“... 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 ...”

“... gaze”’. Significantly, he undoes any binary of distraction and attention, departing from Walter Benjamin and many others on this score. For Crary, there is always an uneasy relay between the two states, with new demands for attention prompted by new forms of distraction and vice versa.Manet, Seurat and Cézanne are useful to Crary because they ...”

“... Alexandria has been in the ascendant. Warburg is now regarded, alongside Freud and Walter Benjamin, as part of a pantheon of Jewish thinkers interested in the irrational underpinnings of modernity. ‘Warburg is our haunting,’ the art historian Georges Didi-Huberman wrote in 2004. ‘He is to art history that which an unredeemed ghost ...”

“... was concentrated in the north, with the result that the south stagnated. Scanlan turns to Walter Benjamin to make sense of creative destruction, noting that the conception of modernity as progress disavows modernity’s ‘own broken and discarded past’. All too often, the ‘gale’ of creative destruction, as Schumpeter called it, leaves ...”

“... Marxism (1976), Anderson rebuked György Lukács for his ‘cumbersome and abstruse diction’, Walter Benjamin for his ‘gnomic brevity and indirection’, Galvano Della Volpe for his ‘impenetrable syntax and circular self-reference’, Jean-Paul Sartre for his ‘hermetic and unrelenting maze of neologisms’ and Louis Althusser for his ...”

“... marshes in which the malarial mosquitoes breed. For many years I have treasured a quotation from Walter Benjamin which may have helped spawn the character of Arnow or, more likely, contributed something further to a figure already compounded of many memories and unconscious sources: ‘The slightest carelessness in the digging of a ditch or the ...”

“... of our predecessors, not as sudden or unforeseeable eruptions. Rather than being a ‘storm’, as Walter Benjamin described it, history is a perpetual process of sowing and reaping. Liberal democracy struggles to sustain authority under these conditions, because elections are experienced as mere staging posts in a historical longue durée, rather than as ...”

“... once again expressing his deep misgivings. For good measure he then suggested that, by alluding to Walter Benjamin, Trilling had descended to pretentiousness and name-dropping. It’s a petulant and childish swipe at both men, phrased in what seems meant to illustrate how real guys put high-flown intellectuals in their place: ‘Here one cries ...”

“... of. Alternatively, death can be seen as giving a unique authority to her fiction. In the words of Walter Benjamin, the storyteller used to ‘borrow his authority from death’ (‘there used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died’), but in modern times, dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of ...”

“... in the Twenties, when Roth started writing them, Alfred Polgar was the most celebrated exponent. Walter Benjamin called Polgar ‘the German master of the small form’. In 1935, writing in honour of Polgar’s 60th birthday, Roth said that he considered himself Polgar’s pupil: ‘He polishes the ordinary until it becomes extraordinary ... I have ...”

“... destruction of many cast collections in the 20th century – was driven by the belief that, to use Walter Benjamin’s word, reproductions lack the ‘aura’ of the original artwork. Their phrasing implies Benjamin was uneasy about the advent of reproduction technologies, but this is not quite right. Rather, ...”

“... Or, better still, of Giacomo Leopardi’s terrible Dialogue between Fashion and Death, from which Walter Benjamin chose the following line to epitomise his ‘Paris, Capital of the 19th Century’ (a line in which Fashion addresses its double directly): ‘Fashion: Mr Death! Mr Death!’ Or, best of all, of Malevich in 1923: ‘I envisaged the revolution ...”

“... Like Kant’s misinterpretation of the angel of Revelation 10, the angel in the ninth of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ stands between history and the future. He has come to end the destruction of what he would like to think are the last days. But he cannot. Time continues; history is not at a close; the winds of ...”

“... The 19th-century way of putting it was to say that the ‘owl of Minerva flies at dusk’. Walter Benjamin puts it in a more 20th-century sort of way: A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are ...”

“... in response to the charges made by his adversaries. He spoke less of Heidegger than of Levinas and Walter Benjamin, whose radical Jewish messianism struck a chord with him. Deconstruction, he now claimed, had always been about justice, all the more so for having been silent about it. He continued to pun – deconstruction, in French, would be nothing ...”