#Walter benjamin illuminations summary plus#

One is defined by what is within, not without. (98)Įverything sinks into duplicity and what matters most are not the “facts” but the lies or the stories one tells about oneself (91). The importance of emotions existed independently of possible consequences…In the course of such a ruthless confessional the individual is isolated not only from the events of public life, but also from the events of private life. In complete isolation, shame was extinguished. Everything was equally important and nothing forbidden. The singularity of the person, the uniqueness of the individual character, stood out against a background of indefinite anonymity.

With the loss of the priest and his judgment, the solitude of the would-be confessor had become boundless. This came in the wake of religious decay: His confessions maintained this division and complexity. She saw, in his work, a conflict between the private life and the public life. In her book on Rahel Varnhagen, Arendt takes aim at Jean-Jacques Rousseau as encouraging duplicity. To that end, here are some essays/posts I’ve written on Benjamin and the Comic.ĭuplicity and complexity were of great concern to Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem.

#Walter benjamin illuminations summary plus#

As one of Woody Allen’s characters explains, time plus tragedy equals comedy. The tension between the two can produce a new thought (perhaps). In the spirit of dialectics, I think it is good to push in the other direction. But more often than not – as you can see from the google image search I did above and in the majority of texts on him and his work – he is portrayed as a serious thinker of melancholy, tragedy, the daemonic, and the apocalyptic. There is a relationship between comedy and tragedy that Benjamin, himself, was interested in. It is good because it directs us to the hidden (dialectical) side of melancholia and tragedy. To be sure, this topic, like these images suggests another side of Walter Benjamin, one we seldom see. I have written several essays on Walter Benjamin’s interest in the comic modality and in the schlemiel. The visual complements the textual and we are, after all, learning more and more about his life with all of the books coming out on him.

I find this comic angle of great interest to my own work on Benjamin for Schlemiel Theory. I asked them to share photos to visually illustrate their claim and was shown these photos of Walter Benjamin letting loose. The claim made by the tweeted photo and caption was challenged by a few people on the thread who said that Walter Benjamin liked to have fun (in fact, all the time). One of the 50 + people who shared the post this morning commented, “Is it just me or isn’t the idea of Benjamin having fun quite disturbing?” Another said, “I can’t unsee this!” When I posted the screenshot of the Tweet by David Hering with the caption “Possibly the only photo of Walter Benjamin enjoying himself” on the Walter Benjamin Facebook Page (where I am the admin) many people chimed in about the photo and (as of this moment) 275 people have liked the photo (replete with laughing icons, etc).

To be sure, when you do an internet search on Walter Benjamin, the majority of images don’t show him as having fun, smiling, or laughing. The image used for the cover is one that is used for the cover is similar to the images we find on his most read books: Illuminations and Reflections. One of my graduate school professors, Max Pensky, wrote a book entitled Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning. Most of the images I saw were pensive or melancholic. After reading and writing on Walter Benjamin for nearly twenty years (since I was first introduced to him as an undergrad), I seldom saw any photos of him smiling or happy.