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
Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.
I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was"...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.
Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice; food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.
The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.
Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them
To the lover the loved one always appears as solitary.
Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.
The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
Kitsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, wihtout sublimation.
Man is the namer; by this we recognize that through him pure language speaks. All nature, insofar as it communicates itself, communicates itself in language, and so finally in man. Hence, he is the lord of nature and can give names to things. Only through the linguistic being of things can he get beyond himself and attain knowledge of them-in the name. God's creation is completed when things receive their names from man, from whom in name language alone speaks.