Walter Benjamin Quotes on Knowledge
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), whose unfinished Arcades Project (Passagenwerk) and the early Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) supply twentieth-century critical theory with two of its most original epistemological models, treats knowledge as the precise constellation in which a present moment and a fragment of the past are crystallized into a "dialectical image." The Epistemo-Critical Prologue to the Trauerspiel book, and the late Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), develop the corresponding doctrine that genuine historical knowledge is messianic rather than developmental: the redemption of past suffering through the cognitive rescue of what would otherwise have been definitively lost.
Quotes
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“There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
Es ist niemals ein Dokument der Kultur, ohne zugleich ein solches der Barbarei zu sein. -
Attributed to Walter Benjamin:
“History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.”
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Attributed to Walter Benjamin:
“Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought.”
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“In what time does man live? The thinkers have always known that he does not live in any time at all. The immortality of thoughts and deeds banishes him to a timeless realm at whose heart an inscrutable death lies in wait. ... Devoured by the countless demands of the moment, time slipped away from him; the medium in which the pure melody of his youth would swell was destroyed. The fulfilled tranqui”
The Metaphysics of Youth," in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings , Vol. 1 (1996), pp. 10-11 -
“Jede Äußerung menschlichen Geisteslebens kann als eine Art der Sprache aufgefaßt werden, und diese Auffassung erschließt nach Art einer wahrhaften Methode überall neue Fragestellungen.”
Every expression of human mental life can be understood as a kind of language, and this understanding, in the manner of a true method, everywhere raises new questions. "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man" (1916), translated by E. Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings , Vol. 1 (1996), p. 62 -
“The enslavement of language in prattle is joined by the enslavement of things in folly almost as its inevitable consequence. "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man" (1916), translated by E. Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings , Vol. 1 (1996), p. 72”
Zur Verknechtung der Sprache im Geschwätz tritt die Verknechtung der Dinge in der Narretei fast als deren unausbleibliche Folge . -
“I would like to metamorphose into a mouse-mountain.”
Protocols to the Experiments on Hashish, Opium and Mescaline (1927-1934, English translation 1997)