Dossier Benjamin

Author: Fredric Jameson. Traduction by Flavia Gasperetti

Walter Benjamin was an anti-philosophical and anti-systematic thinker. And Fredric Jameson, the greatest living American critic, knows perfectly well not only the writings, but also the ambiguities. So much so as to offer us a surprising lens for reading all of his main works and a large number of reviews of books, notes, letters, which reveal, in addition to the conceptual depth, his unavoidable inclination towards writing. From the shorter articles to the most ambitious projects, from well-known essays such as Baudelaire - The work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility to the posthumous fragments, in this repertoire of documents and revelations, of enigmas and contradictions, it never ceases to amaze the coexistence of apparently irreconcilable linguistic fields and thematic codes, the never tamed tension between the mystical or theological side and the political and historical vocation, which makes Benjamin still today an essential reference point for any investigation of today's capitalism. Jameson's analyzes of the concepts of play and space, of experience and city, of mass and quotation unfold through a “hand-to-hand” from which an easy Benjamin certainly does not come out, but finally writable.