Walter Benjamin's Books

Walter Benjamin's Archive

Images, Texts, Signs

By: Walter Benjamin

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The work of the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin is an audacious plotting of history, art, and thought; a reservoir of texts, commentaries, scraps, and fragments of everyday life, art, and dreams. Throughout his life, Benjamin gathered together all kinds of artifacts, assortments of images, texts, and signs, themselves representing experiences, ideas, and hopes, each of which was enthusiastically logged, systematized, and analyzed by their author. In this way, Benjamin laid the groundwork for the salvaging of his own legacy. Intricate and intimate, Walter Benjamin's Archive leads readers to the heart of his intellectual world, yielding a rich and detailed portrait of its author.

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270

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Verso Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1784782041

ISBN 13

9781784782047

The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940

By: Walter Benjamin

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The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940

By: Walter Benjamin

Called “the most important critic of his time” by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin has only become more influential over the years, as his work has assumed a crucial place in current debates over the interactions of art, culture, and meaning. A “natural and extraordinary talent for letter writing was one of the most captivating facets of his nature,” writes Gershom Scholem in his Foreword to this volume; and Benjamin's correspondence reveals the evolution of some of his most powerful ideas, while also offering an intimate picture of Benjamin himself and the times in which he lived. Writing at length to Scholem and Theodor Adorno, and exchanging letters with Rainer Maria Rilke, Hannah Arendt, Max Brod, and Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin elaborates on his ideas about metaphor and language. He reflects on literary figures from Kafka to Karl Kraus, and expounds his personal attitudes toward such subjects as Marxism and French national character. Providing an indispensable tool for any scholar wrestling with Benjamin’s work, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940 is a revelatory look at the man behind much of the twentieth century’s most significant criticism.

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674

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022627957X

ISBN 13

9780226279572

One-Way Street

And Other Writings

By: Walter Benjamin

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One-Way Street

And Other Writings

By: Walter Benjamin

A classic collection of Walter Benjamin's essays, including some of his most celebrated writing Walter Benjamin is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic intellectual figures of this century. Not only was he a thinker who made an enormous impact with his critical and philosophical writings, he shattered disciplinary and stylistic conventions. This 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. Included in these pages are aphorisms and townscapes, esoteric meditation and reminiscences of childhood, and reflections on language, psychology, aesthetics and politics.

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481

Publisher

Verso Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1839761679

ISBN 13

9781839761676

Selected Writings: 1927-1934

By: Walter Benjamin,Howard Eiland,Gary Smith

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Selected Writings: 1927-1934

By: Walter Benjamin,Howard Eiland,Gary Smith

Comprising more than 65 pieces - journal articles, reviews, extended essays, sketches, aphorisms, and fragments - this volume shows the range of Walter Benjamin's writing. His topics here include poetry, fiction, drama, history, religion, love, violence, morality and mythology.

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890

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Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674945867

ISBN 13

9780674945869

Selected Writings: 1913-1926

By: Walter Benjamin

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Selected Writings: 1913-1926

By: Walter Benjamin

Even as a young man Benjamin possessed astonishing intellectual range and depth. His topics here include poetry and fiction, drama, philosophy, history, religion, love, violence, morality, mythology, painting and much more.

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538

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Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674945859

ISBN 13

9780674945852

Selected Writings

By: Walter Benjamin

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Selected Writings

By: Walter Benjamin

In the final years of the Weimar Republic, Benjamin emerged as the most original public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Here, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, "Surrealism" and "On the Image of Proust," as well as by an article on Goethe and a selection of his wide-ranging commentary for German newspapers.

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478

Publisher

Harvard University Press

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ISBN 10

0674015886

ISBN 13

9780674015883

Illuminations

By: Walter Benjamin

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Illuminations

By: Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin was one of the most original cultural critics of the twentieth century. Illuminations includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode, and Benjamin's theses on the philosophy of history. Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and introduces them with a classic essay about Benjamin's life in dark times. Also included is a new preface by Leon Wieseltier that explores Benjamin's continued relevance for our times.

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290

Publisher

Random House Digital, Inc.

Published Date

ISBN 10

0805202412

ISBN 13

9780805202410

Radio Benjamin

By: Walter Benjamin

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Radio Benjamin

By: Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin was fascinated by the impact of new technology on culture, an interest that extended beyond his renowned critical essays. From 1927 to '33, he wrote and presented something in the region of eighty broadcasts using the new medium of radio. Radio Benjamin gathers the surviving transcripts, which appear here for the first time in English. This eclectic collection demonstrates the range of Benjamin's thinking and his enthusiasm for popular sensibilities. His celebrated "Enlightenment for Children" youth programs, his plays, readings, book reviews, and fiction reveal Benjamin in a creative, rather than critical, mode. They flesh out ideas elucidated in his essays, some of which are also represented here, where they cover topics as varied as getting a raise and the history of natural disasters, subjects chosen for broad appeal and examined with passion and acuity. Delightful and incisive, this is Walter Benjamin channeling his sophisticated thinking to a wide audience, allowing us to benefit from a new voice for one of the twentieth century's most respected thinkers.

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492

Publisher

Verso Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1781687013

ISBN 13

9781781687017

Charles Baudelaire

A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism

By: Walter Benjamin

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Charles Baudelaire

A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism

By: Walter Benjamin

A classic account of late nineteenth-century Paris and a study of Baudelaire's life and work Walter Benjamin, one of the foremost cultural commentators and theorists of this century, is perhaps best known for his analyses of the work of art in the modern age and the philosophy of history. Yet it was through his study of the social and cultural history of the late nineteenth-century Paris, examined particularly in relation to the figure of the great Parisian lyric poet Charles Baudelaire, that Benjamin tested and enriched some of his core concepts and themes. Contained within these pages are, amongst other insights, his notion of the flaneur, his theory of memory and remembrance, his assessment of the utopian Fourier and his reading of the modernist movement.

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193

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Verso Books

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ISBN 10

1804290459

ISBN 13

9781804290453

Illuminations

Essays and Reflections

By: Walter Benjamin

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Illuminations

Essays and Reflections

By: Walter Benjamin

There has been no more original, no more serious critic and reader in our time." -- George Steiner Walter Benjamin was an icon of criticism, renowned for his insight on art, literature, and philosophy. This volume includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's epic theater. Illuminations also includes his penetrating study "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode, and his theses on the philosophy of history. Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and introduces them with a classic essay about Benjamin's life in a dark historical era.

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Page Count

307

Publisher

Mariner Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1328470237

ISBN 13

9781328470232

Selected Writings: 1938-1940

By: Walter Benjamin

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Selected Writings: 1938-1940

By: Walter Benjamin

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492

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Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674010760

ISBN 13

9780674010765

Berlin Childhood Around 1900

By: Walter Benjamin

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Berlin Childhood Around 1900

By: Walter Benjamin

Not an autobiography in the customary sense, Benjamin's recollection of his childhood in an upper-middle-class Jewish home in Berlin's West End at the turn of the century is translated into English for the first time in book form.

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212

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Harvard University Press

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ISBN 10

067402222X

ISBN 13

9780674022225

Selected Writings: 1935-1938

By: Walter Benjamin,Howard Eiland,Gary Smith

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Selected Writings: 1935-1938

By: Walter Benjamin,Howard Eiland,Gary Smith

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480

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Harvard University Press

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ISBN 10

0674008960

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9780674008960

The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932-1940

By: Walter Benjamin,Gershom Scholem

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The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932-1940

By: Walter Benjamin,Gershom Scholem

The legendary correspondence between the critic Walter Benjamin and the historian Gershom Scholem bears indispensable witness to the inner lives of two remarkable and enigmatic personalities. Benjamin, acknowledged today as one of the leading literary and social critics of his day, was known during his lifetime by only a small circle of his friends and intellectual confreres. Scholem recognized the genius of his friend and mentor during their student days in Berlin, and the two began to correspond after Scholem's emigration to Palestine. Their impassioned exchange draws the reader into the very heart of their complex relationship during the anguished years from 1932 until Benjamin's death in 1940.

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322

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674174151

ISBN 13

9780674174153

The Storyteller

Tales out of Loneliness

By: Walter Benjamin

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The Storyteller

Tales out of Loneliness

By: Walter Benjamin

The Storyteller gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including Illuminations, One-Way Street and The Arcades Project. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance of games, and delve into the peculiar relationship between gambling and fortune-telling, and explore the themes that defined Benjamin. The 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.

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230

Publisher

Verso Books

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ISBN 10

1784783064

ISBN 13

9781784783068

The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media

By: Walter Benjamin

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The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media

By: Walter Benjamin

A series of influential essays on the visual arts that were made possible by machines, and the implications for the future of culture.

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449

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674024451

ISBN 13

9780674024458

The Origin of German Tragic Drama

By: Walter Benjamin

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The Origin of German Tragic Drama

By: Walter Benjamin

The Origin of German Tragic Drama is Walter Benjamin's most sustained and original work. It begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar stage-form of royal martyr dramas called Trauerspiel. Benjamin also comments on the engravings of Durer and the theatre of Calderon and Shakespeare. Baroque tragedy, he argues, was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history. Georg Lukacs, an opponent of Benjamin's aesthetics, singled out The Origin of German Tragic Drama as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century.

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325

Publisher

Verso Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1789604737

ISBN 13

9781789604733

On Photography

By: Walter Benjamin

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On Photography

By: Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay “A Short History of Photography” is a landmark in the understanding and criticism of the medium, offering surprising new takes on such photographic pioneers as David Octavius Hill and Nicéphore Niépce and their aesthetic and technical achievements. On Photography presents a new translation of that essay along with a number of other writings by Benjamin, some of them presented in English for the first time. Translator and editor Esther Leslie sets Benjamin’s work in context with prefaces to each piece and contributes a substantial introduction that considers Benjamin’s engagement with photography in all its forms, including early commercial studio photography, the uses of photography in science, and much more.

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128

Publisher

Reaktion Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1780235615

ISBN 13

9781780235615

Myth and Metropolis

Walter Benjamin and the City

By: Graeme Gilloch

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Myth and Metropolis

Walter Benjamin and the City

By: Graeme Gilloch

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.

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240

Publisher

Polity

Published Date

ISBN 10

0745620108

ISBN 13

9780745620107

On Hashish

By: Walter Benjamin

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On Hashish

By: Walter Benjamin

On Hashish' is Walter Benjamin's posthumous collection of writings, providing a unique and intimate portrait of the man himself, of his experiences of hashish, and also of his views on the Weimar Republic.

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212

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Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674022211

ISBN 13

9780674022218

The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940

By: Theodor W. Adorno,Walter Benjamin

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The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940

By: Theodor W. Adorno,Walter Benjamin

The correspondence between Adorno and Walter Benjamin, which appears here for the first time in its entirety in English translation, must rank among the most significant to have come down to us from that notable age of barbarism, the 20th century. Each writer had met his match--happily--in the other. This book is the story of an elective affinity.

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408

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674006895

ISBN 13

9780674006898

Understanding Brecht

By: Walter Benjamin

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Understanding Brecht

By: Walter Benjamin

A collection of essays of political philosophy by the renowned mid 20th-century critical theorist and literary critic The relationship between philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin and playwright-poet Bertolt Brecht was both a lasting friendship and a powerful intellectual partnership. Having met in the late 1920s in Germany, Benjamin and Brecht, both independently minded Marxists with a deep understanding of and passionate commitment to the emancipatory potential of cultural practices, continued to discuss, argue and correspond on topics as varied as Fascism and the work of Franz Kafka. Faced by the onset of the ‘midnight of the century’, with the Nazi subversion of the Weimar Republic in Germany and the Stalinist degeneration of the revolution in Russia, both men, in their own way, strove to keep alive the tradition of dialectical critique of the existing order and radical intervention in the world to transform it. In Understanding Brecht we find collected together Benjamin’s most sensitive and probing writing on the dramatic and poetic work of his friend and tutor. Stimulated by Brecht’s oeuvre and theorising his particular dramatic techniques—such as the famous ‘estrangement effect’—Benjamin developed his own ideas about the role of art and the artist in crisis-ridden society. This volume contains Benjamin’s introductions to Brecht’s theory or epic theatre and close textual analyses of twelve poems by Brecht (printed in translation here) which exemplify Benjamin’s insistence that literary form and content are indivisible. Elsewhere Benjamin discusses the plays The Mother, Terror and Misery of the Third Reich, and The Threepenny Opera, digressing for some general remarks on Marx and satire. Here we also find Benjamin’s masterful essay “The Author as Producer” as well as an extract from his diaries that records the intense conversations held in the late 1930s in Denmark (Brecht’s place of exile) between the two most important cultural theorists of this century. In these discussions, the two men talked of subjects as diverse as the work of Franz Kafka, the unfolding Soviet Trials, and the problems of literary work on the edge of international war.

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145

Publisher

Verso Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1789608880

ISBN 13

9781789608885

Toward the Critique of Violence

A Critical Edition

By: Walter Benjamin

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Toward the Critique of Violence

A Critical Edition

By: Walter Benjamin

Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory. The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context. With its challenging argument concerning violence, law, and justice—which addresses such topical matters as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of religion—Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its publication in Weimar Germany a century ago.

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465

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1503627683

ISBN 13

9781503627680

The Arcades Project

By: Walter Benjamin

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The Arcades Project

By: Walter Benjamin

Focusing on the arcades of 19th-century Paris--glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources. 46 illustrations.

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Page Count

1100

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

067404326X

ISBN 13

9780674043268

The Writer of Modern Life

Essays on Charles Baudelaire

By: Walter Benjamin

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The Writer of Modern Life

Essays on Charles Baudelaire

By: Walter Benjamin

In this book Benjamin reveals Baudelaire as a social poet of the very first rank. More than a series of studies of Baudelaire, these essays show the extent to which Benjamin identifies with the poet and enable him to explore his own notion of heroism."--BOOK JACKET.

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326

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674022874

ISBN 13

9780674022874

Origin of the German Trauerspiel

By: Walter Benjamin

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Origin of the German Trauerspiel

By: Walter Benjamin

Origin of the German Trauerspiel was Walter Benjamin’s first full, historically oriented analysis of modernity. Readers of English know it as “The Origin of German Tragic Drama,” but in fact the subject is something else—the play of mourning. Howard Eiland’s completely new English translation, the first since 1977, is closer to the German text and more consistent with Benjamin’s philosophical idiom. Focusing on the extravagant seventeenth-century theatrical genre of the trauerspiel, precursor of the opera, Benjamin identifies allegory as the constitutive trope of the Baroque and of modernity itself. Allegorical perception bespeaks a world of mutability and equivocation, a melancholy sense of eternal transience without access to the transcendentals of the medieval mystery plays—though no less haunted and bedeviled. History as trauerspiel is the condition as well as subject of modern allegory in its inscription of the abyssal. Benjamin’s investigation of the trauerspiel includes German texts and late Renaissance European drama such as Hamlet and Calderón’s Life Is a Dream. The prologue is one of his most important and difficult pieces of writing. It lays out his method of indirection and his idea of the “constellation” as a key means of grasping the world, making dynamic unities out of the myriad bits of daily life. Thoroughly annotated with a philological and historical introduction and other explanatory and supplementary material, this rigorous and elegant new translation brings fresh understanding to a cardinal work by one of the twentieth century’s greatest literary critics.

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337

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Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674744241

ISBN 13

9780674744240

Towards the Critique of Violence

Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben

By: Walter Benjamin,Giorgio Agamben

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Towards the Critique of Violence

Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben

By: Walter Benjamin,Giorgio Agamben

In the past two and a half decades, Walter Benjamin's early essay 'Towards the Critique of Violence' (1921) has taken a central place in politico-philosophic debates. The complexity and perhaps even the occasional obscurity of Benjamin's text have undoubtedly contributed to the diversity, conflict, and richness of contemporary readings. Interest has heightened following the attention that philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben have devoted to it. Agamben's own interest started early in his career with his 1970 essay, 'On the Limits of Violence', and Benjamin's essay continues.

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Page Count

251

Published Date

ISBN 10

1474252176

ISBN 13

9781474252171

Book's by Walter Benjamin

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