Introduction to Walter Benjamin's "Doctrine of the Similar"

Abstract

Walter Benjamin's Doctrine of the Similar was composed in Berlin early in 1933. He did not return to this text until the following summer in Ibiza.' By that time personal and political circumstances had changed dramatically. He was in exile, separated from his books and manuscripts, and the earlier text had to be retrieved from Gershom Scholem, who returned a copy of the original from Jerusalem. The second version, On the Mimetic Faculty, was not completed until Benjamin's return to Paris, after a bout with malaria, in the fall of 1933.2 Many of the formulations of the second manuscript follow those of the Doctrine of the Similar. Yet, it is not simply a first draftthere are important differences of emphasis in the later text. A comparison of the Doctrine of the Similar and On the Mimetic Faculty reveals both an essential unity and consistency of theological motifs in Benjamin's theory of language throughout, but it also shows the growing impact of his interest in historical criticism. Benjamin recognized as early as 1931 that his philosophy of language did contain the possibilities of a mediation to the mode of perception of historical materialism, but this course was full of tension and problematic(GS, II, 3, p. 950). Nowhere is the complexity of Benjamin's ideal of redemptive critique, the reconstruction of the hidden presence of the Messianic impulse in the present, more evident than in his philosophical concern with language. But, at the same time it is apparent that he saw no clear and simple antagonism between his self-consciously theological ideas and his Marxist standpoint. As he once remarked: My life as well as my thought moves in extreme positions. The Doctrine of the Similar develops the program for a philosophy of language first set out 17 years earlier in the 1916 essay On Language as Such and on the Language of Man. 3 There Benjamin articulated, on the basis of his reading of the first chapter of Genesis, a theory of linguistic origin rooted in the divine act of creation: God rested when he had left his creative power to