Walter Benjamin's Archive: Images, Texts, Signs [Hardcover]

Walter Benjamin (Author), Ursula Marx (Editor), Gudrun Schwarz (Editor), Michael Schwarz (Editor), Erdmut Wizisla (Editor), Esther Leslie (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 17, 2007

An absorbing selection of Walter Benjamin's personal manuscripts, images, and documents.

The work of the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin is an audacious plotting of history, art and thought; a reservoir of texts, commentaries, scraps and fragments of everyday life, art and dreams. It comprises myriad smaller archives, in which Benjamin gathered together all kinds of artefacts, assortments of images, texts and signs, themselves representing experiences, ideas and hopes, each of which was enthusiastically logged, systematized and analyzed by their author. In them, Benjamin laid the groundwork for the salvaging of his own legacy.

This unique book, produced in association with the Benjamin Archive, delves into these archives. They include carefully laid-out manuscripts; photograps of a home with luxurious furniture, arcades, Russian toys; picture postcards from Tuscany and the Balearics; meticulous and unconventional registers, card indexes and catalogs; notebooks, in which every single square centimeter is covered; a collation of his son's first words and sentences; riddles and enigmatic Sibyls. Everything here is subtly interlinked with everything else.

Intricate and intimate, Walter Benjamin's Archive leads right into the core of his work, yielding a rich and detailed portrait of its author.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The most important German aesthetician and literary critic of the twentieth century." - George Steiner Praise for The Arcades Project: "A towering literary event." - New York Times "Benjamin is important because of his insight into the cultural consequences of capitalism, an insight that gives us a style of thinking about the now inescapable culture of consumerism," - Harper's "A magnificent opus." - J. M. Coetzee, Guardian"

About the Author

Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and is the author of Illuminations, The Arcades Project, and The Origin of German Tragic Drama.

Esther Leslie is a lecturer in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, London. She is the author of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism and sits on the editorial boards of Historical Materialism, Radical Philosophy and Revolutionary History.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 311 pages
• Publisher: Verso (December 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1844671968
• ISBN-13: 978-1844671960
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #193,169 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Book of Books, March 20, 2008

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T. Porges (Washington DC, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Walter Benjamin's Archive: Images, Texts, Signs (Hardcover)

It's always wonderful to look into a book or magazine that consists largely of photographs of pages from other books, partly because nothing photographs better,and partly because you are seeing the page in something both like and unlike its native habitat, like an animal in the better kind of zoo.

Because the texts are presented this way, as photographs of autographs (notebooks, postcards, trial drafts of essays, collected photographs with notations), the distance between reader and author is inescapable. Often, when we see a famous text (sometimes,e.g when it's newly translated into contemporary language), we will remark on how contemporary the story feels, how the writer, long dead, feels like someone you know or could know. But with pages like these, the patina of time is present, and so is all of the strangeness of the writer, as much as is left. There's nothing like a trip to the archives to get your bearings relative to a writer; to locate him/her in time, and to feel the presence of time, both as the writer felt it in gathering these scraps together, and as you feel it now.

My favorite image from Benjamin's writing is the Angel of History, who is pinned in the air, blown back and upright by a wind from Paradise (from the Beginning), while all the garbage of every passing moment piles up at her feet. Something like a librarian. Being the angel of history makes movement difficult if not impossible, even when you have to leave Germany to save your life. You can read about that, but it's wonderful to have a chance to see pages from those books. If you're a Benjamin completionist, you will need to buy this book, but even if all you've read are the essays in Arendt's little collection, you will enjoy the added sense of the presence and loss of their author, just the same.

10 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Stuff, April 5, 2008

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Christian Schlect (Yakima, Washington/USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Walter Benjamin's Archive: Images, Texts, Signs (Hardcover)

Amazon's star rating system goes askew on this book.

If you are a devoted fan of Walter Benjamin, then it is essential. On the other hand, if you are like me---who has never read Mr. Benjamin's works ---then it won't be such a useful purchase.

Without a flowing textual narrative, this book provides detailed examples of the scraps and notes kept by Mr. Benjamin, who was a compulsive hoarder of all mundane things tied to his highly intellectual pursuits during most of the first half of the last century