In September 1940, Walter Benjamin committed suicide in Port Bou on
the Spanish-French border when it appeared that he and his travelling
partners would be denied passage into Spain in their attempt to escape
the Nazis. In 2002, one of anthropology’s—and indeed
today’s—most distinctive writers, Michael Taussig, visited
Benjamin’s grave in Port Bou. The result is “Walter Benjamin’s
Grave,” a moving essay about the cemetery, eyewitness accounts of
Benjamin’s border travails, and the circumstances of his demise. It
is the most recent of eight revelatory essays collected in this volume
of the same name. “Looking over these essays written over the past
decade,” writes Taussig, “I think what they share is a love of
muted and defective storytelling as a form of analysis. Strange love
indeed; love of the wound, love of the last gasp.” Although
thematically these essays run the gamut—covering the monument and
graveyard at Port Bou, discussions of peasant poetry in Colombia, a
pact with the devil, the peculiarities of a shaman’s body,
transgression, the disappearance of the sea, New York City cops, and
the relationship between flowers and violence—each shares
Taussig’s highly individual brand of storytelling, one that depends
on a deep appreciation of objects and things as a way to retrieve even
deeper philosophical and anthropological meanings. Whether he finds
himself in Australia, Colombia, Manhattan, or Spain, in the midst of a
book or a beach, whether talking to friends or staring at a monument,
Taussig makes clear through these marvelous essays that materialist
knowledge offers a crucial alternative to the increasingly abstract,
globalized, homogenized, and digitized world we inhabit. Pursuing an
adventure that is part ethnography, part autobiography, and part
cultural criticism refracted through the object that is Walter
Benjamin’s grave, Taussig, with this collection, provides his own
literary memorial to the twentieth century’s greatest cultural
critic.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780226790008
Publisert
2018
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Vendor
University of Chicago Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter