Actuality of Walter Benjamin

Although Benjamin’s place in the canon of twentieth-century critical theorists is now established, the boundaries of his work still resist classification and demarcation. His writings, including the best known collection Illuminations, remain an uneasy but thrilling combination of the actual and the mystical, of Marxism and messianic utopianism. This collection shows how extraordinarily substantial were the theoretical footholds which Walter Benjamin supplied: Irving Wohlfarth on historical understanding versus historicism, Zygmunt Bauman on Benjamin the intellectual, Sigrid Weigel on feminism and cultural analysis, Gillian Rose on Benjamin and the sources of Judaism and Martin Jay on the use of imagery in Benjamin’s novels.