Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life

by Howard Eiland, Michael W. Jennings

Walter Benjamin is one of the twentieth century's most important intellectuals, and also one of its most elusive. His writings - mosaics incorporating philosophy, literary criticism, Marxist analysis, and a syncretistic theology - defy simple categorization. And his mobile, often improvised existence has proven irresistible to mythologizers. His writing career moved from the brilliant esotericism of his early writings through his emergence as a central voice in Weimar culture and on to the exile years, with its pioneering studies of modern media and the rise of urban commodity capitalism in Paris. That career was played out amid some of the most catastrophic decades of modern European history: the horror of the First World War, the turbulence of the Weimar Republic, and the lengthening shadow of fascism.

Now, a major new biography from two of the world's foremost Benjamin scholars reaches beyond the mosaic and the mythical to present this intriguing figure in full.

Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings make available for the first time a rich store of information which augments and corrects the record of an extraordinary life. They offer a comprehensive portrait of Benjamin and his times as well as extensive commentaries on his major works, including "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," the essays on Baudelaire, and the great study of the German Trauerspiel. Sure to become the standard reference biography of this seminal thinker, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life will prove a source of inexhaustible interest for Benjamin scholars and novices alike.

Genres: Biography, Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Theory, Politics, Biography Memoir

768 pages, Hardcover

First published January 20, 2014

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

About five years ago, a Chinese tourist in Berlin lost his wallet. He went to a police station and despite not knowing any German or English he hoped to file a report. No one in the police station knew any of the Chinese languages and had to solicit help from a man working at a restaurant. Thus instead of a missing property report the tourist inadvertently signed a request for asylum. He then stayed in refugee housing for a week before the error was discovered.

Stripping away all the historical circumstances which appeared to converge on the life of Walter Benjamin and ultimately push his own hand to end it and what is left? I think the story of the unlucky tourist gives us a clue.

This is an astonishing biography. It manages the fact that Benjamin wrote rather dense pieces of criticism and theory. He also lived a rather lonely and threadbare life. His friendship with Brecht deserved more attention. His on and off again friendships with Bloch, Adorno and Scholem are nuanced and fraught with insensitivity. His marriage and the life of his son are almost an appendix or supplemental subject. The fact that his son’s first word was the German for quiet speaks volumes for this erudite if impractical man.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Walter Benjamin's obscure illuminations are famous for their intractable, mutually contradictory meanings. Depending on your cast of mind, he can be a Marxist or a metaphysician, a fantasist or a deconstructionist. For me, his literary criticism and mystical sense of history represent the most surreal instance of the theological imagination in the 20th century. His fascination with "redemption" reminds me of Kafka's apothegm: There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe … but not for us.

This excellent biography by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings provides a contour of Benjamin's contradictions, resisting the temptation to simplify or polemicize, while setting his critical philosophy within the context of his sad, heroic life. Apropos of his final "Theses on the Philosophy of History," the authors remark, "For Walter Benjamin, history remained from first to last a Trauerspiel."

Highly recommended for aesthetes of the recondite.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m a reader but by no means a literary theorist or critic. I do have an interest in history, particularly European history. I took a lot of intellectual history courses in college (is intellectual history still a discipline or has it disappeared?) and it is from this angle that the life of Walter Benjamin came to interest me. My approach to this book was to learn about his life and the culture of European intellectualism in the early 20th century. I knew I wouldn’t fully grasp the complexity of Benjamin’s theories so my approach to reading was to push on through the parts of the book I wasn’t following despite Eiland’s helpful elucidation.

It helped that I was reading this for pleasure instead of, say, a school assignment as it was freeing not to feel that I had to master every development of Benjamin’s convoluted thinking. That said, I congratulated myself on how much I did understand (at least I think I did), especially of Benjamin’s perspective on history and time. I found both fascinating, maybe enough to read “On the Concept of History” sometime in the future.

Eiland’s biography of Walter Benjamin’s life is exhaustively thorough. I would not be surprised to learn that he read and included every extant piece of the man’s writing, from correspondence to each draft of work published or meant for publication. Given Benjamin’s life - detached from any stable institution such as a university, complicated by living in exile and years of poverty – bringing together his written work and presenting the development of his thinking over the course of Benjamin’s life was no small task. Eiland clearly has deep respect, even reverence, for Benjamin and while he presents Benjamin’s personal faults, one could argue that those are glossed over in favor of focusing on the man’s intellectual contributions.

I came away with a much richer understanding of what it meant to live the life of a European intellectual between the wars, particularly a Jewish intellectual. (Though Benjamin claimed no or little religious devotion, he was certainly identified by others as a Jew and so experienced the prejudices even assimilated Jews were subject to at that time.) With Eiland’s detailed accounting, month-to-month and year-to-year, one feels the immersion in the café life of conversation, letters, the many journals and publications devoted to sometimes narrow, esoteric interests. Radio and film were coming into their own as a means of communication and it was fascinating to observe those impacts on intellectual life and read not only Benjamin’s thoughts about technological development but the thoughts expressed by many other intellectuals in his circle and with whom he maintained a robust correspondence.

Truly, this was a singular time and even with the deprivations associated with Benjamin’s lifestyle, I couldn’t help feeling a longing and nostalgia for even an opportunity to have that life.
Throughout Benjamin’s exile from Germany in the 1930s, Eiland shows how people were still living their daily lives, working, all whilst Europe was marching towards war, the fascist elements growing stronger all around, not just in Germany but in Italy and Spain. Meanwhile the hopes pinned on Marxism were sinking under the clearly growing oppression of the Soviet Union. The beginnings were even noted in the 1920s, a time of relative prosperity in the intellectual world.

Like today, the politics were evident. The direction of the various regimes, government and populism was evident. But people were busy living their lives, making a living, raising families, not necessarily inclined to political activity. The looming disaster of WWII, especially for Jews, was both a lived presence and also in the background. I learned a lot about everyday life and decisions during that time from Eiland’s rendering of Benjamin’s life. I was not aware of how many Germans, Jews and non-Jews, fled to Brazil. I could also see how hard it was for people to leave Europe behind, to truly abandon that continent as an identity for even England was difficult to fathom. America was completely foreign. The perspective back then on world politics was vastly different that what I’ve been accustomed to in my life with America being central to world affairs. That all happened after WWII.

All this was something I knew on an intellectual level but this book made me understand what that meant. The second world war truly shifted America into prominence of thought. We’ve not been a background player since that time. I wonder if an equally large shift won’t happen in my lifetime, maybe not brought on by war. It feels like American influence on the world is shrinking as we become consumed with internal issues and strife. This is very similar to what seemed to happen in Europe during the 1920s and 30s.

I had this book on my “To Be Read” shelf for many years and only with the pending publication of Jean McNeil’s Day for Night was I prompted to better familiarize myself with Walter Benjamin’s life. Reading this book was time well spent.

[Gustavo Racy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a precious, delicate and theoretical account of one of 20th century's most appraised cultural critique and philosopher. Although I would not consider this work a "Benjaminian" text, in the sense that it establishes a somewhat causal relation between Benjamin's life and work, something that the Berliner philosopher avoided both in his autobiographical works and in his criticism of Goethe, for instance, it does fill in some gaps that were, to-day, left aside and/or unknown about Benjamin's life. In this sense, it is an important piece of work, evidentely done with tremendous research effort, care, and sensibility. It is a book for those interested in the work of Benjamin himself, whether an amateur or a professional, and for those interested in the intellectual life of the Weimar Republic.

[Dionysius the Areopagite · Rating 5 out of 5]

Walter Benjamin is a key figure in terms of modern critical-educational inquiry. His name is pronounced Ben-a-mean, like amphetamine, my old German roommate informed me. Actually it was my friend's roommate. I was just there a lot so etc. Goethe, of course, is Go-Tay. Alright.

In layout, scope, and particularly linguistics, the big book is brilliant. I mean, just about everything is considered brilliant at one point or another, including my decision to confiscate a roll of toilet paper from the supermarket earlier today.

I have long found Benjamin over-rated. I found him by accident in the San Francisco State University library and we spent the week together. We were listening to the Mamas & the Papas when the guy next door blew his brains out with a shotgun. Apparently he was one of Richard Brautigan's last living drinky-pals. Two liters of vodka per day kind of gig. No big deal.

I found Benjamin's life far less illuminating than the linguistic scope, cadence, architecture of the author(s). For instance, on taking my ritualistic notes starting w/ the Introduction, I came up with this:

'Nights of Annihilation'

- reformulation

- protean

- polycentric

- aphoristic

- hazard

- assimilation

- turbulent

- recollections

- permutation

(Are we fans of lists or more importantly the symbiopsychotaxiplasm gun-running right behind them?)

- recombinatory

- incisive

- multifarious

- saturnine

- aporetic

- inextinguishable

'... the endless fund of darkness in his intellectual life...'

- historicity

- proclivity

- spatiotemporal

- qualitative distinctions

The feast of language is far more interesting than the subject at hand. A living writer entitled William Gass has made a career out of this. If you are curious about the actual biography, of course, it's pretty simple: Rich Jew Intellectual OD's On Morphine Before Being Taken Captive By the Nazis

Would make a good Christmas present. For a lover of books, or for a relative you want to just shut the fuck up for a week or two. Check it out.

[Hrafnkell Úlfur · Rating 3 out of 5]

Þetta er í raun þriðja ævisagan sem ég hef lesið um Benjamin, en sú fyrsta sem fjallar einungis um hann. Hinar tvær verandi Tími töframanna eftir Wolfram Eilenberger og Stærðarinnar Hótel hyldýpið (Hvort ætli það hafi verið hótelið eða hyldýpið sem hafi verið stærðarinnar?) eftir Stuart Jeffries. Hvorug þeirra var eitthvað áberandi góð, sem fær mann þá til að íhuga spurninguna sem fylgir í raun öllum ævisögum: "Hvort skiptir meira máli í ævisögum: Ævin eða höfundurinn sem skrifar um hana?" Lifði Benjamin kannski einfaldlega "lélegri" ævi þegar það kemur að því að skrifa ævisögu um hann?—Ekki misskilja mig samt, hann sem höfundur á sér fáa jafningja, bæði varðandi ritstíl og frumleika hugmynda—Eða voru kannski bara allir þessir fjórir höfundar að klúðra því að koma ævi hans til skila á áhugaverðan máta í skrifum sínum?

Hins vegar var alveg áhugavert að lesa um rannsóknarferlið hans í tengslum við Verslunarsalaverkefnið sem og bók hans um Baudelaire sem hann lauk aldrei við, þannig að lesturinn var kannski ekki alls til einskis.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a scholar's book, detailed and thorough.

It reveals rather more of Benjamin's life than he might have wished, but the mores of the moment, the haute bourgeois class within which he moved, and the peculiar stresses of the between-the-wars period go am long way toward explaining his behavior.

The book does give a very good sense of the life of a Jewish litterateur and emigre, one marginalized first of all by disposition and, second, by the lack of a settled position. Living hand-to-mouth, day-by-day with a tendency to {justified) depression, his work, in both its perceptiveness and depth with its focus on major literary artists--Baudelaire, Kafka, Proust--and the circles within which he moved amaze one. I first came across his essays in ILLUMINATIONS shortly after it was published (1969) and, since my courses included Kafka and Proust as well as film and literary criticism/theory, that book became a mainstay, for me and for students.

While much of this work is taken up with explication of WB's ideas, for me, it's major impact will be to send me back to his writings and his correspondence, especially that with Scholem and Adorno. While these two and others were drawn to WB's genius, they both seemed to want to make him over into disciples, something unlikely in such an independent thinker.

The depressing effect of the rise of Nazism and the uprooting of an entire intellectual class arises as one aspect of this biography as does the tie between Benjamin and his major subject, Baudelaire, both peripatetic outsiders in a unappreciative capitalist society.

I certainly did like the book, but it fit into a special niche for me. I have biographies of Karl Kraus and Brecht here to read along with a second book on Weimar and its philosophical cast. If I have a reservation the authors go out of their way to emphasize WB's eminence in the European intellectual life of his time, and, while they were thrown together early in their student days, WB's distaste for Heidegger never gets any development. One might think that the latter's association with Nazism a sufficient cause, but I do not agree; in the world of ideas, argument is essential.

[D]

One of my favourite things to do during the winter break is to crack open a big book. It's usually a book that's been recommended to me as requiring patience. In years past I've read novels that became instant favourites, like Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924) and Peter Weiss's The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975). In other years I've read books that have been gifted to me, like Gareth Steadman Jones's critical biography of Marx, Greatness and Illusion. What unites them all is that they bear some relation to German history and culture. This year, it's finally time to read Eiland and Jennings' 700-page study of Walter Benjamin's life and work. I say finally because I once loaned this book out from the university library in 2015, only to return it again in 2016 completely untouched. But I am glad to have returned to it. I start reading it in the final days of the general election, and I finish the night before new year's eve.

First things first: this is an astonishing book. It's long, but not a single page is wasted. It's critical, but rarely cold. Its balance between page-turning biographic life-writing, pertinent historical contextualisation and rigorous scholarly analysis is mostly pitch perfect. Anyone who's remotely interested in Walter Benjamin will, I think, get a great deal from it. I look forward to reading it everyday of the holidays, and I'm sad when it's over.

Benjamin was born into a haute-bourgeois German-Jewish family in the late nineteenth century. In his twenties, he was messed-around by several German universities. He was never awarded a Habilitation for his work on German tragic theatre, and this effectively locked him out of academia and stable employment. He became a critic, living mostly on small commissions and his wife Dora's salary. By his thirties, when he resolved to become the foremost literary critic in Germany, he had already lived through the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Sparticist uprising. During this time he published articles on literature, cinema and art; he wrote popular reviews and miniature reflections (what he called Denkbilder, or "figures of thought", literally "thought-images") in national newspapers; and he hosted radio shows on popular culture. He fled Nazism in the 30s, scraped by in Paris until the outbreak of the Second World War, only to find himself interred in a refugee camp. He fled southwards towards Spain in 1938. With his heart growing weaker and his anxiety growing stronger, Benjamin was granted a visa to travel to the United States and work with his long-time associates Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. But the visa arrived too late. France was now occupied, the Vichy government installed, and all the borders were closed to the country's fleeing Jews and communists. Benjamin kept his head down in Marseilles, then smuggled himself across the border with a group of fellow travellers. On the night that they were turned away from entering Spain at Portbou, Benjamin took his own life. The next day, the rest of the travellers were granted entry into Spain, and escaped the Nazi holocaust.

The Benjamin I've come to know from my reading over the past few years is dominated by the writer of One-Way Street, Berlin Childhood around 1900, and 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', as well as by the Benjamin who shines through in Illuminations, the selected works that Hannah Arendt edited and published in the late 1960s. Yet one of the central arguments that Eiland and Jennings make is that Benjamin's project culminates – chronologically, thematically, politically, formally – in the two major works that I haven't read: The Arcades Project, his study of the Parisian arcades, and his monograph on Charles Baudelaire as the quintessential poet of modernity. Who knows if this is correct, but at least it gives me motivation to read them.

Another of the book's major contentions is that Benjamin was contradictory. In both his life and his work, Benjamin was a "mobile and contradictory whole", "a set of pure improvisations". Benjamin was characterised by an almost antique commitment to friendly pleasantries and manners, yet he was manipulative and kept each of his friends separate, never allowing them to meet one another. He wrote passionately about the prospect of a communist society, yet he remained mostly distant from all communist politics on the ground, and he clung on in his daily life to the warm privileges of his family's wealth. He kept a weekly budget for his finances, yet he factored into these budgets the fact that he would waste a portion of his income on gambling. He was a tireless critic of an emerging consumer society, yet he would often spend hundreds of francs in luxury toy shops. Turns out, too, that Benjamin was a pretty inadequate father to his son and a bad husband to his wife. An expert procrastinator, he turned down opportunities to move to Moscow, Paris, London, and Israel, only to later find the door closed when he needed to move the most.

All of this is not to say that Benjamin was a "hypocrite", or that by doing one thing (like enjoying bourgeois daily life) he necessarily cancelled out his wish for another thing (a communist revolution). Rather, it's to tell the truer, fuller story of Benjamin's life, a story that's also more dialectical. For in the case of Benjamin's relationship with communism, Eiland and Jennings argue – persuasively, I think – that it's precisely this contradictory relationship to communist politics that drives the innovations of his work. Benjamin not only arrived at communism relatively late (in the 1920s, thanks to the amazing Latvian actress and proletarian theatre director, Asja Lacis), but he also pushed Marxist thought into conversation with a kind of gnostic Jewish mysticism. Thus Benjamin's work practiced a dialectical rethinking of Marxism itself – and it's this contribution that has sustained Benjamin's appeal into the twenty-first century.

[Geoff]

Walter Benjamin's Afterlife:

http://chronicle.com/article/Walter-B...

~~

I'm also kind of reading the bio as prefatory homework for an imminent reading The Arcades Project, a long intended goal of mine.

[Caterina Buttitta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cosa rende Benjamin così attuale nella sua dirompente inattualità? Perchè i suoi scritti , talvolta brevi frammenti, aneddoti autobiografici, lettere, serbano un potenziale esplosivo? Al punto da indirizzare perfino la riflessione contemporanea? Quel che emerge, però, sempre più chiaramente, è che Benjamin, ha presagito gli esiti del capitalismo, ne ha scrutato i segreti, gli arcana reconditi.

Che un giorno la politica, scaduta a mera amministrazione, esercizio di governance, si sarebbe dissolta nell'economia, è un pensiero che Benjamin condivide con altri filosofi. Ma lui osa un passo ulteriore: quella forma economica, divenuta globale, si sarebbe rivelata per quello è: una religione. Non è forse il capitalismo una religione del debito?
Per Benjamin il capitalismo non è una religione secolarizzata, bensì una religione in senso stretto. Il che conferma l'intuizione di Benjamin, che sembra assumere oggi ulteriore validità. Esistono alternative? Non appare forse il capitalismo il nostro orizzonte ultimo e insuperabile? Questa società crede nel capitalismo, lo accetta come proprio ineluttabile destino. E come nel passato si pregavano gli dei, se ne indagava l'umore, se ne temeva il volere, oggi una società secolare è pronta a offrire ogni sorta di sacrifici alle potenze del mercato.

[Benji · Rating 5 out of 5]

An inspiring mobile and contradictory whole. The fire-breathing Communist stood alongside the Frankfurt school neo-Hegelian, with his infinite deferral of political action; the messianic Jewish mystic confronted uneasily the cosmopolitan assimilated Jew, with his fascination for Christian theology; the literary deconstructionist avant la lettre, astray in the hall of mirrors we call language, coexisted with the social theorist who envisioned a wholesale renovation of the human sensorium through the reform of modern media.

Someone sunk so deeply into himself that he comes to be viewed by those around him as a kind of seer.


Like many other residents of Paris, he purchased a gas mask early in the year; unlike many other residents, he could see in its material presence in his little world an ironic allegory, one superimposing the medieval on the modern and the spiritual on the technological:
'A disturbing double of those skulls with which studious monks decorated their cell'.

[Steven Hendrix · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best non-fiction books I've ever read. Incredible thinker to whom we owe much regarding the way we view social and historical movement, how we understand human experience through the lens of art and criticism, and how the past informs the present and vice versa. This book also paints a vivid and terrifying picture of what it meant to be a German Jew during the rise of the third reich and in exile as the walls closed in throughout Europe. Benjamin is without doubt one of the most important intellectuals of both the early 20th century and of all time.

[Frank B. Farrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a thorough, reliable, insightful, and briskly readable account of one of the more interesting intellectuals of the twentieth century. A Jewish Berliner from a well-off family, Benjamin brought together a somewhat odd configuration of intellectual movements: a quirky Marxism with its dialectical thinking; a radical messianic Jewish mysticism; and surrealism in the arts. This combination required that Benjamin present the world as a site of complete ruin and failure, where none of the standard political, ethical, and cultural structures of his time could be seen as unfolding a valuable potential leading eventually to justice, freedom, and happiness. He never had a good word to say about leftist parliamentary parties that were doing their best to hold the Weimar Republic together. Instead, true improvement could come only through a revolutionary transformation that must arrive out of nowhere like a messianic entry from without, such that the content of such a future is fully incomprehensible and indescribable to us today and incommensurable with anything we are familiar with. Benjamin had a strong scholarly interest in German baroque drama, which he favored precisely for what others considered its flaws. Unlike Renaissance drama and art, with their convincing incarnation of spiritual ideas in powerful natural metaphors, baroque drama produced allegories that were ever more multiple, outlandish, arbitrary, and unconvincing. Instead of being a failure, this outcome, said Benjamin, honestly portrayed the complete failure of humans to capture an incomprehensible spiritual realm whose representation by us has to be arbitrary and empty. It shows something about Benjamin’s dialectical mind that he later treated the commodity under capitalism in a similar manner: as an ever more arbitrary, empty, and quickly replaceable representation of true human hopes and desires. Benjamin supported what he called a concept of theological nihilism. The absolute, ineffable power of a divine elsewhere must thoroughly undermine and hollow out all natural and cultural items and events, so that only a radically messianic future can offer any hope. In the mid-Thirties he began his Arcades project. This was an attempt to locate in the details of 19th-century Parisian life not only the triumph of modernity and its commodities and changed ways of experiencing, but also certain vague glimmers of utopian hopes that could only be understood, and ultimately redeemed, in a future incomprehensible to those Parisians.

Eiland and Jennings do an excellent and fair job of describing Benjamin’s life and thought. We observe him associating with key intellectuals such as Adorno, Horkheimer, and other members of the Frankfurt School. We see him meeting up with Berthold Brecht and with important French writers such as Gide and Julien Green, as well as translating Proust. We are given an insightful look at the rather quirky travel essays and book reviews that Benjamin wrote for newspapers. There is a judicious treatment of his private life. He was not an especially admirable husband or father, leaving his son to be brought up and rescued from Germany almost entirely by his wife, allowing himself to have several affairs, and attempting to treat his wife quite unfairly, financially speaking, in their divorce. As in a great drama, we follow him to his suicide at the French-Spanish border, where he is afraid of being sent back in spite of letters of transit through Spain and Portugal to the USA. Eiland and Jennings have succeeded in presenting his life in a remarkably astute and fair account.

Walter Benjamin figures prominently in my book Euroconnections: Literature, Philosophy, Religion, and Sexuality, 1880-1940, which explores connections, coincidences, and chance meetings between European intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

You can read the first chapter of Euroconnections for free at the link below:
https://frankbfarrell.substack.com/p/...

[Jack Pettifor · Rating 3 out of 5]

The prolonged start to this book weighs on it, and it was only around 400 pages in (just under half the book's total length) that one began to find one's footing. Nevertheless, this book powerfully captures and presents -at the very least the formal -aspects of Benjamin's life and works. The end, and Benjamin's fate in particular, is a moving reminder of the threat borne to all person's in times of crisis; the mainstay of the text, by contrast, is a continuous display of the threat occurring to all those "abnormal" person's in times of normality.
Ultimately, this book is likely to be appreciated most fully for those already inaugurated into the church of Benjamin, yet it might also find interest amongst those interested in the position of Jewish intellectuals in the world of the Weimar Republic and Western Europe in the early-mid 20th century. Regardless, it is a good text.

[Peter Caron · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is dense. The author goes into significant detail about Benjamin, at key periods in the subject's life exploring his activities on an almost daily basis. But, the laser like focus bears fruit because the author has woven the development of Benjamin's literary and historical criticism into context.

Though at times difficult to read because of its density, this is nevertheless an important contribution to the understanding of one of the most important German critics of the twentieth century who, had things gone differently, could have as easily disappeared from history.

This book assures that that will not happen.

[Philippe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only read the second half of the book, starting with Benjamin's exile from Germany in 1933. A pleasure to read and very helpful in the way it traces the development of the late thinking. Not a linear development in any way. Anthony Auerbach pointedly characterised Benjamin's legacy as presenting "an image in which a construction site seems to merge with a ruin". So rather a sedimentation, or a constellation of all sorts of ideas around, perhaps, the nodal chimaera of the 'dialectial image'. Which is the conceptual beacon that I will rely on, for the time being, in my ongoing Benjamin explorations.

[Tien-Hsin]

Lecture by葉浩 in 左轉有書 2024.06.22

班雅明的學術人生 / 學問人生 有各種落差，他想要的「未來哲學」存在時間差，總之，就是個悲慘人生！

班雅明的一生，始於尼采的不合時宜（班所想要的總是不在身邊）；而人生不是一個argument，也終於尼采。
尼采的概念，都可以套用在班雅明身上，雖然他急欲抵抗尼采的「上帝/作者已死」。
班雖然一直進行批判（葉評：批判就是切割再切割） ，不過班本人沒讀過幾頁marx！卻成為比馬克思更純粹的唯物主義者...

班的核心論點：
Messiah timing、新天使（畫）、想要拯救被時間歷史所衝擊輾壓的芸芸眾生。
新天使是拯救—是拯救作品—抵抗（神聖）暴力。

葉評：班雅明有一致的哲學、對於作品之評論，而藝術品之評論而完整。

一些紀錄：
Understanding as originality
Critical comments as art meaning.
What is the resurrection of authorship?

葉評：Kant 的方法論舊了，抓不住彩色的經驗，Democracy vs.dictatorship…..吧啦吧啦

我的評論：班雅明好悲慘/ 克果兒好帥 / 給我原書Index，其餘免談！

[Enrique · Rating 5 out of 5]

Walter it’s the Jewish conscience of the European literature, the heir of the greatest poets, the first that see the stance of language, a mystic maybe, a philosopher of the future, what he began still is waiting for a heir.

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent reference text and introduction to WB

[Trudy Ferrer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is to hoping this never lands on the big screen; Possibly the most diminishing thing that could happen to a persons' work/art. Which is to say that I do not find it hard to praise the authors.

[Sara Avi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a huge book! It provides an in depth bio about the life of Walter Benjamin, his childhood, early years of his career, and exile.

The book helped me understand the context behind his writing and beliefs. Benjamin was highly intelligent despite his introverted nature and lack of social skills. At his university years he was engaged in extra curricular activities and lead a few groups, like the Youth Movement. He was involved in different communities and worked towards social reform.

He was somewhat of a rebel and a visionary, yet he was diplomatic and friendly with his family and peers. His progressive nature and rebellious attitude is reflected in his social and cultural criticism.

Benjamin continued to work towards his vision and literary goals despite being in exile and utter darkness. Almost all of his work was published after his suicide and edited by his trusted peers Adorno and Arendt.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The hero is the true subject of modernity. In other words, it takes a true a heroic constitution to live modernity.” This is what Walter Benjamin thought at the beginning of modernity almost a hundred years ago, what would he think about living in post-modern age? Especially in the beginning of Hitler's Germany and being a Jew.

Benjamin unable to get a job teaching, he lived by the generosity of others. In other words, from hand to mouth. Where as the book barely mentions it, he was quite fond of gambling.

The depth of his reading is impressive as is the amount of intellectuals he was in contact with, such as Adorno, Scholem and Horkheimer. As a Marxist theorist he helped move Germany to the left. Eiland does a great job of not only tracking Benjamin's movements from Germany, France, Spain and Denmark, of summarizing his his thinking in various writing.

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

The style is extremely amnesiac. Every seven pages I encounter a sentence I had already read before (sometimes two or three times before), as if I had forgotten—I did not forget. This kind of biography is intended to make you feel smart while extending minimal intellectual effort and at that it succeeded.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best critical biography I have read in a long, long time. Highly recommended.

[Drenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

See my review of Illuminations

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most beautiful and poetic work of a lifetime about the greatest thinker of the 20th century.

[Rafael]

to-read