Abstract
In a letter to his friend Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin once expr essed his wish to be considered the ‘foremost critic of German literature’.1 According to some, he has indeed satisfied this ambition, albeit posthumously. However, there has been much discussion about whether Benjamin should be classified as a philosopher, and not rather as a literary critic or an historian.2 Until this day his work is read rather in the circles of literary, media and cultural studies than in philosophy departments.
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Notes
W. Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, translated by M. R. Jacobson and E. M. Jacobson, edited by G. Scholem and T. W. Adorno (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 359 (hereafter C).
See for this discussion: T. W. Adorno, ‘A Portrait of Walter Benjamin’ in his Prisms, translated by S. and S. Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981); H. Arendt’s introduction to
Benjamin’s Illuminations, translated by H. Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969);
B. Witte, Walter Benjamin: Der Intellektuelle als Kritiker (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1976);
S. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
Most attempts to reconstruct Benjamin’s theory of critique primarily focus on his theory of art and literary criticism. Cf. B. Witte, Walter Benjamin: Der Intellektuelle als Kritiker; M. W. Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaka, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987);
U. Steiner, ‘Kritik’, in M. Optiz and E. Wizisla (eds), Benjamins Begriffe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 479–523.
For some important programmatic texts on art and literary criticism see ‘Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus’, in W. Benjamin, Selected Writings, edited by H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings, translated by E. Jephcott, R. Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), 292–296 (hereafter SW); ‘The Critic’s Technique in Thirteen Theses’ in One-Way Street (SW 1, 460) and ‘Program for Literary Criticism’ (SW 2, 289–296).
W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, edited by R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974–1989), I 952 (my translation) (hereafter GS).
As a consequence, Benjamin’s reading of the Romantic philosophers is quite idiosyncratic, and his use of source materials sometimes unorthodox. Rodolphe Gasché writes that Benjamin ‘makes such free use of citations that they are made on occasion to say the exact opposite of what they say in their original context’. R. Gasché, ‘The Sober Absolute’, in B. Hanssen and A. Benjamin (eds), Walter Benjamin and Romanticism (New York: Continuum, 2002), 51. The discussion about whether Benjamin’s interpretation of the Romantics is sound, however, lies outside the scope of this chapter.
F. Schlegel, ‘On Goethe’s Meister’, in J. M. Bernstein (ed.), Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 275. See also Bernstein’s Introduction, xxx–xxxi.
Benjamin quotes Fichte: ‘Thus we shall continue, ad infinitum, to require a new consciousness for every consciousness, a new consciousness whose object is the earlier consciousness, and thus we shall never reach the point of being able to assume an actual consciousness’ (SW 1, 125). For the original passage see J. G. Fichte, Versuch einer neuen Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre (Leipzig: Meiner, 1984), 106.
W. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by J. Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), 182.
Its most notable commentaries in recent years have been: J. Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority’, Cardozo Law Review, 11, 1989–1990, 920–1045;
G. Agamben, Homo Sacer, translated by D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); and
State of Exception, translated by K. Attell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and
S. Žižek, Violence (London: Profile Books, 2008).
B. Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 2000), 3.
W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, edited by R. Tiedemann (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 391 (hereafter AP).
SW 4, 396. I prefer to translate Historismus as ‘historism’ instead of ‘historicism’ (as do the translators of the Selected Writings) to avoid confusion with the understanding of ‘historicism’ as a teleological philosophy of history, i.e. the way that Karl Popper uses the term in his The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge, 2002).
Cf. W. Hamacher, ‘“Now”: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time’, in A. Benjamin (ed.), Walter Benjamin and History (New York: Continuum, 2005), 38–68, 38.
Cf. U. Steiner, ‘The True Politician. Benjamin’s Concept of the Political’, New German Critique, 83, 2001, 49.
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Lijster, T. (2012). The Interruption of Myth: Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Critique. In: de Boer, K., Sonderegger, R. (eds) Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230357006_10
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