Actualities of aura: Twelve studies of Walter Benjamin

What could be more topical than a book on the auratic character of contemporary existence? We live in a media-mediated world, where the role of the spectator is ever a problem and a subject of concern for sociologists, both with respect to the generation of passivity and how to theorize its mutating technological forms. Walter Benjamin was an early theorist of precisely these things, in essays such as a ‘Little History of Photography’, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, ‘The Storyteller’ and the unfinished ‘Arcades Project’. Since his untimely death in 1940, his work has been of recurring interest to western intellectuals, and it is perhaps fair to ask if a new book is necessary. It is hard to envisage a secondary text capable of replacing Susan Buck-Morss’s (1989) The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. This collection has no such ambitions, and it lacks the visual images that make the Buck-Morss book a pleasure to both the reader and the viewer