The Actuality of Walter Benjamin

This collection shows how extraordinarily substantial were the theoretical footholds which Walter Benjamin supplied. The contributors engage with Benjamin on a number of levels, with essays on historical understanding versus historicism, a look at gender and dialectical images, the space of the city, the sources of Judaism and the aesthetics of conflict. Also analysed are Benjamin’s artwork, the novel, the anthropology and philosophy of history, ‘fate and character’, the baroque and Benjamin the intellectual.