The Benjamin Files

Fredric Jameson

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Hardback

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English

Verso Books
02 February 2021

Social & political philosophy; Theology; Marxism & Communism

"The Benjamin Files offers a comprehensive new reading of all of Benjamin's major works and a great number of his shorter book reviews, notes and letters.

Its premise is that Benjamin was an anti-philosophical, anti-systematic thinker whose conceptual interests also felt the gravitational pull of his vocation as a writer.

What resulted was a coexistence or variety of language fields and thematic codes which overlapped and often seemed to contradict each other: a view which will allow us to clarify the much-debated tension in his works between the mystical or theological side of Benjamin and his political or historical inclination.

The three-way tug of war over his heritage between adherents of his friends Scholem, Adorno and Brecht, can also be better grasped from this position, which gives the Brechtian standpoint more due than most influential academic studies.

Benjamin's corpus is an anticipation of contemporary theory in the priority it gives language and representation over philosophical or conceptual unity; and its political motivations are clarified by attention to the omnipresence of History throughout his writing, from the shortest articles to the most ambitious projects.

His explicit program – ""to transfer the crisis into the heart of language"" or, in other words, to detect class struggle at work in the most minute literary phenomena – requires the reader to translate the linguistic or representational literary issues that concerned him back into the omnipresent but often only implicitly political ones. But the latter are those of another era, to which we must gain access, to use one of Benjamin's favorite expressions."

By: Fredric Jameson
Imprint: Verso Books
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 153mm, Spine: 21mm
Weight: 436g
ISBN: 9781784783983
ISBN 10: 1784783986
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 02 February 2021
Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Primary
Replaced By: 9781839765575
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture's relation to political economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Cultural Turn, A Singular Modernity, The Modernist Papers, Archaeologies of the Future, Brecht and Method, Ideologies of Theory, Valences of the Dialectic, The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital.

Reviews for The Benjamin Files

Fredric Jameson is America's leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction. - Terry Eagleton Probably the most important cultural critic writing in English today ... It can be truly said that nothing cultural is alien to him. - Colin MacCabe For anybody hoping to understand not just the cultural but the political and social implications of postmodernism ... Jameson's book is a fundamental, nonpareil text. - Sunday Times (in praise of Postmodernism) The scope and profundity of Postmodernism, covering theory, architecture, film, video and economics, is truly staggering ... Brilliant. - Independent (in praise of Postmodernism)