Walter Benjamin, Fabulist

in The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms 20.8 (2015).

Journal of Urban History, 2002

2019

Paragraph

Modernist Cultures, 2008

The Faculty Lounge of the Paris Institute of Critical Thinking, 2021

This is the introduction of my book Walter Benjamin and the Actuality of Critique: Essays on Violence and Experience, slightly modified to work as a stand-alone piece. It shows how Benjamin’s concept of Kritik is intrinsically bound to his idea of the “afterlife” of works (or events) and thus to his very specific idea of “actuality.” Actuality is defined not as a topicality or current “usefulness” but rather as the “continued life” of a work, of which the work of Kritik is a fundamental part. This is applied to Benjamin’s own work, which is extremely actual today not because it is “useful” in the context of current debates, but because, in its afterlife, it has come to a moment of high “legibility.” The text presents thus the two foci of the book, the actuality of Benjamin’s critique of violence and the actuality of his critique of experience. It is argued that, if the actuality of the critique of violence is more evident and probably largely responsible for Benjamin’s current “fame,” the actuality of his critique of experience constitutes the bedrock of his whole philosophical project and also of its afterlife.