○ Central claim: Easy reproduction makes art necessarily a political phenomenon

○ talks about “aura” of art - idea borrowed from Klages

○ production of art in past/present (painting vs photography/film)= magician and
surgeon
○ 1936
○ talks about evils of Futurists, use of the dadaists in furthering the banality of art
○ Fascism makes war aesthetic, communism politicizes art
○ authenticity of art comes from its role in time and space, which is lost by allowing
too many people to easily see things - focuses on film and photography
○ photography lacks the “tissue of time and space”
○ sense perception changes with humanities mode of existence
● Task of the Translator - is an art form
● The Storyteller - about disunity of experience since WWI leading to demise of storyteller
● The origin of german tragic drama
● On Hashish - profane illumination
● The image of Proust
○ Translated in search of lost time with hessel
● The Arcades project - about parisian architecture
○ flaneur is alienated modern city life
○ On Some Motifs in Baudelaire - dialectical image - about Baudelaire’s Artificial
Paradises
○ Fashion, Boredom, Advertising, Baudelaire are section
○ some remarks on iron construction
○ about bourgeois experience
● Theses on Philosophy of history
○ hates on historical materialism
○ called klee painting (angelus novus) as angel of history
■ shows “storm of progress” - which is pushing him away from paradise
towards chain of catastrophes
■ zero hour of messianic time
○ compares historical materialism to the turk - supposed machine that was run by a
dwarf - except hm uses theology

Otto Rank
● Trauma of Birth
○ separation anxiety - pre-oedipal complex
● Myth of the Birth of the Hero
○ Analyses Lohengrin, Moses, Sargon of Akkad, other heroes
○ discusses neuroses and Freud and “paranoid structure”

20th Century On Thinkers

Wittgenstein
● 1889-1951