Interpretation, Revolution, Inheritance: Benjamin with Marx

Abstract

Interpretation, Revolution, Inheritance:Benjamin with Marx Gerhard Richter (bio) In Section III of her seminal if controversial reading of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt rightfully remarks upon Benjamin's engagement with what she diagnoses, here and elsewhere in her works, as a certain Traditionsbruch, or "break in tradition." She reminds her readers that, insofar as "the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority," and to the extent that "authority presents itself historically, it becomes tradition." Benjamin, Arendt suggests, "knew that the break in tradition and the loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable," propelling him "to discover new ways of dealing with the past." According to Arendt's account, if Benjamin's trademark insight is "that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by its citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present," then his new way of organizing the past is to quote it in ever-renewed and reconceptualized constellations, rather than seeking to "repair" a broken tradition by reinserting the past into it.1 Next to the practice of citation, Arendt trains her focus on Benjamin's privileging of the figure of the collector in response to the Traditionsbruch in modernity. The [End Page 523] one who cites and the one who collects each assemble their shards of history in ways that creatively and strategically reconfigure the tradition in which they find themselves. Yet what is missing from Arendt's consideration of this shifting relation to the disruption of tradition and its transmissibility is the critical and abiding role that the categories of interpretation and inheritance play for Benjamin in this context. In the pages that follow, I wish to suggest some of the ways in which these two categories of reflection enrich our understanding of Benjamin's singular relation to a refractory tradition and the variegated movements of transmission, reception, and reinscription without which it can hardly be thought. In the process, Benjamin's work will enter a dynamic and, I would argue, often under-appreciated relationship with certain elements of Marxian modes of thought. Among the substantive topics that Benjamin addresses in a consequential letter from December 9, 1923 to his friend Florens Christian Rang, one finds not only the nature of the "idea" as he was concurrently attempting to develop it in the Trauerspiel book, and, by implication, the attendant relation of the specifically Benjaminian idea, his idea of the idea, to the idea in the Platonic, Kantian, and Hegelian senses. What concerns Benjamin above all else in the letter is the fundamental question regarding a possible relation between the work of art and what he calls "geschichtliches Leben," historical life. He writes: "What has been preoccupying me is the question of the relationship between works of art and historical life. In this regard, it is evident to me that there is no such thing as art history. The concatenation of temporal occurrences, for example, does not imply only things that are causally significant for human life." And he adds: "Rather, without a concatenation such as development, maturity, death, and other similar categories, human life fundamentally would not exist at all. But the situation is completely different as regards the work of art. In terms of its essence, it is ahistorical."2 If the essence of the artwork can be said to be ahistorical, it is because the "attempt to place the work of art in the context of historical life does not open up perspectives that lead us to its innermost core as, for example, the same attempt undertaken with regard to peoples leads us to see them from the perspective of generations and other essential strata."3 The relationship between the artwork and its historicity therefore cannot [End Page 524] be reduced to a thematic history or to a history of form. Yet, at the same time, "there remains an intense relationship among works of art" in a way that renders them "similar to philosophical systems, in that the so-called history of philosophy is either an uninteresting history of dogma or even philosophers, or the history of problems."4 If one wishes, by extension...