![]() ![]() (This will be discussed presently.) In those days, encouraged by Scholem, he still believed that his own estrangement from tradition was probably due to his Jewishness and that there might be a way back for him as there was for his friend, who was preparing to emigrate to Jerusalem. That a certain destructive force was active even in this passion for the past, so characteristic of heirs and late-comers, Benjamin did not discover until much later, when he had already lost his faith in tradition and in the indestructiblity of the world. Shortly before the fall of France he seriously considered exchanging his edition of the Collected Works of Kafka, which had recently appeared in five volumes, for a few first editions of Kafkas early writings - an undertaking which naturally was bound to remain incomprehensible to any nonbibliophile.) The inner need to own a library ( Briefe I, 193) asserted itself around 1916, at the time when Benjamin turned in his studies to Romanticism as the last movement that once more saved tradition ( Briefe I, 13 8). (Not that he ever stopped collecting books. ![]() It started early with what he himself called his bibliomania but soon extended into something far more characteristic, not so much of the person as of his work: the collecting of quotations. I have already mentioned that collecting was Benjamins central passion. As to their weight in Benjamins writings, quotations are comparable only to the very dissimilar Biblical citations which so often replace the immanent consistency of argumentation in medieval treatises. Still, the discoverers and lovers of this destructive power originally were inspired by an entirely different intention, the intention to preserve and only because they did not let themselves be fooled by the professional preservers all around them did they finally discover that the destructive power of quotations was the only one which still contains the hope that something from this period will survive - for no other reason than that it was torn out of it. In this form of thought fragments, quotations have the double task of interrupting the flow of the presentation with transcendent force ( Schriften I, 142-43) and at the same time of concentrating within themselves that which is presented. This discovery of the modern function of quotations, according to Benjamin, who exemplified it by Karl Kraus, was born out of despair - not the despair of a past that refuses to throw its light on the future and lets the human mind wander in darkness as in Tocqueville, but out of the despair of the present and the desire to destroy it hence their power is not the strength to preserve but to cleanse, to tear out of context, to destroy ( Schriften II, 192). Quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions. ( Schriften I, 571). In this he became a master when he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by its citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of peace of mind, the mindless peace of complacency. Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past. Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority insofar as authority presents itself historically, it becomes tradition. ![]()
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