The Philology of Life

Abstract

This book proposes to retrace the outlines of the philological project developed by Walter Benjamin in his literary critical essays on Hölderlin, the Romantics, and Goethe that were composed from 1914 through 1922. This philological program provides the methodological key to Benjamin’s work as a whole. The fundamental importance of this “philological” method in Benjamin’s work seems not to have been recognized by his contemporary readers, including Theodor Adorno who considered it to be lacking in dialectical rigor. It was also not appreciated in the initial reception of the two-volume edition of Benjamin’s writings, Schriften, in 1955 and in the collections that appeared in the 1960s and 1970s under the titles of Illuminations and Reflections. But the publication of a wider range of Benjamin’s writings in recent decades has made it possible to retrace the outlines of a distinctive philological project that starts to develop in his early literary criticism and extends into the late studies of Baudelaire and Paris. By bringing this innovative method to light this study proposes “the philology of life” as the key to the critical program of one of the most influential intellectual figures of the past few decades in literary studies and the humanities.