Language and Critique: Jurgen Habermas on Walter Benjamin

Abstract

The contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin's works has become inseparable from the history of their reception in the last quarter century. Jiirgen Habermas' study on Consciousness-raising or Redemptive Criticism receives its formative impulse from this history and is at all points inextricably bound to it. The short, almost eruptive history of impact Benjamin's writings have had in the FRG, which Habermas reviews from the very outset, began with Theodor W. Adorno's publication of the twovolume Schriften in 1955, and the first volume of Benjamin's selected writings, Illuminationen, in 1961. The second volume of his selected writings, Angelus Novus, did not appear until 1966. That year also witnessed the publication of a selective edition of Benjamin's letters (Briefe) by Gershom Scholem and Adorno, as well as Rolf Tiedemann's collection of the writings on Brecht (Versuche iiber Brecht) much of which was not previously published. This wealth of new material led many to question why it had not come to light until then, a question directed at the selectivity of Adorno's editorial practice. One cannot help but agree with Habermas that Benjamin's work is from the very beginning constituted in such a way that it is disposed to a history of disparate effects, but the piecemeal fashion in which it appeared and the aftermath of the 1966 publication of new materials did not help matters. It is indisputably to Adorno's credit to have rescued Benjamin's writings from oblivion, but this achievement did not exempt him from charges that turned against him his own statement that increased interest in Benjamin would give rise to increased misunderstanding. This charge was taken up, for instance, by the FAZ in a review of Angelus Novus that Adorno had neglected Benjamin's politically-oriented essays in earlier editions; Helmut Heissenbiittel built upon this theme in a review of the Briefe, in which he accused Adorno of a retouche of Benjamin's later Marxist writings. This debate concerning Benjamin's relation to Marxism increased in vehemence with a special Benjamin-issue of Alternative in 1967, where it is pointed out that Benjamin's literary remains were not solely in Adorno's private possession, but that much of the unpublished material for his Arcades project, among other things, had been preserved in the Potsdam archives in the GDR. This discovery led to a series of philological debates on which versions represented Benjamin's project's most authentically. The sections of the Baudelaire study published by Adorno, it is claimed, were