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Walter Benjamin 1892
- 1940
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Walter
Benjamin : A Biography by
Momme Brodersen, Malcolm R. Green (Translator), Ingrida Ligers
(Editor), Martina Dervis (Editor)
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is now generally
recognized as one of the most original and influential thinkers
of this century. In Britain and the United States, in
particular, he has acquired a status unlike that of any other
German philosopher, as successive generations of readers find
their own paths through the endlessly fruitful ambiguities of his
work. Now available for the first time in English, Momme
Brodersen's Walter Benjamin is the most comprehensive biography
so far published, and has been widely acclaimed in its author's
native Germany. Brodersen provides a fuller and more coherent
account of Benjanin's career than has any previous writer. In
telling detail, he recounts Benjamin's emotional and
intellectual relationships and discusses many hitherto neglected
aspects of Benjamin's life, including his role as literary
critic. Brodersen pays particular attention to Benjamin's
childhood and youth, his activities in the radical section of
the German Youth Movement, and the formative, irreconcilable
influences of idealism, socialism and Zionism. At the same time,
he gives a fresh and lucid presentation of Benjamin's written
work -- much of which remains unavailable in English -- and of
the extraordinary diversity of his ideas and enthusiasms.
Thoroughly revised and updated for this English edition, and
accompanied by nearly a hundred documentary photographs, this
biography, is an essential study of the man who himself remains
an indispensable guide to the ruins and enchantments of the
twentieth century.
Momme Brodersen teaches German literature and
cultural history at the University of Palermo. He has compiled
two Benjamin bibliographies and has edited a casebook of
Benjamin studies.
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Excerpt:
The Arcades project went through many kinds of existence between 1927
and 1939. It never achieved a completed form. What remains are vast
quantities of notes, images, quotes and citations; capable of being
ordered and reordered in endlessly different constellations. This site
is the beginning of an ongoing experiment in just such a reordering, its
increasingly multiple links between material bringing elements into new
juxtapositions and hopefully generating new meanings out of the debris
of the era of high capitalism. (Mind you, this could also just be an
exercise in giving these materials an aura, an air of nostalgic mystery
which already hangs around their appearance in this present, if not that
of the 1930s).
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An essay by Scott Thompson
Excerpt from the Introduction:
When Thomas Mann and Georg Lukacs reprimanded
Aldous Huxley for "glorifying" his mescaline experiences to
the world , they were convinced that their position represented reason
and the responsibility of intellectuals in the face of neo-fascist
mind-control and late capitalist chemical escapism. What they failed to
consider was that they were playing into the hands of a propaganda
machine which had functioned quite well under the Nazis. Called "Rauschgiftbekaempfung"
[The Combatting of Drugs],it was a true precursor to the U.S. War on
Drugs which has mobilized the entire U.S. armed forces to root out the
demonized forces of irrationalism threatening the performance principle
of Late Capital's global sweat shop. Mann and Lukacs, who have no doubt
made very valuable contributions to western literature, represent an
academic attitude toward the irrational that would appear to be based on
certain aesthetic biases. We can locate the germs of their
anti-inebriant bigotry in the debates on Expressionism, particularly
those between Lukacs and Ernst Bloch. Mann and Lukacs represent that
"grandeur in repose" of neo-classicism, which is always so
predictably horrified by displays of passion. Visionary inebriants
evidently threatened their "masks of composure"...
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Paper read at the
Walter Benjamin Congress 1997 under the title "From Rausch to
Rebellion." by Scott J. Thompson.
Excerpt:
This motto beginning Walter Benjamin's Berlin Childhood Around the
Turn of the Century and appearing in a slightly altered form in Berliner
Chronik has its origins in Benjamin's experiments with hashish, as
Gershom Scholem and the editors of Benjamin's Gesammelte Schriften have
noted. The "golden leading strings" of childhood and the
attempt to recapture their magic are interlaced throughout Benjamin's
writings and experimental notes on hashish, opium and mescaline. As he
expressed it in the mescaline protocol recorded by Dr. Fritz Fränkel in
Paris on 22. May 1934, "The first experience the child has of the
world is not that the adults are stronger, but rather that it cannot
conjure." In Benjamin's novella Myslowitz - Braunschweig -
Marseilles: Story of a Hashish Rausch (1930), the narrator's hashish
vision transforms a man in a restaurant into the image of a young boy in
an Eastern European town. In the essay "Hashish in
Marseilles" (1932), a young boy on an electric tram is transformed
into the sad child, Barnabus, from Kafka's The Castle.
In Crock Notes (1932), the opium smoker and hashish eater are said
to "playfully exhaust those experiences of the ornament which
childhood and fever made us capable of observing." In the protocol
to the hashish experiment with Gert and Egon Wissing in March 1930,
Benjamin recorded the following:
I was not very attentive...
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A participant's critical evaluation of the
first annual . Amsterdam:
July 24-26, 1997.
Excerpt from the Preface:
At the conclusion of his essay, "The Integrity of the
Intellectual: In Memory of Walter Benjamin," Leo Lowenthal,
sociologist of literature and editor of the Zeitschrift für
Sozialforschung , posed a challenge:
Now that the edition of Benjamin's collected works is completed,
the publishing house and the group responsible for it can collectively
regard themselves as the writers of Benjamin's history. It will remain
a concern to all of us, especially those younger than we, to define
his gift to us from the enemy...
In an attempt to wrest the tradition Benjamin fought for from the
enemy, the publishers and their tenured ministeriales, the Walter
Benjamin Research Syndicate sent a delegate to the International Walter
Benjamin Congress 1997: "Perception and Experience in Modernity/
Wahrnehmung und Erfahrung in der Moderne," which was held in
Amsterdam, July 24th through July 26th, at the Felix Meritis Foundation
of the University of Amsterdam.
The Congress itself was well-attended, as was indicated by the number
of people standing in the aisles during the plenary papers. Between the
plenary sessions parallel workshops were held throughout the Felix
Meritis Foundation on Keizersgracht and the Bungehuis on Spuistraat.
Plenary Speakers included George Steiner, Samuel Weber, Gary Smith,
Sigrid Weigel, Irving Wohlfahrt, Martin Jay, Mona Jean & Kim Yvon
Benjamin (WB's granddaughters), Michael Benjamin (WB's nephew),
Burkhardt Lindner, Werner Hamacher, and Susan Buck-Morss. Over one
hundred people gave short presentations (15 minutes) in the parallel
workshop sessions.
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Excerpt:
While a member of the "outer circle" of the Institute,
Benjamin does the least amount of addition, or correction to Marxist
theory. The added perceptive that he does provide is perhaps the most at
odds with Marx,
because of what Marx would call "unscientific" methods.
In the collection of his works, Walter Benjamin demonstrates complete
adherence to the notion of history moving through the necessary epochs
set forth by Marx; to human material desire being the prime mover of
mankind; to the notions of alienation;
and to the proletariat being the class with the ability to move mankind
(through revolution) from the current epoch of capitalism,
to the next epoch, communism.
Benjamin challenges orthodox Marxism,
with the notion that the individual participant in the bourgeoisie can
come to a full awareness of his of his part in the current
disintegration of man, by the structure of his method, and by
questioning the deterministic element of Marxism. Benjamin’s method is
a combination of an artful use of literary tools, empirical observation,
and "transcendent" experience....
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