Benjamin on Karl Kraus:...His entire fire-eating, sword-swallowing philological scrutiny of the newspapers is actually concerned not with language but with justice... His linguistic and ethical quibbling is not a form of self-righteousness; it belongs to the truly desperate justice of a proceeding in which words and things concoct the most implausible alibi simply to save their own skin, and must be incessantly refuted by the evidence of one's eyes or straightforward calculation.
-Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 1, 195-6.
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