German Jewish philosopher (1892-1940)
There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Theses on the Philosophy of History
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Illuminations
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.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Reflections
Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Illuminations
A religion may be discerned in capitalism--that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Capitalism as Religion
Of all beings man is the only one who himself names his own kind, as he is the only one whom God did not name.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Reflections
For in reality there exists a fundamental identity between the word that, after the promise of the snake, knows good and evil, and the externally communicating word. The knowledge of things resides in name, whereas that of good and evil is, in the profound sense in which Kierkegaard uses the word, "prattle," and knows only one purification and elevation, to which the prattling man, the sinner, was therefore submitted: judgment.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Reflections
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
WALTER BENJAMIN
One-Way Street
Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.
WALTER BENJAMIN
One-Way Street
It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Selected Writings
Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Protocols to the Experiments on Hashish, Opium and Mescaline
And we speak of the sexualization of the spirit: this is the morality of the prostitute. She represents culture in Eros; Eros, who is the most powerful individualist, the most hostile to culture--even he can be perverted; even he can serve culture.
WALTER BENJAMIN
letter to Herbert Belmore, June 23, 1913
Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the "authentic" print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice -- politics.
WALTER BENJAMIN
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
WALTER BENJAMIN
One-Way Street
The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred.
WALTER BENJAMIN
"The Destructive Character", Frankfurter Zeitung, November 20, 1931
To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past -- which is to say, only a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation à l'ordre du jour -- and that day is Judgement Day.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Theses on the Philosophy of History
The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Selected Writings
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.
WALTER BENJAMIN
One-Way Street
Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Selected Writings
All purposeful manifestations of life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis have their end not in life but in the expression of its nature, in the representation of its significance.
WALTER BENJAMIN
The Task of the Translator