el arte culto, por ejemplo.El Passagen-Werk está dedicado a hacer una arqueología de la cultura moderna a través de un diagnóstico sobre la historia y conseguir ver la actualidad del siglo XIX hoy y Benjamin encuentra el origen de la cultura de masas contemporánea en el París del siglo XIX. Así, en el siglo pasado se consiguió, de manera creciente, la destrucción de las relaciones simbolicas y la progresiva desmitifcacion de lo antes considerado sacro mediante la producción creciente de mercancías para el consumo inmediato como la masificación del arte; pero, también, en el siglo pasado, se restableció también nuevas relaciones míticas en el ensueño colectivo de la sociedad de consumo: la glorificación de la industria en las Exposiciones Universales, en los Pasajes, la concepción populista de la política, la exhibición del progreso nacional y la novedad mercantil.Lo simbólico se transformó en fetiche porque cuando antes la legitimidad provenía de la naturaleza tanto en el arte como en las relaciones sociales, es decir, la tradición que progresivamente transforma las convenciones en órdenes naturales; en la industria, la legitimidad proviene precisamente de la idea del progreso, la transformación de la vieja naturaleza mediante la técnica y su consecuente vencimiento para la comodidad de los hombres. Sin embargo, la sacralziacion de la experiencia industrial que se consigue con el consumo mercantil y con la concepción positivista e historicista del progreso informará tanto la ideología de masas como la filosofía culta: el positivismo de Comte y el historicismo de Hegel.La idea de la evolución social, en efecto, glorificaba el curso empírico de la historia humana y daba, en el siglo XIX, justificación filosófica al ordo capitalista.Tomando de Darwin, los filósofos de la época transformaban su teoría de la selección natural en dogma social por el cual, la competencia, en este caso, de clases, era, por supuesto, un hecho natural.Este ejemplo ideológico es excelente para demostrar la reauratización de la vida social.La naturaleza, negada y vencida en la industria, vuelve como referente de legitimación.Sin embargo, bajo el progreso aparente, se esconde la barbarie más profunda, puesto que un estado prehistórico de salvajismo se transcribe en el medio económico de la competencia. La huella trata de encontrar los orígenes históricos del presente; el aura, al contrario, trata de instaurar una naturalización del presente; así como aquella trata de volver cercano el objeto que va desapareciendo en la historia pero para mirarlo con otros ojos, ésta última intenta volver lo presente, lejano, inaccesible, investido con el aura del fetiche mágico.La huella intenta historizar la naturaleza, el aura, naturalizar la historia.Esta dialéctica aplicada a la mercancía se formularía así: en el aura, la mercancía se entiende como alma, fetiche; en la huella, como proceso industrial por el cual los consumidores se identifican entre ellos.La huella no es solamente polemizar contra la barbarie sino demostrar que, aún más, la nueva naturaleza es más transitoria que la anterior. En la huella la discontinuidad del tiempo histórico es afirmada en el sentido que ésta trata de actualizar un objeto que está siendo consumido por la tradición histórica para revelar lo actual que éste posee y, de esta manera, demostrar que la originariedad de los fenómenos modernos residen ya en los objetos despassés. Esta busqueda por las huellas ideologicas de la sociedad industrial avanzada es el objetivo central de Walter Benjamin en esta obra monumental.

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.

NY Times Review
Herbert Muschamp, the NY Times architectural critic, has written an interesting article about Benjamin and his Paris project which appears in the Arts & Leisure section on January 16, 2000. While not strictlyspeaking a book review it nevertheless offers some observations as to thecultural importance of Benjamin's chef d'oevre. Another book on the ArcadesProject isSusan Buck-Morss's 'The Dialectics of Seeing' (MIT 1989, 1991,1997). ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description
A companion volume to Illuminations, the first collection of Walter Benjamin's writings, Reflections presents a further sampling of his wide-ranging work.Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin.He moves seamlessly from literary criticism to autobiography to philosophical-theological speculations, cementing his reputation as one of the greatest and most versatile writers of the twentieth century.Also included is a new preface by Leon Wieseltier that explores Benjamin's continued relevance for our times. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

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.

He was really a pretty funny guy if you give him a chance...
"Walter Benjamin is now recognized as one of the most accute analysts of literary and sociological phenomena of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A companion volume to Illuminations, the earlier collection ofBenjamin's writings, Reflections presents a new sampling of hiswide-ranging work. In addition to literary criticism, it containsautobiograohical narration and travel pieces, aphorisms, andphilosophical-theological speculations. Most of Benjamin's writings onBrecht and his celebrated essay on Karl Kraus are included."

Enjoycharming anecdotes like "Hashish in Marseilles" and the sardonicincites of "One-Way Street" (Germans, Drink German Beer!) as youperuse the timeless thoughts of a persecuted man. ... Read more

Book Description
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

Book Description
This book follows the life and work of this prominent critical theorist, 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

Amazon.com
A leading German critic from the generation of Europeans scarred by the First World War, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) had a writing career marked by deep philosophical insights and tumultuous emotional crises. But until recently, most of his work was unavailable in English; the handful of essays that could be read in English, like "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," were undisputed classics, but the full spectrum of Benjamin's thought remained untapped. That has changed with Harvard University's publication of the multivolume Selected Writings. This second volume covers Benjamin's work from 1927 to 1934, the period in which he established himself as a leading public intellectual, and encompasses a wide variety of literary forms addressing an even wider variety of subject matter. From interviews with André Gide to film reviews of work by Chaplin and Eisenstein, from the autobiographical recollections of "A Berlin Chronicle" to his reflections on the cultural nostalgia for children's literature and toys, Benjamin wrote with perception and unflagging inquisitiveness. The editors have provided a chronological essay, which helps place the assembled writings in the context of Benjamin's life; the collection considered as a whole will undoubtedly be of vital importance to any scholar of modern European philosophy. Book Description

In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mourning political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of Selected Writings, covering the years 1927 to 1934, displays the full spectrum of Benjamin's achievements at this pivotal stage in his career.

Previously concerned chiefly with literary theory, Benjamin during these Years does pioneering work in new areas, from the stud of popular Culture (a discipline he virtually created) to theories of the media and the visual arts. His writings on the theory of modernity-most of them new to readers of English--develop ideas as important to an understanding of the twentieth century as an contained in his widely anthologiied essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility.

This volume brings together previously untranslated writings on major figures such as Brecht, Valéry and Gide, and on subjects ranging from film, radio, and the novel to memory, kitsch, and the theory of language. We find the manifoldly inquisitive Benjamin musing on the new modes of perception opened tip by techniques of photographic enlargement and cinematic montage, on the life and work of & Goethe at Weimar, on the fascination of old toys and the mysteries of food, and on the allegorical significance of Mickey Mouse.

Customer Reviews (2)

Beware of translation
Harvard is doing non-German speakers a great service by compiling all of these essential essays in chronological order. I am baffled, however, that some of the translations are so inaccurate. Non-German readers should know that there are egregious errors in some of these translations, especially those by Rodney Livingstone. I have compared one of his translations closely with the original German and was shocked to find so many inaccuracies. In one sentence Livingstone translates into English the *exact* opposite of what Benjamin actually writes. He doesn't just get the wrong word (as he does elsewhere); he composes a sentence that is the precise negation of what Benjamin wrote. This is very worrisome and does not bode well for the rest of the volume. I have not closely compared the majority of the volume to the original-- I don't have the time for that. But from the little evidence I found in just a few hours it looks bad indeed.

the triumph of silent cinema
An excellent book, finally Banjamin on photography and cinema is available in english. Reading his essay on Chaplin is extremely illuminating concerning the question of the passage from silent film to sound film. His concept of critique, as well as his concept of "making history"lies in this text. ... Read more

Book Description
Long considered to be an impenetrable, hermetic treatise, Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama has rarely received the attention it deserves as a key text, central to a full understanding of his work. In this critically acclaimed study, distinguished Benjamin scholar Beatrice Hanssen unlocks the philosophical and ethical dimensions of his thought with great clarity and sophisitication.
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Book Description
The Origin of German Tragic Drama is generally acknowledged as Benjamin's most sustained and original work and as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century. It begins with a general theoretical introductions 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. Later, Benjamin discusses the engravings of Dürer, and the theatre of Shakespeare and Calderón. Baroque tragedy, he argues was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

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

Book Description

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.

Book Description

Book Description

Begun in Poveromo, Italy, in 1932, and extensively revised in 1938, Berlin Childhood around 1900 remained unpublished during Walter Benjamin's lifetime, one of his "large-scale defeats." Now translated into English for the first time in book form, on the basis of the recently discovered "final version" that contains the author's own arrangement of a suite of luminous vignettes, it can be more widely appreciated as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century prose writing.

Not an autobiography in the customary sense, Benjamin's recollection of his childhood in an upper-middle-class Jewish home in Berlin's West End at the turn of the century becomes an occasion for unified "expeditions into the depths of memory." In this diagram of his life, Benjamin focuses not on persons or events but on places and things, all seen from the perspective of a child--a collector, flaneur, and allegorist in one.

This book is also one of Benjamin's great city texts, bringing to life the cocoon of his childhood--the parks, streets, schoolrooms, and interiors of an emerging metropolis. It reads the city as palimpsest and labyrinth, revealing unexpected lyricism in the heart of the familiar.

As an added gem, a preface by Howard Eiland discusses the genesis and structure of the work, which marks the culmination of Benjamin's attempt to do philosophy concretely.

Book Description

Walter Benjamin's essays on the great French lyric poet Charles Baudelaire revolutionized not just the way we think about Baudelaire, but our understanding of modernity and modernism as well. In these essays, Benjamin challenges the image of Baudelaire as late-Romantic dreamer, and evokes instead the modern poet caught in a life-or-death struggle with the forces of the urban commodity capitalism that had emerged in Paris around 1850. The Baudelaire who steps forth from these pages is the flâneur who affixes images as he strolls through mercantile Paris, the ragpicker who collects urban detritus only to turn it into poetry, the modern hero willing to be marked by modern life in its contradictions and paradoxes. He is in every instance the modern artist forced to commodify his literary production: "Baudelaire knew how it stood with the poet: as a flâneur he went to the market; to look it over, as he thought, but in reality to find a buyer." Benjamin reveals Baudelaire as a social poet of the very first rank.

The introduction to this volume presents each of Benjamin's essays on Baudelaire in chronological order. The introduction, intended for an undergraduate audience, aims to articulate and analyze the major motifs and problems in these essays, and to reveal the relationship between the essays and Benjamin's other central statements on literature, its criticism, and its relation to the society that produces it.

Customer Reviews (1)

Benjamin On Baudelaire
It is difficult to review a book that, however important, one disagrees with so profoundly. Walter Benjamin, an early 20th century (between WWI and WWII) German socialist, is justifiably considered one of the most influential critics of Baudelaire. But reading his essays with an open mind (honest!), all I could think of was how silly those old-time, Marxist and Freudian notions appeared to me, and how little they illuminated Baudelaire's poetry for a 21st-century reader.

On the good side, Michael Jennings' editorship is superb: the best modern scholar of Benjamin, he's given us an excellent redaction of Benjamin's German text into modern English, with fine and clear translations by several authors and a complete and illuminating 80 pages worth of notes.

Anyone who really loves poetry should avoid, at any cost, contaminating their minds with 20th century lit crit. But if, for whatever reason, you can't help yourself, and you absolutely must have an English translation of Walter Benjamin's essays on Baudelaire, then this is the edition to get!

... Read more