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Titre:
The arcades project

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Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, "The Arcades Project" (in German, "Das Passagen-Werk") is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas." Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris, glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism, Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things, a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age. "The Arcades Project" is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask.

Titre:
One-way street

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Résumé:
One-Way Street is a thoroughfare unlike anything else in literature?by turns exhilarating and bewildering, requiring mental agility and a special kind of urban literacy. Presented here in a new edition with expanded notes, this genre-defying meditation on the semiotics of late-1920s Weimar culture offers a fresh opportunity to encounter Walter Benjamin at his most virtuosic and experimental, writing in a vein that anticipates later masterpieces such as “On the Concept of History” and The Arcades Project. Composed of sixty short prose pieces that vary wildly in style and theme, One-Way Street evokes a dense cityscape of shops, cafes, and apartments, alive with the hubbub of social interactions and papered over with public inscriptions of all kinds: advertisements, signs, posters, slogans. Benjamin avoids all semblance of linear narrative, enticing readers with a seemingly random sequence of aphorisms, reminiscences, jokes, off-the-cuff observations, dreamlike fantasias, serious philosophical inquiries, apparently unserious philosophical parodies, and trenchant political commentaries. Providing remarkable insight into the occluded meanings of everyday things, Benjamin time and again proves himself the unrivalled interpreter of what he called “the soul of the commodity.” Despite the diversity of its individual sections, Benjamin’s text is far from formless. Drawing on the avant-garde aesthetics of Dada, Constructivism, and Surrealism, its unusual construction implies a practice of reading that cannot be reduced to simple formulas. Still refractory, still radical, One-Way Street is a work in perpetual progress.

Titre:
The storyteller: tales out of loneliness

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'The Storyteller' gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including Illuminations, 'One-Way Street' and 'The Arcades Project'. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance of games, and delve into the peculiar relationship between gambling and fortune-telling, and explore the themes that defined Benjamin. The novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables and riddles in this collection are brought to life by the playful imagery of the modernist artist and Bauhaus figure Paul Klee.

Titre:
The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility and other writings on media

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This one-volume gathering of Benjamin's dialectical writing on media of all kinds, ranging from children's literature to cinema, has at its heart the second, most expansive version of his path-breaking essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.' Readers familiar only with partial versions of this piece, where Benjamin began to record the melancholy loss of aesthetic presence at the turn of the twentieth century, will find their understanding transformed-- for this second version, like all the essays and supplemental texts included here, explores a set of latent, utopian possibilities inherent in mechanical means of art-making. Benjamin, the visionary magus of particulars, reveals profoundly, and repeatedly, both the grounds and the consequences of our ever-changing image of the made world. --Susan Stewart

Titre:
Sur l'art et la photographie

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Trois essais du célèbre philosophe sont regroupés dans ce livre : L'oeuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproductibilité technique (1936), "Du nouveau sur les fleurs" (1928) ainsi que "Peinture et photographie" (1936).

Titre:
Walter Benjamin : Petite histoire de la photographie

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Ne regardez jamais l'appareil.

Titre:
Walter Benjamin : critique et utopie

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Résumé:
En s'autorisant de la pratique de la citation et du montage, courante chez Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), le présent recueil propose à la lecture un certain nombre d'écrits de cet auteur qu'on ne cesse de découvrir à neuf : notes, articles, fragments théoriques, extraits conséquents de grandes études et recherches, ici organisés autour du concept de critique, doublé de celui d'utopie.

Titre:
Walter Benjamin : Je déballe ma bibliothèque

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La plupart des essais regroupés ici paraissent en français pour la première fois ; ils fournissent un aperçu non seulement sur les livres que possédait Walter Benjamin, mais aussi sur le type même du collectionneur, ce "mystérieux genre d'homme qui peut dire : Je crois à mon âme, la Chose". Les curiosités que Walter Benjamin déballe sous nos yeux - livres pour enfants, abécédaires, rébus, témoignages rédigés par des malades mentaux - attestent toutes un refus de dissocier le texte de l'iconographie, ou plus généralement de la matérialité du livre. Les deux essais de 1931 - "Je déballe ma bibliothèque" et "Pour collectionneurs pauvres" - constituent un début de recherche théorique sur l'acte de collectionner. Enfin une liste de lectures - catalogue fragmentaire dressé par Benjamin lui-même - introduit au parcours de ce penseur aussi inclassable qu'inépuisable.

Titre:
Walter Benjamin: Early writings 1910-1917

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Résumé:
Early Writings, 1910-1917 documents the formative intellectual experiences of one of the twentieth century's most independent thinkers.

Titre:
Walter Benjamin: archives

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Résumé:
Cet ouvrage se compose teizes archives rassemblant images, textes, photographies et schémas de Walter Benjamin. Elles sont fort complexes et très personnelles, parfois marginales, et pourtant elles mènent au centre de son œuvre. Elles tracent un portrait de l’auteur.