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18361485 No.18361485 [Reply] [Original]

Weeks ago I made a thread about Walter Benjamin and I came back to suggest his works to everyone here.
I'm reading Passages and it's very interesting. The book starts explaining the introduction of iron in construction and how it revolutionized architecture, then goes on about Haussmann's renovation of Paris in contrast to the city Baudelaire lived. The author keeps talking about Marxists concepts and historical events, so you may take a little more from the book if you know Marx's work, but it's still amazing.
Another shocking thing is how the passages are the embryo of shopping malls, all started in the 1830s based on bazaars of the Orient.

>The linchpin of his entire theory of art is "modern beauty," and for him the proof of modernity seems to be this: it is marked with the fatality of being one day antiquity, and it reveals this to whoever witnesses its birth. Here we meet the quintessence of the unforeseen, which for Baudelaire is an inalienable quality of the beautiful. The face of modernity itself blasts us with its immemorial gaze.

>> No.18362016

No one?

>> No.18362242

Jew

>> No.18362243

>>18361485
Everyone here has probably already read a fuck ton on Benjamin in college since humanities professors shill him 24/7.

>> No.18364031

I remember your thread friend, I got some wonderful suggestions from it.

>> No.18364035

>>18361485
overrated.

>> No.18364050

>>18361485
I've never read any Benjamin, but I've seen the name thrown around a lot. Can I get a QRD? What kind of work did he do? What were his professional and intellectual affiliations?

>> No.18364051

>>18361485
Any other recommendations? I have the Verso collected, and enjoyed essays like fate and character. I'm interested in his criticism of Proust and Baudelaire as well, they aren't in this edition though.

>> No.18364910

Benyahmeen

>> No.18365852

>>18364035
Why?

>>18364050
Essays, with great insights, about everything. He gives a political and historical background, so you'll know why that thing happened and how it affected everything around.
He was from the Frankfurt School and a friend of Adorno.

>>18364051
He briefly touches Baudelaire's writings in Passages, but keep in mind it's an incomplete work that turns into aphorisms, ideas and suggestions ("explain why that word got a different meaning in French").
My suggestion is to read everything else he wrote and keep Passages to the end.