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Walter Benjamin, an Aesthetic of Redemption Weimar and Now ; 7 Author : Wolin, Richard

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Walter Benjamin, an Aesthetic of Redemption Weimar and Now ; 7 Author : Wolin, Richard cover next page > title : Walter Benjamin, an Aesthetic of Redemption Weimar and Now ; 7 author : Wolin, Richard. publisher : University of California Press isbn10 | asin : 0520084004 print isbn13 : 9780520084001 ebook isbn13 : 9780585181349 language : English subject Benjamin, Walter,--1892-1940--Criticism and interpretation. publication date : 1994 lcc : PT2603.E455Z96 1994eb ddc : 838/.91209 subject : Benjamin, Walter,--1892-1940--Criticism and interpretation. cover next page > < previous page cover-0 next page > Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism Martin Jay and Anton Kaes, General Editors 1. Heritage of Our Times, by Ernst Bloch 2. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 18901990, by Steven E. Aschheim 3. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg 4. Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity, by Christoph Asendorf 5. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, by Margaret Cohen 6. Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany, by Thomas J. Saunders 7. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, by Richard Wolin 8. The New Typography, by Jan Tschichold, translated by Ruari McLean 7. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, by Richard Wolin 8. The New Typography, by Jan Tschichold, translated by Ruari McLean < previous page cover-0 next page > < previous page page_i next page > Page i Walter Benjamin < previous page page_i next page > < previous page page_ii next page > Page ii Benjamin in 1927, at the age of 35. (Photo: Suhrkamp Verlag) < previous page page_ii next page > < previous page page_iii next page > Page iii Walter Benjamin An Aesthetic of Redemption Richard Wolin with a new Introduction by the Author UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London < previous page page_iii next page > < previous page page_iv next page > Page iv University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press London, England Copyright © 1994 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wolin, Richard. Walter Benjamin, an aesthetic of redemption / Richard Wolin. [2nd ed.] p. cm.(Weimar and now; 7) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-08400-4 (alk. paper) 1. Benjamin, Walter, 18921940Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Series. PT2603.E455Z96 1994 838´.91209dc20 93-30241 CIP Printed in the United States of America 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 < previous page page_iv next page > < previous page page_v next page > Page v For my parents, Harold and Merle Wolin, with love and gratitude < previous page page_v next page > < previous page page_vii next page > Page vii Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xvii A Note on the Translations xviii A Note on Terminology xviii Introduction to the Revised Edition xix Chapter One 1 Origins 1 Childhood and Autobiography 4 Youth Movement 13 Romantic Anticapitalism Chapter Two 29 The Path to Trauerspiel 31 Experience, Kabbalah, and Language 48 Messianic Time Versus Historical Time 63 Allegory Chapter Three 79 Ideas and Theory of Knowledge 79 Anti-Historicism 84 The Essay as Mediation Between Art and Philosophical Truth 90 Constellation, Origin, Monad < previous page page_vii next page > < previous page page_viii next page > Page viii Chapter Four 107 From Messianism to Materialism 108 Radical Communism 118 One-Way Street and Dialectical Images 126 Surrealism Chapter Five 139 Benjamin and Brecht 139 "Crude Thinking" 148 Epic Theater 154 The Author as Producer Chapter Six 163 The Adorno-Benjamin Dispute 165 The Philosophical Rapprochement Between Benjamin and Adorno in the Early 1930s 173 The Arcades Exposé 183 Art and Mechanical Reproduction 198 Methodological Asceticism, Magic and Positivism 207 Beyond the Dispute Chapter Seven 213 Benjamin's Materialist Theory of Experience 218 The Disintegration of Community: Novel versus Story 226 Baudelaire, Modernity, and Shock Experience 239 Nonsensuous Correspondences Chapter Eight 251 "A L'Écart de Tous Les Courants" Notes 275 Bibliography 305 Index 313 < previous page page_viii next page > < previous page page_ix next page > Page ix Preface Like a shipwrecked man who keeps afloat by climbing to the top of a mast that is already disintegrating. But from there he has a chance to signal for his rescue. Walter Benjamin (1931) The life of the German-Jewish literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin was marked by a series of failures and misfortunes, from the rejection of his Habilitationsschrift in 1925 to his death by suicide on the Franco-Spanish border in September 1940. Once he was denied an academic career he was forced for the remaining fifteen years of his life to pursue a hand-to-mouth existence as a free-lance writer, first in Germany, and then, following Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, in Paris. His life seemed dominated by a perpetual wanderlust; seldom would he remain in any of his favorite European haunts for longer than a few months at a time. He possessed a lifelong fascination for modern city life and published accounts of his forays into the urban landscapes of Naples, Moscow, and Marseille. Benjamin, the admirer and translator of Proust, recorded in the 1930s a series of reflections on his childhood experiences. He also kept a record of his experiences with hashish and mescaline which he hoped one day to use as the basis for a study on the subject of drug-induced intoxication. 1 However, this study, not to mention the major project of his later years, his Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century or Passagenarbeit (Arcades Project), was never completed. Much has been made of Benjamin's fascination with "ruins"2 (especially with reference to his failed Habilitationsschrift on seventeenth-century German Trauerspiel), and in many ways Benjamin's lifework itself remains a ruin. Aside from a collection of aphorisms (One-Way Street) the < previous page page_ix next page > < previous page page_x next page > Page x only book he published in his lifetime was Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928). His literary estate comprises scores of essays and reviews, miscellaneous fragments, two volumes of correspondence, and hundreds of pages from the ill-fated Arcades Project. He remained virtually a nonentity in the field of German letters until a two-volume selection of his Schriften appeared in 1955, edited jointly by Theodor and Gretel Adorno. Since then he has become a bona fide phenomenon; the most recent and comprehensive bibliography of secondary literature on Benjamin now lists 430 entries, 3 and there is no reason to suspect that this profusion of posthumous interest will abate in the near future. The unorthodox character of his life and literary legacy is surely in part responsible for the Benjamin enthusiasm of the last two decades. Benjamin, as certain critics would have it, should be viewed as a twentieth-century anachronism, the last representative of a vanishing species: the authentic European homme de lettres, someone for whom philosophy and literature are not mere parlor games, but for whom these serve as the focal point, the raison d'être of life. Benjamin, the ill-fated, twentieth-century Wandering Jew, was born into the wrong era, we are told. He was ''The Last Intellectual."4 Benjamin's intellectual odyssey, which culminated in such tragic fashion, was certainly unconventional. Unfortunately, however, much secondary literature on the American side of the Atlantic has taken this aura of unconventionality as its point of departure without probing much deeper; and thus it has been the idiosyncratic side of Benjamin, as a personality, as an intellectual, which has captured the imagination of so many American interpreters and critics.5 To be sure, it is difficult to come to terms with his thought; one reason is that it possesses a magical quality, an originality of focus and vision, such that those select traditions with which he actively came into contact appearonce absorbed through the prism of his worktransformed to the point of being unrecognizable. Yet, once this aura of unconventionality is pierced, one realizes that as a theorist Benjamin was preoccupied with fundamental and relevant issues concerning the nature of art and philosophy, their point of intersectioncriticismand the sociohistorical matrix from which they emerge. < previous page page_x next page > < previous page page_xi next page > Page xi Hence, if there remains no simplistic, unifying theme to which the totality of his oeuvre might be reduced, there nevertheless exists a set of underlying problems and recurring motifs which lend that oeuvre a continuity much greater than one would initially suppose. It is precisely these problems and motifs that I have sought to bring to the fore in my presentation; while at the same time I attempt to avoid the all-too-seductive temptation of becoming immersed in the labyrinthine structure of Benjamin's arguments to the point of emerging with greater perplexity than one had before the original descent. Nevertheless, Benjamin self-consciously opted for a hermetic and forbidding mode of discourse, further compounding the difficulties of reception by steadfastly refusing in most cases to supply outright the meta-theoretical bases of his conceptual train. The latter were to emerge of their own accord, unforced,
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