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This book provides a highly original approach to the writings of the twentieth-century German philosopher Walter Benjamin by one of his most distinguished readers. It develops the idea of "working with" Benjamin, seeking both to read his corpus and to put it to work - to show how a reading ofBenjamin can open up issues that may not themselves be immediately at stake in his texts.The defining elements in Benjamin's writings that Andrew Benjamin isolates - history, experience, translation, technical reproducibility and politics - are put to work; that is, their utility is established in engaging the works of others. The question is how utility is understood. As AndrewBenjamin argues, utility involves demonstrating the different ways in which Benjamin is a central thinker within the project of understanding the nature of modernity. This is best achieved by noting connections and points of differentiation between his work and the writings of Adorno and Heidegger.However, the more demanding project is that "working with" Benjamin necessitates deploying the implicit assumptions within his writings as well as demanding of his formulations more than is provided by their initial presentation. What is at stake is not the application of Benjamin's thought. Ratherwhat counts is its use.Working with Benjamin engages with the themes central to Benjamin's work with deftness, daring and critical insight while at the same time situating those themes within current academic and cultural debates.
This book provides a highly original approach to the writings of the twentieth-century German philosopher Walter Benjamin by one of his most distinguished readers. It develops the idea of 'working with' Benjamin, seeking both to read his corpus and to put it to work - to show how a reading of Benjamin can open up issues that may not themselves be immediately at stake in his texts. The defining elements in Benjamin's writings that Andrew Benjamin isolates - history, experience, translation, technical reproducibility and politics - are put to work; that is, their utility is established in engaging the works of others. The question is how utility is understood. As Andrew Benjamin argues, utility involves demonstrating the different ways in which Benjamin is a central thinker within the project of understanding the nature of modernity. This is best achieved by noting connections and points of differentiation between his work and the writings of Adorno and Heidegger. However, the more demanding project is that 'working with' Benjamin necessitates deploying the implicit assumptions within his writings as well as demanding of his formulations more than is provided by their initial presentation. What is at stake is not the application of Benjamin's thought. Rather what counts is its use.Working with Benjamin engages with the themes central to Benjamin's work with deftness, daring and critical insight while at the same time situating those themes within current academic and cultural debates.
This book provides a highly original approach to the writings of the twentieth-century German philosopher Walter Benjamin by one of his most distinguished readers. It develops the idea of "e;working with"e; Benjamin, seeking both to read his corpus and to put it to work - to show how a reading of Benjamin can open up issues that may not themselves be immediately at stake in his texts. The defining elements in Benjamin's writings that Andrew Benjamin isolates - history, experience, translation, technical reproducibility and politics - are put to work; that is, their utility is established in engaging the works of others. The question is how utility is understood. As Andrew Benjamin argues, utility involves demonstrating the different ways in which Benjamin is a central thinker within the project of understanding the nature of modernity. This is best achieved by noting connections and points of differentiation between his work and the writings of Adorno and Heidegger. However, the more demanding project is that 'working with' Benjamin necessitates deploying the implicit assumptions within his writings as well as demanding of his formulations more than is provided by their initial presentation. What is at stake is not the application of Benjamin's thought. Rather what counts is its use. Working with Benjamin engages with the themes central to Benjamin's work with deftness, daring and critical insight while at the same time situating those themes within current academic and cultural debates.
Despite being contemporaries, Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger never directly engaged with one another. Yet, Hannah Arendt, who knew both men, pointed out common ground between the two. Both were concerned with the destruction of metaphysics, the development of a new way of reading and understanding literature and art, and the formulation of radical theories about time and history. On the other hand, their life trajectories and political commitments were radically different. In a 1930 letter, Benjamin told a friend that he had been reading Heidegger and that if the two were to engage with one another, "sparks will fly." Acknowledging both their affinities and points of conflict, this volume stages that confrontation, focusing in particular on temporality, Romanticism, and politics in their work.
Fifty years after his death, Walter Benjamin remains one of the great cultural critics of this century. Despite his renown, however, Benjamin's philosophical ideas remain elusive--often considered a disaggregated set of thoughts not meant to cohere. This book provides a more systematic perspective on Benjamin, laying claim to his status as a philosopher and situating his work in the context of its time. Exploring Benjamin's theory of language, spoken and nonspoken, Rainer Rochlitz shows how Benjamin reconceptualized traditional ideas of language, art, and history. Offering an expansive assessment of a unique twentieth-century thinker, this volume provides an indispensable guide for readers of Benjamin's recently released collected works.
This collection explores, in Adorno's description, `philosophy directed against philosophy'. The essays cover all aspects of Benjamin's writings, from his early work in the philosophy of art and language, through to the concept of history. The experience of time and the destruction of false continuity are identified as the key themes in Benjamin's understanding of history.
Tracing Walter Benjamin's convergences with, and divergences from, influential German legal theorist Carl Schmitt, this edited collection contextualizes Benjamin's thinking in the intellectual currents of his time, while also placing him in dialogue with traditions and thinkers from antiquity to the present. At stake is whether Benjamin presents the possibility of a distinctive political theology-a question which the collection addresses without collapsing the tensions internal to Benjamin's thought. Benjamin's thought has been a touchstone, explicitly or implicitly, in numerous efforts to conceive of a 'new' political theology that is not anchored in legitimizing and preserving power, but in justice and liberation. Benjamin interrogates the political-theological complex from what may be construed as a vantage point opposed to Schmitt. Whereas Schmitt excavates the theological elements in modernity in order to shore up liberalism's illiberal inheritance, Benjamin roots out these latent structures in order to dissolve them and liberate us from their oppressive legacy. This volume's multifaceted contributions explore why Benjamin has been such a fertile source for thinking about political theology beyond – and often against – Schmitt. Benjamin indicates how existing political theologies can be challenged or expanded. This book accordingly makes a wide range of relevant work available for study whilst also opening new perspectives on Benjamin's œuvre.
This book provides a study of Walter Benjamin’s first philosophy in two senses: it focuses on his early philosophy as a source of insight into his later works, and it explores his thinking about the nature of truth, method, experience, the relation of body and mind, and the limits of human knowledge. While most attention is paid to Benjamin’s later works, his writings from roughly 1914-1925 explore philosophical themes and develop a critical method. This book argues that this early work founds a series of original and lasting questions and insights. Benjamin understands experience as a broken continuum of diverse forms of spiritual expression, each of which is ephemeral. This leads Benjamin to a series of thought figures: the notion of language as a medium of experience; a philosophy of perception based in the natural history of the human body; an emphasis on mimesis as a faculty of creative assimilation; and a discovery of memory as a power for excavation of meaning in past experience. This book demonstrates that the need for a new understanding of the metaphysical structure of experience, as well as a new conception of truth, play a special role in shaping Benjamin’s subsequent work. Walter Benjamin’s First Philosophy will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on the thought of Walter Benjamin, 20th-century Continental philosophy, comparative literature, and modern German thought.
The first book to examine in detail Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History Benjamin's collection of fragments, Theses on the Philosophy of History, play a determining role in how Benjamin's thought is understood, as well as in the debate about the interplay between politics, history and time. Walter Benjamin and History is the first volume to give access to the themes and problems raised by the Theses, providing valuable exegetical and historical work on the text. The essays collected here are all the work of noted Benjamin scholars, and pursue the themes central to the Theses.
This book provides a critical assessment of Benjamin’s writings on Franz Kafka and of Benjamin’s related writings. Eliciting from Benjamin’s writings a conception of philosophy that is political in its dissociation from – its becoming renegade in relation to, its philosophic shame about – established laws, norms, and forms, the book compares Benjamin’s writings with relevant works by Agamben, Heidegger, Levinas, and others. In relating Benjamin’s writings on Kafka to Benjamin’s writings on politics, the study delineates a philosophic impetus in literature and argues that this impetus has potential political consequences. Finally, the book is critical of Benjamin’s messianism insofar as it is oriented by the anticipated elimination of exceptions and distractions. Exceptions and distractions are, the book argues, precisely what literature, like other arts, brings to the fore. Hence the philosophic, and the political, importance of literature.