Introducing Walter Benjamin E-Book

Alex Coles

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Graphic Guides
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 90

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Walter Benjamin is often considered the key modern philosopher and critic of modern art. Tracing his influence on modern aesthetics and cultural history, Introducing Walter Benjamin highlights his commitment to political transformation of the arts as a means to bring about social change. Benjamin witnessed first-hand many of the cataclysmic events of modern European history. He took a critical stance on the dominant ideologies of Marxism, Zionism and Technocracy, and his attempt to flee Nazi Europe ultimately led to his suicide in 1940. With its brilliant combination of words and images, this is an ideal introduction to one of the most elusive philosophers.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP Email: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-178578-019-6

Text copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

Illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

The Passionate Critic

Snapshots of A Berlin Childhood

The Peripatetic Philosophy Student

Kant and Neo-Kantianism

Apriorism

Phenomenology

Pro- Or Anti-zionism?

“What were you doing on 4 August 1914?”

Betrayal and Revolution

How to Avoid Conscription

Friendship with Gershom Scholem

Greek Tragedy

Trauerspiel or Mourning Play

On Language

The Experience of Freedom

The Experience of Colour

German Romantic Art Criticism

The Concept of Ruination

Parental Strife

The Failed Editor

Conflict with the George Circle

The Story of Elective Affinities

Benjamin’s Affinities

The Task of the Critic

The Task of the Translator

The Bookman

... And the Media Man

Riegl Versus Wölfflin

The Transition from Haptic to Optic

The Aesthetics of Disintegration

Riegl’s Structuralism

The Task of the Art Critic

Children’s Books

Line or Colour?

The Optic of Technology

The Collector

Benjamin the Nomad

Introduction to Marxism

Mediation

Reification

The Bolshevik Verdict

The Porosity of Naples

Spatial and Temporal Porosity

A Dictator’s Visit

Introducing the Arcade

Looking Ahead …

Past, Present and Future

Moscow Diary

Sovereign Violence

The Religion of Capitalism

The Origin of German Tragic Drama

What is “Baroque”?

Political Theologies

A Nihilistic Toy-box

Symbol, Allegory and Ruination

A University Scandal

A Fairytale for Academics

One-way Street

Scenes from One-way Street: Writing

... And Technology

Benjamin, the Surrealist

Teddy and Bert

The Frankfurt Institute

Dissimilar Similarities

“The Hard Thing Gives Way”

“The Presence of the past, Now”

The Art of Montage

The Dark Age Begins

The Great Dictator …

… Seen as Charlie Chaplin

The Author as Producer

The Age of Reproduction

The Painter and the Camera-man

Mass Reproduction

History of the Aura

The Decay of the Aura

Uncertainties and Ambiguities

Criticisms of Benjamin’s Position

Kafka and Benjamin’s Mysticism

The Kabbala

Which Benjamin?

Origins of the Arcades Project

A Central Architectural Motif

A Marathon Project

Materialist Ventriloquism

The Maverick Historian

Phantasmagoria and Dialectical Images

Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century

1. Fourier, or the Arcades

2. Daguerre, or the Panoramas

3. Grandville, or the World Exhibitions

4. Louis Philippe, or the Interior

5. Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris

6. Haussmann, or the Barricades

Troubles with the Institute

The Exile in Danger

Last Exit …

Theology and History

Samples From the “Theses”

Time Runs Out …

In Transit

The Last Day

Further Reading

Biographies of Walter Benjamin

Acknowledgements

The Authors

THE PASSIONATE CRITIC

Walter Benjamin eludes classification. He seemed content with the name “critic”. But an exceptional critic of such passion, erudition and virtuosity who transforms the nature of what usually passes for criticism. His gaze is multiple: philosophy, language, art, architecture, photography, history, Jewish mysticism, Marxism. He does not merely glance at these but digs to their foundations.

Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.

If this book can help the reader through the dazzling maze of Benjamin’s work, it will be at the end to find Benjamin the allegorist.

SNAPSHOTS OF A BERLIN CHILDHOOD

Walter Benjamin was born 15 July 1892 in Berlin. His parents were Emil, a businessman, and his wife Pauline, née Schönflies. They were Jewish, unassimilated to Christianity, but like many others not strictly observant.

Although it was a peaceful childhood, I was strangely haunted by it for the rest of my life.

He remembered his childhood experiences in a series of memoirs written when he was contemplating suicide in 1932, “Berlin Chronicle” and “A Berlin Childhood Around 1900”. The hybrid nature of these texts – at once cultural criticism and personal reflection – exemplifies the complexity of Benjamin’s writings which transgress disciplinary borders and rules of genre.

Benjamin presents his memories in the form of snapshot mosaic images, a practice which anticipates his later comments on the philosophy of history. He remembered himself walking reluctantly half a step behind his mother while out shopping.

This was the origin of my habit of seeming slower and more stupid than I actually am

In another image Benjamin remembered seeing a sandwich man vainly trying to give away leaflets.

This first alerted me to the existence of the poor outside of my privileged childhood

He recalled with particular pleasure reading the latest edition of the New Companion to German Youth with its hunting and spy stories which he read illicitly under the bed-covers at night.

Many of these recollected images are tinged with a sense of catastrophe and desperation, such as the flood disaster which left the young Benjamin abandoned on the main shopping boulevard of Berlin, the Kurfürstendamm.

I felt particularly exposed to the elemental power of nature which made the city seem like a primeval forest

While composing his memoirs, Benjamin was partial to hashish and some images show the influence of this: such as his recollection of the Berlin victory column in the park, associated with the words: “O brown-baked column of victory/with children’s sugar from the winter days.” Death haunts these images.

My father entered my bedroom at night with news of a relative’s death. He used a strange word that I forgot. “syphilis”.

Here we find an example of Benjamin’s characteristic insight: the manifestation of death “in little things”.

For all of his life, Benjamin carried with him a horror and fascination for the luxuriously appointed bourgeois interior – the over-furnished drawing-room.

These interiors seemed to eat up their inhabitants and digest them into the luxurious furnishings

Although affluent, these interiors were not comfortable. As Benjamin said, “They had no space for dying – which is why their owners died in a sanatorium, while the furniture went straight to the second-hand dealer.”

Benjamin’s encounter with art began early, with him posing for individual and family photographs.

I remember being perplexed by the demand that I should “look like myself”

This was particularly difficult when he had to pose in front of a crudely painted backdrop of the Alps, holding a walking stick, bareheaded, sporty, and gazing into the distance with a tortured smile on his lips.

The magnitude of his torments at home and at the photographer’s studio faded before those of school. He attended the Kaiser Friedrich School in Berlin’s wealthy Charlottenberg west-end, where he enjoyed a relatively privileged education. The name of the school reflected the attitudes of the staff and the content of the curriculum. The ethos of the German Imperial Army was ever-present, along with a commitment to unremitting industry: “If I rest, I rust.” The teachers were a strange crew of Imperial parodies who did not recognize the future brilliance of their pupil. They found him “well-behaved but with inadequate handwriting”.

Benjamin’s horror of the discipline of school – its routines, rituals and daily humiliation – moved his parents to send him for two years to an experimental school in the country at the age of 14. At the Haubinda school in Thuringia, Benjamin was taught by the educational reformer Gustav Wyneken.

He was one of the most important influences on me

Wyneken introduced Benjamin to the blossoming Youth Movement in Germany which consisted of various separate groups and organizations of young people.

These ranged from clubs of hikers and ramblers to vaguely anarchistic groups such as the one Wyneken encouraged Benjamin to join. But there were also anti-Semitic and proto-Nazi bands, for example the Youth League of the Imperial Faithful. Benjamin became a teenage rebel, travelling the country giving lectures and writing in the youth fanzines on the need for the young to follow their own inclinations.

Our youth is but a brief night (fill it with rapture!)

THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHY STUDENT

Like many German students then and now, Benjamin attended a number of different universities. He left the Kaiser Friedrich School with good results in literature but a weakness in mathematics, and undertook an extended journey to Italy. In 1912, at the age of 20, he enrolled to study philosophy at the University of Freiburg in Bresgau. He attended lectures by the neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936) which he found extremely boring.

Science can only establish conceptual clarity on the plurality of world-views present in actuality and thus become the doctrine of world-views.

While suffering in the back row, he penned a short poem for his friend Herbert Belmore: “Science is a cow/I listen/I sit in the lecture hall/while it goes moo.”

Also in the audience was another student philosopher, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). There is no record of them having met or spoken to each other, although Benjamin’s later comments on Heidegger are far from complimentary.

I expect sparks will fly from the shock of the confrontation between our two very different ways of looking at history

Heidegger did not ever mention Benjamin in any of his works or reflections.

From 1912 to 1915, Benjamin carried on a peripatetic study of philosophy at the universities of Freiburg, Berlin and Munich. Apart from these studies, he also attended courses in art and literary history, as well as others in Berlin by the influential sociologist and cultural historian Georg Simmel (1858–1918).

I find simmel’s approach very congenial. He’s written on subjects like the sociology of the alps and the experience of everyday life in the metropolis

It was from Simmel that Benjamin gained his fascination with modern urban experience.

In 1915, Benjamin attended courses at the University of Munich by Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945), the great art historian and specialist in Baroque art. Benjamin was not impressed. “A by no means overwhelmingly gifted man, who, by nature, has no more feel for art than anyone else, but who attempts to get around this by using all the energy and resources of his personality (which have nothing to do with art).”

Here is the most disastrous activity I have encountered in a German university!

Benjamin’s hostility to Wölfflin is interesting in the light of his own interest in art and in the Baroque age, as we’ll see later.

KANT AND NEO-KANTIANISM

The kind of philosophy studied at the time by Benjamin was known as neo-Kantianism, a late 19th century development of Kant’s theory of knowledge. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) had severely undermined metaphysics’ pretensions to transcendent knowledge in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781). The concept of the soul, for example, is transcendent: it is an unobservable substance, and as such, unknowable by our minds which depend on the raw material of sense-data. But there is a difference between transcendent and the transcendental.

The transcendental is the logical apparatus of concepts, common to all minds, which organizes experience and is thus logically prior to it.

APRIORISM

Concepts are logically prior