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Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)

Benjamin wrote as a critic and was read for decades as one, and the philosophy underneath the criticism has come into view only gradually. He held that every thing communicates in language, that a work of art has an afterlife in which translation and criticism take part, that Ideas are arrangements of extremes rather than concepts that subsume, and that history written from the standpoint of progress is history written by the victors. He gave the twentieth century two of its most quoted formulations: the aura that withers under technological reproducibility, and the angel of history blown backwards into the future by the storm called progress. He worked between theology and Marxism without settling in either, and the question of which he finally belonged to has been argued by his friends and his readers ever since.

Walter Benjamin, born in Berlin to a prosperous, assimilated Jewish family, was sent at thirteen to a progressive boarding school at Haubinda, where the educational reformer Gustav Wyneken became his mentor; after Wyneken’s pro-war speech of November 1914 he broke with him in a letter of March 1915. He studied at Freiburg, Berlin and Munich, began a lifelong friendship with Gershom Scholem in 1915, and took his doctorate summa cum laude at Bern in 1919 with The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism. His Habilitation thesis on the German mourning-play, written largely on Capri in 1924, was withdrawn from the University of Frankfurt in 1925, closing the academic route; it was published in 1928. On Capri he met the Latvian Bolshevik theatre director Asja Lacis, whom he visited in Moscow in the winter of 1926–27 and who introduced him to Brecht in 1929. He wrote and presented radio broadcasts until 1933, when he left Germany for good. In exile he lived on a stipend from the Institute for Social Research, which published his essays in its journal and edited them in the process. Interned briefly as a German national in 1939, he worked on the Arcades material at the Bibliothèque Nationale until Paris fell, left the notes with Georges Bataille, and crossed the Pyrenees on foot in September 1940 with a small party guided by Lisa Fittko. At Portbou the group was told it would be returned to France, and that night he took an overdose of morphine. The doctor’s certificate gives 26 September, the companion who found him gives the 27th, and he was buried in a common grave whose location is no longer known. The rest of the party was allowed through the next day. His brother Georg, a Communist physician, died at Mauthausen in 1942.

Language, criticism and the Idea

Language as such. In an essay of 1916 that he never published, Benjamin set out a conception of language that runs under everything he wrote afterwards. There is no event or thing, in animate or inanimate nature, that does not in some way partake of language, because it is essential to each to communicate its spiritual content. Human language is the language of naming; the account is theological, running from the divine creative word through Adamic naming to a fall into the judging, abstract word and the multiplicity of tongues. The early essay on Kant, “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy” (1918), belongs with it: it argues that Kant’s concept of experience had been narrowed to the model of Newtonian physics, and that it could be widened by relating knowledge to language, after Hamann.

Criticism as the completion of the work. The dissertation reconstructed Early Romantic criticism, in Schlegel and Novalis, as grounded in Fichte’s theory of reflection: criticism does not judge a work from outside but consummates it, raising it towards the Idea of art. Whether Benjamin read Fichte accurately has been questioned. The essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1924–25) then distinguished criticism, which seeks a work’s truth content, from commentary, which handles its material content, and introduced the expressionless: the caesura that arrests a work’s semblance and shatters its false totality.

Ideas as constellations. The “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” to the Trauerspiel book (1928) states his theory of knowledge. Ideas relate to things as constellations relate to stars: they neither contain the phenomena nor subsume them under a general concept, but are the objective arrangement of their extremes. Origin is distinguished from genesis. It is not a coming-to-be but an eddy in the stream of becoming, and it includes a phenomenon’s after-history as well as its fore-history. The body of the book argues that baroque allegory, with its melancholy and its natural history, had been wrongly disparaged in favour of the Romantic symbol; the symbol’s time is the mystical instant, allegory’s is mobile and fluid, and allegory expresses transitoriness itself. The book cites Carl Schmitt on sovereignty, and what to make of that citation is a later dispute, discussed below.

Translation

The task of the translator. The preface to his translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens (1923) is among the founding texts of modern translation theory. Consideration of the recipient, it opens, is nowhere fruitful for understanding a work: no poem is meant for the reader, no picture for the viewer, no symphony for the audience. Translation therefore does not exist to transmit information or to serve a public. Translatability is a property of the work itself, and a translation belongs to the original’s afterlife (Fortleben), the stage of its continued life in which it is renewed. Languages differ in their way of meaning while intending the same thing: in “Brot” and “pain” what is meant is the same, the way of meaning it is not. The kinship of languages lies in their supplementing one another towards a pure language in which the ways of meaning are reconciled, and the translator serves that kinship best by literalness, the interlinear version being the ideal. Benjamin was a working translator, of Baudelaire and, with Franz Hessel, of Proust.

Violence, capitalism and the political

Critique of violence. The 1921 essay reads Gewalt, which covers force, power and authority as well as violence, through its relation to law. Law-making and law-preserving violence belong together as mythic violence; against them stands divine violence, which destroys law and does not found it. Georges Sorel’s proletarian general strike appears as a pure means, a political act that is not a means to an end within the legal order. Divine violence’s expiatory power cannot be known within human history, which is where the essay’s readers have divided. The fragment “Capitalism as Religion” (1921) describes capitalism as a cult without theology, celebrated without interruption, which makes guilt (Schuld, also debt) pervasive and offers no atonement. Both texts have become canonical in radical political theory, largely through the readings discussed below.

Media, technology and the arts

Aura. “Little History of Photography” (1931) defines aura as a strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1935–39) takes the definition over and states its fate: what withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art is its aura. Cult value gives way to exhibition value; the camera opens an optical unconscious; film trains perception for life among apparatus. The essay exists in three German versions of 1935, 1936 and 1939, increasingly urgent, and in a French text of 1936 edited by the Institute. The second version distinguishes a first technology, which seeks mastery over nature, from a second, which seeks an interplay between nature and humanity, and reads film as the rehearsal of that interplay. The epilogue sets fascism’s aestheticisation of political life against communism’s answer, the politicisation of art. Theodor Adorno’s objection, in a letter of March 1936, was that the magical aura had been transferred too readily to the autonomous work and assigned a counter-revolutionary function, and that Brecht’s influence was showing. “The Storyteller” (1936) and the essays on the mimetic faculty (1933), in which language is the highest archive of non-sensuous similarity, belong to the same years.

The Arcades Project and the concept of history

The Passagen-Werk. From 1927 until his death Benjamin gathered material for a philosophical primal history of nineteenth-century Paris, organised into thirty-six lettered convolutes, upper- and lower-case, and sketched in exposés of 1935 and 1939. Its figures are the flâneur, the collector and the ragpicker; its notions phantasmagoria, fashion and the commodity; its method the dialectical image, in which past and present meet in a flash, and dialectics at a standstill. Convolute N states the method: literary montage, “I have nothing to say, only to show”, and a historical materialism rid of the idea of progress. The Baudelaire material became essays of its own: “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”, which the Institute rejected in 1938, and “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1940), on shock and the disintegration of aura. City writings of the same cast run from One-Way Street (1928), dedicated to Lacis, through the portraits of Naples, Moscow and Marseille to Berlin Childhood around 1900.

On the concept of history. The theses of 1940 were not written for publication and survive in several versions; the Institute printed them in a hectograph memorial volume in 1942. Against historicism’s “the way it really was” and against the Social Democratic faith in progress, they set now-time (Jetztzeit) against homogeneous, empty time; grant each generation a weak messianic power; brush history against the grain; and observe that there is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism, since the cultural treasures owe their existence to the nameless toil of contemporaries. The ninth thesis reads Klee’s Angelus Novus as the angel of history, face turned to the past, wreckage piling before him, driven backwards into the future by the storm we call progress.

The contested corpus

Benjamin’s afterlife has been shaped by the people who held his papers and by three friendships that pulled in different directions. Scholem read him theologically, Brecht’s influence pulled the later work towards materialism, and Adorno sought a mediation. His letter of November 1938 on the Baudelaire essay objected that the material was presented without theoretical mediation, “at the crossroads of magic and positivism”. The question whether the late work is theological or materialist descends from that triangle, and recent scholarship tends to treat the tension as productive rather than resolvable, with a theological remainder that is not reducible to any confession. Adorno and Scholem on one side and Hannah Arendt on the other disagreed over the estate and how to present him. Adorno’s two-volume Schriften (1955) foregrounded the philosophical, historical and city writings; Arendt’s Illuminations (1968) presented a poetic thinker and set the political aside. Arendt also held that the Institute’s support had made him compliant with its edits. Whether the corpus is a set of brilliant fragments or has an underlying coherence, religious or philosophical, remains open, and one proposal is to read it as philosophising beyond philosophy.

The poststructuralist reception took its own texts. Derrida read “Critique of Violence” in Force of Law (1990) for the undecidability of its oppositions, worried that its messianism could license violence, and in later work set a weaker messianicity of his own against it; Paul de Man took up the translator essay and the theory of allegory. How far Benjamin anticipates deconstruction is disputed, and one line of scholarship insists that his commitment to the immanent truth content of works remains resolutely modernist. Giorgio Agamben, from an essay of 1970 to Homo Sacer and State of Exception, staged an encounter between Benjamin and Schmitt on sovereignty and the exception; several scholars have found the chronology reversed and the reading strained, and hold that Ludwig Klages’s vitalism, not Schmitt, was the live influence on the Trauerspiel book. Habermas read the pure means of the violence essay as pointing towards a theory of communication, a reading later charged with encouraging a non-reading of the essay itself.

Textual questions remain live. The Work of Art essay and the theses on history each exist in several versions, and which one an edition prints changes what “the” text says; the English titles vary between editions (“Mechanical Reproduction” against “Technological Reproducibility”; “Theses on the Philosophy of History” against “On the Concept of History”). The critical edition of the works, planned at twenty-two volumes, has been appearing since 2008.

Key works

Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of the German Trauerspiel, written 1925, published 1928) — the Habilitation; the Prologue on Ideas as constellations
“Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” (“The Task of the Translator”, 1923) — preface to his Baudelaire translation
“Zur Kritik der Gewalt” (“Critique of Violence”, 1921)
Einbahnstraße (One-Way Street, 1928)
“Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”, 1935–39, three versions)
“Über den Begriff der Geschichte” (“On the Concept of History”, 1940; printed 1942)
Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project, 1927–40, unfinished; published 1982)
Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert (Berlin Childhood around 1900, written 1930s)
Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols (Suhrkamp, 1972–89); Selected Writings, 4 vols (Harvard, 1996–2003) — the standard editions; Werke und Nachlaß. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Suhrkamp, 2008–) in progress