Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism) (Volume 7)

About this book

Few twentieth-century thinkers have proven as influential as Walter Benjamin the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural and literary critic. Richard Wolins book remains among the clearest and most insightful introductions to Benjamins writings offering a philosophically rich exposition of his complex relationship to Adorno Brecht Jewish Messianism and Western Marxism. Wolin provides nuanced interpretations of Benjamins widely studied writings on Baudelaire historiography and art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In a new Introduction written especially for this edition Wolin discusses the unfinished Arcades Project as well as recent tendencies in the reception of Benjamins work and the relevance of his ideas to contemporary debates about modernity and postmodernity.