259 definitions
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Walter Benjamin: top 300 quotes
259 definitions
The City (n.) is itself a threatening natural disaster.
The City (n.) is a manifestation of the modern. Urban space is the locus of class struggle.
The City (n.) is a site of porosity: In the city streets, buildings and collective actions interpenetrate in 'unforeseen constellations'.
The City (n.) is messianic instances of radical alterity.
Politics (n.) is the satisfaction of unenhanced humanness.
Politics (n.) is, in the first order, a philosophical problem.
Politics (n.) is rendered aesthetic with only one result: war.
Journalism (n.) is a field whose form is wholly imposed by the reader's impatience (both an impatience for fresh nourishment and also an impatience to be assimilated as readers).
Journalism (n.) is the most authoritative instance of a revolutionary form of authorship that is capable of going beyond not only the conventional separations between genres, between writer and poet, between the scholar and the popularizer, but it also forces us to re-examine the separation between author and reader.
Journalism (n.) forces us to re-examine the separation between author and reader.
Addiction (n.) is characteristic of modernity. Intoxication served to buffer the shock of the modern. Beginning in the nineteenth century, a narcotic (via a tricking-of-the-senses as to what reality is by new cinema technologies) was made out of reality itself.
Civilization's (n.) every monument is a monument of barbarism
Progress (n.) is, in the 19th century, a kind of religion.
Progress (n.) carries along with it an immanent critique of the concept of progress.
Progress (n.) is the cultural forms that do not repeat the old, but rather redeem it.
Progress (n.) must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are 'status quo' is the catastrophe.
Progress (n.) is the 'always-the-same' of the 'new', the fetishization of modern temporality, which is an endless repetition of the 'new' as the 'always-the-same.' The rebus in which this temporality appears is fashion.
A Critic (n.) approaches a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
The Critic (n.) is the strategist in the camp of literature.
The Critic (n.) is the art of coining slogans without betraying ideas, without peddling them to fashion.
The University (n.) is simply not the place to study.
The Intellectual (n.) is not a profession but a character.
Autobiography (n.) is not about the months and years appearing; it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.
Autobiography (n.) is not just about reminiscences, even extensive ones. It has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life, with all its moments and discontinuities.