Illuminations

Illuminations (1969)
By Walter Benjamin

Synopsis: This book is a series of essays that span about 15 years, and most are reflections on various cultural components or figures, including Baudelaire, Kafka, and Proust. Also includes a chapter on Benjamin's personal library. Book is most focused on the way history, memory, artifacts, and time together. Underlying all his work is the tension of modernity. In his most famous piece here - "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" - Benjamin argues that the shift from art as steeped in ritual and tradition, to art made solely for mechanical reproduction messes-up the concept of authenticity and also messes with the "aura" of the work. Benjamin is fixated on phenomena and "the wonder of appearance," and seems to be amazed by the way memory and history is embodied. There is a strong sense of loss and longing in his writing, and he seems very concerned with the way human relations and the artifacts between humans have been transformed by modernity. The nineteenth century seems to be more of his place than the twentieth.

Interesting Specifics:

Benjamin loved the flaneur; "To endow this crowd with a soul is the very special purpose of the flaneur" (195).

"The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity" (220).

"All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war" (241)

War is a way to mobilize all technological systems while still maintaining the property system (241).

Jew are forbidden in the Torah from investigating the future [is this why Benjamin is so obsessed with the past?].

Interacts With:

Anything on memory its link to material culture/artifacts
Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste