Philosophizing Beyond Philosophy Walter Benjamin Reviewed

Philosophizing beyond philosophy Walter Benjamin reviewed

PETER OSBORNE

More books on Benjamin,* and still the pile grows. for all its voluminousness. This is testament, no doubt, If the previous ﬁn de siècle in Europe ushered in an to the historical power of Benjaminʼs writings, but age which (in Wildeʼs phrase) ʻreads so much that it also to a certain more contemporary need for what has no time to admire, and writes so much that it has they have come to represent. For if Benjamin has no time to thinkʼ, how much more true is this of the prospered, in part, from the notorious multiplicity of academy today, as it gears up to full capacity, putting his personae – and hence from a seemingly endless even its most industrious predecessors to shame. Ben- capacity for reinvention – how much more deeply has jaminʼs prose breeds commentary like vaccine in a lab. his writing been felt as the site of the possibility of There are already half a dozen monographs in English their convergence? Thus has the enigma of Benjamin which take Benjaminʼs name for their title – quite the man (multiple yet one) come to underlie and secure apart from such staples of the secondary literature the continued productivity of the work. as Michael Jenningsʼs Dialectical Images (1987) and It is not the actualities of Benjaminʼs life which The Dialectics of Seeing (1989) by Susan Buck-Morss have been important here, so much as the image – to which Brodersenʼs biography (a revised version of victimhood – condensing Jewish, communist, and of the German edition of 1990) and Howard Cay- intellectual identities – with which it has become gillʼs ﬁne study may now be added. Brodersen refers associated, thanks in no small part to the widespread his readers to a ʻvery limited choiceʼ of twenty-nine reproduction of his photographic portraits. The promise volumes on Benjamin ʻeasily availableʼ in English. of the writings is sustained as a promise, frozen, ʻlike And all this prior to the founding in Amsterdam last time in a photographʼ, because the life was cut short. A summer of an International Walter Benjamin Associ- study in interiority, the eyes in Giséle Freundʼs famous ation. Meanwhile, the long-awaited magnum opus by photograph (reproduced on the cover of Illuminations) Irving Wohlfarth, No Manʼs Land – rumoured to have cast a downwards glance, but they see only inwards. sprouted into several volumes – broods ominously in In the face of such images, it is all too easy to project the wings. Words enough, one might think, to blunt Benjaminʼs end backwards, as unworldliness, into his even the keenest enthusiasm. Yet still the pile grows. life, suffusing it with the light of tragic resignation, It is remarkable that the literature on Benjamin in as if this were its essence. Yet this is to appeal to English maintains so high a standard of commentary, precisely that ʻcommonly regarded causal connectionʼ

* Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography, trans. Malcolm R. Green and Ingrid Ligers, ed. Martina Dervis, Verso, London and New York, 1996 (1997 pb). xvi + 334 pp., £25.00 hb., £ 14.00 pb., 1 85984 967 9 hb., 1 85984 082 5 pb. Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience, Routledge, London and New York, 1998. 184 pp., £40.00 hb., £13.99 pb., 0 415 08958 1 hb., 0 415 08959 X pb. Gerhard Fischer, ed., ʻWith the Sharpened Axe of Reasonʼ: Approaches to Walter Benjamin, Berg, Oxford and Washington DC, 1996. viii + 229 pp., £34.95 hb., £14.95 pb., 1 85973 044 2 hb., 1 85973 054 X pb. Michael P. Steinberg, ed., Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1996. 252 pp., £33.50 hb., £13.95 pb., 0 8014 3135 2 hb., 0 8014 8257 7 pb. Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin, trans. Georgina Paul with Rachel McNicholl and Jeremy Gaines, Routledge, London and New York, 1996. xvii + 204 pp., £40.00 hb., £12.99 pb., 0 415 10955 8 hb., 0 415 10956 6 pb.

28 Radical Philosophy 88 (March/April 1998) between character and fate which Benjamin himself historical context and details of Benjaminʼs childhood (in his 1919 essay, ʻFate and Characterʼ) argued was and student years (nearly half the book), and of the ʻtheoretically untenableʼ, since ʻno definition of the sources and publishing history of his writings, at external world can disregard the limits sets by the times it feels less like a biography than a biographical concept of the active manʼ: ʻwhere there is character source-book: a reservoir of information, a hagiography there will, with certainty, not be fate, and in the area of fact. The concentration on the early years is both of fate character will not be found.ʼ For Benjamin, frustrating and fruitful. It is as if, in flight from the fate was the ʻguilt context of the livingʼ, and as such impossible demand of throwing new light on the end essentially pagan. It is associated with nature and law, of Benjaminʼs life, Brodersen has buried himself in not religion or ethics or politics. It is always mythic Benjaminʼs childhood and refused to come out. This is in structure. Suicide, on the other hand, was for many probably as much a result of which archives were open of his generation (in the wake of Nietzsche) a heroic to him, as of any conscious choice: both the Benjamin passion, a paradigmatic if paradoxical example of a estate and the Adorno archive refused access. free act. The gains of the focus on the early years are This is just one instance of the pitfalls placed by a powerful evocation of a particular class life in conventional modes of interpretation in the path of a Berlin in the decades either side of the beginning proper response to Benjaminʼs work. It might seem of this century, and a stronger sense than has previ- fitting that Benjamin, philosopher of the image, should ously been conveyed of the abiding significance for find the reception of his works so dominated by a an understanding of Benjaminʼs life of the period particular set of images. (There are two films about of his involvement in the German Youth Movement, him – drama-documentaries – in distribution.) Yet it prior to the First World War. The former relies a little is as an illustration of the highly charged ambiguity of too heavily on Benjaminʼs own, by now well-known, imagistic attraction, alone, that this is so: that innerv- reminiscences to be fully convincing, biographically. ating immediacy which can swamp, as easily as it can (The use of autobiographical materials here converts ignite, the immediacy of reflection. For there is no Brodersenʼs objectivism into an oddly affectless critical power in the image here. No disruption of the subjectivism.) But the latter pays dividends in the false continuities of narrated time. No rearticulation of contribution it makes to undermining the image of historically disparate elements. Indeed, it is a mark of Benjamin as victim, haplessly subject to forces beyond the mythic function of Benjaminʼs photographic image his control. As Brodersen shows, the young Benjamin that it is used so often as the frontispiece of books, may have been forbiddingly intellectual, but he was establishing identity without reflection, as a kind stridently opposed to the German university in its of logo for enigmatic intellectuality: a guarantee of existing (and any likely) form. He was enormously quality indifferent to what lurks between the covers. ambitious intellectually and supremely confident in It was a heightened sense of the dangers of the his powers. His notorious rejection by the system (his ecstatic side of the image which drew Benjamin away failure to place his Habilitation thesis on the German from surrealism in the mid-1930s, with the rise of sorrow play) must be placed in this context. For even fascism, towards the affective rationalism of Brechtʼs if the outcome of the Habilitation had been different, notion of the epic; although the productive tension it is hard to imagine him, in the long run, restricting between these two poles of his thought was unresolved. what Brodersen calls his ʻdesire for cultureʼ to the dis- It is ironic that Benjaminʼs writings, famous for their ciplinary regimes of academe. Rather, the whole tenor refusal of biographical criticism (he considered his of Benjaminʼs life up to this point gestures forcefully contribution to German literature to lie in his abstin- towards the self-appointed role of ʻstrategist in the ence from the word ʻIʼ), should become so dominated literary battleʼ that he would subsequently adopt. by their authorʼs image. Hardly surprising, though, The claim that The Origin of German Tragic from the standpoint of their analysis of aura, com- Drama was critically neglected, when it was eventually modification, and cultural form. published in 1928, is an important component of the conventional image, since it reinforces the idea that its Biography and self-mythologization rejection as a thesis was a great personal disaster. Yet It is a virtue of Brodersenʼs Walter Benjamin that it Brodersen shows that this is nothing less than a myth largely avoids the mythologization of Benjaminʼs life, initiated by Benjamin himself: ʻIf ever one of Ben- forgoing reverence for its subject in favour of reverence jaminʼs books received universal attention during his for the facts. Meticulous in its reconstruction of the lifetime, it was this one.ʼ It was favourably reviewed

Radical Philosophy 88 (March/April 1998) 29 in a large number of the most renowned newspapers personal relationships, his years in exile (given half the and periodicals of the day, including several abroad. space of his early life), or the developmental logic of By 1928 Benjamin had been a regular reviewer for his work. We learn next to nothing about Benjaminʼs the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Literarische Welt for life in Paris in the mid-1930s, for example; and very three years. On Brodersenʼs count, he contributed well little about the Passagen-Werk, or Arcades Project, over one hundred pieces to the latter – which by 1929 the massive, posthumously published collection of was selling nearly 30,000 copies of each issue – in the notes and materials which formed the centre of his space in eight years. He also made more than eighty intellectual existence in his final years. radio broadcasts in Frankfurt and Berlin between 1929 To write the biography of a bibliophile is in large and 1932. And despite the wartime interruption of part to tell the tale of the books he or she loved. And it his education, all this before his fortieth birthday. In is certainly texts and their cultural life – including the contrast, his most successful piece of academic work, text of the city – rather than women which hold centre- his doctoral dissertation, The Concept of Art Criticism stage in Brodersenʼs book, in stark contrast to some in German Romanticism, published as a monograph other recent biographies of philosophers. (See Jonathan in 1920, sold no more than a few hundred copies, and Réeʼs review of Ray Monkʼs Bertrand Russell, ʻPoor left almost no trace on the cultural consciousness of Bertieʼ, in RP 81.) Yet one should not mistake Brod- the day. ersenʼs Walter Benjamin for an intellectual biography. At its best, Brodersenʼs Walter Benjamin eschews It is not sufficiently interested in ideas. Bernd Witteʼs Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography (Wayne State University Press, 1991; translating the German edition of 1985) is far superior on that score. The real delight of Brodersenʼs book is its pictures: elegantly displayed photographs and reproductions, over two hundred in all, scattered liberally throughout, nestling in the wide margins of the text and trumpet- ing themselves across the pages – great slabs of grey. Brodersen immerses the images of Benjamin himself (of which there are about fifteen) in a sea of buildings and street scenes, postcards and documents, portraits of friends, associates and family, letters, journals and book covers – dissolving their claim to uniqueness into the historical stream from which they have become detached. Brodersenʼs historiographical method is by no means Benjaminian. The book is free of excessive methodological self-consciousness. But if Benjaminʼs extraordinary intellect at times appears – as Benjamin himself appeared to Asja Lacis when he turned up unexpectedly in Riga – ʻto have arrived from another planetʼ, Brodersen reminds us that itʼs the one we are living on.

Romanticism and art criticism The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism biographical criticism for biography as criticism of may have sold no more than a few hundred copies, myth. After giving up on the academy, Benjaminʼs but it is central to an understanding of Benjaminʼs stated goal was to become ʻthe premier critic of German thought. Until now, the reception into English of literatureʼ, and in the process, ʻto recreate criticism as Benjaminʼs early writings, prior to the ʻcaesuraʼ of a genreʼ. And by the beginning of 1930, he considered 1924 – Marxism – has mainly been restricted to an he was ʻgetting closeʼ to this ʻat lastʼ. However, if unpublished fragment of his mystical philosophy of Brodersen is good on the institutional dynamics and language (1916), an essay of messianic political phil- cultural coordinates of Benjaminʼs life (reﬂecting his osophy, written under the inﬂuence of Georges Sorel archival researches), he is far less impressive on his (ʻCritique of Violenceʼ, 1921), and the introduction

30 Radical Philosophy 88 (March/April 1998) to his German translation of Baudelaireʼs Tableaux dissertation on Romanticism was originally to have Parisiens (ʻThe Task of the Translatorʼ, also from been about Kantʼs writings on history, and he viewed 1921). More recently, attention has been drawn to the the two topics as being in close contiguity with one systematic import of the conception of experience another. In the dissertation itself, Benjamin insists outlined in the quasi-Kantian ʻOn the Program of that it is only from the standpoint of messianism the Coming Philosophyʼ (1918, another posthumously – an orientation towards the future energized by the published piece). Yet these are in themselves by no prospect of the fulfilment of history – that the essence means the most significant or representative of Ben- of Romanticism can be grasped. And he associates jaminʼs early works, or the ones which best help us this standpoint with modernity: the idea of the French to comprehend the complex, fractured continuity of Revolution, the realization of the kingdom of God on his life-work. Earth. From the point of view of this metaphysical Now, the philosophical ground of Benjaminʼs oeuvre structure of history, the task of criticism is ʻto liber- is finally available, in the first volume of his Selected ate the future from its deformations in the present by Writings.* This includes The Concept of Art Criti- an act of cognitionʼ (SW, p. 38) – a formulation that cism in German Romanticism and Goetheʼs ʻElective appears as early as 1915. Affinitiesʼ (completed in 1922, and published in two Reading The Concept of Art Criticism in German instalments in 1924–5), along with ʻTwo Poems by Romanticism today is an extraordinary experience. Friedrich Hölderlinʼ (1916) and a range of other manu- Not only does it throw light on various aspects of script materials and short pieces. With the appearance Benjaminʼs (and Adornoʼs) later work, but it speaks of this book, all of Benjaminʼs most important writings directly to the current philosophical conjuncture in are now accessible to the English-reader, with the a number of ways. There has been a revival of philo- crucial exception of the Passagen-Werk, the culminat- sophical interest in early German Romanticism going ing torso of Benjaminʼs life-work. on for some time now, and a spate of translations.* Benjaminʼs early writings are marked, not by Jewish For those dissatisfied with the evasions of pragma- mysticism as such, so much as by its influence on tism and quasi-transcendental method, yet disinclined his reception of German Romanticism. It was in to embrace either of the main metaphysical alterna- the context of this relationship that Kantʼs work acquired its peculiar significance. For in providing a systematic structure for their mediation, it embraced them within the horizon of a specific philosophical task: ʻthe epistemological foundation of a higher [metaphysical] concept of experienceʼ (SW, p. 102). Benjaminʼs early thought is dominated by this idea. Its elaboration is only sporadically philosophical, in any direct, disciplinary sense. Yet it is here – in the entanglement of epistemological and what he called ʻextralogical, aesthetic determinationsʼ – that the deepest philosophical impulse of his thinking lies. It provided the impetus for Benjaminʼs development of a quasi-Romantic theory of criticism, which he would subsequently generalize beyond the work of art, into the philosophical ground of his own distinctive experimental form of experiential cultural history. It is in the relationship of philosophy to art, mediated by the concept of criticism, that the key to Benjaminʼs early writings is to be found. It is in this context that his metaphysical conceptions of history and politics are to be understood. His

* Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume One: 1913–1926, eds, Marcus Bullock and Michael W, Jennings, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1997. 520pp., £23.50 hb., 0 674 94585 9. Hereafter cited as SW.

Radical Philosophy 88 (March/April 1998) 31 tives (negative-theological Hegelianism and libidinal plurality of works. The infinity of art is fulfilled only energetics), the decline of the intellectual culture of in the totality of individual works (SW, p. 183). Marxism has left the field open to Romanticism, as 3. However, this does not effect the necessity for the main competitor to deconstruction in providing philosophy to be systematically oriented, since as a framework for the exploration of the implications, Friedrich Schlegel put it: ʻthe spirit of system … is limits, and destruction of Kantianism. Romanticism something entirely different from a systemʼ. The con- appears here as an explicitly literary form of philo- cept of systematic intention can thus be saved from sophical hermeneutics through which concepts of the impossibility of systematic exposition. representation and truth may nonetheless be critically 4. The ʻsystematic referabilityʼ of the work of maintained. Adorno, Benjamin and Heidegger can all art (the fact that it gains its meaning as art as a be re-read productively from this point of view. (See reflection-medium of the absolute) is demonstrated in Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory, the possibility of a systematic commentary. It is the reviewed by Austin Harrington in RP 87.) role of art criticism ʻto grasp the system absolutelyʼ The first part of Benjaminʼs dissertation marks (SW, p. 138) through the analysis of the systematic the relation to Kantianism through its account of the intention of the individual work. This is the mysticism transitional role of Fichteʼs concepts of reflection and of Romanticism. positing in laying a path from transcendental logic 5. Criticism does this through the analysis of form. to experience of the absolute, via the infinity of the (Form is understood as ʻthe objective expression of ʻIʼ. The decisive move made by the Romantics is the the reflection proper to the work, the reflection that retention of the idea of ʻreflection in the absoluteʼ constitutes its essenceʼ [SW, p. 156].) Art criticism in the context of the rejection of Fichteʼs ʻIʼ (on the ʻdissolves the form in order to transform the single grounds of inconsistencies in its relation to finitude). work into the absolute work of artʼ (SW, p. 163). This The Romantics replace Fichteʼs ʻIʼ with the work of art is what it means to ʻromanticizeʼ it. as the medium of reflection of the absolute. This has 6. Art criticism is thus ʻfar less the judgment of a a series of consequences for the constellation of the work than the method of its consummationʼ (SW, p. work of art, systematic philosophy, and art criticism, 153). It completes the work. Indeed, in Romanticism, which are foundational for Benjaminʼs thought, across art criticism is ʻvalued more highly than works of artʼ all differences in its subsequent contexts of application (SW, p. 185). and discursive modes. To sum up: only in criticism, criticism of art, can we 1. The work of art is irreducibly individual. As a find a form of experience adequate to the metaphysical functional unity of perceptual and intellectual proper- notion of truth, which rationalism attempted to pre- ties, it reflects the individuality of the absolute. This serve in the face of modern epistemology through the sounds similar to a view of the artwork based on system. As Benjamin puts it in a fragment composed Kantʼs notion of aesthetic judgement. However, there shortly after his dissertation: works of art are ʻcon- is nothing specifically artistic about the objects of such structs that bear the deepest affinity to philosophy, or judgement in Kantʼs view. Here, on the other hand, rather to the ideal form of its problem, without con- the experience of artworks is transcendentally depend- stituting philosophy themselvesʼ. What critique seeks ent on the idea of art, whilst the works themselves to prove about a work is ʻthe virtual possibility of the are nonetheless relatively autonomous, as individual formulation of its contents as a philosophical problemʼ. works, via-à-vis this idea. Thus, ʻevery great work has its sibling (brother or 2. This notion of the irreducibly individual work of sister?) in the realm of philosophy.ʼ (SW, pp. 217–19) art as a ʻmedium of reflection of the absoluteʼ destroys Given the importance of the idea of art here, it the possibility of systematic philosophy (the aspira- is something of a scandal that the Selected Writings tion to grasp the infinite connectedness of the real in should have omitted the word from the title of their the form of a conceptual totality), on account of the translation of the dissertation: rendering Kunstkritik

* Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthrology of Early German Romantic Writings, eds and trans. Jochen Schulte-Sasse et al., University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 1997. x + 479 pp., £50.00 hb., £18.95 pb., 0 8166 2778 9 hb., 0 8166 2779 7 pb. Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 1991. xxiii + 112 pp., £11.95 pb., 0 8166 1901 8. Novalis, Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1997. x + 194 pp., £37.50 hb., £10.00 pb., 0 7914 3271 8 hb., 0 7914 3272 6 pb.

32 Radical Philosophy 88 (March/April 1998) as ʻcriticismʼ, to give us ʻThe Concept of Criticism commentary, but the thesis ends with a comparison in German Romanticismʼ, and translating the generic of the Romantic theory of art with Goetheʼs, which Kritik by the English ʻcritiqueʼ, to make up. There notes the inadequacy of the account of content in are at least two dubious assumptions here. One is that the Romantic view. For the Romantics, the relation the English ʻcriticismʼ implies ʻartʼ so strongly as to of artworks to ʻartʼ (the idea of art) is defined as render its qualification redundant. The other is that the ʻinfinity in totalityʼ or ʻpure formʼ; for Goethe, it is English ʻcritiqueʼ has the same breadth of application defined as ʻunity in pluralityʼ or ʻpure contentʼ. The as the German Kritik. The former is problematic not theory of criticism expounded in Goetheʼs ʻElective only because it excludes the possibility of criticism Affinitiesʼ may be read as an attempt to resolve this of other kinds of object (social or political criticism, antinomy by giving an account of the relationship of for example); but also because, in so far as it has any the ʻtruth contentʼ of a work of art to its ʻmaterialʼ validity, such usage applies to literary works alone. or historical content. Some justification for this might be sought in the [This relation] is determined by that basic law of Romanticsʼ own restricted use of the term ʻartʼ (Kunst). literature according to which the more significant But Benjamin himself points out that the work, the more inconspicuously and intimately its truth content is bound up with its material con- this equivocation … designates a fundamental tent. If, therefore, the works that prove enduring are lack in the Romantic theory of literature, indeed precisely those whose truth is most deeply sunken of art generally. Both concepts are only unclearly in their material content, then, in the course of this distinguished from each other, to say nothing of duration, the concrete realities rise up before the their being oriented towards each other so that no eyes of the beholder all the more distinctly the more understanding of the peculiar nature and the limits they die out in the world. With this, however, to of poetic expression vis-à-vis other arts could arise. judge by appearances, the material content and the (SW, p. 118) truth content, united at the beginning of the workʼs To try to eliminate the equivocation terminologically, history, set themselves apart from each other in the course of its duration, because the truth content in the translation of a text which explicitly draws our always remains to the same extent hidden as the attention to it, is seriously to diminish that work. Not material content comes to the fore. More and more, only does it cut off the Romantic heritage from those therefore, the interpretation of what is striking and areas of its greatest contemporary relevance – music curious – that is, the material content – becomes a and the visual arts – but it conceals the extent to which prerequisite for any later critic. (SW, p. 297) the subsequent radical cultural generalization of the The critic must begin with commentary and move theory by Benjamin has its conceptual condition in through it towards critique. the Romantic theory of art itself. The failure of German literary criticism, on Ben- jaminʼs view, was that it failed to make this transition. Commentary and critique Not only was it stuck at the level of material content, The Concept of Art Criticism is a strong reading of an but, because it was stuck there, it failed to grasp its existing body of theory. Goetheʼs ʻElective Affinitiesʼ, relationship to the work as a whole, and was thus inad- Benjaminʼs next main work, develops that position equate as commentary as well. The famous polemic theoretically and applies it to a particular work. More against the biographical criticism of Gundolfʼs Goethe specifically, it takes up the historical dimension of – ʻthe legally binding condemnation and execution of interpretation, which Benjamin had noted but set aside Friedrich Gundolfʼ, as Benjamin put it in a letter to in his doctorate, in order to render the Romantic Scholem – and against the ʻthoughtless dogmaʼ of the theory of criticism explicitly historical, and thereby George-inspired ʻGoethe cultʼ more generally, must be to make it Benjaminʼs own. The theoretical dimension read in this context. Although it was also the means of the text hinges on a distinction introduced on the for Benjamin to draw attention to himself before a first page: ʻCritique seeks the truth content of a work wider audience. Picked up by Hugo Hofmannstahl for of art; commentary, its material content.ʼ This is the his journal Neue deutsche Beiträge, this essay was fruition of a distinction first raised in ʻTwo Poems by Benjaminʼs ticket for the first stage of his journey out Friedrich Hölderlinʼ, where Benjamin distinguishes of the academy, into a broader, more influential, and between ʻaestheticʼ and ʻphilologicalʼ commentary, more polemical literary world. associating the former with Goetheʼs notion of content In accordance with Benjaminʼs own analytical posi- as ʻinner formʼ. In the dissertation on Romanticism, tion, it is the ʻmaterial contentʼ of the polemic against ʻsystematic commentaryʼ takes the place of aesthetic Gundolf which stands out most obtrusively today. Its

Radical Philosophy 88 (March/April 1998) 33 The transition from commentary to critique is registered within the text in the rhythm of the prose, whereby the fluidity of descriptive exposition is suddenly interrupted by dense, aphoristic, theoretical sentences, which pull the reader up short and require re-reading. It is necessary to traverse these passages again and again, not because they are grammatically obscure, but because they possess the exact measure of semantic opacity required to stimu- late philosophical thought. It is precisely these kind of passages which contemporary intellectual culture edits out of public discourse as impenetrable diversions. The famously obscure ʻEpistemo-Critical Prologueʼ to The Origin of German Tragic Drama is constituted almost wholly at this level. Here, in Goetheʼs ʻElective Affinitiesʼ, they act as a punctual counterpoint to a commentary which would otherwise be in danger of lapsing into a mere recovery of material content. The essay marks a deepening of Benjaminʼs interest in philosophical form. Anyone with a serious interest in Benjamin, Adorno, or the relationship of the philosophy of art to cultural theory more generally, has much to gain from studying The Concept of Art Criticism and Goetheʼs ʻElective Affinitiesʼ closely. It is a pity that the editors of Selected Writings have diminished its usefulness by failing to ensure the provision of a subject index. The distinction between commentary and critique is a useful one to apply to the secondary literature on Benjamin, as a test of how much intellectual work is being done in his reception; how much ʻthe striking and the

Passages, Dani Karavanʼs monument to Walter Benjamin, inaugurated on 15 May 1994 curiousʼ has become a barrier, how much a route, to criticism. diminished relevance is often cited to explain the previous failure to translate the piece. Yet the textʼs The colour of experience primary interest lies in its theoretical content, and its Caygillʼs Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experi- relationship to its own literary form – especially, as ence passes the test admirably. It is an excellent, an ancestor to Adornoʼs Aesthetic Theory. For we ﬁnd idiosyncratic book. Setting aside what it describes as here in fragmentary form a systematically oriented ʻthe proliferation of à la carte Walter Benjaminsʼ, it exposition of the constellation of concepts: truth and opts for what it takes to be Benjaminʼs own method form; material content and technique; beauty, sem- of immanent critique. Such a method is immanent, blance and reconciliation; the expressionless, the spell not merely to the norms of the texts in question, but and the caesura; mystery and hope. The pages on hope to the historical time of their after-life: the time that also connect directly to Benjaminʼs later essay on determines which ʻconcrete realitiesʼ rise up most Kafka, in a series of textual continuities which inverts distinctly because they have ʻdied out in the worldʼ. the conventional picture of the relationship between Caygillʼs book is organized around the relation between thought and language in intellectual development. two such realities: the philosophical dimension of

34 Radical Philosophy 88 (March/April 1998) Benjaminʼs concept of experience and his brief early defines the speculative aspect of experience. The trans- writings on colour and visual experience, several of cendental thus reappears, semanticized and historical, which are now conveniently available in English in the yet still within the field of the absolute, as ʻa fold in the Selected Writings. However, although the latter provide surface of speculative configurationʼ. Caygill detects Caygill with his distinctive angle and his title (giving two ʻinconsistent and even contradictory waysʼ in him a ʻbrandʼ in the competitive market of Benjamin which Benjamin inhabits this speculative position: one commentators), the former constitutes the conceptual which is open to ʻthe complex patterns and distortions heart of the book – the place where the work is being of spatio-temporal experienceʼ, another which tends done, the truth content uncovered, the claims made. towards ʻa closed “redemptive” immanenceʼ. It is the The movement of the book is from a direct approach latter, associated with the theme of the messianic, to the philosophical structure of Benjaminʼs project which is cast aside by Caygill as ʻdogmaticʼ. The (concentrating on the early years) to a demonstration eccentric emphasis on Benjaminʼs writings on colour of the richness of its actualization as a new, specula- is the flip-side of this rejection of the messianic: tive form of cultural history, through analyses of the the non-dogmatic alternative to the imagined closure later writings on modernism, the work of art, and the of time as a figure of totality. Colour becomes the experience of the city. The main argument of the book figure for an openness to the contingencies of experi- is that Benjamin turns cultural history into a medium ence which compels philosophizing to ʻmove beyond for speculative critique. classical philosophical problems and texts into the Setting out from the now generally accepted critical reflection upon literature, art, and culture in position that Benjaminʼs project develops out of the the broadest senseʼ. Kantian concept of experience, Caygillʼs reading is So far, so good. However, without some interpre- distinctive in four main ways. First, it argues for the tation of, or substitute for, the messianic, what figures ʻanti-Hegelian but nevertheless speculativeʼ charac- the infinite set of conditions of legibility as a totality ter of Benjaminʼs version of this concept. Second, it (as unconditioned), such that it can provide a specifi- claims that this is developed out of Kant ʻthrough an cally speculative dimension to experience? Why is extension of a Nietzschean method of active nihilismʼ, totality immanent to experience? Having lopped off as ʻan exploration of the ambiguity of nihilismʼ. Third, the messianic as dogmatic (because ʻexternalʼ), Caygill it suggests that the paradigm of experience here is doesnʼt have an answer to this question, despite his not linguistic, as is generally supposed, but rather repeated invocations of ʻthe absoluteʼ as the ultimate, the intuitive intensities of ʻchromatic differentiationʼ. albeit impossible, object of experience. As a result, Finally, and most dramatically, it downgrades the mes- ʻthe absoluteʼ tends to appear within his text as an sianic dimension of Benjaminʼs thought to a dogmatic abstract, dogmatic door-stop, much as it does in the residue, fit only for critical excision. Hegelianism of his mentor, Gillian Rose, to whose The advantage of this approach is that it situ- memory the book is dedicated. Thus, while we seem ates Benjaminʼs oeuvre in the mainstream of nine- to be offered a Benjamin who is an eccentric neo- teenth- and twentieth-century European philosophy Kantian (the retrospective revenge of neo-Kantianism as an invasion and ruin of philosophy by experience. on phenomenology, in fact – Caygill is the author of (As Caygill comments nicely on Benjaminʼs essay on Blackwellʼs Kant Dictionary) it is actually a Hegelian Naples: ʻthe Neapolitan staircase walks all over the Kantianism much closer to Adornoʼs that is proffered: Critique of Pure Reason, disobeying all the rules transcendental dialectic as a negative form of specu- which would qualify it to be an object of a possible lative experience. This is the consequence of trying to experience.ʼ) The ʻdiscontinuous experience of the reconstruct the shape of Benjaminʼs project from such absoluteʼ which Benjamin seeks ʻexceeds philosophyʼ, very early texts, without consideration of the relation but its meaning derives from this overstepping of its to Romanticism. For it is only with the latter, with the limits. Benjaminʼs is a ʻphilosophising beyond phil- idea of the work of art, that the notion of immanent osophyʼ. Caygillʼs account of the transformation in the totality acquires plausibility, below the level of a mes- relations between the transcendental and the specula- sianic conception of history. (In fact, even the work tive which this involves is a brilliant feat of condensed on colour is implicitly dependent on the idea of the philosophical exposition. Kantʼs conditions of the pos- work of art, in the painterly idea of the ʻgiven surfaceʼ.) sibility of experience are re-read, first, as conditions However expansive Benjaminʼs subsequent sense of of legibility, and, second, as just one of an infinite set the objects of cultural experience and analysis would of such conditions, the relation to the whole of which become, he continued to treat them on the Romantic

Radical Philosophy 88 (March/April 1998) 35 model of artistic autonomy. Failure to recognize this contemporaneity. The question is vexed, first, because (because of a conflation of the ideas of artistic and how we are to go about determining the historical aesthetic autonomy, in the Kantian sense) has been meaning of the present is one of the main things at the main barrier to a proper understanding of the issue in Benjaminʼs thought; and, second, because, analytical structure of Benjaminʼs later work – and under the influence of various French thinkers of its relationship to Adornoʼs – for years. the 1960s and 1970s, contemporary Anglo-American Fortunately, Caygill soon leaves the philosophical literary and cultural theory operates at considerable formalism of his interpretation of the earliest works remove from the philosophical presuppositions of behind (elegant as it, in its technical austerity), to chart Benjaminʼs work. the transformations in Benjaminʼs writings brought Weigelʼs Body- and Image-Space is made up of about by the shift in their register towards the experi- eleven loosely related essays on Benjamin, subdivided ence of modernity. Although the basic philosophical according to the themes of ʻimages and bodyʼ, ʻgenderʼ, position is repeated, in condensed form, with metro- and ʻmemory and writingʼ. ʻWith the Sharpened Axe of nomic regularity, as a kind of mantra: a spell which Reasonʼ presents papers from one of the international must be continually recast to ward off the messianic, conferences commemorating the centenary of Ben- as it emerges again and again from inside Benjaminʼs jaminʼs birth in 1992, held in Sydney, Australia. Walter texts – initially, in the Hölderlin and Goethe essays Benjamin and the Demands of History collects pieces and The Origin of German Tragic Drama, through first delivered in the North American academy. All the figure of death; later, in the multiple forms of a three books are actively concerned to insert Benjaminʼs work into new intellectual contexts in order to uncover temporal dialectics of desire and remembrance, invest- hitherto concealed or neglected dimensions of its pro- ing the commodity-form and released in the bottled-up ductivity: the modernism/postmodernism debate (the futurity of the outmoded. Fischer and Steinberg collections), poststructuralism The second half of the book concentrates on selected and feminism (Fischer and Weigel), psychoanalysis essays from the late 1920s and 1930s, leaving aside the (Weigel), and cultural and post-colonial studies (Stein- Passagen-Werk and the famous theses ʻOn the Concept berg). The determination to avoid what Fischer calls of Historyʼ. The chapter on the work of art wonʼt let go ʻthe adulatory-identificatory approachʼ is refreshing, of the bone of vision, but its reading of the over-quoted but thinking through such engagements critically is but still misunderstood ʻWork of Artʼ essay, in its a trickier business than some of the contributors here various versions, is a model of lucidity. It is followed seem prepared to acknowledge. For example, it is by a free-ranging discussion of ʻthe experience of not particularly useful or illuminating to be told that the cityʼ in which the early fragment ʻCapitalism as Benjamin ʻanticipatesʼ poststructuralist theories of text- Religionʼ is used as a frame for the interpretation of uality and ʻvarious motifs of Postmodernismʼ (Docker, the writings on Paris. The book ends with a brief (and, in Fischer, p. 76); or that his idea of ʻthe language of to me, unconvincing) apologia for its relegation of the thingsʼ represents ʻan expanded concept of writing messianic motif, in which Benjaminʼs Nietzschean- (anticipating Derrida)ʼ (Weigel in Fischer, p. 96). Not ism momentarily reappears, in Rosean guise, as the only do such parallels lack all theoretical specificity abstract promise of ʻthe advent of a new lawʼ. Caygillʼs or point, but the language of anticipation tends to be Walter Benjamin is not for the philosophically faint used in a crudely historicist manner: as if the more of heart, but it repays close attention. It is by some recently propounded theory is for some mysterious distance the most philosophically sophisticated work reason preferable on the sole grounds that it occupies on Benjamin in English. Readers inclined to disagree a chronologically subsequent time. Benjamin himself, with it will need strong grounds for doing so. Those of course, was insistent on the theological character of who want their cultural theory without philosophy will such implicitly providential historicism. It is odd that have to stop reading Walter Benjamin. Weigel should lapse into this way of writing, since elsewhere she is, at least formally, fairly ferociously In the light of the present anti-historicist. Brodersen and Caygill offer different ways to read Body- and Image-Space opens with a polemic Benjamin – the life and the work – as a whole. The against the concept of actuality in use in most of the remaining three books under review are concerned centenary commemorations, in the name of Benjaminʼs with more specific aspects of his thought, and, in own conception of actuality, as it is found in the extra- particular, the vexed question of its ʻactualityʼ or ordinary, ecstatic conclusion to his ʻSurrealismʼ essay,

36 Radical Philosophy 88 (March/April 1998) defined in terms of body- and image-space, as the lesbian is the heroine of modernismʼ, which promises mediation of the material and the intelligible, or ʻpres- an alternative approach. Those seeking a more direct ence of mind incarnateʼ (leibhaftige Geistesgegenwart). confrontation between Benjamin and feminism will This leads into the second, most important, chapter, in have to wait for Jodi Brooksʼs forthcoming Benjamin which this idea is traced through Benjaminʼs corpus. It for Girls. is here that the bookʼs main thesis – that Benjaminʼs As might be expected given its provenance, ʻWith work is characterized by a distinctive way of think- the Sharpened Axe of Reasonʼ is a mixed bag. Critics ing in images – achieves its most direct presentation. in flight from the pull of mimetic adaption can land up Central to this is the idea of distortion (Entstellung) as in strange places. Even the title is puzzling, since this an essential feature of Benjaminʼs thought-images and most uncharacteristically ʻEnlightenedʼ of Benjaminʼs their link to psychoanalytical theory. Indeed, Weigel phrases hardly describes the tendency of most of the goes so far as to argue that it is contemporary readings contributions. These axes have been blunted by the of Freud that provide the condition of possibility of a sheer weight of trees in the forest of signs. Readers productive re-reading of Benjamin, including the mes- with interests in particular bits of Benjaminʼs oeuvre sianic aspect of his thought – a claim that is tested by that are directly addressed here will no doubt dip in the reading of the famous figure of the angel of history and take their chances. It is worth mentioning that in Chapter 4. Chapters 8 to 11 extend this approach there are four essays on the related topics of childrenʼs to Benjaminʼs writings on memory and the theory of literature, childrenʼs theatre, and performance. language. Together these chapters constitute the bookʼs Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History is a theoretical core. They are a distinctive contribution to more focused affair. Concentrating on what Benjamin the burgeoning literature, and an important counter to has to offer current practices of cultural history, it the cognitivism of Caygillʼs approach. ranges from critical reconstructions by established However, this is only part of the bookʼs argument. Benjamin scholars (Kittsteiner, Löwy, Pensky, Wohl- There are two subsidiary themes – poststructuralism farth), via Rancièreʼs nuanced but biting scepticism and gender – which follow a rather different course. about the ʻtoo-easy projectʼ of a Benjaminian cultural For whereas Benjaminʼs notions of distortion and the history (Benjamin as the author who both ʻachievedʼ dream-image provide an opening onto psychoanalytic and ʻdismemberedʼ the mystical body of Marxism and theory, which can then be turned back upon Ben- modernity), to reflections on the use of Benjaminʼs jaminʼs work, the way Weigel articulates the relation work as a path to ʻdifferent cultural imaginariesʼ to poststructuralism and feminism places them at (Harootunian, Hinsley, Abbas). It is these latter three considerably greater distance from both Benjaminʼs pieces which carry the promise of putting Benjaminʼs texts and politics. The comparisons with Foucault analytic of modernity to work on new materials: Japan and Kristeva (Chapters 3 and 5) operate at a broad in the 1920s and 1930s, the 1893 Chicago World Fair, thematic level only. And the treatment of gender and contemporary Hong Kong (through the eyes of is so overdetermined by a Kristevan notion of ʻthe premier film-maker, Wong Kar-wei), respectively. This feminineʼ that it is hardly appropriate to use the term is a rather different sense of ʻactualityʼ to Weigelʼs ʻgenderʼ, which Kristeva avoids. It is representations surrealist Benjaminʼs fulfilled ʻworld of universal of sexual difference, not ʻgender differenceʼ, which is and integral actualityʼ: the ʻactualisationʼ (Verwirkli- the actual topic of Chapter 5. This is hardly surprising chung) of the Passengen-Werkʼs Konvolut ʻNʼ. A fitful given Benjaminʼs historical location, but it is mis- and uneven process – part will, part method, part leading to pretend otherwise. In fact, it is not clear contingency – of constructing new constellations of that Weigel herself accepts the concept of gender in concepts, new thought-images, in order to reorganize the Anglo-American feminist sense of the term. For experience historically, to grasp the political meaning all the writing about ʻgender imagesʼ (generally of of the latest cultural forms. a mythic kind), for example, there is no discussion Who will give us a Benjaminian reading of Happy of Benjaminʼs claim that in Baudelaireʼs poetry ʻthe Together, Wongʼs latest film?

Radical Philosophy 88 (March/April 1998) 37