The Construction Site

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. --Walter Benjamin

Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

—Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (via littleeve)

(Source: little-evie)

dajohnston: “That it ‘keeps going on like this’ is the catastrophe.” - Walter Benjamin

dajohnston:

“That it ‘keeps going on like this’ is the catastrophe.” - Walter Benjamin

thearcadesproject: In 2008, I spent an entire night searching for this street sign in Berlin. 

thearcadesproject:

In 2008, I spent an entire night searching for this street sign in Berlin. 

beautone: Walter Benjamin & Bertholt Brecht playing chess (Svendborg, Denmark 1934)

beautone:

Walter Benjamin & Bertholt Brecht playing chess (Svendborg, Denmark 1934)

It is not enough to know that an ecstatic component lives in every revolutionary act. This component is identical to anarchy. To accentuate this exclusively would be to subordinate methodical and disciplined preparation for the revolution entirely to a praxis oscillating between fitness exercises and celebrations in advance.

—Walter Benjamin (quoted in Michael Löwy’s, Morning Star)

(Source: courier5, via madsimian)

These are days when no one should rely unduly on his ‘competence.’ Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.

—Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street (in Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott)

(Source: bloodletters)

beetleinabox: Otto Dix, Die Skatspeiler [Cardplayers] aka Kartenspielende Kriegskrüppel [Cardplaying War Cripples], 1920 (Nationalgalerie Staatliche Museen, Berlin). Walter Benjamin writes: Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent — not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth. And there was nothing remarkable about that. For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn-street-car now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.

beetleinabox:

Otto Dix, Die Skatspeiler [Cardplayers] aka Kartenspielende Kriegskrüppel [Cardplaying War Cripples], 1920 (Nationalgalerie Staatliche Museen, Berlin).

Walter Benjamin writes:

Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent — not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth. And there was nothing remarkable about that. For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn-street-car now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.
anticipatedstranger: “Forbidden bird.” Doodle drawn by Walter Benjamin during one of his drug experiments, some time between 1927 and 1934. From Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6, (Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), p. 617. via Cabinet.

anticipatedstranger:

“Forbidden bird.” Doodle drawn by Walter Benjamin during one of his drug experiments, some time between 1927 and 1934. From Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6, (Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), p. 617. via Cabinet.