Benjamin, Walter

Called “the most important critic of his time” by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) has become more influential over the years, as his work has assumed a crucial place in current debates over the interactions of art, culture, and technology. His efforts to develop a politically oriented, materialist aesthetic theory proved to be an important stimulus for the Frankfurt School. His essay on The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility remains a fundamental work for film theory. The notes for his unfinished research project on nineteenth-century Paris (The Arcades Project) provide a philosophical representation of modernity and postmodernity centered on the concept of commodity fetishism. Benjamin’s paradoxical understanding of history, which includes elements of materialism and Jewish messianism, has been an enduring source of theoretical fascination for contemporary thinkers, including Jaques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas and Giorgio Agamben.