Should Benjamin Have Read Marx?

Abstract

First, apologies for my title. I realize it puts the question I have in mind somewhat glibly, not to say flippantly, as if scared to death of seeming too reverential in the face of the Benjamin phenomenon. I apologize, then, for the form of the question but not for the question itself—and not for posing it baldly. Doing so is meant as antidote to what seems to me to have been happening in the generality of Benjamin studies over the last decade or so— where I take the question very often to be put implicitly, and, as it were, with regret, and the answer given by the implicitness. ‘‘Was it a good thing for Benjamin as a writer’’—here is the question spelled out—‘‘that he came to identify himself with the project called Marxism, and seems to have entertained the idea of turning his book on nineteenth-century Paris into a study, specifically, of culture shaped by commodity production, the latter elaborated in terms picked up from Capital and The Critique of Political Economy?’’ Posing the question implicitly, as, by and large, recent writing on Benjamin has done, seems to me a way of avoiding having to say something as vulgar and ahistorical as that it was a bad thing. Only very distinguished South African novelists are allowed to