I gotta reread this bc most of it went over my head. What I got was pretty fire tho

the proust essay is sublime

five stars for the Theses on the Philosophy of History alone. I can't imagine what it would have been like in the 1940s when that was published. Reading Benjamin's description of the Paul Klee painting and thinking, holy shit, I need to see this thing. Maybe years pass before you ever do see a reproduction (ironic, no?) of the thing. I imagine one would be pretty underwhelmed. Regardless the essay is a masterpiece. What illumination might rise from the ruins of secular modernity? who knows but we'll create a lot of debris in pursuit of it.

Brilliant and evergreen, obviously. Only ruined by that vile forward by Leon Wieseltier which goes against all of Benjamin’s principles and philosophies entirely.

“Thus, for contemporary man [sic] 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.”

“I have made my most memorable purchases on trips, as a transient. Property and possession belong to the tactical sphere. Collectors are people with a tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationery store a key position. How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!”

“To articulate the past does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”

“The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”

“Fascism [and neoliberalism] attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.. . . [Fascism] expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of ‘l’art pour l’art.’ Mankind’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.”

Siempre que termino de leer un texto de Benjamin me pasa lo mismo: sólo espero a que pase el tiempo para poder leerlo de nuevo. Con motivo de esta edición, vuelvo a leer las Tesis sobre el concepto de historia y La obra de arte en la época de su reproductibilidad técnica, y leo por primera vez los otros ensayos que componen este volumen. En concreto, pienso mucho en Benjamin pensando a Kafka, porque justo ahora yo también me encuentro pensándole.

Notes

* The Task of The Translator

The most illuminating part for me personally is how Benjamin challenges the concept of“ fidelity “ in translation ( the balancing act of “creativity “ and “fidelity “).
I also appreciate his thoughts on the “ afterlife” of the original texts.

Patrick star snoring gif

obscure, boring then enlightening all the way through.

I'd lie if I said that I understood more than - charitably - fifty percent of these essays. Besides for the mountains of literary references and the oblique angles from which Benjamin approaches his subjects, his languid, flâneur-like writing makes it difficult to follow his train of thought. Still, the beauty of such writing, and the tendency toward hyperbole so characteristic of the Frankfurt School, have no doubt played a great role in Benjamin's reputation as a critic.

These essays, selected by Hannah Arendt, focus on a number of Modernist writers (Proust, Kafka, Baudelaire, Leskov [whom I hadn't heard of], Brecht) and their approach to society. As a Marxist, Benjamin saw the cultural as tightly embedded in the political - as he concludes the most best-known essay in the book, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Fascism seeks to make the aesthetic political (glorifying war and destruction), and Communism must respond by politicising the aesthetic. Thus he sees the decline of the culture of storytelling as symptomatic of the increasing demands on our time placed by industrialisation and urbanisation. Boredom, the prime condition for storytelling, no longer exists ("Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov"). In another essay, he recalls Poe's and Baudelaire's respective takes on an imagined crowd scene, both regarding with growing horror the single-minded intensity of the crowd, and their utter alienation (in the Marxist sense) from each other and themselves ("On Some Motifs in Baudelaire").

Benjamin is fascinated by Proust, focusing on the Bergsonian metaphysics underpinning In Search of Lost Time. From what I understand of Bergson's philosophy, he claims that only by ignoring our subjective experience of time and connecting to the atemporal durée can we transcend causality and experience true freedom. Thus Proust searches for his childhood memories, attempting to restore his unadulterated youthful happiness through mental effort. Perhaps it is not a stretch to see Benjamin politicising this thought, seeing society as undergoing a similar transformation through the overthrow of the bourgeois societal status quo and the return to the more authentic state of nature.

The other essays focus on some literary trends with remarkable prescience. One is a deep reading of Kafka's absurdism, and its relation to Jewish culture (in 1940, the year of Benjamin's death, Kafka was still a little-known figure, at least in the English-speaking world). A shorter essay describing Brecht's idea of the Epic Theatre (stripped of the attempt at realism, and full of meta-theatrical devices to confuse and startle the audience) presages Tom Stoppard, Samuel Beckett, and countless art films. The final essay consists of some rather Gnomic statements on Hegel's Philosophy of History.

Contrary to its subtitle, this book is rather more one of "Reflections", and less one of "Essays", in the Montaignian sense. Benjamin swirls his brush into society, politics, and art, and teases out the gossamer threads connecting artistic creation and social change. In the finest spirit of Modernism, he delves into the unconscious, seeking to understand the changes we have wrought, the ills in our society, and the ephemeral presence of beauty amongst cruelty and dehumanisation. Sadly, he could not escape the march of that inhumanity, which was close on his heels at the time that he took his own life.

Might review this later, but I read this last year and forgot to log it

This is a book I think everyone likes, or at least 'readers' qua 'reader' do (whatever that's worth). I was glad to revisit it since, when first I read it, I had glistened over and taken his arguments as though they were trivially simple, which stood in contrast to the great profundity and reverence with which Benjamin is always credited; to my surprise, upon rereading I found that Benjamin was just as direct and literal as I remembered -- Kafka as a dreamy expressionist of a ridiculous world, artistic authenticity as a passing error, Proust as an imagist against his fleeting life. It seems to me that much of the merit of Benjamin's writing doesn't derive from his literal arguments, and that much of his scholastic legacy rests on the unsolid foundation of his creative, relatively ineffectual manifest claims (I have looked over some academic papers neurotically constructing a cargo culte around Benjamin's concepts of 'reproduction' that say less than nothing) ... rather, Benjamin's real and meaningful contribution to the reader is an receptive enthusiasm for great art, stemming from his ulterior philosophical attitude deriving from his studies of Judaism with Scholem -- all gravitating around to the anxiety of Logos as Image from the Old Testament, and the subsequent descent into vanity doomed to all such icons, no matter how beautifully rendered. This is a theory well worth considering, but it is perhaps the ultimate folly to attempt criticism discursive to this ultimate rejection of discursive criticism; Benjamin is the champion of what some might call vague obscurantism and others the profoundest of ironies. In spite of this (and in spite of Hannah Arendt's confession that these essays were very selectively excerpted out of a massive corpus of incoherent rambling) Benjamin is at the least an excellent scholar on the most literal level, making infinitely many memorable connections and re-rendering as many passages from his favorite writers. What he says of Baudelaire, for example, is relatively banal (a poetic Last Man 'celebrating his own demise' as Adorno says, obsessed with the inert images of crowd and devil), but he does the duest of diligences in finding analogous sources, passages that become clearer under his reading, and arguing concretely his points. Many of his 'successors' played just as fast and loose with discursive content as Benjamin did, if not more, but this hard-minded academic rigor became a lost art for them.

Pay good attention to the Theses on History, which if read carefully will demonstrate Benjamin in his purest form, and exonerate him of his (rather incidental and mostly instrumental) entanglements with Marxism.

Progress is a heavenly storm propelling an angel forward ass first, rendering it unable to face the future, and forcing it to witness the single mounting catastrophe that is the history of humankind. Also, it is a pure joy to read Benjamin's thoughts on book collecting and the role of the storyteller. His deep dives into Kafka, Proust, the task of the translator, and the role of art in the age of mechanical reproduction are genius. I struggled the most with his Baudelaire essay, but am the least familiar with his work, and still i gleaned enough kernels to make it worth the slog. This is a collection of essays for the lifetime bookshelf and one I am sure to pick through again and again.