Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity

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Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity

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Description

Walter Benjamin is universally recognized as one of the key thinkers of modernity: his writings on politics, language, literature, media, theology and law have had an incalculable influence on contemporary thought. Yet the problem of architecture in and for Benjamin’s work remains relatively underexamined. Does Benjamin’s project have an architecture and, if so, how does this architecture affect the explicit propositions that he offers us? In what ways are Benjamin’s writings centrally caught up with architectural concerns, from the redevelopment of major urban centres to the movements that individuals can make within the new spaces of modern cities? How can Benjamin’s theses help us to understand the secret architectures of the present? This volume takes up the architectural challenge in a number of innovative ways, collecting essays by both well-known and emerging scholars on time in cinema, the problem of kitsch, the design of graves and tombs, the orders of road-signs, childhood experience in modern cities, and much more. Engaged, interdisciplinary, bristling with insights, the essays in this collection will constitute an indispensable supplement to the work of Walter Benjamin, as well as providing a guide to some of the obscurities of our own present.

Contents

Introduction

Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity
Andrew Benjamin and Charles Rice

Aesthetics and Philosophy

Booking Benjamin: The Fate of a Medium
Henry Sussman

On the ‘Vital Significance’ of Kitsch: Walter Benjamin’s Politics of ‘Bad Taste’
Winfried Menninghaus

Modernity as an Unfinished Project: Benjamin and Political Romanticism
Michael Mack

Violence, Deconstruction, and Sovereignty: Derrida and Agamben on Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’
Robert Sinnerbrink

Graves, Pits and Murderous Plots: Walter Benjamin, Alois Riegl, and the German Mourning Play’s Dreary Tone of Intrigue
Joel Morris

Benjamin’s Critique of Aesthetic Autonomy
George Markus

Framing Pictures, Transcending Marks: Walter Benjamin’s ‘Paintings, or Signs and Marks’
Andrew Benjamin

Cities and Images

Interiority, Exteriority and Spatial Politics in Benjamin’s Cityscapes
Peter Schmiedgen

Time Without End: Exploring the Temporal Experience of Wong Kar‑Wai’s 2046 Through Walter Benjamin
Jo Law

Experience and Play: Walter Benjamin and the Prelapsarian Child
Carlo Salzani

Experimental Set-ups: Benjamin on History and Film
Tara Forrest