Benjamin heute: Grossstadtdiskurs, Postkolonialitat und Flanerie zwischen den Kulturen

Abstract

Goebel, Rolf J. Benjamin Heute: Gro[beta]stadtdiskurs, Postkolonialitat und Flanerie zwischen den Kulturen. Munich: Iudicium, 2001. 191 pp. euro21.50 paperback. In this book Rolf Goebel provides a new angle on Germanistik and Benjamin studies in the US. In a less orthodox way than usual in Benjamin scholarship-namely without dwelling extensively on the philological and historical analysis of Benjamin's thought-the author considers the relevance of Benjamin's work for some prominent postcolonial theorists active today in the US and elsewhere (e.g., in Germany and Brazil). He investigates Benjamin's reception in recent works by Homi Bhabha and Rey Chow (with whose theories the book opens), by Willi Bolle, Helmut Lethen and John Kranauskias, among others. In addition to illustrating the connections between postcolonial theory and Benjamin, Goebel expands the postcolonial appropriations of the German philosopher to include his own analyses of well-known 19th century and contemporary philosophers and writers who, too, explored theoretically, as in Benjamin's work, the terrains of travel and the metropolis. For example, Goebel engages Pierre Loti and Lafcadio Hearn's travel writing as well as Roland Barthes's texts on Japan through the lens of Benjamin's flaneur figure. Goebel's view of Benjamin's reception in post-colonial thought is twofold. On the one hand, the focus is on the translation of Benjamin's methods of citation and quotation-as exemplified in Benjamin's work on the flaneur and the European metropolis-into contemporary theoretical constructions and representations of the sub-altern and the migrant and their respective experiences as colonial and postcolonial subjects. On the other hand, questions are raised about the concern by Benjamin and the postcolonial critics about (1) the existence of an original, authentic native (a question more associated with Subaltern Studies than with postcolonial theory) and (2) the representability in and by the Western critic of the Other's voice as hybrid. Goebel elucidates Benjamin's dialectical construction of otherness and his rejection of the divide between either the authentic or the impure, thereby aligning Benjamin with post-colonial idioms of hybridity. In Goebel's account, positive and negative evaluations of postcolonial theorists themselves divide on the issue of authenticity and representability of the Other's voice. Without disregarding important critiques of Benjamin's own Eurocentrism, Goebel concludes that Benjamin's technique of quotation, although violent and sometimes mirroring the plundering technique of Imperialist assimilation of the Other, always engages the latter in its dialectical move and shows the Western critic's ambivalence about the possibility of speaking from the Other's position. In this regard, in Goebel's rendition, Benjamin does not believe in the Other's absolute authenticity. Benjamin evokes the flaneur as the figure that experiences the fragmented historical and spatial layers of the metropolis. The flaneur is able to see through the everyday to perceive the presence of the repressed and forgotten material as that of another. The flaneur ties together Benjamin's analysis of modernity's periphery (as manifested in Paris) and the contemporary, post-colonial urban centers at the periphery of the Western world. In Goebel's view, the Western flaneur catches indirect glimpses of the colonial and imperialist enterprise through his observant strolls in Parisian urban space, while the writer-himself a flaneur-proceeds by constructing a textual space that is mimetically fragmented, constituted by quotations of the foreign spaces and images in the book, one reconstructed as metropolitan space. Thus Benjamin's flaneur never familiarizes and assimilates the exotic. Rather, he uncovers strangeness in the familiar, and points to the dialectical coexistence of both dimensions. For Goebel, the flaneur is a forerunner of the reflexive ethnographer, who theorizes his or her own impact in the construction of the notion of the native, a notion also developed by the Other. …