Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

Rating

8.0

The Pequod Review:

Walter Benjamin's Illuminations is a collection of essays on literary figures (Kafka, Proust, Brecht, Baudelaire, etc.), and various other subjects, including book collecting, artistic reproductions, and the philosophy of history. Benjamin (1892-1940) is among the most concise of writers:

Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it... The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.

[...]

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 activities 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 community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeated stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained.

[...]

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

Recommended.