Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher and cultural critic. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School, and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was also related by law to German political theorist Hannah Arendt through her first marriage...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth15 July 1892
CountryGermany
The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].
In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
The work of memory collapses time.
For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.
I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.
Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.
True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.
Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.
The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away ... The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenates in clearing away traces of our own age ...