“Not there at all”: Criticism and Its Concept in Walter Benjamin's Doctoral Dissertation

Abstract

ABSTRACT Submitted at the University of Bern in 1919, Walter Benjamin’s doctoral dissertation “On the Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism” has regularly been understood as an attempt to describe the nature of criticism in early German Romanticism through the idea of art’s criticizability. No longer governed by external criteria, works, according to this concept, become mediators of the absolute idea of art, and criticism simply unfolds their potential for infinite reflection. This article seeks to challenge the dominant understanding of the dissertation by suggesting that, rather than taking the conceptual nature of criticism for granted, Benjamin’s text recognizes and tarries with a potentially unbreachable distance between criticism and its concept. After an initial reading of a letter in which Benjamin describes a relation between language and criticism so entangled that the possibility of a coherent concept of criticism is questioned, the article engages closely with the dissertation to suggest that the concept of criticizability relies upon Benjamin’s identification—and immediate suppression—of a withdrawn linguistic form. By showing that Benjamin elsewhere problematizes even this “minimal Romanticism,” the article’s conclusion briefly considers the implications of Benjamin’s work for contemporary Romantic studies.