In the Language of Walter Benjamin

This book insists on Benjamin’s method of philosophical contemplation as performance, on a performance that demands precise immersion in the minute details of its subject matter. Readings of some of his key works: the autobiographical Berlin Chronicle, the apparently biographical study of Proust, the fictional autobiographical story “Myslowitz—Braunschweig—Marseille,” and those essays on the theory of language so crucial to an understanding of Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” “Doctrine of the Similar,” and “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.”