Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

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César Rendueles, Ana Useros, Atlas Constelaciones, Madrid: Círculo de Bellas Artes, 2010. Catalogue. (Spanish) Dialektik des Sehens - Walter Benjamin und das Passagen-Werk, trans. Joachim Schulte, Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1993. [65] (German) Arendt, Hannah; Scholem, Gershom Gerhard; Knott, Marie Luise (2017). "Letter's 1-4". The correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem. Chicago (Ill.): University of Chicago press. pp.1–9. ISBN 978-0-226-92451-9.

Radiophoniques, Editions Allia, 2014. Benjamin’s radiophonic works. Excerpt, [55], [56], Commentary. (French) Ostensibly and analysis of the stories of Russian author Nikolai Leskov. This is merely the introduction into a much more complex and expansive examination of the increasing loss of storytellers in literature. The storyteller belongs to the age of the past when experience informed narrative. The modern world has changed the very dynamics of existence so much that experience has lost meaning. Industrialization has had the effect of removing many daily experiences which used to be common across cultures. In addition, the horrific machine of industrialization has created experiences which writers don’t want to revisit. Predicting the rise of the information age, Benjamin also theorizes that the myth and legend of storytelling is too subject to investigation and explain of factual foundations. At Bloch's suggestion, he read Lukács's History and Class Consciousness (1923). He also met the Latvian Bolshevik and actress Asja Lācis, then residing in Moscow; he became her lover and was a lasting intellectual influence on him. [51] 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. with Gretel Adorno, Briefwechsel 1930–1940, eds. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005, 434 pp. [63] (German)

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Hansen, Miriam. “Benjamin, Cinema, and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology.’” New German Critique 40 (1987) : 179-224.

The Arcades Project, in its current form, brings together a massive collection of notes Benjamin filed together from 1927 to 1940. [80] Benjamin had already fled when the Nazis marched into Paris, but his apartment—and all his quotations and books—remained. Walter's uncle, William Stern (born Wilhelm Louis Stern; 1871–1938), was a prominent German child psychologist who developed the concept of the intelligence quotient (IQ). [16] He also had a cousin, Günther Anders (born Günther Siegmund Stern; 1902–1992), [16] a German philosopher and anti-nuclear activist who studied under Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Through his mother, Walter's great-uncle was the classical archaeologist Gustav Hirschfeld. [16] [17]

General Overviews

Literárněvědné studie. Výbor z díla I, trans. Martin Ritter, Prague: Oikoymenh, 2009, 336 pp. Publisher. Footprint 18: "Constellation of Awakening: Benjamin and Architecture", Spring/Summer 2016. (English) Despite its relative brevity, Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” continues to inspire significant scholarly attention as a major work in the history of modern aesthetic and political criticism. The essay is credited with developing an insightful interpretation of the role technological reproduction plays in shaping aesthetic experience; more specifically, Benjamin catalogues the significant effects of film and photography on the decline of autonomous aesthetic experience. After fleeing the Nazi government in 1933, Benjamin moved to Paris, from where he published the first edition of “Work of Art” in 1936 (Brodersen XV). This publication appeared in French translation under the direction of Raymond Aron in volume 5, no. 1 of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Benjamin subsequently rewrote the essay and after editorial work by Theodore and Margarethe Adorno it was posthumously published in its commonly recognized form in his Schriften of 1955 (Wolin 183-4). Erasmus: Speculum Scienta

Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography, trans. James Rolleston, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991, 226 pp, ARG. (English) In 1923, when the Institute for Social Research was founded, later to become home to the Frankfurt School, Benjamin published Charles Baudelaire, Tableaux Parisiens. At that time he became acquainted with Theodor Adorno and befriended Georg Lukács, whose The Theory of the Novel (1920) much influenced him. Meanwhile, the inflation in the Weimar Republic after the war made it difficult for Emil Benjamin to continue supporting his son's family. At the end of 1923 Scholem emigrated to Palestine, a country under the British Mandate of Palestine; despite repeated invitations, he failed to persuade Benjamin (and family) to leave the continent for the Middle East. Matthew Rampley, Remembrance of Things Past. On Aby M. Warburg and Walter Benjamin, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000, 138 pp. (English) Dialéctica de la mirada: Walter Benjamin y la dialéctica de los pasajes, Madrid: Visor, 1995. (Spanish)

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A year later, in 1925, Benjamin withdrew The Origin of German Tragic Drama as his possible qualification for the habilitation teaching credential at the University of Frankfurt at Frankfurt am Main, fearing its possible rejection. [52] The work was a study in which he sought to "save" the category of allegory. It proved too unorthodox and abstruse for its examiners, who included prominent members of the humanities faculty, such as Hans Cornelius; [53] he was not to be an academic instructor. Volume 2, Part 2: 1931-1934, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, 1999; 2005, PDF. [48]

Einbahnstraße [One-Way Street], Berlin, 1928; repr., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001, 128 pp. [4] Malé dejiny fotografie", trans. Adam Bžoch, in Benjamin, Iluminácie, ed. Adam Bžoch, Bratislava: Kalligram 1999, pp 160-174. (Slovak) The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility", trans. Harry Zohn, in Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, 1968; 2007, pp 217-251. (English)This is not just Benjamin’s most famous work—by far—but also one of the essential key texts in modern critical thought. The basic premise analyzes the consequence of the ability for mass reproductions of works of art for the first time in history with the arrival of the machinery of the twentieth-century. That consequence is one in which the original work of art has lost what Benjamin terms its “aura” in the face of the ability to reproduce it. What was once unique about any work of art—but especially something like the Mona Lisa—no longer possesses the same value, or least the same kind of value which is divorced from consumer value, as it did when only one existed or even when on the ability to reproduce on a singular scale existed. The deep political and social significance of these reflections are developed briefly in Benjamin’s epilogue, wherein he recognizes in fascism a final and terrible instantiation of the L’art pour l’art movement. As a form of extreme capitalism, fascism ultimately does not alter the structure of property relationships. Instead it substitutes aesthetic expression into the world of politics, thus supposedly allowing the masses the right to self-expression. The result is a reinstatement of the aura and cultic values into political life, a process which inevitably ends in war (241-2). In a chilling final paragraph Benjamin suggests that self-alienation within fascism has become so extreme that the destruction of humanity becomes an aesthetic experience. In response to this total aestheticization of politics, Benjamin writes that communism responds in a supposedly positive gesture by “politicizing art” (242). Evropeyskoe i sovetskoe iskusstvo" [Европейское и советское искусство], Vechernyaya Moskva (Вечерняя Москва) 11, 14 Jan 1927, p 2; repr., Zeitschrift für Slawistik 30:5, 1985, pp 697-700. (Russian) Walter Benjamin - Biography". European Graduate School EGS. Archived from the original on September 7, 2011.