Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher and cultural critic. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and 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 also related by law to German political theorist Hannah Arendt through her first marriage...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth15 July 1892
CountryGermany
Walter Benjamin quotes about
Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.
Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.
Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
The killing of a criminal can be moral-but never its legitimation.
No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
Uncleanness is so much the attribute of officials that one could almost regard them as enormous parasites...In the same way the fathers in Kafka's strange families batten on their sons, lying on top of them like giant parasites. They not only prey upon their strength, but gnaw away at the sons' right to exist. The fathers punish, but they are at the same time the accusers. The sin of which they accuse their sons seems to be a kind of original sin.
It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.
Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.
The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
Only for the sake of the hopeless have we been given hope.
Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
A revolutionary woman can't have no reactionary man. If he's not about liberation, if he's not about struggle, if he ain't about building a strong Black family, if he ain't about building a strong Black nation, then he ain't about nothing.