On benjamin's 80th anniversary, we invited 13 Benjamin researchers, translators and publishers
(Wang Min'an, Xia Kejun, Qin Lu, Yang Junjie, Tan Xufeng, Lin Yahua, Yao Yunfan, Hu Sang, Jiang Xue, Xie Jun, Wang Fanke, Li Sha, Wang Yaochong)
, conducted a deep and divergent pen talk, respectively from love
(Life History)
die
(History of Acceptance)
think
(History of Ideas)
The dimension perspective of Benjamin. Rather than the commemorative paradigm that systematically organizes scholars' ideas according to different themes, we choose to cut into Benjamin's world in a way that may be more in tune with Benjamin's temperament.
Masaaki Moto.
In the second issue of the pen talk about love, growth and life history, Tan Xufeng, Jiang Xue, Wang Fanke, Li Sha, Wang Yaochong and several authors extracted the "fragments of thought" they collected when reading Benjamin, and Benjamin was obsessed with the things around him as a child. The young Benjamin, together with the intellectual sharpness and emotional life of his friends, was incorporated into a sonnet. Inspired by his lover, his mind began to "turn left". From Berlin to Moscow, Marseille and Paris, Benjamin traveled, and every place he traveled inspired his philosophy, which also formed a unique stylistic form, the "image of ideas". Even though the Slovaks are gone, Benjamin's writings continue to carry out his travels to China in a unique way.
We have preserved as much of the different styles, structures, and emotions of each author as possible in our editing—it is these fragments that are far from systematic, like a prism that reflects the "totality" of Benjamin's intellectual legacy, as well as the practical dilemmas and limits of thinking he faces, which is the key to our reactivation of the energy of Benjamin's thought today.
Written by Li Sha, Wang Yaochong, Jiang Xue, Wang Fanke, Tan Xufeng
Planning editor 丨 Beijing News reporter Dong Muzi intern Xie Tingyu
Benjamin's Childhood Butterfly: Reflections on Ecstasy, Throughout Life
Walter Benjamin grew up obsessed with illusions of what was around him. Sometimes it's objects that are pronounced in words that evoke similar perceptions, and sometimes it's the colorful colors on candy tin foil. Before attending elementary school in 1901, he spent a carefree time with his parents in a summer cottage in the foothills of potsdam's brewing mountain in the southwestern suburb of Berlin.
When I captured this memory more than 30 years later, the air was full of butterflies wearing flowers. He spoke of illusion again: "I let myself rise and fall with each dance or swing of the pair of wings I was obsessed with. [......] The more I mobilized each of my muscle fibers to get close to the little animal, the more I transformed myself into a butterfly in my heart, and the more the butterfly fell together, the more similar it was to the every move of a human being..."
("Berlin Childhood Catching Butterflies")
Because the butterfly flutters and flutters, he depicts the state of inner fluttering during the illusion, which is similar to the bee-like fanatical mind of the poet in Plato's "Ion".
Childhood Benjamin.
From the 1910s onwards, thinking about fanaticism almost ran through Benjamin's life. In 1915, he even wrote a book entitled "Rainbow - A Dialogue about Intoxication" on the theme of intoxication.
("The Rainbow—Conversation about the Imagination")
an essay. In the form of a debate between Margaret and the painter Georg, the essay is cut layer by layer into the psychedelic world that haunted his heart since childhood, and the machine blade falls out of the essence and perfection. Margaret dreamed of a strange color: the scenery shone brightly in the middle. The mottled colors of every mountain, every tree, and the leaves stretch endlessly. The kaleidoscopic nature of nature is revealed. She is indistinguishable from color, and all feelings are forgotten. The painter said that this is a psychedelic color, an intoxicating experience. Man is fully accommodating to things in self-forgetfulness, and this is where the "soul" of the artist is sought.
It is impossible to talk about this without mentioning Hölderlin, whom Benjamin had been obsessed with for a long time when he wrote Rainbow.
Benjamin embarked on the already accumulated Hölderlin study in the winter of 1914, and later formed his first treatise, On Hölderlin's Two Poems.
("Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin")
。 In early 1916 he addressed Herbert Belmoch
（Hebert Belmore）
The letter mentions that both works were completed at the same time. At the end of the year, he told the early acquaintance about his critical ideas.
Criticism should touch the soul of the object, like a chemical that breaks down things and presents its inner nature unscathed, like a hole of light piercing through it. And what underpins this critical idea is Hölderlin's revelation over the years: life must be sought from the soul of all names, words, and signs. On Hölderlin's Two Poems analysis of The Courage of the Poet
（“Dichtermut”）
, "Weakness"
（“Blödigkeit”）
The "divine sobriety" of Hölderlin's later poems is mentioned, pointing to the state of the poet's soul. It is a paradoxical essence of bravery, daring to be completely passive, to be purely one with the world in a relationship that is fully engaged in the world.
Hölderlin also summed up Germany in this way
（abendländish）
National disposition, that is the god of heaven "Yuno-style soberness"
(Junonic sobriety)
。 And this later benjamin", "Commenting on Goethe's < Affinity >"
("Goethe's Elective Affinities", 1924—1925)
A culture is the ultimate goal of German artistic practice. "Detached from expression/extraterrestrial things"
（Ausdruckslos）
The tension in the construction of this term is immediately apparent, showing a tendency to transcend organic forms.
This inspiration comes from Benjamin's response to Hölderlin's perverse form of the rhythm of the drama – pause
(Caesura)
Of understanding. In the final analysis, less speech means that the poet is not governed by his own perceptual consciousness. In this way, sobriety is called a sacred, supreme state because the poet is no longer limited by man's subjective consciousness. To be one with all things means to be transformed into the operation of pure functions as a result.
Hölderlin's train of thought comes from the true experience of oneness with all things, and it is this divine state that is in mind when he writes. Absolute unity is what he calls "existence," a time when subject and object merge so closely that no human conscious judgment arises
(The First Judgment and Existence, "Urteil und Sein", 1794/95)
。 The experience of existence originated from Hölderlin's realization of the beauty of Plato's Drink. Mortals merge with beauty through the glimpse of the soul, and beauty itself is "self-rooted, self-existent, eternally one with itself."
If one touches on the subtle moments of unity, one cannot fail to mention Hölderlin's familiar reading of Ferdejo, and Socrates mentions a wonderful spiritual activity when he describes the fascination of beauty. True beauty comes from the activity of a soul growing wings, accompanied by a wonderful perception intertwined with bittersweet. Hölderlin quotes Heraclitus's proverb to sum up its mysteries: "The One who is different from himself in himself"
(εν διαφερον εαυτῳ, the One in itself differed)
。
It can be said that the experience of beauty is not an antelope hanging on its horns without leaving traces, only people are out of their own consciousness, that is to say, in the case of the demise of perceptual judgment, it is the way to enter Taiyi. The spirit Eros, who gives birth to souls between man and god in "Drinking", most aptly represents this mystery. In the ancient Greek creation myth, Aeros himself was a creation god who carried wings to promote the reproduction of all things, and the endless transformation between poverty and abundance represented the law of human beings from division to unity.
In an age of inexperience deprivation, Aeros, who was looking for a fertile soul
Some similar statements vaguely reveal Benjamin's understanding of Hölderlin's transformation of consciousness. In the 1925 Introduction to the Critique of Epistemology, a German drama, he used the idea of Platomy as the content of truth, which was no longer a predetermined in a priori philosophy, but the "withering away" of man's subjective intentions. As early as the draft of the dialogue that explored the intoxication, he also constructed the word "intuitive", which contrasted with the "intellectual intuition" of the conceptual predecessors, showing how the inheritors of German classical philosophy were step by step to the opposite of their predecessors.
In this way, the legend of the Chinese painter who disappeared in Benjamin's 1930s article "Works of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction" about Aura is a perfect example of intuitive knowledge. This is also Benjamin's "Chinese Paintings in the National Library" in Paris in the late 1930s.
("Chinese Paintings at the National Library")
The world of imagery.
The brushstrokes of Chinese calligraphy form some imitation of the illusion, like a flash, penetrating the rapidly flowing and changing real world, that is, the world of meaning. The Chinese artists who remembered Benjamin from childhood to middle age frequently painted the soul world beyond the eyesight from the bottom of the pen, and Hölderlin coincided here, converging into a grand and profound world of mountains and colors.
Benjamin in 1932.
In the 1928 article "Leading to the Planetarium" at the end of "One Way", Benjamin broke the essence of intoxicated experience from the grand cosmic communication relationship. This contemplation, as man's way of joining the universe, means that man and the world become one. The scientific cognition represented by modern astronomy has led to the division of the relationship between heaven and man, and the abuse of wartime technology has ignited the fire to the destruction of man himself. In contrast, he used "fertility intoxication" as a method for modern civilization to reconstruct the classical spiritual order. If we correspond to the image of Hölderlin's spiritualized image of the fertile soul of Aros, this rhetoric and purpose are no longer unfamiliar.
Benjamin, who always cared for the life of the soul in the age of experience poverty, was not the Same Aeros who wandered between poverty and abundance? He used his unruly self as a vessel for na bai chuan, confined to any single ethnic culture, and in close agreement with the Chinese thinkers who adopted Western philosophy in the early 20th century, demonstrating the subtle and vast expansive reachable spirit when the ancient and modern West and the East were integrated.
Benjamin excerpts Baudelaire's friend Maxim Dugan's "Voyager" under the theme of "Arcade Street" that crosses the threshold of the old and new worlds.
("The Traveler", 1855)
A poem is deeply tasted here. Isn't the self's cycle of fusion and separation in the world a portrayal of the transformation of consciousness between existence and non-existence when the soul is created? To remember Walter Benjamin in the chaos, isolation and challenges caused by the coronavirus is also a modern mission that looks forward to humanity's constant adaptation to new experiences:
I was afraid to stop; it was the instinct of life
As I wandered, I was lost under the blue sky
Listen to the intoxicating chanting of my youthful soul
My heart is filled with the light of God
……
The desire to love is too frightening, and I don't want to drown.
Get on the road! Get on the road! Suffering people
Continue your miserable journey and pursue your destiny...
Spring in Capri: Benjamin in Love
In April 1924, Benjamin descended to capri
(capri)
Staying in a villa with the highest balcony on the island, he was enchanted by the companionship of friends and the scenery of spring, while Berlin's troubles were forgotten. This may be the last few happy times of his life. Originally, he came here only to complete his teaching thesis in order to seek development within the college again. But the glitzy prodigal son squandered as usual, breaking free from the sentimental atmosphere of leaving Heidelberg. He spent the first two years there for a long time, and eventually the accumulated emotional power crystallized into "Commenting on Goethe's Affinity", dedicated to the female sculptor Yura Cohen
(Jula Cohn)
, the object of his hopeless admiration. At the same time, his deep hopes for an academic position were disappointed, but Jaspers was destined to miss this work that he was sure to appreciate.
At present, Benjamin's body is surging with a rare vitality, and another encounter has also been ushered in at the right time. Capri was then a healing haven for left-wing intellectuals in Europe. Access to the most popular local "Tomcat Sedigai Cafe"
(Cafe »Zum Kater Hiddigeigei«)
Benjamin and the Russian revolutionary, avant-garde actor and director Rassis
(Thing lacis)
Come across. The relationship not only drowned Benjamin in a wealth of emotions and senses, but also drew his mind to "turn left"—in short, despite the controversy, a wonderful chemistry took place for the repressed student of German philosophy.
If Capri was the focal point of the Romantic landscape, Naples was its social focal point. Although seemingly in a quiet corner, Benjamin took Lassis to Naples with him at least twenty times.
(Martin Mittelmeier,Adorno in Naples,64)
Fast forward to summer, Benjamin has discovered his new philosophy in the heat of this southern city, a way to change style and thought. Documentary testimonies of this period are found in volume IV of Benjamin's Complete Works entitled "Images of Thought"
（Denkbilder）
Under the heading, several urban essays are commanded by the title "Benjamin and Lassis", which shows thought and love: the first one is "Naples"!
Lassis in 1924.
Approaching this "rocky" city, the mysterious eye of Benjamin's conceptualism is superimposed on the lens of historical materialism
(Wolfram Allenberg, The Age of the Magician, translated by Lin Linna, p. 244)
Touching the chaotic urban landscape: "Like these veins, the building is also porous
(Porous)
state. Whether in courtyards, arcades, or stairs, buildings mingle with people's movements. Event spaces are maintained everywhere in order to set aside space and provide new and unforeseen landscapes
(Constellations)
"People are afraid of cookie-cutter creation. There is no scene that makes people think that it will always be like this, and there is no form that declares 'solipsism'. ”
(The Complete Works of Benjamin, Vol. IV, 309)
The silent rock should actually be in line with the bustling construction of human beings today, and Benjamin seems to be deliberately allowing "nature" to infect history, so that history has "nature" - there is not conquest, but an indissoluble intersection.
In this image, which still haunts the conceptual air, the element of historical materialism is slightly provocative: not only has history failed to move toward its end, but it cannot be completed in a single day as long as it fails to measure "nature" for a day. Isn't the modern style of the city closer to the bloated concubine of history the more "civilized" it is? Instead, Naples "nothing is done." porosity
(Porosity)
Not only is it mixed with the laziness of the Southern craftsmen, but it especially echoes the fanaticism of improvisation. In any case, space and timing must be preserved. The building serves as the People's Theater
(Volksbühne)
to use ".
(The Complete Works of Benjamin, Vol. IV, 310)
The popular theater that Benjamin-Lasis will be aware of here may correspond to the People's Theater in Berlin, designed by Oscar Kaufmann and completed in 1914. The theater was intended to promote naturalistic drama to the working class, which inherited Zola's principles of naturalistic creation and expressed the social contradictions of Germany.
Obviously, the "porous" interpretation mixes half of the typical "naturalistic" meaning, that is, the laziness of focusing on the "essence" of the Southern craftsmen, while the other half of the improvisational fanaticism belongs to the avant-garde art of Lasis—a passion that Benjamin will soon experience and fully unleash in the writing of The One Way—and apart from History and Class Consciousness, which was popular at the Knowledge Café in Capri at the time, there is nothing more appealing to Benjamin's taste, a real, Avant-garde historical materialism derived from experience?
Secrets of the City: Benjamin on a Trip
Benjamin left Capri and returned to Berlin, when the autumn winds were blowing. Perhaps what is at the helm of his life is not the fear of death, but more love and thought.
He sailed to Moscow in the winter, then to Marseille, and then to Paris. It is no exaggeration to say that every trace of his deeds also inspired his philosophy. Since Herder, philosophy has been embedded in the pockets of German philosophers. But what remains to be asked is: Is it the landscape of philosophy, or the philosophy of landscape? Undoubtedly, the traveler's vision ultimately reveals a difference in philosophical perspectives. Compare Benjamin's former classmate, the already famous Heidegger, who was almost reluctant to travel to Greece, despite his lifelong call to return to the land.
For Heidegger, greece today is far from the pure landscape that his philosophy aspires to. It is said that his wife worked hard to get him to Greece, which finally took place in 1962. When the ship reached the port, the master was reluctant to disembark, for the land of Greece was no longer open to the travelers of the industrial age, but were simply constantly kicked out of one means of transport, crammed into another and transported to another.
(Peter Geimer, Spring 1962,49)
In fact, Benjamin is equally well versed in this. Although he was passionate about the historical study of textual strata and urban topography, to whom could the true secrets of these cities for centuries be revealed, apart from the real wanderers?
Traveler MasaakiMoto.
Unfortunately, the times soon confiscated the traveler's pass.
In 1935, Benjamin, who was stranded in Paris, received a worried letter from Auerbach, a Fellow Berliner and later author of The Imitation
(Erich Auerbach)
。 Auerbach was in exile in Istanbul, and in order to help Benjamin escape the doom of his time, he recommended a teaching position in German literature at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.
Later history is known to people. However, if the unfinishedity of history is at least a limiting experience of human thought, then this stubborn experience comes from man as a kind of being, who is not only able to remember, but also rests on fantasy, but also always has a wish.
If Benjamin had secured this teaching position and gone well, he might have been with Levi Strauss
(Claude Lévi-Strauss)
Sailing through the "melancholy tropics" – at least, in any case, he would have met his Fellow Frenchman at his destination. What kind of scenery should it be? Will we be waiting for another Benjamin, another never-ending encounter?
Perhaps, with sufficient preparation, he was destined to meet any Benjamin at some point, whether he was a wanderer, a collector, a literary critic, a philosopher, a theologian, or a historical materialist. Perhaps, there is no "other" Benjamin, only Benjamin as a method.
Benjamin's working method: "thought image" as a style
Benjamin's complexity set him apart among 20th-century Western thinkers, and the difficulty in positioning Benjamin was fundamentally unable to give an appropriate definition of identity within the existing frame of reference.
We are all familiar with Hannah Arendt
（Hannah Arendt）
The series of "not XX" titles given to Benjamin in the preface to Enlightenment can only be explained by Arendt's "poetic thinking" to Benjamin, who is neither a poet nor a philosopher. Today I would like to talk about Benjamin's working methods, and that concludes here.
When Arendt commented on Benjamin's "poetic thinking," "poetic" refers to "metaphor."
(Metaphor)
。 She said: "What makes Benjamin so puzzling is that he thinks poetically, though he is not a poet, and therefore metaphors must be the greatest and most mysterious gift that language has given him to him, because metaphors are 'transmitting'
(Transfer)
In the process, the invisible becomes perceptible. ”
In 1968, Arendt was giving a lecture on Benjamin.
Metaphor, as a method of rhetorical expression, is at its core the image. Benjamin's many concepts and theories such as "halo"
(Aura)
, "Wanderer"
(Flâneur)
Benjamin's treatment of such concepts is generally a figurative description rather than an abstract definition, such as the famous definition of "halo". This way of thinking is thinking in an image, or thinking in an image.
Benjamin's early epistemology also held that philosophy should be a figurative representation, and that the task of future philosophy was to characterize truth in a "concrete empirical whole." His approach is linguistic, and many times it is not based on conceptual deduction and rational theory, but uses actual imagery to cut into the real world, not so much conceptual cognition as image display. Every image is frozen and becomes an image. It is a spatial expression that is opposed to linear logic and layered reasoning.
In many of Benjamin's works, especially as later attempts were made to leave the purely theoretical realm and project most of their intellectual concerns into the political and social everyday, such textual qualities became more apparent: figurative representations replaced rigorous arguments, observations of concrete things were more than abstract and explicit assertions, roundabout and paused approaches to thinking and juxtaposition of spatialized imagery, fragmented and unstructured essay writing.
This kind of working method is reflected in the style of writing, which is a unique stylistic form. German-speaking scholars have summarized many of Benjamin's short essays as "images of thought."
（Denkbild）
。 The editors of the fourth volume of the seven-volume Benjamin Collection of the Surkamp Publishing House followed the title "Images of Thought" from the catalogue of Benjamin's Collected Works, edited and compiled by Adorno in 1955, under which he included many of Benjamin's short stories published in the press between 1925 and the early 1930s.
"Thought image" is a compound word, by "Denk"
(Thinking, here more emphasis is placed on the whole process of intuitive thinking)
and the central word "Bild"
(Image)
Composition, translated in English as thought-image, is the idea as an image or the idea formed in the form of an image. Etymologically, it can be an alternative expression of "idea." The word is very tense, it pulls in on the specific content
and the corresponding philosophy
(Thoughts)
Such opposite poles are between each other, and the two poles inseparably echo each other. At the beginning of the last century, German-speaking literature also took on a poem by Georg
(The Franks in The Seventh Ring)
This has sparked a fierce debate over the origin and meaning of "Denkbild", which has focused on whether the meaning of "Denkbild" is based on "idea"
(Idea)
Or "Image"
(Image)
, that is, whether it is an pictorial idea or a reflective and abstract image.
The significance of this controversy was profound, and the tense nature of the word was applied to later Goetheic studies and developed into a critical term to summarize the central idea of a balance between intuition and reflection in Goethe's thought.
Simply put, the thought image is a way of thinking that pulls ideas from the abstract field of speculation back to the perceptual and visual field of perception, and puts it into the background of the development of Western philosophy as a whole, and this kind of writing is an experiment to criticize and change the metaphysical way of thinking to overcome the dilemma of modern epistemology, and it is an expression of possibility speech for ineffable modernity.
Around Benjamin, around Benjamin, Horkheimer, Krakauer, Bloch, Adorno, and Brecht wrote literary-philosophical short stories of this form. The one-way street, an important work that marks Benjamin's pre- and post-speculative ideological turn, is a typical example of his thought-image creation, Adorno
(The first person to identify "One Way" as a "collection of thought images")
The Minimum Morality is very similar in form to The One Way.
Benjamin's One Way: The Experience of Redemption Being Devalued
Today, "One Way" is undergoing constant retranslations and reprints in China, which is enough to illustrate its popularity, but its obscurity
(Improvisation, Experience, Intuitive, Concrete, Broken)
But they frequently block us. If we understand the structural form of the thought image and go back to the history of the book, perhaps we will be able to grasp the key to interpretation that opens the door. During Benjamin's writing of The One Way
(1923-1926)
The close attention to French Surrealism, travels around nearly half of Europe, especially Paris and Naples, and awareness of communism and the Russian Revolution all had a profound impact on the book's outward form to its core content.
Benjamin was one of the few German intellectuals of the Weimar Republic who studied the French Surrealist movement in depth, and his attention and criticism of Surrealism continued to extend from 1925 onwards into his grand "Arcade Project". Surrealism's emphasis on dreams, the unconscious, and everyday experience, the use of automated writing techniques, and montage techniques were all consciously and critically absorbed by him.
Bloch once commented that "One Way" represents a "surreal way of thinking", and we see that the whole book of "One Way" shows a messy theme and structure, like a rosary bead with a rope removed is sprinkled at will, and the three-dimensional images are like surreal fragment montages. There are also several dream imitations in "Automatic Writing" in The One Way, which are undoubtedly Benjamin's poetic practice of following surrealism.
Benjamin's sympathy for Surrealism and his affinity for communism occurred almost at the same time. The One Way is dedicated to his lover, Althea Lasis, through whom Benjamin learned about the true situation of the Russian Revolution while on vacation in Capri, as well as Lukács's History and Class Consciousness.
We see the longest of the One Way, Panorama of Empire, a panoramic picture of German society during the Great Depression and the plight and general mental hardships of the German populace in a repressive atmosphere. This is the earliest dated manuscript of the One Way, and its importance lies in benjamin's first essay analyzing the social realities in Germany, with a very clear critical stance towards current politics. As a starting point, it is like the embryonic cell of "One Way", which contains the political explosive power of the entire book.
One Way, by Walter Benjamin, translated by Jiang Xue, Studio of Tan Xufeng 丨Beijing Normal University Press, January 2020.
For the criticism of current politics, the method used by Benjamin is not a slate and eye-catching analysis, but focuses on eliminating the antagonisms and differences between reflection and daily life, which is embodied in capturing the trivial scene of the moment, making phenomena and ideas superimposed in the specific image display, or directly cutting into the social symptoms through imagery, pulling daily experience, allusions and aphorisms into the field of display and criticism.
For example, in "Panorama of Empire", Benjamin uses proverbs that condense ancient wisdom such as "things will not go on like this" and "poverty is not shameful" to cut directly into real life, and enlighten people to get rid of the shackles of existing concepts and reopen the way to reflect on the current crisis by showing the proverb, that is, the failure of traditional experience.
The experience of traveling in Naples also gave him a system of open thinking and examination of reality, that is, "porosity" and "permeability". "Porosity" is a revelation about cognition. It is a linguistic talent that recognizes similarities and connections, with the creativity to transform, analogize, project, and generate meanings to form new knowledge and understandings. We see that there are many "porous" terms like connectors in The One Way.
Take, for example, the contrast between books and prostitutes in "Number 13": "One day, they will stand on the street with fat bodies."
(stands as a well-behaved corpus on the line)
,......" of which "Strich" refers both to the narrow streets of prostitutes and to the carriers of words, that is, to lines; "wohlbeleibtes Korpus" refers both to the fat body of women and to the thickness of books that have accumulated in writing.
This "porous" language sets the stage for the superposition of images and ideas in thought images, such as the title "Embassy of Mexico."
(Message)
"To link and confront the secular and religious elements hidden in the text. If you read the original German text, you will find these organs.
Benjamin's thought image writing was actually part of his philosophical and aesthetic thought on experience. In Benjamin, "thought-experience" is an ideal model of cognition in which experience and knowledge are both dichotomous and unified, and this synthetic form saves empirical phenomena from their former subordinate position, and their multiplicity and triviality are all preserved in the process of knowing truth. The image is no longer an imitation of an idea or idea, but a composite of the thought image with the thought, forcing the phenomenon itself to present the truth of the ontology.
The image of thought thus becomes in Benjamin's case a unique empirical method of work, which on the one hand gives the thought a unique figurativeness, and on the other hand, in the specific historical and cultural context, makes the experiential fragment a philosophical reflection on the wonderful fusion of speculation and experience.
In Benjamin's later intellectual concerns, the experience of modern society, which has been broken and devalued, is the core focus of Benjamin's attention to solve the mystery of modernity, and the ultimate purpose of the thought image in "The One Way" points to the redemption of experience, and the redemption of experience is the restoration of wholeness.
If Mrs. Gulland's statement is basically true, if Adorno is found quickly after coming to the United States at the end of 1940, then Adorno must be sad in the face of this "thing" will. If what is involved is the "Outline of the Philosophy of History", if she has seen it in general and can tell a thing or two, then Adorno must be pleased to open the box brought by Dr. Domke and find that there is an "Outline of the Philosophy of History" in it! True, Dr. Domke
(July 1941)
Brings with it the "Outline of the Philosophy of History", as before
(June 1941)
The "Philosophical Theses of History" given to Arendono are markedly different.
Benjamin's poem: "You sleep, but you are the light of awakening"
Benjamin, a name surrounded by interdisciplinary keywords such as history, halo, Baudelaire, translation, technological reproduction, aesthetic redemption, storyteller, melancholy, journalism and photography, messiah, involuntary memory, commodity, author and producer, a "deep-sea pearl diver" (Arendt) who "ran ahead of the track before the audience could applaud", one of the "greatest literary minds" in Europe of the 20th century.
(Brecht)
, but it is destined to be like a "comet with no atmosphere over the Empire"
(Adorno)
The "Last Literati of Europe" quietly blends the intellectual sharpness and emotional life of his youth into the fourteen lines of lamentations, allowing the reader to glimpse the secret thoughts and illustrious talents of a thinker.
Author of The Degradation of Poetry, Karl Gustav Jochmann, an object of literary criticism by Walter Benjamin
(Carl Gustav Jochmann)
In the biographer's pen, it has been commented: "As early as his youth, Jochman gained a high level of spiritual cultivation and a clear mind, but he paid a high price of homelessness. ”
These sentences are almost equally applicable to the poet Christopher Friedrich Heinle
（Christoph Friedrich Heinle）
He was one of Benjamin's closest companions in his youth and the sole object of Benjamin's secret seventy-three sonnets of mourning.
Benjamin and the poet Heinler met in the early youth movement, and although their relationship lasted only more than a year, they are considered to be "the most mysterious episode in Benjamin's mysterious life", leaving An indelible mark on Benjamin's "future intellect and emotion". As Friedrich Potsus
(Friedrich Podszus)
The Sulcanop editor, who was active in Benjamin's circle of friends in the 1920s, wrote in a "Note on Life" in Adorno's two-volume Benjamin Anthology edited in 1955: "Here Benjamin is recorded in memory of the poet Heinler and his girlfriend Lika Seligsund
（Rika Seligson）
and composed sonnets".
The young poet's companion and his girlfriend, who was also a member of the youth movement, resisted the war in a lifeless way, which in Benjamin's eyes was one of the most brutal devastations that war could bring, and a sign of the fall of the true youth spirit. Unlike Jochman, Heinle's "sobriety"
(sober)
In fact, it is hidden under some kind of "passion"; his "cultivation"
(Deeds)
He was also often seen as "unclean"; and the "price" he paid was more expensive, that is, the self-abolition of young life in the early days of the war, but sublimated in Benjamin's poetry as a redeemer of the suffering for awakening.
As a former spiritual mentor and leader of the youth movement, Veneken
(Gustav Wyneken)
When writing Youth and War calling on young migratory birds to fight, Benjamin used heinle's sonnets to constitute a reflection and criticism of "youth and death", and made different voices in the youth atmosphere lost in the "dangerous and beautiful charm" of the will to fight and heroism, just as in the twenty-ninth poem, Heinle's anthropomorphic call:
You are asleep, but you are a clear light
You are sad, but you are a comforter to the melancholy
You are silent, but you are the redeemer of those who cry out
You weep, but you are the healing God of the laughing one
You are the companion of the lonely, and you are the greatest
You are the one who was abandoned on the brink of the ship of death
You are the keeper of love, the intoxicated manners
You are the messenger of the most beautiful, the naked one in distress,
You are the angel of peace, but you are destroyed by violence
You are a bleeding child, a companion of death
You are the Savior, summoned in the center of destruction
You are a prayer, expelled from the threshold of numbness
You are the messenger of the old gods, bringing new grace
You become the Savior and redeem us
It can be said that youth and death formed the central theme of Benjamin's early fourteen lines of lamentations, and Heinler was contrary to the reverse self-destruction of the will to fight in the youth movement at that time, which was full of blind optimism and sacrifice, and allowed him to enter a sacred and inviolable height through poetry without defense.
It is generally believed that life is the highest good and death is the highest evil, and in the overall culture of mankind, death always brings despair and suffering. There is no shortage of inspiration in the earthly world to fight against the mortal nature of the flesh, so there is a desire for immortality and detachment on the other side of the earthly world, or the search for elixirs as in gilgamesh's epics, or the search for divine comfort in mortal dust in the atmosphere of divine intoxication.
And in Benjamin's fourteen lines of lamentations, Heinle's death is precisely "a gift from the ghosts of darkness."
(21st)
, it is "the branch of the coral sticking out / The purple fire is burning at the bottom of the sea"
(68th)
In the "seabed" symbolizing the reality of falling, it bursts with vigorous primordial vitality; it is "the laurel crown of youth crowning themselves"
(64th)
, which manifests the purity and glory of the age of sin; it is "the true openness of the life of youth"
(52nd song)
All beauty has a secret sorrow. Sacred and ecstatic, euphoric and awey, intertwined in the land of death, where "wildflowers and cress grow" and "the organ sound of the Mijaya" is blown.
(Twelfth Track)
: For in the most filthy places, death becomes the most beautiful cleansing, showing the qualities of purification and enlightenment.
Young Benjamin.
Heinle reversed the usual fear of death in the face of the great violence of the "human meat grinder" of war, and the fear of life and death once lay in the awareness of the end of the self, in the horror of the self dissipating from nothingness, and Heinle's self-dethronement from world history, with the consciousness of life and the spirit of youth, let death in a special age, in the coffin of the decaying world, become "a holy light bursting from the tomb"
(Song 47)
The true spirit of youth is not willing to live in fear and haggardness in the mud of the "brown forest", so around the young boy's skull is the "sparkling jewel-like branches" of death sticking out.
(11th track)
。 In an age of war crimes and the ugliness of human nature, life has replaced death, falling into clearings full of sorrow and nothingness. Benjamin's exhortation to Heinle: "You are the merciful one in the Age of Fall"
(16th track)
It refers to the unwilling young mind of the sinful age, which is constantly accepting the remnants of the increasing depletion of the soul, so death is seen by the poet as a blessing: the original spirit that can evoke the original spirit that is as clean as the morning light, and the "deep sea of pain" around it.
(Sixth track)
, emitting a scorching "light of lucidity"
(Song 29)
Benjamin's fourteen lines of lament, written in mourning the death of his young friend Heinle, have long been in a state of obscurity. In contrast to the dreary thinker portraits of Benjamin, whose readers are more familiar with him, they present a more personal silhouette of Benjamin's youth.
Behind Benjamin's deep historical silhouette, the reader is able to slowly find his true identity in a field of incomprehensible poetry, and to get close to the most remarkable and difficult-to-define thinker of the twentieth century and the intellectual stars and emotional life of his early years.
In other words, these poems not only record Benjamin's passion and reflection before 1914, especially during the youth movement, but also show Benjamin's early poetic talent and keen prophetic temperament. In Benjamin's view, the dethronement of heinle, a companion poet of the youth movement, for his life against the violence of war, symbolizes the immortality and transcendence of the true spirit of youth, and is also different from the "sober" will that distinguishes it from the danger of nationalist carnival and war romanticization in the later stage of the youth movement.
The American writer Franzen once gave an example to answer the question "What exactly is existence?" The problem: The Titanic is about to sink, and there are still a few people who will go to the deck to smoke a cigarette without hurrying to confirm their existence. Heinle also brought an eternal spiritual imprint to Benjamin with a certain unforeseen "unhurried", and in his sonnet to his deceased friends, we can glimpse the secret thoughts and prominent talents of a thinker.
The last intellectual of Europe, who spent his life in the shadow of the doom of the "hunchback villain", with all his fragments and fragments, waiting for the judgment of the last days to "enter sideways from the holes of time at any time", he held the lamp for the spiritual life of ancient Europe, especially when civilization was obscure, which should have the weight of poetry.
A Journey to China by Benjamin: An Encounter with Benjamin
Meeting Benjamin was a long time ago.
I remember when I was a freshman and sophomore in the History Department of Central China Normal University in Guizishan, Wuhan, because the new books in the library were updated too slowly, and I was poor, so I liked to collect the books of my brothers and sisters of all grades and looked for them everywhere. I also had the opportunity to read Benjamin's biography and "Lyric Poet in the Era of Advanced Capitalism", which was amazing at that time.
Eighteen or nineteen years have passed since now.
I started editing in 2007, and at the Renmin University Press, I was always interested in bringing in the works of German thinkers. Because Benjamin's work was too difficult and translators were not easy to find, he started with the works of the German sociologist Carl Mannheim and made a series of works, but when it was actually published, it was late 2012. At that time, I had left the Renmin University and established an academic publishing center at the beijing normal university press at the invitation of the famous scholar Professor Yang Geng.
Promoting the publication of Benjamin's works has always been my wish, and I have been thinking about what the new Beijing Normal University Publishing Academic Publishing Center should do for a long time. Later, it was decided to use the New Historical Library and the German Library as a breakthrough. The new direction of historiography, of course, is to continue the previous efforts, while doing in-depth expansion, building seven or eight sets of systems, so far, has been published about 110 kinds, and there are two or three hundred kinds of topics to be published, in time, perhaps can leave a mark in the history of contemporary Chinese academic publishing.
Deutsche Bunku, it is said that it is very fateful, because Professor Yang Geng likes Benjamin very much, and before that, beijing Normal University Press reported the Benjamin collection as a project, but unfortunately it was promoted very slowly. And I also like Benjamin, coupled with the potential of publishing, I consider that the introduction of academic works in Europe, america and Japan, each publishing house has a lot of advantages, and then follow up, it seems to be insufficient motivation, the difficulty is also very large. And German thinkers, especially in addition to classical thinkers, in fact, there is still a lot of room for doing, if you take this as a positioning, focus on cultivating the Weimar Republic era and its works before and after, presumably a larger rich mine.
So I started from the completed translation of "The Origin of German Tragedy", I myself finalized a relatively light folio and layout, and also invited the famous designer Mr. Cai Liguo to design, at that time made several plans, we gave up the elegant plan, chose the design of the German flag color, after the fact proved out everyone praised. In this process, he also received the full support of Teacher Cao Weidong.
The Origins of German Tragedy, by Walter Benjamin, translated by Li Shuangzhi / Su Wei, Tan Xufeng Studio 丨Beijing Normal University Press, January 2013.
Since then, we have translated more than twenty of Benjamin's works, of which eight have been launched, such as The Origin of German Tragedy, The Germans, The Moscow Diary, The Untittled Pleasure, The One Way, The Benjamin Archives, The Concept of Art Criticism of the German Romantics, the > of < Affinity of Goethe, and twelve of them, including his voluminous collection of letters. We specifically purchased the copyright of the collection of letters from the Surkamp Publishing House, and it took many years to translate it, and we have recently submitted manuscripts. Looking forward to launching together next year, it may be the best memorial to Benjamin.
In the translation, we have the support of Mr. Wang Bingjun, an expert in German literature studies, and a group of young talents in German studies, and now the translation is a chore, laborious and unflattering, and it cannot be counted as a work point, but many of them are tireless and generous, and finally gather their armpits into a coat, so that the Chinese edition of Benjamin's works can come out in its complete form.
Benjamin Archives, Edited by Walter Benjamin Archives, translated by Li Shixun, Tan Xufeng Studio 丨Beijing Normal University Press, September 2019.
Of course, there will be more or less problems with these translations that we focus on, but most of the translators are Doctors of German Literature, and most of them have the experience of studying in Germany, and our editors also have better German training, plus the translation process is relatively long, requiring them to translate as literally as possible, respect the complexity and obscurity of the original text, and then appropriately polish, rather than requiring the so-called text to conform to the word, or even arbitrarily changing the word, and not seeking quick results, so the translation is more reassuring.
After the launch of these books, many readers gave them high praise, which is a very happy thing, but we know that we have not done well enough, and we look forward to the opportunity to persist in this matter, and we can go hand in hand with the Brecht Collection, Scheler Collection, Simmel Collection, Schütz Collection, and the Historical Journey of Translation in German Works.
The road may be long, but the scenery is quite charming.
Author 丨Li Sha Wang Yaochong Jiang Xue Wang Fanke Tan Xufeng
Editor 丨安也 Dong Muzi Xie Tingyu
Proofreading 丨 Liu Jun