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105-519: Das Passagen-Werk or Arcades Project was an unfinished project of German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin , written between 1927 and his death in 1940. An enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, it was especially concerned with Paris' iron -and- glass covered " arcades " (known in French as the passages couverts de Paris ). Benjamin's Project , which many scholars believe might have become one of

210-474: A bachelor's thesis titled L'ordre de la chevalerie, conte en vers du xiiie siècle, avec introduction et notes . Though he is often referred to as an archivist and a librarian because of his employment at the Bibliothèque Nationale , his work there was with the medallion collections (he also published scholarly articles on numismatics ). His thesis at the École des Chartes was a critical edition of

315-550: A 1927 letter to his friend Gershom Scholem , describing it as his attempt to use collage techniques in literature. Initially, Benjamin saw the Arcades as a small article he would finish within a few weeks. However, Benjamin's vision of the Arcades Project grew increasingly ambitious in scope until he perceived it as representing his most important creative accomplishment. On several occasions Benjamin altered his overall scheme of

420-534: A British mandate; despite repeated invitations, he failed to persuade Benjamin (and family) to leave the continent for the Middle East. In 1924 Hugo von Hofmannsthal , in the Neue Deutsche Beiträge magazine, published Benjamin's "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften" (" Goethe 's Elective Affinities "), about Goethe's third novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809). According to literary critic Burkhardt Lindner,

525-452: A commitment to the furtherance of European culture. He wrote: "My life experience led me to this insight: the Jews represent an elite in the ranks of the spiritually active ... For Judaism is to me in no sense an end in itself, but the most distinguished bearer and representative of the spiritual." This was a position Benjamin largely held lifelong. It was as a speaker and debater in the milieu of

630-492: A concept that identifies the subject's ability to identify desire in visual objects. This also leads to the ability to perceive information by habit instead of rapt attention. Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels ( The Origin of German Tragic Drama , 1928), is a critical study of German baroque drama, as well as the political and cultural climate of Germany during the Counter-Reformation (1545–1648). Benjamin presented

735-580: A cousin, Günther Anders , a German philosopher and anti-nuclear activist who studied under Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger . Through his mother, Walter's great-uncle was the classical archaeologist Gustav Hirschfeld . In 1902, ten-year-old Walter was enrolled at the Kaiser Friedrich School in Charlottenburg ; he completed his secondary school studies ten years later. In his youth, Walter

840-501: A day before the Germans entered the capital with orders to arrest him at his flat. In August, he obtained a travel visa to the U.S. that Horkheimer had negotiated for him. In eluding the Gestapo , Benjamin planned to travel to the U.S. from neutral Portugal, which he expected to reach via Francoist Spain , then ostensibly a neutral country. The historical record indicates that he safely crossed

945-506: A devout Catholic for about nine years. He considered entering the priesthood and attended a Catholic seminary briefly. However, he quit, apparently in part in order to pursue an occupation where he could eventually support his mother. He eventually renounced Christianity in the early 1920s. Bataille attended the École Nationale des Chartes in Paris , graduating in February 1922. He graduated with

1050-403: A jumble of sixty apparently autonomous short prose pieces: aphorisms, jokes, dream protocols, cityscapes, landscapes, and mindscapes; portions of writing manuals, trenchant contemporary political analysis; prescient appreciations of the child's psychology, behavior, and moods; decodings of bourgeois fashion, living arrangements and courtship patterns; and time and again, remarkable penetrations into

1155-560: A large typeface for his writing and a smaller one for citations. This convention comes from the German version, but has no basis in Benjamin's manuscript. The convolutes also make extensive use of epigraphs from obscure publications. The notes and manuscript for the Arcades Project and much of Benjamin's correspondence had been entrusted to Benjamin's friend Georges Bataille before Benjamin fled Paris under Nazi occupation. Bataille, who worked as

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1260-508: A librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale , hid the manuscript in a closed archive at the library where it was eventually discovered after the war. The full text of Benjamin's unfinished magnum opus was published in English translation by Harvard University Press in 1999 after years of difficult editorial work undertaken by Rolf Tiedemann  [ de ] , the editor of the landmark 1982 German edition. The Arcades Project , as it stands,

1365-455: A professional critic and occasional translator. Working with Franz Hessel he translated the first volumes of Marcel Proust 's À la Recherche du Temps Perdu ( In Search of Lost Time ). The next year, 1926, he began writing for the German newspapers Frankfurter Zeitung and Die Literarische Welt (The Literary World); that paid enough for him to reside in Paris for some months. In December 1926,

1470-491: A rough estimate) is doomed to destruction or at least to unproductive use without any possible profit, it is logical, even inescapable, to surrender commodities without return. Henceforth, leaving aside pure and simple dissipation, analogous to the construction of the Pyramids, the possibility of pursuing growth is itself subordinated to giving: The industrial development of the entire world demands of Americans that they lucidly grasp

1575-625: A small part of the text prepared by Benjamin was included in the encyclopedia. During Benjamin's lifetime, the article was not published in its entirety. A Russian translation of the article was published in the Russian edition of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in 1996. In 1927, he began Das Passagen-Werk ( The Arcades Project ), his uncompleted magnum opus , a study of 19th-century Parisian life. The same year, he saw Scholem in Berlin, for

1680-559: A tenured university professor in Germany. At Bloch's suggestion, he read Lukács's History and Class Consciousness (1923). He also met the Latvian Bolshevik and actress Asja Lācis , then residing in Moscow; he became her lover and she was a lasting intellectual influence on him. A year later, in 1925, Benjamin withdrew The Origin of German Tragic Drama as his possible qualification for

1785-476: A trend of episodic behavior that was to remain true throughout his life, Benjamin was a maven within an important community during a critically important historical period: the left- intelligentsia of interwar Berlin and Paris . Acquaintance with Walter Benjamin was a connecting thread for a variety of major figures in metaphysics, philosophy, theology, the visual arts, theater, literature, radio, politics and various other domains. Benjamin happened to be present on

1890-471: A “pre-fascist aestheticism”. Bataille drew from diverse influences and used various modes of discourse to create his work. His novel Story of the Eye ( Histoire de l'œil ), published under the pseudonym Lord Auch (literally, Lord "to the shithouse" — "auch" being short for "aux chiottes", slang for telling somebody off by sending him to the toilet), was initially read as pure pornography , while interpretation of

1995-402: Is a book written by Bataille between 1946 and 1949, when it was published by Les Éditions de Minuit. It was translated into English and published in 1991, with the title The Accursed Share . It presents a new economic theory, which Bataille calls "general economy," as distinct from the "restricted" economic perspective of most economic theory. Thus, in the theoretical introduction, Bataille writes

2100-521: Is central to Bataille's thinking. Bataille's inquiry takes the superabundance of energy, beginning from the infinite outpouring of solar energy or the surpluses produced by life's basic chemical reactions, as the norm for organisms. In other words, an organism in Bataille's general economy, unlike the rational actors of classical economy who are motivated by scarcity, normally has an "excess" of energy available to it. This extra energy can be used productively for

2205-463: Is obliviously destined to an outrageous and catastrophic outpouring in war. Though the distinction is less apparent in Hurley 's English translation, Bataille introduces the neologism "consummation" (akin to a fire's burning) to signal this excess expenditure as distinct from "consommation" (the non-excess expenditure more familiarly treated in theories of "restricted" economy). The notion of "excess" energy

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2310-564: Is often claimed to be a forerunner to postmodernism . Walter Benjamin Among Benjamin's best known works are the essays " The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction " (1935), and " Theses on the Philosophy of History " (1940). His major work as a critic included essays on Baudelaire , Goethe , Kafka , Kraus , Leskov , Proust , Walser , Trauerspiel and translation theory . He also made major translations into German of

2415-436: Is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that

2520-460: Is partly a meditation on the form 'free-love' that the Benjamins were experimenting with in their marriage at this time, amongst other things. But this was only tangential to the issue that led to the controversy to which Arendt refers. His mistake (per Arendt) was killing a sacred cow from amongst the academic establishment. As so often in Benjamin's writings, his study of Goethe's Elective Affinities

2625-558: Is the author of a large and diverse body of work: readings, poems, essays on innumerable subjects (on the mysticism of economy, poetry , philosophy, the arts and eroticism). He sometimes published under pseudonyms, and some of his publications were banned. He was relatively ignored during his lifetime and scorned by contemporaries such as Jean-Paul Sartre as an advocate of mysticism , but after his death had considerable influence on authors such as Michel Foucault , Philippe Sollers , and Jacques Derrida , all of whom were affiliated with

2730-652: The Arcades Project , due in part to the influence of Theodor Adorno , who gave Benjamin a stipend and who expected Benjamin to make the Arcades project more explicitly political and Marxist in its analysis. It contains sections (c onvolutes) on arcades , fashion , catacombs , iron constructions , exhibitions , advertising , interior design , Baudelaire , The streets of Paris, panoramas and dioramas , mirrors , painting , modes of lighting , railroads , Charles Fourier , Marx , photography , mannequins , social movements , Daumier 's caricatures , literary history ,

2835-589: The Frankfurt School , Benjamin published Charles Baudelaire, Tableaux Parisiens . At this time he became acquainted with Theodor Adorno and befriended Georg Lukács , whose The Theory of the Novel (1920) influenced him. Meanwhile, inflation in the Weimar Republic after the war made it difficult for Emil Benjamin to continue supporting his son's family. At the end of 1923 Scholem emigrated to Palestine, then under

2940-576: The Gustav Wyneken 's German Youth Movement that Benjamin was first encountered by Gershom Scholem and later Martin Buber although he had parted ways with the youth group before they had become properly acquainted. Elected president of the Freie Studentenschaft (Free Students Association), Benjamin wrote essays arguing for educational and general cultural change while working alongside Wyneken at

3045-624: The Institute for Social Research and is best remembered as the co-author of Benjamin's closest disciple Theodor Adorno 's magnum opus, the Dialectic of the Enlightenment (a book which cribs heavily from Benjamin's unpublished, esoteric writings in many of its most important passages). In the case of Benjamin's habilitation, however, Horkheimer presents a united front with Cornelius and Professor Schultz in asking Benjamin to withdraw his application for

3150-465: The Nazis . Fascinated by human sacrifice , he founded a secret society, Acéphale , the symbol of which was a headless man. According to legend, Bataille and the other members of Acéphale each agreed to be the sacrificial victim as an inauguration; none of them would agree to be the executioner. An indemnity was offered for an executioner, but none was found before the dissolution of Acéphale shortly before

3255-704: The Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu . Of the hidden principle organizing Walter Benjamin's thought Scholem wrote unequivocally that "Benjamin was a philosopher", while his younger colleagues Arendt and Adorno contend that he was "not a philosopher". Scholem remarked "The peculiar aura of authority emanating from his work tended to incite contradiction". Benjamin himself considered his research to be theological , though he eschewed all recourse to traditionally metaphysical sources of transcendentally revealed authority. In 1940, at

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3360-565: The University of Berlin to continue studying philosophy. There, Benjamin had his first exposure to Zionism , which had not been part of his liberal upbringing. This gave him occasion to formulate his own ideas about the meaning of Judaism. Benjamin distanced himself from political and nationalist Zionism, instead developing in his own thinking what he called a kind of " cultural Zionism "—an attitude that recognized and promoted Judaism and Jewish values . In Benjamin's formulation, his Jewishness meant

3465-485: The University of Munich , where he met Rainer Maria Rilke and Scholem; the latter became a friend. Intensive discussions with Scholem about Judaism and Jewish mysticism gave the impetus for the 1916 text (surviving as a manuscript) Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen (" On Language as Such and on the Language of Man "), which, as Benjamin said to Scholem , "has an immanent relationship to Judaism and to

3570-548: The Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung journal of the Institute for Social Research. It was a critique of the authenticity of mass-produced art; he wrote that a mechanically produced copy of an artwork can be taken somewhere the original could never have gone, arguing that the presence of the original is "prerequisite to the concept of authenticity". In 1937 Benjamin worked on "Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire" ("The Paris of

3675-506: The posthumously published My Mother (which would become the basis of Christophe Honoré 's film Ma Mère ), The Impossible and Blue of Noon , which, with its incest , necrophilia , politics, and autobiographical undertones, is a much darker treatment of contemporary historical reality. During World War II Bataille produced Summa Atheologica (the title parallels Thomas Aquinas ' Summa Theologica ) which comprises his works Inner Experience , Guilty , and On Nietzsche . After

3780-463: The stock exchange , lithography , and the Paris Commune . It influenced Marshal McLuhan 's studies in media theory . The project's structure is idiosyncratic. The convolutes correspond to letters of the alphabet; the individual sections of text— sometimes individual lines, sometimes multi-paragraph analyses —are ordered with square brackets, starting from [A1,1]. This numbering system comes from

3885-625: The French government and incarcerated for three months in a prison camp near Nevers , in central Burgundy . Returning to Paris in January 1940, he drafted "Über den Begriff der Geschichte" ("On the Concept of History", later published as " Theses on the Philosophy of History "). While the Wehrmacht was pushing back the French Army , on 13 June Benjamin and his sister fled Paris to the town of Lourdes , just

3990-640: The French–Spanish border and arrived at the coastal town of Portbou , in Catalonia on 25 September 1940. The Franco government had cancelled all transit visas and ordered the Spanish police to return such persons to France, including the Jewish refugee group Benjamin had joined. They were told by the Spanish police that they would be deported back to France the next day, which would have thwarted Benjamin's plans to travel to

4095-448: The Institute for Social Research, later going permanently into exile. In Paris, he met other refugee German artists and intellectuals; he befriended Hannah Arendt , novelist Hermann Hesse , and composer Kurt Weill . In 1936, a first version of " The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction " (originally written in German in 1935) was published in French ("L'œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction méchanisée") by Max Horkheimer in

4200-618: The Second Empire in Baudelaire"), met Georges Bataille (to whom he later entrusted the Arcades Project manuscript), and joined the College of Sociology (which he would criticize for its "pre-fascist aestheticism.") In 1938 he paid a last visit to Brecht, who was exiled to Denmark. Meanwhile, the Nazi régime stripped German Jews of their German citizenship; now a stateless man, Benjamin was arrested by

4305-517: The Surrealists resumed cautiously cordial relations after World War II . Bataille was a member of the extremely influential College of Sociology which included several other renegade surrealists. He was heavily influenced by Hegel , Freud , Marx , Marcel Mauss , the Marquis de Sade , Alexandre Kojève , and Friedrich Nietzsche , the last of whom he defended in a notable essay against appropriation by

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4410-517: The United States. Expecting repatriation to Nazi hands, Benjamin killed himself with an overdose of morphine tablets that night, while staying at the Hotel de Francia ; the official Portbou register records 26 September 1940 as the date of death. Benjamin's colleague Arthur Koestler , also fleeing Europe, attempted suicide by taking some of the morphine tablets, but survived. Benjamin's brother Georg

4515-535: The age of 48, Benjamin died by suicide at Portbou on the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape the advance of the Third Reich . Though popular acclaim eluded him during his life, the decades following his death won his work posthumous renown. Walter Benjamin and his younger siblings, Georg (1895–1942) and Dora (1901–1946), were born to a wealthy business family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in Berlin , then

4620-472: The angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. The final paragraph about the Jewish quest for the Messiah provides a final point to Benjamin's work, with its themes of culture, destruction, Jewish heritage and the fight between humanity and nihilism. He brings up

4725-406: The aura is found in a work of art that contains presence. The aura is precisely what cannot be reproduced in a work of art: its original presence in time and space. He suggests a work of art's aura is in a state of decay because it is becoming more and more difficult to apprehend the time and space in which a piece of art is created. This essay also introduces the concept of the optical unconscious,

4830-472: The beginning of the nineteenth century and were sometimes destroyed as a result of Baron Haussmann 's renovation of Paris during the Second French Empire (ca. 1850–1870). Benjamin linked them to the city's distinctive street life and saw them as providing one of the habitats of the flâneur (i.e., a person strolling in a locale to experience it). Benjamin first mentioned the Arcades Project in

4935-494: The capital of the German Empire . Walter's father, Emil Benjamin, was a banker in Paris who had relocated from France to Germany, where he worked as an antiques trader; he later married Pauline Schönflies. He owned a number of investments in Berlin, including ice skating rinks. Walter's uncle, William Stern , was a prominent German child psychologist who developed the concept of the intelligence quotient (IQ). He also had

5040-407: The critic Paul de Man argued that the intellectual range of Benjamin's writings flows dynamically among those three intellectual traditions, deriving a critique via juxtaposition; the exemplary synthesis is "Theses on the Philosophy of History". At least one scholar, historian of religion Jason Josephson-Storm , has argued that Benjamin's diverse interests may be understood in part by understanding

5145-464: The delivery of this piece by several years. Benjamin was a close colleague of Ernst Bloch while Bloch was writing the Spirit of Utopia and maintained a relationship with him until the late 20's that Bloch later described as "almost too close." An untitled scrap omitted from Benjamin's book review of Bloch's Spirit of Utopia which remained unpublished during Benjamin's lifetime (later anthologized under

5250-493: The essay forms the "third major philosophical-aesthetic treatise of the early work" alongside the PhD dissertation and the habilitation thesis . It has often been linked to the breakup of his marriage. The dedication to Julia Cohn, whom he had courted in vain at the time, suggests this. Likewise, according to Hannah Arendt , it was his essay on Goethe that ruined Benjamin's only chance of a university career. Benjamin's Goethe monograph

5355-490: The feuilleton played a decisive role in shaping the prose form on which the book is based." Written contemporaneously with Martin Heidegger's Being & Time , Benjamin's work from this period explores much of the same territory: formally in his "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" to The Origin of German Tragic Drama , and as sketches, allusions and asides in One Way Street. The Passagenwerk ( Arcades Project , 1927–40)

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5460-706: The first chapter of the Genesis ". In that period, Benjamin wrote about the 18th-century Romantic German poet Friedrich Hölderlin . In 1917 Benjamin transferred to the University of Bern ; there he met Ernst Bloch , and Dora Sophie Pollak (née Kellner), whom he married. They had a son, Stefan Rafael, in 1918. In 1919 Benjamin earned his PhD summa cum laude with the dissertation Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik ( The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism ). For his postdoctoral thesis in 1920, Benjamin hit upon an idea very similar to

5565-407: The following: I will simply state, without waiting further, that the extension of economic growth itself requires the overturning of economic principles—the overturning of the ethics that grounds them. Changing from the perspectives of restrictive economy to those of general economy actually accomplishes a Copernican transformation: a reversal of thinking—and of ethics. If a part of wealth (subject to

5670-460: The great texts of 20th-century cultural criticism, was never completed due to his suicide on the French-Spanish border in 1940. The Arcades Project has been posthumously edited and published in many languages as a collection of unfinished reflections. The work is mainly written in German, yet also contains French-language passages, mainly quotes. Parisian arcades began to be constructed around

5775-502: The habilitation teaching credential at the University of Frankfurt at Frankfurt am Main, fearing its possible rejection. The work was a study in which he sought to "save" the category of allegory . It proved too unorthodox and abstruse for its examiners, who included prominent members of the humanities faculty, such as Hans Cornelius . Max Horkheimer also sat on the panel of examiners who rejected Benjamin's thesis. Horkheimer later serves as both patron and promoter of Benjamin's work at

5880-466: The habilitation to avoid disgrace on the occasion of the examination. That is to say: His committee informed him that he will not be accepted as an academic instructor in the German university system. A diagram of the internecine dynamics of Benjamin's habilitation committee's rejection of his work bear recollection here, as they determine something of the character of his later career and ultimate legacy. Hans Cornelius had been Adorno's mentor in

5985-415: The heading of theology". After Scholem sympathetically informed his friend that his interest in the concept had been pre-empted by Heidegger's earlier publication, Benjamin seemed to have derived a lifelong antagonism toward the rival philosopher whose major insights, over the course of both of their careers, sometimes overlapped and sometimes conflicted with Benjamin's. Incidentally, at that time Heidegger

6090-400: The heart of every day things, what Benjamin would later call a mode of empathy with 'the soul of the commodity'" according to Michael Jennings in his introduction to the work. He continues: "Many of the pieces...first appeared in the feuilleton section," of newspapers and magazines which was "not a separate section but rather an area at the bottom of every page...and the spatial restrictions of

6195-485: The importance of Karl Korsch 's interpretation of Capital to understanding Benjamin's engagement with Marxism in later works like the Arcades . Karl Korsch's Karl Marx , which was "one of Benjamin's main sources [on]... Marxism," introduced him "to an advanced understanding of Marxism." "Theses on the Philosophy of History" is often cited as Benjamin's last complete work, having been completed, according to Adorno, in

6300-475: The influence of Western Esotericism on Benjamin. Some of Benjamin's key ideas were adapted from occultists and New Age figures including Eric Gutkind and Ludwig Klages , and his interest in esotericism is known to have extended far beyond the Jewish Kabbalah . In addition to Brecht's Marxism, Adorno's critical theory, and Scholem's Jewish mysticism, Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings have underscored

6405-530: The institutional context of the university, whereas once Adorno started actually teaching as a professor at the University of Frankfurt, he devoted his seminars to Benjamin's rejected work. Adorno's 1931 and 1932 seminars, delivered at Frankfurt University , devoted themselves to a close reading of the Origins of German Tragic Drama . Adorno was still teaching this class on the Origins of German Tragic Drama during

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6510-438: The intellectuals to each other. In that time, Benjamin also briefly embarked upon an academic career, as an instructor at the University of Heidelberg . In 1932, during the turmoil preceding Adolf Hitler 's assumption of the office of Chancellor of Germany , Benjamin left Germany temporarily for the Spanish island of Ibiza where he stayed for some months; he then moved to Nice , where he considered killing himself. Perceiving

6615-573: The interdiction, in some varieties of Judaism, of attempts to determine the year when the Messiah would come into the world, and points out that this did not make Jews indifferent to the future "for every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter". Perhaps Walter Benjamin's best-known essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," identifies the perceptual shift that takes place when technological advancements emphasize speed and reproducibility. Benjamin argues that

6720-430: The journal Tel Quel . His influence is felt most explicitly in the phenomenological work of Jean-Luc Nancy , but is also significant for the work of Jean Baudrillard , the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan , Julia Kristeva , and recent anthropological work from the likes of Michael Taussig . Initially attracted to Surrealism , Bataille quickly fell out with its founder André Breton , although Bataille and

6825-543: The kabbalah, God's attributes were once held in vessels whose glass was contaminated by the presence of evil and these vessels had consequently shattered, disseminating their contents to the four corners of the earth. Tikkun was the process of collecting the scattered fragments in the hopes of once more piecing them together. Benjamin fused tikkun with the Surrealist notion that liberation would come through releasing repressed collective material, to produce his celebrated account of

6930-406: The last time, and considered emigrating from Germany to Palestine. In 1928, he and Dora separated (they divorced two years later, in 1930); in the same year he published Einbahnstraße ( One-Way Street ), and a revision of his habilitation thesis Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels ( The Origin of German Tragic Drama ). In 1929 Berlin, Lācis, then an assistant to Bertolt Brecht , socially presented

7035-574: The legendary and controversial youth magazine Der Anfang (The beginning), that was banned in all schools in Bavaria. Wyneken's thesis that a new youth must pave the way for revolutionary cultural change became the main theme of all of Benjamin's publications at that time. When not reelected as student association president, he returned to Freiburg to study, with particular attention to the lectures of Heinrich Rickert ; at that time he traveled to France and Italy. Benjamin's attempt to volunteer for service at

7140-596: The major published works that appeared in his lifetime—" The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction ", " Paris, The Capital of the 19th Century ", and his late essays and monograph on Baudelaire —are fragments of the book that he developed as standalone pieces for publication. The Arcades Project , in its current form, brings together a massive collection of notes Benjamin filed together from 1927 to 1940. Georges Bataille Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille ( / b ɑː ˈ t aɪ / ; French: [ʒɔʁʒ batɑj] ; 10 September 1897 – 8 July 1962)

7245-642: The medieval poem L'Ordre de chevalerie which he produced directly by classifying the eight manuscripts from which he reconstructed the poem. After graduating he moved to the School of Advanced Spanish Studies in Madrid . As a young man, he befriended, and was much influenced by, the Russian existentialist Lev Shestov , who schooled him in the writing of Nietzsche , Dostoevsky , and Plato as well as Shestov's own critique of reason and philosophical systematization. Founder of several journals and literary groups, Bataille

7350-399: The mere requirements for survival, challenges traditional economic paradigms by emphasizing the importance of unproductive uses of surplus that contribute to societal and cultural enrichment, rather than mere economic growth. Bataille's exploration of dépense highlights the philosophical and existential dimensions of how societies utilize their surplus resources. Crucial to the formulation of

7455-410: The narrow mind of the mechanic who changes a tire. Thus, according to Bataille's theory of consumption, the accursed share is that excessive and non-recuperable part of any economy which is destined to one of two modes of economic and social expenditure. This must either be spent luxuriously and knowingly without gain in the arts, in non-procreative sexuality, in spectacles and sumptuous monuments, or it

7560-409: The necessity, for an economy such as theirs, of having a margin of profitless operations. An immense industrial network cannot be managed in the same way that one changes a tire… It expresses a circuit of cosmic energy on which it depends, which it cannot limit, and whose laws it cannot ignore without consequences. Woe to those who, to the very end, insist on regulating the movement that exceeds them with

7665-468: The organism's growth or it can be lavishly expended. Bataille insists that an organism's growth or expansion always runs up against limits and becomes impossible. The wasting of this energy is "luxury." The form and role luxury assumes in a society, are characteristic of that society. "The accursed share" refers to this excess, destined for waste, which he calls "dépense" (French for expenditure). This non-productive expenditure of excess energy, which transcends

7770-576: The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 was rejected by the army. Benjamin later feigned illnesses to avoid conscription, allowing him to continue his studies and his translations of works by French poet Charles Baudelaire . His conspicuous refuge in Switzerland on dubious medical grounds was a likely factor in his ongoing challenges in obtaining academic employment after the war. The next year, 1915, Benjamin moved to Munich, and continued his schooling at

7875-666: The outbreak of the first World War; another was one of the Jewish Liaisons who took Nazi diplomats on a tour of Palestine. This happened while the Third Reich was preparing the European Zionists to believe that Europe's Jews would be forcibly emigrated from the Reich, to deflect attention from the looming possibility of the strategy that was ultimately adopted: mass extermination in the death camps . Scholem, Benjamin's oldest friend, and

7980-634: The outskirts of many of the most important events within the intellectual ferment of the interwar-period in Weimar Germany and interpreted those events in his writing. He was in the crowd at the conference where Kurt Gödel first described the incompleteness theorem . He once took a class on the Ancient Mayans from Rilke. He attended the same seminar as Heidegger at Freiburg in the summer of 1913 when both men were still university students: concepts first encountered there influenced their thought for

8085-440: The pieces of folded paper that Benjamin wrote on, with [A1a,1] denoting the third page of his 'folio.' Additionally, Benjamin included cross-references at the end of some sections. These were denoted by small boxes enclosing the word (e.g., ■ Fashion ■). The sections of text are at times Benjamin's own thoughts, and at other times consecutive quotations. These two types of textual sections are differentiated in their typography, with

8190-421: The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan . Bataille also had an affair with Colette Peignot , who died in 1938. In 1946 Bataille married Diane de Beauharnais (author, pseudonym, Selena Warfield), with whom he had a daughter. In 1955 Bataille was diagnosed with cerebral arteriosclerosis , although he was not informed at the time of the terminal nature of his illness. He died seven years later, on 8 July 1962. Bataille

8295-445: The readers of which likewise dismissed Benjamin's work. The university officials recommended that Benjamin withdraw Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels as a habilitation thesis to avoid formal rejection and public embarrassment. He heeded the advice, and three years later, in 1928, he published The Origin of German Tragic Drama as a book. Einbahnstraße ( One Way Street , 1928) is a series of meditations written primarily during

8400-574: The remainder of their careers. He was an early draft script reader, comrade, favorable critic and promoter as well as a frequent house-guest of the Berlin cabaret theater scene writer and director Bertolt Brecht . Martin Buber took an interest in Benjamin, but Benjamin declined to contribute to Buber's journal because it was too exoteric . Nevertheless, Buber financed Benjamin's trip to Moscow and promoted his career in other ways. Nominally, Buber had commissioned Benjamin to write an article Moscow for his Die Kreatur, though Benjamin blew his deadline for

8505-498: The revolutionary historiographer, who sought to grab hold of elided memories as they sparked to view at moments of present danger. In the essay, Benjamin's famed ninth thesis struggles to reconcile the Idea of Progress in the present with the apparent chaos of the past: A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth

8610-520: The same phase as The Origin of German Tragic Drama , after Benjamin had met Asja Lācis on the beach at Capri in 1924. He finished the cycle in 1926, and put it out the same year that his failed thesis was published. One Way Street is a collage work. Greil Marcus compares certain formal qualities of the book to the graphic novel Hundred Headless Women by Max Ernst , or to Walter Ruttman's The Weekend (an early sound collage film) . The book avoids "all semblance of linear-narrative...[offering]

8715-656: The sociopolitical and cultural significance of the Reichstag fire (27 February 1933) as the de facto Nazi assumption of full power in Germany, then manifest with the subsequent persecution of the Jews , he left Berlin and Germany for good in September. He moved to Paris, but before doing so he sought shelter in Svendborg , at Bertolt Brecht's house, and at Sanremo , where his ex-wife Dora lived. As he ran out of money, Benjamin collaborated with Max Horkheimer , and received funds from

8820-520: The sole executor of his literary estate, would resurrect the canonical books of the Kabbalah from private libraries and ancient document dumps called Genizah . These were created when the books flooded into Mandatory Palestine during the period leading up to, coinciding with, and immediately following the Holocaust . In 1923, when the Institute for Social Research was founded, later to become home to

8925-489: The spring of 1940. The Institute for Social Research, which had relocated to New York, published Theses in Benjamin's memory in 1942. Margaret Cohen writes in the Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin : In the "Concept of History" Benjamin also turned to Jewish mysticism for a model of praxis in dark times, inspired by the kabbalistic precept that the work of the holy man is an activity known as tikkun . According to

9030-405: The subject of Baroque drama in the first place, only to reject the thesis that derived from this recommendation--is virtually altogether forgotten. The episode in the history of the German academy is immortalized in the bon mot , "One cannot habilitate intellect." This failure resulted in his father's refusal to continue to support him financially, so that Benjamin was forced to make ends meet as

9135-509: The thesis proposed by Martin Heidegger in the latter's own postdoctoral project ( Duns Scotus: Theory of Categories and Meaning ). Wolfram Eilenberger writes that Benjamin's plan was "to legitimize [his theory of language] with reference to a largely forgotten tradition [found in the archaic writings of Duns Scotus ], and to strike the sparks of systematization from the apparent disjunct among modern, logical, and analytical linguistic philosophy and medieval speculations on language that fell under

9240-415: The title "Theologico-Political Fragment") is now perhaps better remembered than the larger work it cites as an authority for its mystical reflections. It was Bloch's commission that inspired Benjamin's work on the theory of categories , according to Scholem. This was to be a consequential theme throughout his career. One of Benjamin's high-school best friends (also a German Jew) killed himself using gas at

9345-471: The ultimate horror, withdrawal and rejection with which members of the circle greeted the Nazi regime ) this group's commitment to particular archaic styles anticipated the aesthetics of fascism . Later that year Benjamin and Bloch resided on the Italian island of Capri ; Benjamin wrote Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels ( The Origin of German Tragic Drama ) as a habilitation thesis meant to qualify him as

9450-427: The war he composed The Accursed Share , which he said represented thirty years' work. The singular conception of " sovereignty " expounded there would become an important topic of discussion for Derrida, Giorgio Agamben , Jean-Luc Nancy and others. Bataille also founded the influential journal Critique . Bataille's first marriage was to actress Silvia Maklès , in 1928; they divorced in 1934, and she later married

9555-429: The war. The group also published an eponymous review of Nietzsche's philosophy which attempted to postulate what Derrida has called an "anti- sovereignty ". Collaborators in these projects included André Masson , Pierre Klossowski , Roger Caillois , Jules Monnerot , Jean Rollin and Jean Wahl . The German philosopher and cultural critic, Walter Benjamin , described Bataille and Acéphale’s fascination with sacrifice as

9660-433: The winter semester that Adolph Hitler came to power, although at that time it was not listed in the course catalog--whereas Adorno's academic mentor Cornelius, who had rejected this thesis, is today remembered primarily because of his rejection of Benjamin's habilitation. Horkheimer becomes a footnote to the career of Benjamin's apprentice. Schultz--the other member of Benjamin's committee who seems to have directed him to

9765-510: The work has gradually matured to reveal the same considerable philosophical and emotional depth that is characteristic of other writers who have been categorized within " literature of transgression ". The imagery of the novel is built upon a series of metaphors which in turn refer to philosophical constructs developed in his work: the eye, the egg, the Sun, the Earth, the testicle. Other famous novels include

9870-469: The work to the University of Frankfurt in 1925 as the postdoctoral dissertation meant to earn him the habilitation (qualification) to become a university instructor in Germany. Professor Schultz of the University of Frankfurt found The Origin of German Tragic Drama inappropriate for his Germanistik department (Department of German Language and Literature), and passed it to the Department of Aesthetics ,

9975-564: The year his father died, Benjamin went to Moscow to meet Lācis and found her ill in a sanatorium. During his stay in Moscow, he was asked by the editorial board of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia to write an article on Goethe for the first edition of the encyclopedia. Benjamin's article was ultimately rejected, with reviewer Anatoly Lunacharsky (then the People's Commissar of Education ) characterizing it as "non-encyclopedic", and only

10080-487: Was Benjamin's final, incomplete book about Parisian city life in the 19th century, especially about the Passages couverts de Paris —the covered passages that extended the culture of flânerie (idling and people-watching) when inclement weather made flânerie infeasible in the boulevards and streets proper. In this work Benjamin uses his fragmentary style to write about the rise of modern European urban culture . Several of

10185-427: Was a French philosopher and intellectual working in philosophy , literature , sociology , anthropology , and history of art . His writing, which included essays , novels , and poetry , explored such subjects as eroticism , mysticism , surrealism , and transgression . His work would prove influential on subsequent schools of philosophy and social theory , including poststructuralism . Georges Bataille

10290-488: Was a major influence on Derrida's deconstruction , and both thinkers attempt to destabilise philosophical oppositions by means of an unstable "third term." Bataille's notion of materialism may also be seen as anticipating Louis Althusser 's conception of aleatory materialism or "materialism of the encounter," which draws on similar atomist metaphors to sketch a world in which causality and actuality are abandoned in favor of limitless possibilities of action. La Part maudite

10395-446: Was an atheist . Bataille developed base materialism during the late 1920s and early 1930s as an attempt to break with mainstream materialism , which he viewed as a subtle form of idealism. He argues for the concept of an active base matter that disrupts the opposition of high and low and destabilises all foundations. Inspired by Gnostic ideas, this notion of materialism defies strict definition and rationalisation. Base materialism

10500-717: Was killed at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1942. The others in his party were allowed passage the next day (maybe because Benjamin's suicide shocked Spanish officials), and safely reached Lisbon on 30 September. Arendt, who crossed the French-Spanish border at Portbou a few months later, passed the manuscript of Theses to Adorno. Another completed manuscript, which Benjamin had carried in his suitcase, disappeared after his death and has not been recovered. In addition to his lifelong dialogue in letters with Gershom Scholem , Walter Benjamin maintained an intense correspondence with Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht , and

10605-415: Was marked by polemics and the theme of his assault in this work concerned Friedrich Gundolf 's Goethe book. Gundolf was the most prominent and able academic member of the (Stefan) George-Kreis --a cult of post-symbolist, romantic nationalist poets with a mystically conservative, medievalist bent. Elsewhere, in the anonymity of his private epistolary writings, Benjamin explicitly points out how (regardless of

10710-533: Was occasionally funded by the Frankfurt School under the direction of Adorno and Horkheimer , even from their New York City residence. At other times he received funding from Hebrew University or from funds made available by Martin Buber and his publishing associates including Salman Schocken . The dynamism or conflict between these competing influences—Brecht's Marxism, Adorno's critical theory , Scholem's Jewish mysticism—were central to his work, although their philosophic differences remained unresolved. Moreover,

10815-456: Was of fragile health and so in 1905 the family sent him to Hermann-Lietz-Schule Haubinda , a boarding school in the Thuringian countryside, for two years; in 1907, having returned to Berlin, he resumed his schooling at the Kaiser Friedrich School. In 1912, at the age of 20, he enrolled at the University of Freiburg , but at the summer semester's end, he returned to Berlin and matriculated at

10920-616: Was soon to embark on a love affair with Hannah Arendt , later related to Benjamin through marriage to his cousin Günther Anders . Later, unable to support himself and family, Benjamin returned to Berlin and resided with his parents. In 1921 he published the essay "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" ("Toward the Critique of Violence"). At this time Benjamin first became socially acquainted with Leo Strauss , and he remained an admirer of Strauss and his work throughout his life. Starting in adolescence, in

11025-537: Was the son of Joseph-Aristide Bataille (b. 1851), a tax collector (later to go blind and be paralysed by neurosyphilis ), and Antoinette-Aglaë Tournarde (b. 1865). Born on 10 September 1897 in Billom in the region of Auvergne , his family moved to Reims in 1898, where he was baptized. He went to school in Reims and then Épernay . Although brought up without religious observance, he converted to Catholicism in 1914, and became

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