Michael Benjamin's Books

Walter Benjamin's Grave

By: Michael Taussig

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

In September 1940, Walter Benjamin committed suicide in Port Bou on the Spanish-French border when it appeared that he and his travelling partners would be denied passage into Spain in their attempt to escape the Nazis. In 2002, one of anthropology’s—and indeed today’s—most distinctive writers, Michael Taussig, visited Benjamin’s grave in Port Bou. The result is “Walter Benjamin’s Grave,” a moving essay about the cemetery, eyewitness accounts of Benjamin’s border travails, and the circumstances of his demise. It is the most recent of eight revelatory essays collected in this volume of the same name. “Looking over these essays written over the past decade,” writes Taussig, “I think what they share is a love of muted and defective storytelling as a form of analysis. Strange love indeed; love of the wound, love of the last gasp.” Although thematically these essays run the gamut—covering the monument and graveyard at Port Bou, discussions of peasant poetry in Colombia, a pact with the devil, the peculiarities of a shaman’s body, transgression, the disappearance of the sea, New York City cops, and the relationship between flowers and violence—each shares Taussig’s highly individual brand of storytelling, one that depends on a deep appreciation of objects and things as a way to retrieve even deeper philosophical and anthropological meanings. Whether he finds himself in Australia, Colombia, Manhattan, or Spain, in the midst of a book or a beach, whether talking to friends or staring at a monument, Taussig makes clear through these marvelous essays that materialist knowledge offers a crucial alternative to the increasingly abstract, globalized, homogenized, and digitized world we inhabit. Pursuing an adventure that is part ethnography, part autobiography, and part cultural criticism refracted through the object that is Walter Benjamin’s grave, Taussig, with this collection, provides his own literary memorial to the twentieth century’s greatest cultural critic.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

260

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226790002

ISBN 13

9780226790008

Benjamin's Gift

By: Michael Golding

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Benjamin's Gift

By: Michael Golding

A richly crafted novel, here is a tale that is at once the adventure-filled story of an unusual father and son and a front-row view of the momentous events that shaped the 20th century.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

187

Publisher

Grand Central Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

0446930172

ISBN 13

9780446930178

German Idealism and the Jew

The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses

By: Michael Mack

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

German Idealism and the Jew

The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses

By: Michael Mack

In German Idealism and the Jew, Michael Mack uncovers the deep roots of anti-Semitism in the German philosophical tradition. While many have read German anti-Semitism as a reaction against Enlightenment philosophy, Mack instead contends that the redefinition of the Jews as irrational, oriental Others forms the very cornerstone of German idealism, including Kant's conception of universal reason. Offering the first analytical account of the connection between anti-Semitism and philosophy, Mack begins his exploration by showing how the fundamental thinkers in the German idealist tradition—Kant, Hegel, and, through them, Feuerbach and Wagner—argued that the human world should perform and enact the promises held out by a conception of an otherworldly heaven. But their respective philosophies all ran aground on the belief that the worldly proved incapable of transforming itself into this otherworldly ideal. To reconcile this incommensurability, Mack argues, philosophers created a construction of Jews as symbolic of the "worldliness" that hindered the development of a body politic and that served as a foil to Kantian autonomy and rationality. In the second part, Mack examines how Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Franz Rosenzweig, and Freud, among others, grappled with being both German and Jewish. Each thinker accepted the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, in varying degrees, while simultaneously critiquing anti-Semitism in order to develop the modern Jewish notion of what it meant to be enlightened—a concept that differed substantially from that of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Wagner. By speaking the unspoken in German philosophy, this book profoundly reshapes our understanding of it.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

238

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226500942

ISBN 13

9780226500942

Fire Alarm

Reading Walter Benjamin's 'On the Concept of History'

By: Michael Lowy

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Fire Alarm

Reading Walter Benjamin's 'On the Concept of History'

By: Michael Lowy

This illuminating study of Benjamin's final essay helps unlock the mystery of this great philosopher. Revolutionary critic of the philosophy of progress, nostalgic of the past yet dreaming of the future, romantic partisan of materialism-Walter Benjamin is in every sense of the word an "unclassifiable" philosopher. His last text was written in a state of urgency, as he attempted to escape the Gestapo in 1940, before finally committing suicide. "On the Concept of History" is one of the most important philosophical and political writings of the twentieth century, argues Michael Löwy in this scrupulous, clear and fascinating examination. Löwy uses the concept of "elective affinity," the mutual attraction between two cultural figures, derived from the amorous encounter of two souls in Goethe's novel Elective Affinities. Looking in detail at Benjamin's celebrated but often mysterious text, and restoring the philosophical, theological and political context, Löwy strives to understand and highlight the complex relationship between redemption and revolution in Benjamin's philosophy of history.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

172

Publisher

Verso

Published Date

ISBN 10

1844670406

ISBN 13

9781844670406

Gestures of Ethical Life

Reading Hölderlin's Question of Measure After Heidegger

By: David Michael Kleinberg-Levin

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Gestures of Ethical Life

Reading Hölderlin's Question of Measure After Heidegger

By: David Michael Kleinberg-Levin

For Greek antiquity, the question of right or fitting measure constituted the very heart of both ethics and politics. But can the Good of the ethical life and the Justice of the political be reduced to measurement and calculation? If they are matters of measure, are they not also absolutely immeasurable? In critical dialogue with texts by Plato, Hölderlin, Rilke, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Levi, the author argues that the question of measure has become ever more urgent in the context of a modernity pressured by the conditions of a technological economy and a relativism that threatens to destroy a vital sense of moral responsibility and the commitment to justice that underlies the possibility of freedom. Conceived as a task for the “metaphysics” of memory, this book explores the normative problematic of measure, bringing its deeply buried redemptive promise to appearance in our gestures, uses and abuses of the hands, the dialectic of tact, and the manners of social existence.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

540

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804750882

ISBN 13

9780804750882

The Land Boomers

The Complete Illustrated History

By: Michael Cannon

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Land Boomers

The Complete Illustrated History

By: Michael Cannon

Boom or bust? What was the truth of the great land booms that swept Australia in the 1880s and 1890s? How was it that some speculators amassed prodigious fortunes, while others went so spectacularly broke? Seventy years after the events, historian Michael Cannon began sifting through thousands of records and documents, long since filed and forgotten. He pieced together an incredible trail of corruption and roguery, rarely if ever equalled in any parliamentary democracy. When the bare bones of this expos were first published in 1966, it caused an immediate sensation as the forebears of many well-known families were involved. Never before had any Australian historian been able to document such unbridled greed and over-riding ambition. Extended and revised, The Land Boomers is generously illustrated with cartoons, photographs and etchings of the time, and includes an introduction by the author on how he came to research and write the book.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

420

Publisher

Melbourne University Publish

Published Date

ISBN 10

0522846637

ISBN 13

9780522846638

Five Portraits

Modernity and the Imagination in Twentieth-century German Writing

By: Michael André Bernstein

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Five Portraits

Modernity and the Imagination in Twentieth-century German Writing

By: Michael André Bernstein

In the introduction, Bernstein (English, U. of California, Berkeley) describes what he calls the "modernist masterpiece as a distinct and historically circumscribed form." In the five essays that follow, he analyzes the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Celan, Robert Musil, Martin Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin. c. Book News Inc.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

172

Publisher

Northwestern University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0810117746

ISBN 13

9780810117747

On Voluntary Servitude

False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology

By: Michael Rosen

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

On Voluntary Servitude

False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology

By: Michael Rosen

Those who approach the history of political thought must pick their way through a veritable elephant’s graveyard of grand theories. This book is aimed at one of the oldest and grandest of them all: the theory of ideology. The Age of Grand Theory has only recently ended, yet it is already hard to recall how many unquestioningly believed in the idea of ideology as false consciousness, most notably in Karl Marx’s version of that idea. Michael Rosen diagnoses the underlying question to which the theory of ideology was meant to provide the answer: “Why do people accept forms of political domination which it is against their interests to accept?” This book provides a historical and critical analysis of that answer and of the way in which it came to be taken for granted in social theory. Rosen’s post-mortem makes it clear that Marx was never able to develop an adequate theory of ideology and that recent attempts at reconstructive surgery on what he did give us, by G.A. Cohen and Jon Elster, have been unsuccessful. However, by putting Marx into a history that runs from Plato and Augustine to Benjamin, Adorno, and Habermas, Rosen shows that, though Marx may have failed, the rationalist tradition on which he drew is far from dead—that it is, in fact, the dominant tradition in Western political thought, with very few effective dissenters. This is a very rich and wide-ranging book in the history of ideas, written with philosophic rigor and great clarity.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

316

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674637798

ISBN 13

9780674637795

The Kirkland Family Genealogy

By: Lanette Hill Brightwell,Michael Keith Kirkland

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Kirkland Family Genealogy

By: Lanette Hill Brightwell,Michael Keith Kirkland

This book has the ancestry of the Henry County Alabama pioneer family of- THE KIRKLAND and then proceeds to list as much information as possible on the descendants. Beginning with the history of the KIRKLAND surname begins in the home country as Protector of the Church [Kirk}. Immigrating to the United States; South Carolina, South Alabama-Henry Co.; South Georgia to Donaldsonville and Bainbridge area. The last three generations settle in Leon Co. & Madison Co. Florida. This book is full of historical data, census records, wills, family stories, state and county records, churches, cemeteries, etc. Excellent for those who have the name KIRKLAND.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

158

Publisher

Lulu.com

Published Date

ISBN 10

143573680X

ISBN 13

9781435736801

America's Founders

By: Michael V. Uschan

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

America's Founders

By: Michael V. Uschan

This book discusses the influence of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, and John Adams on the early history of the U.S.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

132

Published Date

ISBN 10

1560065710

ISBN 13

9781560065715

Book's by Michael Benjamin

Walter Benjamin's Grave

Walter Benjamin's Grave

Benjamin's Gift

Benjamin's Gift

German Idealism and the Jew

German Idealism and the Jew

Fire Alarm

Fire Alarm

Gestures of Ethical Life

Gestures of Ethical Life

The Land Boomers

The Land Boomers

Five Portraits

Five Portraits

On Voluntary Servitude

On Voluntary Servitude

The Kirkland Family Genealogy

The Kirkland Family Genealogy

America's Founders

America's Founders

Username

Password

Username

Password

Password again

Birthday

Email