A challenging, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately satisfying interaction with the works of Walter Benjamin. Sifting through the "flashes," "stars," "lightning" and "ghosts" that ignite, light and haunt Benjamin's disjointed philosophies, Cadava has penned a highly respectful tome reflecting and furthering the thoughts of this enigmatic, doomed thinker.

Cadava's Theses are illuminious! But It was, as I remember, once seen in the reading of Derrida's "Differance". However similiar it may be, history captured by photography has given insights for me. In fact I was confused with the difference between J. Baudrillard and Derrida. Reading Cadava's theses, particular the 'between either ... or', I could percieve the meaning of Derrida's 'quasi-transcendantal' and 'survie'. Of course, J. Derrida not identical with Cadava, but I think the spacing and temporization of differance was behind historicity of photography. Finally, between light and darkness, there is points. That it!

This book is a nihilistic, incoherent work, and I dare anyone who reads this review to argue to the contrary. Admiration for this book is humbuggery in action. The emperor has no clothes.

In the fifth of his "Theses on History" Benjamin mentions that "every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disapear irretrievably." This work represents a significant way of not forgetting. It is fragmentary...but it reminds us that the texts we read are all fragmentary, and we assemble and contextualize them as we read them.

Herbert Muschamp, the NY Times architectural critic, has written an interesting article about Benjamin and his Paris project which appears in the Arts & Leisure section on January 16, 2000. While not strictly speaking a book review it nevertheless offers some observations as to the cultural importance of Benjamin's chef d'oevre. Another book on the Arcades Project is Susan Buck-Morss's 'The Dialectics of Seeing' (MIT 1989, 1991, 1997).

"The Dialectics of Seeing" is an absolutely *superb* book -- possibly the best book on philosophy I have ever read. Not yet having read the Harvard U Press edition of the Arcades Project, I don't really have any basis for comparing the two works, but it seems to me that Buck-Morss' astonishing (incandescent) use of self-deconstructive and poetic literary techniques in this tour de force of an "invention" of the Arcades Project entitles it to rank as at least as dazzling and eye-opening (deep assumption-challenging) as anything else Benjamin himself wrote. Sources aren't important; spelling isn't important; pedantry is misleading as a criterion of value. All that matters is that the experience of reading the book be a dialectical one -- and the experience of reading *this* book *is*. An absolutely incomparable work.

I have to agree with the reader from Los Angeles, and the review of November 28, 1999. This book is a lot of fun! Yes, a peculiar judgement, I know.

I'm not usually a reader of literary scholarship and excavation. (Hey, I'm in the Army and very busy and I don't have much time to read). But there is something about this book which is fascinating and very intriguing.

Now that "The Arcades Project," Harvard Belknap Press: 1999, has just been published I have been trying to resist buying this rather expensive work. But I must say that because of this book I'm "reviewing" here by Susan Buck-Morss , I'm going to have to succumb and buy it soon.

Ok, this is not a fancy or insightful examination of the "why's" and "wherefore's" on my part. But I encourage any and all readers to trust their guts on this...what at first seem opaque and in-accessible, gradually unveils something crucial about Benjamin's project for ourselves and our cultural, our History.

I'm thinking now of what it would be like to find out that we have been missing something all along. I mean our Western Culture and its great wonders. Perhaps missing something crucial about ourselves.

Maybe this is one way to think of it, reader: and ask yourself this question perhaps. What if what has been shown to us as our history or culture, something we both admire and love, but are at times horrified by could be like a movie that holds us in its grip.

But imagine this movie has been worked on over many years, and various editors and directors have changed hands in the creation of the final, definitive print which will be shown to the rest of us.

Now, imagine that each director, based on his/her own sense of things, decided what part of the original film he might keep and which parts he'd destroy.

But some of the editors hated to let all the spliced out frames be destroyed. And put some of them away in a drawer let's say.

Its kind of like Benjamin was searching the arcades, the hidden passage-ways between buildings and looking in the drawers for the missing frames and was then trying to figure out where to splice the frames back into the original.

Now, would the reconstructed film of ourselves, our History and Culture make sense to us? If the original sequence is still inexplicable to us,or long forgotten, then what else is too late for us...amidst this century's human rubble? Maybe this is one thing to value about Susan Buck-Morss' book. Any reader, knowledgeable or not about this century's intellectual landscape, knows that there is something missing in this story about ourselves. Something more intolerable and heartbreaking than a few missing frames from a 2 hour movie. There has been a terrible human cost. We know that not all of the story has been shown. It will be terrible to forget that we have forgotten. Thus, Benjamin was trying to un-cover something we have all lost. This seems astounding in some way.

Buck-Morss is very likely the most insightful and best informed scholar writing on Benjamin (or Adorno) in English today. If there are typos, misspellings, etc., they are more a sign of the declining standards in editing, even at university presses, than any reflection on Buck-Morss' scholarship. She knows the primary and secondary literature and has clearly spent much time with Benjamin's papers and in various archives. Morevoer, having written the best book I know on the philosophical relationship between Adorno and Benjamin, she is clearly well placed to provide insightful analysis the latter's unfinished masterwork. Since the Passagen-Werk is recently available in English ("The Arcades Project," Harvard Belknap Press: 1999), one can judge for oneself the worth of Buck-Morss' reading.

While it concerns baroque Trauerspiel (literally, "mourning play" or "lamentation play," not "tragic drama") this book is necessary reading for students of critical theory who don't have literature as a primary field of interest. In it, Benjamin develops his critique of allegory (which he later amended in his work on Baudelaire and would play a major role in The Arcades Project) as well as his method of philosphical history, which would decisively influence Theodor Adorno (see, for example, Adorno's book on Kierkegaard and his lecture "The Idea of Natural History"). Don't let the notoriously opaque prologue dissuade you from reading beyond the opening pages--the rest of the book has more stylistic and conceptual clarity (which doesn't mean it's easy!). In fact, you may want to skip the prologue and return to it after reading the body of the text. In any case, this book will give you a solid grounding for understanding the foundations of Benjamin's work--it should not be slighted. I deduct a star not because of Benjamin but because of the translation (less than sterling) and Steiner's introduction which, despite correcting the title's translation, restricts itself to literary concerns.

I think that this book is a forgery by appenine fascist youth. Like most of this book's readers, they took their master plan far too seriously. It's this inability to laugh which makes the work canonical, but nonetheless a product of unknown authorship.

Reflections presents for the reader the great range that Benjamin had as a writer, critic and occidentalist. This collection further demonstrates Benjamin's acute awareness of the literature of his time, as evidenced by his essay on 'Surrealism', which is as fine a reflection on its themes as the manifestos of Andre Breton. Furthermore, his writings and conversations with Bertolt Brecht show Benjamin to be very close to the thinking of the author himself. Also included is his celebrated essay on Karl Kraus,"the Jewish Swift of Vienna". But what I like most about this collection are the amorphisms and autobiographical sketches of 'Marseilles' and 'One-way Street'. In his images of Marseilles Benjamin creates an "exegesis of the city" that is as fine as any poet could offer; spellbinding, acute, and beautiful. As well, his wit and insight into social phenomena is detailed in 'One-Way Street', and also in the piece on Moscow, which lets the western reader experience a rare witnessing of the Russian city in the years after the Revolution in a way that recalls Dziga Vertov. Finally, the inclusion of several pieces of Benjamin's philosophical-theological speculations show that he was a man of great breath and wisedom, and further showcase the wide range of his highly polished mind.

"Walter Benjamin is now recognized as one of the most accute analysts of literary and sociological phenomena of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A companion volume to Illuminations, the earlier collection of Benjamin's writings, Reflections presents a new sampling of his wide-ranging work. In addition to literary criticism, it contains autobiograohical narration and travel pieces, aphorisms, and philosophical-theological speculations. Most of Benjamin's writings on Brecht and his celebrated essay on Karl Kraus are included."

Enjoy charming anecdotes like "Hashish in Marseilles" and the sardonic incites of "One-Way Street" (Germans, Drink German Beer!) as you peruse the timeless thoughts of a persecuted man.

Let me see. If you think about buying this book. Forget it. It's a No No! The context are dull and boring. Believe it or not, this book really IS BAD! This is more like a history copy.

Although it provides much information, the book manages to avoid insight, both into Benjamin's remarkable writing and into his difficult relationships, both human and cultural. It is hard to follow any thread through these pages. Its place is on the shelf, as a reference work for biographies we are still expecting.

Brodersen is a bibliographer, and this tome is a bibliographer's compendium. More troubling than the lack of original research are two lacunae: his failure to offer virtually any interpretation of Benjamin's writings and his consistent misjudgements about Benjamin's motives and relationships. Whether the Work of Art essay, the Trauerspiel book, or the essay of Goethe's Elective Affinities, texts are for Brodersen no more than dates in a chronicle of events. The abiding enigma of his steel-like bond with the younger, insistent Scholem, the dearth of information about the Paris years, his political and philosophical vacillations, his ambivalences about Jewishness and Judaism -- these and other fundamental questions are rarely answered, and if so, then impressionistically. Deeply unsatisfying are also the stamp-size, poorly reproduced photographs, especially for a work about one of the preeminent visual theorists of the early part of this century. The only serious biographical treatment of Benjamin, however fragmentary, still remains "Benjaminia", regrettably only available in German.