The Benjamin Files
- ISBN-10
- 1784783994
- ISBN-13
- 9781784783990
- Category
- Philosophy
- Pages
- 272
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2020-11-03
- Publisher
- Verso Books
- Author
- Fredric Jameson
Description
The Benjamin Files offers a comprehensive new reading of all of Benjamin's major works and a great number of his shorter book reviews, notes and letters. Its premise is that Benjamin was an anti-philosophical, anti-systematic thinker whose conceptual interests also felt the gravitational pull of his vocation as a writer. What resulted was a coexistence or variety of language fields and thematic codes which overlapped and often seemed to contradict each other: a view which will allow us to clarify the much-debated tension in his works between the mystical or theological side of Benjamin and his political or historical inclination. The three-way tug of war over his heritage between adherents of his friends Scholem, Adorno and Brecht, can also be better grasped from this position, which gives the Brechtian standpoint more due than most influential academic studies. Benjamin's corpus is an anticipation of contemporary theory in the priority it gives language and representation over philosophical or conceptual unity; and its political motivations are clarified by attention to the omnipresence of History throughout his writing, from the shortest articles to the most ambitious projects. His explicit program – "to transfer the crisis into the heart of language" or, in other words, to detect class struggle at work in the most minute literary phenomena – requires the reader to translate the linguistic or representational literary issues that concerned him back into the omnipresent but often only implicitly political ones. But the latter are those of another era, to which we must gain access, to use one of Benjamin's favorite expressions.
Get the book
Other editions
Similar books
-
Benjamin's Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque
By Jane O. NewmanIn Benjamin’s Library, Jane O. Newman offers, for the first time in any language, a reading of Walter Benjamin’s notoriously opaque work, Origin of the German Tragic Drama that systematically attends to its place in discussions of the ...
-
Radio Benjamin
By Walter BenjaminFrom your Senff , Michel , or Kohl catalogs you certainly know how much a single one of them can sometimes be worth . The most valuable of them all is not , as most believe , the twopenny “ Post Office ” from Mauritius , but rather a ...
-
One-Way Street: And Other Writings
By Walter BenjaminThis collection, introduced by Susan Sontag, contains the most representative and illuminating selection of his work over a twenty-year period, and thus does full justice to the richness and the multi-dimensional nature of his thought.
-
The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
By Susan Buck-MorssSusan Sontag . Trans . Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter . London : NLB , 1979 . The Origin of German Tragic Drama . Intro . George Steiner . Trans . John Osborne . London : NLB , 1977 . Understanding Brecht . Intro .
-
Allegory and Ideology
By Fredric JamesonFredric Jameson takes on the allegorical form Works do not have meanings, they soak up meanings: a work is a machine for libidinal investments (including the political kind).
-
The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness
By Walter BenjaminThe novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables and riddles in this collection are brought to life by the playful imagery of the modernist artist and Bauhaus figure Paul Klee.
-
Walter Benjamin: A Biography
By Momme BrodersenWalter Benjamin (1892-1940) is now generally recognized as one of the most original and influential thinkers of this century. In Britain and the United States in particular, he has acquired...
-
The Origin of German Tragic Drama
By Walter BenjaminFrom 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 ...
-
Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography
By Bernd WitteBoth concept and method of this procedure are adapted from Carl Schmitt's work Political Theology : Four chapters on the Doctrine of Sovereignty , published in 1922 , to which Benjamin refers several times by citation .
-
How to Be a Revolutionary: A Novel
By C.A. DavidsThe truths unearthed in this manuscript cause her to reckon with her own past, and the long-buried story of what happened to Kay, her fearless, revolutionary friend.