For the Get to Know Series, we’ve gathered together our collection of an author’s books and information about them, their work, and background. Combined with other materials such as reviews, interviews, discussions, and more, we hope it will become a resource to find out more about their life and works, and place their books in context.
Walter Benjamin (15th July 1892 – 26th September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, and essayist. Associated with the Frankfurt school, some of his best known works include The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and Theses on the Philosophy of History.
Toward the Critique of Violence
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.
Books about Benjamin
Walter Benjamin and Theology
In the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin writes that his work is “related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it.” In bringing together some of the most renowned experts from both sides of the Atlantic, Walter Benjamin and Theology seeks to establish a new site from which to address both the issue of Benjamin’s relationship with theology and all the crucial aspects that Benjamin himself grappled with when addressing the field and operations of theological inquiry.
Walter Benjamin: Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy
Arguing that the importance of painting and other visual art for Benjamin’s epistemology has yet to be appreciated, Weigel undertakes the first systematic analysis of their significance to his thought. She does so by exploring Benjamin’s dialectics of secularization, an approach that allows Benjamin to explore the simultaneous distance from and orientation towards revelation and to deal with the difference and tensions between religious and profane ideas. Sensitive to the notorious difficulty of translating his language, she underscores just how much is lost in translation, particularly with regard to religious connotations. The book thus positions Benjamin with respect to the other European thinkers at the heart of current discussions of sovereignty and martyrdom, of holy and creaturely life.
Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions
This collection of nine essays focuses on those writings of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) on literature and language that have a direct relevance to contemporary literary theory, notably his analyses of myth, violence, history, criticism, literature, and mass media. In an introductory essay, David S. Ferris discusses the problem of history, aura, and resistance in Benjamin’s later work and in its reception. Samuel Weber, in a reading of Benjamin’s most influential essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” analyzes the status of the image and technology in Benjamin’s own terms and in the shadow of Heidegger. Rodolphe Gasché devotes himself to an analysis of Benjamin’s dissertation on the German Romantics, providing a valuable guide to a major text that has yet to appear in English translation.
Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History
This book is the first to consider the presence of history and the question of historical practice in Walter Benjamin’s work. Benjamin, the critic and philosopher of history, was also the practitioner, the authors contend, and it is in the practice of historical writing that the materialist aspect of his thought is most evident.
Some of the essays analyze Benjamin’s writings in cultural history and the philosophy of history. Others connect his historical and theoretical practices to issues in contemporary feminism and post-colonial studies, and to cultural contexts including the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong. In different ways, the authors all find in Benjamin’s specific notion of historical materialism a dialectic between textual and cultural analysis which can reinvigorate the relation between literary and historical studies.
Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power
Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power explores Walter Benjamin’s seminal writings on the relationship between mass culture and fascism. The book offers a nuanced reading of Benjamin’s widely influential critique of aesthetic politics, while it contributes to current debates about the cultural projects of Nazi Germany, the changing role of popular culture in the twentieth century, and the way in which Nazi aesthetics have persisted into the present.
Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition
In a landmark interpretation of the whole of Benjamin’s career, John McCole demonstrates a way of understanding Benjamin that both contextualizes and addresses the complexities and ambiguities of his texts. McCole traces Benjamin’s deep ambivalence about cultural tradition through the longterm project-an immanent critique of German idealist and romantic aesthetics-which unites his writings. McCole builds a sustained reading of Benjamin’s intellectual development which sheds new light on the formative role of early influences—particularly his participation in the pre-World War I German youth movement and the orthodox discourse of German intellectual culture—and shows how Benjamin later extended the strategies he learned within these contexts during key encounters with Weimar modernism, surrealism, and the fiction of Proust.
From other publishers:
With an introduction by Hannah Arendt, the now legendary Illuminations, published by Penguin, collects together some the most celebrated of Benjamin’s works: ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, ‘The Task of the Translator’ and ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, and includes his essays on Kafka, storytelling, Baudelaire, Brecht’s epic theatre, Proust and an anatomy of his own obsession, book collecting.
Conceived in Paris in 1927 and unfinished at the time of his death, fleeing the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years—“the theater,” as Benjamin called it, “of all my struggles and all my ideas.”
The Arcades Project is Benjamin’s effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed “true history” that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by “progress,” Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.