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58 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the great, unclassifiable writers of the century, March 4, 1998
This review is from: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (Paperback)
Walter Benjamin is easily one of the great German prose writers of our century, despite being almost impossible to classify. His subject matter is frequently literary, but he always transcends his subject matter to touch upon issues in philosophy, art, history, Marxism, and Western culture, illuminating (no pun intended) all he discusses. His essays on Proust and Kafka are priceless, and his essays on "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and the theses on the philsophy of history, are classic. But the best reason to read Benjamin is his prose. There are images in his essays on Proust and Kafka that are as superb as anything in Proust and Kafka. That is saying a lot, but it is true. As a philosopher, I value his example which proves that one can write meaningfully on philosophical topics, and yet write well. This collection of his essays, ILLUMINATIONS, is preferable to the second collection to appear in English, REFLECTIONS, though that one is also worth the time and effort.
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102 of 111 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful, every sentence an insight, November 25, 2000
This review is from: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (Paperback)
Benjamin is one of the few 20th century philosophers who can convey profound thoughts in language that isn't at all opaque. His sentences are always perfectly clear - no pretentious literary or Marxist jargon (thank God). The only thing that makes it slow reading is that you always want to stop, put the book down, and think about what he's just said. For example, a passage from his essay on Kafka: 'The definition of it which Kafka has given applies to the sons more than to anyone else: "Original sin, the old injustice committed by man, consists in the complaint that he has been the victim of an injustice, the victim of original sin." But who is accused of this inherited sin - the sin of having produced an heir - if not the father by the son? Accordingly the son would be the sinner. But one must not conclude from Kafka's definition that the accusation is sinful because it is false. Nowhere does Kafka say that it is made wrongfully. A never-ending process is at work here, and no cause can appear in a worse light than the one for which the father enlists the aid of these officials and court offices . . . ' This is not opacity for the sake of being opaque; he is trying to get at something incredibly complex, something that (unlike most literary criticism) actually helps you appreciate Kafka and understand him a little better. Benjamin doesn't peel away layers of an onion to arrive at a single shining insight; he presents a simple idea, expands on it a little, and lets you put on the layers of complexity yourself. Read these essays carefully, and it will be obvious why entire schools of thought have sprung up around single paragraphs, why people have devoted their lives to figuring out the ramifications of a single sentence . . . Benjamin accomplishes something rare: in writing about art, he succeeds in telling us something about life in modern times. And his insights never seem forced; they flow naturally from what he is discussing. For example, his essay on Leskov, "This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places - the activies that are intimately associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the comminity of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeated stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained." A simple little paragraph on storytelling, but soon you start thinking about how the art of writing has changed since Benjamin's time, and what effect television and the movies have had on the way we live, on "boredom" and mental relaxation . . . anyway, I'm probably starting to get pretentious which Benjamin, thankfully, never does. Above all this entire collection is filled with something increasingly rare nowadays, a genuine love of books. Forget all the Marxist stuff in other reviews, all Benjamin is really doing, finally, is talking about some books that he likes. That he succeeds in doing much more is a testament to his brilliance.
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89 of 97 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Benjamin's Greatest Hits, November 27, 2001
This review is from: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (Paperback)
This is the only theoretical text that I have read, with pleasure, in recent memory. Given the conventional prolixity, obfuscation, and circumlocution of contemporary academic prose in the humanities, the fact that you can read Benjamin with pleasure marks him as outstanding. Benjamin's project was itself outstanding. He aimed at a synthesis of Marxism, mysticism, German romanticism--in a sense, theology, materialist philosophy, and poetry. His critical approaches and thinking embodies the characteristics he praises in literary texts; Benjamin thinks poetically. This eclectic collection of material, emphasizing Benjamin's later (and more Marxist) ideas, is not unlike a sampler of related but different confections. It's mistaken to think of Benjamin's various intellectual leanings as discrete ideologies or outright contradictions; instead, to borrow from Wittgenstein, consider his ideas to be different members of a family that resemble one another and are clearly related but live different lives in different contexts. Benjamin's essay "Unpacking my Library," for example, looks on the surface like a confession of self-indulgence, but (in my opinion) deals in a clever and powerful way with the ways in which we inherit, buy, trade, classify, and value our heritage and cultures. This is truly fascinating material!
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