Philosophizing Beyond Philosophy Walter Benjamin Reviewed
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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.