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“... both arresting time and focusing on the key moments of a concatenation, in a similar way to what Walter Benjamin thought photographs did in changing our perception of human movement: Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens ...”

“... field, as painting and sculpture were pressured by photography and film, and modernists like Walter Benjamin and László Moholy-Nagy redefined literacy as the ability to read both. For Benjamin, the reproducibility of these media not only shattered the auratic power of the unique work (this was mostly wishful ...”

“... m the Air). Bloch’s passion for aerial and low life excursions was one of his many bonds with Walter Benjamin, the outstanding critical mind among his younger German contemporaries and, like Klemperer, an early admirer of Geist der Utopie. It was surely thanks to Bloch and his essay on Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann – written for the 1930 Kroll ...”

“... hospitality to those of differing origins and language. Derrida made clear in his short book on Walter Benjamin, The Force of Law (1994), that justice was a concept that was yet to come. This does not mean that we cannot expect instances of justice in this life, and it does not mean that justice will arrive for us only in another life. He was clear ...”

“... declares a ‘state of emergency’ and suspends its own judicial code. In fact, as foreseen by Walter Benjamin in ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), his final text before he committed suicide while in flight from Nazi Europe, this state threatens to be ‘not the exception but the rule’. Agamben effectively turns this foreboding into ...”

“... expression: ‘eyes characteristic of people on public transport’, Camille says, paraphrasing Walter Benjamin. The customers of Viollet-le-Duc’s ‘factory’ for ‘the mass production of the medieval’ were not medieval themselves, and so there was to be no buggering of kings, and only one (faintly Goya-esque) demon snacking on human ...”

“... rackety and sometimes rickety lines. Frequently it is merely chopped prose. In a vignette of Walter Benjamin we find this: ‘after he fled Berlin/the Bibliothèque Nationale/was the only place/he allowed himself to feel at home in./It couldn’t be a sanctuary/for it gave him only/a brief passing illusion/of safety that ended/with the German ...”

“... to crumble! Well, yes, I guess I shall end up scribbling much the same thing. I do think that Benjamin’s Arcades Project – over a thousand pages of it in this first English-language edition – is some kind of prose Communist Cantos to set beside the verse Fascist one we have. And the comparison immediately suggests the problem. Even Bunting is ...”

“... and it was there, on her arrival, that Hannah Arendt deposited the surviving manuscripts of Walter Benjamin. Characteristically, and perhaps accurately, she thought that the Frankfurt people handled them dishonestly. New York in the Fifties was Weimar in partibus. There are emigrations and emigrations. Chateaubriand elegantly described the French ...”

“... we move to its equally emblematic ending with the opening of the Métro. This is work inspired by Walter Benjamin, as Prendergast says, whose ‘imprint’ is to be found ‘virtually everywhere in the following pages’. But the influence has been thoroughly assimilated, converted into practice. Benjamin has provided ...”

“... before comes a fleeting reference to one of Europe’s leading intellectuals of the period: ‘Walter Benjamin once defined an intellectual (himself) as a man “with spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart”.’ Benjamin appears not to have been nasty enough to be chaptered in the book, and it also appears ...”

“... In all versions, this is very lonely work. One of the aphorisms I keep returning to is quoted by Walter Benjamin but not otherwise much cited as far as I can tell. It is very low-key, and discreetly funny, as so many of these pieces are. It was Benjamin who said that ‘the key to Kafka’s work is likely to fall into ...”

“... injustice was accompanied by a pious fantasy of purity, of a language being violated. It was Walter Benjamin, in 1931, who wrote what is in many ways still the most revealing essay on Kraus and his ‘struggle against the empty phrase, which is the linguistic expression of the despotism with which, in journalism, topicality sets up its dominion over ...”

“... identified them as spies, so he told us in his gloss on Autumn in Central Paris, his memorial to Walter Benjamin. But it also suggests an identification with the artist, who had been similarly equipped.                   I may be needing a new cover, signals Cupcake, John Hollander’s secret agent in his marvellous book-length poem ...”

“... way that he himself used earlier scholars. Some of the tributes paid to him, like those paid to Walter Benjamin, seem excessive. Like Benjaminomania, Warburgolatry in some of its modes has more to do with the pathos of the fragment, so appealing in an age that rejects grand narratives, and the powerful contemporary nostalgia for the lost world of the ...”