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Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin Books

Literary critic

Illuminations

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One-Way Street

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On Hashish

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Moscow Diary

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“The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura. Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual—first the magical, then the religious kind.”

ArtPhilosophyTraditionWalter Benjamin
Book:Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
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“With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later. At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l'art pour l'art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of "pure" art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter.”

ArtPhilosophyPhotographyWalter Benjamin
Book:Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
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“The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, the Penelope work of forgetting? ... And is not his work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a counterpart to Penelope's work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night has woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting.”

MemoryForgetting
Book:Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
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“Duhamel calls the movie “a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a ‘star’ in Los Angeles.”

HollywoodAmerican DreamMovie Star
Book:The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
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“C’è un quadro di Klee che s’intitola Angelus Novus. Vi si trova un angelo che sembra in atto di allontanarsi da qualcosa su cui fissa lo sguardo. Ha gli occhi spalancati, la bocca aperta, le ali distese. L'angelo della storia deve avere questo aspetto. Ha il viso rivolto al passato. Dove ci appare una catena di eventi, egli vede una sola catastrofe, che accumula senza tregua rovine su rovine e le rovescia ai suoi piedi. Egli vorrebbe ben trattenersi, destare i morti e ricomporre l’infranto. Ma una tempesta spira dal paradiso, che si è impigliata nelle sue ali, ed è così forte che egli non può più chiuderle. Questa tempesta lo spinge irresistibilmente nel futuro, a cui volge le spalle, mentre il cumulo delle rovine sale davanti a lui al cielo. Ciò che chiamiamo il progresso, è questa tempesta.”

GuerraFuturoPassatoStoriaProgressoWalter BenjaminCatastrofePaul KleeAngelus Novus
Book:Angelus Novus. Saggi e frammenti
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“You have to have approached a place from all four cardinal points if you want to take it in, and what’s more, you also have to have left it from all these points. Otherwise it will quite unexpectedly cross your path three or four times before you are prepared to discover it. One stage further, and you seek it out, you orient your-self by it. The same thing with houses. It is only after having crept along a series of them in search of a very specific one that you come to learn what they contain. From the arches of gates, on the frames of house doors, in letters of varying size, black, blue, yellow, red, in the shape of arrows or in the image of boots or freshly-ironed laundry or a word stoop or a stairway’s solid landing, the life leaps out at you, combative, determined, mute. You have to have traveled the streets by streetcar to realize how this running battle con-tinues up along the various stories and finally reaches its decisive pitch on the roofs.”

LoveArcadesLoafing
Book:Moscow Diary
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“The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.”

HistoryMarxismClass StruggleHistorical Materialism
Book:On the Concept of History
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“I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood -- it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation -- which these books arouse in a genuine collector.”

Illuminations
Author:Walter Benjamin
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“To illustrate this claim, Benjamin relates a fable about a father who taught his sons the merits of hard work by fooling them into thinking that there was buried treasure in the vineyard by the house. The turning of soil in the vain search for gold results in the discovery of a real treasure: a wonderful crop of fruit. With the war came the severing of ‘the red thread of experience’ which had connected previous generations, as Benjamin puts it in ‘Sketched into Mobile Dust’. The ‘fragile human body’ that emerged from the trenches was mute, unable to narrate the ‘forcefield of destructive torrents and explosions’ that had engulfed it. Communicability was unsettled. It was as if the good and bountiful soil of the fable had become the sticky and destructive mud of the trenches, which would bear no fruit but only moulder as a graveyard. ‘Where do you hear words from the dying that last and that pass from one generation to the next like a precious ring?’ Benjamin asks.”

World War IModernityOral HistoryOral TraditionFrankfurt SchoolCommunicability
Book:The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness
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“Die Natur fesselte [in der Zeit der lateinischen Dekadenz] die Aufmerksamkeit nur durch ihre mirabilia; die Geschichte nur durch Begebenheiten, die sich in Reden als Illustration bewahrt hatten. Niemand dachte an eine Einheit der Wissenschaft, geschweige an mögliche Fortschritte der letzteren. Die Kritik war auf dem Tiefpunkte angelangt: man wußte eine Antwort auf jede Frage. Rezension von: Henri-Irenee Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique. Paris: E. de Boccard 1938. XV, 620 S.”

KritikNaturWissenschaftSpätantike
Book:Opere complete. VII. Scritti 1938-1949
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“In short, in contrast to the magician - who is still hidden in the medical practitioner – the surgeon at the decisive moment abstains from facing the patient man to man; rather, it is through the operation that he penetrates into him. Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.”

RealityTechnologyPainterEquipmentEnchantmentCameraman
Book:The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: An Influential Essay of Cultural Criticism; the History and Theory of Art
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“Die Beeinflussung der Massen ist [...] keine Schwarzkunst, gegen die an die weisse Magie der Eliten zu appellieren wäre. Sie ist eine geschichtliche Aufgabe, und vieles [...] spricht dafür, dass der Charlatan ihr zu seiner Zeit und auf seine Weise entsprochen hat. Gewiss nicht immer auf eine säuberliche. Aber die Versuche, profanes Wissen an die Massen heranzubringen, sind noch niemals desinteressiert gewesen. Dennoch stellten sie einen Fortschritt dar. Oft hat ihm der Charlatan selbst noch da gedient, wo er am rücksichtslosesten seinem Vorteil nachging. Ein Cagliostro und Saint-Germain rächten den dritten Stand an der Herrenkaste. Sie waren authentische Zeitgenossen von Beaumarchais.”

CharlatanBeeinflussungElitenMassen
Book:Kritiken und Rezensionen
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“I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood — it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation — which these books arouse in a genuine collector. For such a man is speaking to you, and on closer scrutiny he proves to be speaking only about himself.”

BooksUnpackingMoving HouseUnpacking BooksUnpacking My Library
Author:Walter Benjamin
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“The realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking. Thus, dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awakening. Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow but in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. "It bears its end within itself and unfolds it-as Hegel already noticed-by cunning. With the destabilizing of the market economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.”

PhilosophyHistoryDreamsRevolutionSpeculationDialectics
Book:The Arcades Project
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“In the last case it is clear that state censorship played its part, but the distortion of dreams should also be understood as psychic protection from the messages they carry. When the energies of the night are wrenched into the day through the process of linguistic representation, repressed desires and wishes can no longer evaporate through a process of forgetting. Benjamin, in One Way Street, equates such writing-up with betrayal, for it is in the moment of transcription that latent desires have to be confronted. Just as the person who wakes up after dreaming betrays the night with food, so too does the writer who reaches for a pen. Censorship operates to protect dreamers from their dreams. Elaboration operates to capture the intensity of the dream-experience against the inadequacies of memory and language.”

WritingLanguageDreamsProtectionUnconsciousCensorshipRepressed Desires
Book:The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness
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