Walter Benjamin and the Idea of Natural History (Cultural Memory in the Present)

In this incisive new work, Eli Friedlander demonstrates that Walter Benjamin's entire corpus, from early to late, comprises a rigorous and sustained philosophical questioning of how human beings belong to nature. Across seemingly heterogeneous writings, Friedlander argues, Benjamin consistently explores what the natural in the human comes to, that is, how nature is transformed, actualized, redeemed, and overcome in human existence. The book progresses gradually from Benjamin's philosophically fundamental writings on language and nature to his Goethean empiricism, from the presentation of ideas to the primal history of the Paris arcades. Friedlander's careful analysis brings out how the idea of natural history inflects Benjamin's conception of the work of art and its critique, his diagnosis of the mythical violence of the legal order, his account of the body and of action, of material culture and technology, as well as his unique vision of historical materialism. Featuring revelatory new readings of Benjamin's major works that differ, sometimes dramatically, from prevailing interpretations, this book reveals the internal coherence and philosophical force of Benjamin's thought. Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction The Natural in the Human Part I: Nature in Language 1. God, Nature, and Man in Language 2. Naming Beauty 3. The Life and Afterlife of Words 4. The Life of Forms Part II: Life and Fate 5. The Guilt and Innocence of Life 6. Fate, Redemption, and Hope in Love 7. Myth, Law, and Life in Common Part III: Body and Corporeality 8. The Language of the Body and the Body of Language 9. Acting Naturally Part IV: Primal History 10. “From the Pagan Context of Nature into the Jewish Context of History” 11. Matters of Memory 12. First and Second Nature in Art Part V: The Image of the Contingent 13. Distorted Life Notes Bibliography Index Back Cover