Focusing on the arcades of 19th-century Paris--glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources. 46 illustrations.

Walter Benjamin's magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form. Working with Benjamin's vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth. The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose "materialist metaphysics" he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century "ur-form" of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin's dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time—from air balloons to women's fashions, from Baudelaire's poetry to Grandville's cartoons—as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique. Buck-Morss plots Benjamin's intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south—Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples—and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of "dialectics at a standstill." She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin's insights but then allows a set of "afterimages" to have the last word.

One of the most significant cultural documents of the Weimar Republic and Nazi era, Walter Benjamin's unfinished Arcades Project has had a remarkable impact on present-day cultural theory, urban studies, cultural studies and literary interpretation. Originally designed as a panoramic study chronicling the rise and decline of the Parisian shopping arcades, Benjamin's work combines imaginative peregrinations through the changing city-scape of nineteenth-century Paris with passages that read like a blueprint for a new cultural theory of modernity. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project provides the first comprehensive introduction to this extraordinary work accessible to English-language readers. The diverse range of issues explored include the nature of collecting, the anatomy of melancholy, the flâneur, the physiognomy of ruins, the dialectical image, Benjamin's relation to Baudelaire, the practice of history-writing, and modernity and architecture. Contributors include Susan Buck-Morss, Stanley Cavell, Jonathan Culler, Brigid Doherty, Barbara Johnson, Esther Leslie, Gerhard Richter, Andrew Benjamin, Howard Caygill, Beatrice Hanssen, Detlef Mertins, Elissa Marder, Tyrus Miller, and Irving Wohlfarth

Published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the Jewish Museum, New York, March 17-August 6, 2017.

This Companion offers a comprehensive introduction to the thought of the highly influential twentieth-century critic and theorist Walter Benjamin. The volume provides examinations of the different aspects of Benjamin's work that have had a significant effect on contemporary critical and historical thought. Topics discussed by experts in the field include Benjamin's relation to the avant-garde movements of his time, his theories on language and mimesis, modernity, his significance and relevance to modern cultural studies, and his autobiographical writings. Additional material includes a guide to further reading and a chronology.

The history of modernity written as a philosophy if fashion, set in the cultural framework of Paris.

Following the spirit of Benjamin's Arcades Project, this book acts as a kaleidoscope of change in the 21st century, tracing its different reflections in the international contemporary while seeking to understand individual/collective reactions to change through a series of creative methodologies.

'Benjamin's Arcades' is an innovative text for students and specialists on the intellectual and political context of Walter Benjamin's unfinished masterpiece, 'The Arcades Project'. It includes a special 'convoluted index' to aid the reader in discovering recurrent themes and ideas, both in the book itself and Benjamin's methods.

Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory. The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context. With its challenging argument concerning violence, law, and justice—which addresses such topical matters as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of religion—Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its publication in Weimar Germany a century ago.

Not an autobiography in the customary sense, Benjamin's recollection of his childhood in an upper-middle-class Jewish home in Berlin's West End at the turn of the century is translated into English for the first time in book form.