From: "L Spencer" <L.SPENCER-AT-tasc.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 08:35:37 +0000 Subject: Benjamin's Intensive Method Benjamin's first "classic" statement on an intensive approach to works of art comes in a long letter to Florens Christian Rang which he wrote in 1923. This is still much in the charged language of his "Task of the Translator" essay, etc. and his work on German Romanticism. "Intensive" analysis in this sense is closely akin to Benjamin's notion of a "monad" as cryptically announced in the "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" to his failed Habilitionsschrift translated as "Origins of German Tragedy". Actually although Benjamin's language is sometimes arcane the idea here seems to me not at all an obscure one. And Benjamin returns to such matters in his last reflections and you can see traces of the "intensive" approach throughout the Arcades materials, and again in the treatments of his own childhood which announce their preoccupation with reading off an epoch from its details, its smallest smallest details. (At one point talking of "splitting the atom"). Lloyd SPencer
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