Who's /your guy/, Veeky Forums?
That one author that just connects with you, and you never tire of?
Benjamin is mine, I shill him here all the time. It really does sadden me to think about his death, and that he was never recognized in his lifetime. Even today he is a bit of an outcast. His eccentricities keep him from being fully respected as a philosopher, but at least he's praised as a critic.
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Fuck off with this cuck shit. We're a right-wing board.
Evola
Hitler
Kevin McDonald
Read them and realize how terribly shallow and inferior this Jew is
I'm glad you like Benjamin a lot, I was turned onto his writing by Susan Sontag's essay (I never heard of him before). But a lot of philosophers/theorists never knew their work would find new audiences - would Max Stirner be surprised we're reading him in the 21st century?
>>>/Bellevue/
Probably Robert Walser. I just love his cheeky, ironic, joyous, melancholic, loving spirit.
Where should I start with Benjamin? I read an essay he wrote about Walser that I loved. I'm not so much interested in literary criticism, but philosophy, religion, and social criticism interests me heaps.
I'm bored of this meme.
Not OP but read The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. It's not Deleuze and Guattari-level difficult:
As a Luddite, this tickles my fancy
I never get tired of reading the political commentary embedded in most of Frank Herberts books. He was brilliantly insightful.
I love Walser too user, and Benjamin's essay on him is one of my favorites.
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is his most famous essay, and one of his most philosophically dense ones. On Hashish, Capitalism as Religion, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, The Narrator, On The Concept of History and The Author as Producer, and his essays on Baudelaire and Kafka are some of my favorites. But really, he wrote about almost everything: childhood, astrology, Socrates, toys, pornography, photography, literature by the mentally ill, communism, history, language, etc, etc. And the difficulty of the texts (and admittedly, the quality) varies drastically, some are almost impenetrable while others are straightforward and clear. Although he uses the essay as his medium, the way he can be brief and esoteric, and not overstay his welcome, reminds me of aphoristic writers like Nietzsche and Heraclitus, and he did wrote aphorisms. But it's a very peculiar method.
Benjamin is the king of bullshiters. Honestly, if you analyze him, he doesn't say anything at all, he's just constantly contradicting himself.
I'm honest, it took me a lot of time to realize it, and I tried to like him, but he doesn't have any substance at all.
Cool, he sounds eclectic as hell which is awesome. Also I have the same gripe with machine-society as he does, so we should get on well. Any particular collection of writings you'd recommend?
Probably Melville. I like to follow in his wake as he soars and dives. The last time I read Moby-Dick I got choked up reading the first chapter.
Michel de Montaigne. Even his smallest essays prompt hours of meditation and even wonder. Like Attic Greek in general, ideas just fly out of speculations upon his pages. Same holds for Emily Dickinson's poems and letters. Uncommon brains of an entirely different order.
Love Benjamin too, OP. Perhaps the most intimate of the ENTIRELY literary neo-intellects. Especially the Illuminations collection and the wonderful scaffolding that is the Arcades.
This. We're Veeky Forumserally Hitler now
Bah. Humbug. (You) like to think so, but that would be because youre an idiot.
(You) picked the wrong thread, nosebleed.
the /pol/onization is inevitable
Of course, I wouldn't say so. But I don't deny that some of his stuff really is contradicting and some of it really does amount to well-written but pointless roundabouts. This is why I read Benjamin mostly in a non-academic sense, because he doesn't always survive a rigorous critical reading. But, firstly, saying that about all or most of his work would be nonsense, as so much of it is defensible, and insightful, and relevant today more than ever. The essays he's most notorious for: on art and technology, on photography, on history, and his critical work on Brecht, Kafka, Walser, Proust, Goethe, etc are all very substantial and rightfully taken seriously.
But secondly, and this is going to sound like shilling (and it sort of is), even when Benjamin is flawed and insane, even his strange early writings and his full-on mystical hashish-fueled musings on astrology, even in them I find that I come out of the reading enriched, be it by the style or the novelty of questions it proposes, or of its eclectic approach, I usually still value it. There are times when I don't though, and that's when he's at his driest and most rigid, which is the case with some of his political writing.
/myguy/
Politics is fashion, Literature the loom.
That's why /pol/ MUST come here, and why no one actually from here ever goes there except to browse after some event like Charlottesville.
/pol/ branches because it's bored, the irony being that with nothing to contribute, it's absolutely confined to what? spreading the banality.
>earnestly reading Susan Sontag
Is this b8?
I'm starting to come here now because I'm more interested in books. /pol/ is always good during happenings both other than that it's almost all shitposting
As is Veeky Forums but it CAN be negotiated, and there are still plenty of un/pol/luted threads.
Blah blah blah.
Have (you) read Lord Acton?
no I have not. Can I still stay?
>not reading intelligent people
>the state of (You)
Yeah. Carry on.
Just a very interesting conservative man-of-affairs and brilliant essayist. Lord Acton, i.e. May prove of interest.
Melville for me too. Helped me to appreciate Shakespeare, too.
Am I wrong if I pronounce his name like normal and not Valter Ben-Yah-Min?
Jack is that you
...
Jack from SoCal?
I've been trying my hardest to understand this guy but most of his essays are either shit or I'm just an autist.
I liked his famous essay and some other small ones, I liked "Telephone" I think it was, talking about how he was forced to act along with the medium or whatever.
I'll probably get back to him one day but I think I'm missing some very needed context(If you could provide me with it that would be great).
Oh god....
Please don't let the world know it's conceptual Devises are unholy - if you understand my gist.
Great prose. Interesting ideas. She's well worth reading if you're into questions about images.
Under the Sign of Saturn is an excellent collection, and her long essay about her visit to North Vietnam is frankly GOAT.
he was another shitty Jew
One of the Patron Saints of Four Chan. Particular saint for robots and techophiles.
Take the high road, user. Otherwise absolutely nothing distinguishes (you) from the lefty id-pols who trash otherwise great writers because theyre white and male. Begin with the essay on Nikolai Leskov. And in the future, endeavour to know what (you) say, or spew.
trotsky
What about him
...
...
I used to pronounce it Ben-Yah-Min until I noticed everyone in university, even professors, pronounced it like the english Benjamin and I always had to clarify who I was referring to.
As a side note, I've never heard anyone in my country pronounce Goethe correctly. Even people who've studied him in depth. Sometimes a culture just has its own adapted version of a name that's more socially adequate than the proper pronunciation.
Though I tend to shuffle books in and out of my life I can never seem to let go of Southern Mail and Wind, Sand, Stars. But this is ok. They take up very little space.
delicoustacos
"You're only alive because your suicide would ruin your mother's life"
frank stanford
J K Rowling
looks like a too intelligent jimmy fallon
If I'm not mistaken it's "Val-ter Ben-GAH-meen"
Ah. The United States of America and Angleterre and environs checking in. Suddenly, I'm depressed..