Benjamin's Intensive Method

[L Spencer]

Benjamin's first "classic" statement on an intensive approach to 
works of art comes in a long letter to Florens Christian Rang which 
he wrote in 1923. This is still much in the charged language of his 
"Task of the Translator" essay, etc. and his work on German 
Romanticism. 

"Intensive" analysis in this sense is closely akin to Benjamin's 
notion of a "monad" as cryptically announced in the "Epistemo-Critical 
Prologue" to his failed Habilitionsschrift translated as "Origins of 
German Tragedy".

Actually although Benjamin's language is sometimes arcane the idea 
here seems to me not at all an obscure one.

And Benjamin returns to such  matters in his last reflections and you 
can see traces of the "intensive" approach throughout the Arcades 
materials, and again in the treatments of his own childhood which 
announce their preoccupation with reading off an epoch from its 
details, its smallest smallest details. (At one point talking of 
"splitting the atom").

Lloyd SPencer