К портрету Пруста

by Walter Benjamin, Вальтер Беньямин

« L’analyse proustienne du snobisme, qui est bien plus importante que son apothéose de l’art, représente le sommet de sa critique sociale. Car l’attitude du snob n’est rien d’autre que la contemplation conséquente, organisée, endurcie, de l’existence à partir du point de vue chimiquement pur du consommateur. »« C’est moins l’humour que le comique qui est le véritable noyau de la puissance de Proust?; il ne transcende pas le monde par le rire, mais par le rire il l’abat. Au risque de le briser en mille morceaux, devant lesquels il n’y a que lui pour fondre en larmes. Sont en morceaux : l’unité de la famille et de la personnalité, de la morale sexuelle et de l’honorabilité sociale. Les prétentions de la bourgeoisie éclatent sous les rires. »Ce livre rassemble pour la première fois les textes (inédits ou retraduits), articles, remarques et pensées que Benjamin a consacrés à Proust.

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1929

About the author

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, Jewish mysticism, and neo-Kantianism, Benjamin made influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders, though the friendship between Arendt and Benjamin outlasted her marriage to Anders. Both Arendt and Anders were students of Martin Heidegger, whom Benjamin considered a nemesis.
Among Benjamin's best known works are the essays "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935) and "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940). His major work as a literary critic included essays on Charles Baudelaire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Franz Kafka, Karl Kraus, Nikolai Leskov, Marcel Proust, Robert Walser, Trauerspiel and translation theory. He also made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.
Of the hidden principle organizing Walter Benjamin's thought Scholem wrote unequivocally that "Benjamin was a philosopher", while his younger colleagues Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno contend that he was "not a philosopher". Scholem remarked "The peculiar aura of authority emanating from his work tended to incite contradiction". Benjamin himself considered his research to be theological, though he eschewed all recourse to traditionally metaphysical sources of transcendentally revealed authority.
In 1940, at the age of 48, Benjamin died by suicide at Portbou on the French Spanish border while attempting to escape the advance of the Third Reich. Though popular acclaim eluded him during his life, the decades following his death won his work posthumous renown.