Walter Benjamin took a unique approach to all of his literary
and critical writing, one of constant flux in form and content, one
of experimentation and fragmentation. His work rests just outside the
margins of the 20th-century European literary canon, and Benjamin the
scholar stands apart from his contemporaries in the Frankfurt school of
philosophers. Perhaps he belongs instead at the table of literary
brooders—both authors and their characters: Hamlet, Baudelaire, Duras,
Plath, Bernhard, and Sebald—all of whom establish themselves as
outsiders, set apart from “normal” behavior and creativity. These
melancholics isolate themselves from society to wallow in solitude
and ennui. Victor Frankenstein, for example, holes himself away in a
windowless attic for a year to research and then constructs a creature
out of cadavers. Benjamin, alone in his mind palace, drove himself
nearly to madness with his philosophical investigations of the dark arts
of capitalism, the phantasmagorias of underground Parisian commerce,
and the mechanization of art in the age of technology.
Many of these melancholics—both the artists and
their creations—wander aimlessly, either in pursuit of, or to
escape from, their own dark states of mind. Both Walter Benjamin
and Baudelaire wrote about the flâneur who saunters through the streets
of Paris, usually at night, observing prostitutes, performance artists,
and other spectacles of the human condition. These cultural observers
appear to be exploring the streets of their own minds, more than the
cities which they trace with their slow steps. W. G. Sebald’s narrator
in Rings of Saturn drifts slowly,
alone, down the dreary coast of Suffolk in search of—what, a landscape
haunted by death? During a conversation with Joseph Cuomo, Sebald spoke
about the asystematic approach that he took to his research and writing
process: “If you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, he
traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner. And he
invariably finds what he is looking for.” ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/illustrating-the-visual-illusions-of-walter-benjamins-mind/
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