The work is the death mask of its conception: The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses by Walter Benjamin

May 3, 2013May 3, 2013 Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

1. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.

2. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

3. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

4. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

5. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

6. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

7. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

8. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

9. Nulla dies sine linea [‘No day without a line’] — but there may well be weeks.

10. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

11. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

12. Stages of composition: idea — style — writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.

13. The work is the death mask of its conception.

Text taken from Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings

On Benjamin’s Public (Oeuvre)

July 30, 2012 Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

On the run from the Nazis in 1940, the philosopher, literary critic and essayist Walter Benjamin committed suicide in the Spanish border town of Portbou. In 2011, over 70 years later, his writings enter the public domain in many countries around the world. Anca Pusca, author of Walter Benjamin: The Aesthetics of Change, reflects on the relevance of Benjamin’s oeuvre in a digital age, and the implications of his work becoming freely available online.

Via The Public Domain Review. Continue HERE

Art/Aesthetics · Human-ities

Proust’s Mother

March 30, 2012March 30, 2012 Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

There are texts that seem to require a certain craziness of us, a mismeasure of response to match the extravagance of their expression. But can a mismeasure be a match? All we know is that we don’t want to lose or reduce the extravagance but can’t quite fall for it either. An example would be Walter Benjamin’s wonderful remark about missed experiences in Proust:

None of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for. This is what ages us – this and nothing else. The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called on us; but we, the masters, were not at home.

Even without the ‘nothing else’ this is a pretty hyperbolic proposition. With the ‘nothing else’ it turns into a form of madness, a suggestion that we shall not grow old at all unless we keep failing to receive the passions, vices and insights that come to see us. This would be a life governed by new necessities, entirely free from the old ones, exempt from time and biology. The sentences are clear enough but don’t read easily as fantasy or figure of speech. Benjamin is asking us to entertain this magical thought for as long as we can, and not to replace it too swiftly by something more sensible.

Excerpt from Proust and His Mother by Michael Wood at London Review. Continue HERE

Book-Text-Read-Zines · Human-ities · Philosophy

A Philosophical Portrait: Walter Benjamin on the 120th Anniversary of his Birth

January 9, 2012January 9, 2012 Sebastian Alvarez2 Comments

Gisèle Freund, Walter Benjamin in the Bibliothèque National, 1939

If 2012 is the year our world comes to an end, as doomsayers predict, that will provide additional employment for the angel of history, who observes the past and the wreckage of humanity as described by Walter Benjamin in his essay “On the Concept of History.” But if the world and its inhabitants continue to exist, they will be able to observe, next July 15, the 120th anniversary of Benjamin’s birth. His influence has only been growing in recent decades, and his writings are increasingly the inspiration for discussion and reconsideration.

The growing corpus of works about Benjamin is about to be augmented with the publication, in January, of a comprehensive study, “Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait,” by Prof. Eli Friedlander (Harvard University Press ). Friedlander, head of the Philosophy Department at Tel Aviv University, discusses Benjamin’s approaches to concepts such as history, mythology, language, beauty and truth. His aim is to tie together the threads of thought spun by the philosopher, who committed suicide in 1940.

“Many people,” Friedlander says, “emphasize the enigmatic and enchanting aspect of Benjamin’s writings. They present him, as Hannah Arendt did, as a kind of pearl fisherman retrieving precious treasures from the depths. But the amazement at that marvelous uniqueness is also a sure way to isolate him and avoid becoming seriously involved in his thought.”

Friedlander’s book revolves around the relationship between history and philosophy, which he elucidates through Benjamin’s unfinished work “The Arcades Project.” “Benjamin’s thought is faithful to concrete historical content, so much so that it sometimes seems his writing lacks the recognizable form of philosophy,” Friedlander observes. “Benjamin wrote philosophical history, or more accurately, wrote philosophy with historical materials whose ordering and arranging he worked on for years. The most salient expression of this commitment to concreteness is ‘The Arcades Project,’ which was intended to be a book consisting largely of quotations focusing on the arcades of Paris in the 19th century. After Benjamin’s death, the material he had compiled remained divided into convolutes according to subjects such as ‘modes of lighting,’ ‘iron construction’ and ‘the flaneur.’ These are certainly not the typical subjects of philosophy.”

Text By Avner Shapira in Ha’aretz. Continue HERE

“Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait”