Resurrecting Walter Benjamin

Abstract

Resurrecting Walter Benjamin Colin Smith Yale University Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin's Grave. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, July 2006, 248 pp. Although Benjamin's work received scant attention from his peers while he was alive, a vast secondary literature has flowered since his untimely death by suicide in 1940. That he has become one of the great romantic figures of modern European intellectual history is due no doubt both to the unconventionality of his work and the heroic and tragic elements of his life. Denied an academic career, he lived in penury for much of his adult life; once Hitler seized power he was forced to flee Germany, first to Paris, and ultimately to Port Bou on the Franco-Spanish border where, rather than give himself up to the Nazis, he took his own life. He left a fragmentary corpus of writings that defies conventional intellectual classification. Ranging from literary criticism to metaphysics, the production and reception of art, the philosophy of history, and urban landscapes, his writing evinces what Richard Wolin calls a profound spirit of apocalyptic immanence combined with a Utopian sensibility. Benjamin fascinates on many levels. Considering that much of Benjamin's work has serious implications for historical and social analysis, it is curious that he is rarely cited in anthropological discourse. One is much more likely to come upon references to him in art history, literature, film studies, or cultural studies. One of the few anthropologists who have fruitfully made use of Benjamin's ideas is Michael Taussig. Over the years, beginning with The Devil and Commodity Fetishism, Taussig has gotten much mileage out of concepts such as profane illumination, dialectical image, and redemption. Taussig's most recent book, Walter Benjamin's Grave, is a collection of eight essays which, except for the title essay which was written specifically for this volume, are based on articles published between 1993 and 2003. The reader who has encountered Taussig's earlier work will find many of his central theoretical and methodological insights reviewed and extended in this volume. He/she will also find the writing style to be familiar, either poetic or bombastic and obfuscatory, depending on her point of view. The title suggests a memorial to Benjamin, but the book is more a critique of conventional modes of interpretation in history and the social sciences, a critique inspired by Benjamin first and foremost, but also by Marx, Nietzsche, and Bataille, among others. The peculiar thing about Benjamin's grave is that no one knows for sure where it is. There are records of his stay, death, and burial in Port Bou, but when Hannah Arendt arrived a few months after his suicide, she could not locate the grave. In his memoir of Benjamin, Gershom Scholem vented his disgust at the apocryphal memorial that had been erected by the cemetery attendants. This kind of reaction is based on the assumption that there should be a clear and direct connection between symbol and referent for something to be authentic or true, an assumption that Taussig questions as the only appropriate way to view burial, or to apprehend reality. He notes that Benjamin himself sought meaning in the world not only from smoothly functioning symbols, as if reading from a dictionary, but also from an awkwardness of fit between signs and what they refer to, most especially when those signs cluster around Taussig finds evidence which suggests that Benjamin's body might have been removed from its original niche in the cemetery to a fosa comun, or grave, which was part of the Port Bou burial system and a common practice under Franco's dictatorship. In contrast to Scholem, he reads Benjamin's grave as an allegory for the violence of the state, its mass torture, and its disappearance of people. Beyond the mystery surrounding Benjamin's death and gravesite, the essays in this volume cover a wide range of topics: a Columbian peasant epic poet; commodity fetishism and the Devil's Pact; changing understandings and uses of the sea; shamanism; secrecy and taboo; the spectral nature of police; and the relationship between flowers and death. …