Illuminations: Essays and Reflections by Walter Benjamin

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections Reviews

• 
  Michael

  A wide-ranging collection of critical and aesthetic essays exploring everything from the process of literary translation across space and time to the artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin’s style, at once sensitive and incisive, is entrancing, though much of the criticism gathered here, including pieces on Kafka, Baudelaire, and Proust, feels archaic, ahead of its time but dated and shallow today.
• 
  Ahmad Sharabiani

  Iluminaciones, Walter Benjamin
  Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist. 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.
  تاریخ نخستین خوانش: سال 1988 میلادی
  عنوان: نشانه ای به رهایی: مقاله های برگزیده؛ نویسنده: والتر بنیامین؛ مترجم: بابک، احمدی، تهران، تندر، 1366؛ در 292 ص؛ موضوع: مقالات نویسندگان - سده 20 م
  گزیده‌ ای از مقالات «بنیامین» با عنوان: نشانه‌ ای به رهایی، در سال 1366 هجری خورشیدی با ترجمه جناب «بابک احمدی» توسط نشر تندر منتشر شده‌ است. فهرست: مقدمه ای طولانی از مترجم؛ مقاله تصویر پروست؛ درباره ابله داستایوسکی؛ فرانتس کافکا؛ سوررآلیسم واپسین عکس فوری از اندیشه گران اروپایی؛ حکایت گر: اندیشه هایی در باره نیکلای لسکوف؛ اثر هنری در دوران تکثیر مکانیکی آن، پسگفتار، پانوشتها، و نمایه ها؛ ا. شربیانی
• 
  Jonfaith

  For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
  
  There are hardly enough superlatives for this amazing collection of essays concerning Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, messianism and the aesthetic tension between the cultic and the exhibitional. I had read Unpacking My Library a half dozen times previously and it still forces me to catch my breath. The thoughts on Kafka explore the mystical as well as the shock of the modern. The shock of the urban and industrial is a recurring theme in these pieces. Likewise is the dearth of actual experience and the onslaught of involuntary memory. It was a strange juxtaposition that this very morning I put down Illuminations and was enjoying my breakfast. Before me in the recent Bookforum was an article by Geoff Dyer about August Sander's People of the Twentieth Century
  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4.... Benjamin's idea of aura has likely morphed into something strange over the intervening 70 odd years.
  
  
• 
  Szplug

  The introductory essay by Hannah Arendt—who also did duty as editor of this wonderful collection—serves up her usual insight (and reliably delivered via her rather dense language) in categorizing Benjamin as a poetic mind who approached cultural and literary criticism in a unique manner, one that left a lasting influence upon those who followed in his wake. Benjamin's opening sally, a short piece on the eccentric inner workings of the book collector, resonated in a warmly satisfying way, describing idiosyncrasies and behaviors that fit me like a glove. Currently approaching some six thousand titles, my personal library is of comparable size to that of Herr Benjamin's back when he put pen to paper; the learned author comes off as a more intelligent kindred spirit to this reviewer, one whose book-based similarities both measure and explain the bibliomaniac's obsessions and joys with a reassuring abundance of lucidity and enthusiasm. It underscores why I could never abandon the printed book for its electronic changeling: I'm crazy about, and require, its physical manifestation, with its covers, front and back, and fleshy pages redolent with human imagination, intelligence, and spirit. A book is a microcosm of life itself—each page a separate day, with its own unique events, thoughts, conversations, and actions. Each page is necessary for those that follow, for establishing a linear narrative for that which occurs as pages are turned; and as yesterday and the day before will eventually fade and dim in memory's retreats, so what took place several dozen pages past will be an etiolated projection of that which is occurring in stark detail on the current page with which the reader is occupied. Yet just as we must endeavor to plumb memory for its stored images if we are to make sense of, and survive within, the bewildering labyrinth of existence, we similarly must recall the pages we've already perused if we're to understand the lines of type arrayed in their ordered ranks before our eyes. Thus, if you love books you must perforce bear some love—however imperceptible it seems—for life itself; and by this measure Benjamin's passion for existence must have been deep.
  
  My favorite of Benjamin's intellectual recipes is his brief essay on translation: confounding and difficult—a dialectic prose puzzle—but flush with profound insight and a depth of analysis that rings very true to me, especially that of a good translation advancing the suitor language, of necessity accessing the ur-language inherent to conveyed experience and which exists on a higher level even to the original tongue. By Benjamin's theory, civilizations existing in isolation will conceptually lag those wherein multiple tongues dance with each other, soar ever higher in an effort to transcend the barriers of differing vowel and consonantal pairings and patterns. I'll never read another translated work without giving it serious thought from what I take to be Benjamin's proposition.
  
  I entered into the essay The Image of Proust with some trepidation, as I've yet to read his endlessly lauded literary paradigm and did not want to receive spoiling details. Thankfully, Benjamin avoids giving anything of importance away while spinning another measured web on the prime role recollection and forgetting played in the life, and lifework, of this indolent reminiscer. The entire piece is a wonder—wending the difficult prose reveals remarkable burnishing of Proust's image, the two-sided tapestry his great text wove, in which story and characterization were the penumbral opposite of recollection, the structural key in which details of existence were salvaged from the slate gray interweaving of forgetting's loom. The manner in which Benjamin probe's the peculiar coincidence of a bedridden life combining with Proust's fascination with French high society and envy for the innate ability of servants to inhale the entirety of the manners and mores of their social betters is striking, as is the diligent effort he expended towards decoding the hidden language of the aristocracy in order to preserve its timeworn rituals and routines in his immortal search. The end result is but further pressure put upon myself to make that goddamn commitment to this three thousand page siren and get in on the goods, already.
  
  The final entry—Theses on the Philosophy of History, written at a particularly grim stage of the Twentieth Century—besides its arresting wordplay in contrasting Historicism with Historical Materialism, offers food for thought in expounding the messianic component in the latter, and the violence and barbarism ingrained in the cultural objects proudly carried along in the onrushing stream of progressivism.
  
  And it's such gorgeous writing, too:
  
  Experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness. Every glance at a newspaper demonstrates that it has reached a new low, that our picture, not only of the external world but of the moral world as well, overnight has undergone changes which were never thought possible. With the (First) World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent—not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth. And there was nothing remarkable about that. For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.
• 
  Noel

  
  
  I feel I’ve finally found my model here, in Benjamin’s complex intertextual webs and in his flâneur-like strolls through history, politics, literature, and cinema. Or perhaps this always has been my model, even without my knowing it—Benjamin’s interests align so closely with mine that reading this was spending the evening a friend who is passionate about all the same things that you are (although, of course, much smarter). In Benjamin’s world, everything is fragmented and melts into one another; it’s as though every picture or mirror or piece of furniture were a text holding secrets waiting to be unlocked. It’s a world of waking dreams. That’s not to say I understood most, or even half, of what was written here. In fact, it’s the very quality I just described that makes Benjamin so difficult for me to understand. But the flashes of understanding I did have seemed to illuminate the whole world.
• 
  Sebastien

  These are meandering thoughts on the book (especially on Benjamin's Mechanical Reproduction essay). If you have any thoughts, insights, critique on my view I appreciate any comments. The topic of art is something I'm endlessly fascinated by and always love discussing!
  
  I loved the preface by Hannah Arendt, gives insight into mindset and analytical style of Benjamin. Offers perceptive bio framing his life against historical issues and cultural landscape (including situation of Jewish bourgeoisie in Europe at the time which is Benjamin’s background, she also interweaves details from Kafka who also came from this milieu and struggled with similar identity issues facing European Jewish bourgeoisie of that era). The story of Benjamin’s final days and attempt to escape the Nazis from France to Spain is tragic and heartbreaking. I had no idea of this backstory.
  
  There are several essays on Kafka and Proust. Very interesting, Proust is kind of a weird guy but Benjamin offers a lot of insightful commentary on his life and how this influenced Proust's work and his way of dealing with time, memory, past, present, and how this all plays a role in examination of the self. Makes me want to read some Proust but not sure I have the patience for it either, seems very solipsistic and maybe a different time and place in my life I would have been more intrigued... I didn’t realize the extent of Proust’s health issues and suffering which seem to have had a large part in shaping his work. I also enjoyed the essay on Baudelaire which interweaves analysis on modern city life and Baudelaire’s connection and then disillusionment with this situation.
  
  Following paragraphs are my thoughts (like I said meandering) on Benjamin’s essay on Mechanical Reproduction, I will do my best, this would be an essay to reread carefully because there is a lot there, and I don’t doubt I’ve missed certain nuances and points but that won’t stop me from writing about it haha!
  
  This is a very good essay as it hits upon a lot of interesting insights but I have some issues. Let me preface this by saying that I think Benjamin truly knows how to dance around and with a subject, poking and prodding it allowing him to expertly and gradually drill to core issues. So sometimes I disagree with his tone or view, but his insights are keen. It was interesting how he presented the evolution of the purpose of art, how it morphed and changed from cultish function (often times religious/social glue) to more the idea of “art for art’s sake.”
  
  Benjamin delves into issues of who manufactures art and its quality. In this realm he references Alduous Huxley, who brandishes a viewpoint I find mindblowingly elitist and aggravating to my sensibilities. To reduce it, Huxley comes across as the type of guy who thinks only one type of person (genius) is fit to produce art (his example is based on the art of writing), his view is that a greater amount of people creating (due to greater amount of reading public) has led to a high output of garbage art (literally he calls it garbage!) and vulgarity that caters to lowest common denominators. It’s one of the more aggravating excerpts I’ve read, I’ve always had good thoughts about Huxley but this passage was a disappointment for me, smacking of a real aristocratic superiority. It’s a view that not so subtly hints that art should be walled off, and created and consumed by only a specific subset of people. It’s hard for me not to get emotional with such a viewpoint because it touches a raw nerve for me, kind of makes me want to punch people in the face. As if art needs to strive to be only one thing, nestle itself into a small box, and needs to cater to a certain elite “cultured” chosen. Huxley seems to have a narrow definition, that only great art should be made by the men of genius and all else is garbage (I assume garbage is anything that doesn’t speak to him or his particular sensibilities). I don’t even know what good art is! How can one apply such qualitative assessments on what is good and therefore deserves to be made? Is it “mastery” of technique? Style? Universality? Different things appeal to different people which is why I’m happy there is a lot of different kinds of art and diversity of practitioners, creators, and a broad diverse public that consumes the work.
  
  I know there are things I think are good but it doesn't mean it is universally good, it merely means it speaks to me and has some meaning for me. I tend to gravitate towards things that fit my tastes based on style, technique, themes, but I also search for work where the artist seems to have managed to put some truth of their life or experience within their work which I always consider an accomplishment. It doesn’t need to be technically brilliant and mind-blowing, it just needs to communicate to me and make me feel something that I think is important for my life and how I relate to this world, maybe acts as mirror and helps me see things about myself or about others. For me art is about communication, that is broad but I can’t really figure out more specific parameters. Yes it transcends mere passing of information, it is often more ethereal and abstract, nebulous.
  
  Of course I judge art based on my time, place, upbringing, experiences, views, tastes, and am influenced by the people and culture around me, but I will never say something is universally good or great, tastes wax and wane and vary across cultures, all that matters is that something speaks to us. To project one’s personal artistic tastes as being the be all end all definition of what good art is is the height of arrogance and pride imo, so you know I kinda gotta throw Huxley in the doghouse on that one because he might be very brilliant in many ways but from the passage Benjamin quotes he strikes me as the kind of guy who thinks his standard is the only standard (you can tell this is a subject that really riles me up right?! haha)
  
  Benjamin is much more nuanced and doesn’t fall into this elitist trap so easily. Too clever hehe. He is more about looking at issues and stripping the veneer off the subject matter to get a better look at it, look at how the machinery works and how it has evolved. He’s not blindly denouncing anything that doesn’t fit his standard although he is asking piercing questions that hints at some of his uneasiness (some of which is justified for sure). It is a very good essay and hits so many interesting points, and there is just so much to talk about. But one problem is that I feel he has a fetishization of original object (his argument is that reproduction leads to a destruction or “withering of aura” breaking the art away from tradition and history). He seems to place traditional art forms (painting) on a pedestal, I feel he has a lot of nostalgia for this mode. In his eyes the modern art techniques like film are not all bad, in fact they have a lot of potential due to the force of their democratizing possibilities, but they also feature a capacity to exploit, dominate, indoctrinate, and subjugate people. To be fair I think one can make an argument that this is not new at all, for example painting and previous modes of art were exploited in such a manner by the Catholic church, maybe not as broadly due to limitations of the medium but churches and art within them were tools and had broad reach in both physical but also spiritual realms/lives of people living in medieval Europe, certainly exploited to gain greater power and exert social control. In a similar vein in these eras many paintings were commissioned by powerful elites to project power. And acknowledging this doesn't mean I don't like this work, in fact there is a lot of art from this era - most especially the Northern Renaissance - that I love for multiple reasons, including craftsmanship and style of certain works but also the historical and cultural aspects of the works.
  
  And it’s funny because for me my favorite art form is painting, but I don’t attach more significance to it than I do to film or writing or many other forms of artistic communication. It is a tool like all the others and even if I love painting I try my best not to overly fetishize/mythologize the art object. But hey full disclosure I’m not immune to enchantment, I love love love sitting in front of a painting, looking at how it is painted, love knowing the artist’s hand was there because it creates a connection to the original creation point and connection to the artist (or team of artists if they worked in a workshop) that transcends time and space, and there is a meditative quality to looking at the static image. As Benjamin mentions this is in contrast to the moving image which by its constant flood of image after image exacts what he calls a "shock effect" on the viewer, hampering the ability to think and process the constant stream of visual info. I don't think this medium precludes the ability to think deeply on the material but it is easy to get lulled into being a mere receptacle. Anyways yes I like paintings, I like the static image, but sometimes becoming too obsessed with this mythologization of object we paradoxically becoming blinded to it and what is directly in front of us!
  
  In my estimation each medium has its own positive and negative aspects, ultimately it comes down to the creators and their ability to leverage whatever medium they choose. Maybe my thinking is more democratic about art and modern techniques because I was raised with them, I’ve consumed a lot of visual forms and I enjoy film a lot. I don’t come from a world where the artist’s hand is the only avenue for creation so Benjamin sometimes seems a bit quaint to me with some of these arguments. Maybe I miss some of his nuance even though I have to agree that some of his critiques of modern art forms are on point but the negative aspects of the critique are overemphasized vs the positive aspects, while the reverse is true for how he treats the older modes like painting.
  
  Now this obsession with aura… I don’t know, tbh it just straight up annoys me but the discussion is rather fascinating. I find him overly obsessed with the object and its materiality, and while I do think there is importance to seeing a physical piece in the flesh and witness it in its context I think he goes overboard in placing the art object in this mystical realm. He deconstructs film as being too manufactured, too sliced and diced in the effort to create illusion (also there is no actual original object, he really doesn't like this!). But you know, painting is all illusion too, filled with various techniques, color strategies, perspective, composition, all in the effort to create various visual illusions. That film is created via the camera lens is a detriment in his eyes, taking away the human hand. But even more traditional mediums have artificiality and limitations, for instance the painter is often limited by the very nature of the 2d canvas/wood-panel (well that is the preferred format on average), so there is artificiality within this pursuit as well. Sometimes I think the focus on the artificiality of photography and film has more to do with these being new techniques of the modern age, and in a way this newness is frightening to people like Benjamin who were witnessing a flux of new techniques and mediums. But to overlook the artificiality of previous modes of creation is a bit silly to me, even if the human hand was more involved in past times it was still using tricks of technique to create illusion (heck I wonder what he’d have to say about the use of the camera obscura going way back, it’s highly likely that many artists including Vermeer were using this technique to capture greater realism within their work. Does this take away from the paintings so-called “aura” because an artificial lens/lens-like technique was used to create the illusion?).
  
  Benjamin is more balanced than a lot of the other Frankfurt school philosophers who just hate mass culture and see it as a tool of control that flattens and deadens thought. I think Benjamin recognizes both the potential benefits and potential dangers of mass culture and art. Now what he says on the issue concerning concentration of viewer vs distraction is interesting. Why and how we consume art are key issues and I like the exploration of this question. Sometimes if distraction is our only reason for visiting art we become mere receptacles, but if we approach art with concentration we can pierce through content and think through it, more of a meeting in the middle. But even on this issue I think people should consume art however they see fit, whether it be via concentration or the goal of distraction. I prefer the idea of concentration, that’s just my preference but yes I do consume things to distract as well. So it’s not always just one way, it depends.
  
  As Benjamin explains in the essay originally much art served a cultic or religious function. Over time there was a greater shift to the mentality of art for art’s sake (which as an idea I find a bit silly). As I said, to distill my view I see art as a mode of communication that helps us connect with each other and try to better understand this world, life experience, others, ourselves; a conduit to share ideas and experience. To critique the "art for art's sake" I'd say this, I doubt we would make art if we alone existed and no other humans existed. Art is a bridge, and when we are lucky it can help us expand our minds, help us transcend daily reality, allow us to share ideas and experience, make us connect with things beyond ourselves, reveal insights into our own selves and the world we live in.
• 
  Ian "Marvin" Graye

  Sentimentality
  
  I still talk about "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" 30 years after I first read it.
  
  I don't remember it as a purely political tract, even though that is how it is all dressed up.
  
  I think Benjamin displayed some degree of sentimentality and attachment to the original work of art. Its uniqueness, its cult value, its authenticity, its ability to "illuminate".
  
  Ironically, the way that we relate to mechanically reproduced books now replicates this sentimentality, even though it's rare for a book to be a single surviving copy (although I bet that it happens more than we suspect).
  
  Digital Reproduction
  
  If Benjamin were to write his book now, it would probably be called and reconceived as "The Work of Art in the Age Of Digital Reproduction".
  
  Everything now has the ability to be digitally replicated and available.
  
  Even though he might have appreciated the increased access to culture (provided that you have cable), his attachment to his library parallels his appreciation of "illuminations".
  
  I like mine too, just like I love my CD collection.
  
  However, there are many people out there (here) who don't care for CD's and paper inserts, they just want the mp3, the music.
  
  The Container versus the Contents
  
  The method of reproduction is preoccupied with the container, whereas many people are now more interested in the contents.
  
  The wine versus the bottle (I originally thought this analogy was from Nicholas Negroponte's "Being Digital". However, it might actually come from John Perry Barlow's "Selling Wine Without Bottles").
  
  The Future of Sentimentality
  
  Just as we have become sentimental about mechanical reproduction, I suspect that those who follow us will become sentimental about something else.
  
  If we're lucky, it might be the verb (experiencing the act of communication) rather than the noun (the receptacle of the content).
  
  The Message is the Message
  
  Many of us grew up to believe that the medium is the message. One day, the message might be the message again.
  
  I just hope that the quality of the message remains.
• 
  Bekhradaa

  56
  در زبان ناب آغازین "نام تنها جنبه ناب وجودی هر چیز را نشان میداد" ... ژولیت شکسپیر از خود می پرسید: "چه چیز در یک نام پنهان است؟" و می اندیشید که نام گل سرخ هر چه باشد تفاوتی در حضور آن نمیدهد و نام رومئو هر چه باشد تفاوتی در واقعیت هستی او نمیدهد: "پس رها کن نامت را، رومئو". بنیامین نیز می گوید: "در بهشت هنوز نیازی به مبارزه با معانی نشانه گونه واژه ها نبود. منظورم معانی موجد ارتباط است". تنها با رهایی از مفاهیم اخلاقی و ارزشی که با هر نام هستند، می توان راه را به سوی "شناخت ناب" گشود
  
  37
  تناقضی که نوگرایی با روح آفریننده آدمی دارد بیرون توان تحمل آدمی است. می توان فهمید که چگونه انسان خسته و از پا افتاده به سوی مرگ رانده می شود. نوگرایی را باید با نشان خودکشی شناخت. نشانی بر کنشی قهرمانی
  
  36
  درحالیکه در دهه 1930، بنیامین، بلوخ و اندیشمندان مکتب فرانکفورت "تاریخ و آگاهی طبقاتی" را ستایش می کردند، خود لوکاچ زیر فشار رژیم پلیسی شوروی و رهبران کمینترن عقایدی که در این کتاب ابراز کرده بود را مردود میشمرد و در انتقاد از خود می نوشت که "روحیه و مباحث ایدئالیستی کتاب را باید انحرافی دانست"
• 
  Josh Friedlander

  I'd lie if I said that I understood more than - charitably - fifty percent of these essays. Besides for the mountains of literary references and the oblique angles from which Benjamin approaches his subjects, his languid, flâneur-like writing makes it difficult to follow his train of thought. Still, the beauty of such writing, and the tendency toward hyperbole so characteristic of the Frankfurt School, have no doubt played a great role in Benjamin's reputation as a critic.
  
  These essays, selected by Hannah Arendt, focus on a number of Modernist writers (Proust, Kafka, Baudelaire, Leskov [whom I hadn't heard of], Brecht) and their approach to society. As a Marxist, Benjamin saw the cultural as tightly embedded in the political - as he concludes the most best-known essay in the book, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Fascism seeks to make the aesthetic political (glorifying war and destruction), and Communism must respond by politicising the aesthetic. Thus he sees the decline of the culture of storytelling as symptomatic of the increasing demands on our time placed by industrialisation and urbanisation. Boredom, the prime condition for storytelling, no longer exists ("Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov"). In another essay, he recalls Poe's and Baudelaire's respective takes on an imagined crowd scene, both regarding with growing horror the single-minded intensity of the crowd, and their utter alienation (in the Marxist sense) from each other and themselves ("On Some Motifs in Baudelaire").
  
  Benjamin is fascinated by Proust, focusing on the Bergsonian metaphysics underpinning In Search of Lost Time. From what I understand of Bergson's philosophy, he claims that only by ignoring our subjective experience of time and connecting to the atemporal durée can we transcend causality and experience true freedom. Thus Proust searches for his childhood memories, attempting to restore his unadulterated youthful happiness through mental effort. Perhaps it is not a stretch to see Benjamin politicising this thought, seeing society as undergoing a similar transformation through the overthrow of the bourgeois societal status quo and the return to the more authentic state of nature.
  
  The other essays focus on some literary trends with remarkable prescience. One is a deep reading of Kafka's absurdism, and its relation to Jewish culture (in 1940, the year of Benjamin's death, Kafka was still a little-known figure, at least in the English-speaking world). A shorter essay describing Brecht's idea of the Epic Theatre (stripped of the attempt at realism, and full of meta-theatrical devices to confuse and startle the audience) presages Tom Stoppard, Samuel Beckett, and countless art films. The final essay consists of some rather Gnomic statements on Hegel's Philosophy of History.
  
  Contrary to its subtitle, this book is rather more one of "Reflections", and less one of "Essays", in the Montaignian sense. Benjamin swirls his brush into society, politics, and art, and teases out the gossamer threads connecting artistic creation and social change. In the finest spirit of Modernism, he delves into the unconscious, seeking to understand the changes we have wrought, the ills in our society, and the ephemeral presence of beauty amongst cruelty and dehumanisation. Sadly, he could not escape the march of that inhumanity, which was close on his heels at the time that he took his own life.
• 
  Geoff

  Benjamin's writings on Proust, Kafka, Baudelaire and Leskov are really brilliant and engrossing. I was especially taken with his history of the storyteller in relation to Leskov's stories, how the verbal communication that was the initial component of storytelling dissipated after the fragmenting of human experience that came along with the realities of the industrial revolution and the barbarism of World War I, as if history itself killed mankind's ability to actually feel and process experience, and how this sets the modern novel outside the tradition of storytelling. His essay on Proust inspired me to start in on a second reading of Swann's Way, and his ideas on Baudelaire in relation to Poe and the history of the flaneur have been echoed by numerous critics hence. Really, anyone interested in the art of writing needs to give some time to this collection. The introduction is also a very compelling review of Benjamin's life and thought. And thankfully, at least in this collection (but less so in "Reflections"), he does not siphon his ideas on art through his sometimes annoying Marxist filter. This is essential stuff.
• 
  Argos

  “Parıltılar” çoğu kısa hatta bir paragraflık, üç tanesi ise uzunca olan çok sayıda denemesinden oluşmaktadır. Bu uzun denemelerinden biri “Çevirmenin İşlevi” başlıklı ilginç bir metin. “Yıkıcı Karakter” başlıklı kısa denemesi ise bir faşistin resmini mükemmel bir şekilde çizmektedir.
  W. Benjamin’in düşünce yapısı değişik ve bazen çelişkili görülüyor, bu durumu Meral Özbek “Walter Benjamin’i Okumak” başlıklı akademik çalışmasında (Ank. Üniv. SBF Dergisi, 55-2) onun felsefi düşüncesini Yahudi mistisizmi kaynaklı bir kurtuluş felsefesiyle tarihi ve materyalist diyalektik felsefenin bir alaşımından oluşmasına bağlamaktadır. Ondaki bu alaşımın derin bir düşünme, kapsamlı bir araştırma ve eşsiz bir yazma tarzıyla birarada olduğunu vurgulamaktadır.
  Bu düşünce “Parıltılar”ı okuyunca net olarak görülüyor. Felsefe ve W. Benjamin’e ilgi duyanlara öneririm.
• 
  Dan

  I found “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”, “Theses on the philosophy of history”, and Arendt's introduction the best parts of this book. Unless you are into literature, Marxist, popular, and fashionable criticism; you cannot appreciate much of the rest of the book. It also convinced me to read Baudelaire.
• 
  Anna

  I'd come across
  Walter Benjamin mentioned in various non-fiction (e.g
  In Search of Lost Books: The forgotten stories of eight mythical volumes) and long been fascinated by
  The Arcades Project. Indeed, I own a copy but haven't yet tackled its immensity.
  Illuminations seemed like a suitable introduction to Benjamin's writing. It was edited and is introduced at length by
  Hannah Arendt. As a known sceptic of long introductions to books of theory (which put me off Marx's Capital and Lefebvre's
  Critique of Everyday Life for years), I was pleased to find Arendt's clear, well-structured, and enlightening. Rather than placing a barrier in front of the book, her introduction enhances the reading experience. It provides a succinct synopsis of Benjamin's life, work, and milieu. Inevitably, there is great emphasis on his extraordinary bad luck. Benjamin's timing was, tragically, always wrong. Arendt wonders whether he was born too late to be a man of letters, whereas I found myself thinking that he could also have been a blogger and contemporary writer of cultural commentary. Indeed, he is apparently the progenitor of those popular montage-style tumblr posts:
  
  

  The main work consisted in tearing fragments out of their context and arranging them afresh in such a way that they illustrated one another and were able to prove their raison d'être in a free-floating state, as it were. It definitely was a sort of surrealistic montage.

  
  
  
  Illuminations collects writing on books, poetry, theatre, historiography, and art. Benjamin was nothing if not eclectic. This makes general commentary on the collection as a whole difficult. My experiences of each essay varied quite a bit. 'Unpacking My Library' was easy to read but surprisingly unmemorable; 'Franz Kafka' was hard to follow and I cannot say I understood much of it. Conversely, I found 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire' fascinating and 'The Storyteller' full of insight. I also learned two new words: apodictically (expressing certainty/truth) and banausic (mundane, technical).
  
  I wasn't very surprised that the clear highlight of the collection was an essay I've seen cited repeatedly, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'. This remains rewarding and thought-provoking in the age of mechanical reinterpretation, when machine learning can be used to remix existing art into seemingly new works (if they can be considered such). Benjamin's analysis of how mechanical reproduction of art changes our relationship with it is of interest both in the historical context when it was written and now, when mechanical reproduction of art has become effectively instant.
  
  He quotes Paul Valéry predicting this very thing: 'Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.' Just so, a swipe of the finger summons a new algorithmically-chosen selection of static and moving images, with optional sounds. Benjamin's contemplations on film still apply quite neatly to the disorientating, agitating quality of online videos:
  
  

  Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it has already changed. Duhamel, who detests the film and knows nothing of its significance, though something of its structure, notes this circumstance as follows, 'I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.' The spectator's process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change.
  
  This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned bt heightened presence of mind. By means of its technical structure, the film has taken the physical shock effect out of wrappers in which Dadaism had, as it were, kept it inside the moral shock effect.

  
  
  The final sentences of this essay seem uncomfortably relevant in a time of neo-fascism: '[Humanity's] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics that fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicising art.'
  
  Briefer and more fragmentary but equally memorable, my other favourite in the collection was 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'. It too has notable significance to the present, as well as some beautifully chilling imagery:
  
  

  This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

  
  
  Benjamin turned out to be as intriguingly idiosyncratic as I'd heard. Although the essays in
  Illuminations are a varied bunch, they all exhibit a striking voice and unusual intelligence. I don't pretend to understand or fully appreciate every one of them, but found all distinctive and several really powerful. I feel a little more prepared for
  The Arcades Project now.
• 
  lisa_emily

  Reading Benjamin makes me realize how 98% of the conversations I have are a waste of time. His depth reaches far and his reading spreads vast.
• 
  Vartika

  Reading literary and aesthetic criticism with barely any context is a habit I've picked up in these strange times; with Illuminations, this exercise has been fairly rewarding and quite frustrating in equal measure.
  
  I picked up this book for the famous essay on art in the age of mechanical reproduction, but I quite enjoyed reading Benjamin's reflections on book collecting; on Proust eating a cookie and stumbling upon lost time; on Brechtian theatre; on the history of storytelling told through Leskov; and on Baudelaire in the crowd . Despite not having read Leskov, Baudelaire, or Proust in any capacity; or perhaps because of it; I found the essays concerning their works and their thematic exploration of time and memory intriguing; Benjamin's essays on Kafka, on the other hand, came off as rather dated and quite hard to get through. The bigger disappointment, though, was "The Task of the Translator," which rather ironically was the one whose eloquence felt tragically lost in translation.
  
  While I probably understood less than half of this book (and have retained even lesser), I feel humbled by Benjamin's range and touched by the way he writes, i.e. in near psychedelic meditations that reflect upon and illuminate some of the most important issues in modernist times — be it memory, art, the aesthetic politics of Fascism, history, or the principles of social democracy.
  
  Equally deserving of praise is
  Hannah Arendt's brilliant introduction to this book and to the life and work of Walter Benjamin. I particularly liked the section on posthumous fame and the parallels between Benjamin and Kafka, as well as the way Arendt talks about the former's death. It was also in this essay that I found the exceptionally and historically eerie fact of

  a report from Vienna dated summer 1939, saying that the local gas company had 'stopped supplying gas to Jews. The gas consumption of the jewish population involved a loss for the gas company, since the biggest consumers were the ones who did not pay their bills. The Jews used the gas especially for committing suicide'

  which appeared next to a love poem in Benjamin's collection of quotations. That's one amongst things I feel both guilty and amused to have learnt through this book.
  
  All that aside, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in theory, especially those who have more context to the subject matter than I did. I would also leave the task of assigning this book a star rating to such a reader, or to myself in the occassion I return to this book better-equipped.
• 
  Aslı Can

  Benjamin bu dünyadan gelmiş geçmiş en tatlı, en naif ruhlardan birisi. Rüya gibi onun yazılarını okumak. Gerçeküstü ve salt gerçeğin birbirinin içinde eridiği bir rüya.
  
  Çeviri yaklaşımını inanılmaz feci buldum. Benjamin'in içinden bir Nietczhe çıkarmış adeta çervirmen. ''ırzına geçmek'' gibi tabirlerin kullanılmasının metnin dokusunu ve Benjamin'in üslubunu zedelediğini düşünüyorum.
• 
  Claire Cray

  Five years ago I discovered Walter Benjamin. I had never been much for theory before, and my initial encounter with his writing was sort of like one of those old 3D puzzle pictures: first, a dense field of mesmerizing psychedelic prose, and then POW! MEANING!
  
  I don't gush over philosophy often, I swear (okay, I don't swear swear, but like, 89% swear) -- but this is love. His haunting theories and beautiful metaphors have stayed on my mind ever since that sunny afternoon in Portland, Oregon when I sat gaping in wonder at my photocopy of "The Task of the Translator." No writer has ever made such a huge impact on my perceptions of thoughts, words, and art.
  
  If there's one thing I wish I could include in more conversations, it's Walter Benjamin!
• 
  Elena Sala

  ILLUMINATIONS is the first part of a collection of essays and musings written by Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). Benjamin is well known for his philosophical analysis of literature and culture. He had a way of looking at things which made them no longer familiar: he thought nothing is as it appears to be, for this reason he became a scholar of appearances.
  
  Benjamin greatly influenced Sebald's writing. Sebald quotes Benjamin's thesis about the angel of history in his book ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF DESTRUCTION to question the relationship between progress and ruination. This is the central theme of Sebald's oeuvre so Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History " is indispensable reading for those interested in Sebald's work.
  
  This tome includes Hannah Arendt's introduction with an essay about Benjamin's life and the dark times in which he lived. His essays on Proust and Kafka are simply brilliant. Benjamin is a must read for those interested in cultural criticism.
• 
  Leonard Houx

  me: i started trying to do a heidegger thing. just finished the 'basic writings' book. but am not feeling totally enthused.
  William: ugh
  why heidegger?
  me: i dunno. because he is so central? influential?
  it is just a little boring. a little, like: what's the point?
  William: seriously
  i have to finish up my heidegger-hoelderlin chapter and i'm so bored with heidegger
  so stodgy and airless
  me: totally
  William: in contrast, if you read walter benjamin, from walter you can get interested in a myriad of different subjects: history, german romanticism, theater, capitalism, brecht
  whereas if you read heidegger, it's this lonely little room where it's just fucking BEING all the time
• 
  Murtaza

  The destruction of Jewish Vienna came along with many attendant tragedies, but perhaps none was as poignant as the suicide of Walter Benjamin after he’d been driven into exile by the Nazi war machine. One thing I learned from this collection of essays introduced by Hannah Arendt is that his fame was largely posthumous. In his time, Benjamin was far less known than he is today. In my mind that makes him even more remarkable. Even in translation his writing is captivating. Through the circuitous route of literary criticism, he confronted the most pressing issue of his generation: the emergence of industrial civilization and mass society.
  
  Of the essays in this collection the most memorable ones to me were his famous essay on the consequences of the mechanical reproduction of art, storytelling in the modern age, his reflections on Baudelaire and Kafka and finally a short essay on the joys of book collecting which would undoubtedly touch the heart of any reader. Benjamin had a strange style of writing in which there are long passages in which he is very hard to follow (although his meanderings are somehow still rendered beautiful by his gifted writing) before dropping some explosively powerful observation seemingly out of nowhere. This is a book of scattered gems that you have to go looking for.
  
  In the last two centuries such rapid and overwhelming changes have taken place in human life such as have never been experienced by all the generations who lived before us. The sensory environment we live in has been filled with unprecedented symbols, sounds, explosions and signals. Politics meanwhile has been transformed by the tools of the mass control of human beings; something which many foresaw would deliver the terrifying phenomena of fascism and authoritarian communism. Benjamin did his best to parse through these changes, always with the awareness of how monumental and disorientating they were.
  
  Literary criticism seems to have been the way people used to make certain arguments about the present, a kind of theological parsing of secular texts for eternal meaning. For people like us I suspect it would’ve been better to just make the points directly; I’d be lying to say that I understood every word Benjamin wrote because the textual and cultural references he used were simply too foreign. But one cannot fault a person for writing for the age in which they lived. I’m glad that Benjamin earned the recognition in posterity that he was denied in life. He was a beautiful writer who dealt with an evolving dilemma that all of us are still grappling with today, even as we have mostly surrendered to it.
  
• 
  Caroline

  
  From the last chapter: Theses on the Philosophy of History
  
  

  The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are exoeriencing are "still" possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge--unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.
• 
  Steven Godin

  This is a hard one to score, as on the one hand this guy was obviously a genius of a thinker and had a mind that made me look like a retarded cow in comparison whilst reading him, but on the other hand I'm not somebody, politically speaking, that can big up Marxism. The pieces on Brecht, Proust, and Kafka were the highlights for me.
• 
  Tosh

  Walter Benjamin just had that vision to see what was underneth his subject matter. Wonderful writer who can look at each layer of whatever subject matter he's writing about. Cultural critic before there were cultural critics. Now this is a man you would like to sit down and have a glass of wine with him. Alas not here with us anymore, so the second best thing is to have a glass of wine and read this book.
• 
  Alex Sarll

  I’d encountered Benjamin more through the way The Arcades Project always tends to crop up as one of the foundational texts of psychogeography, but you don’t go in on a thousand-page unfinished (and probably always unfinishable) volume as your first encounter with a writer, do you*? So when I saw this in the library, I thought I’d give it a go. First surprise: about a third of the book is taken up with the introduction, which would normally be taking the piss, but this one is by Hannah Arendt, which puts a different complexion of matters. While full of praise for Benjamin, she also details the many ways in which his life was ridiculous. That refusal at the Spanish border which precipitated his suicide, for instance - had he arrived the day before, or the day after, he would apparently have got through just fine. How's that for timing? Which set part of me wondering, had it not been for his consistently awful timing, would we have heard of the poor bastard at all? Just like most of the war poets would be happily forgotten today had they been lucky enough to stay at home writing 'O why/Am I/So sensitive?' as nature intended, instead of gaining the illusion of substance with 'O why/Am I/In a trench?’ Because make no mistake, the first few essays here are very silly. ‘Unpacking my Library’ is exactly the sort of title which would usually get me on side, but when Benjamin’s detailing his collection of whole categories of books he doesn’t even much like, he comes across like a bad parody of the Continental intellectual. Which also means, of course, that he’s given to grand sweeping statements of system and theory, the sort which sound good at first but which don’t bear the slightest examination. At times it goes past even that into simple errors of fact: Mnemosyne was not the epic muse at all, for instance, but her mother. And the whole essay on storytellers - which at least makes some direct reference to its ostensible subject, Leskov (unlike the one on translators which fails to mention Baudelaire beyond the title, instead sticking to lofty generalities) contrasts the storyteller with the novelist, while seemingly never realising that the latter field includes several of the former under varying degrees of cover. If the novel is something one encounters alone, what of the Victorian paterfamilias reading Dickens to the assembled clan? And so forth.
  
  Still, once Benjamin does properly get on to Baudelaire, he's mostly brilliant - a reading through Freud seems of questionable use, but the correspondences to Proust are enlightening, and he's dead on with the idea of Baudelaire as at once the last great lyric poet and the one who sees the end of the traditional audience for lyric poetry. This is also one of the first encounters with a theme which will recur at the book’s glorious finale: humanity's war with time. Alas, there’s more slog to come before we get there – but always with just enough glimmers of brilliance to keep you going. He’s prescient regarding newspapers as atomising the people, and the increasingly haptic everyday world. Every so often there’s a perfect image, like the idea of the proverb as a ruin where once a story stood. Or this, from the piece on Proust: “This is what ages us – this and nothing else. The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called on us but we, the masters, were not home.”
  
  And then the collection shows us it’s closer kin to the gig than the compilation album, because rather than opening with the hits, it ends with them. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’** is ultimately much better on politics (“Fascism sees its salvation in giving the masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.”) than it is on art, where its problem is that it was simply written too soon, with too little material or perspective. When Benjamin talks about how the audience identify with the lens, not the actor, or how the painter lays on hands but the film dissects – well, some films do one, some the other (and conversely, of course, some paintings dissect – Benjamin would never have seen Bacon). When he says that unlike the stage actor and his character, the film versions have no aura…really? Because I can’t think of a better word for what the greats of Hollywood’s golden age especially possessed. And I doubt even a Garrick, Irving or Bernhardt had more of it. Beyond that, many of what purport to be analyses are really just the old moan that it’s not like it was in my day, or rather my preferred edit of the day slightly before my day. The idea that cinema is inherently less real, less magical than theatre is exactly the same snobbery currently being replayed in Cannes, except now it’s all about how Netflix and Amazon could never be as real or magical as the cinema. Benjamin pays less attention to music, but glancingly makes much the same suggestion regarding recorded versus live music. Well, that one I’ve seen get several remakes in my time alone: it used to be vinyl DJs looking down on CD DJs, then CD DJs looking down on MP3 DJs, and now even the MP3 DJs look down on the people using playlists. Or how about the idea of the actor as reduced to just another prop? Here it’s a moan re: film in general – nowadays you see it reproduced exactly, except that fans of classic cinema instead use it as a stick with which to beat special effects blockbusters. Funnier still is the realisation that Benjamin never admits he's part of his subject – he handwaves away the reasons this thesis doesn’t apply to printing versus manuscripts (the real reason, obviously, is that he’s used to printed books), but the editor’s notes admit that his own handwriting was largely illegible, that there are errors in published magazine versions of his essays, and that on the one occasion when they could compare the two manifold differences were apparent.
  
  And yet. After that farrago, the volume closes with 'Theses on the Philosophy of History’. Which is simply staggering. Best known for its image of the angel of history, or the idea that there is no record of civilisation that is not also a record of barbarism, it’s full of similarly compelling material. If anything it’s the most aphoristic piece here, but unlike its predecessors it aims that bit higher, offers that bit more to unpack, manages to trip itself up so much less. It’s definitely something which deserves not just reading but rereading, the sort of text philosophical schools are founded around. Except much better than most of them.
  
  In summary: skip to the end.
  
  *OK, yes, I did with Dostoevsky, and quite liked it. But as a rule…
  **I already did the Grease 2 joke on Facebook.
• 
  Cool_guy

  Worth the price of admission for the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction alone. Much in the other essays was interesting, although they're too studded with references to 19th Cent French literature for a rube like me to understand fully.
  
  I didn't find Hannah Arendt introduction very "illuminating" hahahaha
• 
  Lady Selene

  "Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli".
  - verse 1286 of De litteris, De syllabis, De Metris by Terentianus Maurus; literally, "According to the capabilities of the reader, books have their destiny"
  
  Difficult to rate when one finds oneself halfway either agreeing with or being bewildered by Walter Benjamin.
  
  His 'Unpacking the Library' essay is, obviously, my favourite, it's pleasant to find oneself nodding along to the sentences, we see eye to eye, Walter and I, in terms of Books: Walter argues that buying an old book is rebirth, that a collector's desire is to renew an old, possibly forgotten world. To a book collector, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves. There is no sense of (vulgar) 'ownership', the books do not come alive in the collector, it is he who lives in them.
  
  "And the non-reading of books owned, you will object, should be characteristic of collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. Experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world. Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, 'And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?' 'Not one-tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sevres china every day?' "
  
  The Baudelaire essay taught me of Engels having an unpleasant aesthetic reaction to the crowds of London, as opposed to the French masters (Delvar), but where Engels is just a peasant boy from Barmen (yes, the very place where one of the first concentrations camps was opened in Germany), with daddy-money (that was coming from owning a large textile factory in Britain), who would always be bothered by crowds, for the Parisians moving in a crowd is a natural thing.
  
  Some random, personal thoughts on reading 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' essay:
  
  Yes, even the most perfect reproduction of art is lacking one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
  
  But what a thing to ponder in our contemporary world. How many physical copies are there of
  Fiammetta ? How many duplicates of these? How many digital duplicates of these? Has
  Fiammetta lost its soul? Or has it merely stretched itself out, giving a small piece of itself to every owner of every copy? And do I answer my own question simply by being conflicted whether to use the pronoun 'it' or 'she' in the last sentence?
  
  We have two scholars of the Viennese school, Piergl and Wickehoff to thank for being the first to point out that human sense changes with humanity's entire mode of existence and that social transformations were moulded by these changes of perception (photography).
  
  In this world of contemporary perception, a world in which the tradition of Art/Book ownership is rendered invalid by the Internet, how can one still debate the soul of
  Fiammetta , without sounding like one is off one's meds?
  
  Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself.
• 
  sologdin

  key moment of frankfurt marxism. well known for "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction" as well as the "theses on the philosophy of history." less famous contributions are great, too.
  
  there is of course a mysticism here that is somewhat dangerous, potentially arriere garde. must cogitate further.
• 
  Elliot

  This book made me feel alternately confused and like a genius, and I feel like that’ll be true no matter how much I revisit it. There’s a remarkable moral and philosophical coherence to Benjamin that I find so compelling, which is Marxism. So dumb that so many of his contemporaries denounced this facet of his thought, which, to me, is its center