Walter Benjamin

by Benjamin, Walter

• ISBN13: 9780674013551
• ISBN10: 0674013557
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-05-30
• Publisher: Belknap Pr

Summary

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 mans' theets of his thought. A separate volume will consist of his book The Arcades Project, the magnum opus of his Paris years. The writer Walter Benjamin emerged our of the head-on collision of an idealistic youth movement and the First World War, which Benjamin and his close friends thought immoral. He walked away from the wreck scarred yet determined "to be considered as the principal critic of German literature." But the scene as he found it was dominated by "talented fakes," so-to use his words-"only a terrorist campaign would I suffice" to effect radical change. This book offers the record of the first phase of that campaign, culminating with "One-Way Street," one of the most significant products of the German avant-garde of the Twenties. Against conformism, homogeneity, and gentrification of all life into a new world order, Benjamin made the word his sword. 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 Houml;lderlin," "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. We meet Benjamin the youthful idealist, the sober moralist, the political theorist, the experimentalist, the translator, and, above all, the virtual king of criticism, with his magisterial exposition of the basic problems of aesthetics. Benjamin's sentences provoke us to return to them again and again, luring us as though with the promise of some final revelation that is always being postponed. He is by turns fierce and tender, melancholy and ebullient; he is at once classically rooted, even archaic, in his explorations of the human psyche and the world of things, and strikingly progressive in his attitude toward society and what he likes to call the organs of the collective (its architectures, fashions, signboards). Throughout, he displays a far-sighted urgency, judging the present on the basis of possible futures. And he is gifted with a keen sense of humor. Mysterious though he may sometimes be (his Latvian love, Asia Lacis, once described him as a visitor from another planet), Benjamin remains perhaps the most consistently surprising and challenging of critical writers.

Table of Contents

METAPHYSICS OF YOUTH, 1913-1919
"Experience"	3	(3)
The Metaphysics of Youth	6	(12)
Two Poems by Friedrich Holderlin	18	(19)
The Life of Students	37	(11)
Aphorisms on Imagination and Color	48	(2)
A Child's View of Color	50	(2)
Socrates	52	(3)
Trauerspiel and Tragedy	55	(4)
The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy	59	(3)
On Language as Such and on the Language of Man	62	(13)
Theses on the Problem of Identity	75	(3)
Dostoevsky's The Idiot	78	(4)
Painting and the Graphic Arts	82	(1)
Painting, or Signs and Marks	83	(4)
The Ground of Intentional Immediacy	87	(3)
The Object: Triangle	90	(2)
Perception Is Reading	92	(1)
On Perception	93	(4)
Comments on Gundolf's Goethe	97	(3)
On the Program of the Coming Philosophy	100	(11)
Stifter	111	(3)
Every Unlimited Condition of the Will	114	(1)
Types of History	115	(1)
The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism	116	(85)
Fate and Character	201	(6)
Analogy and Relationship	207	(3)
The Paradox of the Cretan	210	(3)
The Currently Effective Messianic Elements	213	(4)
ANGELUS NOVUS, 1920-1926
The Theory of Criticism	217	(3)
Categories of Aesthetics	220	(3)
On Semblance	223	(3)
World and Time	226	(2)
According to the Theory of Duns Scotus	228	(1)
On Love and Related Matters	229	(2)
The Right to Use Force	231	(4)
The Medium through Which Works of Art Continue to Influence Later Ages	235	(1)
Critique of Violence	236	(17)
The Task of the Translator	253	(11)
Notes for a Study of the Beauty of Colored Illustrations in Children's Books	264	(3)
Riddle and Mystery	267	(2)
Outline for a Habilitation Thesis	269	(3)
Language and Logic (I-III)	272	(4)
Theory of Knowledge	276	(2)
Truth and Truths / Knowledge and Elements of Knowledge	278	(2)
Imagination	280	(3)
Beauty and Semblance	283	(1)
The Philosophy of History of the Late Romantics and the Historical School	284	(2)
The Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe	286	(2)
Capitalism as Religion	288	(4)
Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus	292	(5)
Goethe's Elective Affinities	297	(64)
Baudelaire (II, III)	361	(2)
Calderón's El Mayor Monstruo, Los Celos and Hebbel's Herodes and Mariamne	363	(24)
Letter to Florens Christian Rang	387	(4)
Stages of Intention	391	(2)
Outline of the Psychophysical Problem	393	(9)
Even the Sacramental Migrates into Myth	402	(2)
On the Topic of Individual Disciplines and Philosophy	404	(2)
"Old Forgotten Children's Books"	406	(8)
Naples	414	(8)
Curriculum Vitae (I)	422	(2)
Reflections on Humboldt	424	(2)
Review of Bernoulli's Bachofen	426	(2)
Johann Peter Hebel (I): On the Centenary of His Death	428	(4)
Johann Peter Hebel (II): A Picture Puzzle for the Centenary of His Death	432	(3)
A Glimpse into the World of Children's Books	435	(9)
One-Way Street	444	(45)
A Note on the Texts	489	(1)
Chronology, 1892-1926	490	(26)
Index	516