Walter Benjamin Quotes on Time
Walter Benjamin’s late essay “On the Concept of History” (1940), composed shortly before his suicide while fleeing Nazi-occupied France, gave critical theory its most enigmatic and influential analysis of historical time. Against the homogeneous empty time of historicist progress — the chronological frame in which one event simply follows another — Benjamin set the messianic time of revolutionary recognition, in which the past flashes up in a moment of danger as a constellation with the present that demands redemptive action now. The framework — with its angel of history (Klee’s Angelus Novus) blown backward into the future amid the wreckage of the past — shaped the subsequent reception of his Arcades Project and the broader twentieth-century debate over modernity, progress, and the politics of memory.
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:
“It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned.”
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Attributed to Walter Benjamin:
“Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theatre.”