Status Updates From Eseji

The goal of any good translator is to not merely translate what is being said, but to retain the substance and content of what is being communicated by the original work. In order to do this, it requires an intimate understanding of the original work.

It also requires the translator to take words that can't be put properly into the new language and describe them with the power of analogy and symbolism.

"But, Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehended." — Walter Benjamin. Unpacking My Library.

"But one thing should be noted: the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter. I do know that time is running out for the type that I am discussing here and have been representing before you a bit ex officio." - Benjamin

A writer only writes because they are disaffiliated with the literature of the present. The present writings fail to communicate their passions and drives in the ways that are their standard, so they take up the mantle of manifesting such writing or things because no one has yet to do it or do it correctly.

If philosophy is like having a scream, to follow Deleuze's example, then the writer makes themself a mouth.

What a good collector does is take lost memories and things that have been left to rot by the never-ending march of linear time and give them new life or purpose in order to redeem what has been collected.

To take an object, especially one that has been left to dust, and interact with it in ways that express wonder and love creates something beautiful that becomes the collector's creed.

"Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories." – Walter Benjamin. Unpacking My Library.

According to Benjamin, the collector becomes a dialectician between the order and chaos: the order of arranging their passion in their own structured image and the chaos of allowing themselves to be consumed fiercely by what they love.

Fetishism takes an object and imbues it with intrinsic worth that remains seperate from the maket value and use-value of a thing. The thing's existence or "intrinsic" properties become sought after and destorts the relation between people and things.

The questions remains "How can we come to value an object beyond its mere utility or commidifcation while not distorting our relation to the object?"



Collecters

Truth, to Benjamin, is not "an unveiling which destroys the secret, but the revelation which does it justice."

Once truth comes into the human world at its proper moment in history, it becomes tangible because of its consistency. When truth becomes tradition (i.e., a consistent authority of the past), it transforms into wisdom.

Tradition is the past giving authority to the present.

Benjamin did not wish to return to his Jewish heritage or Judaism in any formal sense, as he found all sense of "belonging" to a culture or tradition questionable.

Tying oneself to such things in order to "belong," especially in the way Zionists would harp on it, only meant backsliding away from more important or grander questions about life.

The generation of Jews that was a decade older than Benjamin found their rebellious streak in either Communism or Zionism. Both beliefs violently rejected each other and served as an escape from the anomie and nonsense of present life.

Benjamin only had a passing interest in both, for he was more focused on the way such belief systems and thought could come to unravel the illusions of current society.

The problem with many intellectuals in any group is that they may come to despise their own group or feel themselves above it because, in order to write about their group, they must frequently adopt an outsider's perspective. What they gain from this process is new knowledge about their group, but it often comes at the expense of never concretely representing such a group, especially if their insights are not great

Every marginalized group with an intelligentsia that represents it in academia or literature has a gap between that intelligentsia and its own community. This gap causes two-way resentments where the groups feel alienated by those that claim to be part of it and their lived experience undermined, but also the intelligentsia who feel themselves outsiders looking in to the people they are part of.

Very interesting but perhaps a little (a lot) dated? Clearly well read, thoughtful and a fantastic mind