Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (July 15, 1892 – September 27, 1940) was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and Jewish mysticism as presented by Gershom Scholem. As a sociological and cultural critic, Benjamin combined ideas drawn from historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism in a body of work which was a novel contribution to western philosophy, Marxism, and aesthetic theory. As a literary scholar, he translated Charles Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens and Marcel Proust's famous novel, In Search of Lost Time. His work is widely cited in academic and literary studies, in particular his essays The Task of the Translator and The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility. Influenced by Bachofen, Benjamin gave the name "auratic perception" to the aesthetic faculty through which civilization would recover a lost appreciation of myth. (via Wikipedia)

About Walter Benjamin

Place of Death: Port Bou, Spain

Region: Western Philosophers

Name: Benjamin, Walter
Walter Benjamin

Influenced: Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Gershom Scholem, Susan Sontag, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Taussig, José Guilherme Merquior

Birthplace: Berlin, Germany

Period: 20th-century philosophy

School/Tradition: Western Marxism, Frankfurt School

Influenced By: Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Johann Jakob Bachofen, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Gershom Scholem, Charles Baudelaire

Birth Date: Jul 15, 1892

Death Date: Sep 27, 1940