Confession:
- Skipped long ass intro by Hannah Arendt
- Didn't understand most of the thing, but I know uncle Ben is great anyway

Sudah lama saya ingin membaca karya-karya Paman Benjamin. Entah kenapa saya suka menyebutnya paman. Coba lihat saja fotonya, sangat menggemaskan. Illuminations berisi esai-esai Paman Benjamin, rata-rata, tentang sastra. Mulai dari Nikolai Leskov (jujur saya tidak pernah dengar nama ini sebelumnya), Kafka, Baudelaire dan Proust. Jujur saja saya tidak mengerti apa yang dia katakan. Penyebabnya ialah saya tidak pernah baca karya orang-orang itu. Namun, ada dua esai yang mungkin bisa sedikit dipahami, yakni The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction dan Theses on Philosophy of History (kalau tidak salah). Esai yang pertama menjelaskan tentang seni yang berhadapan dengan mode (re)produksi modern. Paman Benjamin banyak menjelaskan tentang perkembangan fotografi dan film. Esai kedua tentang sejarah, khususnya histomat. Namun, agak sulit dipahami karena Paman Benjamin menggunakan bahasa yang ndakik-ndakik dan puitis.

Secara keseluruhan, pertemuan pertama degan Paman Benjamin tidak mudah sama sekali. Hanya saja memang karya-karya macam ini tak bisa dibaca hanya sekali. Terlepas dari karyanya, bagi saya, Paman Benjamin adalah paman baik yang terlalu cepat mati. Paman Benjamin meninggal di Spanyol kala ia hendak kabur dari pemerintah Nazi. Andai saja kau hidup lebih lama, Paman.

برخی فکر میکنند که کتاب حاضر، ترجمه ای از
Illuminations
، مجموعه مقالات والتر بنیامین با ویرایش هانا آرنت است. اما «نشانه ای به رهایی» حاوی هشتاد نود صفحه متن تألیفی از بابک احمدی است و سپس ترجمه مقالاتی می آید که با کتاب
Illuminations
مغایر است.
در مورد قابلیت اطمینان و اعتماد به تألیف ها و ترجمه های بابک احمدی نیز بخوانید:
https://3danet.ir/%D8%B3%D8%A7%D8%AE%...

باری، مقالات
Illuminations
عبارت اند از:

- Unpacking My Library (A Talk about Book Collecting)
- The Task of the Translator (An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelair’s Tableaux Parisiens)
- The Storyteller (Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov)
- Franz Kafka (On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death)
- Some Reflections on Kafka
- What Is an Epic Theater?
- On Some Motifs in Baudelaire
- The Image of Proust
- The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production
- These on Philosophy of History

اما مقالات ترجمه شده در «نشانه ای به رهایی» عبارت اند از:

- تصویر پروست
- درباره ابله داستایوسک��
- فرانتس کافکا
- سوررئالیسم (واپسین عکس فوری از اندیشه گران اروپایی)
- حکایت گر (اندیشه هایی درباره نیکلای لسکوف) که تحت عنوان «قصه گو» در ارغنون-درباره رمان توسط مرادفرهادپور ترجمه و چاپ شده است
- اثر هنری در دوران تکثیر مکانیکی آن که توسط امید نیک فرجام نیز ترجمه و در نشریه فارابی چاپ شده است.

This book made me feel alternately confused and like a genius, and I feel like that’ll be true no matter how much I revisit it. There’s a remarkable moral and philosophical coherence to Benjamin that I find so compelling, which is Marxism. So dumb that so many of his contemporaries denounced this facet of his thought, which, to me, is its center

Here I’ve finally found my ideal—in Benjamin’s gossamer intertextual webs and his crossings of history, politics, literature, and cinema. Or maybe this always has been my ideal, without my realizing it. Benjamin’s interests are cast so much in the same mold with my own that reading this was a lot like spending a beer-drinking evening with a friend who gets excited about all the same things you do—although of course much, much smarter. It was never a dull moment. Benjamin’s is a world of constant flux, in which there are no boundaries, no limitations, in which nothing exists by itself or for itself—everything is bound up in infinite relations to other things in which order is constantly being disrupted and new forms simultaneously being created. It’s as if every portrait or mirror or piece of furniture brimmed with secrets just waiting to be uncovered. It’s a world of waking dreams. That’s not to say I understood most—or even much—of what was written here, but the little I did understand illuminated a whole world that had been obscure to me, and started streams of thought that are flowing still.

I decided to read this English translation collection because I keep coming across references to the Hannah Arendt introduction, and she also edited this. Her 50 page intro was a good read. I really do need to read the original German versions of Walter Benjamin's greatest hits though, because every time I re-read a Benjamin essay, I think, that's not how I remember it. Well, "Unpacking my library" was more or less how I remembered, but "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" seemed very different. Is it my memory, or the work Arendt did as editor, or the translation?

All of the essays give a lot of captial-T Thoughts to mull over but this time around I was especially into the essays on Franz Kafka and the "Theses on the Philosophy of History." Of course anything reflecting on the rise of fascism takes on extra weight in this age of trumps, putins, orbans, netanyahus etceteras. But offering reasons why we (especially the so-called Left) haven't learned from history or why we're so surprised are especially welcome. I was so into the "Theses" I was thinking, I should copy these out by hand. Well, maybe I'll just read some other peoples' takes on them instead.

There is a thing in this book from Charles Baudelaire, I don't remember if it was in the Baudelaire essay or the Marcel Proust essay, but it was about a gambler choosing Hell instead of Nothingness. This really spoke to me, and I don't remember it from Les Fleurs du Mal, but this time... wow. All the opioid overdoses, the gun deaths, up to including all the genocides and wars are because some people look at their nothing, routine lives and are ready to go to hell to escape nothingness, instead of recognizing their connection to everything else, instead of seeing poetry to put it one way in the everyday. Please, let's stop choosing hell.

me: i started trying to do a heidegger thing. just finished the 'basic writings' book. but am not feeling totally enthused.
William: ugh
why heidegger?
me: i dunno. because he is so central? influential?
it is just a little boring. a little, like: what's the point?
William: seriously
i have to finish up my heidegger-hoelderlin chapter and i'm so bored with heidegger
so stodgy and airless
me: totally
William: in contrast, if you read walter benjamin, from walter you can get interested in a myriad of different subjects: history, german romanticism, theater, capitalism, brecht
whereas if you read heidegger, it's this lonely little room where it's just fucking BEING all the time

"Through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way." From "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

"Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience." From "The Storyteller"

"In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower....the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule." From "Theses on the Philosophy of History"

Review:

August 2006

Of Benjamin, Dwarfs and Angels

The depth of Benjamin's pessimism has, I think, been underestimated.

"The story is told of an automation constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet's hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called "historical materialism" is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight." Walter Benjamin, First "These on the Philosophy of History", p 253.

One can measure how far the contemporary Marxist (better said, the post or semi-Marxist) left has fallen by how many books have appeared, since the fall of the USSR, enthusing over the radically Universal and allegedly 'Progressive' nature of early Christianity. Walter Benjamin, who was first to place the wise but ugly dwarf (Theology) in the beautiful puppet (Historical Materialism) would be amazed (or perhaps not, see the letters between Benjamin and Scholem) to learn that puppet and dwarf are on the verge of switching places! That is, now the ugly dwarf (historical materialism) wants to hide in (and of course direct) the beautiful puppet of Christian theology. ...Crazy, you say? But even Habermas, the Keeper of the Flame of Critical Theory, has on occasion made somewhat similar noises. The best place, btw, to start reading about this new 'political-theology' probably remains Jacob Taubes.

But perhaps this emergent trend is really not so crazy after all. The only reason the Church became so cozy with Capitalism was its fear of Atheism. The collapse of the Soviet Union ended that fear. Now Christianity faces Capitalism alone. Or not, if the detente being proposed between the left and the Church is actually consummated. But every detente is aimed at some third party. The Church was with Capitalism because it had to defeat atheism. Now it is likely that the Church will join (a moderate) Socialism in trying to contain the ravages of capitalism. This is only another move on the chessboard of History. ...But what did Benjamin think of History?

"A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." BENJAMIN, Ninth Thesis on History, p 257.

Picture this Angel, wings pinned back by the wind, shoulders forced back because of that - the Angel of History is in the position of the Crucified Christ; except that this crucification does not end. It is this tone of almost ontological despair that was new to the left. This Crucified Angel is the perfect image of the left-wing theoretical pessimism pioneered by not only Benjamin but also Adorno and Horkheimer that split the intellectual left into two camps: the revolutionary and the cultural. And though no one is likely to admit it, the cultural left has quietly come to think of revolution itself as but another 'progressive' force piling up bodies.

It is one of the little ironies of history that this despairing fantasy described contemporary reality exactly. The Angel of History is the image of dialectical knowledge. Rather than seeing disconnected events this Dialectical Knowledge grasps History as One (single catastrophe). Always facing the past ('the owl of Minerva takes flight at night', Hegel said; meaning that dialectical knowledge is retrospective) the 'contemplating' Angel is overwhelmed by historical action - the storm that has been blowing since the expulsion of humanity from paradise - and can never Himself achieve effective action. His knowledge grows in lockstep with the accumulating horror, but each new historical event only results (i,e., gets 'caught in the wings' of our Angel) in more contemplation. So we see how theory (our Angel) is 'irresistibly' propelled into the future. And we also see that the Knowledge dialectical theory gains is precisely equal to the debris the storm hurls at the angel's feet. With an irony equal to the wind blowing from Paradise Benjamin ends this meditation by calling this storm progress.

This is perhaps why Benjamin insisted over 50 years ago that the dwarf Theology must guide the puppet Historical Materialism. Theory can never be equal to action; circumstance piles upon circumstance so rapidly that theory cannot effectively act, and if it does act (presumably) it only adds to the debris. Thus theology (myth) must guide materialism's hand because theoretical knowledge is powerless to help. Benjamin quotes the following remarks of Willy Haas, with approval, in his large Kafka essay;

"'The object of the trial', he writes, 'indeed, the real hero of this incredible book is forgetting, whose main characteristic is the forgetting of itself [...] The most sacred ... act of the ... ritual is the erasing of sins from the book of memory.'
What has been forgotten - and this insight affords us yet another avenue of access to Kafka's work - is never something purely individual." (Benjamin, Franz Kafka, p 131.)

(The last sentence was Benjamin's own.) Theology is a non-individual forgetfulness. Thus myth (theology) is the only forgetfulness worthy of the name. What needs to be forgotten is the unsurpassable fact of the futility of theory...

It is difficult for most to look such despair in the face.t

Five years ago I discovered Walter Benjamin. I had never been much for theory before, and my initial encounter with his writing was sort of like one of those old 3D puzzle pictures: first, a dense field of mesmerizing psychedelic prose, and then POW! MEANING!

I don't gush over philosophy often, I swear (okay, I don't swear swear, but like, 89% swear) -- but this is love. His haunting theories and beautiful metaphors have stayed on my mind ever since that sunny afternoon in Portland, Oregon when I sat gaping in wonder at my photocopy of "The Task of the Translator." No writer has ever made such a huge impact on my perceptions of thoughts, words, and art.

If there's one thing I wish I could include in more conversations, it's Walter Benjamin!

Walter Benjamin thought of himself as a literary critic. I found this interesting, since I would not have known how to label his work. After all, his studies and degree were in philosophy, and his many attempts to find a position were in philosophy departments at German universities. But as both Eliand* and Arendt(1) point out, this was mostly to satisfy his father's demand for productive results from his son's education. What Benjamin really wanted was for his father to support him in a life situated in books; Arendt remarks, not an uncommon assumption for his generation of German Jewish intellectuals from wealthy families. The people who knew Benjamin best claimed his affinity was for literature, not philosophy, as it was considered at that time and probably still ours. Philosophy, trying to make statements about the world and how humankind connects with it, was of necessity dogmatic; the only truth available to us is found in our fictions (here he is close to Adorno, see my review of The Sovereignty of Art by Menke) and , for Benjamin, the spark that comes from bringing together unnoticed resemblances.

And why not culture critic a la the Institute for Social Research, the group with which he is most closely associated? Certainly Benjamin hated the culture of the previous generation(s), which resulted in the catastrophes of his own, with as much passion as any Institute member. His last public statement,
Theses on the Philosophy of History, is unnerving in its presentation of the horror that is history. If there is any consistency in Benjamin, then Eliand would maintain that it is based in commitments from his time as a leader in the German Youth Movement, which revolted against the death of thought and creativity in the authority figures around them. Benjamin came to articulate this revolt by way of Marxism and felt an intense sympathy with the doctrine of the superstructure. But as a literary critic, he could use this heuristic device of the superstructure in a way that truly appealed to him, in finding immediate correspondences between say a poem by Baudelaire and 'a street scene, a speculation on the stock market, a thought' so strong that they needed no "interpretive or explanatory commentary". The Institute replied to Benjamin's Baudelaire essay with a furious criticism that it was lacking in all mediation and showed a 'wide-eyed presentation of actualities'. As Arendt would say, indeed so; Benjamin's was an entirely untheoretical stance versus the Institute's admirably always deferred formulation of mediated Marxism. Benjamin's reliance on correspondences rather than theory fed his hope for literary montage as a method for philosophical exposition: he voiced a great desire to produce a work consisting entirely of quotes with no other interpolations. Perhaps if he had been able to continue to work on his Arcades project, it would have finally arrived there. We would then have to hope the world would be lucky enough to
have access to all the stages Benjamin worked through at achieving this goal.

More soon, I hope. (1) I seem to need to add that my edition is edited by Hannah Arendt, with an introduction that is perceptive beyond compare on a man who was one of her best friends during the last years of Benjamin's life.

* abbreviation for Walter Benjamin, A Critical Life by Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings

The writings of an interesting literary critic, a sincere and somewhat unorthodox marxist and a leftist mystic whose life will likely be remembered and redeemed on the Judgement Day. Most essays in it are very interesting, although in a few of them Benjamin's argument can get a bit contrived.

A tour-de-force of literary criticism. Especially enjoyable for its glimpse into the critical perspective of a 19th century autodidact and 'literary man' par-excellence. For the conditions required to possibly achieve anything of the like the essay on the art of book collecting is key, and for the outcome it offers the essays here on Proust and the task of translation are masterful and importantly: original. Most attention and effort however should be paid on the final two essays which each carry great political import for our times as they teach us how to succeed in the critical act of remembrance. Remembering is, as Luxemburg would have it, the measurement of our fall from grace. It is looking backwards and buffeting the winds of progress whilst seeing only the accumulated rubble of constant crisis necessarily overcome. The way in which the forlorn historical agent must orient themselves could relate to an instinctive reliance on art in its uncountable mediums, yet even this proves suspect as Benjamin cares to include likely one of the most influential criticisms of its ever changing guises. 3 stars out of frustration of my basic ignorance of everything touched upon here, 5/5 for creating the gnostic conditions of its possibility.