File spoon-archives/seminar-11.archive/benjamin_2000/seminar-11.0002, message 1


From: "L Spencer" <L.SPENCER-AT-TASC.AC.UK>
Date:          Wed, 16 Feb 2000 08:45:00 +0000
Subject:       (Fwd) Benjamin's Intensive Method


Someone on the Frankfurt School list (Ralph Dumain) posted a quote 
about Benjamin's "intensive" analysis. This list seems a little quiet 
so I am posting my reply here.

I suspect the Benjamin-list is quiet because everyone is bowled over 
and rather daunted by the publication in the last days of the last 
millenium of Benjamin's unfinished major work... the Arcades Project. 

It was easier to deal with as a great scholarly legend than as a huge 
but accessible text.

THE 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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