By Walter Benjamin
A significant other quantity to Illuminations, the 1st selection of Walter Benjamin's writings, Reflections presents one more sampling of his wide-ranging paintings. right here Benjamin evolves a concept of language because the medium of all construction, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces approximately Berlin within the Nineteen Twenties, remembers conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and gives travelogues of assorted towns, together with Moscow lower than Stalin. He strikes seamlessly from literary feedback to autobiography to philosophical-theological speculations, cementing his attractiveness as one of many maximum and such a lot flexible writers of the 20th century. additionally integrated is a brand new preface by means of Leon Wieseltier that explores Benjamin's persisted relevance for our occasions.
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Additional info for Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings
Example text
This common piece of schoolboy parlance was entirely unfamiliar to me. An abyss opened before me, which I sought to bridge with a laconic protest. Here in the great hall it was the verses with which the school choir began the farewell song to the leavers ——“Brother now may we your companions be / in the world so wide"——~—followed by something containing the words “loyally by your side"; at any rate these were the verses that enabled me year by year to take the measure of my own weakness. For no matter how palpably the abominable goings-on at school were daily before my eyes, the melody of this song seemed to surround the departure from this hell with infinite melancholy.
He describes how the Surrealists have exploded traditional poetry from within by pushing the idea of "poetic life" to the utter limits of the possible; inevitably they have reached a tortuous moment of transition in which the heroic period of Surrealism, or the intimate years of the "inspiring wave of dreams,” have to give way to a public struggle for power, political commitment, and involvement with revolutionary action. Yet the key concept of the “profane illumination," which emerges here to characterize Surrealist vision, suggests Benjamin’s own way of unveiling, in his materialist hermeneutics, how history resides in some of the things of the world and institutions of society; and by attributing to the Surrealists the virtue of "seeing" and "freeing" revolutionary energies in things nearly obsolete, Benjamin describes what he is actually going to do in his later essays on Paris and French society.
L. Mencken, Siiren Kierkegaard, and a demonic Woody Allen, all in one. As editor of the inuentialperiodical Die Fackel (The ‘Torch, 1899-1936), which . xxxui Introduction for decades he himself wrote from cover to cover, as author of the superdrama The Last Days of Mankind (1922), crying from the depth of despair against the powerful of the world, and as erce critic and polemicist in the age of Fritz Mauthner and Ludwig Wittgenstein, he was obsessed with judging the virtues and perversions of his contemporaries, famous and infamous, by looking closely at how they spoke and wrote.
