Walter Benjamin

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Western Philosophers 20th-century philosophy
Name:	Walter Benjamin
Birth:	July 15, 1892 (Berlin, Germany)
Death:	September 27, 1940 (Port Bou, Spain)
School/tradition:	Western Marxism, Frankfurt School
Main interests:	Literary theory, Aesthetics, Technology, Epistemology, Philosophy of language, Philosophy of history
Influences:	Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, Theodor Adorno, Gershom Scholem
Influenced:	Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Giorgio Agamben

Walter Benjamin (July 15, 1892 – September 27, 1940) was a German Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and the Jewish mysticism of Gershom Scholem.

As a sociological and cultural critic, Benjamin combined ideas of historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism in a body of work which was an entirely novel contribution to western philosophy, Marxism, and aesthetic theory. As a literary scholar, he translated essays written by Charles Baudelaire and Marcel Proust's famous novel, In Search of Lost Time. His work is widely cited in academic and literary studies, in particular his essays The Task of the Translator and The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 Death 2 Works 2.1 The Origin of German Tragic Drama 2.2 The Arcades Project 2.3 Benjamin's Style 3 Legacy 4 Bibliography 5 Notes 6 References and further reading 7 External links

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

Benjamin was born into a Jewish family in Berlin. He was brother-in-law to Hilde Benjamin.

[edit] Death

Benjamin probably committed suicide in Portbou at the Spanish-French border, attempting to escape from the Nazis. The circumstances of his death are unclear. He appeared to be ill when he arrived in Portbou, having crossed a wild part of the Pyrenees in refugee fashion, and the party he was with were told they would be denied passage across the border, which would have been a step towards freedom (Benjamin's ultimate goal was the United States). While staying in the Hotel de Francia he took some morphine pills and he died in the night of 27/28 September 1940. The fact that he was buried in the consecrated section of a Roman Catholic cemetery would indicate that it was not announced as a suicide. The other persons in his party were allowed passage the next day, and safely reached Lisbon on 30 September. A manuscript copy of Benjamin's "On the Concept of History" was passed to Adorno by Hannah Arendt, who crossed the French-Spanish border at Portbou a few months later, and was subsequently published by the Institute for Social Research (temporarily relocated in New York) in 1942.

One way of interpreting these facts is that though the entire group of travellers was stopped, Benjamin was in fact the main target. As an emigrant Jew, a radical writer who had made close friends with Brecht and Adorno, and a fierce critic of Nazism he would have been well-known to the Gestapo and it is a well documented fact that the Spanish border police were cooperative with the Germans. Once he was dead, following this interpretation, there would be no point in holding back the others (who did not know Benjamin). Benjamin certainly was aware that he was risking his life both if he went south or if he stayed behind in Paris; the latter meant certain death and probably torture at the hands of the Gestapo. It does not seem that he was using any forged identity papers when attempting to cross into Spain, and this would make it easier for the border police to identify him. In all probability Benjamin did not know people who were in the more advanced escape business, and his portliness and distinctive face made it hard for him to disguise himself anyway.

A completed manuscript which Benjamin had carried in his suitcase disappeared after his death and has not been recovered. Some critics speculate that it was his Arcades Project in a final form; this is very unlikely as the author's plans for the work had changed in the wake of Adorno's criticisms in 1938, and it seems clear that the work was flowing over its containing limits in his last years. As the last finished piece of work we have from Benjamin, the Theses on the Philosophy of History (noted above) is often cited; Adorno claimed this had been written in the spring of 1940, weeks before the Germans invaded France. While this is not completely certain, it is clearly one of his last works, and the final paragraph, about the Jewish quest for the Messiah provides a harrowing final point to Benjamin's work, with its themes of culture, destruction, Jewish heritage and the fight between humanity and nihilism. He brings up the interdiction, in some varieties of Judaism, to try to determine the year when the Messiah would come into the world, and points out that this did not make Jews indifferent to the future "for every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter".

An alternative theory of his death considers the possibility that Benjamin was actually murdered by Stalinist killerati. He might have earned his place on Stalin's hitlist by the fact that his last book Theses on the Philosophy of History can be read as an analysis of failures of Marxism. The lost manuscript could well have been an elaboration of his criticism of Marxism and its loss not so much an accident as the very cause for the murder (cf Did Stalin's killer liquidate Walter Benjamin).

[edit] Works

His most important writings were:

• Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften (Goethe's Elective Affinities / 1922),
• Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of German Tragic Drama [Mourning Play] / 1928),
• Einbahnstraße (One Way Street / 1928),
• Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction / 1936),
• Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin Childhood around 1900 / 1950, published posthumously),
• Über den Begriff der Geschichte (On the Concept of History / Theses on the Philosophy of History) / 1939, published posthumously).
• Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire (The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire / 1938)

Benjamin corresponded extensively with Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht and occasionally received funding from the Frankfurt School under Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's direction, even after this had moved to New York City. The competing influences of Brecht's Marxism (and secondarily Adorno's critical theory) and the Jewish mysticism of his friend Gerschom Scholem were central to Benjamin's work, though he never completely resolved their differences. On the other hand, some later critics, such as Paul de Man, have argued that Benjamin's writings dynamically flow between these different traditions in order to create a kind of internal critique out of their juxtaposition. Nonetheless, the essay "On the Concept of History" (often referred to as the "Theses on the Philosophy of History"), among Benjamin's last works, is, according to some readers [citation?], the closest approach to such a synthesis, and along with the essay "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility" (more commonly printed in English under the title "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"), are among the most often read of his texts among English speakers, and are thus considered among the more accessible.

In the ninth thesis of the essay "Theses on the Philosophy of History" Benjamin, inspired by a Paul Klee painting called Angelus Novus in his possession, poetically describes the course of human history as a path of accumulating destruction which "the angel" views with horror but from which he cannot turn away. His "Angel of History" would later inspire Tony Kushner's angels in his work Angels in America. Benjamin focused on epistemology, theory of language, allegory, and the philosophy of history. Furthermore, he wrote essays on Baudelaire, Kafka, Proust and Brecht.

[edit] The Origin of German Tragic Drama

Benjamin's most lengthy completed work is his Habilitation dissertation, the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (translated as The Origin of German Tragic Drama by John Osborne). In this study, at once forbiddingly theoretical and painstakingly empirical, Benjamin analyses Reformation-era German politics and culture through the Trauerspiel genre of the 16th-17th century.

The project begins with a lengthy "Epistimo-Critical Prologue" in which Benjamin sets out the philosophical stakes of his work: the combination and elaboration of parts of the Platonic theory of ideas, the Hegelian historical sublation, and the Leibnizian monad. Encapsulating the one within the other, Benjamin gives the Platonic form a historical instantiation, but only in the sense that it is monadic. Within aesthetic objects of study, there is contained the monad of its historical development, and when this monad is placed within a constellation of other objects, it reveals to the scholar the historical development of the idea. Thus, in the Trauerspiel itself, what appears to be an ahistorical accumulation of fragments is instead already in some sense historical.

Within the main text itself, there are two main divisions: first, a distinction between tragedy and Trauerspiel, where Benjamin clears away the interpretations that precede his work, and second, a lengthy discussion of the relation of allegory to symbolism and the way in which allegory might open onto his modified platonic notion of the idea. In the first section, Benjamin notes that tragedy and Trauerspiel differ in their conception of time: the tragedy is eschatological insofar as its plot leads to a defined end-point, where characters and stories reach a fatalistic resolution; whereas the Trauerspiel takes place only in space, time stretches out forever towards the promised but undisclosed Last Judgment, so characters are therefore paralysed from all action and can only wait - thus there is no resolution and no sense of time passing. In short, in Trauerspiel, time is spatialized. Part of what makes Trauerspielen so inscrutable is that their relationship to history is only ever allegorical, in the sense that the play presents fragments and broken shards of history without narrativizing them, as we are accustomed to seeing in most plays. These fragments, when placed on the stage, rather than maintaining a denotative relationship to history, where history is told, the spatial constellation of these fragments reveals a true idea of history. Benjamin's book constantly performs this constellating of monads, presaging in dependent clauses what will be said more fully later, itself constantly reaching back to earlier sections of the book. Benjamin's project, then, is most famously summed up very early in the book, writing, "the baroque knows no eschatology and for that very reason it has no mechanism by which it gathers all earthly things in together and exalts them before consigning them to their end" (p. 66).

In a changing political climate, Benjamin hoped that this book would relate to the German belief in political and historical progress by showing the absolute futility of raw historicism, just as in the Trauerspiel the resuccitation of historical objects and facts is absolutely impossible. Instead, the massive complexity and profound obscurity of the book meant that it fell on largely deaf ears. When submitted as a Habilitation thesis (a higher degree in the German academic system that, after a PhD, gives legal authority to teach in a university), Benjamin's supervisor claimed it was unreadable and refused to award the degree.

[edit] The Arcades Project

Main article: Arcades Project

Benjamin's final, unfinished work, known as the Passagenwerk or Arcades Project, was to be an enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, especially concerned with the roofed outdoor "arcades" which created the city's distinctive street life and culture of flânerie. It has been posthumously edited and published in its unfinished form.

[edit] Benjamin's Style

Susan Sontag once remarked that, in Benjamin's texts, sentences do not seem to generate in the ordinary way; they do not lead gently into one another, and do not create an obvious line of reasoning. Instead, it is as if each sentence "had to say everything, before the inward gaze of total concentration dissolved the subject before his eyes", a style of writing and thinking Sontag calls "freeze-frame baroque." Sontag writes that "his major essays seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct" ^[1]. Though Sontag didn't have a full overview of the Arcades Project when she wrote this, her comments apply to that work as well. The difficulty of Benjamin's style can be understood as an essential part of his philosophical project. Fascinated by notions of reference and constellation, Benjamin's goal in much of his later work was less to articulate a coherent position than to use varied intertexts to reveal aspects of the the past that cannot and should not be understood within larger, monolithic constructs of historical understanding (the so-called "grand narrative").

Even a quick read of Benjamin makes clear his antagonism toward the idea that writing should have a denotative relation to its overt subject. Through his writings Benjamin identifies himself as a modernist for whom the philosophical merges with the literary: logic-based philosophical reasoning cannot account for all experience, and especially not for self-representation through artistic mediums.

His concerns regarding style are exemplified in his essay The Task of the Translator, in which he argues that any literary translation -- by definition -- produces deformations and misunderstandings of the original text. In the deformed text, otherwise hidden aspects of the original are elucidated, while formerly obvious aspects become unreadable. Benjamin considers this mortification of the text productive; when placed in a specific constellation of works and ideas, newly revealed affinities between historical objects appear and are productive of philosophical truth.

[edit] Legacy

Since the appearance of his Schriften in 1955, 15 years after his death, Benjamin's work has been the subject of numerous books and essays.

[edit] Bibliography

• The Arcades Project. ISBN 0-674-00802-2^[2]
• Berlin Childhood Around 1900. ISBN 0-674-02222-X
• Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet In The Era Of High Capitalism. ISBN 0-902308-94-7
• The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940. ISBN 0-226-04237-5
• The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. ISBN 0-674-17415-1
• Illuminations. ISBN 0-8052-0241-2
• Moscow Diary. ISBN 0-674-58744-8
• One Way Street and Other Writings. ISBN 0-86091-836-X
• Reflections. ISBN 0-8052-0802-X
• On Hashish. ISBN 0-674-02221-1
• The Origin of German Tragic Drama. ISBN 0-86091-837-8
• Selected Writings in four volumes, from Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-94585-9 (vol. 1), ISBN 0-674-94586-7 (vol. 2), ISBN 0-674-00896-0 (vol. 3), ISBN 0-674-01076-0 (vol. 4)
• Understanding Brecht. ISBN 0-902308-99-8

[edit] Notes

[edit] References and further reading

• Jennings, Michael Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism ISBN 0-8014-2006-7
• Leslie, Esther Walter Benjamin, Overpowering Conformism Pluto Press, London 2001 ISBN 0-7453-1568-2
• Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, edited by Michael P. Steinberg. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996 (hardcover, ISBN 0-8014-3135-2; paperback, ISBN 0-8014-8257-7).
• Witte, Bernd; Translated by Rolleston, James Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography ISBN 0-8143-2017-1
• McMurtry, Larry; Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond ISBN 0-684-85496-1

[edit] External links

• Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate
• Benjamin: On the Concept of History
• The Internationale Walter Benjamin Gesellschaft. In English and German.
• Who Killed Walter Benjamin?, a documentary film about the circumstances of Benjamin's death
• ShadowTime, an opera on the life of Walter Benjamin, music by Brian Ferneyhough, libretto by Charles Bernstein.
• Trilectic- The Lives of Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis set to music.
• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Complete Version)
• Head Rush: How drug experiments illuminated Walter Benjamin's thinking, Michael Berk, nextbook, May 16, 2006
• The Arcades Project Project or The Rhetoric of Hypertext
• Fragments of the Passagenwerk: The Arcades Project, Giles Peaker
• The Dialectics of Allegoresis: Historical Materialism in Benjamin's Illuminations, John Parker
• Walter Benjamin, "On Hashish" trans. Scott J. Thompson (1996) [Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate]
• Scott J. Thompson, "From Rausch to Rebellion: Walter Benjamin's ON HASHISH"[Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate]

Persondata
NAME	Benjamin, Walter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	German philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH	July 15, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH	Berlin, Germany
DATE OF DEATH	September 27, 1940
PLACE OF DEATH	Port Bou, Spain