Walter Benjamin: Textos esenciales

by Walter Benjamin

La obra ¿inclasificable? de Benjamin es ciertamente sui generis, tan amplia en sus intereses y tan fragmentaria, que fue preciso que pasaran varias décadas para que fuera reconocida en su real magnitud. Como tantos otros que se adelantaron al pensamiento y las formas de expresarlo propias de su tiempo, Benjamin fue reconocido en vida solamente por un reducido grupo de interesados en sus investigaciones, aquellos que, como su gran amigo Theodor Adorno y algunas figuras más de la célebre Escuela de Frankfurt, entrevieron en su escritura por momentos "esotérica", siempre dotada de una enorme hondura y precisión, el anticipo de uno de los rumbos posibles que tomaría el conocimiento en el porvenir mediato.

¿Cómo, entonces, leer la obra de Benjamin? Partiendo de la base de que es un pensador que ha impactado fuertemente en la modernidad y varias de sus teorías fueron la base de la posmodernidad, pero que, paradojalmente, su obra no está circunscripta a un sólo campo de la investigación y la teorización, sino que es capaz de vérselas con muchos problemas que son propios de varias disciplinas, desde la filosofía hasta la literatura, desde la sociología hasta la historia, abarcando un amplio espectro de intereses y metas, y, lo que es todavía mejor, comprendiendo las múltiples relaciones que permiten establecer los abordajes y los puntos de vista empleados.


Autor: Walter Benjamin

Selección y prólogo: Luis Benítez

194 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 1, 2014

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.