Walter Benjamin and thAngee l of History.
In an essay published after his death in 1940, the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin recalled a painting of an angel that appeared to be moving away from something it was regarding with keen attention. “This is how one pictures the angel of history,” Benjamin observed: His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of.

In Walter Benjamin’s Other History, Beatrice Hanssen makes the debatable case that Benjamin assembled from his eclectic interests and literary inclina-tions “a new theory of natural history.” If she does not completely prove this, in the process she turns over a variety of motifs from his texts and makes con-nections in the critic’s fossil record. While an artist might be more immedi.

Benjamin was often funded by the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. However, unlike some of the key figures of the Frankfurt School, who believe that cultural productions were little more than commodities that functioned in the service of capitalism, Benjamin believes that cultural.

This brings me to my favorite Walter Benjamin quote, below: Incidentally, Benjamin’s brilliant intuition is an instance of what Edgar Allan Poe would call ratiocination, described here by Timothy Green as “a kind of imaginative reasoning, the ability of intuition to make sweeping connections between seemingly small and disparate details, a leap from all the might-have-beens to what.

This remarkable philosophical essay (the subtitle, 'Theological Political Fragments', gives a clue its concerns) comes with heavyweight endorsement from the likes of hip thinkers Slavoj Zizek and.

Most recently, Howard Eiland and Michael E. Jennings have given us the sturdy Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, published by Harvard University Press. If the lion’s share of previously untranslated work finally appeared in the last decade, there still isn’t anything like a helpful “Best of Benjamin.” (Arendt’s 1955 selection, Illuminations, remains the best place to begin.).

The 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.