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4.24 AVERAGE
4.24 AVERAGE
"At any rate, nothing was more characteristic of him in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of "pearls" and "coral." On occasion he read from them aloud, showed them around like items from a choice and precious collection...And this thinking, fed by the present, works with the "thought fragments" it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and strange..." pgs. 45 and 50.
Skipped the essays on Baudelaire and Proust as they were less relevant to my interests. Benjamin is a brilliant thinker.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
I actually still need to read the essay on Baudelaire, but I'm going to wait until I've read some Baudelaire.
Fascinating essays. Benjamin was a great mind, and it's reassuring that this was eventually recognized.
The essays on Kafka, book collecting, art in the age of mechanical reproduction, and theses on philosophy of history are all amazing.
Fascinating essays. Benjamin was a great mind, and it's reassuring that this was eventually recognized.
The essays on Kafka, book collecting, art in the age of mechanical reproduction, and theses on philosophy of history are all amazing.
The bedrock of my masters thesis. Unparalleled exploration of collection and ownership and how this relates to art, life and love.
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
slow-paced
I had a really hard time deciding where to rate this book. German writers are already dry to begin with. German philosophers, ick. Then, add the English translation on top of it. The book was difficult to get through. Definitely not one I'd recommend for a straight-read through.
Each chapter though, is an individual essay. Mostly, the book contains literary criticisms. The last two chapters, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction was scary--this book was published in 1955, the essays all written sometime before 1940, and Benjamin quotes a guy (can't remember who) saying that the day will come when one can sit in his or own home and with a flick of his or her wrist, watch various images. He was referring to movies and film--but what about the TV remote or the mouse? Creepy how he saw into the future like that.
The last chapter, Theses on the Philosophy of History was simply short and intriguing, leaving the reader (or me) reveling in the prose--which I had said before was German-boring (Deutschlangweilig).
Overall though, Illuminations has some real gems in it. You just have to be willing to wade through the text. Take it in small bites, and you'll be fine.
Each chapter though, is an individual essay. Mostly, the book contains literary criticisms. The last two chapters, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction was scary--this book was published in 1955, the essays all written sometime before 1940, and Benjamin quotes a guy (can't remember who) saying that the day will come when one can sit in his or own home and with a flick of his or her wrist, watch various images. He was referring to movies and film--but what about the TV remote or the mouse? Creepy how he saw into the future like that.
The last chapter, Theses on the Philosophy of History was simply short and intriguing, leaving the reader (or me) reveling in the prose--which I had said before was German-boring (Deutschlangweilig).
Overall though, Illuminations has some real gems in it. You just have to be willing to wade through the text. Take it in small bites, and you'll be fine.
Truth be told I found Benjamin to not be particularly insightful. It's perhaps cruel to say but his work strikes me as like an enthusiastic painter attempting a watercolour with a tradesman's brush and shaky hands. Which is to say even if the initial trajectory of the argument is sensible it ends up dense, meandering and far too broad, and often overshooting any sensible end-point.
To put it mildly, I'm no fan of his arguments and his most famous essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, is actually the nadir of his writing to me. An argument beginning with flawed assumptions, advanced with shaky reasoning, where the arguments are incompatible with his prior essay The Storyteller.
However he was a romantic and a Marxist, as well as a traditionalist so much as those allowed, three things I am not, so there's a degree to which my positions differ and I'm going to be ill-inclined to his arguments at the outset; but as Orwell was also those things and was capable of regularly advancing very compelling arguments I think this is an issue of his reasoning being lacking. Notably I found his Theses on the Philosophy of History, heavy steeped in a Marxist worldview (albeit arguing against aspects of Marxist historiography), to contain his most compelling arguments.
So why three stars if I hold the arguments in such low esteem? Simply, Benjamin's writing is beautiful. As a set of arguments his reputation far outstrips his actual work, though a germ of something valuable is intermittently discernible. But as a piece of literature it is wonderful. I may not love the arguments but I love the expression of them, and just as an atheist can find beauty in the Bible I find beauty and worth in these essays.
To this end perhaps my favourite essay is Unpacking My Library, in which he opines on his hobby of book collecting and expresses wonderfully the joy in second hand items and in the act of collection. In this he is not arguing for or against an interpretation of literature or putting forward an argument but simply opining on his hobby and letting the beauty of his experience and of his writing shine through. The themes may be less weighty than his other works but it demonstrates that despite his reputation Benjamin's true talent was not as a philosopher or critic but as a writer.
To put it mildly, I'm no fan of his arguments and his most famous essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, is actually the nadir of his writing to me. An argument beginning with flawed assumptions, advanced with shaky reasoning, where the arguments are incompatible with his prior essay The Storyteller.
However he was a romantic and a Marxist, as well as a traditionalist so much as those allowed, three things I am not, so there's a degree to which my positions differ and I'm going to be ill-inclined to his arguments at the outset; but as Orwell was also those things and was capable of regularly advancing very compelling arguments I think this is an issue of his reasoning being lacking. Notably I found his Theses on the Philosophy of History, heavy steeped in a Marxist worldview (albeit arguing against aspects of Marxist historiography), to contain his most compelling arguments.
So why three stars if I hold the arguments in such low esteem? Simply, Benjamin's writing is beautiful. As a set of arguments his reputation far outstrips his actual work, though a germ of something valuable is intermittently discernible. But as a piece of literature it is wonderful. I may not love the arguments but I love the expression of them, and just as an atheist can find beauty in the Bible I find beauty and worth in these essays.
To this end perhaps my favourite essay is Unpacking My Library, in which he opines on his hobby of book collecting and expresses wonderfully the joy in second hand items and in the act of collection. In this he is not arguing for or against an interpretation of literature or putting forward an argument but simply opining on his hobby and letting the beauty of his experience and of his writing shine through. The themes may be less weighty than his other works but it demonstrates that despite his reputation Benjamin's true talent was not as a philosopher or critic but as a writer.
Reading literary and aesthetic criticism with barely any context is a habit I've picked up in these strange times; with Illuminations, this exercise has been fairly rewarding and quite frustrating in equal measure.
I picked up this book for the famous essay on art in the age of mechanical reproduction, but I quite enjoyed reading Benjamin's reflections on book collecting; on Proust eating a cookie and stumbling upon lost time; on Brechtian theatre; on the history of storytelling told through Leskov; and on Baudelaire in the crowd . Despite not having read Leskov, Baudelaire, or Proust in any capacity; or perhaps because of it; I found the essays concerning their works and their thematic exploration of time and memory intriguing; Benjamin's essays on Kafka, on the other hand, came off as rather dated and quite hard to get through. The bigger disappointment, though, was "The Task of the Translator," which rather ironically was the one whose eloquence felt tragically lost in translation.
While I probably understood less than half of this book (and have retained even lesser), I feel humbled by Benjamin's range and touched by the way he writes, i.e. in near psychedelic meditations that reflect upon and illuminate some of the most important issues in modernist times — be it memory, art, the aesthetic politics of Fascism, history, or the principles of social democracy.
Equally deserving of praise is [a:Hannah Arendt|12806|Hannah Arendt|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1222711954p2/12806.jpg]'s brilliant introduction to this book and to the life and work of Walter Benjamin. I particularly liked the section on posthumous fame and the parallels between Benjamin and Kafka, as well as the way Arendt talks about the former's death. It was also in this essay that I found the exceptionally and historically eerie fact of
All that aside, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in theory, especially those who have more context to the subject matter than I did. I would also leave the task of assigning this book a star rating to such a reader, or to myself in the occassion I return to this book better-equipped.
I picked up this book for the famous essay on art in the age of mechanical reproduction, but I quite enjoyed reading Benjamin's reflections on book collecting; on Proust eating a cookie and stumbling upon lost time; on Brechtian theatre; on the history of storytelling told through Leskov; and on Baudelaire in the crowd . Despite not having read Leskov, Baudelaire, or Proust in any capacity; or perhaps because of it; I found the essays concerning their works and their thematic exploration of time and memory intriguing; Benjamin's essays on Kafka, on the other hand, came off as rather dated and quite hard to get through. The bigger disappointment, though, was "The Task of the Translator," which rather ironically was the one whose eloquence felt tragically lost in translation.
While I probably understood less than half of this book (and have retained even lesser), I feel humbled by Benjamin's range and touched by the way he writes, i.e. in near psychedelic meditations that reflect upon and illuminate some of the most important issues in modernist times — be it memory, art, the aesthetic politics of Fascism, history, or the principles of social democracy.
Equally deserving of praise is [a:Hannah Arendt|12806|Hannah Arendt|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1222711954p2/12806.jpg]'s brilliant introduction to this book and to the life and work of Walter Benjamin. I particularly liked the section on posthumous fame and the parallels between Benjamin and Kafka, as well as the way Arendt talks about the former's death. It was also in this essay that I found the exceptionally and historically eerie fact of
a report from Vienna dated summer 1939, saying that the local gas company had 'stopped supplying gas to Jews. The gas consumption of the jewish population involved a loss for the gas company, since the biggest consumers were the ones who did not pay their bills. The Jews used the gas especially for committing suicide'which appeared next to a love poem in Benjamin's collection of quotations. That's one amongst things I feel both guilty and amused to have learnt through this book.
All that aside, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in theory, especially those who have more context to the subject matter than I did. I would also leave the task of assigning this book a star rating to such a reader, or to myself in the occassion I return to this book better-equipped.