WALTER BENDIX SCHÖNFLIES BENJAMIN
15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940
Walter Benjamin was a German literary critic, philosopher and essayist. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, historical materialism, and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory and Western Marxism. He is associated with the Frankfurt School.
"The art of storytelling
is reaching its end because
the epic side of truth,
wisdom, is dying out.
Memory is not an instrument for exploring
the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past
experience, as the ground is the medium in which
dead cities lie interred.
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics
as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
Every passion borders on the chaotic,
but the collector's passion borders
on the chaos of memories."
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