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Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.

Walter Benjamin

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Walter Benjamin
Age: 48 †
Born: 1892
Born: July 15
Died: 1940
Died: September 26
Art Critic
Essayist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Philosopher
Sociologist
Translator
Writer
Berlin
Germany
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin
Work
Relations
Time
Production
Like
Productions
Relation
Position
Attitude
Asks
Rather

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The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them
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To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere.
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True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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All disgust is originally disgust at touching.
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Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.
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The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
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By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.
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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
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For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.
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What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.
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It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.
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I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.
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