
Walter Benjamin: Fragments, Salvage and Detours - lermontov
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/walter-benjamin-fragments-salvage-detours/
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xaryk
Benjamin is a fascinating figure in the history of philosophy. He had a lot of
interesting things to say about fascism and history. Probably the most vivid
expression of his understanding of history can be found in his 9th thesis on
history [1]

>"A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is
about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are
staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the
angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a
chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage
and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the
dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from
Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel
can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future
to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows
skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

[1]
[https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html](https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html)

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telesilla
Benjamin's essay _The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction_
[1][2] is probably of great interest to HN readers: he states that
reproduction releases art from the ritual of production. This applies to so
many aspects of our modern digital lives. It's touched on in this essay when
they note that Benjamin viewed modern writing, such as Kafka, as becoming
secular, i.e. free from religious ritual: "where its laws and traditions are
still present but have lost their meaning". Interesting stuff for our current
times, e.g. as another extraction from the article reads:

"how does human perception evolve over the course of history, as a result of
social and technological change?"

[1]
[https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf](https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction)

