The Fragmentary, Mystical Thought of Walter Benjamin Presented by Two Experimental Films in Film, Philosophy | July 24th, 2013 2 Comments Literary theorist and scholar Walter Benjamin was part of a small but incredibly significant cohort of German-Jewish intellectuals who fled the Nazis in the thirties. The group included thinkers like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, and Berthold Brecht. Of all of the names above, only Benjamin succumbed, committing suicide by morphine overdose in 1940 at a Catalonian hotel, when it became clear that the Spanish, with whom he had sought refuge, were going to turn him back over to Germany.
Of all of the thinkers above, most of whom are fairly well-known by U.S. students of the liberal arts, it can (and should) be argued that Benjamin was the most influential, even if he rarely appears on a syllabus, excepting one well-known essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” a staple of film and media theory classes. All of the thinkers listed above adored Benjamin, and all of them figuratively sat at his feet. And while Benjamin—often by reference to the aforementioned essay—gets pegged as a Marxist thinker, he was also something else; he was a mystic and a sage, the critical equivalent, perhaps, of Kafka.
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