Called "the most important critic of his time" by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin has only become more influential over the years, as his work has assumed a crucial place in current debates over the interactions of art, culture, and meaning. A "natural and extraordinary talent for letter writing was one of the most captivating facets of his nature," writes Gershom Scholem in his Foreword to this volume; and Benjamin's correspondence reveals the evolution of some of his most powerful ideas, while also offering an intimate picture of Benjamin himself and the times in which he lived.Writing at...

"La nostra indagine si propone di mostrare come in conseguenza di questa rappresentazione cosistica del processo di civilizzazione, le nuove forme di vita e le nuove creazioni a base economica e tecnica, che noi imputiamo al secolo trascorso, appartengano invece alluniverso di una fantasmagoria." Walter Benjamin.

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. Throughout his life, Benjamin gathered together all kinds of artifacts, 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 this way, Benjamin laid...

Publicado originalmente en la revista Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, es un ensayo de 1936 escrito por el critico cultural marxista Walter Benjamin en el tiempo en que Adolf Hitler ya era Canciller de Alemania en un esfuerzo por describir una teoria del arte que seria util para la formulacion de demandas revolucionarias en la politica del arte. En la ausencia de cualquier valor ritual o tradicional, el arte en la epoca de su reproductibilidad tecnica estaria basado en la practica de la politica.