Benjamin's "Ghosts": Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory

Abstract

Richter, Gerhard, ed.Benjamin's Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. 365 pp. $55.00 hardcover, $24.95 paperback. In recent years, the philological study of Benjamin's writings has increasingly been supplemented by the larger project of conceptually translating his concepts into other disciplines, cultural domains, or methodological frameworks. Thus, sociology, political science, urban studies, feminism, postcolonial theory, and a host of other discourses have critically appropriated Benjamin for their own purposes. Indeed, certain features of Benjamin, specifically his disavowal of philosophical systems, as well as his highly allusive arguments, metaphorical conceptualizations, and montage-like constellations of thought figures, make his texts seem infinitely citable (and recyclable) by new critical readings and counterreadings that often go beyond his original intention and historical contexts. As the editor of this wide-ranging and immensely insightful collection of fourteen essays by internationally known scholars argues in his introduction, Benjamin's status today resembles the appearance of ghosts. Belonging to a seemingly bygone but irrepressible past that returns to haunt the present in surprising and often shocking ways, his achievements, once marked by marginalization and persecution, wait to be rescued or redeemed by the cultural needs of today. Intriguing as the imagery of the ghostly is in that sense, I wonder if it may not -unintentionally-also be tantamount to desubstantiating the essence and truthfulness of Benjamin's texts, which as a result can all the more easily be exploited by fancy theories and trendy ideologies. After all, the borderline between the spectral and the merely illusory or imaginary may be weaker than one may want to admit, especially in light of the tendency, more visible than ever in our postmodern time of cultural simulations and digitized (re-) presentations of the real, to turn any materiality of the past into a phantom of the present. Still, no one is more aware of this potential problem than Richter himself. he eloquently argues that the urge to rediscover Benjamin is not an unproblematic one, for it must come to terms with the paradoxical structure of his sentences, which remain infinitely appropriable for this or that cause while often strangely resisting] assimilation into current methodological paradigms and cultural trends (2-3). Such resistance seems particularly important considering that some hegemonic models of cultural studies tend to coopt and instrumentalize all kinds of previous knowledge for their own cognitive interests. This danger, Richter suggests, is in tune with the power of late-capitalist ideologies to see everything, including ideas of great complexity, predominantly in terms of commercial exchange value (18). Focusing on four thematic clusters-cultures of the textualities of experience, rethinking history, and of finitude -the collection reflects the tension between appropriation and resistance in a multi-faceted and thought-provoking manner. Sometimes it seems that the fear of uncritical or ahistorical Aktualisierung lets contributors return to the philological project of meticulously close readings of Benjamin's texts in their own historical context. These critics include Rainer Nagele on the rhetoric of Benjamin's notion of the image, Eva Geulen on the art work essay and its self-reflexive reenactment of cinematic technique in the structure of its argument, Norbert Bolz (all too sketchily) on Benjamin's thinking between theology and media theory Peter Fenves on tragedy and prophecy in Origins of the German Mourning Play, Bettine Menke on Benjamin's figures of ornament, constellation and flurries, and Sigrid Weigel on Eros and language in the essay on Karl Kraus. Densely analytical and marked by impeccable scholarship, their approaches lead to remarkable insights into the intellectual complexity and intricate form of Benjamin's thought, but on the other hand, I feel, one finds insufficient exploration here of the texts' potential translatability into new cultural situations or methodological frameworks. …