El pensamiento filosófico de Walter Benjamin en Neruda

Born in Berlin in 1892, Benjamin was a tragic figure: a Jew in an increasingly anti-Semitic Germany. As the son of a prosperous art-dealer he was not prepared for the confusing days ahead. He had wanted to spend a quiet life buried in a university.

The German government, however, refused to pay Jewish lecturers. He would have had to become a private lecturer, funded by his family. That would have presented no problem under normal circumstances but his father had lost much of his business during the years of hyperinflation that set in after the First World War.

Benjamin had to support himself. To do this he was ill equipped. Legend has it that he was extraordinarily clumsy, a problem that had irritated his mother beyond endurance during his youth and which seemed to predestine him for a career in thought and contemplation. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, Benjamin fled to Paris where he continued to write reviews and articles. When the Germans entered France in 1940, he wanted to escape to Spain.

On the French-Spanish Border the Spanish authorities informed him that he and the others in his group would have to be handed over to the Gestapo. He committed suicide that night. It was 1940. Hearing of his suicide, the Spanish authorities felt guilty, relented and let the others across the border. His suicide, a lonely act of despair, had heroic consequences.

Who was Walter Benjamin? And more to the point, what is he to us? Primarily he was someone who was able to look. He could 'see' with great resolution. His thought is poetically provoking, by which I mean that his interpretation of the everyday changes the goal-posts of our expectations. His writing forces you to look at problems and events in a different light, from a different angle, at a different scale.

His analysis of what he looks at is rich as well as incisive, but his writing does not obey the strictures of scholarly persuasion and rigid taxonomy. He is a poet in prose.

He undermines the landscape we think we are so familiar with by substituting new landmarks for old. In this way Benjamin forces us to acknowledge features which, veiled by the ordinary, needed to be made visible.

And when we begin to see what we think he is showing us, he tells us that it is precisely the veil of the everyday that is so full and rich in possibilities. He removes the distortions we have grown accustomed to and substitutes these for new distortions. That allows you, for good or bad, to develop fresh strategies to approach your own problems and your own interpretation of events.
 
The flaneur

http://www.othervoices.org/1.1/gpeaker/Flaneur.php
http://www.wbenjamin.org/voorthuis.html