The Rose of Babylon: Walter Benjamin, Film Theory, and the Technology of Memory

Abstract

The intellectual limitations of an age are nowhere more evident than in the agreement they produce between opposite views. In every intellectual situation, certain things become almost impossible to believe, almost impossible to understand, while others become almost impossible to avoid. Indeed, without a strict critical consciousness of the prejudices which command language long before we arrive and begin to set its machinery in motion, the most significant possibilities for opposition in our views are always mysteriously taken away. The recent reception of Walter Benjamin is an instructive case in point. I would certainly concede that his work is most complex and difficult to isolate within the confines of one particular viewpoint, but this concession only highlights the suspicions aroused by recent scholarship on him in the Englishspeaking world. There are areas of agreement which belie the apparent differences of approach, often contradict the avowed central purpose and even disrupt the scholarly arguments of important studies on Benjamin. This is clearly illustrated in two books by well-known and authoritative figures published respectively in 1981 and 1982: Terry Eagleton's Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, and Walter Benjamin: an Aesthetic of Redemption by Richard Wolin. These men differ very sharply in their estimation of Benjamin's ideological value. Wolin regrets the long period when Benjamin worked within a historical materialist framework, whose concerns, his book