Walter Benjamin Quotes

“Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts.”
― Maximilien Robespierre

“A sensibility that wails almost exclusively over the enemies of liberty seems suspect to me. Stop shaking the tyrant's bloody robe in my face, or I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains.”
― Maximilien Robespierre

“Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow tunnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead-ends, one-way streets. Too many possibilities, indeed.”
― Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays

“History is an angel being blown backwards into the future”
― Laurie Anderson

“Unlimited goodwill. Suspension of the compulsive anxiety complex. The beautiful "character" unfolds. All of those present become comically iridescent. At the same time one is pervaded by their aura.”
― Walter Benjamin, On Hashish

“C’è un quadro di Klee che s’intitola Angelus Novus. Vi si trova un angelo che sembra in atto di allontanarsi da qualcosa su cui fissa lo sguardo. Ha gli occhi spalancati, la bocca aperta, le ali distese. L'angelo della storia deve avere questo aspetto. Ha il viso rivolto al passato.
Dove ci appare una catena di eventi, egli vede una sola catastrofe, che accumula senza tregua rovine su rovine e le rovescia ai suoi piedi. Egli vorrebbe ben trattenersi, destare i morti e ricomporre l’infranto. Ma una tempesta spira dal paradiso, che si è impigliata nelle sue ali, ed è così forte che egli non può più chiuderle.
Questa tempesta lo spinge irresistibilmente nel futuro, a cui volge le spalle, mentre il cumulo delle rovine sale davanti a lui al cielo. Ciò che chiamiamo il progresso, è questa tempesta.”
― Walter Benjamin, Angelus Novus. Saggi e frammenti

“The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with
the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura. Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual—first the
magical, then the religious kind.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“Gustav: ¡Su trasero es divino!
Berdoa: ¿Verdad que merece ser inmortal? Gustav: ¿Qué?
Berdoa: Nada.”
― Grabbe

“Only when poetry is read can it become a hobby, a habit, a daily necessity. Only so can it become ‘literature’, enjoyment of which is no longer confined to the solemn moments of life or to special festivities, but which may be drawn upon as desired merely to pass the time of day. Poetry thus loses the last remnant of its numinous character and becomes mere ‘fiction’, mere invention which can arouse aesthetic interest without claiming any element of conviction.”
― Arnold Hauser

“Only when poetry is read can it become a hobby, a habit, a daily necessity. Only so can it become ‘literature’, enjoyment of which is no longer confined to the solemn moments of life or to special festivities, but which may be drawn upon as desired merely to pass the time of day. Poetry thus loses the last remnant of its numinous character and becomes mere ‘fiction’, mere invention which can arouse aesthetic interest without claiming any element of conviction”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages

“The tendency to approach the question of creation in such all-or-nothing terms is, for example, less pronounced in the Jewish tradition. Walter Benjamin’s commentary on the book of Genesis, as set forth in his essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (in Early Writings: 1910–1917, trans. H. Eiland [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011], 251–269), provides a summary of an alternative view. It is helpful to see Benjamin’s alternative reading of creation as involving six moments corresponding to the following six sorts of remarks to be found in that essay:
(1) In individual acts of creation . . . only the “Let there be” appears. (259)
(2) With the creative omnipotence of language this act begins. . . . In God, name is creative because it is word. . . . (259)
(3) The second version of the Creation story, which tells of the breathing of God’s
breath into man, also reports that man was made from earth. In the whole story of the Creation, this is the only reference to a material in which the Creator expresses his will, which is doubtless otherwise thought of as immediately creative. (258)
(4) In this second story of the Creation, the making of man did not come about through the word (God spoke and it was so), but this man who was not created from the word is now endowed with the gift of language, and he is elevated above nature. . . . (258) God did not create man from the word, and he did not name him. (259)
(5) God’s creation is completed when things receive their names from man—this man from whom, in the name, language alone speaks. . . . (255) Language is therefore that which creates and that which completes; it is word and name. (259)
(6) The absolute relation of name to knowledge exists only in God; only there is the name, because it is inwardly identical with the creative word, the pure medium of knowledge. This means that God made things knowable in their names. Man, however, names them according to knowledge.”
― James Conant

“After an era of lunar mortification, we are entering an era of solar mystification.

Every great thought is of the order of the lapsus. When Benjamin pronounces this terrifying sentence: 'Fascism is made up of two things: fascism properly so called and anti-fascism', is this not thought sliding, letting itself slide beyond truth, into the fundamental ambiguity of discourse, an ambiguity far greater than any political or ideological explanation, and which alone explains why there has never been any plausible explanation of fascism, whilst anti-fascism is self explanatory? Whatever hypothesis you propose about it, fascism poses more problems than anti-fascism. From the very start, it is more interesting than - and itself encompasses - anti-fascism. This is what Benjamin's statement is saying. And it should not be made to say what it is not saying. Though it surely will be.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“With the advent of cloning, this kind of thing is occurring not just at the level of messages but also in terms of individuals. Indeed, this is exactly what happens to the body when it is conceived of as nothing more than a message, nothing more than computer fodder. In such circumstances there is no obstacle in the way of a mass reproduction of the body exactly comparable to the mass reproduction of industrial objects and mass-media images described by Benjamin. Thus reproduction precedes production, and the genetic model of the body precedes all possible bodies. An exploding technology is what presides over this reversal - that technology which Benjamin was already able to describe, in its ultimate consequences, as a total medium; but Benjamin was writing in the industrial era: by then technology itself was a gigantic prosthesis governing the generation of identical objects and images which there was no longer any way of distinguishing from one another, but it was as yet impossible to foresee the technological sophistication of our own era, which has made it possible to generate identical beings, without any means of returning to an original. The prostheses of the industrial era were still external, exotechnical, whereas those we know now are ramified and internalized -esotechnical. Ours is the age of soft technologies, the age of genetic and mental software.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“His (Benjamin's) dialectical image, like the stereoscopic image, is not part of the phenomenal world, but an image that is activated by present readers gazing upon the past. Again, it is not something that is directly perceptible (not reproducible), but only emerges in the imaginative interaction between reader and text.”
― Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography and the Optical Unconscious

“The photograph not only stops time, Benjamin argues, but also works to project the future out of the past. The photograph is a forward-looking document, so to speak, anticipating a future viewer who will recognise in it a spark of contingency that cannot be contained to one temporal moment. As Benjamin puts it in his "Little History of Photography": "No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.”
― Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography and the Optical Unconscious

“photography can help us to grasp. The camera can capture scenes that pass too quickly, too remotely, or too obscurely for the subject to consciously perceive. By enlarging details, or by slowing down or stopping time, the camera pictures phenomena that the viewer has encountered and unconsciously registered but not consciously processed. This sense of the optical unconscious is not about making latent memory traces visible, however, but rather demonstrating the reach and complexity of unconscious perception,”
― Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography and the Optical Unconscious

“With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later. At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l'art pour l'art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of "pure" art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections