ABSTRACT
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German philosopher, literary/cultural critic and essayist whose reputation has only grown since his early death by suicide. The disparate influences on his thinking include Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, German Romanticism, Jewish mysticism, Marxism and surrealism. Benjamin’s importance as critic, philosopher of art and pioneering media theorist is now universally recognized. Such recognition was belated however. Only after T. W. Adorno’s 1955 publication of selections from his work did Benjamin become known to a wider public (see Benjamin 1955). Following decades of commentary, in several languages, supplemented by a scholarly Gesammelte Schriften (1972) – from which were excerpted four volumes of Selected Writings (1996-2003) – his place in the intellectual firmament of our time is assured. Yet his thought is notorious for its obscurity, stemming from a certain density of expression, the fragmentary nature of even the published works and the extreme, often inconsistent positions he was drawn to in what he once called, in a 1934 letter to Adorno’s wife Gretel, “the economy of my existence” (Benjamin 2008b: 105). More than with most thinkers, his life and works are inseparable; his critical essays respond to times of crisis, and must be read in that light. A more immediate problem of interpretation, however, lies in gauging how far
Benjamin should be considered an aesthetic theorist at all. At various times he took art to be subsidiary to theological, philosophical, historical and political concerns, while by the 1930s he had come to think art at an end, its “aura” of authentic value now atrophied or just ideological illusion. The ambiguity of his utterances may be seen in their diverse reception. He was brought to the attention of the anglophone world by the 1968 publication of Illuminations, a volume of essays edited by Hannah Arendt, who knew Benjamin in Paris (it was supplemented in 1978 by a second volume, Reflections; Benjamin 1978). Implicitly – and openly in her introduction – Arendt labeled Benjamin a literary critic and “poetic thinker,” so taking issue with perspectives that would view him as primarily a philosopher (Adorno), a metaphysician of messianic bent (Scholem) or a political theorist whose engagement with historical materialism was (in Terry Eagleton’s words) more than “a contingent peccadillo or tolerable eccentricity” (Eagleton 1981: xii). Recent work by Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben has even given a postmodern twist to his thoughts on violence and on “sovereignty,” although Benjamin remains the quintessential advocate of “the modern.”
