Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German critic and philosopher whose work defies classification. Benjamin’s work emerges out of the turn-of-the-century Neo-Kantian movement, the most significant representative of which was Hermann Cohen. The early text Programm einer kommenden Philosophie (Program of a Future Philosophy) clearly takes Kant’s thought, as systematized by Cohen, as its point of departure. But Benjamin's philosophical writing rapidly becomes much more difficult to situate within the intellectual landscape of his time. Indeed, other early publications by Benjamin assume a form and draw on traditions that are difficult to locate on a standard map of philosophical positions. The dissertation on the concept of criticism in early German Romanticism, with its deep engagement with Fichte, is still philosophically accessible, but the essays on the origin of language and on divine violence, both of which draw on Biblical sources, are much more difficult to assess. And the brilliant but elusive essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, although clearly evincing a Kierkegaardian inspiration, develops a repertoire of critical terms that resist translation into a familiar conceptual vocabulary. The treatise The Origin of the German Mourning Play, written to qualify Benjamin for the venia legendi in philosophy, is certainly one of the most mysterious works of criticism (if that, in fact, is what it is) ever produced and its central doctrines (e.g., the “monadic” character of the artwork, the “non-intentional” (intentionslos) character of truth) have been scrupulously circumvented by most scholars working on Benjamin. Then too we have the literary criticism strictu sensu: the penetrating essays, produced mainly for newspapers, on Kafka, Hebel, Robert Walser, Julien Green, Karl Kraus, Hofmannsthal’s Tower, and Gottfried Keller, to name just a few of the prominent names. Do they signal, as Benjamin’s first biographer Bernd Witte claimed, an abandonment of philosophy and critical theory altogether? Equally challenging is the late phase of Benjamin’s work: the famous essay on the Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility, with its three versions and what looks, at least on a first reading, like a recasting of a progressivist Marxist historical schema in technological terms. It is juxtaposed, of course, with the essays on Baudelaire, written in an almost elegiac tone, and then the massive, unfinished and unfinishable web of citations, observations, and essayistic ruminations that constitutes the so-called Passagen-Werk, the historico-philosophical reconstruction (Whatever that might mean!) of Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century.
In an interesting study of frequency of citation in the Chicago journal Critical Inquiry that was published a few years ago, Benjamin ranked just behind Jacques Derrida and well ahead of every other scholar referred to since the journal’s founding. It is likely that a follow-up study would find that Benjamin has in the meantime overtaken Derrida. The fact is that there is hardly a humanistic discipline in which publications are not dense with references to Benjamin. We mention this not to suggest the pervasive thrall of intellectual fashion, but to highlight the richness of Benjamin’s work and its centrality to humanistic study. To put this another way: A very broad cross-section of scholars working in the Humanities carry out their work with reference to moments in Benjamin’s work and with some loose conception of the overall purport of his thought. This is a remarkable fact in view of the obscurity and apparent disunity of Benjamin’s oeuvre sketched in the previous paragraph. Indeed, in both the Benjamin literature and the Benjamin-inspired literature one typically finds highly selective citations, intense focus on single essays without reference even to chronologically contiguous works: a pars pro toto mode of reading where the “totality” never comes into view. Of course, starting with Witte’s biography alluded to above, there have been attempts at comprehensive views, but these have been mostly biographical or tendentious (Frankfurt Critical Theory, deconstruction). Most remarkable is the almost complete abdication of responsibility to come to terms with the philosophical achievement on the part of serious philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition. By virtue of its declared philosophical ambition, proven fecundity in humanistic research, and its conceptual difficulty, the body of work left to us by Walter Benjamin cries out for systematic philosophical treatment. But such treatment has not been forthcoming.
Not forthcoming, that is to say, until the publication of Eli Friedlander’s book last year.
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In an interesting study of frequency of citation in the Chicago journal Critical Inquiry that was published a few years ago, Benjamin ranked just behind Jacques Derrida and well ahead of every other scholar referred to since the journal’s founding. It is likely that a follow-up study would find that Benjamin has in the meantime overtaken Derrida. The fact is that there is hardly a humanistic discipline in which publications are not dense with references to Benjamin. We mention this not to suggest the pervasive thrall of intellectual fashion, but to highlight the richness of Benjamin’s work and its centrality to humanistic study. To put this another way: A very broad cross-section of scholars working in the Humanities carry out their work with reference to moments in Benjamin’s work and with some loose conception of the overall purport of his thought. This is a remarkable fact in view of the obscurity and apparent disunity of Benjamin’s oeuvre sketched in the previous paragraph. Indeed, in both the Benjamin literature and the Benjamin-inspired literature one typically finds highly selective citations, intense focus on single essays without reference even to chronologically contiguous works: a pars pro toto mode of reading where the “totality” never comes into view. Of course, starting with Witte’s biography alluded to above, there have been attempts at comprehensive views, but these have been mostly biographical or tendentious (Frankfurt Critical Theory, deconstruction). Most remarkable is the almost complete abdication of responsibility to come to terms with the philosophical achievement on the part of serious philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition. By virtue of its declared philosophical ambition, proven fecundity in humanistic research, and its conceptual difficulty, the body of work left to us by Walter Benjamin cries out for systematic philosophical treatment. But such treatment has not been forthcoming.
Not forthcoming, that is to say, until the publication of Eli Friedlander’s book last year.
.
