Bloomsbury Inheriting Walter Benjamin (Walter Benjamin Studies)

Review Gerhard Richter brings meaning to the event of inheritance, which affects us in every walk--and failure--of life. The work explores with exquisite integrity what has motivated or tripped us as we are traversed by the experience that Benjamin names and crucially disarticulates. The extent to which Benjamin's text remote controls modern trials of transmissibility and consciousness remains briskly active. Beautifully written, with punch and poignancy, Richter's work commands the authority of the great doubter and accomplished scholar as it constitutes Benjamin's legacy, supplying pleasure and stirring insight to the complex themes, obsessions, and bewilderment of our era. --Avital Ronell, University Professor in the Humanities, New York University, USAWith his carefully elaborated notion of literary and cultural inheritance, Gerhard Richter lends rare coherence both to Benjamin's critical task and to the elective affinities that he shared with such crucial contemporaries as Martin Heidegger. In its dynamic fluidity, this study accommodates exciting tangents, including a new take on Benjamin's gravitation to photography as icon and catalyst of modernization. Engagingly written, rigorous, and well-documented, this book comprises a rich new resource. --Henry Sussman, Visiting Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Yale University, USAGerhard Richter is one of a tiny handful of the most important readers of Walter Benjamin. Inheriting Walter Benjamin will not only enhance that reputation; it also shows Richter as a brilliant scholar of an astonishing range of texts and objects ranging from Kant through contemporary photography. This book is a must read for anyone interested in Benjaminand in innovative and highly suggestive readings of him. Michael W. Jennings, Class of 1900 Professor of Modern Languages, Princeton University, USA This is a fascinating and challenging book. Richters subtle readings demonstrate the theological, political, philosophical, and aesthetic complexity - and contemporary urgency - of Benjamins concept of inheritance. --Rebecca Comay, Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, Canada Product Description Gerhard Richter examines, in the work of Walter Benjamin, one of the central problems of modernity: the question of how to receive an intellectual inheritance. Covering aspects of Benjamins complex relationship to the legacies of such writers as Kant, Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger, and Derrida, each chapter attends to a key concern in Benjamins writing, while reflecting on the challenges that this issue presents for the question of inheritability and transmissibility. Both reading Benjamin and watching himself reading Benjamin, Richter participates in the act of inheriting while also inquiring into the conditions of possibility for inheriting Benjamins corpus today. About the Author Gerhard Richter is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature and Chair of the German Studies Department at Brown University, USA. He is the author of five previous books in critical theory, including Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics ( 2011).