62825533

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156920611X573842

Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 129–136 brill.nl/hima

Review-Articles

Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, Erdmut Wizisla, Translated by Esther Leslie, London: Verso, 2007

Walter Benjamin, Esther Leslie, London: Reaktion Books, 2007

Benjamin Handbuch. Leben-Werk-Wirkung, Burkhardt Lindner (ed.), Stuttgart: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2006

AbstractWe are used to classifying different thinkers according to their general orientation: progressive or conservative, revolutionary or nostalgic of the past, materialist or idealist. Walter Benjamin does not fit into these categories. He is a revolutionary critic of the ideologies of progress, a materialist theologian, and his nostalgia for the past is at the service of his Marxist dreams for the future. It is therefore not surprising that so many different and conflicting readings of his work have developed since his death, some trying to bring him back into the usual frames of thinking, others trying to recruit him for the newest philosophical fads, and many simply damning him as ridden with contradictions and therefore an intellectual failure. But there are also some happy exceptions: those who try to take into account the irreducible singularity of his intellectual and political endeavours. These three books, quite different in object and method – a collection of documents from his archives, a biography, and a ‘Benjamin Handbook’ – belong to these exceptions.

KeywordsMarxism, messianism, materialism, theology, progress, utopia

Images of Benjamin

We are used to classifying different thinkers according to their general orientation: progressive or conservative, revolutionary or nostalgic for the past, materialist or idealist. Walter Benjamin does not fit into these categories. He is a revolutionary critic of the ideologies of progress, a materialist theologian, and his nostalgia for the past is at the service of his Marxist dreams for the future. It is therefore not surprising that so many different and conflicting readings of his work have developed since his death, some trying to restore him within the usual frames of thinking, others trying to recruit him for the newest philosophical fads, and many simply damning him as ridden with contradictions and therefore an intellectual failure. But there are also some happy exceptions: those who try to take into account the irreducible singularity of his intellectual and political endeavours.

There are many astonishing prophetic statements to be found in Benjamin’s works. We are going to discuss some of them. But he could also err in his predictions, for instance on

130 Review-Articles / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 129–136

the future of his own writings. In April 1934, Benjamin wrote to Karl Thieme – a now largely forgotten theologian – thanking him for mentioning his work in an article; he added the following sad comment: ‘For someone whose writings are as dispersed as mine, and for whom the conditions of the day no longer allow the illusion that they will be gathered together again one day, it is a genuine acknowledgment to hear of a reader here and there, who has been able to make himself at home in my scraps of writing, in some way or another’.1 Well, some seventy years later, not only have all his writings been carefully and patiently gathered together and published in their original language, but most of them have been also translated into French, English, Italian, Spanish and Japanese (amongst other languages). Not to mention the enormous – and growing – mountain of secondary literature, interpretations and commentaries.

How to explain the interest, nay, the fascination of so many people with his life and works? It has certainly to do with the singularity of his writing, the beauty and intensity of his enigmatic style, the tragic end of his road; but it may also be that his ferocious critique of the illusions of ‘progress’ can be better understood in our day. In any case, the obsession of the public with Walter Benjamin is so great that specialists have now collected and published not only his articles and manuscripts, but literally all the scraps of paper in his archives. I am referring, of course, to the book Walter Benjamin’s Archive. A brief survey of its chapters may give an idea of how deep this archaeological research on the ruined remains of Benjamin’s citadel has gone (the titles are quotations from Benjamin): 1) ‘Tree of consciousness’: his activity as an archivist of his own writings. 2) ‘Scrappy Paperwork’: all sorts of dispersed scraps, bits and pieces of paper with some written inscription. 3) ‘From Small to Smallest Details’: samples of his micrographic writing. 4) ‘Physiognomy of the Thing World’: his collection of photos of old Russian toys. 5) ‘Opinions et Pensées’: words and expressions of his son Stephan as a child. 6) ‘Daintiest Quarters’: his note- and address-books. 7) ‘Travel Scenes’: his postcard collection with scenes from Tuscany and the Balearics. 8) ‘A Bow Being Bent’: his procedures for the organisation of knowledge. 9) ‘Constellations’: graphic forms for the presentation of ideas. 10) ‘Rag Picking’: the Arcades Project as ‘rubbish-collection’. 11) ‘Past Turned Space’: Germaine Krull’s photographs of the Parisian arcades. 12) ‘Hard Nuts to Crack’: word-games and brainteasers. 13) ‘Sibyls’: eight reproductions of Sibyls from the cathedral of Siena (with hardly any clue as to their meaning for the collector).

Are these items interesting? Certainly! Do they reveal something about Benjamin’s character? Probably. Do they give us significant elements to understand his writings? I doubt it . . . It is very amusing to see the facsimile-reproduction of a sheet with an advertisement for San Pellegrino mineral-water, containing one of Benjamin’s most subtle definitions of aura. And it is even more ironic to find out that his famous definition of revolution – humanity snatching the emergency-brake in the train of world-history – is written on the reverse of calculations on the price of a lunch: Mitagessen: 0,50, 1,80, 1,70. But how much do these amusing discoveries help us to understand his concepts of aura and revolution?

It is true that Germaine Krull’s photographs permit us to see how the arcades looked during the years when Benjamin visited them; and the images of the Russian toys are part-and-parcel of his essay on the topic. But what should one make of the postcards from Ibiza,

1. Quoted in Leslie 2007, p. 146.

Review-Articles / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 129–136 131

or the Sybils from Siena? The lullaby-drawing on the effects of hashish – ‘Sleep, my little Sheep Sleep’ – is very intriguing, it may perhaps be an illuminating complement to his writings under the same drug; the same does not necessarily hold for other graphic forms collected here. A complete list of all addresses in Benjamin’s Parisian notebook would be a significant research-item, but the facsimile of one page with a few addresses under the letter ‘S’ is just a curiosity (I have been told that there exists a facsimile of the address-book, for the pleasure of Benjamin fetishists). And the same applies to much of the interesting items reproduced in this book . . .

It should be said, however, that at least in one of the sections there is a direct relation between the presentation of Benjamin’s procedures, his ways of collecting, classifying and ordering materials, and the content: the chapter on the ‘rag-picker’ and the Arcades Project. What it describes and documents is precisely the meaning of the project: the author as rag-picker wishes to collect the refuse of history, the materialist historian is the one that picks up everything that has been ‘crushed underfoot’, discarded, torn into pieces. The revolutionary meaning of the Arcades Project is intimately linked with the method Benjamin proposes: the collection and appropriation of rags.

Much of the interest in Benjamin is certainly nourished by his tragic life-story, the life of a ‘man in dark times’ (Hannah Arendt) who spent his last years in a precarious exile, and committed suicide in September 1940 to escape from the Gestapo. Thus the multiplication of biographies, of which Esther Leslie’s can be counted amongst the best. Unlike previous works, she was able to use the archive-material made available during the last few years – including the volume reviewed above, which she translated into English, and used extensively in her own research. In fact, the most important new source is Benjamin’s correspondence, finally published in an unabridged, complete and uncensored version by Suhrkamp Verlag. Her book is not, strictly speaking, an intellectual biography: Benjamin’s works are mentioned, of course, but not systematically discussed, with a few exceptions. Since she had already published a – remarkable – book on his thought, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (2000), the aim, this time, was rather to deal with his life and with the multiple facts of his personality: not only his political and cultural interests, but also his erotic and financial troubles, and his idiosyncratic obsessions with graphology, children’s books, etc. The book is very readable, in spite of some not-very-helpful chapter-titles – except for the dates, they don’t tell us much about his life: ‘Making a Mark, 1917–24’, ‘Books after Books, 1925–9’, ‘Man of Letters, 1930–2’, ‘Noms de Plume, 1933–7’, ‘Writer’s Block, 1938–40’ . . .

The one piece of Benjamin’s writing that Leslie does analyse in detail is the essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, perhaps his best-known and most discussed writing. She analyses carefully the text itself, with all its ambiguities, as well as various interpretations, emphasising its surprising conclusion: the essay seems to celebrate modern technology – mainly cinema – but ‘the epilogue . . . reversed the optimistic current – all the potential credited to art in the age of technology evaporated before the techo-mysticism and class violence of the National Socialists. In the essay’s coda Benjamin determined that fascists . . . too participated in technological modernity’ (p. 164).

Unlike other biographers – for example, Werner Fuld and Rainer Rochlitz – Leslie is interested in and sympathetic to Benjamin’s political views. She points to the importance of his meeting with the young Latvian Bolshevik Asja Lacis in 1924, which gave him, according to a letter to Scholem, ‘intensive insight into the actuality of a radical communism’;


she also refers to the astonishing insights of his Moscow diaries, written during his visit in December 1926 – ‘the restoration’ had begun in the USSR and ‘militant communism’ was being suspended – or of his letters to Fritz Lieb in 1937, criticising the policies of the French Popular Front: ‘the leadership has managed within two years to rob their workers of the elementary basis of their instinctive activity: that infallible sense of when and under which circumstances a legal action must turn into an illegal, an illegal into a violent one’.

However, her discussion of Benjamin’s amazing essay on surrealism (1929) is not quite satisfactory; she emphasises Benjamin’s criticism of the surrealists, while the main aspect of the article is the importance of surrealism from a communist viewpoint, the viewpoint of revolutionary pessimism. This is clearly stated in a phrase from Benjamin’s article which she quotes, but does not discuss:

Surrealism has come ever closer to the communist answer. And that means pessimism all along the line. Absolutely. Mistrust in the fate of literature, mistrust in the fate of freedom, mistrust in the fate of humanity, but three times mistrust in all reconciliation: between classes, between nations, between individuals. And unlimited trust only in I.G. Farben and the peaceful perfection of the Luftwaffe.2

Benjamin borrowed the concept of communist pessimism – obviously against the grain of official Soviet, wildly-optimistic, discourse – from Pierre Naville’s book La Révolution et les intellectuels (1928), which he describes as an ‘excellent’ work. Former editor of the journal La Révolution surréaliste, and militant of the French Communist Party, Naville had just joined, in those years, the Trotskyist Left Opposition, of which he would become one of the main leaders. This ‘revolutionary pessimism’ enabled Benjamin to foresee – intuitively, but with an astonishing acuity – the catastrophes awaiting Europe, perfectly summarised in the ironic phrase on ‘unlimited trust’. Obviously, even he, the most pessimistic of all, could not predict the destructions that the Luftwaffe was to wreak on the cities and civilian population of Europe; nor that I.G. Farben would, barely a dozen years later, distinguish itself by employing forced labour from the concentration-camps by the tens of thousands. However, uniquely among Marxist thinkers and leaders of those years, Benjamin had a premonition of the monstrous disasters to which a crisis-ridden bourgeois civilisation could give birth.

This essay, as well as the contemporary book, One Way Street (1928) document a decisive aspect of Benjamin’s thought: he is one of the few Marxists, in those years, to attempt a radical break with the ideology of inevitable and linear progress. As he would later write in the Arcades Project, his aim is to emancipate historical materialism from the bourgeois idea of progress and of all ‘bourgeois habits of thought’.

Leslie discusses Benjamin’s increasing distance from the Soviet (Stalinist) brand of Communism during the thirties, a process which culminates after the German-Soviet pact of 1939, in his ‘Theses On the Concept of History’; written when it was ‘midnight in the century’ (the title of a novel by Victor Serge), they constitute, as Leslie aptly summarises, ‘Benjamin’s reckoning with Social Democracy, Stalinism and bourgeois thought, none of which were able to prevent the disaster of fascism’. In her conclusion, after surveying some

2. Benjamin 1978, p. 191.


of the various interpretations of his life and work, she argues, with keen insight, that ‘his writings envision a world not condemned to repeat its mistakes . . . a world in which the political subject still has recourse to revolutionary praxis, unlike the disempowering theory of a Habermas’ (p. 232).

Among the innumerable attempts to propose a synthetic view of Benjamin’s life and works, one of the most ambitious and interesting is the recent Benjamin Handbuch, an impressive collection of contributions by sixty of the best German-speaking specialists. In his preface, Burkhardt Lindner, the organiser of the collection – with the help of two colleagues, Thomas Küpper and Timo Skrandies – justifies the Handbook by the existence, in recent years, of a critical edition of all of Benjamin’s existing writings, as well as of his correspondence – the Gesammelte Schriften published by Suhrkamp Verlag in Frankfurt – and by the need for a presentation that tries to cover the diversity of his philosophical, political and literary interests. Lindner insists that the book does not propose a specific image of Benjamin: the different contributions are not only diverse, but sometimes contradictory; what they have in common is simply a willingness to take seriously his stature as a philosopher, and not simply a literary essayist; this is probably a polemical barb against Hannah Arendt, who considered Benjamin not as a philosopher, but as a homme de lettres.

In its presentation of Benjamin’s writings, the Handbuch does not follow the criteria of the Gesammelte Schriften, which separated, in distinct volumes, the pieces that appeared during his lifetime from those which remained unpublished: a distinction, comments Lindner, that was not at all taken into account by the reception of his œuvre. While one can easily agree with him on this issue, his rejection of a chronological order seems to me much more questionable. The reason offered is that such an order would wrongly give the impression of a ‘progress’ in his thinking. Again, one can agree that the concept of ‘progress’ is inadequate; there exists nevertheless in the chronological sequence of his writings a movement, sometimes in opposed directions – a passage from theology to materialism, a return to theology without abandoning materialism – sometimes in the form of intellectual experiments taken to their ultimate conclusion, and then abandoned; in other words, a process which is not disconnected from historical events, but which is lost from sight if one renounces chronology.

After the first section, ‘Life, Work, Influence’, which surveys the present state of the publication of Benjamin’s collected works, and proposes a very interesting account of their reception (by Küpper and Skrandes), and following a section entitled ‘Intellectual Friendships’, dealing with his links with Gershom Scholem, Bertolt Brecht and the Frankfurt School, most of the book discusses, under the general title ‘Analysis’, the writings themselves, classed by themes, in four great parts: ‘Messianism, Aesthetics, Politics’, ‘Literary critique, avant-garde, media, journalism’, ‘Literary analysis and author-images’, ‘Philosophy of language and autobiographical writings’. It seems to me that these thematic regroupings are quite arbitrary and heterogeneous; not to mention the fact that many of Benjamin’s writings concern several topics and cannot be reduced to a single one. But these artificial distinctions are the price to be paid for renouncing the chronological option.

In spite of this reservation, one must acknowledge the great quality of the whole, and of the majority of the individual contributions. Since it would be impossible to discuss all sixty papers, I will pick up on only a few, using as a guiding thread the issue – of central importance in Benjamin’s thought – of the relation between theology and politics. No


other issue has provoked so many polemics in the reception of his work, with conflicting views trying to ‘purge’ Benjamin’s philosophy of some irritating element: for some, religion, for others, materialism.

One can start with his ‘intellectual friendship’ with Gershom Scholem, as remarkably studied by Stéphane Mosès. Since their first conversations in Switzerland during the First World-War, which turned around the concepts of revelation, redemption and justice, until their exchanges during their final meeting in Paris (February 1938), this issue never ceased to occupy them. Scholem could never accept his friend’s turn toward communism, which he considered, in a letter from 1931, as a ‘regrettable confusion between religion and politics’. During their last conversations in Paris, Benjamin defended himself arguing – according to Scholem’s memories – that his method consisted in ‘transferring metaphysical and theological forms of thought into the Marxist perspective’, thus assuring them a powerful vitality in a modern context.

Most of Benjamin’s writings on religion and politics are discussed in the chapter ‘Messianism, Aesthetics and Politics’, where, luckily, they are presented in chronological order. Under the title ‘Writings on Youth’, Thomas Regehly examines some works from the years 1912–15, beginning with the ‘Dialogue on the Religiosity of the Present’ (1912) – in my view, a striking example of Benjamin’s revolutionary-romantic critique of modern civilisation. Unfortunately, his analysis of the documents contains some obvious mistakes; according to Regehly, for Benjamin ‘social religion – “socialism as religion” – is not an alternative, because it has “lost its metaphysical seriousness”’. Now, what Benjamin says is quite different: modern social action, that suppressed the gods and transformed everything into an affair of civilisation, ‘such as electric light’, has ‘lost its metaphysical seriousness’; ‘socialism as religion’ presents itself precisely as an alternative to this ‘civilised’ and disenchanted modern social action, which has replaced the ‘heroic-revolutionary efforts’ of the past by the pitiful ‘crab-like march’ of evolution and progress. Regehly misses the point of this essay, which documents Benjamin’s precocious support for socialist ideas, interpreted within a religious and revolutionary perspective, critical of civilisation and progress.

In his discussion of the following document, ‘On the Life of Students’ (1914) Regehly correctly mentions Benjamin’s critique of the ideology of progress in the name of utopian images. But he fails to quote the next passage, were Benjamin explains, with the help of two examples, what he understands by utopische Bilder: ‘the messianic kingdom and the French-revolutionary idea’. This detail is essential, because it permits us to see, already in 1914, the appearance of the constellation between messianism and revolution – as an alternative to historicist evolutionism – that will become a central tenet in his reflections on history.

Regehly also mentions, en passant, as a proof of Benjamin’s rejection of socialism his critique of Marx in the fragment from 1921, ‘Capitalism as Religion’. Now, as Uwe Steiner shows in his very suggestive analysis of this difficult but fascinating text, Benjamin’s critique of Marx – that he will abandon only after 1924 – is inspired by the libertarian – and religious – socialism of the German-Jewish anarchist Gustav Landauer. The fragment, which presents capitalism as a merciless religion leading humanity to ‘the house of despair’, is directly inspired by Max Weber, but goes well beyond the ‘value-neutral’ arguments of the sociologist, in the direction of a radical anticapitalism.

At the same time (1921) Benjamin wrote another enigmatic piece, the ‘Theological-Political Fragment’ – a title given it by Adorno. Werner Hamacher’s interpretation


proposed in the Handbook seems questionable to me. In a first moment, he shows, quite accurately, that Benjamin’s effort to separate messianism from history, by insisting that the kingdom of God ‘is not the telos of historical dynamics’, is a polemical answer to Hermann Cohen’s neo-Kantian theories. But I cannot follow Hamacher when he pretends that the fragment should be called ‘Political-Atheological’, because, for Benjamin, ‘the theological concepts are useless for political praxis’: this corresponds neither to the letter nor the spirit of the fragment. If theological concepts are ‘useless’, why does Benjamin conclude his fragment by referring to profane action as favourable to the coming of the messianic era? After a long detour through Plato, Aristotle and Kant, which is not obviously of much help in understanding this document, Hamacher attributes to Benjamin – without any textual basis – the idea of an eternal distancing of the messianic times.

After the essay ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921), whose political-theological conclusion – the revolutionary general strike as an expression of a ‘divine violence’ – is accurately described by Axel Honneth, and the doctoral thesis – refused by the University of Frankfurt – on the German-baroque Trauerspiel, discussed by Bettine Menke, theology seems to disappear from Benjamin’s writings. It will return, several years later, in some fragments of the Arcades Project, set to paper at the end of the 1930s. In his remarkable study of this strange and massive unfinished manuscript, Irving Wohlfarth shows how Benjamin tries, against his best – albeit opposed – friends, Scholem and Brecht, to hold together theology and historical materialism; a comment by Adorno is the best definition of Benjamin’s attempt: ‘to mobilise, in an anonymous way, the force of the theological experience for the profane’.

It is above all in Benjamin’s last writing, his testament in a certain sense, the ‘Theses On the Concept of History’ (1940), that theology, and its relationship to politics, becomes again a central issue. In a brilliant exegesis of this complex piece, which was to exercise a considerable posthumous influence, Jeanne-Marie Gagnebin proposes the following hypothesis: theology is here the model of another conception of time, permitting us to simultaneously think a critical historiography and a revolutionary practice. What interests Benjamin is not ‘religion’ as such, but the explosive force of the theological – messianism and the remembrance of past victims – against historicist conformism. Benjamin defined, in the Arcades Project (specifically the section on the theory of progress) the relation of his thought to theology as similar to that of the blotter to ink: it is soaked with it, but nothing of what has been written remains. Thus, the theological dwarf hidden inside the puppet called ‘historical materialism’ described in ‘Theses on the Concept of History’: theology must remain invisible.

Jeanne-Marie Gagnebin’s interpretation is quite persuasive; but one has to take into account the following paradox: the ink does not disappear, its traces are visible in the blotter, as well as in the paper where the ink-pen had written something. Similarly, theology – i.e. messianism – is not hidden in the ‘Theses’ from 1940, but is visible, from one end of the text to the other.

None of Benjamin’s multiple heterodox and idiosyncratic ideas have provoked as much incomprehension and perplexity as this attempt to combine Marxism and theology. And yet, a few decades later, what in 1940 had been merely an intuition was to become a major historical phenomenon, supported by hundreds of thousands: Latin-American liberation-theology, condemned by the Holy Office (Cardinal Ratzinger!) of the Catholic Church for its ‘indiscriminate’ use of Marxism . . . Of course, the Latin-American theology is


Christian and not Jewish, and its specific concepts are different from those of Benjamin’s document – even if a critical distance with respect to the ideologies of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ is also present in the writings of Gustavo Gutierrez or Leonardo Boff; moreover, the historical context of Latin America since the 1970s is very different from Europe in 1940. However, the association of theology and Marxism Benjamin dreamt of has turned out, in the light of historical experience, to be not merely possible and fruitful, but a powerful stimulant for social struggles.

Reviewed by Michael LöwyCNRS, [email protected]

References

Benjamin, Walter 1978 [1929], ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligensia’, in Reflections, translated by Edmund Jephcott, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Leslie, Esther 2000, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism, London: Pluto Press.—— 2007, Walter Benjamin, London: Reaktion Books.

Copyright of Historical Materialism is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be

copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written

permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

Documents

62825533