W alter Benjamin's earliest published writings date back to 1910, when he was a high-school stude... more W alter Benjamin's earliest published writings date back to 1910, when he was a high-school student in Berlin. Th at year, as he turned eigh teen, he published poems and short stories in various styles-lyrical, allegorical, expressionistic-in the student-run periodical Der Anfang (Th e Beginning), for which venue he always made use of the multivalent Latin pseudonym "Ardor." Th e following year, he began publishing theoretical essays on the general subject of "youth" and its "awakening"; these were overtly polemical pieces. In the feverish years before the First World War, Benjamin played an active role in what is known today as the German Youth Movement, a po liti cally heterogeneous phenomenon which he and many others looked on as primarily a movement of educational and cultural reform, one whose goal was the reform of consciousness in general, nothing short of a "new humanity." Th us, his programmatic writings on academic reform, comprising about a quarter of the contents of this volume, represent not so much direct appeals to action as eff orts to re orient and liberate their readers' general outlook. Already, in 1905-1906, at the country boarding school Haubinda, where he had been sent because of his delicate health, the young Benjamin came under the infl uence of Gustav Wyneken, one of the leading Translator's Introduction 514-45996_ch01_1P.indd 1 514-45996_ch01_1P.indd 1 1/19/11 7:26 PM 1/19/11 7:26 PM 3. But there is also a critique of the mystifi cations of l'art pour l'art. See "Dialogue on the Religiosity of the Present" (Chapter 13 in this volume).
Walter Benjamin became a published writer at the age of seventeen. Yet the first stirrings of thi... more Walter Benjamin became a published writer at the age of seventeen. Yet the first stirrings of this most original of critical minds--penned during the years in which he transformed himself from the comfortable son of a haute-bourgeois German Jewish family into the nomadic, uncompromising philosopher-critic we have since come to appreciate--have until now remained largely unavailable in English. Early Writings, 1910-1917 rectifies this situation, documenting the formative intellectual experiences of one of the twentieth century's most resolutely independent thinkers. Here we see the young Benjamin in his various roles as moralist, cultural critic, school reformer, and poet-philosopher. The diversity of interest and profundity of thought characteristic of his better-known work from the 1920s and 30s are already in evidence, as we witness the emergence of critical projects that would occupy Benjamin throughout his intellectual career: the role of the present in historical remembrance, the relationship of the intellectual to political action, the idea of truth in works of art, and the investigation of language as the veiled medium of experience. Even at this early stage, a recognizably Benjaminian way of thinking comes into view--a daring, boundary-crossing enterprise that does away with classical antitheses in favor of the relentlessly-seeking critical consciousness that produced the groundbreaking works of his later years. With the publication of these early writings, our portrait of one of the most significant intellects of the twentieth century edges closer to completion.
This article analyzes Benjamin's enigmatic essay of 1921, “Critique of Violence,” together wi... more This article analyzes Benjamin's enigmatic essay of 1921, “Critique of Violence,” together with related fragmentary writings from the postwar period (including the “Theological-Political Fragment”) and, from 1931, “The Destructive Character.” Benjamin's deconstruction of violence (Abbau der Gewalt) is seen in the context of phenomenology. In addition, texts by Hermann Cohen and Georges Sorel are studied as principal sources, and critical commentaries by Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Werner Hamacher are discussed. Violence is considered an essentially moral phenomenon, a function of human actions and intentions; strictly speaking, there is no natural violence. The critique of violence itself bespeaks a kind of violence. Benjamin's critique of the reifying “mythic violence” that founds and administers the law presupposes an expiatory “divine violence” that reveals myth as such and thereby opens the possibility of justice beyond law and beyond the m...
There is no getting around our residence in language—language understood not primarily as a syste... more There is no getting around our residence in language—language understood not primarily as a system of signification but as the necessarily ambiguous existential condition of intelligibility in which we always already find ourselves situated, the historically evolving collective articulation of things. The ontological theory of language at issue here, with its concern for the problems of meaning and translation in particular and its methodological distance-in-nearness, entails a simultaneously concentrated and expansive allegorical experience of the world. Allegory brings out the word inherent in the thing—the word not as flat marker but as gravitating and radiating body of history. This essay touches on prominent nineteenth- and twentieth-century sources of this modernist theory of language and philosophical philology, thinkers who worked in different ways to open theoretical horizons while promulgating an art of reading. Such historically oriented and textually focused work of opening remains a political-educational imperative.
Drawing on writings of the German Romantic tradition, Werner Hamacher’s aphoristic Minima Philolo... more Drawing on writings of the German Romantic tradition, Werner Hamacher’s aphoristic Minima Philologica develops a philosophy of philology, one operating without the control mechanisms of instrumentalized thought but not without internal rigor. Hamacher conceives philology as an art of (slow) reading bound to the spirit of experiment and linguistic play. Versed in the conventions and operations of literature in order to do it justice, philology nevertheless speaks in another voice, one more ascetic and conjectural. Having broken with the positivism of the Alexandrian tradition of philologia, this other philology plays the trickster in humanistic disciplines. Its task today is twofold: to unmask the industrial manufacture of language, complicit as it is with hostility to the word; and, as remedy for reification, to reawaken the philia in philology by cultivating—with historically informed critical vigilance—the power of affect, the mimetic power, in language and discourse.
In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger compares language in general to a well-worn streetca... more In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger compares language in general to a well-worn streetcar in which everyone rides "without hindrance and above all without danger."' A singularly reactionary complaint, we may say. Do we really need more danger in the world at present? But, then, what might we mean by 'danger'? The question seems impertinent until we realize that in German Gefahr, related to fahren, go, derives from an old substantive vare, which meant not only ambush, peril, fear, but also endeavor, aspiration, a word which, moreover, in its oldest historical form is cognate with Latin periculum, trial, danger, and its verbal offshoot, experiri, to try, test, prove ("placet experiri" being Hans Castorp's initiatory motto in The Magic Mountain). Danger is literally cousin to experience (Erfahrung). The German and Latin terms, together with the Greek peira, trial, experience, and empeiros, experienced (>'empirical'), go back to a reconstructed Indo-European root form per-, meaning specifically to try, undertake, risk. To try is metaphorically to lead over, press forward, and this verbal base belongs to a more general word family, built around the phoneme per, in which we may trace the extension
... of the phantasmagoria appertaining to commodity character, allowing us to reflect on its soci... more ... of the phantasmagoria appertaining to commodity character, allowing us to reflect on its social and historical significance. ... brings the dialectic of new and old to a state of Stillstand, an instance that is not the end of a continuous movement but a qualitatively different moment; . . . ...
W alter Benjamin's earliest published writings date back to 1910, when he was a high-school stude... more W alter Benjamin's earliest published writings date back to 1910, when he was a high-school student in Berlin. Th at year, as he turned eigh teen, he published poems and short stories in various styles-lyrical, allegorical, expressionistic-in the student-run periodical Der Anfang (Th e Beginning), for which venue he always made use of the multivalent Latin pseudonym "Ardor." Th e following year, he began publishing theoretical essays on the general subject of "youth" and its "awakening"; these were overtly polemical pieces. In the feverish years before the First World War, Benjamin played an active role in what is known today as the German Youth Movement, a po liti cally heterogeneous phenomenon which he and many others looked on as primarily a movement of educational and cultural reform, one whose goal was the reform of consciousness in general, nothing short of a "new humanity." Th us, his programmatic writings on academic reform, comprising about a quarter of the contents of this volume, represent not so much direct appeals to action as eff orts to re orient and liberate their readers' general outlook. Already, in 1905-1906, at the country boarding school Haubinda, where he had been sent because of his delicate health, the young Benjamin came under the infl uence of Gustav Wyneken, one of the leading Translator's Introduction 514-45996_ch01_1P.indd 1 514-45996_ch01_1P.indd 1 1/19/11 7:26 PM 1/19/11 7:26 PM 3. But there is also a critique of the mystifi cations of l'art pour l'art. See "Dialogue on the Religiosity of the Present" (Chapter 13 in this volume).
Walter Benjamin became a published writer at the age of seventeen. Yet the first stirrings of thi... more Walter Benjamin became a published writer at the age of seventeen. Yet the first stirrings of this most original of critical minds--penned during the years in which he transformed himself from the comfortable son of a haute-bourgeois German Jewish family into the nomadic, uncompromising philosopher-critic we have since come to appreciate--have until now remained largely unavailable in English. Early Writings, 1910-1917 rectifies this situation, documenting the formative intellectual experiences of one of the twentieth century's most resolutely independent thinkers. Here we see the young Benjamin in his various roles as moralist, cultural critic, school reformer, and poet-philosopher. The diversity of interest and profundity of thought characteristic of his better-known work from the 1920s and 30s are already in evidence, as we witness the emergence of critical projects that would occupy Benjamin throughout his intellectual career: the role of the present in historical remembrance, the relationship of the intellectual to political action, the idea of truth in works of art, and the investigation of language as the veiled medium of experience. Even at this early stage, a recognizably Benjaminian way of thinking comes into view--a daring, boundary-crossing enterprise that does away with classical antitheses in favor of the relentlessly-seeking critical consciousness that produced the groundbreaking works of his later years. With the publication of these early writings, our portrait of one of the most significant intellects of the twentieth century edges closer to completion.
This article analyzes Benjamin's enigmatic essay of 1921, “Critique of Violence,” together wi... more This article analyzes Benjamin's enigmatic essay of 1921, “Critique of Violence,” together with related fragmentary writings from the postwar period (including the “Theological-Political Fragment”) and, from 1931, “The Destructive Character.” Benjamin's deconstruction of violence (Abbau der Gewalt) is seen in the context of phenomenology. In addition, texts by Hermann Cohen and Georges Sorel are studied as principal sources, and critical commentaries by Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Werner Hamacher are discussed. Violence is considered an essentially moral phenomenon, a function of human actions and intentions; strictly speaking, there is no natural violence. The critique of violence itself bespeaks a kind of violence. Benjamin's critique of the reifying “mythic violence” that founds and administers the law presupposes an expiatory “divine violence” that reveals myth as such and thereby opens the possibility of justice beyond law and beyond the m...
There is no getting around our residence in language—language understood not primarily as a syste... more There is no getting around our residence in language—language understood not primarily as a system of signification but as the necessarily ambiguous existential condition of intelligibility in which we always already find ourselves situated, the historically evolving collective articulation of things. The ontological theory of language at issue here, with its concern for the problems of meaning and translation in particular and its methodological distance-in-nearness, entails a simultaneously concentrated and expansive allegorical experience of the world. Allegory brings out the word inherent in the thing—the word not as flat marker but as gravitating and radiating body of history. This essay touches on prominent nineteenth- and twentieth-century sources of this modernist theory of language and philosophical philology, thinkers who worked in different ways to open theoretical horizons while promulgating an art of reading. Such historically oriented and textually focused work of opening remains a political-educational imperative.
Drawing on writings of the German Romantic tradition, Werner Hamacher’s aphoristic Minima Philolo... more Drawing on writings of the German Romantic tradition, Werner Hamacher’s aphoristic Minima Philologica develops a philosophy of philology, one operating without the control mechanisms of instrumentalized thought but not without internal rigor. Hamacher conceives philology as an art of (slow) reading bound to the spirit of experiment and linguistic play. Versed in the conventions and operations of literature in order to do it justice, philology nevertheless speaks in another voice, one more ascetic and conjectural. Having broken with the positivism of the Alexandrian tradition of philologia, this other philology plays the trickster in humanistic disciplines. Its task today is twofold: to unmask the industrial manufacture of language, complicit as it is with hostility to the word; and, as remedy for reification, to reawaken the philia in philology by cultivating—with historically informed critical vigilance—the power of affect, the mimetic power, in language and discourse.
In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger compares language in general to a well-worn streetca... more In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger compares language in general to a well-worn streetcar in which everyone rides "without hindrance and above all without danger."' A singularly reactionary complaint, we may say. Do we really need more danger in the world at present? But, then, what might we mean by 'danger'? The question seems impertinent until we realize that in German Gefahr, related to fahren, go, derives from an old substantive vare, which meant not only ambush, peril, fear, but also endeavor, aspiration, a word which, moreover, in its oldest historical form is cognate with Latin periculum, trial, danger, and its verbal offshoot, experiri, to try, test, prove ("placet experiri" being Hans Castorp's initiatory motto in The Magic Mountain). Danger is literally cousin to experience (Erfahrung). The German and Latin terms, together with the Greek peira, trial, experience, and empeiros, experienced (>'empirical'), go back to a reconstructed Indo-European root form per-, meaning specifically to try, undertake, risk. To try is metaphorically to lead over, press forward, and this verbal base belongs to a more general word family, built around the phoneme per, in which we may trace the extension
... of the phantasmagoria appertaining to commodity character, allowing us to reflect on its soci... more ... of the phantasmagoria appertaining to commodity character, allowing us to reflect on its social and historical significance. ... brings the dialectic of new and old to a state of Stillstand, an instance that is not the end of a continuous movement but a qualitatively different moment; . . . ...
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