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والتر بنیامین یا به سوی نقدی انقلابی
این کتاب، که از دو بخش تشکیل شده است، مجموعهای از مفاهیم اصلی بنیامین نظیر «تمثیل»، «هاله»، «تاریخ» و «سنت» و غیره را مطرح میکند و میکوشد برخورد مفهومی بنیامین با پدیدههایی چون باروک را با ژستهای مشابه کسانی چون تی. اس. الیوت و اف. آر. لیویس و غیره محک بزند. ایگلتون، در بخش اول، از منظر لکان و دریدا وجوهی از کار بنیامین را که پیش از این تا حدودی مغفول و مبهم مانده بودند برجسته میکند و از این منظر خاص بر آنها نور میتاباند. این کار تلاشی است برای اینکه بنیامین را که کموبیش به چهرهٔ مطلوب مطالعات فرهنگی بدل شده است از پیوستار تاریخ نقد ادبی بیرون بکشد. در بخش دوم، او مفاهیم بنیامین را بهشکلی خلاقانه در پسزمینهٔ نظریات و نزاعهای موجود در حوزهٔ نقد ادبی قرار میدهد و میکوشد از مجموع این مباحث طرحی کلی از نقدی انقلابی به دست دهد. ایگلتون مینویسد: «این کتاب را… نوشتهام تا درعینحال دست ما پیش از معاندان به بنیامین برسد.»
284 pages, Paperback
First published January 17, 1985
About the author
Terry Eagleton
177 books1,325 followersWidely regarded as England's most influential living literary critic & theorist, Dr. Terry Eagleton currently serves as Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster and as Visiting Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He was Thomas Warton Prof. of English Literature at the University of Oxford ('92-01) & John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester 'til '08. He returned to the University of Notre Dame in the Autumn '09 semester as Distinguished Visitor in the English Department.
He's written over 40 books, including Literary Theory: An Introduction ('83); The Ideology of the Aesthetic ('90) & The Illusions of Postmodernism ('96).
He delivered Yale's '08 Terry Lectures and gave a Gifford Lecture in 3/10, titled The God Debate.
He's written over 40 books, including Literary Theory: An Introduction ('83); The Ideology of the Aesthetic ('90) & The Illusions of Postmodernism ('96).
He delivered Yale's '08 Terry Lectures and gave a Gifford Lecture in 3/10, titled The God Debate.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
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May 1, 2025me, terry eagleton, and walter benjamin, each living forty years apart from the other, doing the three pointing Spider-Mans meme as we tell ourselves “I guess I need to reckon with the left’s defeat”
February 1, 2026
"In an astounding circulation of signifiers, ‘any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else’. The immanent meaning that ebbs from the object under the transfixing gaze of melancholy leaves it a pure signifier, a rune or fragment retrieved from the clutches of an univocal sense and surrendered unconditionally into the allegorist’s power. If it has become in one sense embalmed, it has also been liberated into polyvalence: it is in this that for Benjamin the profoundly dialectical nature of allegory lies. Allegorical discourse has the doubleness of the death’s head: ‘total expressionlessness—the black of the eye-sockets—coupled to the most unbridled expression—the grinning rows of teeth’" (p.20).
April 2, 2025
Writings that bring Benjamin in connection with an array of thinkers and writers, but Eagleton doesn't clarify and also doesn't critically engage with his work. What was the point?
September 9, 2026
Having just read three books by Walter Benjamin, who is a fairly difficult writer, I decided to read some secondary literature about him. I started with this book by Terry Eagleton, a Marxist critic and literary theorist who is very much influenced by Benjamin; according to the Preface, this was the first full-length book about Benjamin in English. To be honest, Eagleton is (in this book at least) also sometimes a rather difficult writer, and if he made some things clearer in Benjamin, he made other things seem even more obscure.
The book is divided into two parts; the first is called “Walter Benjamin” and contains three chapters, while the second is called “Towards a Revolutionary Criticism” and consists of six chapters, not all of which are primarily about Benjamin. Each of the nine chapters could be considered as a separate essay, although there are loose connections between them.
The first chapter is called “The Baroque Allegory” and takes its start from Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. This was the first Benjamin book I ever read, but it was many years ago when I was reading German literature from that period, so I approached it then from the ostensible subject matter rather than from literary theory in general. What I found interesting in this chapter was that Eagleton applies Benjamin’s ideas about allegory to English literature from around the same period, specifically comparing Donne and Milton, who are more interesting to me than say Martin Opitz. He also discusses Benjamin’s early theories about language, trying to explain them without the mysticism, but I think I will never be able to understand them. In any case, not from this book.
The second chapter is called “Aura and Commodity”. I thought I had more or less understood Benjamin’s concept of the aura from Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit but Eagleton discusses it instead as Benjamin used it in his book on Baudelaire, which I haven’t read, and gives the concept a much more Freudian interpretation which I found confusing (especially when he drags in Lacan).
The third chapter, “History, Tradition and Revolution”, on the other hand, was one of the clearest in the book. It discusses Benjamin’s rejection of “historicism”, the bourgeois understanding of history as essentially continuous, and his view of “tradition” as something apart from “history”, as what “escapes” from history. Benjamin’s idea is that history is discontinuous, that it is divided into different constellations by revolutions, where even concepts and phenomena which seem to be the same are different because of their different positions in the changed system of relations, and that traditions in his sense only gain meaning when viewed from a future point. I know I’m not making this clear, but I haven’t the language skills of an Eagleton, much less a Benjamin. The discussions on history were what I found most interesting in Benjamin, without being able to explain exactly why; this chapter really helped me to understand what it was that I was reacting to. This chapter is also really the underpinning of the second part of the book.
The first chapter of the second part, “Marxist Criticism” (in quotation marks in the original), was one of the chapters I learned the most from; it gives a history of attempts at literary criticism from a Marxist viewpoint, starting from Marx himself, Mehring and Plekhanov, and Trotsky, but mostly discussing and contrasting Lukács and Brecht, with a kind of epilogue on Adorno. He argues that the idealist and reformist nature of what passes for Marxist criticism today [i.e. in 1981, though I don’t think much has changed] and of “Western Marxism” in general is due to the lack of mass revolutionary parties which would provide the material conditions for a revolutionary cultural criticism. The next chapter, “A Small History of Rhetoric”, made some interesting points but I didn’t find it all that useful; the third chapter, “On Textuality”, was meant to set the stage for the later chapters with a discussion of semiotics but goes off on what seemed to me like a digression on the history of criticisms of Thomas Hardy.
The fourth chapter discusses Benjamin’s version of what is now called “deconstruction” and contrasts it with the idealist version of deconstructionism as represented by Derrida, which was also quite informative although I haven’t read enough of Derrida to fully evaluate what Eagleton says about him.
The fifth chapter, “Carnival and Comedy”, deals (mostly separately) with Bakhtin and Brecht, and was undoubtedly the best chapter in the book, although it barely mentions Benjamin. The last chapter comes back to Benjamin and compares him to Trotsky, ending with a few tentative conclusions on “Revolutionary Criticism”.
Taken as a whole, this book is rather mixed; there are whole sections of jargon-filled “lit-crit”, but there are also passages (especially the discussion of Marxism and comedy in chapter five) which were so good I wanted to read them out loud and copy them out somewhere. It is definitely a book I would recommend to anyone with an interest in Walter Benjamin or in Marxist views on literature.
The book is divided into two parts; the first is called “Walter Benjamin” and contains three chapters, while the second is called “Towards a Revolutionary Criticism” and consists of six chapters, not all of which are primarily about Benjamin. Each of the nine chapters could be considered as a separate essay, although there are loose connections between them.
The first chapter is called “The Baroque Allegory” and takes its start from Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. This was the first Benjamin book I ever read, but it was many years ago when I was reading German literature from that period, so I approached it then from the ostensible subject matter rather than from literary theory in general. What I found interesting in this chapter was that Eagleton applies Benjamin’s ideas about allegory to English literature from around the same period, specifically comparing Donne and Milton, who are more interesting to me than say Martin Opitz. He also discusses Benjamin’s early theories about language, trying to explain them without the mysticism, but I think I will never be able to understand them. In any case, not from this book.
The second chapter is called “Aura and Commodity”. I thought I had more or less understood Benjamin’s concept of the aura from Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit but Eagleton discusses it instead as Benjamin used it in his book on Baudelaire, which I haven’t read, and gives the concept a much more Freudian interpretation which I found confusing (especially when he drags in Lacan).
The third chapter, “History, Tradition and Revolution”, on the other hand, was one of the clearest in the book. It discusses Benjamin’s rejection of “historicism”, the bourgeois understanding of history as essentially continuous, and his view of “tradition” as something apart from “history”, as what “escapes” from history. Benjamin’s idea is that history is discontinuous, that it is divided into different constellations by revolutions, where even concepts and phenomena which seem to be the same are different because of their different positions in the changed system of relations, and that traditions in his sense only gain meaning when viewed from a future point. I know I’m not making this clear, but I haven’t the language skills of an Eagleton, much less a Benjamin. The discussions on history were what I found most interesting in Benjamin, without being able to explain exactly why; this chapter really helped me to understand what it was that I was reacting to. This chapter is also really the underpinning of the second part of the book.
The first chapter of the second part, “Marxist Criticism” (in quotation marks in the original), was one of the chapters I learned the most from; it gives a history of attempts at literary criticism from a Marxist viewpoint, starting from Marx himself, Mehring and Plekhanov, and Trotsky, but mostly discussing and contrasting Lukács and Brecht, with a kind of epilogue on Adorno. He argues that the idealist and reformist nature of what passes for Marxist criticism today [i.e. in 1981, though I don’t think much has changed] and of “Western Marxism” in general is due to the lack of mass revolutionary parties which would provide the material conditions for a revolutionary cultural criticism. The next chapter, “A Small History of Rhetoric”, made some interesting points but I didn’t find it all that useful; the third chapter, “On Textuality”, was meant to set the stage for the later chapters with a discussion of semiotics but goes off on what seemed to me like a digression on the history of criticisms of Thomas Hardy.
The fourth chapter discusses Benjamin’s version of what is now called “deconstruction” and contrasts it with the idealist version of deconstructionism as represented by Derrida, which was also quite informative although I haven’t read enough of Derrida to fully evaluate what Eagleton says about him.
The fifth chapter, “Carnival and Comedy”, deals (mostly separately) with Bakhtin and Brecht, and was undoubtedly the best chapter in the book, although it barely mentions Benjamin. The last chapter comes back to Benjamin and compares him to Trotsky, ending with a few tentative conclusions on “Revolutionary Criticism”.
Taken as a whole, this book is rather mixed; there are whole sections of jargon-filled “lit-crit”, but there are also passages (especially the discussion of Marxism and comedy in chapter five) which were so good I wanted to read them out loud and copy them out somewhere. It is definitely a book I would recommend to anyone with an interest in Walter Benjamin or in Marxist views on literature.
November 20, 2007
This was the last book I checked out of the library....It ended up being the most expensive book in my collection!! So much for the library...
August 3, 2025
This is genuinely baffling - Eagleton supposedly wants to tackle the field of Marxist literary criticism and aesthetic critique (while insisting that the task of Marxist intellectuals is to resist the "division of labour" which cul-de-sac's them into such narrow confines or fixations), and begins with Benjamin's The Origin of Germanic Tragic Drama. He, oddly, mobilizes Derrida in order to cipher Benjamin on the Trauerspiel, a confounding decision only matched by that of taking up Benjamin in the first place, given the fact that Eagleton ultimately finds him too "idealist," not "materialist" enough, and opposes his notion of messianism (though he can at least endorse his literary analysis, if only by counterposing it to T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis as foils). As for Derrida, for some reason he consistently breaks Eagleton's brain, to the point where he is reduced to literally protesting too much, troping deconstructionism in adolescent babble that he somehow imagines serves as refutation, instead of engaging in a close reading of one of Derrida's texts, for example, an operation he seemingly refuses to perform. To risk a psychologism, it almost feels motivated by jealousy, for Derrida's popularity within Western academia is constantly placed under scrutiny, apparently serving as evidence of his non-radicality. But more than an examination of Benjamin, this is ultimately a gloss or coverage on what Anderson termed "Western Marxism" and their relation to the field of aesthetics, covering much of the same ground as that Verso collection, Aesthetics and Politics. We go over Adorno's critique of Benjamin's draft on Baudelaire, in too quickly assimilating isomorphisms in base and superstructure without properly elucidating the mechanisms by which the two are related and inform or affect each other, as well as the realism versus expressionism debate, the former championed by Lukács, the latter by Bloch, along with Brecht's intervention in the debate. Ultimately, this also means to serve as an exposition on Marx and history, through the byway of literature and thus historical narrative.
November 5, 2025
"The socialist revolution, by contrast, does not for Marx derive its poetry from the past. It rejects the seductive tyrannies of parental authority, displacing the myth of origins for the practice of 'beginning.' The socialist reveolution takes its poetry from the future; but since that future, much mor e palpably than the past, does not exist, this amounts to saying that it derives its poetry from absence...The authority of the socialist revolution, then, is not to be located in the past, least of all in the texts of Marx himself, but in the intentionality of its transformative practice, its ceaseless 'beginning.'" (Eagleton, pg68-69).
Filled with salient thought-provoking asides like the one above, Terry Eagleton's "Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism" is a tome that is divided, just about evenly, between a segment concerning Walter Benjamin, erstwhile mystic/Marxist/critical darling of the left, and a more proper section positing a new 'Revolutionary' criticism, notable for its fusing of critical schools, all under the aegis of Eagleton's considerable critical acumen. For one acquainted with literary theory, this work is, by all lights, accessible and relatively easy to comprehend (compared to Derrida Eagleton is a model of probity and lucidity). And all the critical points native to the parameters of Marxist criticism are here, from an analysis of Deconstuction from the point of view of Historical Materialism, to a critique of Marx's analysis of Louis Napoleon in "The Eighteenth Brumaire." Indeed, reading this slighty yet essential bAook, one is consistently amazed at the erudition and accomplishment of Mr. Eagleton in his chosen field of Marxist criticism. This is a man who holds the keys to communicating (what prose stylings!) and has at his finger tips the knowledge of a life time of thinking and reading about Benjamin and associated topics. The result? A book that equally instructs and entertains, and, at the same moment, tells something real and true about socialism. A great book this is!
Filled with salient thought-provoking asides like the one above, Terry Eagleton's "Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism" is a tome that is divided, just about evenly, between a segment concerning Walter Benjamin, erstwhile mystic/Marxist/critical darling of the left, and a more proper section positing a new 'Revolutionary' criticism, notable for its fusing of critical schools, all under the aegis of Eagleton's considerable critical acumen. For one acquainted with literary theory, this work is, by all lights, accessible and relatively easy to comprehend (compared to Derrida Eagleton is a model of probity and lucidity). And all the critical points native to the parameters of Marxist criticism are here, from an analysis of Deconstuction from the point of view of Historical Materialism, to a critique of Marx's analysis of Louis Napoleon in "The Eighteenth Brumaire." Indeed, reading this slighty yet essential bAook, one is consistently amazed at the erudition and accomplishment of Mr. Eagleton in his chosen field of Marxist criticism. This is a man who holds the keys to communicating (what prose stylings!) and has at his finger tips the knowledge of a life time of thinking and reading about Benjamin and associated topics. The result? A book that equally instructs and entertains, and, at the same moment, tells something real and true about socialism. A great book this is!
May 13, 2023
Probably, or surely?, quite a lot in this that went right past me, academically speaking. Walter Benjamin studies of any sort - much like the man - resist any true grounding, so a theorist/thinker who decided to NOT try to organize his writing ON Benjamin and instead intellectually wander through his writings was destined to frustrate me. There isn't much doubt Eagleton is smart and erudite, but I found this book a bit too meandering to be true brain food for me. There are a multitude of great nuggets and truncated attempts at developing a theory of something that Benjamin thought, wrote, or studied, but too much of it seems to drift away, unsettled. Was this in fact the point? Possibly. I would prefer to be confused or confounded by Benjamin's own writings, than doubly both by someone writing about said writings, enigmatically so.
April 15, 2024
Este libro tiene partes muy complejas, pero de repente dice Terry Eagleton: "Cualquier intento de recuperar directamente el pasado de forma no-violenta solo resultará en una paralizante complicidad con él", y arroja tanta luz...
February 7, 2026
trying to put some wrinkles on my brain. i understood like 20% of this at most
February 10, 2009
wow. pretty fresh insight/analysis on benjamin. i gave it 3 stars because i didn't jive with the second half...
March 21, 2007
Eagleton and Benjamin -- who could ask for more?
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews