Walter Benjamin

By Walter Benjamin Introduction by Susan SontagClassic collection of Walter Benjamin’s celebrated essays.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, contains the most representative and illuminating selection of his work over a twenty-year period, showing 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.Paperback480 pagesVerso Books, 2021Originally published in 19795 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9781839761652Philosophy

One-Way Street And Other Writings

By Walter BenjaminEdited and translated by Howard Eiland “In Early Writings, Howard Eiland covers the earliest period of Benjamin’s extant oeuvre that helped form the critical project that dominated his literary and philosophical career. This volume’s range provides a comprehensive account of Benjamin’s development from an ardent advocate of youth and educational reform to a philosophically committed critic of literature.”—David Ferris, University of Colorado at Boulder“In the introduction, editor and translator Eiland does a wonderful job of explaining how the essays relate to events in Benjamin’s early adult life and to the evolution of his theories…These pieces offer the reader valuable insight into Benjamin’s philosophical thought.”—Scott Duimstra, Library Journal“This is a valuable addition to the available work in English of one of the seminal Jewish critical thinkers of the 20th century, author of the massive Arcades Project. The mostly lambent translations by editor Eiland and others…help place Benjamin’s later work within the context of his early preoccupations.”—Publishers WeeklyWalter Benjamin became a published writer at the age of seventeen. Yet the first stirrings of this most original of critical minds—penned during the years in which he transformed himself from the comfortable son of a haute-bourgeois German Jewish family into the nomadic, uncompromising philosopher-critic we have since come to appreciate—have until now remained largely unavailable in English. Early Writings, 1910-1917 rectifies this situation, documenting the formative intellectual experiences of one of the twentieth century's most resolutely independent thinkers.Here we see the young Benjamin in his various roles as moralist, cultural critic, school reformer, and poet-philosopher. The diversity of interest and profundity of thought characteristic of his better-known work from the 1920s and 30s are already in evidence, as we witness the emergence of critical projects that would occupy Benjamin throughout his intellectual career: the role of the present in historical remembrance, the relationship of the intellectual to political action, the idea of truth in works of art, and the investigation of language as the veiled medium of experience.Even at this early stage, a recognizably Benjaminian way of thinking comes into view—a daring, boundary-crossing enterprise that does away with classical antitheses in favor of the relentlessly-seeking critical consciousness that produced the groundbreaking works of his later years. With the publication of these early writings, our portrait of one of the most significant intellects of the twentieth century edges closer to completion.Hardcover320 pagesBelknap Press, 20115.3 x 1.1 x 9.1 inchesISBN 9780674049932Philosophy, Anthology

Early Writings (1910-1917)

By Walter Benjamin Introduction by Stanley Mitchell Translated by Anna Bostock "A small bomb of ideas and vital argument."—Guardian"He does not abolish the distance between us and Leskov, or Brecht, or Kafka; he brings it to life."—Times Higher Education Supplement"If the killing of Lorca was Fascism’s first crime against literature, Benjamin’s death was undoubtedly the second."—The Listener 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. Paperback144 PagesVerso, 20245 1 1/12 x 7 4/5 InchesISBN 9781804294796Literary Criticism, Theory and Aesthetics

Understanding Brecht

By Walter Benjamin Translated by Harry Zohn “I fully realize that my discussion of the mental climate of collecting will confirm many of you in your conviction that this passion is behind the times, in your distrust of the collector type. Nothing is further from my mind than to shake either your conviction or your distrust.” Walter Benjamin was one of the great cultural critics of the twentieth century. In Unpacking My Library he offers a strikingly personal meditation on his career as a book collector and on the strange relations that spring up between objects and their owners. Witty, erudite and often moving, this book will resonate with bibliophiles of all kinds.Eris Gems make available in the form of beautifully produced saddle-stitched booklets a series of outstanding short works of fiction and non-fiction.Paperback24 pagesEris Gems, 2022Originally published in 19317.64 x 4.33 inchesISBN 9781912475841 Essays

Unpacking My Library

By Walter BenjaminIntroduction by George SteinerTranslated by John Osborne"He drew, from the obscure disdained German baroque, elements of the modern sensibility: the taste for allegory, surrealist shock effects, discontinuous utterance, a sense of historical catastrophe."—Susan Sontag"If the killing of Lorca was Fascism’s first great crime against literature, Benjamin’s death was undoubtedly the second."—The Listener"Walter Benjamin is the most important German aesthetician and literary critic of this century."—George SteinerThe 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.Paperback256 pagesVerso Publishers, 20235 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9781804290460Literary Theory

The Origin of German Tragic Drama

By Walter BenjaminTranslated from the German by Harry ZohnA classic account of late nineteenth-century Paris and a study of Baudelaire’s life and workWalter 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.Paperback192 pagesVerso, 20235 x 1 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9781904290453Theory, Modernism

Charles Baudelaire

By Walter BenjaminIllustrated by Paul KleeEdited by Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie, and Sebastian TruskolaskiA beautiful collection of the legendary thinker’s short storiesThe 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.Paperback240 pages Random House, Inc., 20235.09 x 0.59 x 7.77 inchesISBN 9781804290415 Literature, Anthology, Short Stories

The Storyteller: Tales Out of Loneliness

By Walter BenjaminAn NYRB Classics OriginalEdited by Samuel TitanTranslated by Tess Lewis “[T]he newly published collection The Storyteller Essays, translated by Tess Lewis and edited by Samuel Titan, marks a unique achievement. . . . It provides a brief intellectual history of an essay and revivifies it.”—Clint Williamson, Full Stop“[B]ecause it is delivered without panic, quietly, in graceful sentences, from within the culture of books and criticism, it is hard at first to accept the implications of what Benjamin is saying. You suspect he is being bombastic in order for him to come back later and tell you what modern literature’s saving grace is, but the moment of redemption does not arrive. . . . Reading such claims over eighty years later, we might be reminded that every generation foresees a crisis and the end of the world as we know it. It is also possible that Benjamin had his eyes wide open at the beginning of our era and proved able to observe its salient features.”—Philip Ó Ceallaigh, The Stinging Fly The Storyteller is one of Walter Benjamin’s most important essays, a beautiful and suggestive meditation on the relation between narrative form, social life, and individual existence—and the product of at least a decade’s work. What might be called the story of The Storyteller Essays starts in 1926, with a piece Benjamin wrote about the German romantic Johann Peter Hebel. It continues in a series of short essays, book reviews, short stories, parables, and even radio shows for children. This collection brings them all together to give readers a new appreciation of how Benjamin’s thinking changed and ripened over time, while including several key readings of his own—texts by his contemporaries Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács; by Paul Valéry; and by Herodotus and Montaigne. Finally, to bring things around, there are three short stories by “the incomparable Hebel” with whom the whole intellectual adventure began. Paperback128 pagesNYRB Classics, 20195 x 0.4 x 8 inchesISBN 9781681370583Theory, Short Essays, Criticism

The Storyteller Essays

By Walter BenjaminTranslated by Howard Eiland 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. Paperback336 pagesHarvard University Press, 2019Originally published in 19285.5 x 0.8 x 8 inchesISBN 9780674744240Philosophy, Drama

Origin of the German Trauerspiel

By Gershom ScholemIntroduction by Lee SiegelTranslated by Harry Zohn “The force of this remarkable memoir derives as much from the insights it offers into the mind and beliefs of the writer as into those of its subject.”—Publishers Weekly“Walter Benjamin [was] perhaps the most subtle, intuitive, and creative critic of the age….Since Scholem is himself a great scholar and thinker, since the intellectual comradeship between the two was so intense for a long time, the commingling of their thoughts comes to be even more revealing than the life-facts themselves….An invaluable document about not merely one but two of the century’s most profound minds.”—Kirkus Reviews Gershom Scholem is celebrated as the twentieth century's most profound student of the Jewish mystical tradition; Walter Benjamin, as a master thinker whose extraordinary essays mix the revolutionary, the revelatory, and the esoteric. Scholem was a precocious teenager when he met Benjamin, who became his close friend and intellectual mentor. His account of that relationship—which was to remain crucial for both men—is both a celebration of his friend's spellbinding genius and a lament for the personal and intellectual self-destructiveness that culminated in Benjamin's suicide in 1940. At once prickly and heartbroken, argumentative and loving, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship is an absorbing memoir with the complication of character and motive of a novel. As Scholem revisits the passionate engagements over Marxism and Kabbala, Europe and Palestine that he shared with Benjamin, it is as if he sought to summon up his lost friend's spirit again, to have the last word in the argument that might have saved his life. Paperback328 pagesNYRB Classics, 2003Originally published in 19815 x 0.8 x 8 inchesISBN 9781590170328Memoir, Literary Criticism, Philosophy

Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship

By Walter BenjaminEdited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings “Readers new to Benjamin will find this a welcome introduction to a challenging but rewarding writer. Those already familiar with his work will be grateful to be reminded, once again, of the wisdom of his maxim, ‘all the decisive blows are struck left-handed.’”—Graham McCann, Financial Times“The appeal of Benjamin’s writing, according to Terry Eagleton, lies in the way it ‘manages marvellously to combine…[Marxist] ‘aesthetics’ with the entrancing esotericism of the Kabbala.…Benjamin is admired not in spite of but because of his arcane syntax, murky vocabulary, and buried meanings….You have to seek the truth in Benjamin’s writings, if you have the patience, and not treat them as conveying knowledge. There is an awful lot of husk to burn in the process, but the theory of truth, if true, explains the obscurity.”—Arthur C. Danto, Artforum“Selected Writings, Volume I increases our understanding of this most important of writers exponentially. There is nothing like Benjamin, and I can hardly imagine a more rewarding book being published this year.”—David Wheatley, The Irish Times Walter Benjamin was one of the most original and important critical voices of the twentieth century, but until now only a few of his writings have been available in English. Harvard University Press has now undertaken to publish a significant portion of his work in definitive translation, under the general editorship of Michael W. Jennings. This volume, the first of three, will at last give readers of English a true sense of the man and the many facets of his thought. Volume I of the Selected Writings brings together essays long and short, academic treatises, reviews, fragments, and privately circulated pronouncements. Fully five-sixths of this material has never before been translated into English. The contents begin in 1913, when Benjamin, as an undergraduate in imperial Germany, was president of a radical youth group, and take us through 1926, when he had already begun, with his explorations of the world of mass culture, to emerge as a critical voice in Weimar Germany’s most influential journals. The volume includes a number of his most important works, including Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin, Goethe’s Elective Affinities, The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, The Task of the Translator, and One Way Street. He is as compelling and insightful when musing on riddles or children’s books as he is when dealing with weightier issues such as the philosophy of language, symbolic logic, or epistemology. Paperback528 pages | 7 halftonesHarvard University Press, 20046.25 x 9.25 inchesISBN 9780674013551Philosophy, Criticism, Anthology

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926

By Walter BenjaminEdited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith “For those who know only the small selection of essays and longer texts previously translated into English, this book may be a revelation. Selected Writings, Volume 2, spanning the period from his abandonment of academia and his emergence as an important literary journalist in 1927 to his near silencing after the Nazis seized power and his exile in 1934, shows [Walter Benjamin] at his sparkling best….All his published work of this time is included here, from a few longer essays on themes as varied as the history of photography and Kafka to three-page pieces on recent French fiction, art history, ‘the crisis of the novel,’ food and the effects of hashish. The new book also includes a generous selection of Benjamin’s notes, diary entries and drafts. Interesting in themselves, and indispensable to anyone seeking insight into Benjamin’s thinking, they also offer a view of the writer at work, developing different aspects of a thought or recycling successful paragraphs from one assignment to another.”—Paul Mattick, The New York Times Book ReviewIn the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts. In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, “Surrealism” and “On the Image of Proust,” as well as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany’s newspapers. Selected Writings, Volume 2: Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays (“Franz Kafka,” “Karl Kraus,” and “The Author as Producer”) the extended autobiographical meditation “A Berlin Chronicle”; extended discussions of the history of photography and the social situation of the French writer; and previously untranslated shorter pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology, and the newspaper, and on such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.Paperback480 pagesHarvard University Press, 20056.3 x 9.25 inchesISBN 9780674015883Philosophy, Sociology, Anthology

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2: Part 1

Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith “Volume 2 of the Harvard edition, a welcome project that I cannot praise enough, is filled with astonishingly ‘annihilating trivia,’ as astonishing, I dare say, as Benjamin’s half-dozen fully realized monographs. Thanks to it, his luminosity, on the eve of the 60th anniversary of his premature death, is happily in focus.”—Ilan Stavans, The Forward“This second volume of [Walter Benjamin’s] selected writings covers all aspects of the time, with the great figures of European thought in the background. Surrealism, Russian films, Chaplin, Keller, Kafka, Gide, Proust, hashish, children’s toys and literature, Hoffmansthal, travel, Goethe, Berlin life, radio talks, Stefan George—it is all here and all living….This volume cannot be praised too highly.”—Gene Shaw, Library JournalIn the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world. Volume 2 of the Selected Writings is now available in paperback in two parts. In Part 1, Benjamin is represented by two of his greatest literary essays, “Surrealism” and “On the Image of Proust,” as well as by a long article on Goethe and a generous selection of his wide-ranging commentary for Weimar Germany’s newspapers. Selected Writings, Volume 2: Part 2 contains, in addition to the important longer essays (“Franz Kafka,” “Karl Kraus,” and “The Author as Producer”) the extended autobiographical meditation “A Berlin Chronicle”; extended discussions of the history of photography and the social situation of the French writer; and previously untranslated shorter pieces on such subjects as language and memory, theological criticism and literary history, astrology, and the newspaper, and on such influential figures as Paul Valery, Stefan George, Hitler, and Mickey Mouse.Paperback480 pagesHarvard University Press, 20056.3 x 9.25 inchesISBN: 9780674017467Philosophy, Theory, Criticism, Anthology

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2: Part 2

By Walter BenjaminEdited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings “The quintessential Benjamin gesture of Volume 3 is the 1936 selection of letters by a wide assortment of figures from the German Romantic era, together with his brief, meticulously sympathetic commentaries, contained in German Men and Women….It is the story primarily of friendships amidst the passages and misfortunes of time, and of ideas as the substance of friendship: Their exchange becomes the fabric that connects one individual to another, and binds each to their precarious, uncertain lives.”—Howard Hampton, The Village Voice Radical critic of a European civilization plunging into darkness, yet commemorator of the humane traditions of the old bourgeoisie—such was Walter Benjamin in the later 1930s. This volume, the third in a four-volume set, offers twenty-seven brilliant pieces, nineteen of which have never before been translated. The centerpiece, A Berlin Childhood around 1900, marks the first appearance in English of one of the greatest German works of the twentieth century: a profound and beautiful account of the vanished world of Benjamin's privileged boyhood, recollected in exile. No less remarkable are the previously untranslated second version of Benjamin's most famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," with its striking insights into the relations between technology and aesthetics, and German Men and Women, a book in which Benjamin collects twenty-six letters by distinguished Germans from 1783 to 1883 in an effort to preserve what he called the true humanity of German tradition from the debasement of fascism. Volume 3 also offers extensively annotated translations of essays that are key to Benjamin's rewriting of the story of modernism and modernity—such as The Storyteller and Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century—as well as a fascinating diary from 1938 and penetrating studies of Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, and Eduard Fuchs. A narrative chronology details Benjamin's life during these four harrowing years of his exile in France and Denmark. This is an essential collection for anyone interested in his work. Paperback480 pagesBelknap Press, 20066.4 x 0.9 x 9.2 inchesISBN 9780674019812Philosophy, Criticism, Anthology

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938

By Walter BenjaminEdited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings “The final volume in this collection of the German philosopher’s writing, this title covers the last three years of Benjamin’s life and is masterfully translated, edited, and annotated. Presented here are Benjamin’s grandest themes: the arcades of Paris, Baudelaire, the concept of remembrance, and materialist theology. Also included is the third version of Benjamin’s most famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” which was unpublished in the author’s lifetime. This essay alone makes the volume indispensable for any scholar of interwar literature, philosophy, or modern European thought. Together with the first three volumes in the set (1996–2002), this is one of the most remarkable editorial achievements in contemporary thought and politics.”—M. Uebel, Choice“Every line we succeed in publishing today…is a victory wrested from the powers of darkness.” So wrote Walter Benjamin in January 1940. Not long afterward, he himself would fall prey to those powers, a victim of suicide following a failed attempt to flee the Nazis. However insistently the idea of catastrophe hangs over Benjamin’s writings in the final years of his life, the “victories wrested” in this period nonetheless constitute some of the most remarkable twentieth-century analyses of the emergence of modern society. The essays on Charles Baudelaire are the distillation of a lifetime of thinking about the nature of modernity. They record the crisis of meaning experienced by a civilization sliding into the abyss, even as they testify to Benjamin’s own faith in the written word.This volume ranges from studies of Baudelaire, Brecht, and the historian Carl Jochmann to appraisals of photography, film, and poetry. At their core is the question of how art can survive and thrive in a tumultuous time. Here we see Benjamin laying out an ethic for the critic and artist—a subdued but resilient heroism. At the same time, he was setting forth a sociohistorical account of how art adapts in an age of violence and repression.Working at the height of his powers to the very end, Benjamin refined his theory of the mass media that culminated in the final version of his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. Also included in this volume is his influential piece On the Concept of History, completed just before his death. The book is remarkable for its inquiry into the nature of “the modern” (especially as revealed in Baudelaire), for its ideas about the transmogrification of art and the radical discontinuities of history, and for its examples of humane life and thought in the midst of barbarism. The entire collection is eloquent testimony to the indomitable spirit of humanity under siege.Paperback496 pages | 4 halftonesHarvard University Press, 20066.3 x 9.25 inchesISBN 9780674022294Philosophy, Sociology, Anthology

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940

By Stuart Jeffries “An engaging and accessible history of the lives and main ideas of the leading thinkers of the Frankfurt School.”—The New York Review of Books“This seemingly daunting book turned out to be an exhilarating page-turner . . . Grand Hotel Abyss is an outstanding critical introduction to some of the most fertile, and still relevant, thinkers of the 20th century.”—Michael Dirda, Washington Post“Jeffries moves swiftly across the decades, retracing the jagged paths from the official founding of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in June 1924, through its years in exile in New York in the ’30s and Los Angeles in the ’40s and its hasty return to Frankfurt in the early postwar years, up to the work of Horkheimer and Adorno’s prized protégé Jürgen Habermas and the Institute’s legacy today.”—Noah Isenberg, Bookforum Grand Hotel Abyss combines biography, philosophy, and storytelling to reveal how a group of German thinkers, the Frankfurt School, redefined the twentieth century and our own times. Among the most prominent members of what became the Frankfurt School were the philosophers Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. By taking popular culture seriously as an object of study—whether it was film, music, ideas, or consumerism—the Frankfurt School elaborated upon the nature and crisis of our mass-produced, mechanized society. Grand Hotel Abyss shows how much these ideas still tell us about our age of social media and runaway consumption. Paperback336 pagesVerso, 20175.1 x 1.3 x 7.6 inchesISBN 9781784785697Biography, Philosophy

Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School

By Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukacs With an afterword by Fredric Jameson "This is vital reading for anyone concerned with the relationship between art and socialism."—John Fowles, Philosophy"They are key texts in the study of modernism, of expressionist drama and of realism, and of many closely related general questions...It is genuinely an indispensable volume."—Raymond Williams"A volume of Adorno is equivalent to a whole shelf of books on literature."—Susan SontagAn intense and lively debate on literature and art between thinkers who became some of the great figures of twentieth-century philosophy and literature.No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume. They do not form a disparate collection but a continuous, interlinked debate between thinkers who have become giants of twentieth-century intellectual history.Paperback256 pagesVerso, 20205 x 7.8 inches ISBN 9781788738583Theory

Aesthetics and Politics

By Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings “[An] outstanding and monumental biography of Walter Benjamin….In the thoroughness of their account and the acuity and delicacy of their philosophical analyses, Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings have provided an indispensable sighting of Benjamin’s achievement.”—Anthony Phelan, The Times Literary Supplement“[This] is a careful synthesis of all the available sources for Benjamin’s life—letters, diaries, reminiscences of friends—with all of his major writings, to produce the comprehensive account that has been sorely lacking until now….Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life makes clear how intimately Benjamin’s biography was shaped by the history of Europe during his lifetime.”—Adam Kirsch, The New York Review of Books Walter Benjamin is one of the twentieth century's most important intellectuals, and also one of its most elusive. His writings—mosaics incorporating philosophy, literary criticism, Marxist analysis, and a syncretistic theology—defy simple categorization. And his mobile, often improvised existence has proven irresistible to mythologizers. His writing career moved from the brilliant esotericism of his early writings through his emergence as a central voice in Weimar culture and on to the exile years, with its pioneering studies of modern media and the rise of urban commodity capitalism in Paris. That career was played out amid some of the most catastrophic decades of modern European history: the horror of the First World War, the turbulence of the Weimar Republic, and the lengthening shadow of fascism. Now, a major new biography from two of the world's foremost Benjamin scholars reaches beyond the mosaic and the mythical to present this intriguing figure in full.Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings make available for the first time a rich store of information which augments and corrects the record of an extraordinary life. They offer a comprehensive portrait of Benjamin and his times as well as extensive commentaries on his major works, including "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," the essays on Baudelaire, and the great study of the German Trauerspiel. Sure to become the standard reference biography of this seminal thinker, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life will prove a source of inexhaustible interest for Benjamin scholars and novices alike. Paperback768 pagesBelknap Press, 20162.2 x 6.5 x 9.5 inchesISBN 9780674970779Biography, Philosophy

Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life

By Eli Friedlander “This highly original study by Friedlander is a rare attempt to expose the philosophical infrastructure of the thought of Walter Benjamin. Rather than a collection of disjointed observations on culture, the Benjaminian corpus turns, on Friedlander’s reading, into a singular testimony to the fragile and liminal possibility of philosophy that refuses to assimilate the singular under the umbrella of universal abstraction….Friedlander pays special attention to Benjamin’s relation to Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx, accentuating the problems of temporality, historicity, and a philosophically robust materialism. A laudable achievement, this volume is an exquisite dialogue between philosophy and its others, between totality and constellation, and between the universal and the singular.”—M.V. Marder, Choice“Benjamin is not, for Friedlander, just a writer or a thinker, he is a philosopher of world-historical significance, and his work is a vessel of the highest truth.”—Brian Hanrahan, Los Angeles Review of Books Walter Benjamin is often viewed as a cultural critic who produced a vast array of brilliant and idiosyncratic pieces of writing with little more to unify them than the feeling that they all bear the stamp of his "unclassifiable" genius. Eli Friedlander argues that Walter Benjamin's corpus of writings must be recognized as a unique configuration of philosophy with an overarching coherence and a deep-seated commitment to engage the philosophical tradition.Friedlander finds in Benjamin's early works initial formulations of the different dimensions of his philosophical thinking. He leads through them to Benjamin's views on the dialectical image, the nature of language, the relation of beauty and truth, embodiment, dream and historical awakening, myth and history, as well as the afterlife and realization of meaning. Those notions are articulated both in themselves and in relation to central figures of the philosophical tradition. They are further viewed as leading to and coming together in The Arcades Project. Friedlander takes that incomplete work to be the central theater where these earlier philosophical preoccupations were to be played out. Benjamin envisaged in it the possibility of the highest order of thought taking the form of writing whose contents are the concrete time-bound particularities of human experience. Addressing the question of the possibility of such a presentation of philosophical truth provides the guiding thread for constellating the disparate moments of Benjamin's writings.Hardcover304 pagesHarvard University Press, 20126.2 x 1 x 9.2 inchesISBN 9780674061699Philosophy, Criticism

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