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
All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.
The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe
Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.
Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.
In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. . . . He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand -like precious fragments or torsos in a collector's gallery -in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.