Inheriting Walter Benjamin

Description

Gerhard Richter examines, in the work of Walter Benjamin, one of the central problems of modernity: the question of how to receive an intellectual inheritance. Covering aspects of Benjamin's complex relationship to the legacies of such writers as Kant, Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger, and Derrida, each chapter attends to a key concern in Benjamin's writing, while reflecting on the challenges that this issue presents for the question of inheritability and transmissibility. Both reading Benjamin and watching himself reading Benjamin, Richter participates in the act of inheriting while also inquiring into the conditions of possibility for inheriting Benjamin's corpus today.

Gerhard Richter is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature and Chair of the German Studies Department at Brown University, USA. He is the author of five previous books in critical theory, including Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics (2011).

Engaging and lucidly written, Inheriting Walter Benjamin offers new insights into some of Benjamin's most important theoretical concerns. From inheritance to critique, from the work of art to the critical, dangerous moment of reading, Richter's rhetorical close readings of key passages are one of the great strengths of this work. * MLN * Perhaps the greatest contribution of this new book to Benjamin studies is the discovery that Benjamin's reflections on the question of inheritance traverse his entire corpus and that "inheritance" may function as a key concept. * German Studies Review * Gerhard Richter brings meaning to the event of inheritance, which affects us in every walk--and failure--of life. The work explores with exquisite integrity what has motivated or tripped us as we are traversed by the experience that Benjamin names and crucially disarticulates. The extent to which Benjamin's text remote controls modern trials of transmissibility and consciousness remains briskly active. Beautifully written, with punch and poignancy, Richter's work commands the authority of the great doubter and accomplished scholar as it constitutes Benjamin's legacy, supplying pleasure and stirring insight to the complex themes, obsessions, and bewilderment of our era. * Avital Ronell, University Professor in the Humanities, New York University, USA * With his carefully elaborated notion of literary and cultural inheritance, Gerhard Richter lends rare coherence both to Benjamin's critical task and to the elective affinities that he shared with such crucial contemporaries as Martin Heidegger. In its dynamic fluidity, this study accommodates exciting tangents, including a new take on Benjamin's gravitation to photography as icon and catalyst of modernization. Engagingly written, rigorous, and well-documented, this book comprises a rich new resource. * Henry Sussman, Visiting Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Yale University, USA * This is a fascinating and challenging book. Richter's subtle readings demonstrate the theological, political, philosophical, and aesthetic complexity - and contemporary urgency - of Benjamin's concept of inheritance. * Rebecca Comay, Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, Canada * Gerhard Richter is one of a tiny handful of the most important readers of Walter Benjamin. Inheriting Walter Benjamin will not only enhance that reputation; it also shows Richter as a brilliant scholar of an astonishing range of texts and objects ranging from Kant through contemporary photography. This book is a must read for anyone interested in Benjamin-and in innovative and highly suggestive readings of him. * Michael W. Jennings, Class of 1900 Professor of Modern Languages, Princeton University, USA * "... Richter's volume is a remarkable achievement, representing a renewal of non-hermeneutic but text-centered reading practices that judiciously employ the heritage of philological exegesis, deconstructive analysis, and the etymological reconstruction of key terms in the service of re-situating Benjamin's writings in broader but hitherto under-explored legacies of philosophy, theology, and aesthetics. In so doing, Richter's monograph raises important questions concerning tradition, transmission, and cultural translatability that deserve to resonate for a long time to come. * Monatshefte *