Product Description

In looking at the entirety of Walter Benjamin's work - rather than the four or five essays available in English which tend to form the Benjamin "canon" - this book offers insights into a key 20th-century political thinker. It aims to reposition Benjamin's work in its historical and political context. In the examination of his commentary on the politics and aesthetics of technology, from his work on 19th-century industrial culture and his analyses of the Nazi deployment of the bomber, the book recontexturalizes Benjamin's writings.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #424490 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 298 pages

Customer Reviews

Scholarly and a well-argued polemic
The accretion of an academic `Benjamin Industry' around Walter Benjamin's legacy makes one wary of the secondary literature. Overcoming Conformism is different. Esther Leslie actually reads German - many Anglophone books on Benjamin have restricted themselves to what has been available in translation - and, more important, she understands the politics of the period. Instead of fitting Benjamin into some eternal supermarket of philosophical options, she traces his responses to the pertinent crises of his times. As well as a book about the problems facing avantgarde intellectuals, Overcoming Conformism is also a well-argued polemic about effective anti-Nazi politics, showing how reformism and Stalinist state capitalism (`non-revolutionary Marxism') opened the way to Hitler and the holocaust. Crucially, Leslie distinguishes between corporate and fascist uses of technology (`First Technik') and progressive, subversive ones (`Second Technik') - a distinction which cuts through today's politically-confused-&-deleuzed cyberbabble like a hot wire through blubber. In a bravura interpretation of his `Theses on the Philosophy of History', she shows how Benjamin rejected Stalin's version of Communism as reversion to Second International reformism and proposed instead an anti-bourgeois messianism parallel to Trotsky's concept of permanent revolution. This is Walter Benjamin viewed from the perspective of Punk, Rock Against Racism, Mad Pride and the Anti-Nazi League (about time those movements had a publication whose intellectual acumen measures up to their risk and courage). Far from the melancholic lamb-to-the-slaughter beloved of academics who love nothing more than weeping into the prospect of their own graves, Leslie's Benjamin is an inspiration for anyone who believes that technological and artistic virtues can contribute to the cause of Anti-Capitalism.