|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Other authors named Walter:
|
|
|
|
Author's popularity: 2
Vote:  
|
If you like or dislike this author in general or one or more of their quotes in particular, please give us your feedback by clicking on the icon to vote for, or the icon to vote against them.
|
|
Popularity: 2
Vote: | All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven. |
|
Biography
|
Walter Benjamin (July 15, 1892-September 27, 1940) was a German Jewish Marxist literary critic and philosopher.
Life and work Benjamin was known during his life primarily for his philosophical essays and as a critic. As a sociological and cultural critic he combined ideas of Jewish mysticism with historical materialism in a body of work which was an entirely novel contribution to Marxist philosophy. As a literary scholar, he translated texts written by Marcel Proust and Charles Baudelaire, and Benjamin's essay "The Task of the Translator" is one of the best-known theoretical texts about translation.
His most important writings were:
* "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften" (Goethe's Elective Affinities / 1922),
* Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin Of German Tragic Drama / 1928),
* Einbahnstraße (One Way Street / 1928),
* Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility / 1936),
* Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin Childhood around 1900 / 1950, published posthumously),
* Über den Begriff der Geschichte (On the Concept of History (Theses on the Philosophy of History) / 1939, published posthumously).
The Passagenwerk or "Arcades Project," Benjamin's lifelong project, was to be an enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, especially concerned with the roofed outdoor "arcades" which created the city's distinctive street life and culture of flânerie. The project, which many scholars believe might have become one of the great texts of 20th-century cultural criticism, was never completed; it has been posthumously edited and published in many languages in its unfinished form.
Benjamin corresponded extensively with Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht and occasionally received funding from the Frankfurt School under Adorno's and Horkheimer's direction. The competing influences of Brecht's Marxism (and secondarily Adorno's critical theory) and the Jewish mysticism of his friend Gerschom Scholem were central to Benjamin's work, though he never completely resolved their differences. The essay "On the Concept of History" (often referred to as the "Theses on the Philosophy of History"), among Benjamin's last works, is the closest approach to such a synthesis, and along with the essay "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility" (more commonly printed in English under the title "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"), is the most often read of his texts.
Benjamin committed suicide in Port Bou at the Spanish-French border, while attempting to escape from the Nazis, when it appeared that his party would be denied passage across the border to freedom. The rest of the group was allowed to cross the border the next day, possibly because their desperation was made clear by Benjamin's suicide. A completed manuscript which Benjamin had carried in his suitcase, possibly his "Arcades Project," disappeared after his death and has not been recovered.
He was brother-in-law to Hilde Benjamin.
...(more on Wikipedia)
|
|
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Walter Benjamin".
|
|
|