Benjamin's Blind Spot

Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay, ''The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'', revolutionized the way we look at the social function of the work of art, and the faculties with which we appreciate it. Using that essay--and its introduction of the Benjaminian notion of the aura--as a springboard, the essays collected in Benjamin's Blind Spot apply Benjamin's insights to a wide range of topics. Subjects range from Benjamin's use of hashish to an analysis of Woody Allen's Zelig, from Wallace Stevens to the early recordings of Elvis Presley, and from the dark epiphanies behind Jackson Pollock's work to the question of whether Benjamin's model is even relevant to contemporary issues. In the same volume, presented in the text's margins, is The Manual of Lost Ideas, a massive manuscript that arrived at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry via an anonymous bequest in 1955. Speculated to be thousands of years old, this is the first time the Manual has been published in over two centuries.