lisafrankfurtschool:

This is how one pictures the unicorn of history. Its face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, it sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of its hooves. The unicorn 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 its wings with such violence that the unicorn can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels it into the future to which its back is turned, while the pile of debris before it grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

ardora:

“March 1922, from Walter Benjamin’s notes:

- Mummy, why do you always say saucer [Untertasse]; it is a plate, isn’t it?
- Yes, but these plates have a special name because they are always under the cup [Tasse].
- Yes, but if you take away the cup, then you cannot say saucer anymore.”

— Walter Benjamin’s Archive, tr. Esther Leslie, Verso, 2007, p. 129

Image: Walter Benjamin and his mom, ibid, Fig 5.1, p. 115 (via)

poorgrammar:

“The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us.  In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.  The same applies o our view of the past, which is the concern of history.  The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption” (254).

species-of-spaces:

Walter Benjamin at Heringsdorf, c.1896, Walter Benjamin Archiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

(Source: spatiotemporalcookiez)

I love this. Well done. 

metamaartje:

(Concept, Design and book binding by Lotte Bogels, Stan de Natris (www.standenatris.com) and me)

Unpacking Our Libraries

Wal­ter Ben­jamin al­ready de­scribed the del­i­cate op­er­a­tion of un­pack­ing his li­brary. Tak­ing this idea as a start­ing point for the pro­ject, we man­aged to ob­tain a large part of our class­mates home li­brary and bring it to­gether in a huge cat­a­logue. Each book gets one spread in the cat­a­logue, using only the front­cover, spine, in­side-spread and the back­cover to give a glimpse of the book.

The cat­a­logue func­tions as a re­quest plat­form for other stu­dents who are look­ing for a book they can’t find in the ArtEZ li­brary. This process of search­ing for a book gets eas­ier when you use the table of con­tents or the cat­e­gory index, also pro­vided in the cat­a­logue.

If someone wants to borrow a book, they have to fill in a form on bookmarks we created, and place it between the pages where the desired book is displayed.

Histoire et Narration Chez Walter Benjamin

Great recommendation. I am going to try and find it in English, but if not, I will have to read it in French!