Loss of Experience and Experience of Loss: Remarks on the Problem of the Lost Revolution in the Work of Benjamin and His Fellow Combatants

Abstract

That the fame Benjamin so fatefully and (un)successfully ran away from all his life has finally caught up with him post mortem predisposes his work, in the wake of the complete edition of his collected writings, not only to a perspective that should eventually be freer from preconceptions, but also to a neutralization that would seem to be the shadow side of every academic consecration. Its sunny side, however, is the opportunity to recognize on the basis of its now unchallenged greatness certain inherent limitations as well. The latter are the concern of the following sketches, which place certain aspects of his oeuvre in a context that links Benjamin's thinking to that of his fellow combatants on the left and the conservative-revolutionary right. If it is true that, in however sublimated a manner, the best minds of a given era end up wrestling with the same problems, it would be worth investigating to what extent Benjamin belongs by not belonging to the groupings of the left and the right. However evident or dubious his participation might appear, his non-participation is in fact no less striking. To define this non-participation anew would involve relating Benjamin's intellectual paths to the positions of that bourgeois social philosopher who was neither his opposite number nor his model, who was neither the bNte noire nor the bNte blanche of the German intelligentsia and yet remained its challenging inspiration even where his name remained unspoken: I am speaking of the Myth of Heidelberg, Max Weber.