How to read Walter Benjamin today? This book argues that the proper way is through an approach which recognizes and respects his own peculiar theorization of the act of reading and the politics of interpretation that this entails. The approach must be , that is, focused on images, and driven by the notion of . Figural reading, in the very Benjaminian way, understands figures as , whereby an image of the past juxtaposes them with an image of the present and is thus actualized. To apply this method to Benjamin’s own work means first to identify some figures. The book singles out the Flâneur, the Detective, the Prostitute and the Ragpicker, and then sets them alongside a contemporary account of the same figure: the Flâneur in Juan Goytisolo’s (1982), the Detective in Paul Auster’s (1987), the Prostitute in Dacia Maraini’s (1973), and the Ragpicker in Mudrooroo’s (1993). The book thereby, on the one hand, analyses the politics of reading Benjamin today and, on the other, sets his work against a variety of contemporary aesthetics and politics of interpretation.weiterlesen