New Benjamin Anthology

At the Seminary Co-op yesterday, I picked up a copy of a new anthology of Benjamin’s writings from Suhrkamp — Kairos: Schriften zur Philosophie. It contains a lot of the classic essays not found in Illuminationen, including sections from the Trauerspielbuch, as well as a selection of letters to and from Scholem, Adorno, and Horkheimer. The copyright date is 2007, meaning that all of you who do not live near the Co-op should continue to be murderously jealous of me.

I have a kind of compulsion to buy Benjamin’s writings in German whenever I find them, even though my German is still pretty bad. The fantasy, of course, is that I will discover some magic-bullet solution that will enable me to read German comfortably, but that does not appear to be forthcoming at this time.