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Walter Benjamin is universally recognised as one of the key thinkers ofmodernity: his writings on politics, language, literature, media, theologyand law have had an incalculable influence on contemporary thought. Yet theproblem of architecture in and for Benjamin's work remains relativelyunderexamined. Does Benjamin's project have an architecture and, if so, howdoes this architecture affect the explicit propositions that he offers us?In what ways are Benjamin's writings centrally caught up with architecturalconcerns, from the redevelopment of major urban centres to the movementsthat individuals can make within the new spaces of modern cities? How canBenjamin's theses help us to understand the secret architectures of thepresent? This volume takes up the architectural challenge in a number ofinnovative ways, collecting essays by both well-known and emerging scholarson time in cinema, the problem of kitsch, the design of graves and tombs,the orders of road-signs, childhood experience in modern cities, and muchmore. Engaged, interdisciplinary, bristling with insights, the essays inthis collection will constitute an indispensable supplement to the work ofWalter Benjamin, as well as providing a guide to some of the obscurities ofour own present. ... Read more

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Bringing together the best critical essays on one of the mostfascinating literary figures of our time, this book immediately takesits place as a major secondary source for Benjamin scholarship.

Hannah Arendt call Walter Benjamin "the outstanding literarycritic of the twentieth century," and his reputation has grown steadilysince she introduced him to English-language readers in 1968 with theselection of essays entitled Illuminations. Although thetranslation of his work into English has been slow in coming, Benjaminhas become something of a literary legend; the legend encompasses bothhis life and his work--a diverse and thoughtful series of writings onart, culture, and society--and the tragic circumstances surrounding hissuicide at Port Bou in 1940.

The twelve critical essays collected here are by contemporaries ofBenjamin as well as by younger scholars. Covering the full range of hisinterests, from hashish to Goethe to the modern city, they includeimportant essays by Gershom Scholem, Jürgen Habermas, and CharlesRosen. There are also several moving and evocative recollections ofBenjamin by friends and colleagues such as Theodor Adorno and ErnstBloch. Each essay is introduced by the editor. ... Read more

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In light of the legendary difficulty of Walter Benjamin's works, it is a strange and intriguing fact that from 1929 to 1933 the great critic and cultural theorist wrote--and broadcast--numerous scripts, on the order of fireside chats, for children.Invited to speak on whatever subject he considered appropriate, Benjamin talked to the children of Frankfurt and Berlin about the destruction of Pompeii, an earthquake in Lisbon, and a railroad disaster at the Firth of Tay.He spoke about bootlegging and swindling, cataclysm and suicide, Faust and Cagliostro.In this first sustained analysis of the thirty surviving scripts, Jeffrey Mehlman demonstrates how Benjamin used the unlikely forum of children's radio to pursue some of his central philosophical and theological concerns.

In Walter Benjamin for Children, readers will encounter a host of intertextual surprises:an evocation of the flooding of the Mississippi informed by the argument of "The Task of the Translator;" a discussion of scams in stamp-collecting that turns into "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction;" a tale of bootlegging in the American South that converges with the best of Benjamin's essays on fiction.Mehlman superimposes a dual series of texts dealing with catastrophe, on the one hand, and fraud, on the other, that resonate with the false- messianic theology of Sabbatianism as it came to focus the attention and enthusiasm of Benjamin's friend Gershom Scholem during the same years.The radio scripts for children, that is, offer an unexpected byway, on the eve of the apocalypse, into Benjamin's messianic preoccupations.

A child's garden of deconstruction, these twenty-minute talks--from the perspective of childhood, before an invisible audience, on whatever happened to cross the critic's mind--are also by their very nature the closest we may ever come to a transcript of a psychoanalysis of Walter Benjamin.Particularly alive to that circumstance, Mehlman explores the themes of the radio broadcasts and brilliantly illuminates their hidden connections to Benjamin's life and work.

This lucid analysis brings to light some of the least researched and understood aspects of Walter Benjamin's thought.It will interest and provoke literary theorists and philosophers of culture, as well as anyone who hopes to understand one of this century's most suggestive and perplexing critics. ... Read more

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Walter Benjamin's magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen-Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form.

Working with Benjamin's vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth.

The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose "materialist metaphysics" he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century "ur-form" of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin's dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time—from air balloons to women's fashions, from Baudelaire's poetry to Grandville's cartoons—as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique.

Buck-Morss plots Benjamin's intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south—Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples—and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of "dialectics at a standstill." She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin's insights but then allows a set of "afterimages" to have the last word.

The Dialectics of Seeing is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Philosophik Genius.
"The Dialectics of Seeing" is an absolutely *superb* book -- possibly the best book on philosophy I have ever read. Not yet having read the Harvard U Press edition of the Arcades Project, I don't really have anybasis for comparing the two works, but it seems to me that Buck-Morss'astonishing (incandescent) use of self-deconstructive and poetic literarytechniques in this tour de force of an "invention" of the ArcadesProject entitles it to rank as at least as dazzling and eye-opening (deepassumption-challenging) as anything else Benjamin himself wrote. Sourcesaren't important; spelling isn't important; pedantry is misleading as acriterion of value. All that matters is that the experience of reading thebook be a dialectical one -- and the experience of reading *this* book*is*. An absolutely incomparable work.

Wonderful
I have to agree with the reader from Los Angeles, and the review of November 28, 1999. This book is a lot of fun! Yes, a peculiar judgement, I know.

I'm not usually a reader of literary scholarship and excavation.(Hey, I'm in the Army and very busy and I don't have much time to read).But there is something about this book which is fascinating and veryintriguing.

Now that "The Arcades Project," Harvard BelknapPress: 1999, has just been published I have been trying to resist buyingthis rather expensive work. But I must say that because of this book I'm"reviewing" here by Susan Buck-Morss , I'm going to have tosuccumb and buy it soon.

Ok, this is not a fancy or insightfulexamination of the "why's" and "wherefore's" on mypart. But I encourage any and all readers to trust their guts onthis...what at first seem opaque and in-accessible, gradually unveilssomething crucial about Benjamin's project for ourselves and our cultural,our History.

I'm thinking now of what it would be like to find out thatwe have been missing something all along.I mean our Western Culture andits great wonders. Perhaps missing something crucial about ourselves.

Maybe this is one way to think of it, reader: and ask yourself thisquestion perhaps. What if what has been shown to us as our history orculture, something we both admire and love, but are at times horrified bycould be like a movie that holds us in its grip.

But imagine this moviehas been worked on over many years, and various editors and directors havechanged hands in the creation of the final, definitive print which will beshown to the rest of us.

Now, imagine that each director, based onhis/her own sense of things, decided what part of the original film hemight keep and which parts he'd destroy.

But some of the editors hated tolet all the spliced out frames be destroyed. And put some of them away in adrawer let's say.

Its kind of like Benjamin was searching the arcades,the hidden passage-ways between buildings and looking in the drawers forthe missing frames and was then trying to figure out where to splice theframes back into the original.

Now, would the reconstructed film ofourselves, our History and Culture make sense to us?If the originalsequence is still inexplicable to us,or long forgotten, then what else istoo late for us...amidst this century's human rubble? Maybe this is onething to value about Susan Buck-Morss' book. Any reader, knowledgeable ornot about this century's intellectual landscape, knows that there issomething missing in this story about ourselves. Something more intolerableand heartbreaking than a few missing frames from a 2 hour movie. There hasbeen a terrible human cost. We know that not all of the story has beenshown. It will be terrible to forget that we have forgotten. Thus, Benjaminwas trying to un-cover something we have all lost. This seems astounding insome way.

I disagree
Buck-Morss is very likely the most insightful and best informed scholar writing on Benjamin (or Adorno) in English today. If there are typos, misspellings, etc., they are more a sign of the declining standards in editing, even at university presses, than any reflection on Buck-Morss' scholarship. She knows the primary and secondary literature and has clearly spent much time with Benjamin's papers and in various archives. Morevoer, having written the best book I know on the philosophical relationship between Adorno and Benjamin, she is clearly well placed to provide insightful analysis the latter's unfinished masterwork. Since the Passagen-Werk is recently available in English ("The Arcades Project," Harvard Belknap Press: 1999), one can judge for oneself the worth of Buck-Morss' reading.

salon scholarship, deeply flawed first summarization
The deeper flaws in this synoptic summary are suggested by the profusion of factual errors: even names are misspelled, confirming the author's overreliance on the assertions of secondary literature without more than asuperficial understanding of the discursive context in which Benjamin'sunfinished magnum opus was prepared.Thus the flood of footnotes, over 100pages of annotation documenting a disappointing hesitance to form opinionsbased upon original research.Fortunately, Benjamin's Paris "ArcadesProject" will be appearing imminently in English translation;unfortunately all the serious scholarship or reflections on this work onlyexists in German or French. ... Read more

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“There is no world of thought that is not a world of language,” Walter Benjamin remarked, “and one only sees in the world what is preconditioned by language.” In this book, Samuel Weber, a leading theorist on literature and media, reveals a new and productive aspect of Benjamin’s thought by focusing on a little-discussed stylistic trait in his formulation of concepts.

Weber’s focus is the critical suffix “-ability” that Benjamin so tellingly deploys in his work. The “-ability” (-barkeit, in German) of concepts and literary forms traverses the whole of Benjamin’s oeuvre, from “impartibility” and “criticizability” through the well-known formulations of “citability,” “translatability,” and, most famously, the “reproducibility” of “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Nouns formed with this suffix, Weber points out, refer to a possibility or potentiality, to a capacity rather than an existing reality. This insight allows for a consistent and enlightening reading of Benjamin’s writings.

Weber first situates Benjamin’s engagement with the “-ability” of various concepts in the context of his entire corpus and in relation to the philosophical tradition, from Kant to Derrida. Subsequent chapters deepen the implications of the use of this suffix in a wide variety of contexts, including Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book, his relation to Carl Schmitt, and a reading of Wagner’s Ring. The result is an illuminating perspective on Benjamin’s thought by way of his language—and one of the most penetrating and comprehensive accounts of Benjamin’s work ever written.

Customer Reviews (1)

seagull-ability
Samuel Weber mentions at the end of this stirring engagement with the writing and thought of Walter Benjamin that this work had a gestation of about forty years. Given the patient teasing of German words and suffixes throughout, of their etymological and allegorical valences, it does not surprise that this book represents a lifetime of work and thought. The book is divided into two main parts: the first explores key forms, stylistic tics and themes in Benjamin's writing, as on media, translation and history. Weber inaugurates the second section, largely readings of Benjamin's readings or readings of others with Benjamin, with a soaring journey through The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1924). The final chapter on "Seagulls" glides the reader to a gently rocking conclusion, allowing one to lean back to better focus on the horizon of one's thoughts. This book is peppered with engagements with other philosophers such as Aristotle, Kant, Deleuze, Schmitt, and Derrida. One chapter possesses the subtitle: "Agamben Reading Benjamin Reading Kafka Reading Cervantes...", perhaps revealing Weber's predilection for provocative synchronic passages. This book revealed a new Benjamin to me and I am grateful for the guiding thoughtfulness of its author. ... Read more

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Suma ethnographica
Certainly Michael Taussig is not used to be quoted as an orthodox fellow. Inside the recent reformulations around the practices made by anthropologists this is one of the most courageous and consistent writing applications, with no easy way out of the proposed questions or resolutions. In few words, not a lazy companion for Walter Benjamim. This specific book is a colection of articles wrote around some concepts suggested in some other writings. Nervous system, mimesis, violence and magic appears in more specific findings, in an almost jornalistic attention, but maintaining a scrupulous guidance of a long stabilshed discipline even in hard propositions of defiance.

It is sure that for an actual generation of ethnographers and carefull readers what is read cannot be considered a handbook or some precise and secure method of "writing culture". Even so any trying of ethnografic protocolized assurance trembles when faced with inconstants chalenges of ways of being-there that so many years have been making company for researchers in field-work. It is precisely that inconstancy and the movement of being-in-and-out-of-fase that Taussig's considerations about mimesis and other concepts compannion that makes the reading so fruitfull. To challenge the forms of ethnography it is not the question of shout in vain but to write it well. ... Read more

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On The Concept of History written by legendary author Walter Benjamin is widely considered to be one of the top 100 greatest books of all time. This great classic will surely attract a whole new generation of readers. For many, On The Concept of History is required reading for various courses and curriculums. And for others who simply enjoy reading timeless pieces of classic literature, this gem by Walter Benjamin is highly recommended. Published by Classic House Books and beautifully produced, On The Concept of History would make an ideal gift and it should be a part of everyone's personal library. ... Read more

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What exactly is this book?
I just got an email from amazon.com announcing this publication, and given the product's description, I was immediately skeptical. (I mean who actually buys a book with a back cover announcing its product as belonging to the "top 100 books of all time"? are they for real??)

What is being published here, if I understand it correctly, is Benjamin's famous "Theses on the Philosophy of History" or "On the Concept of History" (it goes by different names in different translations) under what appears to be no new translator (did they rip this off from a previous translation?); this has been published by many *famous* publishing houses prior to this, and it appears in Harvard's Selected Writings, Vol. 4 (pages 389-400) and the earlier "Illuminations" (ed. Hannah Arendt) collection (pages 253-264). Both translations, I believe, are by Harry Zohn. This work was unpublished in Benjamin's lifetime.

It's hard to believe that these guys are republishing 10 pages of Benjamin's work as a full book, but it's being done! If your a Benjaminian, you'd be immediately skeptical, so this book must be targeted at potential Benjaminians (entering college students) who might need to read this work for a college course...To you, I recommend purchasing one of the volumes which contain *many* of Benjamin's writings, including this one (such as the "Illuminations" mentioned previously), so that you can get a better and broader sense of Benjamin's historical materialism (this one work is often quoted to examine that philosophy, but it is quite enigmatic at points, and is easily illuminated in light of his other, earlier works). The "Illuminations" volume, for example, also contains "The Task of the Translator", "The Image of Proust", "Franz Kafka", "The Storyteller", and "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility".

Basically, you're being ripped off here: if you're just buying (what was once) ten pages republished for 10 dollars, you should really spend the 10 dollars (and maybe a few more) and buy one of Benjamin's collections. ... Read more

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This is a lucid study of Walter Benjamin's lifelong fascination with the city and forms of metropolitan experience, highlighting the relevance of Benjamin's work to our contemporary understanding of modernity. ... Read more

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A wonderful introduction to Benjamin
Beautifully written, provocative and truly mind expanding, Gilloch makes Benjamin not only relevant but necessary.Benjamin like Freud like McLuhan, like Baudrillard invites engagement, welcomes new interpretations, even demands controversy--Gilloch does it all and the read is as substantial as it is rewarding. The book opened doors into Benjamin that I could not pry open alone.In Gilloch's company, I feel I can enter Benjamin's labyrinth confident I'll emerge with a real grasp of the man's intent. ... Read more

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Few twentieth-century thinkers have proven as influential as Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural and literary critic. Richard Wolin's book remains among the clearest and most insightful introductions to Benjamin's writings, offering a philosophically rich exposition of his complex relationship to Adorno, Brecht, Jewish Messianism, and Western Marxism. Wolin provides nuanced interpretations of Benjamin's widely studied writings on Baudelaire, historiography, and art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In a new Introduction written especially for this edition, Wolin discusses the unfinished Arcades Project, as well as recent tendencies in the reception of Benjamin's work and the relevance of his ideas to contemporary debates about modernity and postmodernity. ... Read more

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The essays compiled in this book explore aspects of Walter Benjamin’s discourse that have contributed to the formation of contemporary architectural theories.

Issues such as technology and history have been considered central to the very modernity of architecture, but Benjamin’s reflection on these subjects has elevated the discussion to a critical level. The contributors in this book consider Walter Benjamin's ideas in the context of digitalization of architecture where it is the very technique itself that determines the processes of design and the final form.

This book was published as a special issue of Architectural Theory Review.

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This volume contains a selection of Benjamin's writings, including the set of aphorisms 'One-Way Street', which enables the reader to appreciate the magnitude of his intellectual achievement. ... Read more