Noted: Walter Benjamin

From "One-Way Street", collected in Reflections:

. . .because the lust for profit of the ruling class sought satisfaction through
it, technology betrayed man and turned the bridal bed into a bloodbath. The
mastery of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the purpose of all technology.
But who would trust a can wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by
adults to be the purpose of education?

Noted: Walter Benjamin

From "One-Way Street", collected in Reflections:

Is there anyone who has not once been stunned, emerging from the Métro into the open air, to step into brilliant sunlight? And yet the sun shone a few minutes earlier, when he went down, just as brightly. So quickly has he forgotten the weather of the upper world. And as quickly the world in its turn will forget him. For who can say more of his own existence than that it has passed through the lives of two or three others as gently and closely as the weather?

Again and again, in Shakespeare, in Calderón, battles fill the last act, and kings, princes, attendants and followers "enter, fleeing." The moment in which they become visible to spectators brings them to a standstill. The flight of the dramatis personae is arrested by the stage. Their entry into the visual field of nonparticipating and truly impartial persons allows the harassed to draw breath, bathes them in new air. The appearance on stage of those who enter "fleeing" takes from this its hidden meaning. Our reading of this formula is imbued with expectation of a place, a light, a footlight glare, in which our flight through life may be likewise sheltered in the presence of onlooking strangers. (pp. 90-91)

Noted: Walter Benjamin

From "One-Way Street", collected in Reflections:

A descriptive analysis of bank notes is needed. The unlimited satirical force of such a book would be equaled only by its objectivity. For nowhere more naïvely than in these documents does capitalism display itself in solemn earnest. The innocent cupids frolicking about numbersm, the goddesses holding tablets of the law, the stalwart heroes sheathing their swords before monetary units, are a world of their own: ornamenting the façade of hell. (p. 87)

Noted: Walter Benjamin

From Walter Benjamin's "One-Way Street", collected in Reflections:

These are days when no one should rely unduly on his "competence." Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed. (p. 65)

What is "solved"? Do not all the questions of our lives, as we live, remain behind us like foliage obstructing our view? To uproot this foliage, even to thin it out, does not occur to us. We strive on, leave it behind, and from a distance it is indeed open to view, but indistinct, shadowy, and all the more enigmatically entangled. (pp. 67-68)

Noted: Walter Benjamin

From Walter Benjamin's "A Berlin Chronicle", collected in Reflections:

It must have been in the afternoon that a difference of opinion arose between myself and my mother. Something was to be done that I did not like. Finally, my mother had recourse to coercion. She threatened that unless I did her bidding I should be left at home in the evening. I obeyed. But the feeling with which I did so, or rather, with which, the threat hardly uttered, I measured the two opposed forces and instantaneously perceived how enormous was the preponderance of the other side, and thus my silent indignation at so crude and brutal a procedure, which put at stake something totally disproportionate to the end--for the end was momentary whereas the stake, the gratitude for the evening that my mother was about to give me, as I know today and anticipated then, was deep and permanent--this feeling of violated trust has outlived in me all that succeeded it that day. (pp. 46-47)

Reflections-preface postscript

The other day I complained about Leon Wieseltier's preface to the new edition of Walter Benjamin's Reflections. Reflections is published by Schocken, which is a Random House imprint. In that post I almost expressed disappointment in Schocken for including the preface from Wieseltier. It seemed odd that anyone would see it as appropriate. André Schiffrin, founder of The New Press, and former head of Pantheon and Schocken, provides a little background. In a letter to the editor in the April issue of Harper's, responding to Ursula K. Le Guin's essay from the February issue on the decline of reading ("Staying Awake") (I didn't read Le Guin's piece: these semi-regular laments about reading rarely say anything new and thus tend to bore me), Schiffrin's says the following:

Le Guin is also correct in spotting the hostility of the conglomerates to the books themselves. One of the first signs that warned me of Random House's agenda when I was directing Pantheon and Schocken Books, both of which were once independent presses, was a memo warning that any backlist paperback selling under 2,000 copies a year would be pulped. This would have destroyed our backlist sales, sales on which any serious publisher must depend in order to survive. When my colleagues and I left in protest of this and other diktats, most of the books we had published by Cortázar, Duras, de Beauvoir and many others were eliminated--presumably on the fallacious assumption that all energies should be focused on the very few titles that might become bestsellers. This policy led, in part, to Random's losing unprecedented sums and eventually being sold by S. I. Newhouse, who had approved these maneuvers, to Bertelsmann.

This is familiar stuff, and as Schiffrin implies, Schocken is not quite the Schocken of old, though it may indeed maintain the same general array of titles, the same general focus on Judaica. . .

Pre-empting Reflections

Yesterday I bought a copy of Reflections, the Walter Benjamin collection. I'm happy to have the book, but now I sort of wish I'd held off and perhaps tried to find an older, used edition. See, I bought a copy of the new edition, issued in 2007. The cover is uglier than the old one was, for one thing. Far worse, it's saddled with a new, worthless, three-page preface from one Leon Wieseltier. Has a preface or introduction ever made you want to unload a book you're otherwise happy with having? Is it wrong that I want to take a blade to these pages? Wieseltier isn't around for long and doesn't say much, but characteristically, he does have time to irritate. After a relatively innocuous opening page, we get this:

In his temperament and in his method, Benjamin was an esotericist. He was modernity's kabbalist. In his turgidly enchanted world there were only mysteries, locked and unlocked. His infatuation with Marxism, the most embarrassing episode of his mental wanderings, the only time that he acquiesced in the regimentation of his own mind, may be understood as merely the most desperate of his exercises in arcane reading. . .

[. . .]

. . . Benjamin's work was scarred by a high ideological nastiness, as when he mocked "the sclerotic liberal-moral-humanistic ideal of freedom" (as if Europe in his day was suffering from a surfeit of this), and speculated acidly about the belief in "the sacredness of life" (or from a surfeit of this), and responded with perfect diffidence to the censorship and persecution of writers in the Soviet Union, which he coldly described as "the transfer of the mental means of production into public ownership." The pioneering explorer of memory worshipped history too much. He also wrote too much: he advised writers to "never stop writing because you have run out of ideas," and often he acted on his own advice. I confess that there are many pages of Benjamin that I do not understand, in which the discourse seems to be dictating itself, and no direction is clear. Like many esotericists, he abuses the privilege of obscurity.

What is the purpose of such a preface? The book still has the original, 35-page introduction by Peter Demetz (who, to be sure, does criticize Benjamin in certain ways, including aspects of his relationship with Marxism, but who isn't dismissive or obnoxious about it), which should do a well enough job by itself introducing the new reader to Benjamin (especially when combined with Hannah Arendt's introduction to Illuminations). Why is Wieseltier here? What purpose can he serve, other than as an attempt to pre-empt the novice reader's own readings? This Benjamin character is an interesting read, when it comes to literature, sure, but be sure to not take him all that seriously otherwise! (But, you know, thanks for buying our book!)