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:

    “... when one reflects on the books one never has written, and never may, though their schedules lie in the beautiful chirography which marks the inception of an unexpressed thought upon the pages of one’s notebook, one is aware, of any given idea, that the chances are against its ever being offered to one’s dearest readers.”
    —Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)

    “On the day we filmed the scene, a bee stung me. I screamed and cried so much they called a doctor, and my father said, “It can’t hurt that badly!” But it wasn’t the pain that upset me, it was the thought that I mightn’t be in the film. Already the little professional.”
    —Natasha Richardson (b. 1963)

    “A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.”
    —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)