Toward a Genealogy of Gender in Walter Benjamin's Writing

Abstract

When feminists turn or return to the Frankfurt School-as a number recently have done-Walter Benjamin is usually not the first of its figures to come to mind. Still, his complex relationship to the more canonical figure of Adorno suggests the possibility that Benjamin might also offer alternatives to the notoriously ambivalent status of femininity in Adorno's thought. Adorno's relentless critique of any genderessentialism which would deny its mediation by the social whole is only one side of his thought on gender. The other, more problematic side becomes evident in his tendency to associate the utopian moment of nameless bliss with the feminine-as-nature. This gesture always threatens to reaffirm a specific mode of aestheticizing femininity via its hypostazisation as exotic otherness that constitutes one of the dominant gender ideologies of bourgeois culture.1 For this and other reasons many recent feminist turns to Adorno in particular and the Frankfurt School in general have shifted focus, and they have done so within the context of a specific juncture, or perhaps, at a specific impasse of contemporary feminisms. To put it in inexcusably crude and abstract terms, the question is this: Is it possible-and ifso, how-to acknowledge and account for differences without either subsuming difference under a common denominator, which would hypostatize, erase, subjugate, or negate difference, or sacrificing any notion of a common ground, which would risk the disintegration of feminist politics into an ever-increasing and potentiallly infinite number of feminisms and their respective identity politics? What Fredric Jameson sought and believed to have found in Adorno as an antidote to postmodernist relativism and proliferating particularisms2-namely unity and difference -is certainly compatible with the motivations behind feminist returns to Adorno. And it is in this regard that Benjamin's work, too, might provide insights for feminism's current dilemma, for Benjamin also sought alternatives--even more forcefully than Adorno and sometimes to the latter's dismay-to the idealist dialectic of subjective and objective, particular and universal. But perhaps because Benjamin's philosophical project is considerably less clearly defined than Adorno's, feminist criticism and critique ofBenjamin traditionally have focused on the kind of prominent themes whose relevance to feminist concerns seemed beyond question: Christine BuciGlucksmann's work on the feminine as allegory of modernity in the Baudelaire essays and the Passagen-Werk, Miriam Hansen's work on the affinities between female spectatorship and Benjamins's analysis of distracted reception, Susan BuckMorss's discussions of women and nature in Benjamin, and Helga Geyer-Ryan's re-