Imaginative, unique thinking. Over my head for the most part. ( )

I was completely disappointed and underwhelmed by this book. ( )

Although it contains the excellent essays, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and Theses on the Philosophy of History, this collection is subject to the weaknesses of most anthologies: We are made to glide along the surface of the text, which Arendt has paternalistically selected for us to peruse. Though Benjamin is not well-known for his long-form (and though this is a limitation of short books by definition) Illuminations would have done well to include a single more substantive selection from his longer work instead of padding itself with lightweight selections such as, Unpacking My Library. ( )

I found this dense and difficult. Maybe it's me. Maybe it's the translation (by Zohn). ( )

Walter Benjamin is a name, a thinker that I've encountered over and over throughout my years of reading--yet, I've never read his work directly. This, then, was my first experience with the German polymath. Hannah Arendt's 51-page introduction is one of the finest introductions I've ever read-scholarly, compassionate, engaging; it is not to be skipped, though I suggest that it be read after the compendium of Benjamin's essays. Arendt sheds light on the crucial fact that Benjamin was nearly unclassifiable, especially in his lifetime. He did literary criticism but was not a literary critic; he engaged in theological discourse, but was not a theologian, etc. This (or perhaps Harry Zohn's translation) could account for what I feel to be a lack of congruence in these essays. Out of all 10 essays, I felt that I was in a jungle of thoughts, only to happen upon shining treasure once in a while. I've included some examples below. Overall, his thoughts were stimulating, though they may not last. The best of the lot were his essay on Proust and the essay on art during the age of mass-production, the latter of which I will be returning to when I concentrate on William Gaddis's [b:The Recognitions|11786836|The Recognitions|William Gaddis|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1348605197s/11786836.jpg|1299804] for my dissertation.

Examples:

Unpacking My Library
- "...the mild boredom of order" (59).
- "Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the [book] collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories" (60).
- "Writers are really people who write books...because they are dissatisfied with the books which they...do not like" (61).
- A theme in this essay, as in others, is that the collector exists inside the collection; the collection possesses the collector.

The Task of the Translator
- "Languages are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express" (72).
- "Where a text is identical with truth or dogma, where it is supposed to be the 'true language' in all its literalness and without the mediation of meaning, this text is unconditionally translatable. In such case translations are called for only because of the plurality of languages" (82).

The Image of Proust
- "...from the honeycombs of memory he built a house for the swarm of his thoughts" (203).

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
- "A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it...the distracted mass absorbs the work of art" (239). ( )