Authors: Richard Wolin
ISBN-13: 9780520084001, ISBN-10: 0520084004
Format: Paperback
Publisher: University of California Press
Date Published: March 1994
Edition: 2nd Edition
Richard Wolin is Professor of History at Rice University. His books include The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (1990) and The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism (1992).
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.
Preface | ||
Acknowledgments | ||
A Note on the Translations | ||
A Note on Terminology | ||
Introduction to the Revised Edition | ||
Ch. 1 | Origins | 1 |
Childhood and Autobiography | 1 | |
Youth Movement | 4 | |
Romantic Anticapitalism | 13 | |
Ch. 2 | The Path to Trauerspiel | 29 |
Experience, Kabbalah, and Language | 31 | |
Messianic Time Versus Historical Time | 48 | |
Allegory | 63 | |
Ch. 3 | Ideas and Theory of Knowledge | 79 |
Anti-Historicisim | 79 | |
The Essay as Mediation Between Art and Philosophical Truth | 84 | |
Constellation, Origin, Monad | 90 | |
Ch. 4 | From Messianism to Materialism | 107 |
Radical Communism | 108 | |
One-Way Street and Dialectical Images | 118 | |
Surrealism | 126 | |
Ch. 5 | Benjamin and Brecht | 139 |
"Crude Thinking" | 139 | |
Epic Theater | 148 | |
The Author as Producer | 154 | |
Ch. 6 | The Adorno-Benjamin Dispute | 163 |
The Philosophical Rapprochement Between Benjamin and Adorno in the Early 1930s | 165 | |
The Arcades Expose | 173 | |
Art and Mechanical Reproduction | 183 | |
Methodological Asceticism, Magic and Positivism | 198 | |
Beyond the Dispute | 207 | |
Ch. 7 | Benjamin's Materialist Theory of Experience | 213 |
The Disintegration of Community: Novel versus Story | 218 | |
Baudelaire, Modernity, and Shock Experience | 226 | |
Nonsensuous Correspondences | 239 | |
Ch. 8 | "A l'Ecart de Tous les Courants" | 251 |
Notes | 275 | |
Bibliography | 305 | |
Index | 313 |