#Walter Benjamin
(Source: amazon.com)
“
Theory of distraction.
Attempt to determine the effect of the work of art once its power of consecration has been eliminated.
Walter Benjamin, Theory of Distraction, inThe Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media
“
This is what is most important: we must not commit ourselves to a determinate idea [Gedanken]; even the idea of youth culture should be for us only the illumination which draws the most distant spirit into effulgence. However, for many, even Wyneken and the Sprechsaal will become a “movement,” they will have committed themselves; and they will no longer perceive the spirit where it appears more free, more abstract. This constantly pulsating feeling for the abstractness of pure spirit—-that is what I would like to call Youth.
Benjamin on the Youth Movement, 1913, quoted in Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic Redemption
(Source: books.google.com)
“
God, progress, civilisation, there was nothing he could not doubt, least of all himself. He was so modestly uncertain, this man of towering intellect. Gershom Scholem, the fountainhead of Jewish mysticism, thought Benjamin was a most special soul but why on earth did he converse with those leftists? Brecht had a profound respect for him but never understood what he was doing around those mystics. And in between two worlds, translating the words of those who never spoke the same language, Benjamin stood on his own, beautiful in his loneliness.
“My Hero: Walter Benjamin” by Elif Shafak. Featured in The Guardian. It is this loneliness, I believe, that has captured the hearts and minds of so many.
“
The chronicler, who recounts events without distinguishing between the great and small, thereby accounts for the truth, that nothing which has ever happened is to be given as lost to history. Indeed, the past would fully befall only a resurrected humanity. Said another way: only for a resurrected humanity would its past, in each of its moments, be citable. Each of its lived moments becomes a citation a l’ordre du jour [order of the day] – whose day is precisely that of the Last Judgment.
“Theses on the Philosophy of History: III”
(Source: marxists.org)
“
We need history, but we need it differently from the spoiled lazy-bones in the garden of knowledge.
Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life
Where does Benjamin use this quote as an epigraph?
“
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. “The truth will not run away from us”: in the historical outlook of historicism these words of Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with the throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth).
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History: V”, from Illuminations
“
As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
My two worlds just collided in the realm of historic violence (or so Benjamin would say). Here we have Walter Benjamin’s The Theory of Criticism and an advert for Server Density.
Designed by Richard Mavis. Powered by Tumblr.
