Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption
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...
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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.
PrefaceAcknowledgmentsA Note on the TranslationsA Note on TerminologyIntroduction to the Revised EditionCh. 1Origins1Childhood and Autobiography1Youth Movement4Romantic Anticapitalism13Ch. 2The Path to Trauerspiel29Experience, Kabbalah, and Language31Messianic Time Versus Historical Time48Allegory63Ch. 3Ideas and Theory of Knowledge79Anti-Historicisim79The Essay as Mediation Between Art and Philosophical Truth84Constellation, Origin, Monad90Ch. 4From Messianism to Materialism107Radical Communism108One-Way Street and Dialectical Images118Surrealism126Ch. 5Benjamin and Brecht139"Crude Thinking"139Epic Theater148The Author as Producer154Ch. 6The Adorno-Benjamin Dispute163The Philosophical Rapprochement Between Benjamin and Adorno in the Early 1930s165The Arcades Expose173Art and Mechanical Reproduction183Methodological Asceticism, Magic and Positivism198Beyond the Dispute207Ch. 7Benjamin's Materialist Theory of Experience213The Disintegration of Community: Novel versus Story218Baudelaire, Modernity, and Shock Experience226Nonsensuous Correspondences239Ch. 8"A l'Ecart de Tous les Courants"251Notes275Bibliography305Index313
