Customer Reviews

Walter Benjamin's Archive: Images, Texts, Signs

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It's always wonderful to look into a book or magazine that consists largely of photographs of pages from other books, partly because nothing photographs better,and partly because you are seeing the page in something both like and unlike its native habitat, like an animal in the better kind of zoo.

Because the texts are presented this way, as photographs of autographs (notebooks, postcards, trial drafts of essays, collected photographs with notations), the distance between reader and author is inescapable. Often, when we see a famous text (sometimes,e.g when it's newly translated into contemporary language), we will remark on how contemporary the story feels, how the writer, long dead, feels like someone you know or could know. But with pages like these, the patina of time is present, and so is all of the strangeness of the writer, as much as is left. There's nothing like a trip to the archives to get your bearings relative to a writer; to locate him/her in time, and to feel the presence of time, both as the writer felt it in gathering these scraps together, and as you feel it now.

My favorite image from Benjamin's writing is the Angel of History, who is pinned in the air, blown back and upright by a wind from Paradise (from the Beginning), while all the garbage of every passing moment piles up at her feet. Something like a librarian. Being the angel of history makes movement difficult if not impossible, even when you have to leave Germany to save your life. You can read about that, but it's wonderful to have a chance to see pages from those books. If you're a Benjamin completionist, you will need to buy this book, but even if all you've read are the essays in Arendt's little collection, you will enjoy the added sense of the presence and loss of their author, just the same.

Amazon's star rating system goes askew on this book.

If you are a devoted fan of Walter Benjamin, then it is essential. On the other hand, if you are like me---who has never read Mr. Benjamin's works ---then it won't be such a useful purchase.

Without a flowing textual narrative, this book provides detailed examples of the scraps and notes kept by Mr. Benjamin, who was a compulsive hoarder of all mundane things tied to his highly intellectual pursuits during most of the first half of the last century