Baudelaire had a penchant for “intoxication” and comedy. And what better day to discuss Baudelaire’s notion of the comic than on St. Patrick’s Day! To be sure, Baudelaire thinks that the absolute comic, at its best, is like “intoxication.” Perhaps the “Satanic Serenity” that Walter Benjamin takes note of has a source in this; after […]
Over several different blog entries, I pointed out how Walter Benjamin, in his reflections on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, the Goethe Dream (“The Vestibule”), his entries on six children in One Way Street, and in the Shuvalkin parable (in the Kafka essay), makes it quite clear that he saw himself as a man-child (that is, as […]
In an essay on Walter Benjamin entitled “Walter Benjamin and his Angel,” Gershom Scholem notes that one of the things that disturbed him most about Benjamin was his interest in the daemonic. Scholem, in this essay, notes that Benjamin’s interest increased the more he delved into the work of the Parisian poet and cultural critic […]
In the wake of rapid changes in technology, media, industry, communications, and transportation, many modernist thinkers and artists – from Freud to the Futurists – were obsessed with the meaning of shock. They were afraid of the consequences. What – they wondered – will be lost that needs to be saved? This is still with […]
I can’t seem to get smallness out of my mind. It’s not simply an obsession. The Kabbalists of Safed and also Kafka knew that. The notion of “tsimtsum” (also spelled “tzimtzum”), in particular, addresses smallness and contraction in terms of a dynamic (a movement from one state to another). It emerges in JS Foer’s recent […]
Translating Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin’s notion of the flaneur into the language of the digital world, Kenneth Goldsmith argues that the flaneur “is hardwired into the ethos of the Internet”(65, Wasting Time on the Internet). We are, like the flanuer, constantly “browsing.” But as we do we become smaller and less noticeable. Goldsmith, drawing […]
Martin Luther – in one of his least friendly moments toward Jews – said that a “Jew is full of idolatry and sorcery as nine cows have hair on their backs, that is: without number and without end.” Joshua Trachtenberg, in his book The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval […]
Extreme difference in size or scale is a staple of comedy, caricature, folklore, and literature. The Brothers Grimm, for instance, tell many stories about small people who comically stumble through the world and are thought not just to be small in scale but small minded. Take, for instance, “The Seven Swabians,” a story about how […]
Whenever I reflect on the celebrated modern writer, Marcel Proust the thought always comes to me – seemingly out of nowhere – that his appeal to childhood memory, to his bed, is sheer nostalgia. He is telling us that the past is always better than the present. And if we put this in a temporal […]
The feeling of pain (what Emmanuel Levinas calls the “little death”) and the existential onset of death are the most private experiences. It goes without saying that nobody can feel my pain or experience my death for me. Even though someone can take notice of pain and say, “I feel you.” He or she really […]
Schlemiel Theory 