Although Walter Benjamin (18921940)is considered one of the most significantwriters and theorists in twentiethcentury Western culture, his enigmatic sense of the political has eluded definition. His later work in particular stages a perpetual but little understood confrontation with German fascism. Gerhard Richter shows that Benjamins engagement with the political cannot be understood in terms of unified concepts and fully deducible theses that can be easily verified or refuted. Rather than explaining his sense of the political, Benjamin enacts it in the movement of his language. Richter traces Benjamins radical notions of the political through a series of corporeal figures in his often neglected autobiographical writingsthe Moscow Diary, the Berlin Chronicle, and the Berlin Childhood around 1900. Each text subtly mobilizes a different trope of anatomy the body, the ear, and the eye. Richter places these figures into a wide network of references from Benjamins corpus demonstrating that Benjamins innovative acts of selfportraiture are inseparable from his analyses of the physiognomy of Weimar culture and German fascism. Benjamins preoccupation with the body becomes visible as a political struggle that illuminates the relations among the self, history, reading, andlanguage. Benjamins autobiographies, as Richter shows, negate fascism and its ideology of stable meaning with each turn away from an essential corporeal self. Readers interested in modem German literature and...

Binding: Paperback;310 pages; Publisher: Wayne State University Press; Classification: DSA; Weight: 629 g; Dimensions: 228 x 152 x 16

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