In much the same way, Adorno was critical of his mentor and friend Walter Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Production”, “I am all too aware of the weakness of the work. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered. Georg Lukacs wrote of some members of the Frankfurt School, Adorno in particular:Ī considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the “Grand Hotel Abyss” which I described as “a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. – Walter Benjamin, “Theses On The Philosophy Of History”, in Illuminations, ed. It seeks to convey an idea of the high price our accustomed thinking will have to pay for a conception of history that avoids any complicity with the thinking to which these politicians continue to adhere.
Our consideration proceeds from the insight the the politicians’ stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their “mass basis,” and, finally, their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus have been three aspects of the same thing. At a moment when the politicians in whom the opponents of Fascism had placed their hopes are prostrate and confirm their defeat by betraying their own cause, these observations are intended to disentangle the political worldlings from the snares in which the traitors have entrapped them. The thoughts which we are developing here originate from similar considerations. The themes which monastic discipline assigned to friars for meditation were designed to turn them away from the world and its affairs. – Hannah Arendt, “Walter Benjamin”, Men In Dark Times, pp.155-156 The describe adequately his work and him as an author within our usual framework of reference, one would have to make a great many negative statements, such as: his erudition was great, but he was no scholar his subject matter comprised texts and their interpretation, but he was no philologist he was greatly attracted not by religion but, “Walter Benjamin by theology and the theological type of interpretation for which the text itself is sacred, but he was no theologian and he was not particularly interested in the Bible he was a born writer, but his greatest ambition was to produce a work consisting entirely of quotiations he was the was the first Germ to translate Proust (together with Franz Hess) and St.-John Perse, and before that he had translated Baudelaire’s Tablueax Parisiens, but he was no translator he reviewed books and wrote a number of essays on living and dead writers, but he was no literary critic he wrote a book about the German baroque and left behind a huge unfinished study of the French nineteenth century, but he as no historian, literary or otherwise I shall try to show that he thought poetically, but he was neither a poet nor a philosopher. To put it bluntly, it would be as misleading today to recommend Walter Benjamin as a literary critic and essayist as it would have been misleading to recommend Kafka of 1924 as a short-story writer and novelist.
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