Illuminations

Publisher:  Schocken Books
Year First Published:  1955
Year Published:  1969
Pages:  278pp   Price:  $6.60   Resource Type:  Book
Cx Number:  CX6332

Litearcy essasy, general reflections, and probings into cultural phenomena.

Abstract: 
-


Table of Contents

Introduction: Walter Benjamin 1892-1940, by Hannah Arendt
Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting
The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux parisiens
The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov
Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death
Some Reflections on Kafka
What is Epic Theater?
On some Mofits in Baudelaire
The Image of Proust
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Theses on the Philosophy of History
Editor's Note
Index of Names


Excerpts:


From Arendt's Introduction:

I have already mentioned that collecting was Benjamin's central passion. It started early with what he himself called his "bibliomania" but soon extended into something far more characteristic, not so much of the person as of his work: the collection of quotations.

As Benjamin was probably the first to emphasize, collecting is the passion of children, for whom things are not yet commodities and are not valued according to their usefulness, and it is also the hobby of the rich, who own enough not to need anything useful and hence can afford to make "the transfiguration of objects" (Schriften I, 416) their business.

I do not know when Benjamin discovered the remarkable coincidence of his old-fashioned inclinations with the realities of the times; it must have been in the mid-twenties, when he began the serious study of Kafka, only to discover shortly thereafter in Brecht the poet who was most at home in this century. I do not mean to assert that Benjamin shifted his emphasis from the collecting of books to the collecting of quotations (exclusive with him) overnight or even within one year, although there is some evidence in the letters of a conscious shifting of emphasis.

The main work consisted in tearing fragments out of their context and arranging them afresh in such a way as they illustrated one another and were able to prove their raison d'etre in a free-floating state, as it were. It definitely was a sort of surrealistic montage. Benjamin's ideal of producing a work consisting entirely of quotations, one that was mounted so masterfully that it could dispense with any accompanying text, may strike one as whimsical in the extreme and self-destructive to boot, but it was not, any more than were the contemporaneous surrealist experiments which arose from similar impulses.


From Benjamin's ILLUMINATIONS:

... if there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalogue.

There is no living library that does not harbour a number of booklike creations from fringe areas. They need not be stuck-in albums or family albums, autograph books or portfolios containing pamphlets or religious tracts; some people become attached to leaflets and prospectuses, others to handwriting facsimiles or typewritten copies of unobtainable books; and certainly periodicals can form the prismatic fringes of a library.

But, as Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.

For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

On the first evening of fighting it turned out that the clocks in towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from several places in Paris. An eye-witness, who may have owed his insight to the rhyme, wrote as follows:
Qui le croirait! on dit, qu'irrités contre l'heure
De nouveaux Josues au pied de chaque tour,
Tiraient sur les cadrans pour arreter le jour
[Who would have believed it! we are told that new Joshuas
at the foot of every tower, as though irritated with
time itself, fired at the dials in order to stop the day.

He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time canceled*; in the lifework, the era; and in the era, the entire course of history. The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
[* The Hegelian term aufheben in its threefold meaning: to preserve, to elevate, to cancel.]

But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical post-humously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years.

Subject Headings

• Culture