Walter Benjamin - Thought

Thought

Walter Benjamin corresponded much with Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht, and was occasionally funded by the Frankfurt School under the direction of Adorno and Horkheimer, even from their New York City residence. The competing influences — Brecht’s Marxism, Adorno’s critical theory, Gerschom Scholem’s Jewish mysticism — were central to his work, although their philosophic differences remained unresolved. Moreover, the critic Paul de Man argued that the intellectual range of Benjamin’s writings flows dynamically among those three intellectual traditions, deriving a critique via juxtaposition; the exemplar synthesis is On the Concept of History (Theses on the Philosophy of History).

Read more about this topic:  Walter Benjamin

Famous quotes containing the word thought:

    “We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered, that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.”
    —Quentin Crisp (b. 1908)

    “Art to me was a state, it didn’t need to be an accomplishment. By any of the standards of production, achievement, performance, I was not an artist. But I always thought of myself as one.”
    —Margaret Anderson (1886–1973)