Walter Benjamin Re-Situated

Modernist Cultures, 2008

Historical Materialism, 2016

Uwe Steiner’s Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to His Work and Thought is a comprehensive and compelling account of Walter Benjamin’s life and work, which will satisfy both newcomers to Benjamin and those with an existing interest. In this review, I argue that Steiner’s account goes beyond similar encounters with Benjamin in two main ways: first, by focusing specifically on Benjamin’s personal and intellectual relationship with ‘modernity’ and, second, by presenting Benjamin’s enduring appeal as a result of the creative interpretation of his work according to changing times and tastes. Yet Steiner’s historicising account of Benjamin also somewhat neutralises his critical potential as a historical-materialist thinker. Drawing on the work of Benjamin’s erstwhile friend and contemporary Ernst Bloch, as well as on Peter Osborne’s concept of modernity as a specific consciousness of time, I argue that the act of interpretation itself requires a weakly teleological concept of history, such...

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

personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in The German Quarterly, 89:2, . http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/gequ.10270. Review of Eiland, Howard and Michael W. Jennings. Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life. Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 2014, 768 pp. $39.95 (hardcover).

New German Critique, 2001

NOTE: This original entry from 2011 has been updated in a 2015 revision by the authors, available on the SEP website. Walter Benjamin's importance as a philosopher and critical theorist can be gauged by the diversity of his intellectual influence and the continuing productivity of his thought. Primarily regarded as a literary critic and essayist, the philosophical basis of Benjamin's writings is increasingly acknowledged. They were a decisive influence upon Theodor W. Adorno's conception of philosophy's actuality or adequacy to the present (Adorno 1931). In the 1930s, Benjamin's efforts to develop a politically oriented, materialist aesthetic theory proved an important stimulus for both the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the Marxist poet and dramatist Bertolt Brecht. The delayed appearance of Benjamin's collected writings has determined and sustained the Anglophone reception of his work. (A two-volume selection was published in German in 1955, with a full edition not appearing until 1972–89; English anthologies first appeared in 1968 and 1978; the four-volume Selected Writings, 1996–2003.) Originally received in the context of literary theory and aesthetics, the philosophical depth and cultural breadth of Benjamin's thought have only recently begun to be fully appreciated. Despite the voluminous size of the secondary literature that it has produced, his work remains a continuing source of productivity. An understanding of the intellectual context of his work has contributed to the recent philosophical revival of Early German Romanticism. His essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility’ remains a major theoretical text for film theory. One-Way Street and the work arising from his unfinished research on nineteenth century Paris (The Arcades Project), provide a theoretical stimulus for cultural theory and philosophical concepts of the modern. Benjamin's messianic understanding of history has been an enduring source of theoretical fascination and frustration for a diverse range of recent philosophical thinkers, including Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben and, in a critical context, Jürgen Habermas. The ‘Critique of Violence’ and ‘On the Concept of History’ are important sources for Derrida's discussion of messianicity, which has been influential, along with Paul de Man's discussion of allegory, for the poststructuralist reception of Benjamin's writings. Aspects of Benjamin's thought have also been associated with the recent revival of political theology, although it is doubtful this reception is true to the tendencies of Benjamin's own political thought.

International Political Sociology, 2009

2018

This thesis takes a diagram of Walter Benjamin’s Urbekanntschaften (‘primal acquaintances’) as its starting point to explore questions of friendship and generation in relation to history, as manifested through Benjamin’s work and biography. The diagram, drawn hastily in the corner of a notebook in 1932, includes 48 names connected by lines. I first transpose this diagram into a number of counter-forms to interrogate its potential significance: into the arborescent form of an ontogenetic/phylogenetic tree, a diagram of chemical bonds, a city map and an astral chart. Each chapter then draws out a number of spatio-temporal constellations detectable on the diagram: from Benjamin’s exile in Switzerland from 1917 to his time in Naples/Capri in 1923–24 and, lastly, to his time in Paris around 1927. With each moment clusters of names and shared generational concerns emerge. With 1933 and the fracturing of the generation by political and social crisis, the diagram is surpassed by another document: an address book, used by Benjamin from 1933 until his death in 1940. The address book is a record of scattering: the dispersal of people, relationships, things in exile, as testament to repeated erasures. In order to ground the thesis in an account of experience, I contextualise each moment on the stage of Benjamin’s generational development. This is both collective (historical, phylogenetic) but also individual (historical, ontogenetic), from an account of adolescence to maturation into the 1920s. 1933 brings an account of degeneration and the thesis falls back into childhood in the conclusion: with an account of projected salvation. The purpose of this thesis is to reconsider the work of Walter Benjamin within the context of his life, through his associations and within the currents of larger historical conjunctures; to examine questions of friendship and its relation to history and politics; to investigate the parallels of friendship and generation from the work of Benjamin alongside his contemporaries; to understand friendship’s relation to freedom and the redemption not just of life but the concept of friendship itself.

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.