Epigraph/Another Benjamin: From theology to Mickey Mouse

Alessandro Baricco uses and explains this epigraph in his book “I Barbari”. This is all I´ve ever read on Walter Benjamin: a table of contents and two pages worth of Baricco´s comments on it. Enough to illustrate the intermingling of subjects in the realm of everydayness, enough to get a glimse of the continuity of life , enough to tranquilize the anxiety caused by not grasping the whole in every second.

As my epigraph, here are some lines from the table of contents in “Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 2, 1931-1934″ as found here:

• Critique of the New Objectivity
• We Ought to Reexamine the Link between Teaching and Research
• Left-Wing Melancholy
• Theological Criticism
• Franz Kafka: Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer
• Little History of Photography
• Paul Valéry
• The Lisbon Earthquake
• Reflections on Radio
• Mickey Mouse
• In Almost Every Example We Have of Materialist Literary History
• On Ships, Mine Shafts, and Crucifixes in Bottles
• A Family Drama in the Epic Theater
• Excavation and Memory
• Oedipus, or Rational Myth
• On Proverbs
• Light from Obscurantists
• The Handkerchief
• In the Sun
• The Rigorous Study of Art
• Hashish in Marseilles
• The Eve of Departure
• On Astrology
• “Try to Ensure that Everything in Life Has a Consequence”
• The Lamp
• Doctrine of the Similar
• Kierkegaard
• Antitheses Concerning Word and Name
• Experience and Poverty
• Once Is as Good as Never
• The Newspaper
• Venal but Unusable
• The Present Social Situation of the French Writer
• Hitler’s Diminished Masculinity