- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: Pluto Press; First edition edition (20 May 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0745315682
- ISBN-13: 978-0745315683
- Product Dimensions: 21.5 x 13.5 x 2.1 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 969,656 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Esther Leslie’s path-breaking study of Walter Benjamin is unlike any other book presently available in English on Benjamin, in seeking to make a case for a more politicised reading of Benjamin’s oeuvre. In looking at the entirety of Benjamin’s work - rather than the four or five essays available in English which tend to form the Benjamin ‘canon’ - Leslie offers powerful new insights into a key twentieth-century political thinker, correcting the post-structuralist bias that has characterised so much Benjamin scholarship, and repositioning Benjamin’s work in its historical and political context.
In her examination of Benjamin’s commentary on the politics and aesthetics of technology - from Benjamin’s work on nineteenth-century industrial culture to his analyses of the Nazi deployment of the bomber - Esther Leslie recontextualises Benjamin’s writings in a lucid and cogently argued new study.
In her examination of Benjamin’s commentary on the politics and aesthetics of technology - from Benjamin’s work on nineteenth-century industrial culture to his analyses of the Nazi deployment of the bomber - Esther Leslie recontextualises Benjamin’s writings in a lucid and cogently argued new study.
About the Author
Esther Leslie is a lecturer in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London.
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
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