/lit/ - Literature

Best place to start with him?

this fag killed himself

Just finished his essay on art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Really enjoyed the the disclosure of insight on art and its untethering from context---aura and all that---although I wondered if he glossed over historical signifiers and how that can encode and/or imbue meaning/information (or perhaps its embodied/extended within the piece itself?). Apologies, that digression on his essay was aggressively reductive.

My knowledge of Benjamin is blurry at best, and I want to proceed, most likely in piecemeal fashion (which will no doubt compound my obfuscations), but I'd be remiss if I didn't say I am unsure where to go next.

I am leaning towards his history essay, and then, inelegantly, going to haphazardly choose by what titles I like, as unjustifiable as that may be. Perhaps someone with a better lay of the land of Benjamin's works could recommend me a better way forward? Thanks.

Anyone write about Walter Benjamin in the age of digital reproduction? Especially focusing on how the internet allowed for a wealth of images compared to the development of the photograph.

Who do I need to read before reading Walter Benjamin?

How difficult is Walter Benjamin?

Weeks ago I made a thread about Walter Benjamin and I came back to suggest his works to everyone here.
I'm reading Passages and it's very interesting. The book starts explaining the introduction of iron in construction and how it revolutionized architecture, then goes on about Haussmann's renovation of Paris in contrast to the city Baudelaire lived. The author keeps talking about Marxists concepts and historical events, so you may take a little more from the book if you know Marx's work, but it's still amazing.
Another shocking thing is how the passages are the embryo of shopping malls, all started in the 1830s based on bazaars of the Orient.

>The linchpin of his entire theory of art is "modern beauty," and for him the proof of modernity seems to be this: it is marked with the fatality of being one day antiquity, and it reveals this to whoever witnesses its birth. Here we meet the quintessence of the unforeseen, which for Baudelaire is an inalienable quality of the beautiful. The face of modernity itself blasts us with its immemorial gaze.

First, some background:
I watched a lecture on Russian literature and the professor talked about Leskov. He cited, and suggested us to read, The Storyteller/Die Erzähler by Walter Benjamin while explaining how close it is from a dying genre of oral stories that used to be common in my country when I was a kid.
So, I decided to read The Storyteller and I was blown away. I like to avoid everything that isn't fiction, but this essay was so good.

Now, the questions:
Is everything Walter Benjamin wrote this good or I just got lucky?
What else from him would you suggest?

Walter Benjamin

The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments. Still, Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war:

“For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic ... Accordingly we state:... War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others ... Poets and artists of Futurism! ... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art ... may be illumined by them!”

Cont

Who are the most wholesome philosophers

A lot of Marxists are known for their deep written analysis on film and cinema. Has a fascist ever done the same?

“Not architecture alone but all technology is, at certain stages, evidence of a collective dream.”

All art is made by machines.

The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments. Still, Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war:

“For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic ... Accordingly we state:... War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others ... Poets and artists of Futurism! ... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art ... may be illumined by them!”

Cont

Walter Benjamin

Could someone please explain Walter Benjamin's 'Poverty of Experience' to me?

I'm quite slow and it takes me a while to wrap my mind around concepts, for some reason this one isn't sticking. It's from his essay "Experience and Poverty"

>No, this much is clear: experience has fallen in value, amid a generation which from 1914 to 1918 had to experience some of the most monstrous events in the history of the world. Perhaps this is less remarkable than it appears. Wasn’t it noticed at the time how many people returned from the front in silence? Not richer but poorer in communicable experience? And what poured out from the flood of war books ten years later was anything […] remarkable about that.
>For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly: strategic experience has been contravened by positional warfare; economic experience, by the inflation; physical experience, by hunger; moral experiences, by the ruling powers. A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, amid a landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds and, at its center, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body.

>With this tremendous development of technology, a completely new poverty has descended on mankind. And the reverse side of this poverty is the oppressive wealth of ideas that has been spread among people, or rather has swamped them entirely – ideas that have come with the revival of astrology and the wisdom of yoga, Christian Science and chiromancy, vegetarianism and gnosis, scholasticism and spiritualism. For this is not a genuine revival but a galvanisation.

best text to start with for this chap?

Redpill me on this guy. Is he based or cringe? What's his endgame?

>/lit/ has taken the Deleuze pill
>/lit/ has taken the Musil pill
>/lit/ has taken the Whitehead pill
>/lit/ has taken the Henry James pill
>/lit/ has taken the Pessoa pill
>/lit/ has taken the Marx pill
>/lit/ has taken the Bernhard pill
But have you taken the Benjamin pill /lit/?

>>14054608

Where to start with this guy? I'm particularly interested in his conception of esotericism. I'm a kabbalist and while everyone knows how that relates to dialectacs I want to know more.

What should I read from Benjamin?

Baudelaire is the best poet to have ever lived fuck you adorno you can't read poetry for shit gtfo