Walter Benjamin, Howard Eiland (translator), Marcus Boon (contributor) · 1972 · PDF · Calibre ID 12603
Resurfaced in The Person Who Waits (2026-10-23).
Role in the triad
Counter-voice: keeps the posture and the word illumination, makes it profane; the protocol with a hole in it
Why this book
Benjamin lies down and waits with a physician keeping the record, and argues the source of illumination is profane. Fränkel’s protocol, broken off when note-taking is forbidden, is the best evidence for the observation problem.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “the second of these secrets cannot be recovered, since at this point the compiler of the protocol was very energetically prohibited from taking notes.” (Fränkel protocol, Apr. 18, 1931, p. 77)
- “I lay on my bed, read, and smoked.” (‘Myslovice—Braunschweig—Marseilles’, p. 110)
- “LYING DOWN, with eyes closed most of the time, completely calm.” (Wissing protocol, Mar. 7, 1931, p. 65)
- “But the true, creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration” (‘Surrealism’, p. 132)
- “Just as waiting seems to be the proper state of the impassive thinker, doubt appears to be that of the flaneur.” (Arcades M2,4, p. 139)
- “The reader, the thinker, the person who waits, the flaneur, are types of illuminati—just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane.” (p. 134)
Themes
flaneur · Fränkel · hashish · Joël · note-taking · profane illumination · protocols · surrealism · waiting · Wissing