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“... about art at times of siege? ‘Histories of art are triumphal,’ he acknowledges, with a nod to Walter Benjamin. ‘Artworks remain with the victors.’ In his view this is far less the case with artists and art historians focused on emergency. ‘Unable to conquer, such art can at most endure’; it suggests ‘a history of the not yet: not yet ...”

“... redistributed by the victors). ‘Not even history will be safe from them if they win,’ warned Walter Benjamin presciently, on a different occasion. On the other hand, this arbitrary freedom to judge the past would also seem to betray some more fundamental uncertainty in our own time about History itself. Despite the facile and dismissive remarks ...”

“... Prynne’. Virtue is achieved by the act of naming the virtuous. Beautiful slicks of Adorno and Walter Benjamin that don’t quite fit together (like the M25). You start to feel, convince yourself, that you’ve actually read these books. Passive absorption (Clinton style): the compulsory hallucination of living through those counterculture ...”

“... of life and death; and when they defer to or expatiate upon European theorists of translation like Walter Benjamin or George Steiner, it is easy to miss, as I think Christopher Reid did, the altogether un-European urgency of their concern. For them, translation, and the disputable possibility of it (at least as regards verse), is a matter neither academic ...”

“... time that flows uninterrupted on and on, as in that magnificent passage from Hebel which Walter Benjamin so admired:In the meantime the city of Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake, and the Seven Years’ War came and went, and Emperor Francis I died, and the Jesuit Order was abolished, and Poland was partitioned, and Empress Maria-Theresa ...”

“... epiphany. He’d been reading ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ by Walter Benjamin and every Saturday morning, when entrance was free, visiting the city’s Museum of Fine Arts: One Saturday, I went to see a show of a German photographer whom I thought I had never heard of before. It was the first American retrospective of ...”

“... we should think of climate change as an updated version of the chess-playing Turkish puppet that Walter Benjamin likened to historical materialism operated by the hidden hand of theology, save that historical materialism has now become the wizened hunchback that controls the puppet and has to keep out of sight. That would be too simplistic. The ...”

“... recur throughout A la recherche), engages the nature of his prose as well as his sentiments; as Walter Benjamin said, in one of the finest essays ever written on the novel, Proust’s language is inseparable from his ‘intransigent French spirit’. It is a language with roots reaching deep into the history of French prose from Montaigne through ...”

“... because failed, or thwarted, or unproductive, or fragmentary in literary remains – Barthes, Benjamin, Artaud, Pavese, Canetti, Leiris, Walser, Cioran. Sontag wouldn’t even utter the names of many of those she had as forefathers. Kant was the grandee of the aesthetic of sexless distance she so resented. Yet his name almost never comes up in her early ...”

“... is perceived as a new degree of uncontrollable violence and a new realm of impunity.Both Yeats and Walter Benjamin invoke the story of Niobe in this context. Niobe was the queen of Thebes who boasted of having so many children, and in particular of having more children than the goddess Leto. Leto had only two children. They were both gods – Apollo and ...”

“... of the musical work of the past, its intimate unity with the time and place of performance, what Walter Benjamin called its aura, has been destroyed. Music has become literally disembodied.’ But as Chanan points out elsewhere in Repeated Takes, when Benjamin spoke of aura he was referring to visual art and the ...”

“... the television lights were nine elderly men, all into their seventies or beyond. Their names were Walter Brudno, Smith Brookhart, Nick Doman, Benjamin Ferencz, Whitney Harris, Charles Horsky, Henry King, Daniel Margolies and Walter Rockler, and they had all been prosecuting lawyers at the ...”

“... the early 1900s had come to regard the 19th-century promise of inevitable progress as empty or, as Walter Benjamin saw it, catastrophic. Facing total war, they insisted that action was essential to forestall disaster. As Marx and Engels had warned in the Communist Manifesto, the fight between the oppressor and the oppressed would end ‘either in a ...”

“... an instance of that blending of motivelessness and deliberateness, of control and abdication, that Walter Benjamin appreciated in Walser; he seems, by turns and putting it very bluntly, too stupid to be cynical and too cynical to be stupid. A sort of repro aesthetic (‘Walser paints a postcard world,’ Gass says) seems as likely to serve a ...”

“... statues and legacies. The maps of cities carry, almost unconsciously, an account of the past, as Walter Benjamin said, and he has numerous progeny now in his quest for unearthing the layers of meaning in the streets: Rebecca Solnit has compiled atlases that are albums cum maps of personal experiences in San Francisco, New Orleans and New York. Literary ...”