Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings – Versatile Philosophy, Criticism, and Twentieth-Century Travelogues

by Walter Benjamin

“This book is just reflections of a highly polished mind that uncannily approximate the century’s fragments of shattered traditions.” — Time
 
A companion volume to Illuminations , the first collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings, Reflections presents a further sampling of his wide-ranging work. Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin.
            Benjamin moves seamlessly from literary criticism to autobiography to philosophical-theological speculations, cementing his reputation as one of the greatest and most versatile writers of the twentieth century.

Genres: Philosophy, Essays, Nonfiction, Theory, Art, Literary Criticism, History

369 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

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.

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

We can
remark in passing that there is no better starting point for thought than laughter. In particular, thought usually has a
better chance when one is shaken by laughter than when one’s mind is shaken and upset. The only extravagance of
the epic theatre is its amount of laughter.

This is a much more disparate collection than Illuminations. Surely this is to be expected The isfting and editing. The indecision. Reflections' opening section A Berlin Chronicle is a cartographic autobiography. It is a spatial narrative in the weirdest sense. There is a disorientation present. I also liked the Conversations With Brecht and the Author as Producer though my attentions waned upon approaching the lengthy piece on Karl Kraus. The concluding fragments appear rich with insight but frankly I was spent by that time.

[AK · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really should revisit this book, as I only remember these two sentences, but it is perhaps my favorite quote of ever:

The treasure-dispensing giant in the green pine forest or the fairy who grants one wish - they appear to each of us at least once in a lifetime. But only Sunday's children remember the wish they made, and so it is only a few who recognize its fulfillment in their own lives.

[Michael A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

PART ONE
A Berlin Chronicle - Honestly I groaned when I realized it was an autobiographical piece, even though the subtitle clearly has the word in it. I don't really care for them unless I really like the individual and I dont know Benjamin all that great. However, as it went on I found myself more and more interested in his life growing up in Berlin. Benjamin has a low-key captivating writing style that is hard to describe - it is easy to digest but sophisticated and well-constructed. I enjoyed read this but im not going to lie was glad when it was over. 3/5

One-way Street (Selection) - Some aphorisms, this was neat, I liked some of them but to be honest a couple flew past my head. 3/5

PART TWO

Moscow - I loved this one. A travel diary (which I also tend not to care for, I did not care at all about Camus's travels in Algeria or whatever) but this is set in the winter of 1926-1927 Soviet Russia, and being a communist, the setting excited me greatly. It was very cool to read about the daily life and how Benjamin even notes life seems fuller than in his native Berlin. However, he does say (criticize? probably) the Soviet government is too involved in the lives of people. Despite this, the people seem lively. 5/5

Marseilles & Hashish in Marseilles - Marseilles is a short description of Marseilles and I feel like is a setup for Hashish in Marseilles. The latter is essentially a diary/trip report of Benjamin getting high on Hashish and walking around Marseilles. Its fun and good and I love when philosophers and scholars do trip reports and get high. 4.5/5

Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century - It was very interesting how he related a figure to each architectural design. I thought this was an interesting read, it was a nice description of Paris. 3.5/5

Naples - Written with Asja Lascis, honestly a bit forgettable except for the obese lady anecdote and how obsessed Neapolitans are with trade. Not big on travel diaries about places I don't care about and I don't really care about naples! Still wasnt badly written or anything just not my thing. 2/5

PART THREE
Surrealism - A panegyric to the Surrealist movement. I couldn't quite figure out if Benjamin was criticizing them at the end but he did correctly predict that where they were headed now they might as well join the Communist party, or were close to it or something, which they eventually did. I love reading about Surrealism and Benjamin is a really good writer, I am a bit surprised to see him write so highly of it though. 4/5

Brecht's Threepenny Novel & Conversations with Brecht - These were interesting, I haven't read the Novel, only the Opera (no idea a threepenny novel even existed) but it was interesting to read the changes Brecht made. And the conversations with Brecht was really good, lots of politics talk of course but also a bit of talk about being a writer. Cool stuff. 4.5/5

The Author as Producer - A Marxist analysis of the relationship between the writer, their work, and capitalism. Very good article, I liked this a lot, I think it was basically trying to get authors to be aware of their situatedness in the role of capitalist production and create truly revolutionary proletariat works of art. 4/5

Karl Kraus - An interesting analysis of Karl Kraus, a writer I previously haven't heard of until this book (Benjamin quotes him in an earlier essay, then repeats it and explains it, its a wonderful quote: ""The more closely you look at a word, the more distantly it looks back."). It was an interesting read, and Kraus seems like an interesting writer, and I thought section 3 "Monster" was especially good, and parts in that are very poetic and metaphorical that could apply to any writer. I would have liked this more if I was more familiar with Kraus's work, but Benjamin still made someone who I'll probably never read interesting to read about. 4/5

PART FOUR
Critique of Violence - This essay disappointed me, mainly because I was expecting something like is revolutionary justified or something like that. And that's vaguely touched on and this is an essay critiquing violence vis-a-vis the Law through a Marxist(I guess?)-Sorelian lens. Things get strange when the essay starts getting mytho-poetical, talking about divine and mythical violence. I didn't quite understand that part. It seemed sort of vital to his argument. He does say that the only legal subject entitled to violence other than the State is organized labor. He points out contradictions in the Law in sanctioned/unsanctioned violence, etc. It was okay but honestly I expected different. 2.5/5

Destructive Character - felt like some moral rules or things he did to keep from the "destructive character". not really sure what this was...pretty mysterious! short and well-writtent hough. 3/5

Fate and Character - this was nearly inscrutable to me but it seems very theological/mystical, it deals with "fate" and "character" which i guess is a way to frame the debate between determinism and free will but in terms of a play? and benjamin argues i think that at least fate has primacy over character....but im not really sure what any of this actually meant or what implications it has...pretty tough text. I'll go N/A / 5 officially because i didnt relaly get it at all but 3/5 unofficially because i thought from what i grasped of it it sounded really strange and counterintuitive.

Theologico-Political Fragment - Interesting anti-theocracy argument. The arrow analogy is tough to conceive in my head, a diagram might help but it sounds very interesting. The last paragraph of nature passing away and the task of world politics becoming nihilism is pretty ominous. 3.5/5

On Language as Such and on the Language of Man - Weird essay. I think a big thesis is : "The absolute relation of name to knowledge exists only in God, only there is name, because it is inwardly identicalw ith the creative word, the pure medium of knowledge. That means: God made things knowable in their names. Man, however, names them according to knowledge." The name is how we know God. But I should back up, this essay is I guess what language is? or what language communicates? Anyway, it starts out good enough saying its something like a material thing communicating a mental entity but it ends up where in order to buy into his theory that Genesis is true because he uses Judaeo-Christian mythology as key arguments for certain things. He lost me on its believability though it was still interesting to read. However, this is disappointing as a Marxist because he criticizes other language theories as "bourgeois" which to me implies he thinks his proletarian in some way. I don't think so, i don't think know if it's bourgeois, but it's definitely an theologico-idealist mystification of language rather than a materialist clarification. Interesting read but he posits the Holy Bible having some sort of argumentative power in this topic but doesn't really argue for it, so I can't really accept the rest of his argument. Perhaps its some mythological allegory and he's using the Holy Bible as an allegory - I don't know. Still worth reading though. 3/5

On the Mimetic Faculty - A nice little essay on the relationship between mimesis and language and play. This was good because he didn't bring God into it but he could resist ending the book on "magic". 3/5


Overall, I enjoyed this book. Part 1 is by far the weakest part, probably skippable. But parts 2-4 are all worth reading. In one essay, cant remember which, he identifies power has being "formless" which made me think of a proto or ur-Foucauldian analysis of power where it's distributed throughout a network and doesnt really take a form. My favorite essay was probably Moscow, Surrealism, and the Brecht correspondence. I did know Benjamin had a mystic element to him but Part 4 has a theological miasma, at least, if not out right imprint on every essay that I didn't much care for as I felt it diminished the force of some of his arguments. I feel like he was making a convincing theory of language until he brought in the book of Genesis in his "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man". I also thought Fate and Character was a very strange essay, that was probably the hardest one for me to understand. He definitely alternates between being lowkey readable and captivating and abstruse, mysti(cal/fying). Definitely interesting thoughts, anecdotes, theories are contained in this book and there is a reason why Benjamin is revered as he is as a thinker not just in Marxist circles.

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is meaning? "Not what the moving red neon sign says – but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt" (p.91).

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Walter Benjamin represents the type of intellectual who, excited by the limitless horizon for political changes that echoed throughout Marx's Communist Manifesto, executes a type of literary backtracking where he exemplifies the critical principle that the act of creation justifies its own work; he is decidedly in favor of supporting a work's coherence to the essential principles of art which he believes stand for its internal and wholly authentic meaning. Upon reflection, when comparing my own striving towards the heights of intellectualism with Benjamin's literary and philosophical endeavors, I observe that I am now 52 years old, four years older than Benjamin was when he ingested morphine in a fatal action to prevent him being shipped to the Nazi-controlled Gestapo forces in 1940, but I wonder whether am I as good a writer as he was at the time of his death? I feel my work is at times not under the narcissistic spell of literature and, if I may be so bold, I believe his essays show a somewhat irritating feature in that they may be criticized for being so unduly so. Other than that, I feel that another way my writings do not suffer from the defects of Benjamin's writing is that I do not discuss economics in a vain way, seeking to cross half-grasped economic epiphenomenon with a distinctly literary representation of the idea of essentialism which is the driving force and intellectual fulcrum of this most noteworthy work, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." However, it remains the case that I feel I am unable to say I have written as much as he did in his half-finished life, nor can I say I will meet a death that is half as worthy as the one he did. But then again, upon further reflection it occurs to me that if Theo Logos or Dessaus Reprobate are correct in suggesting that artificial intelligence is currently being used to harvest the information content of Goodreads reviews like mine as a way to prevent contemporary intellectuals from identifying with the spiritual needs of the working class, then it seems to me I am in fact doing a disservice to the proletarians who Benjamin identifies as the agents of progressive social change. In fact, I may be labelled an agent provocateur (if not downright reactionary) in the sense that, by recommending a way out of their impoverished social and intellectual circumstances, I am in fact hemming the underclass in more tightly by constructively enforcing a tightening of the grip of large-scale language models based on the cultural logic of suppression. It seems to me that the state of affairs that Benjamin decried by saying that the writer who does not teach other writers, in fact teaches nothing at all has become, in the modern American landscape, a situation where the supposed privileged of the nobles and the educated has become the fashionable decadence of a declining social order. Three stars.

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like the essays on cities and even authors more than those espousing vaguely mystical social and linguistic theories.

[Alexis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wonder how many of Benjamin’s disciples buy wholesale into his Judaic mysticism and apocalyptic Marxism? It’s probably too strange a brew to imbibe unfiltered and undiluted, and I suspect that few of his followers can differentiate themselves from the thinker in this crucial sense: for all his ecstatic celebration of violence, this absentminded and unworldly professor never threw a punch in his life. When something like the end times descended on his world, he proved grossly unequal to its horrors. (Portbou. Morphine tablets.) So we abide as he left us: eyeless in Babylon, slaves at the mill, puzzling over his labyrinthine writings in a world still awaiting the messianic deliverance that he envisioned.

[Caroline Loftus · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5er. Benjamin is great, but this essay collection is slightly less packed with the heavy hitters compared to the other one I have read. Also, the editor’s introduction of this particular edition hits all of my pet peeves regarding editor’s introductions! “One-Way Street,” “On Surrealism,” “Hashish in Marseilles,” and “The Author as Producer” are my favorites.

[Kate Savage · Rating 3 out of 5]

"In his memoirs as in his essays, he seemed to require of every perception that it be a revolution. It was his premise that nothing is what it appears to be, and this made him into a scholar of appearances. He had an unappeasable appetite for the marginal and the idiosyncratic, because deviance looked to him like an epistemological advantage. Nothing that was not neglected could be true." -Preface to the book, by Leon Wieseltier

Such an uneven compilation. There were moments as brilliant as the essays in Illuminations, and then others that felt like an editor had over-zealously hoarded all of Benjamin's bed-side post-it notes and assumed they were all worth publishing.

I probably just don't understand its significance, but I could be happy never having read the tedious recounting of detailed memories in "A Berlin Chronicle." And I got through "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man" only by holding my nose.

But the raggedy "One-Way Street" is remarkable, as well as some of the notes from conversations with Brecht. I found the direction Marxism and class analysis take in "Surrealism" and "The Author as Producer" to be all kinds of thought-provoking (and argument-generating, like all the best ideas).

Unfortunately, because Benjamin is such a weird Marxist, it's considered completely appropriate for the foremost Benjamin scholars to be tepid liberals, such as the author of this book's introduction (Peter Demetz), who has a few insights and then spends pages decrying Benjamin's political commitments.

I recommend reading Illuminations and then venturing into this volume only if you have a lot of patience, to read through the mind-numbing until you reach the odd Benjaminial gem like this bit from "One-Way Street":

"If a person very close to us is dying, there is something in the months to come that we dimly apprehend -- much as we should have liked to share it with him -- could only happen through his absence. We greet him at the last in a language that he no longer understands."

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm one of those people, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, who felt that Illuminations, the first book of Benjamin people traditionally read, was totally awesome, and not nearly as mindcrushingly difficult as I'd been led to expect-- so what did I do, but buy another book, the seemingly traditional second book by Benjamin people read (I think from here, if you're so inclined, you get the massive two volume Arcades Project that my weird office mate David had).

I didn't find this one nearly as interesting or fun as Illuminations.... In fact, I think that it strangely shows the limits of Benjamin's talents, since I think his philosophical writing, which this contains tracts of, especially in later sections, is kind of junk. This is especially true when he tries to tackle linguistics ("On Language as such"), but also his critique of violence, and in a couple other sections where, well, I think Benjamin is out of his depth (Political-religious fragment, or whatever it's called). Interspersed with that, there's no doubt some delightful writing-- some of the travel stuff, which maybe reappears in Arcades? is pretty great... there's a lot of intriguing prose here, little fragments that aren't quite as dense as Minima Moralia, but still deep and engaged.

I don't know-- I think I've reached the end of my interest in Benjamin, or rather, I've read all I need to, and what I enjoy next will be going back to the work I think is great, instead of hunting out new stuff.

[Andrew]

Being considered the "other" collection of Benjamin essays after Illuminations, it shouldn't shock me that these weren't as stunning. That said, they are still fantastic. This volume includes many of Benjamin's more personal, less theoretical writings, including the lengthy, wonderfully Germanic childhood reminiscence that opens the book. You get Benjamin the traveller, Benjamin the romantic, even Benjamin the goofy stoner kid. I feel rather conflicted about the presence of a fragment of the lengthy essay/aphorism collection "One-Way Street." The whole thing is so coruscant that it feels like a damn shame to only print part of it, but even reading part of it is enough to send me into rapture.

[Katrinka · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are certain essays in here ("Critique of Violence," for example) that are solid fives. Demetz's introduction, with some modification/caveats, and whether for good or ill, pinpoints a large part of what draws me to Benjamin: "his philosophy, sustained by utter loneliness, rather than by the concerns of the masses, particularly attracts those intellectuals who restlessly search for a better world and yet shy away from the grubbbier commitments of a practical kind."

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Everybody seems to like Walter Benjamin; I’m not sure I’ve met any sensitive reader who doesn’t own a well-cherished copy of Illuminations. That book features the classic Age Of Mechanical Reproduction & Theses On History essays, as well as a number of commentaries on his favorite authors. While Benjamin’s style radiates supreme serenity, the more I’ve come to scrutinize him, the more I’ve found that he has relatively little to say: the lit-crit commentaries mostly just re-characterize the basic elements of these authors into catchy ontological framings, and the concepts of Messianism and Authenticity in the more conspicuous essays are, while mesmerizing to read in discursive form, fairly generic accounts of their topics & difficult to meaningfully apply. Indeed, a y survey of any contemporary Philosophy or Comparative Literature department will yield a large number of mostly vacuous essays applying these concepts to various works (usually of modernist or contemporary art) or social phenomena, achieving little more than to reverie in the simultaneous authenticity & falsity of most works of art, or to make facile predicates of Jewish messianism onto any concept of cyclical progression, something about as profound as using Campbellian archetypes to compare basically any fictional hero to the Christ.

Naturally, Benjamin himself has little to do with his reception, as his works were largely disseminated by his friends after the author’s death. As such, it’s very possible that he himself might have been surprised by the rabid enthusiasm for his works (or, rather, for the way that those such as Adorno and Arendt developed & popularized his concepts). To get a better picture of the man & his thought, I decided to read the lesser-known sequel collection, which was given the name Reflections. While divided into a large number of seemingly arbitrary sections, Reflections is really in two parts: a series of novel-like travel diaries & memorabilia, and then a series of political essays concerned loosely with the application of concepts from Jewish theology.

Reading a few pages of A Berlin Chronicle, or of Moscow, one is struck with the impression that Benjamin would have made for an excellent novelist: he outlines, in fluid & very organically developed prose, an almost endless series of images & epochs which sweetly evoke the style of his idol, Marcel Proust. Reading more than a few pages, however, changes this impression, as a small number of devices appear ad nauseam & with strikingly little variety: perceiving some manner of phenomenon (really any kind will do), the marginal details of the impression abruptly catch Benjamin’s interest & ultimately leads him towards the notion that there is some vague type of magic in the world, trailing off elliptically before being distracted by the next violet glow of light or distant mechanical sound. The only time he breaks this formula is to observe social interactions in public, usually from afar, which subsequently leads him to extol the virtues of communism (if he is in Russia, or near a trade union), or else rebuff the vices of ‘capitalism’ as exemplified by the scenario. I should think that one could transpose sections from the Naples or Paris essays into the Moscow essay, and the only sign of disturbance would be that the existence of children buying food is characterized as a great industrialist evil, rather than as evidence of nascent socialist harmony.

I think the main reason that Benjamin wouldn’t succeed particularly well as a novelist is his definitive attachment to his impressions, without any serious engagement with the reality laying beneath. For the constant warbling over the magic of the world around him, much of what he cites as evidence are purely secondary qualities (to use an overly loaded term) in whose tangled but ultimately private sensuality he revels, without any real interest for the Thing-In-Itself (to use an even more loaded term). It is for this reason, then, that I shan’t like to give the impression that Benjamin was a rabid Bolshevist, or whatever else have you, as his field of vision is too withdrawn & apparently autistic for any real partisan or institutional opinion. In fairness, these essays were, to my awareness, written mostly for private dissemination, and rarely meant as serious or definitive works; however, I find it relatively perplexing that, even in so apparently candid a text, Benjamin seems to have preferred wallowing in illusions & spectres (compare, for example the engagement of contemporary socialist Rosa Luxemburg with the same emergent occasions of their day) than to give any real thought as to the concrete political situation of 20s & 30s western Europe or Soviet Russia. While Benjamin was supposedly ambiguous & tergiversatory about the ideologies of his day, the essays here show very little to suggest that he had any serious ideological objections to any particular partisanship or event, but rather had a detachment motivated more by a temperamental preference for avoidance & observation.

Some rationale for his mindset is provided in the second cluster of essays in this collection. While dealing with a wide variety of subjects, they are united in their concern with what other philosophers might have called ‘immanence’ and ‘logos’, although Benjamin, focusing on his subject matter, keeps these preoccupations in the form of latent assumptions. Benjamin generally subscribes to what I like, obscurely, to call “the falsity of the logeitic”, namely, the idea that rational concepts are basically arbitrary arrangements of a inaccessible, primordial & hidden nature of reality, and that as such all concepts, ideas & words are relative & inconclusive in the ultimate analysis.

Benjamin develops this, in part, in a lengthy essay critiquing the works of Karl Krauss, some manner of German modernist who constructed complex symbological dramas: Benjamin’s critique is that it is a cowardly illusion to seek power over the world with extreme conceptual constructions, precisely because doing so attempts to overcome the contortions of life by simply identifying oneself with one specific manifestation of these contortions, thus achieving nothing other than a deluded amplification of one immanent concept. Benjamin is discussing the private creation of symbolism within fiction here, but the same line of reasoning holds just as true for philosophical systems & terminologies; to declare that one has found a solution to any real problem is usually to fixate on a particular framing of events or logical relation, at the expense of ignoring all other possible framings, relations or aporiae. At heart, it is a petty & willful staving-off of the perennial human condition of confusion & perplexity, which can never be really definitive.

Similarly, in the Critique Of Violence, Benjamin contrasts the traditional forms of state and social violence (which, as he claims with almost incredible naivete, will be totally eradicated under the convivial cooperation only possible under communism) with the ineffable violence effected by God in the Old Testament. Benjamin’s intention is seemingly to highlight the arbitrariness & malleability of the human ideologies that produce violence, frequently without adequate rationale or cogent purpose. It is only when violence (or other forms of action) seems to emerge from the ethereal subaltern of reality, appearing without explanation or apparent cause, (for example, plagues, accidents, stochastic tribal violence) that we can really say it is profoundly meaningful in the way that ideologies, drunken off their own mottoes & arguments, falsely believe their variously cruel & power-seeking political operations to be. That is to say, Benjamin operates with the assumption that it is only with a kind of formless & transcendental philosophy that one is able to, in Scholem’s characterization of the Qabbalistic philosophy, “give meaning to suffering”, and any attempts to do so from an earthly or rationalistic basis are ultimately futile.

As such, Benjamin’s understanding of reality should be distinguished from the normal trends of continental philosophy or, really, the various strains of Marxist theory. Rather, I think it’s more apt to characterize him as a poetic visionary (even if not of profound literary merit) operating in an atmosphere where Marxist beliefs were the norm, where he mostly constructed his works to highlight the poetry & beauty of the world as it appeared around him. Thus, I would say it makes more sense to take his psychedelic descriptions of capitalist & of communist societies less as any serious ideological argument, but rather as a painterly effort to illustrate this mystical worldview. That he seemed to have a profoundly weaker understanding of the tenets of the Hegel, Marx & other associated thinkers than did, say, Adorno, then, is not necessarily a mark against Benjamin’s thinking, but rather an indication that he was consistent in his cagey detachment from complete trust in any real system of thought.

If we grant that Benjamin is effectively visionary & closer to Baudelaire than to Adorno, the question becomes how to properly evaluate him as a thinker & writer. Personally, while I am pretty sympathetic to his qualifications against language & to his tendency towards disfigured romantic reveries, I think one would do well to recognize the tension in excellent philosophic works, such as those of Plato, between a metaphysical distrust of specific dicta & the existentialist importance of political operations in a world governed by these (frequently false) dogmas & convictions. There is something of a tragedy in reading a very flowery yet ineffectual philosophy by a man who ended up having to commit suicide to escape the concentration camps, even if we certainly can’t rebuke him for this innocence. Nevertheless, the flow of history & politics continues to roll on, and it’s important to learn these lessons.

Indeed, in many ways, Benjamin is the perfect prefiguration of the contemporary academic: his mind fleetingly full of the most beautiful thinkers & artists of the past, too utterly appreciative of the beauty of the world around him, too utterly impotent to fully recognize (let alone combat) the faults & flaws of his society, capable of writing with a beautiful manifest & incapable of asserting serious order, fluently initiated into the conceptual traditions of his epoch, yet struggling to apprehend it in any meaningful way, ultimately longing for some manner of deus-ex-machina salvation to preclude having seriously to think, and ultimately cherishing the friends & lovers he met along the way far more than any of his serious intellectual pursuits. This has always been the over-warm & slightly putrid attitude I’ve observed in academia & academics. Is there anything wrong with this? If there is, the choice then would be between becoming a serious scholar (whatever this might entail) or, else, fully embracing the arbitrariness of the intellectual world, exchanging truth for passing beauty, and living as a moon-struck star-child.

This aside, I think any half-way serious scholar must, by all means, stop regurgitating & blindly extrapolating so many of Benjamin’s random ad-hoc coinages & ideas, given that the literal truth of anything he wrote is neither the point nor particularly even true.

(Shill corner: my reviews are longer and more carefully written because i've wrote them to post to my substack. I'm going to post them on both platforms but you can also read them and other non-review writings at: https://theiconoclast.substack.com/)

[Hit No · Rating 5 out of 5]

Walter Benjamin’s Reflections is not a book one reads so much as inhabits. It unfolds less like a linear argument and more like a cabinet of intellectual curiosities, where each essay, fragment, and aphorism reveals another facet of a mind operating at rare altitude.

For a reader attuned to the essayistic tradition of Montaigne, the experience is immediately familiar, yet also more electrified. Like Montaigne, Benjamin circles his subjects rather than conquers them, privileging perception over conclusion. But where Montaigne is grounded in the self, Benjamin is suspended within culture, language, and history, reading the modern world as if it were a palimpsest of lost meanings.

There is also something unmistakably Proustian in his sensibility. Not in style, which is far more compressed, but in the reverence for memory, objects, and the strange elasticity of time. Benjamin does not merely describe things; he excavates them. A street, a book, a child’s toy becomes an entry point into entire historical and philosophical constellations.

What distinguishes Reflections, however, is its density. Benjamin writes in a way that demands participation. His prose is crystalline but charged, often requiring the reader to slow down, reread, and reconstruct the argument from within. This is not difficulty for its own sake; it is the natural consequence of a mind that refuses simplification.

In this respect, one feels an affinity with Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino. Like Eco, Benjamin is encyclopedic, capable of moving across disciplines with ease, weaving philosophy, literature, and cultural criticism into a unified vision. Like Calvino, he possesses a lightness of touch, a capacity to render abstract ideas with an almost architectural elegance. Yet he remains distinctly German in his intellectual lineage, closer to the critical tradition than to narrative play, even when he approaches storytelling.

What is perhaps most striking is how contemporary he feels. His reflections on media, reproduction, and modernity anticipate entire fields of thought that would only fully emerge decades later. He reads the 20th century as it is becoming itself, capturing its fractures without the benefit of hindsight.

There is, too, a quiet melancholy that permeates the work. Benjamin writes as someone acutely aware of cultural loss, of traditions slipping into obscurity, of meaning becoming diffuse. This lends Reflections a certain gravity, even when the subject appears minor or anecdotal.

To call Benjamin “overlooked” is both true and misleading. He is not obscure, but he is insufficiently absorbed. His ideas circulate widely, yet the full texture of his thinking is often reduced to isolated quotations or concepts. To read Reflections in its entirety is to encounter not just a set of ideas, but an intellectual temperament of the highest order.

For readers who find joy in the essay as a form of thinking rather than mere exposition, this book is a rare pleasure. It does not offer conclusions so much as invitations—to see differently, to read more attentively, and to recognize the hidden structures within the everyday.

It is, in the fullest sense, a European work: cosmopolitan, erudite, restless, and profoundly alive.

[Dean · Rating 3 out of 5]

The travel writings that start this book are excellent and worth the read. I’m not sure if Benjamin was an influence on the Situationalist concept of psychogeography that arose in the decades after his death, but the impressions he records of Berlin, Moscow, Marseilles, and indeed the fragments pulled here from his vast project on the arcades of Paris combine a keen eye and profound political insight. So much travel writing is better fit for a Lonely Planet article than a place on a bookshelf for literature - Benjamin seeks to understand and catalogue a place with his writing about cities, and as with all good writing, encourages speculation beyond the confines of the work itself, and makes us think about our own cities.

The latter half of the book is filled with a lot of pseudophilosophy that I found it harder to connect with. It seems like a lot of these writings may have been pulled of journals and diaries. Anyone who writes knows that the stuff you write in your private notebooks might be inscrutable to others - while writing to yourself, you use a kind of shorthand, tracing invisible, sketchy lines between ideas that seem clear to you, but would look like a tangled mess to anyone who doesn’t understand the internal logic. I often felt like these pieces were Benjamin talking to himself - long, dense sentences filled with ideas and details that needed to be unpacked and slowed down if I was to get any clarity from them. Maybe I’m just not the intended audience, or maybe I just don’t have the intellectual background, but I feel like Benjamin is a much more interesting writer when he’s aiming at more down to earth topics.

[Adin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Language shows clearly that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand—like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery—in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding. True, for successful excavations a plan is needed. Yet no less indispensable is the cautious probing of the spade in the dark loam, and it is to cheat oneself of the richest prize to preserve as a record merely the inventory of one’s discoveries, and not this dark joy of the place of the finding itself. Fruitless searching is as much a part of this as succeeding, and consequently remembrance must not proceed in the manner of a narrative or still less that of a report, but must, in the strictest epic and rhapsodic manner, assay its spade in ever-new places, and in the old ones delve to ever-deeper layers.

[Lillian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first three parts of this book are incredible fragments of critical reflection, providing an arsenal of tools for a critic in understanding cities, newspapers, novels, buildings, operas, and a myriad other sources. Interspersed within them are moments of remarkable political and anthropological suggestion. But really, I read this book to get to the final chapter, and it utterly blew me away when I did. Part four feels like an unfolding revelation, a picture of messianic arrival which is as vivid as it is radically coherent. I'm glad I read it linearly if only to tantalize myself with that prize. The coherence of it, admittedly, is sweetened by the mind-breaking confusion of some of the earlier chapters (looking at you, Karl Kraus). But it's worth reading in its entirety, even the bits I'm less sure were written (or translated?) to be entirely understood.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

These writings start under the influence of Proust and end up as Marxist, Jewish, and mystical reflections. They are all over the place - but nevertheless are fresh, insightful, and thought-provoking. I found those on language, violence, theology and politics, fate and character, and authors great. It seems to me that the main goal of these reflections is to shake everything and show how hollow some of the entrenched ideas are. Imitations of Benjamin - along with those in the style of pseudo-philosophers like Zizek - explain the current literature and critical theory in America: an army of high paid and Marxist academics hoping to somehow replicate or even to take further the original insights and style.

[Kim Culver · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard to write a concise review of a text this fragmentary and often obtuse. Benjamin is maybe my favorite writer considering the “whole package” of his prose and the depth and novelty of his insights. “On the linguistic faculty” is maybe the most complete and theoretically interesting of the writings here but there are a ton of interesting nuggets across the whole compilation. The persistent theme of modernity’s warping of our relationship with time (past, future, and via the regimentation of the present) is very resonant.

[Gwendoline Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, I was in doubts about this book, but it actually surprised me and turned out to be a very good one. I love Walter's works, but first ones always no-so-good. This one collection, however, brings joy and food for thought. That's why I consider it as good. Also, this great source, I believe, can help everyone to see the beauty in reflection essays and autobiographical writings, too.

[Revanth Ukkalam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! Wow! Wow! I read nearly all the essays in this book on one lonely Tuesday!!
How, how how much do I long that I be able to write in this brief life, one line that reads like Benjamin. One line that carries the fizz of Marxist radicalism, yet while reaching out to the illuminating power of mysticism, of whichever kind possible. Please Benjamin, be my spirit animal. Will you not walk with me, and see the world with me? And teach me to see it like you do? Hmm?

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fairly uneven collection of Benjamin's essays. Two of them I consider outstanding and among his best, Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century and Critique of Violence (which I now remember plays a large roll in Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception).

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fairly uneven collection of Benjamin's essays. Two of them I consider outstanding and among his best, Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century and Critique of Violence (which I now remember plays a large roll in Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception).

[Al Maki]

I loved and will recommend the essay on Naples, co-authored with Asja Lacis, and for which I got the book. I tried a number of other pieces but was unable to finish any. His style doesn’t work for me.

[Fionan]

first section (a berlin chronicle) is a sloooooog but it picks up afterwards. highlights were the writers technique in thirteen theses, the author as producer, and critics of violence (all of section four really)

[Noah · Rating 2 out of 5]

+ One Way Street; Moscow; Paris, Capital of...; Conversations with Brecht; Author as Producer; Critique of Violence

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Critique of Violence"

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt way too dumb for this book lol. It was really hard to get through and understand but when it made sense it was revolutionary.

[Tom Garvey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as earth shaking and gaze orienting as Illuminations, but several of the essays in this collection are more than worth investigating, particularly the lasr section of the book.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

The travelogues are superb.