Benjamin/ Scholem, a note

After my attention was drawn to Walter Benjamin's remarks on Mallarme's Coup de Des, I'’ve been dipping into Gershom Scholem'’s Walter Benjamin, The Story of Friendship. Actually I have always been rather distrustful of Scholem'’s account, motivated as it seems to be by a certain annoyance that WB failed to arrive at the destination assigned him by Scholem. One hears Benjamin in the next room, but not directly. Still, many nuggets.

Benjamin discussed the scope of the concept of experience that was meant here; according to him, it encompassed man'’s intellectual and psychological connection with the world, which takes place in the realms not yet penetrated by cognition.

In experience a certain historical content announces itself. If its site of annunciation is experience, it can be deciphered only by conceptual thought. But thought must first catch what has been announced using the nets of metaphor.

Also, of obvious relevance to Benjamin'’s own technique:

I had for a long time reflected on the derivation of Kraus'’s style from the Hebrew prose and poetry of medieval Jewry - the language of the great halakhists and of the "“mosaic style"”, the poetic prose in which linguistic scraps of sacred texts are whirled around kaleidoscopelike and are journalistically, polemically, descriptively, and even erotically profaned. (WB himself uses the figure of the mosaic in the epistemo-critical prologue to the Trauerspiel book)