Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926. Edited by Marcus Bullock, Michael W. Jennings

Walter Benjamin was one of the most original and important critical
voices of the twentieth century, but until now only a few of his writings
have been available in English. Harvard University Press has now
undertaken to publish a significant portion of his work in definitive
translation, under the general editorship of Michael W. Jennings. This
volume, the first of three, will at last give readers of English a true
sense of the man and the mans' theets of his thought. A separate
volume will consist of his book The Arcades Project, the magnum opus
of his Paris years.

The writer Walter Benjamin emerged our of the head-on collision of an
idealistic youth movement and the First World War, which Benjamin
and his close friends thought immoral. He walked away from the wreck
scarred yet determined "to be considered as the principal critic of
German literature." But the scene as he found it was dominated by
"talented fakes," so-to use his words-"only a terrorist campaign would I
suffice" to effect radical change. This book offers the record of the
first
phase of that campaign, culminating with "One-Way Street," one of the
most significant products of the German avant-garde of the Twenties.
Against conformism, homogeneity, and gentrification of all life into a
new world order, Benjamin made the word his sword.

Volume I of the Selected Writings brings together essays long and
short, academic treatises, reviews, fragments, and privately circulated
pronouncements. Fully five-sixths of this material has never before
been translated into English. The contents begin in 1913, when
Benjamin, as an undergraduate in imperial Germany, was president of
a radical youth group, and take us through 1926, when he had already
begun, with his explorations of the world of mass culture, to emerge as
a critical voice in Weimar Germany's most influential journals.

The volume includes a number of his most important works, including
"Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin," "Goethe's Elective Affinities," "The
Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism," "The Task of the
Translator," and "One-Way Street." He is as compelling and insightful
when musing on riddles or children's books as he is when dealing with
weightier issues such as the philosophy of language, symbolic logic, or
epistemology. We meet Benjamin the youthful idealist, the sober
moralist, the political theorist, the experimentalist, the translator,
and,
above all, the virtual king of criticism, with his magisterial exposition
of
the basic problems of aesthetics.

Benjamin's sentences provoke us to return to them again and again,
luring us as though with the promise of some final revelation that is
always being postponed. He is by turns fierce and tender, melancholy
and ebullient; he is at once classically rooted, even archaic, in his
explorations of the human psyche and the world of things, and
strikingly progressive in his attitude toward society and what he likes to
call the organs of the collective (its architectures, fashions,
signboards). Throughout, he displays a far-sighted urgency, judging
the present on the basis of possible futures. And he is gifted with a
keen sense of humor. Mysterious though he may sometimes be (his
Latvian love, Asia Lacis, once described him as a visitor from another
planet), Benjamin remains perhaps the most consistently surprising
and challenging of critical writers.
Metaphysics of Youth, 1913-1919

"Experience"

The Metaphysics of Youth

Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin

The Life of Students

Aphorisms on Imagination and Color

A Child's View of Color

Socrates

Trauerspiel and Tragedy

The Role of Language in Traucrspiel and Tragedy

On Language as Such and on the Language of Man

Theses on the Problem of Identity

Dostoevsky's The Idiot

Painting and the Graphic Arts

Painting, or Signs and Marks

The Ground of Intentional Immediacy

The Object: Triangle

Perception Is Reading

On Perception

Comments on Gundolf's Goethe

On the Program of the Coming Philosophy

Stifter

Every Unlimited Condition of the Will

Types of History

The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism

Fate and Character

Analogy and Relationship

The Paradox of the Cretan

The Currently Effective Messianic Elements

Angelus Novus, 1920-1926

The Theory of Criticism

Categories of Aesthetics

On Semblance

World and Time

According to the Theory of Duns Scotus

On Love and Related Matters

The Right to Use Force

The Medium through Which Works of Art Continue to Influence Later
Ages

Critique of Violence

The Task of the Translator

Notes for a Study of the Beauty of Colored Illustrations in Children's
Books

Riddle and Mystery

Outline for a Habilitation Thesis

Language and Logic (I-III)

Theory of Knowledge

Truth and Truths / Knowledge and Elements of Knowledge

Imagination

Beauty and Semblance

The Philosophy of History of the Late Romantics and the Historical
School

The Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe

Capitalism as Religion

Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus

Goethe's Elective Affinities

Baudelaire (II, III)

Calderón's El Mayor Monstruo, Los Celos and Hebbel's Herades und
Mariamne

Letter to Florens Christian Rang

Stages of Intention

Outline of the Psychophysical Problem

Even the Sacramental Migrates into Myth

On the Topic of Individual Disciplines and Philosophy

"Old Forgotten Children's Books"

Naples

Curriculum Vitae (I)

Reflections on Humboldt

Review of Bernoulli's Bachofen

Johann Peter Hehel (I): On the Centenary of His Death

Johann Peter Hebel (II): A Picture Puzzle for the Centenary of His
Death

A Glimpse into the World of Children's Books

One-Way Street

A Note on the Texts

Chronology, 1892-1926

Index