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Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume I, 1913-1926
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by Walter Benjamin,
Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings
Harvard University Press
Due/Published
April 2004, 528 pages,
paper
ISBN
0674013557
New in paper (S04) Walter Benjamin emerged out 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 Hölderlin," "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 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. Contents Metaphysics of Youth, 1913-1919
"Experience"
The Metaphysics of Youth
Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin
The Life of Students
Aphorisms on Imagination and Color
A Child's View of Color
Socrates
Trauerspiel and Tragedy
The Role of Language in Traucrspiel and Tragedy
On Language as Such and on the Language of Man
Theses on the Problem of Identity
Dostoevsky's The Idiot
Painting and the Graphic Arts
Painting, or Signs and Marks
The Ground of Intentional Immediacy
The Object: Triangle
Perception Is Reading
On Perception
Comments on Gundolf's Goethe
On the Program of the Coming Philosophy
Stifter
Every Unlimited Condition of the Will
Types of History
The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism
Fate and Character
Analogy and Relationship
The Paradox of the Cretan
The Currently Effective Messianic Elements Angelus Novus, 1920-1926
The Theory of Criticism
Categories of Aesthetics
On Semblance
World and Time
According to the Theory of Duns Scotus
On Love and Related Matters
The Right to Use Force
The Medium through Which Works of Art Continue to Influence Later Ages
Critique of Violence
The Task of the Translator
Notes for a Study of the Beauty of Colored Illustrations in Children's Books
Riddle and Mystery
Outline for a Habilitation Thesis
Language and Logic (I-III)
Theory of Knowledge
Truth and Truths / Knowledge and Elements of Knowledge
Imagination
Beauty and Semblance
The Philosophy of History of the Late Romantics and the Historical School
The Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe
Capitalism as Religion
Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus
Goethe's Elective Affinities
Baudelaire (II, III)
Calderón's El Mayor Monstruo, Los Celos and Hebbel's Herades und Mariamne
Letter to Florens Christian Rang
Stages of Intention
Outline of the Psychophysical Problem
Even the Sacramental Migrates into Myth
On the Topic of Individual Disciplines and Philosophy
"Old Forgotten Children's Books"
Naples
Curriculum Vitae (I)
Reflections on Humboldt
Review of Bernoulli's Bachofen
Johann Peter Hehel (I): On the Centenary of His Death
Johann Peter Hebel (II): A Picture Puzzle for the Centenary of His Death
A Glimpse into the World of Children's Books
One-Way Street A Note on the Texts
Chronology, 1892-1926
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