illuminations: essays and reflections / walter benjamin

Other thoughts fill me than the ones I am talking about – not thoughts but images, memories. Memories of cities … memories of rooms where these books had been housed …

There is nothing that commends a story more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis. And the more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story’s claim to a place in the memory of the listener, the more completely is it integrated into his own experience, the greater will be hos inclination to repeat it to someone else someday, sooner or later.

The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself.

Memory is the epic faculty par excellence. Only by virtue of a comprehensive memory can writing absorb the course of events on the one hand and, with the power of death on the other.

[Of Georg Lukas] “Time,” he says in his Theory of the Novel, “can become constitutive only when connection with the transcendental home has been lost. Only in the novel are meaning and life, and thus the essential and the temporal, separated; one can almost say that the whole inner action of a novel is nothing else but a struggle against the power of time … And from this … arise the genuinely epic experience of time: hope and memory … Only in the novel … does there occur a creative memory which transfixes the object and transforms it  … The duality of inwardness and outside world can there be overcome for the subject ‘only’ when he sees the … unity of his entire life … out of the past life-stream which is compressed in memory … The insight which grasps this unity … becomes the divinatory-intuitive grasping of the unattained and therefore inexpressible meaning of life.”

Towering above this literature is Bergson’s early monumental work, Matiere et memoire. More than the others, it preserves links with empirical research. It is oriented towards biology. The title suggests that it regards the structure of memory as decisive for the philosophical pattern of experience. Experience is indeed a matter of tradition, in collective existence as well as private life. It is less the product of facts firmly anchored in memory than of a convergence in memory of accumulated and frequently unconscious data. It is, however, not at all Bergson’s intention to attach any specific historical label to memory. On the contrary, he rejects any historical determination of memory.

… it was indeed a poet who put Bergson’s theory of experience to the test … Proust’s work A la Recherche du temps perdu may be regarded as an attempt to produce experience synthetically, as Bergson imagines it, under today’s conditions, for there is less and less hope that it will come into being naturally … Bergson emphasizes the antagonism between the vita active and the specific vita contemplative which arise from memory. But he leads us to believe that turning to the contemplative actualization of the stream of life is a matter of free choice. From the start Proust indicates his divergent view terminologically, To him, the memoire pure of Bergson’s theory becomes a memoire involontaire. Proust immediately confronts this involuntary memory with a voluntary memory, one that is at the service of the intellect. .. One afternoon the taste of a kind of pastry called madeleine transports him back to the past, whereas before then he had been limited to the promptings of a memory which obeyed the call of attentiveness. This he calls the memoire volontaire, and it is characteristic that the information which it gives about the past retains no trace of it.

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Walter Benjamin was one of the most original cultural critics of the twentieth century. Illuminations 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 on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode, and Benjamin's 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 dark times. Also included is a new preface by Leon Wieseltier that explores Benjamin's continued relevance for our times.