Illuminations: Essays and Reflections by Walter Benjamin (PDF)

Description

Essays and reflections from one of the twentieth century’s most original cultural critics, with an introduction by Hannah Arendt. Walter Benjamin was an icon of criticism, renowned for his insight on art, literature, and philosophy. This volume includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and Brecht’s epic theater. Illuminations also includes his penetrating study “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode; and his theses on the philosophy of history. Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and introduces them with a classic essay about Benjamin’s life in a dark historical era. Leon Wieseltier’s preface explores Benjamin’s continued relevance for our times. Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and Jewish mysticism as presented by Gershom Scholem.​

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This was a pretty excellent (and challenging) survey of Benjamin’s work, with included pieces mostly concerning storytelling and particular literary figures (e.g., Kafka, Proust, Leskov). I’d say this collection is particularly helpful in that it proceeds, as I read it, thematically. The editor’s introductory piece isn’t really worth reading–mostly just a reflection on Benjamin’s “continuing importance”, pretty standard (though I will say his criticisms of Benjamin, like his reluctance to give in to Scholem, amount more to complaints than critiques). In contrast, I found Arendt’s essay incredibly enlightening. She relates not only much of the content of Benjamin’s thought, but offers insight into his personal life (e.g., his experience in the Parisian Arcades, his collective impulses) that assists greatly in understanding the experience motivating some of Benjamin’s analyses (e.g., of the crowd, of the collector, of the character of the flaneur). In some retellings, as in his chronic financial/employment troubles or the unfortunate coincidences leading to his suicide, a sense of melancholy or “bad luck” is almost palpable, particularly given Arendt’s close relation to Benjamin.As for the essays themselves, anyone who has read Benjamin is aware of how challenging the prose (if we may call it that) is. As Arendt notes in her introduction, Benjamin is a poetic thinker, and tends both to assume a fair amount of foreknowledge and employ sophisticated (and often extended) figurative devices, e.g., simile, to relate his points. Contrast this with the geometric prose of Spinoza and other modern philosophers, with their numbered axioms, definitions, propositions, etc. In his essay on Proust, for example, Benjamin likens the weight of scent in memory to the weight of the fisherman’s net by which he gauges his catch, and sentences to the physical labor required to haul it up. There is also some evidence of his on-again-off-again Marxist tendencies (which embarrassing fact, combined with his ambivalence between this commitment and Zionism, is acknowledged in the introduction to the collection), as in his late essay on art modified by mechanical reproduction, plus the more obvious shoehorning of concepts like “class struggle” and “proletarianization”. Nevertheless, this is a fantastic collection which ought to attract both old and new readers of Benjamin–I know I’ll be buying Reflections, Illuminations’ spiritual companion, and at least some of his standalone work.

⭐What a brilliant collection. Literature, Art, Politics and more are discussed in such a wonderfully clear manner. Great stuff.

⭐The translation by Harry Zohn must be acknowledged as a masterpiece. Fitting in a work that contains Benjamin’s essay “The task of the translator”, I wonder if our author wrote in German as beautifully as has been rendered into English. If so Walter Benjamin must be counted as a great literary mind besides one of the finest intellectuals. The introduction by Hanna Arendt crowns the jewel of a book that speaks to everyman and for all times.

⭐On the kindle version: my electronic copy is complete and I enjoyed reading Benjamin’s essays. But the page number in the book is messed up. From the fourth essay (“Franz Kafka”) onward it is all incorrect. The book says that this essay is on p.109, and all the rest of the book is on p.110, which I suppose is a mistake in digitization. This poses great problem when I try to cite this electronic copy. Other than that the book is great.

⭐Walter Benjamin put everything he knew into everything he wrote. It all resonates. This makes for challenging reading – at times, it seems like what he is saying is simply too much at a tilt with everything one thinks one knows to seem comprehensible. Then, suddenly, one tilts, and the extraordinary reach, eloquence and power of this man’s reading hits home. Benjamin is difficult in the only legitimate way – because what he is trying to say can be said no other way.

⭐I bought the current edition to replace my 35 year old copy. The new edition eliminates the review of Max Brod’s biography of Kafka and substitutes an excerpt from Benjamin’s 1938 letter to his friend Gerhard (later Gershom) Scholem.Hannah Arendt’s introduction, originally an essay published in the New Yorker in 1955 and updated in 1968, is wonderful even if Arendt, a student, defender, and, at one time, the lover of Martin Heidegger, had little interest in what might be called the Marxist or political Benjamin. Arendt mistakenly describes Marxism as “dialectical materialism”–a term popularized by Stalin–when Marx and Engels and the adherents of critical Marxism always used the term “historical materialism,” a more precise formulation. Arendt has some fun demonstrating that Benjamin’s thought was not “dialectical”–although it might be argued that in some respects it was. Still we owe her a debt of gratitude for introducing Benjamin to the English-speaking world and for her beautifully written account of the great critic whom she knew in Paris in the mid-1930s.However, this volume is disfigured by the inclusion of Leon Wieseltier’s preface. It adds nothing to Arendt’s introduction, and takes what only can be called a philistine approach to Benjamin’s life and thought in which Benjamin’s failure to commit to joining Gershom Scholem in Palestine is played off against what Wieseltier considers his spiritual emptiness (“this pilgrim makes no progress”), his “weakness for dogmatic certitude,” his “worship[ing] history too much,” etc. All this is designed to obliterate the political or critical-Marxist Benjamin, who, alas, could be indifferent to the persecution of writers and others under Stalin, but who also dedicated his most incisive essays of the 1930s to the struggle against fascism.Wieseltier’s Benjamin is at best a meager, one-sided Benjamin. You cannot do justice to the author of the incomparable “Theses on the Philosophy of History” without taking into account his exchanges with Theodor Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School or his engagement with, and critique of, precisely, historical materialism.

⭐A good view of a past that never became present. Benjamin’s self-martyrdom might be more significant than his writings since people generally tend to prefer melodrama to sociology these days. Unless you have to read this for class, I recommend you read more contemporary theorists.

⭐Research

⭐First of all, to avoid any confusion, I am not reviewing Benjamin’s ‘Illuminations’ as a text, I am reviewing the edition with the sunset on the cover which is available here.This is a nasty, bootleg edition with no publishing info and an incomplete text. It looks like something you would buy from a street vendor, or be given by a member of a religious cult. There isn’t even any print on the spine, and the set of the text inside is wonky.The only positive thing I can say about my purchase is that Amazon are giving me a refund.

⭐Great introduction to some of Benjamin’s essays.

⭐Great introduction to an indespendable, brilliant, lovable and inaccesible fellow.

⭐not a book! photocopied random pages put together

⭐This is not Illuminations – it is the introduction and three of the chapters. It looks like it has been photocopied and includes none of the publication details.

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