Full name: The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

Author: Susan Buck-Morss Year: 1989 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Philosophy, History, Non Fiction Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780262521642 0262521644

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. Similar books: The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin The Philosophy of Schopenhauer by Bryan Magee The Dominion of the Dead by Robert Pogue Harrison The Unity of Philosophical Experience by Etienne Gilson The Life-Giving Sword by Yagyu Munenori The Writing of the Disaster by Maurice Blanchot Stoicism by John Sellars The Birth of the Clinic by Michel Foucault American Nietzsche by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen The American Evasion of Philosophy by Cornel West What Nietzsche Really Said by Robert C. Solomon The Portable Enlightenment Reader by Isaac Kramnick The Greek Philosophers by W. K. C. Guthrie Foucault by Gary Gutting The Rise of Modern Philosophy by Anthony Kenny Being Good by Simon Blackburn Plato, Socrates, and the Dialogues by Michael Sugrue Medieval Philosophy by Anthony Kenny Foucault For Beginners by Lydia Alix Fillingham Introducing Philosophy by Dave Robinson