Western Philosophers
20th-century philosophy |
 |
|
Name
|
|
|
Birth
|
July 15, 1892,
 Berlin, Germany
|
|
Death
|
September 27, 1940,
 Port
Bou, Catalonia
|
|
School/tradition
|
Western Marxism, Frankfurt School
|
|
Main interests
|
Literary theory, Aesthetics, Technology, Epistemology, Philosophy of language, Philosophy of history
|
|
Influences
|
Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Theodor Adorno, Gershom Scholem
|
|
Influenced
|
Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno,
Giorgio Agamben, Michael Taussig
|
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (July 15, 1892 –
September 27, 1940) was a German Marxist literary critic,
essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School
of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and Jewish mysticism as presented by Gershom Scholem.
As a sociological and cultural critic,
Benjamin combined ideas of historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism in a body of work which was an entirely novel contribution to western philosophy, Marxism, and aesthetic theory. As a literary
scholar, he translated Charles Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens and Marcel Proust's famous novel,
In Search of Lost Time. His work is widely cited in academic and literary
studies, in particular his essays The Task of the Translator and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Life
Walter Benjamin was born in Berlin on July 15, 1892 into a wealthy Jewish family. His father was a banker in Paris and later went to Berlin and became antique trader. He was the
eldest of three children of Emil Benjamin and Pauline Schönflies Benjamin: Walter (1892-1940), Georg (1895-1943) and Dora
(1901-1946). In 1902 Walter was enrolled at Kaiser Friedrich Schule, in Berlin
Charlottenburg, concluding his secondary studies only ten years later. The boy had a fragile physical condition and so, in
1905 he was sent by his parents to a country boarding school in Thuringia, where he spent two
years. Young Benjamin's health is probably one strong reason for his close relation with books, however, in 1907 he returned to
Berlin and to the Kaiser Friedrich Gymnasium.
In 1912 Benjamin enrolled at Albert Ludwigs University in
Freiburg, but at the end of the summer semester returned again to Berlin and enrolled at
Friedrich Wilhelm University to continue his studies of philosophy.
Benjamin became president of the Freie Studentenschaft, and began to write essays arguing for the need of educational and
general cultural change [1]. Failing the re-election in
that student's association, Benjamin again took up studies in Freiburg, attending the lectures of Heinrich Rickert. After visits to Paris and Italy he returned to Berlin.
In 1914 started World War I and Benjamin began translating the french poet
Charles Baudelaire. The following year he moved to Munich, continuing his studies at Ludwig Maximilians
University, where he met Rainer Maria Rilke and Gershom Scholem. His lifetime friendship with Scholem was due not only to the very fact they both were
Jewish but, above all, to their shared interest in art. The same year Benjamin wrote a paper on the german poet Friedrich Hölderlin.
In 1917 he married Dora Sophie Pollack (1890-1964) and moved to the University of
Bern (where he first met Ernst Bloch), and the following year they had a son, Stefan
Rafael (1918-1972). In 1919 Benjamin earned his Ph.D. cum laude with the essay The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism. They returned to Berlin, to
live with Benjamin's parents, because of financial problems. Walter Benjamin and Dora Kellner separated in 1921, and the next
year he moved to the University of Heidelberg where he tried an
academic career.
The Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt School) was founded in 1923. Benjamin met Theodor
Adorno and became a friend of Georg Lukács (whose The Theory of the Novel,
published in 1920, strongly influenced him). The economic crisis in Germany caused his father to
have serious difficulties in continuing the financial support he gave to Benjamin. At the end of 1923 his best friend, Gershom
Scholem, emigrated to Palestine (which had been occupied by the British Army during World War I). The following years Scholem tried to persuade Benjamin to join him.
In 1924 his paper "Goethe's Elective
Affinities" was published by Hugo von Hoffmansthal in the magazine Neue
Deutsche Beiträge. Together with Ernst Bloch, Benjamin spent several months in the Italian island of Capri, writing his habilitation, on The Origin of German Tragic
Drama. There he first met Asja Lacis (1891-1979), a Bolshevik Latvian actress living in Moscow. She would remain an important and lasting
intellectual and erotic influence on him.
In 1925 The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels) was rejected by the
Frankfurt University for good, effectively
closing the door to an academic career for the 33 year old scholar. Together with Franz Hessel (1880-1941), he translated the
first volumes of the novel In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust. The next year Benjamin began writing for the german newspapers Frankurter Zeitung
and Die Literarische Welt, so he could afford living several months in Paris. His father
died in 1926 and, in December, Benjamin travelled to Moscow to meet Asja Lacis, but found her
sick in a sanatorium [2].
In 1927 Benjamin started his monumental and unfinished The Arcades Project,
working on it until his death. The same year he met Gershom Scholem a last time in Berlin, and considered moving to Palestine. In
1928 Benjamin published One-Way Street and The Origin of German Tragic Drama. In 1929, he was introduced to
Bertold Brecht by Asja Lacis, then Brecht's assistant, in Berlin.
Benjamin divorced only in 1930. Avoiding the repressive activities of the Nazi Party and
the SA, in 1932 he spent several months on the Spanish island of Ibiza. Then, moved to Nice, where he planned to commit suicide. With the
Reichstag fire, in 1933, Adolf Hitler became the
Führer and his dictatorship started the persecution of the Jews. Benjamin sought shelter in Svendborg, at Bertold Brecht's, and Sanremo, where his ex-wife lived, before
moving to Paris.
His financial situation got worse. Benjamin collaborated with Max Horkheimer and
received some funds from the Institute for Social Research, which had
relocated to New York. He met other German intellectual and artist refugees in Paris and became
friend of Hannah Arendt, Hermann Hesse and
Kurt Weil. In 1936 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction was
first published in French by Max Horkheimer, in the Institute for Social Research (Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung).
In 1937 Benjamin worked on his book The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, met Georges Bataille, and joined the College of Sociology. In
1938 he paid a last visit to Bertold Brecht in Denmark. Hitler removed the German citizenship
from Jews and Benjamin was incarcerated for three months in a camp near Nevers.
In January 1940 Benjamin returned to Paris and wrote his Theses on the Philosophy of History. In June, the
Wehrmacht broke the French defense. Benjamin flew to Lourdes with his sister, one day before the Germans entered Paris. In August, he obtained a visa to the
United States, wich has been negotiated by Max Horkheimer. Attempting to elude the
Gestapo, Benjamin failed to reach Portugal (officially
a neutral country) through Spain, on his way to the United States. Apparently, he took his own
life on September 27, 1940 at Portbou, a border town in the Pyrenees, Catalonia, swallowing an overdose of morphine compound, after the group of Jewish refugees he joined was intercepted by the Spanish Police [3]. However, many details of his last days remain unclear and
there is a fair amount of speculation, including the one that he was murdered by Stalinist agents (read more about his
Death, below).
Works
Among Benjamin's most important works were the following:
- Zur Kritik der Gewalt (Critique of Violence / 1921).
- Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften (Goethe's Elective Affinities / 1922).
- Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of German Tragic Drama [Mourning Play] / 1928).
- Einbahnstraße (One Way Street / 1928).
- Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter Seiner Technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction /
1936).
- Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin Childhood around 1900 / 1950, published posthumously).
- Über den Begriff der Geschichte (On the Concept of History / Theses on the Philosophy of History) / 1939, published
posthumously).
- Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire (The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire / 1938).
Benjamin corresponded extensively with Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht and occasionally received funding from the Frankfurt
School under Adorno's and Horkheimer's direction, even after this had moved to New York City. The competing influences of
Brecht's Marxism (and secondarily Adorno's critical theory) and the Jewish mysticism of
his friend Gerschom Scholem were central to Benjamin's work, though he never completely resolved their differences. On the other
hand, some later critics, such as Paul de Man, have argued that Benjamin's writings
dynamically flow between these different traditions in order to create a kind of internal critique out of their juxtaposition.
"On the Concept of History" (often referred to as the "Theses on the Philosophy of History"), among Benjamin's last works, is,
according to some readers ‹The template Who? is being considered for
deletion.› [Who?], the closest approach to such a synthesis.
The following is Benjamin's ninth thesis from the essay "Theses on the Philosophy of History":
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly
contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His
face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage
and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a
storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them.
The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows
skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
The Origin of German Tragic Drama
Benjamin's most lengthy completed work is his Habilitation dissertation, the
Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (translated as The Origin of German Tragic Drama by John Osborne). In this
study, at once forbiddingly theoretical and painstakingly empirical, Benjamin analyses Reformation-era German politics and
culture through the Trauerspiel genre of the 16th-17th century.
The project begins with a lengthy "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" in which Benjamin sets out the philosophical stakes of his
work: the combination and elaboration of parts of the Platonic theory of ideas, the Hegelian historical sublation, and the
Leibnizian monad. Encapsulating the one within the other, Benjamin gives the Platonic form a historical instantiation, but only
in the sense that it is monadic. Within aesthetic objects of study, there is contained the monad of its historical development,
and when this monad is placed within a constellation of other objects, it reveals to the scholar the historical development of
the idea. Thus, in the Trauerspiel itself, what appears to be an ahistorical accumulation of fragments is instead already
in some sense historical.
Within the main text itself, there are two main divisions: first, a distinction between tragedy and Trauerspiel, where
Benjamin clears away the interpretations that precede his work, and second, a lengthy discussion of the relation of allegory to
symbolism and the way in which allegory might open onto his modified platonic notion of the idea. In the first section, Benjamin
notes that tragedy and Trauerspiel differ in their conception of time: the tragedy is eschatological insofar as its plot
leads to a defined end-point, where characters and stories reach a fatalistic resolution; whereas the Trauerspiel takes
place only in space, time stretches out forever towards the promised but undisclosed Last Judgment, so characters are therefore
paralysed from all action and can only wait—thus there is no resolution and no sense of time passing. In short, in
Trauerspiel, time is spatialized. Part of what makes Trauerspielen so inscrutable is that their relationship to
history is only ever allegorical, in the sense that the play presents fragments and broken shards of history without
narrativizing them, as we are accustomed to seeing in most plays. These fragments, when placed on the stage, rather than
maintaining a denotative relationship to history, where history is told, the spatial constellation of these fragments reveals a
true idea of history. Benjamin's book constantly performs this constellating of monads, presaging in dependent clauses what will
be said more fully later, itself constantly reaching back to earlier sections of the book. Benjamin's project, then, is most
famously summed up very early in the book, writing, "the baroque knows no eschatology and for that very reason it has no
mechanism by which it gathers all earthly things in together and exalts them before consigning them to their end" (p. 66).
In a changing political climate, Benjamin hoped that this book would relate to the German belief in political and historical
progress by showing the absolute futility of raw historicism, just as in the Trauerspiel the resuccitation of historical
objects and facts is absolutely impossible. Instead, the massive complexity and profound obscurity of the book meant that it fell
on largely deaf ears. When submitted as a Habilitation thesis (a higher degree in the German academic system that, after a PhD,
gives legal authority to teach in a university), Professor Schultz of Frankfurt University found it inappropriate for his own
department of "Germanistik" (the department of German Language and Literature), and passed it off to the department of aesthetics
(philosophy of art). The readers in that department called it an "incomprehensible morass" and the university recommended that
Benjamin withdraw the thesis in order to avoid the embarrassment of a public rejection. After some consideration, Benjamin did
so.
The Arcades Project
-
Benjamin's final, unfinished work, known as the Passagenwerk or Arcades
Project, was to be an enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, especially concerned with the roofed outdoor "arcades" which created the city's distinctive
street life and culture of flânerie. It has been posthumously edited and published in its
unfinished form.
Benjamin's style
Susan Sontag once remarked that, in Benjamin's texts, sentences do not seem to generate
in the ordinary way; they do not lead gently into one another, and do not create an obvious line of reasoning. Instead, it is as
if each sentence "had to say everything, before the inward gaze of total concentration dissolved the subject before his eyes", a
style of writing and thinking Sontag calls "freeze-frame baroque." Sontag writes that "his major essays seem to end just in time,
before they self-destruct."[4] Though Sontag didn't have a
full overview of the Arcades Project when she wrote this, her comments apply to that work as well. The difficulty of
Benjamin's style can be understood as an essential part of his philosophical project. Fascinated by notions of reference and
constellation, Benjamin's goal in much of his later work was less to articulate a coherent position than to use varied intertexts
to reveal aspects of the past that cannot and should not be understood within larger, monolithic constructs of historical
understanding (the so-called "grand narrative").
Through his writings Benjamin identifies himself as a modernist for whom the philosophical merges with the literary:
logic-based philosophical reasoning cannot account for all experience, and especially not for self-representation through
artistic mediums.
His concerns regarding style are exemplified in his essay The Task of the Translator, in which he argues that any
literary translation, by definition, produces deformations and misunderstandings of the original text. In the deformed text,
otherwise hidden aspects of the original are elucidated, while formerly obvious aspects become unreadable. Benjamin considers
this mortification of the text productive; when placed in a specific constellation of works and ideas, newly revealed affinities
between historical objects appear and are productive of philosophical truth.
Death
Walter Benjamin's grave in Portbou
Benjamin probably committed suicide in Portbou at the
Spanish-French border, attempting to escape from the
Nazis. The circumstances of his death are unclear. He appeared to be ill when he arrived in
Portbou, having crossed a wild part of the Pyrenees in refugee fashion, and the party he was
with were told they would be denied passage across the border, which would have been a step towards freedom (Benjamin's ultimate
goal was the United States). While staying in the Hotel de Francia he took some morphine
pills and he died in the night of 27/28 September 1940. The fact that he was buried in the consecrated section of a Roman Catholic cemetery would indicate that it was not announced as a suicide. The
other persons in his party were allowed passage the next day, and safely reached Lisbon on 30
September. A manuscript copy of Benjamin's "On the Concept of History" was passed to Adorno by Hannah Arendt, who crossed the
French-Spanish border at Portbou a few months later, and was subsequently published by the Institute for Social Research (temporarily relocated in New York) in 1942.
One way of interpreting these facts is that though the entire group of travellers was stopped, Benjamin was in fact the main
target. As an emigrant Jew, a radical writer who had made close friends with Brecht and Adorno, and a fierce critic of
Nazism he would have been well-known to the Gestapo and it is a well documented fact that the
Spanish border police were cooperative with the Germans. Once he was dead, following this interpretation, there would be no point
in holding back the others (who did not know Benjamin). Benjamin certainly was aware that he was risking his life both if he went
south or if he stayed behind in Paris; the latter meant certain death and probably torture at the hands of the Gestapo. It does
not seem that he was using any forged identity papers when attempting to cross into Spain, and this would make it easier for the
border police to identify him. In all probability Benjamin did not know people who were in the more advanced escape business, and
his portliness and distinctive face made it hard for him to disguise himself anyway.
A completed manuscript which Benjamin had carried in his suitcase disappeared after his death and has not been recovered. Some
critics speculate that it was his Arcades Project in a final form; this is very unlikely as the author's plans for the
work had changed in the wake of Adorno's criticisms in 1938, and it seems clear that the work was flowing over its containing
limits in his last years. As the last finished piece of work we have from Benjamin, the Theses on the Philosophy of
History (noted above) is often cited; Adorno claimed this had been written in the spring of 1940, weeks before the Germans
invaded France. While this is not completely certain, it is clearly one of his last works, and the final paragraph, about the
Jewish quest for the Messiah provides a harrowing final point to Benjamin's work, with its
themes of culture, destruction, Jewish heritage and the fight between humanity and nihilism. He brings up the interdiction, in
some varieties of Judaism, to try to determine the year when the Messiah would come into the world, and points out that this did
not make Jews indifferent to the future "for every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter."
An alternative theory of his death considers the possibility that Benjamin was actually murdered by Stalinist agents. He might
have earned his place on Stalin's hitlist by the fact that his last book Theses on the Philosophy of History has been read
as an analysis of the failures of Stalinism. The lost manuscript could well have been an elaboration of his criticism of
Stalinism and its loss not so much an accident as the very cause for the murder.[5]
Legacy
Since the appearance of his Schriften in 1955, 15 years after his death, Benjamin's work has been the subject of
numerous books and essays.
Bibliography
Primary literature
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
- The Arcades Project. ISBN 0-674-00802-2
- Berlin Childhood Around 1900. ISBN 0-674-02222-X
- Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet In The Era Of High Capitalism. ISBN 0-902308-94-7
- The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940. ISBN 0-226-04237-5
- The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. ISBN 0-674-17415-1
- Illuminations. ISBN 0-8052-0241-2
- Moscow Diary. ISBN 0-674-58744-8
- One Way Street and Other Writings. ISBN 0-86091-836-X
- Reflections. ISBN 0-8052-0802-X
- On Hashish. ISBN 0-674-02221-1
- The Origin of German Tragic Drama. ISBN 0-86091-837-8
- Understanding Brecht. ISBN 0-902308-99-8
- Selected Writings in four volumes, Harvard University Press. Volume 1, ISBN 0-674-94585-9. Volume 2, ISBN
0-674-94586-7. Volume 3, ISBN 0-674-00896-0. Volume 4, ISBN 0-674-01076-0.
Secondary literature
- Benjamin, Andrew & Peter Osborne (eds.), Walter Benjamin's Philosophy:
Destruction and Experience (New York & London: Routledge, 1993). ISBN 0415083680 (hardcover); ISBN 0415083699
(paperback)
- Derrida, Jacques, "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority'," in Gil
Anidjar (ed.), Acts of Religion (New York & London: Routledge, 2002). ISBN 0415924014
- Ferris, David S. (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). ISBN
0804725691 (hardcover); ISBN 0804725705 (paperback)
- Jennings, Michael, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism. ISBN 0-8014-2006-7
- Leslie, Esther, Walter Benjamin, Overpowering Conformism (London: Pluto Press, 2001). ISBN 0-7453-1568-2
- Lindner, Burkhardt (ed.), Benjamin-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung (Stuttgart & Weimar: Metzler, 2006); ISBN
3-476-01985-3
- McMurtry, Larry, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond. ISBN 0-684-85496-1
- Missac, Pierre, Walter Benjamin's Passages (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995). ISBN 0262133059 (hardcover); ISBN
026263175X (paperback)
- Schiavoni, Giulio, Walter Benjamin: Il figlio della felicità. Un percorso biografico e concettuale (Turin: Einaudi,
2001). ISBN 88-06-15729-9
- Steinberg, Michael P. (ed.), Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).
ISBN 0-8014-3135-2 (hardcover); ISBN 0-8014-8257-7 (paperback)
- Witte, Bernd, Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography. ISBN 0-8143-2017-1
Notes
External links
- Walter Benjamin Research
Syndicate
- Benjamin:
On the Concept of History
- The Internationale
Walter Benjamin Gesellschaft. In English and German.
- Who Killed Walter
Benjamin?, a documentary film about the circumstances of Benjamin's death
- ShadowTime, an opera on the life of Walter Benjamin, music by Brian Ferneyhough, libretto by Charles Bernstein.
- Trilectic- The Lives of
Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis set to music.
- The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction
- The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Complete Version)
- Head
Rush: How drug experiments illuminated Walter Benjamin's thinking, Michael Berk, nextbook, May 16, 2006
- The
Arcades Project Project or The Rhetoric of Hypertext
- Fragments of the
Passagenwerk: The Arcades Project, Giles Peaker
- Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle In French
- The Dialectics of Allegoresis:
Historical Materialism in Benjamin's Illuminations, John Parker
- Walter Benjamin, "On Hashish"
trans. Scott J. Thompson (1996) [Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate]
- Scott J. Thompson, "From Rausch to
Rebellion: Walter Benjamin's ON HASHISH"[Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate]
- Through the Trapdoor: review of
The Narrow Foothold by Carina Birman describes Benjamin's final days
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
