Introduction – Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940, p 3 HANNAH ARRENDT “no society can properly function without classification, without an arrangement of things and men in classes and prescribed types. This necessary classification is the basis for all social discrimination, and discrimination, present opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, is no less a constituent element of the social realm than equality is a constituent element of the political.”
Introduction – Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940, p 3 HANNAH ARRENDT “absolute originality which can be traced to no predecessor and suffers no followers. This is what society can least come to terms with and upon which it will always be very reluctant to bestow its seal of approval.”
Introduction – Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940, p 21 HANNAH ARRENDT “In Paris a stranger feels at home because he can inhabit the city the way he lives in his own four walls. […] strolling through it without aim or purpose, with one’s stay secured by the countless café s which line the streets and past which the life of the city, the flow of pedestrians, moves along. To this day Paris is the only one among the large cities which can be comfortably covered on foot, […] The wasteland of an American suburb, or the residential districts of many towns, where all of street life takes place on the roadway and where one can walk on the sidewalks, by now reduced to footpaths, for miles on end without encountering a human being, is the very opposite of Paris. What all other cities seem to permit only reluctantly to the dregs of society—strolling, idling, flânerie—Paris streets actually invite everyone to do. Thus, ever since the Second Empire the city has been the paradise of all those who need to chase after no livelihood, pursue no career, reach no goal—the paradise, then, of bohemians, and not only of artists and writers but of all those who have gathered about them because they could not be integrated wither politically—being homeless or stateless—or socially.”
Introduction – Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940, p 32 KAFKA “within the German language, only the dialects and, besides them, the most personal High German are really alive.”
Introduction – Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940, p 32 – 33 HANNAH ARRENDT “it is so tempting to misinterpret and dismiss them as mere reaction to an anti-Semitic milieu and thus as an expression of self-hatred. But nothing could be more misleading when dealing with men of the human stature and intellectual rank of Kafka, Kraus, and Benjamin. What gave their criticism its bitter sharpness was never anti-Semitism as such, but the reaction to it of the Jewish middle class, with which the intellectuals by no means identified. There, too, it was not a matter of the frequently undignified apologetic attitude of official Jewry, with which the intellectuals had hardly any contact, but of the lying denial of self-deception by the Jewish bourgeoisie, an isolation which for Kafka, and not only for him, included the often hostile and always haughty separation from the Jewish people, the so-called Ostjuden (Jews from Eastern Europe) who were, though one knew better, blamed by them for anti-Semitism. The decisive factor in all this was the loss of reality, aided and abetted by the wealth of these classes.”
Introduction – Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940, p 34 HANNAH ARRENDT “For the Jews of that generation (Kafka and Moritz Goldstein were but 10 years older than Benjamin) the available forms of rebellion were Zionism and Communism, and it is noteworthy that their fathers often condemned the Zionist rebellion more bitterly than the Communist. Both were escape routes from illusion into reality, from mendacity and self-deception to an honest existence. But this is only how it appears in retrospect. At the time when Benjamin tried, first, a half-hearted Zionism and then a basically no less half-hearted Communism, the two ideologies faced each other with the greatest hostility: the Communists were defaming Zionists as Jewish Fascists and the Zionists were calling the young Jewish Communists “red assimiliationists.””
Introduction – Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940, p 41 HANNAH ARRENDT “even if truth should appear in our world, it could not lead to wisdom, because it would no longer have the characteristics which it could acquire only through universal recognition of its validity.”
The Task of the Translator, An Introduction to the Translations of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens, p 71 “the range of life must be determined by history rather than by nature, least of all by such tenuous factors as sensation and soul.”
The Storyteller, Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov, I, p 84 “With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent—not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? […] A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.”
The Storyteller, Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov, IV, p 86 “the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. But if today “having counsel” is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing. In consequence we have no counsel either for ourselves or others. […] The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out. This, however, is a process that has been going on for a long time. And nothing would be more fatuous than to want to see in it merely a “symptom of decay,” let alone a “modern” symptom. It is, rather, only a concomitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history, a concomitant that has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.”
The Storyteller, Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov, VIII, p 91 “If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places—the activities that are intimately associated with boredom—are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears.”
The Storyteller, Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov, X, p 93 “in the course of the nineteenth century bourgeois society has, be means of hygienic and social, private and public institutions, realized a secondary effect which may have been its subconscious main purpose: to make it possible for people to avoid the sight of the dying. Dying was once a public process in the life of the individual and a most exemplary one”
Franz Kafka, On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death, The Little Hunchback, p 130 FRANZ KAFKA “To believe in progress is not to believe that progress has already taken place. That would be no belief.”
Franz Kafka, On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death, The Little Hunchback, p 130 “The fact that it is now forgotten does not mean that it does not extend into the present. On the contrary: it is actual by virtue of this very oblivion.”
Some Reflections on Kafka, p 144 “in regard to Kafka, we can no longer speak of wisdom. Only the products of its decay remain. There are two: one is the rumor about the true things (a sort of theological whispered intelligence dealing with matters discredited and obsolete); the other product of this diathesis of folly—which, to be sure, has utterly squandered the substance of wisdom, but preserves its attractiveness and assurance, which rumor invariably lacks.”
On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, V, p 166 “The crowd—no subject was more entitled to the attention of nineteenth-century writers. It was getting ready to take shape as a public in broad strata who had acquired facility in reading. It became a customer; it wished to find itself portrayed in the contemporary novel, as the patrons did in the paintings of the Middle Ages.”
On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, V, p 167 FRIEDRICH ENGELS “The greater the number of people that are packed into a tiny space, the more repulsive and offensive becomes the brutal indifference, the unfeeling concentration of each person on his private affairs.”
On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, V, p 169 “What [Baudelaire’s sonnet À une passante] communicates is simply this: Far from experiencing the crowd as an opposed, antagonistic element, this very crowd brings to the city dweller the figure that fascinates. The delight of the urban poet is love—not at first sight, but at last sight. It is a farewell forever which coincides in the poem with the moment of enchantment.”
On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, XI, p 191 GEORG SIMMEL “The interpersonal relationships of people in big cities are characterized by a markedly greater emphasis on the use of the eyes than on that of the ears. This can be attributed chiefly to the institution of public conveyances. Before buses, railroads, and streetcars became fully established during the nineteenth century, people were never put in a position of having to stare at one another for minutes or even hours on end without exchanging a word.”
On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, XI, p 191 CHARLES BAUDELAIRE “I long for the return of the dioramas whose enormous, crude magic subjects me to the spell of a useful illusion. I prefer looking at the backdrop paintings of the stage where I find my favorite dreams treated with consummate skill and tragic concision. Those things, so completely false, are for that reason much closer to the truth, whereas the majority of our landscape painters are liars, precisely because they fail to lie.”
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, IV, p 224 “With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later. At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of “pure” art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter. […] To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. […] 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.”
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, X, p 231 “The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity.” The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Epilogue, p 242 “[Mankind’s] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.”
Theses on the Philosophy of History, II, p 254 “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.”
Theses on the Philosophy of History, V, p 255 “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.)”
Theses on the Philosophy of History, VI, p 255 “In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. […] even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”
Theses on the Philosophy of History, VII, p 256 “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.”
Theses on the Philosophy of History, VIII, p 257 “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. […] The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.”
Theses on the Philosophy of History, IX, p 257 – 258 “A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
Theses on the Philosophy of History, XII, p 260 “Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”
Theses on the Philosophy of History, XIV, p 261 “History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.”