El truco preferido de Satán

by Walter Benjamin

La selección de los Pasajes de Walter Benjamin, tal y como se presenta en esta nueva traducción, tiene la originalidad de subrayar el aspecto más poético que filosófico de la escritura del autor. La estrecha y ambigua relación entre poesía y filosofía es tan antigua como la propia cultura occidental, al menos desde los presocráticos. Sin embargo, su exposición se ha reducido casi siempre a tema de reflexión teórica o ensayística. Nuestro propósito, al incluir la versión en una colección de poesía, con el añadido de la fotografías de Alberto García-Alix, es forzar la lectura poética y no meramente filosófica de los textos benjaminianos, en lo que dicho desplazamiento tiene de sustitución de la preponderancia de lo conceptual por la deriva y multiplicación de sentidos que impone la estructura en iconotexto del volumen; una lógica basada en el diálogo entre la musicalidad de la prosa y el ritmo sensible y no instrumental de las imágenes.

142 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, Jewish mysticism, and neo-Kantianism, Benjamin made influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders, though the friendship between Arendt and Benjamin outlasted her marriage to Anders. Both Arendt and Anders were students of Martin Heidegger, whom Benjamin considered a nemesis.
Among Benjamin's best known works are the essays "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935) and "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940). His major work as a literary critic included essays on Charles Baudelaire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Franz Kafka, Karl Kraus, Nikolai Leskov, Marcel Proust, Robert Walser, Trauerspiel and translation theory. He also made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.
Of the hidden principle organizing Walter Benjamin's thought Scholem wrote unequivocally that "Benjamin was a philosopher", while his younger colleagues Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno contend that he was "not a philosopher". Scholem remarked "The peculiar aura of authority emanating from his work tended to incite contradiction". Benjamin himself considered his research to be theological, though he eschewed all recourse to traditionally metaphysical sources of transcendentally revealed authority.
In 1940, at the age of 48, Benjamin died by suicide at Portbou on the French Spanish border while attempting to escape the advance of the Third Reich. Though popular acclaim eluded him during his life, the decades following his death won his work posthumous renown.