Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften 1, ed. Siegfried Unseld, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961; 2001, 432 pp. [10] Kia Lindroos, Now-Time. Image-Space. Temporalization of Politics in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy of History and Art, Jyvaskyla: Kampus Kirja, 1998. (English) Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography, trans. James Rolleston, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991, 226 pp, ARG. (English) Brodersen, Momme. Walter Benjamin: A Biography. Ed. Martin Derviş. Trans. Malcom R. Green and Ingrida Ligers. New York: Verso, 1996.

The use of quotation marks and the way this is phrased suggest that this automaton is not "true" historical materialism, but something that is given that name. By whom, we ask. And the answer must be the chief spokesmen of Marxism in his period, that is to say the ideologues of the Second and Third Internationals. [5] Radiophoniques, Editions Allia, 2014. Benjamin’s radiophonic works. Excerpt, [55], [56], Commentary. (French)One interpretation of Benjamin in Thesis I is that Benjamin is suggesting that despite claims to scientific objectivity, the historical materialism of vulgar Marxists is actually a quasi-religious fraud. Benjamin uses The Turk, a famous chess-playing device of the 18th century, as an analogy for historical materialism. Presented as an automaton that could defeat skilled chess players, The Turk actually concealed a human (allegedly a dwarf) who controlled the machine. He wrote: Paris, Hauptstadt des 19. Jahrhunderts" (" Paris, Capital of the 19th Century," 1935. This essay has been presented as a diptych with " Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire", as both are fragments from the preparatory writings for the unfinished Arcades Project.) Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Erste Fassung)", in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, I/2, 1980, pp 431-469; repr. in Benjamin, Werke und Nachlaß. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 16: Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013, pp 7-51. Written in Autumn 1935 in Paris. Part (2013). (German) Starting in adolescence, in a trend of episodic behavior that was to remain true throughout his life, Benjamin was a maven within an important community during a critically important historical period: the left- intelligentsia of interwar Berlin and Paris. Acquaintance with the critic was a connecting thread for a variety of major figures in metaphysics, philosophy, theology, the visual arts, theater, literature, radio, politics and various other domains. Benjamin happened to be present on the outskirts of improbably many of the most important events within the intellectual ferment of the interwar-period in Weimar Germany and to interpret those events with penetrating, sometimes prophetic, insight.

One of Benjamin's high-school best friends (also a German Jew) committed suicide by gas at the outbreak of the first World War. And another was one of the Jewish liaisons who took Nazi diplomats on a tour of Palestine. This was during a period of Nazi-Zionist relations when the Third Reich was preparing the European Zionists to believe that Europe's Jews would be forcibly emigrated from the Reich. The purpose of this was to deflect communal attention from the looming possibility of the strategy that was ultimately adopted: mass extermination in the death camps. [43] [44] Benjamin's oldest friend, and the sole executor of his literary estate, Gershom Scholem, would resurrect the canonical books of the Kabbalah from private libraries and ancient document dumps called Genizah. [45] [46] These were created when the books flooded into Israel as darkness descended in the West during the period leading up to, coinciding with, and immediately following the Holocaust. [47] [45] [46] [48] Career [ edit ] Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit", in Benjamin, Benjamins Schriften, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1955; repr. in Benjamin, Illuminationen: Ausgewahlte Schriften, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961; repr. in Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit: Drei Studien zur Kunstsoziologie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963, pp 7-44; repr. in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, VII/1, 1989, pp 350-384; 2003. (German) Hansen, Miriam. “Benjamin, Cinema, and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology.’” New German Critique 40 (1987) : 179-224. Deutsche Menschen - Eine Folge von Briefen, ed. Walter Benjamin, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983, 99 pp. [26]Tobias Robert Klein (ed.), Klang und Musik bei Walter Benjamin, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2013, 224 pp. [68] (German) Agesilaus Santander. Výbor z textů, Prague: Herrmann a synové, 1998, 335 pp. Selection from Gesammelte Schriften (1991). [52] In the essay, Benjamin's famed ninth thesis struggles to reconcile the Idea of Progress in the present with the apparent chaos of the past: Löwy, Michael (2005). Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's 'On the Concept of History' . New York: Verso. p.25. ISBN 1-84467-040-6 . Retrieved July 24, 2012. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version", trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin, Cambridge/London: The Belknap Press, 2008, pp 19-55. (English)

Benjamin's colleague Gershom Scholem, who is quoted in Theses, believed that Benjamin's critique of historical materialism was so final that, as Mark Lilla would write, "nothing remains of historical materialism [...] but the term itself. [1] [8] Historical context [ edit ] One key to Benjamin's critique of historicism is his rejection of the past as a continuum of progress. This is most apparent in thesis XIII: Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, University of California Press, 1995. (English) Ideas initially presented in this article also inform Marshall McLuhan's famous slogan or conception that " the medium is the message". [17] See also [ edit ] In 2017 Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project was reinterpreted in an exhibition curated by Jens Hoffman, held at the Jewish Museum in New York City. The exhibition, entitled "The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin", featured 36 contemporary artworks representing the 36 convolutes of Benjamin's Project. [88]

Literary and Critical Theory

Russell, Catherine (2004). "New Media and Film History: Walter Benjamin and the Awakening of Cinema". Cinema Journal. 43 (3): 81–85. ISSN 0009-7101. Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen" (" On Language as Such and on the Language of Man", 1916) Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image- Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin, Routledge, 1996, 224 pp. (English) Kairos - Schriften zur Philosophie, ed. Ralf Konersmann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007, 355 pp. [34]