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The dialectics of seeing : Walter Benjamin and the Arcades project /

By: Series: Studies in contemporary German social thoughtPublication details: Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1991, ©1989.Edition: 1st MIT Press pbk. edDescription: xii, 493 pages : illustrations ; 23 cmISBN:
  • 0262022680
  • 9780262022682
  • 0262521644
  • 9780262521642
Subject(s): LOC classification:
  • PT2603.E455 P334 1991
Contents:
Part I : Introduction -- 1. Temporal origins -- 2. Spatial oragins -- Part II : Introduction -- 3. Natural history: Fossil -- 4. Mythic history; Fetish -- 5. Mythic nature: Wish images -- 6. Historial nature: Ruin -- Part III : Introduction -- 7. Is this philosophy? -- 8. Dream world of mass culture -- 9. Materialist pedagogy -- Afterword : Revolutionary inheritance -- Afterimages.
Summary: 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. Susan Buck-Morss is Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory at Cornell University. The Dialectics of Seeing is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.
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Item type Current library Collection Call number Copy number Status Notes Date due Barcode
Book Book Whitecliffe Library General Shelves General B 3209 BEN BUC (Browse shelf(Opens below)) 1 Available Donated by Erich Ranfft, 2018. 0016304

An English reconstruction and analysis of Benjamin's Passagen-Werk.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 478-484) and index.

Part I : Introduction -- 1. Temporal origins -- 2. Spatial oragins -- Part II : Introduction -- 3. Natural history: Fossil -- 4. Mythic history; Fetish -- 5. Mythic nature: Wish images -- 6. Historial nature: Ruin -- Part III : Introduction -- 7. Is this philosophy? -- 8. Dream world of mass culture -- 9. Materialist pedagogy -- Afterword : Revolutionary inheritance -- Afterimages.

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. Susan Buck-Morss is Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory at Cornell University. The Dialectics of Seeing is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

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