Walter Benjamin Quotes

“Just as the flâneur wanders the Parisian Grands Boulevards, allowing disparate, shocklike experiences to be inscribed on his body even as they resonate in his memory, so the 'assistant' type, in a state of intoxication akin to a mystical trance, wanders through the Kafkan universe. In their blithe and groundless transparency, such figures alone seem capable of bringing to consciousness the alienating character of historical conditions.”
― Howard Eiland, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life

“He [Walter Benjamin] both craved solitude and complained of loneliness; he often sought community, sometimes working to create it himself, but was just as often loath to commit himself to any group............
He renounced comfort, security, and honors in order to maintain intellectual freedom and the time and space to read, think and write.”
― Howard Eiland, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life

“The furious energy with which Benjamin cast about for publishing venues was underlain by an equally ambitious reading program. Several books had a profound effect on him, and some were surprises - foremost among them Thomas Mann's 1924 epic, The Magic Mountain. [...] It was not only the sweeping and intimate portrayal of the key intellectual currents of the early twentieth century that Benjamin found compelling; it was also, his letter suggests, the perception that Thomas Mann had moved beyond the Nietzschean conservatism of his early years toward a new and more dialectical, if still pessimistic and mythically charged, Dionysian humanism (something epitomized in the protagonist's divagations in the chapter 'Snow').”
― Howard Eiland, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life

“Writing a decade later, in the essay 'Experience and Poverty' of 1933, Benjamin, unsurprisingly, saw the phenomenon differently: 'A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, amid a landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds and, at its center, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body. With this tremendous development of technology, a completely new poverty has descended on humankind. And the reverse side of this poverty is the oppressive wealth of ideas that has been spread among people, or rather has swamped them entirely - ideas that have come with the revival of astrology and the wisdom of yoga, Christian Science and chiromancy, vegetarianism and gnosis, scholasticism and spiritualism. For this is not a genuine revival but a galvanization.' If Kracauer maintains the idealist notion that 'concrete communal forms' might arise as the reflection of ideas emanating from a generalized national spirit, Benjamin suggests that the unceasing profusion of this 'wealth of ideas' would actually 'swamp' people - and that a new experiential poverty or constructive divestiture is actually the only appropriate response to the times.”
― Howard Eiland, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life

“importance”
― Howard Eiland, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life