Actuality of Walter Benjamin: No. 20 (New Formations) - Tapa blanda

"New Formations" is a journal of cultural debate, history and theory. It brings new and challenging perspectives to bear on the categories that frame cultural analysis and political action. The journal has covered issues ranging from the seduction of perversity to questions of nationalism and post-colonialism. Contributors open up new zones of enquiry whilst drawing new charts of understanding to explain new formations in contemporary life. "New Formations" brings together in one volume both established and new writers from many walks of critical life. Past contributors have included: Parveen Adams, Nomi Bhabha, Slavoj Zizek, Susan Buck-Morss, Gillian Rose, Jacqueline Rose, Zygmunt Bauman and Christopher Norris. The centenary in 1992 of Benjamin's birth provides the context for a critical reappraisal of his work, and its implications for a cultural politics of the 1990s. Although it is true that Benjamin's place in the canon of 20th-century critical theorists is now established, the boundaries of his work still resist classification and demarcation. His writings, including the best-known collection "Illuminations", remain an uneasy, but thrilling comination of the actual and the mystical, of Marixism and messianic utopianism. Irving Wohlfarth's essay gives the title to this collection. Wohlfarth takes up the vexed question of historical understanding versus historicism, of the "acuality" of Benjamin's "now", and of the (im)possibility of transposing Benjamin's "actuality" in our own time. The essays in this issue of "New Formations" show how extraodinarily substantial were the footholds which Walter Benjamin supplied. Contributors include Aygmunt Bauman, Andrew Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss, Victor Burgin, Helen Carr, Axel Honneth, Martin Jay, Sharon Monteith, Benita Parry, Julian Roberts, Gillian Rose, Sigrid Weigel, Irving Wohlfarth and Janet Wolff.