{"product_id":"walter-benjamins-transit-9781933146737","title":"Walter Benjamin’s Transit","description":"\u003cp\u003eWalter Benjamin’s Transit is a work in two halves. The first, part 1, entitled\n\u003cbr\u003e“Mapping Desire: Towards a Minor Fascism” applies the lens of Gilles Deleuze\n\u003cbr\u003eand Felix Guattari’s philosophy to the critical writings of to the critical writings\n\u003cbr\u003eof Walter Benjamin, the latter devised amid an atmosphere of emergent fascism\n\u003cbr\u003ein Europe between two World Wars. This book represents something radically\n\u003cbr\u003edifferent from other critical approaches to Walter Benjamin’s body of work. It is\n\u003cbr\u003ean attempt to act with Benjamin to devise a new set of philosophical and political\n\u003cbr\u003ecoordinates viable for a current rethinking of fascism.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis work is critically situated at the margins of Benjamin’s philosophy in its\n\u003cbr\u003eattempt to extend the parameters of thinking that Benjamin left for us. Throughout\n\u003cbr\u003ethis volume, the critical work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari will lend crucial\n\u003cbr\u003einsight into Benjamin’s analysis of fascism, based on their pivotal understanding of\n\u003cbr\u003eit, which considers not only historical fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, but also the\n\u003cbr\u003efascism that is part of our everyday behaviour, causing us to gravitate towards the\n\u003cbr\u003every same powers that dominate and exploit us. The reality of that fascism, even its\n\u003cbr\u003ehistorical guise, connotes an invisible, perpetual war that cannot be definitively lost\n\u003cbr\u003enor won, but rather must be engaged as an ethical combat within oneself on a plane\n\u003cbr\u003ewhere politics equates itself with everyday life.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThis insight has particular resonance given that Benjamin, a German Jew, was\n\u003cbr\u003ehimself under constant threat of historical erasure during the course of his lifetime.\n\u003cbr\u003eBenjamin’s circumstance makes his very person the embodiment of a certain\n\u003cbr\u003econstellation of fascist forces. It is from within that constellation of forces that the\n\u003cbr\u003etrue problem of how to locate fascism becomes proximate to a life, on this occasion\n\u003cbr\u003eWalter Benjamin’s life and body in particular. A life, moreover, that sought not to\n\u003cbr\u003ebe non-fascist per se, but rather to become fascism’s greatest ethical observer, so\n\u003cbr\u003eas to raise alarm bells within its most extravagant perpetrator, the average citizen.\n\u003cbr\u003eBenjamin was dedicated to a methodology that sought to demonstrate and not to\n\u003cbr\u003ejudge the terms on which history rests. The task of this volume is to transport the\n\u003cbr\u003ereader over the difficult terrain of these terms to locations of particular behest to\n\u003cbr\u003eBenjamin’s view of fascism, so as to better evaluate contemporary critical debates\n\u003cbr\u003eabout fascism.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Stephanie Polsky","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48277915762939,"sku":"9781933146737","price":79.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/indiepubs.com\/products\/walter-benjamins-transit-9781933146737","provider":"IndiePubs","version":"1.0","type":"link"}