“For Benjamin to quote is to name, and naming rather than speaking, the word rather than the sentence, brings truth to light. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Illuminations: Essays and Reflections - Walter Benjamin Hannah Arendt Harry at the best. A work of striking originality, The Human Condition is in many respects more relevant now than when it first appeared in 1958. In this they must of necessity discover the beautiful, which need ‘disinterested delight’ (Kant) to be recognized.” (42) Bibliographic information Contributor, Hannah Arendt Edition, reprint Publisher, Pimlico, 1999 ISBN, 0712665757, 9780712665759 Length, 267 pages. The past year has seen a resurgence of interest in the political thinker Hannah Arendt, 'the theorist of beginnings', whose work probes the logics underlying unexpected transformations - from totalitarianism to revolution. As Benjamin was the first to emphasize, collecting is the passion of children, for whom things are not yet commodities and are not valued according to their usefulness, and it is also the hobby of the rich, who own enough not to need anything useful and hence can afford to make ‘the transfiguration of objects’ ( Schriften I, 416) their business. “Collecting springs from a variety of motives which are not easily understood. Not that he ever stopped collecting books…)” (39) It started early with what he himself called his ‘bibliomania’ but soon extended into something far more characteristic, not so much of the person as of his work: the collecting of quotations. “I have already mentioned that collecting was Benjamin’s central passion. “Quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack an relieve an idler of his convictions.” ( Schriften I, 571) Edition of Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. Inspired by philosophy, she warned against the political dangers of philosophy to abstract and obfuscate the plurality and reality of our shared world. Linguistic ‘transference’ enables us to give material form to the invisible – ‘A mighty fortress is our God’ – and thus to render is capable of being experienced.” (14)īenjamin on the discovery of the modern function of quotations (p. Hannah Arendt was a humanist thinker who thought boldly and provocatively about our shared political and ethical world. ![]() What is so hard to understand about Benjamin is that without being a poet he thought poetically and therefore was bound to regard the metaphor as the greatest gift of language. “Metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about. The smaller the object, the more likely it seemed that it could contain in the most concentrated form everything else…” (11-12) And this passion, far from being a whim, derived directly from the only world view that ever had a decisive influence on him, from Goethe’s conviction of the factual existence of an Urphänomen, an archetypal phenomenon, a concrete thing to be discovered in the world of appearances in which ‘significance’ and appearance, word and thing, idea and experience, would coincide. “For him the size of an object was in an inverse relationship to its significance. ![]() From the Introduction by Hannah Arendt to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations (Schocken, 1969, 2007 printing):
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