Walter Benjamin's GraveIn 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. |
Contents
3 | |
2 Constructing America | 33 |
3 The Sun Gives without Receiving | 69 |
4 The Beach a Fantasy | 97 |
Another Theory of Magic | 121 |
6 Transgression | 157 |
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Accursed Share Acéphale Adorno anthropologist art in nature Bataille's beach beautiful become Boas body Bogotá called cane cemetery century Chicago Claude Lévi-Strauss Colombia concealment corpse culture dead death Desired to Learn devil devil's pact dialectical image Don Tomás E. E. Evans-Pritchard edited essay Evans-Pritchard Fittko Franz Boas Freud Gay Science Georges Bataille gift grave hand hanging Hannah Arendt human Hunt Indian Juan Manuel Echavarría Kwakiutl Language of Flowers later less living look magic mandrake Mauss meaning medicine memory Michael Taussig modern mysterious negation never Nietzsche notes past peasant poetry police Port Bou Press reality Recorder religion revelation ritual sacred secrecy secret seems Selk'nam sense shaman Sigmund Freud skepticism spirits story storyteller taboo technique tell things tion Tomás Zapata town transgression translated trees tricks University verses violence Walens Walter Benjamin witch-doctors Witchcraft words writing York
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Page 3 - Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.