Benjamin's Idea Research Articles

The disenchantment of art: the philosophy of Walter Benjamin

Fifty years after committing suicide at the French-Spanish border, Walter Benjamin remains one of the great cultural critics of this century. Yet despite his wide acclaim, his philosophical ideas remain elusive to most, often considered an intentionally desegregated set of thoughts not meant to cohere. Rainer Rochlitz brings a new perspective to Benjamin's work, arguing that throughout his writings runs a constant theme, that of the struggle to clarify and disenchant language. Providing an insightful, systematic analysis of Benjamin's works and applying them to current philosophical debates, The Disenchantment of Art is the first book to lay claim to his status as a philosopher. Beginning with Benjamin's early works, Rochlitz highlights his search for truth in art. Benjamin believed that art constituted a pure language directly related to God. This language existed prior to the everyday language we use to communicate, and only it could express truth. Benjamin was convinced that analytic philosophy, which had broken away from theology, had no chance to discover truth on its own. As Rochlitz shows, Benjamin's views later changed to a more materialist conception of art based on the idea that it was necessary for politics to take the place of theology as the basis of aesthetics. Further, he felt that traditional art and its aura had to be sacrificed to mass reproduction and immediate efficiency in the revolutionary context of the 1930s. In his later works, Benjamin addressed this sacrifice as a danger for the emancipatory potentials of art. For him, critical history (art criticism included) provided a look at the past and contained all the struggles of humanity to overcome mythicalobscurity, oppression, and violence. Offering critical discussions of Benjamin's ideas in the context of his time and exploring their application to current philosophical thought, The Disenchantment of Art will appeal to readers with an interest in philosophy, literature, cultural studie

"To read what was never written": From Deconstruction to the Poetics of Redemption

The current controversy on the “undecidability” of literary meaning and the possibility of reliable translation has focused attention on the intervention of deconstruction as a critical theory of reading and interpretation. The model of deconstruction examined here is Paul de Man's commentary on Walter Benjamin's text “The Task of the Translator.” This essay argues that de Man's mis-construing of Benjamin's ideas reveals the basic methodological and philosophical inadequacies of deconstruction. Deconstruction refuses the historical, cultural and biographical contexts of cultural artifacts it claims to appraise and judge. De Man's neo-Nietzschean perspective (aptly captured by the postmodernist allegories of Borges) cannot comprehend Benjamin's radical historicism. Postmodernist irony is thus no substitute for the rigor of dialectical thinking. This lesson is inscribed in Benjamin's concept of translation situated in the framework of his complex project of an aesthetics of redemption.