![]() Currently approaching some six thousand titles, my personal library is of comparable size to that of Herr Benjamin's back when he put pen to paper the learned author comes off as a more intelligent kindred spirit to this reviewer, one whose book-based similarities both measure and explain the bibliomaniac's obsessions and joys with a reassuring abundance of lucidity and enthusiasm. Benjamin's opening sally, a short piece on the eccentric inner workings of the book collector, resonated in a warmly satisfying way, describing idiosyncrasies and behaviors that fit me like a glove. The introductory essay by Hannah Arendt-who also did duty as editor of this wonderful collection-serves up her usual insight (and reliably delivered via her rather dense language) in categorizing Benjamin as a poetic mind who approached cultural and literary criticism in a unique manner, one that left a lasting influence upon those who followed in his wake. But the flashes of understanding I did have seemed to illuminate the whole world. In fact, it’s this very quality that makes Benjamin so difficult for me to understand. That’s not to say I understood most, or even half, of what was written here. It’s a world of waking dreams, unbounded by space, time, or causality. It’s as if every portrait or mirror or piece of furniture were a text holding secrets waiting to be unlocked. Nothing exists in itself of by itself everything is bound up in infinite relations to other things, in which order is constantly breaking down and new objects are simultaneously being created. In Benjamin’s world, everything is in perpetual flux and fragmentation. Benjamin’s interests align so closely with mine that reading this was rather like spending the evening a friend who is passionate about all the same things that you are (although, of course, much, much smarter). Or perhaps this always has been my model, even without my knowing it. I feel I’ve finally found my model here, in Benjamin’s complex intertextual webs and in his flâneur-like strolls through history, politics, literature, and cinema. Influenced by Bachofen, Benjamin gave the name "auratic perception" to the aesthetic faculty through which civilization would recover a lost appreciation of myth. 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 Mechanical Reproduction. As a literary scholar, he translated the Tableaux Parisiens edition of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal as well as Proust's In Search of Lost Time. 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.Īs 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. Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. In a stimulating introduction, Hannah Arendt reveals how Benjamin's life and work are a prism to his times, and identifies him as possessing the rare ability to think poetically. The essay is Benjamin's domain those collected in this now legendary volume offer the best possible access to his singular and significant achievement. Illuminations contains his two most celebrated essays, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' and 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', as well as others on the art of translation, Kafka, storytelling, Baudelaire, Brecht's epic theatre, Proust and an anatomy of his own obsession, book collecting. Now he is widely held to have possessed one of the most acute and original minds of the Central European culture decimated by the Nazis. ![]() The literary-philosophical works of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) rank among the most quietly influential of the post-war era, though only since his death had Benjamin achieved the fame and critical currency outside his native Germany accorded him by a select few during his lifetime.
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