Walter Benjamin: Self-Reference and Religiosity by Margarete Kohlenbach, and: Benjamin heute: Großstadtdiskurs, Postkolonialitätund Flânerie zwischen den Kulturen by Rolf J. Goebel (review)

Abstract

MLRy 99.4, 2004 1105 Walter Benjamin: Self-Reference and Religiosity. By Margarete Kohlenbach. (New Perspectives in German Studies) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2002. xvii + 241PP. ?47-50. ISBN 0-333-99359-4. Benjamin heute: Grofistadtdiskurs,PostkolonialitatundFlanerie zwischen den Kulturen. By RolfJ. Goebel. Munich: Iudicium. 2001. 191pp. ?21.50. ISBN 3-89129087 -x. Margarete Kohlenbach's study of religious motivation in Walter Benjamin is divided into three chapters. In the first,entitled 'Language', she opens with a comprehensive analysis ofthe 1916 essay 'Uber Sprache uberhaupt und iiber die Sprache des Men? schen'. The second chapter, 'Literature', turns systematically to the development of Benjamin's thought fromhis engagement with Romantic aesthetics onwards. Kohlen? bach focuses on self-reflexivityin Benjamin, inspired as this is by Friedrich Schlegel. Her third chapter, 'History and Technik', examines Benjamin's later thinking on a left-wing historiography that would be both politically capable of intervention and linked to aesthetic and artistic radicalism. The main texts dealt with in this book are treated extensively, and are used to exemplify what the author regards as Benjamin's sceptical non-belief that is nevertheless religious in nature. 'Uber die Sprache' is the primary focus of the opening chapter. Although it is read in the context of other early writings of Benjamin, Kohlenbach's conclusions in this essay are central to her reading of some of his later works. She holds that Benjamin's thinking in this phase is characterized by a conservative cri? tique of culture alongside a metaphysical mode of reflection that should nevertheless not be misconstrued as religious belief. What impresses most in this chapter is the exposition of Benjamin's engagement with scholastic metaphysics. The section on 'analogia linguae' illuminatesthe theological dimension of his reading of Genesis and yields valuable insights into his deliberations on the proper name. Here, as in the subsequent chapters, the scholarship is impressive, and the attention to detail beyond question. However, dealing with what she regards as the contradictions in Benjamin's thinking, the logic with which Kohlenbach interrogates her subject is capable of being relentless. Benjaminian ambiguity may certainly failto satisfy,ifrigour and systematic thought are what the reader seeks. According to Kohlenbach, what underlies 'Uber die Sprache' is 'an aesthete's desire for the religious re-enchantment of modernity', something which could explain why Benjamin tries to explain spiritual essence with linguistic essence, the basis for his notion of revelation. Despite Kohlenbach's rigorous analysis, it seems unnecessary to conclude that Benjamin's phenomenological deliberations that combine in 1916 with an aesthetic experimentalism and a metaphorical reading of Genesis could be read as a plea for religious re-enchantment. These writings are metaphorical, and at least in part metaphysical, but Benjamin should also be judged in terms of the phenomenological critique of culture from Simmel to Husserl. Methodological stringency would be a tall order fora writer who is engaged with so much that is new and, in its defiance of disciplinary specialization (especially in the case of Simmel), daring. Kohlenbach's attempt to place Benjamin alongside conservative critics of culture does not convince, and her use of the term 'aesthete' reveals, perhaps, what is problematic about this book: it does not come to terms with the aesthetic quality of Benjamin's writing or with his intellectual nonconformism. It also does not do justice to his notion of historical intervention, and the section on 'materialism', in a work that elsewhere impresses for its scope and meticulous attention to detail, is surprisingly short. This is perhaps indicative ofa study intent on delineating the metaphysical influences in Benjamin's thinking. Rolf Goebel's book shows that the figure of the fldneur, dating back to Baudelaire and owing so much to Benjamin, continues to be of interest to contemporary writing. Goebel's approach is theoretically informed by poststructuralist and postcolonial the- no6 Reviews ory as well as by critical angles from cultural studies. As the opening chapter shows, he is aware ofthe shortcomings of 'reading' a city solely as text. Barthes is criticized for this tendency, and Goebel is equally aware that a postcolonial approach such as that of Rey Chow risks deconstructing essentialist and Eurocentric readings of the non-European metropolis to such...