Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life - Softcover

Eiland, Howard; Jennings, Michael W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674970772 ISBN 13: 9780674970779

Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2016

Synopsis

Walter Benjamin is one of the twentieth century's most important intellectuals, and also one of its most elusive. His writings―mosaics incorporating philosophy, literary criticism, Marxist analysis, and a syncretistic theology―defy simple categorization. And his mobile, often improvised existence has proven irresistible to mythologizers. His writing career moved from the brilliant esotericism of his early writings through his emergence as a central voice in Weimar culture and on to the exile years, with its pioneering studies of modern media and the rise of urban commodity capitalism in Paris. That career was played out amid some of the most catastrophic decades of modern European history: the horror of the First World War, the turbulence of the Weimar Republic, and the lengthening shadow of fascism. Now, a major new biography from two of the world's foremost Benjamin scholars reaches beyond the mosaic and the mythical to present this intriguing figure in full.

Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings make available for the first time a rich store of information which augments and corrects the record of an extraordinary life. They offer a comprehensive portrait of Benjamin and his times as well as extensive commentaries on his major works, including "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," the essays on Baudelaire, and the great study of the German Trauerspiel. Sure to become the standard reference biography of this seminal thinker, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life will prove a source of inexhaustible interest for Benjamin scholars and novices alike.

About this title

About the Author:

Howard Eiland is an editor and translator of Benjamin’s writings.

Michael W. Jennings is Class of 1900 Professor of Modern Languages at Princeton University.

Review:

“[An] outstanding and monumental biography of Walter Benjamin... In the thoroughness of their account and the acuity and delicacy of their philosophical analyses, Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings have provided an indispensable sighting of Benjamin’s achievement.”―Anthony Phelan, Times Literary Supplement

“[This] is a careful synthesis of all the available sources for Benjamin’s life―letters, diaries, reminiscences of friends―with all of his major writings, to produce the comprehensive account that has been sorely lacking until now... Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life makes clear how intimately Benjamin’s biography was shaped by the history of Europe during his lifetime.”―Adam Kirsch, New York Review of Books

“In their superb new biography, Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings have given us a portrait of this elusive but paradigmatic thinker that deserves to be ranked among the few truly indispensable intellectual biographies of the modern era. I am tempted to call it a masterpiece. Nearly seven hundred pages in length, this is not only a study of Benjamin’s life, it is also a guide to the bewildering mix of themes and preoccupations that populated this most prolific and unfamiliar of minds... To write the biography of an intellectual is difficult business, since so much of what passes for an event is taking place only in the mind or on the page―but those are the events that really matter. Eiland and Jennings move with deliberation through Benjamin’s major works, expounding and explaining with uncommon lucidity even when the text in question is one of notorious difficulty. The result is not a mere chronicle of a life but also a reliable map into Benjamin’s intellectual labyrinth.”―Peter E. Gordon, New Republic

“The most comprehensive biography we are ever likely to have of Benjamin... Both authors have spent close to a lifetime on the subject. The devotion and care evident in their account are clearly based on sympathy and admiration. Their exposition of Benjamin’s thought is exemplary, their sleuthing about his personal life breathtaking. Definitive is an archaic and much abused term that Benjamin would have abhorred; suffice it to say that it is unlikely that anyone will ever be able to tell us more about this German-Jewish thinker or present that knowledge with greater stylistic aplomb.”―Modris Eksteins, Wall Street Journal

“[Eiland and Jennings] argue compellingly that as a critic [Benjamin] not only reshaped our understanding of many important writers, but he recognized the potentials and hazards of technological media that revolutionized culture during his lifetime... An impressive work of exegesis... Indispensable.”―Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian

“Serious and imposing, it seeks to gather up and bind the threads of Benjamin’s career, unite the unpublished and the half-finished essays and book projects, weaving together a comprehensive biography both of the man and his thought. A great strength of Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life is how it lays out Benjamin’s major works as part of an evolution of thought, providing not only invaluable context to each piece, but tracing each work’s central claims in a lucid and approachable manner. One need not be a PhD to approach this book, and it will intrigue anyone with a passing interest in the intellectual history of the 20th century. With key essays and books given substantive contextualization and explanation, Eiland and Jennings make Benjamin’s work accessible and networked into a larger set of themes and concerns... As omnipresent as [Benjamin’s] tragic fate is throughout the book, Eiland and Jennings also provide a host of surprising (and even delightful) details of Benjamin’s life, which round out the melancholic caricature of him in favor of a complex, conflicted individual.”―Colin Dickey, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Impressive... [Eiland and Jennings] portray their subject as a kind of ragpicker in the neglected alleyways of a culture in transition―a specialist in the marginal and mundane, the fragmentary and forgotten... They succeed in offering not only the most comprehensive biography to date, but a tour de force introduction to an incomparably incandescent mind.”―Benjamin Balint, Books & Ideas

“Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings have rightly sought and successfully produced the thread that gives a biography of Benjamin the kind of weight and significance his influence deserves... Their curiosity in searching out an expanded wealth of details now available about Benjamin, both personal and intellectual, historical and anecdotal, has produced an account that enlivens the already well-known turning points in Benjamin’s development... This biography far surpasses not just any preceding biographical history of Benjamin but in its searching out of what remains consistent in Benjamin it has found the thread that allows a narrative of life and work to unfold in a way that does not subordinate one to the other... This achievement will remain not only a standard and resource-full account of Benjamin but in its comprehensiveness as well as its acute accounts of Benjamin’s thought across the whole range of that thinking, it will continue to provide the foundation for the fuller understanding of his place and contribution to the critical, cultural, political and historical present we have inherited from the twentieth century.”―David Ferris, Critical Inquiry

“Walter Benjamin deserves to be more celebrated, and Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, by Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, is a step in the right direction. It is an efficient introduction to his work and legacy while also offering a detailed account of Benjamin the man, his strengths and weaknesses and the world he lived in. It is also a deeply poignant story of his struggle to survive in a hostile Europe and his tragic suicide at the age of 48.”―Cyril Kavanaugh, The Guardian

“Presented here in what looks like a definitive version, Benjamin’s life emerges as a tragedy of incompleteness.”―John Gray, Literary Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0674970772
• ISBN 13: 9780674970779
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 768