Benjamin's Text Research Articles

Jeanne Marie Gagnebin e a crítica de Walter Benjamin ao direito

Abstract Among the production of the philosopher Jeanne Marie Gagnebin dedicated to Walter Benjamin’s thought, there are two texts in which Gagnebin seems to work more directly with Benjamin’s reflections on law: “Myth, Law and Justice in Walter Benjamin” and “State of exception: Between catastrophe and necropolitics”. These texts discuss the theoretical-political and historical foundations of the critique of Law made by the German philosopher. This article intends to realize a brief comment on these texts; and also to indicate, based on these texts and other moments in her work, that how Gagnebin interprets Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history brings us important elements for the task (still unfinished) to build a critical perception on law and especially on the historical regime underlying it. Based on this proposal, this article is divided into 3 parts. The first aims to comment the essays previously mentioned; the second to differentiate the reading suggested by Gagnebin from some influential interpretations of Walter Benjamin's work in theory and philosophy of law; and the third to discuss how the interpretation proposed by the Swiss-Brazilian thinker of Benjamin's texts on law is based in a more integrated reading of the historical criticism proposed by the German philosopher.

خوانش متن به‌مثابۀ پرسه‌زنی در میان منظرهای شهری (مطالعۀ موردی: کتاب‌های خیابان یک‌طرفه و پروژۀ پاساژها)

Walter Benjamin, a philosopher, and theorist associated with Frankfurt School, is known as one of the leading figures in studies about urban modernity. The point that “modern city” is the central theme of many of Benjamin’s works, has been investigated in several studies. However, what has been mostly neglected is the influence of visual/spatial qualities of the modern city on shaping Benjamin’s method for thinking, thereby writing, and forming the perceptive experience of readers while facing such texts. The present research, which is qualitative and fundamental research based on qualitative content analysis, correlates the origins of visual and spatial qualities in Benjamin’s writings with his interest in images and his studies on visual arts and the visual culture of the modern city. Concentrating on two chief works by Benjamin about city, One Way Street and The Arcades Project, the article tries to review the specifications of this method of writing. It is discussed that as Benjamin considers “flaneur” as the archetype of modernity who wanders across the urban landscapes, his writing method recalls a reader who seeks flanerie among textual landscapes. This research seeks to understand what perceptive qualities emerge for the audience-flaneur among the urban landscapes of Benjamin's texts that distinguish this experience from the experiences of reading traditional forms of text? Thereafter, it is concluded that in opposition to traditional forms of reading based on the perception of an isolated, motionless, concentrated subject, the flanerie-like encounter with the text is a distracted reading which is shaped in an absent-mindedness condition. The subject of such a reading is a collective, corporeal, and moving subject. In this regard and while reading, the audience experiences the text through collective corporeality, similar to the mass experience of the modern metropolis.

Thinking violence. Benjamin's Readers.

In what follows the reader will find an exposition of Benjamin's text For a Critique of Violence, the interpretation made by Derrida, Honneth, Žižek, among others, as well as Bernstein's comment on those readings. Derrida has associated the Benjamin text with the "final solution", grouping it into the forms of thought that justify or make possible acts similar to those facts. Honneth looks for an affable outlet, turning towards a proposal for a cultural revolution. Žižek associates the resentment that humans experience to explain historical events, which are examples of pure or divine violence, which are caused by love that seeks good. Bernstein will accept the reading of Derrida, which he considers a product of imagination. He appreciates Honneth's performance, he finds it enlightening. He rejects the idea of reducing guilt to the conscience of the person responsible for violent acts, who silently and autonomously judges himself for the acts committed, seems to him inadmissible; he considers that violence should be a community discussion supported by fallibilist pluralism.

The Age of Translation

The Age of Translation

Waking From the Dream: The Arcades Project, Copia , and the American Consumer

Waking From the DreamThe Arcades Project, Copia, and the American Consumer Laura Morowitz (bio) When the project really started getting legs I started thinking about this idea in reference to the turn of the century, from the nineteenth to the twentieth, how there were some really interesting parallels, especially in visual culture and art, I was specifically thinking about the Post-Impressionists and Manet and Gustave Caillebotte, the great painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. It's kind of weird how in a sense that was almost like what we would call street photography, looking at culture and trying to see this psychological undertone and cultural underpinnings, similar, except the only difference was instead of walking down the Parisian boulevards or sitting at the train station it was now Walmart. —Brian Ulrich, Art Uncovered, November 2011 For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectic: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. — Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (N2, A3) In Brian Ulrich's photograph Cleveland, Ohio, 2003 (fig. 1), from his series Copia (2001–2011), a little girl in a red coat turns her back on the overstuffed shelves and perfect symmetry of a Disney Store display, bewildered by the scene. Behind her, in faded purple, rises Cinderella's castle, the site of twenty-first-century childhood fantasy. With her bright jacket and soft face, she has begun to resemble the cuddly toys behind her.1 While the stuffed tigers seem to laugh at a joke in which we may be the punch line, Eeyore casts a decidedly concerned glance in the little girl's direction, as if she might be on the brink of danger. [End Page 1] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Brian Ulrich, Cleveland, Ohio, 2003, from Copia: Retail, color photograph. Collection: Ulrich. The image captures perfectly both the lure of consumer culture and its threat to engulf us in fantasy. No corporation has been more successful than Disney in trafficking in our collective dreams. Centuries of humanity's legacy—the European fairy tale—are largely accessed now through the entertainment industry and its commodities. Its products hold power over us in part because they reach back to our deepest instincts and collective unconscious; benevolent kingdoms and harmonious villages are accessible now not through oral transmission but through computer games and packaged videos. In addition to its exploration of the bright gleam and highly ordered spaces of the box stores and malls of the United States, Copia equally images the worn and discarded products that overflow the shelves of thrift and secondhand stores and the shuttered malls that dot the American landscape since the economic downturn of 2008 (fig. 2). The perfect symmetry and vivid colors that characterize the earlier images become chaotic and faded, while the structures themselves remain only as ghosts of themselves. [End Page 2] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Brian Ulrich, Pep Boys 3, 2009, from Copia: Dark Stores, color photograph. Collection: Ulrich. The photographic oeuvre of Brian Ulrich has been widely and ingeniously analyzed; his record of modern consumer culture has been mined for its poetic resonance and the way it lays bare the inner workings of contemporary American life.2 Despite their powerful evocation of twenty-first-century consumption, the photographs that constitute Copia are haunted by ideas and images first articulated by the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, in his magisterial—and never finished—The Arcades Project of the 1930s. It's a paradox: Benjamin's The Arcades Project, written by a twentieth-century German to elucidate nineteenth-century Paris, being used here to illuminate twenty-first-century America. Benjamin himself might have savored such a set of historical displacements. In the following pages, I argue that a close reading of Benjamin's texts unlocks some of the mythic, phantasmagoric content of Ulrich's images and that the photographs, in their specificity, give form to Benjamin's doomed project and to his concept of the dialectical image. In this essay, I use the language and imagery of The Arcades Project to...

Walter Benjamin's Berliner Kindheit um 1900: Longing, Enchantment and the Material Subject

ABSTRACTThe aim of this paper is to offer an interpretation of Walter Benjamin's Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin Childhood Around 1900). Exploring the style and the content of Benjamin's text, both of which portray the world of his childhood as a place of enchantment, I suggest that Benjamin creates in this text a conception of the self as displaced into the surrounding material world. I argue that, in doing this, Benjamin seeks to explore the materiality of the subject and erase its subjection to time, creating a self that is constituted only by space. I seek to show that this is part of Benjamin's strategy of exploring a decentred conception of agency. In all this, I suggest, Benjamin converts his own childhood into a work of art in which there is a longing for redemption that cannot finally be achieved but that expresses an important understanding of the truth of a human life.

Der Kult des Kapitals. Kapitalismus und Religion bei Walter Benjamin ed. by Mauro Ponzi et al.

Reviewed by: Der Kult des Kapitals. Kapitalismus und Religion bei Walter Benjamin ed. by Mauro Ponzi et al. Anna Elizabeth Henke (bio) Mauro Ponzi, Sarah Scheibenberger, Dario Gentili, Elettra Stimilli (eds.). Der Kult des Kapitals. Kapitalismus und Religion bei Walter Benjamin. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017. 410 pages. ISBN 9783825365899. It is refreshing to see a collection of essays on Walter Benjamin penned by an unusual group of suspects. Der Kult des Kapitals was inspired by a meeting of the Italian Benjamin Society and while familiar names like Sam Weber and Uwe Steiner do appear, it is encouraging to know that Benjamin's work has found new homes outside of America and Germany. Among those who face the daunting task of writing about Benjamin, it is a common practice to concentrate on a favorite work, but it is less common to see a collection of nearly twenty essays all dedicated to reading the same piece of writing. In this case, that fragment, which belongs to Benjamin's early works, is "Capitalism as Religion." The editors of the collection take the financial crisis of 2008 for inspiration, but the meditation feels coincidentally timelier as an opportunity to commemorate Werner Hamacher, who passed away last year. Hamacher's essay from 2002, "Schuldgeschichte" (translated into English by Kirk Wetters as "Guilt History: Benjamin's Sketch 'Capitalism as Religion'"), was a—perhaps the—ground-breaking reading of the fragment. Though the editors want to make the claim that the fragment has finally reached the Jetztzeit of its legibility because of the political and economic realities staring us in the face today, this collection, as much as any essay on "Capitalism as Religion," owes a great debt to Hamacher's reading. Hamacher's essay appeared originally in another collection, edited by Dirk Baecker, dedicated to and named after the same fragment by Benjamin. This was also where Uwe Steiner's "Die Grenzen des Kapitalismus. Kapitalismus, Religion und Politik in Benjamins Fragment 'Kapitalismus als Religion'" made [End Page 795] its first appearance. Since a reprint of Steiner's essay opens this new collection, it seems a bit rich of the editors to introduce their book with the claim that their publication was necessitated by widespread misunderstandings of Benjamin's fragment. Nevertheless, even if we do date one formative moment of legibility back to Baecker's 2002 collection, Ponzi et al. are clearly hoping that Benjamin's musings on the religious nature of capitalism will finally begin to reach a wider audience in light of the financial meltdown. More than correcting misapprehensions of the text then, the collection seems poised to capitalize on recent interest in the limits of capitalism. But capitalizing on a crisis in order to renew interest in Benjamin is some capitalizing that many of us can probably get behind. That being said, the editors are betting on much more than a moment of legibility for Benjamin's text: they are hoping that the moment of legibility Benjamin predicted in his fragment is at hand. "Capitalism as Religion" sets itself up as an explicit critique of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. According to Weber, capitalism as we know it would not have been possible without the value system we inherited from Christianity. According to Benjamin, capitalism is not so much a product of Christianity as a religion itself. Indeed, it is unprecedented among religions: the economic theology of capitalism places no value on atonement: its rituals are invested in the accumulation of debt entirely for its own sake (rather than, for instance, in order to lend force to the forgiveness of debts). Debt orders history: as Hamacher puts it, "everything that happens is guilt" (Hamacher 83)1; everything that happens "is indebted and indebting" (Benjamin 6:92).2 Divesting ourselves of guilt is by no means straightforward. At the outset of the fragment, Benjamin states: "Wir können das Netz in dem wir stehen nicht zuziehn. Später wird dies jedoch überblickt werden" (17). We cannot simply close the net of debt—though frankly, this may prove a blessing. If we were to close it, we would close it on ourselves. If there is any hope for us...

After Language as Such: Gershom Scholem, Werner Kraft, and the Question of Mathematics

This article investigates a forgotten essay contest proposed by Gershom Scholem to Werner Kraft in the wake of Walter Benjamin's seminal text “On Language as Such and On the Language of Man” (1916). Intent on completing Benjamin's language essay by focusing on the relationship among language, symbolism, and mathematics, the contest and conversation sparked by Benjamin explores the enigmatic proposition with which his essay leaves off: that language is both communication of the communicable and a symbol of the incommunicable. The effects of Benjamin's “On Language” can thus be found in Scholem's formulation of a privative structure of communication in mathematics, lament, and his translations of the Book of Lamentations that—negatively—communicates language's own limits. That Scholem locates in mathematics such an aesthetic strategy, while Kraft's responses remain ambivalent about mathematics, indicates a growing concern over mathematics’ supposed opposition to language and representation, which prefigure Benjamin's and the Frankfurt School's later polemics against mathematics.

Critique and Violence

As I read Andrew Benjamin's book on Walter Benjamin this past March, the question of violence seemed to frame the world around me. Large parts of Bosnia were aflame due to a series of anti-capitalist protests against austerity, economic dispossession, and corruption. In Chicago, three activists collectively named the NATO 3 were being prosecuted for terrorism despite overwhelming evidence of police entrapment and prosecutorial misconduct. Thousands were living without consistent access to clean water due to a record level chemical spill in West Virginia. Eighty thousand platinum miners were on strike for safer working conditions in South Africa. Drone warfare has become the new normal. The birthdays of slain teen Trayvon Martin and civil rights activist Rosa Parks came and went, largely without remark. The intervening months seem merely to have accelerated the carnage and despair.If philosophy is to be about the world, if it is to hold critical purchase on the structures we collectively inhabit and the experiences which constitute us as subjects, then central to our discipline must be a robust consideration of the question of violence in all of its varied manifestations. It is from this vantage, as thinkers situated inside a violent world, that we must consider and applaud Andrew Benjamin's framing question: what promises and possibilities do the texts of Walter Benjamin, one of the twentieth century's most prescient thinkers of violence, hold for us today?Working with Walter Benjamin meditates on this very question, mounting a series of reinterpretations of key texts in Benjamin's corpus. Beginning with a consideration of Benjamin's early essay Towards and Critique of Violence and ending with an analysis of the multiple iterations of On the Concept of History, Andrew Benjamin's text presents Benjamin's corpus as a coherent whole, one which grows and develops over time, but which remains anchored in certain key, central concepts and themes which recur. In this way, Andrew Benjamin stages Towards a Critique of Violence not only as the first text chronologically, but also as one which develops a crucial philosophical architecture for the pieces discussed in later chapters. As it would be impossible to comment adequately on all pieces of such dense and varied work, I will take Professor Benjamin's suggestion to consider Towards a Critique of Violence as fundamental to all Benjamin's works and confine my comments to his chapter on this seminal essay.Andrew Benjamin frames his intervention into Towards a Critique of Violence/Zur Kritik der by arguing for the necessity of retranslating Gewalt, traditionally rendered as or sometimes as 'force,' as 'operability.' Drawing on Arendt's distinction between power and violence, Andrew Benjamin argues that Benjamin, when discussing Gewalt, means something more akin to what Arendt means by power-the condition for the possibility of structures, and in particular, political structures to operate. Under this paradigm, violence means only what Andrew Benjamin at multiple points calls actual or literal 'violence' and what other authors have referred to as individual, discrete, or subjective violence. The distinction between operability and 'literal' violence thus opposes divine and mythic violence as irreconcilable, non-contiguous, as modes of intervention which are fundamentally in kind and which share nothing. Positing this irreducible difference is what allows Andrew Benjamin to, for example, translate Staatsgewalt as 'the operability of the state' while continuing to render gottliche Gewalt as 'divine violence'; as fundamentally opposed, there is no reason to render them under the same linguistic sign in translation.Andrew Benjamin calls these different and radically incommensurable,1 but I'd like to pose the following question: if they are so incommensurable, why does Benjamin name both of them Gewalt? This question does not seek to reduce the obvious and marked differences between modes or kinds of Gewalt that Benjamin describes; rather, I would like to investigate why, despite these differences, Benjamin finds all of them to be differentiations of the same thing. …

Desperately Seeking the Jewish Kingdom of Ethiopia: Benjamin of Tudela and the Horn of Africa (Twelfth Century)

The isolated mention of the existence of a powerful Jewish polity in the Horn of Africa by Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela in the twelfth century AD has generally been given such credence by the twentieth-century orientalistes that it is often considered the first mention of the people later to be known as Falasha. This short passage has indeed engendered a large amount of scholarly literature, which has partially obscured the wider historical and geographical context to which it refers and in which it was produced. Beyond his formulation of the hypothesis of this Jewish polity, which, it will be argued, probably never existed, this article suggests that Benjamin's Jewish viewpoint has much more to tell us about the regional scene than has been recognized. First, analyzed as an itinerary, Benjamin's text sheds new light on the trading routes of the time. Second, the comparison of this text with other sources from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries provides new perspectives on the religious, politica...

Bondless Love

Given this opportunity to reflect on The Bonds of Love (Benjamin, 1988) 25 years later, I read Benjamin's text as a bridge between political theory and psychoanalytic practice. In so doing, I hope to recognize Benjamin's profound influence on my thinking about recognition and destruction in collective erotic experience. I suggest that Benjamin opens the door to the investigation of eros in a collective unconscious. Yet, perhaps because The Bonds of Love predates the rise of the Internet, aspects of recognition that connote libidinization by an erotic collective are sequestered from intrapsychic phenomena and housed in a protointersubjective realm, the ideal, sustaining a long held psychoanalytic priority on loss and narcissistic injury in subject formation. I champion opening the intrapsychic realm to the fantasmatic collective by discussing Grindr, an iPhone app that provides public space for homoerotic desire.

Homo Kantius

One of fundamental insights of Immanuel Kant's Copernican revolution is discovery of an essentially legislative, law-giving aspect of not only our practical relationship to world, but of our knowing relation to objects. Such legislative dimension, and justification it requires, has recently been highlighted as requiring paradoxical space of illegitimacy in Giorgio Agamben's account of state of exception. In this essay I will argue that by extending Agamben's description of paradoxes of sovereignty to Kant's of Pure Reason, we are able to articulate new understanding of sovereignty of transcendental subject. I do so by showing that there is zone of indistinction between interiority and exteriority that grounds Kant's analytic in such way that paradox of sovereignty is at work at two limits of transcendental project: transcendental unity of apperception and thing in itself. These correlate concepts and dualism they produce are not an evasion of those paradoxes and flight into subjective sovereignty, but rather an explication of state of exception upon which Kantian law is itself erected. I will argue that Kant's attempt to secure legality of Reason's self-critique is only arrived at through detour into careful articulation of paradoxes of limits of law and state of exception. In order to do so, I will first justify extension of Agamben's analysis of law to Kant's first critique, and then turn to way paradoxical space of illegitimacy opens up respectively in Kant's account of transcendental unity of apperception and thing in itself. I conclude by suggesting that Kant's project of self-legislation or self-grounding is an attentive response to such paradoxical and difficult zones of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion. This conclusion opens up third option of interpreting sovereign law in Kant against dominant though contradictory criticisms of Kant, namely, that Kantian subject is not sovereign enough and that it is too sovereign and despotic. Quaestio Juris What right (quid juris) could one possibly have in extending juridical concepts of sovereignty and state of exception to analytic of Kant's of Pure Reason! Of course, Agamben himself claims that these concepts are not merely juridical, but extend to very being of politics and its relation to Ufe.1 But it is one thing to extend them to political ontology, and yet another to text that is primarily about relationship between rational finite cognition and its objects of knowledge. One possible justification might be found in fact that main sources of Agamben's analysis, namely, Carl Schmitt's Political Theology and Walter Benjamin's Critique of Violence, are themselves engaged with and against Neo-Kantian interpretations of same concepts. Beyond fact that Benjamin's text cites Hermann Cohen's work on ethics of pure will,2 it is also written few years after he claimed that the central task of coming philosophy will be to take deepest intimations it draws from our times and our expectation of great future, and turn them into knowledge by relating them to Kantian system.3 Alternatively, Schmitt's text is an attack on Hans Kelsen's Kantian attempt to base all legal points of ascription on one fundamental Grundnorm.4 These contacts with Neo-Kantianism may well help explain why certain Kantian themes surreptitiously appear in Agamben's analysis, but do they justify their extension to supposed epistemological problems of first Critique? Since we do not want to justify this extension by appealing to facts and possibly mistaking quid facti for quid juris, legitimacy must rest on Kant's own text. That of Pure Reason is teeming with juridical metaphors can hardly be overlooked. In preface, Kant calls book a tribunal which will assure to reason its lawful claims. …

Between Creation and Last Judgement, the Creaturely and the Holy: Benjamin and Secularization

This article analyses how Benjamin takes Kraus's reference to the creaturely (Kreatur) as a symptom of an ahistorical attitude which projects the state of genesis, i.e. the world of God's creatures, into history. It reads the essay on Karl Kraus as a main site for Benjamin's dialectical approach to secularization, which is characterized by the distance both from genesis and redemption. The awareness of the fundamental difference which separates human concepts from biblical ideas or words which may be observed in many of Benjamin's texts (such as the book on the Baroque Trauerspiel and the essays on language, on Goethe's Elective Affinities, and on Kafka) forms a kind of leitmotif of his work. It is only from this radical separation that he is able to deal with the echo realm of the sacred in modernity.

Catastrophic Constellations: Picasso's Guernica and Klee's Angelus Novus

This article examines how, during the late 1930s, two paintings, Picasso's Guernica and Klee's Angelus Novus, became contextualised within discourses of catastrophe and conflict, creating what Walter Benjamin in his Passagenwerk termed 'constellations'. Besides presenting this notion and its hermeneutic potentials' I examine the positioning of the historical events during this time within aesthetic discourses. In retrospect' the inter-war years, and in particular the late 1930s, can be viewed as a desperate and finally failed attempt to find an orderly, rational discourse to depict the turbulent, even frenzied situation brought about by the combination of new technologies which in tandem with Fascist ideology made the bombings of Gernica, the first chapter of the Second World War, possible. Benjamin's own text about the Angelus Novus-drawing has become iconic for dealing with such catastrophes, but on a more universal level than the monumental Guernica mural. Picasso's work had been commissioned for the Spanish Pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris in 1937 and almost immediately became acknowledged for its outspoken protest against the Gernica-bombings and Fascism.

New Media and Aesthetics

Technology and aesthetics have not always been easy interlocutors, especially when 'the technological' is associated with artificiality and technique. However, prior to Benjamin's seminal text, in the 1920s Soviel artists celebrated available technologies because they saw them as 'more democratic' - that is, capable of communicating to a wider audience Today, once again, we need to think through constructivist political and theoretical appropriations of new technology, especially in the form of new media'.

Dust projects: on Walter Benjamin's Passagen-Werk and some contemporary dusty makings in architecture

In his book on Walter Benjamin's Passagen-Werk, Pierre Missac2 emphasises the relevance of Benjamin's fragmented and unfinished text for its perduring and repeatedly renewable capacity to ‘live on ...

Orthodox violence: “Critique of Violence” and Walter Benjamin's Jewish political theology

This paper deals with the role of Judaism in Walter Benjamin's famous 1921 essay on violence and law, Zur Kritik der Gewalt. Despite the intense attention devoted to this essay, the role of Jewish myth in it has not yet been thoroughly explained. This study contends that the association between what Benjamin termed revolutionary violence and the Jewish messianic tradition, which plays a central role in the evaluation of Benjamin's text, is far more problematic than has hitherto been assumed, and poses a serious challenge, which has not been fully examined in its historical context. Second, this essay claims that the subversive elements that many have supposedly found in Benjamin's text and the attempts to link these elements to messianic traditions are also unconvincing. Third, the paper contextualizes Benjamin's thought within the framework of the Jewish political–theological debate of the period. It contends that Benjamin's theory of law and justice should be understood not as a revolutionary, anti-republican text, as has been generally accepted, but as a secularized conservative orthodox one. In doing so, it seeks to shed light not only on Benjamin's early thinking and its influences, but also on the neglected element of Jewish orthodoxy within the broader topic of political theology.

Transferring Culture in Translations — Modern and Postmodern Options

Transferring Culture in Translations - Modern and Postmodern Options — The characteristic elements of the modern theories of translation by Charles Baudelaire and Sigmund Freud are outlined and described in the context of the question of how differences in culture and understanding can be recognized and translated. Translations depend on a certain homogeneity (between the different sign systems used) which can be provided by the creation of meaning through language. The understanding, acknowledgement and creation of meaning is vital for translations. Both Baudelaire and Freud are quite aware of the relative value of such meaning. In postmodernist theories, translation becomes 'necessarily impossible.' Paul de Man's and Jacques Derrida's practical use of Walter Benjamin's text on translation indeed shows that they do not translate him. They do, however, adapt him to their own view and their specific meaning. More and different meanings can be detected in Benjamin, though, and the necessity for multiple, ambiguous, but not entirely arbitrary translations must be recognized. Only a meaningful, inventive combination of one's own and the other's positions can make cultural transfer and the acknowledgement and tentative understanding of otherness possible.

Benjamin-Handbuch: Leben, Werk, Wirkung by Burkhard LindnerArchiv, Zitat, Nachleben: Die Medien bei Walter Benjamin und das Medium Benjamin by Amália Kerekes, Nicolas Pethes, Peter Plener

MLR, I02.4, 2007 I I9I keeping with thebook's stated aim of appealing toan audience whose interestsextend beyond the cinema. In addition there is a very fullbibliography which, togetherwith an index of Jewish artists and administrators working in theGerman and Austrian film industry up to 1933, filmhistorians will find indispensable. UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK SEAN ALLAN Benjamin-Handbuch: Leben- Werk- Wirkung. Ed. by BURKHARDLINDNER. Stutt gart:Metzler. 2oo6. xiii+720pp. ?64.95. ISBN 978-3-476-oi985-I. Archiv- Zitat- Nachleben: Die Medien beiWalter Benjamin und dasMedium Ben jamin. Ed. by AMALIA KEREKES, NICOLAS PETHES, and PETER PLENER. (Bu dapester Studien zur Literaturwissenschaft, 7) Bern and Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang. 2005. 2IO pp. SwF 57; 639. ISBN 978-3-631-53834-0. Walter Benjamin's popularity as a thinker, writer, and critic continues unabated across the humanities; over the past fewyears this has resulted, alongside the usual flood ofmonographs and articles, in a number ofmore general studies and introductions which have attempted to take stock of Benjamin's work and legacy.The Benjamin Handbuch marks themost ambitious and expansive of such projects; conceived as a combination of companion, referencework, and introduction, itsaim is to transcend Benjamin's appropriation by individual disciplines and to re-emphasize the manifold concerns and trajectories of hiswritings. This critical agenda is reflected in theHandbuch's overall structure: the articles, written by scholars both German and international, are divided into two rather uneven parts. The first,headed 'Leben, Werk, Wirkung', takes up around sixty pages and provides brief outlines of Benjamin's life,of his reception by different movements and disciplines, and of editions, archives, and bibliographical tools. The second part, broadly entitled 'Analysen', spans the remaining 6oo pages and ex plores Benjamin's texts under five different rubrics: 'Intellektuelle Freundschaft'; 'Messianismus, Asthetik, Politik'; 'Literaturkritik,Avantgarde, Medien, Publizistik'; 'Dichtungsanalyse und Autorbild'; and 'Sprachphilosophie; literarisches und auto biographisches Schreiben'. These subsections each contain between three and four teen articles which focus either on individual texts or on more general themes and configurations. As thismacrostructure indicates, the goal of theHandbuch isnot, as theeditor stresses, to insertBenjamin's thought into a rigid biographical chronology, or to reassert the commonplace distinction between early, theologically oriented texts and laterpolitical writings. Neither, however, does theHandbuch follow the structure of theGesammelte Schriften,whose volumes divide Benjamin's writings according to formal criteria such as textual genre and state of completion. As the editor argues, Benjamin's works are too complex, his thought-processes and intellectual interests both too diverse and too interconnected, to be constructively subsumed under such external categories. The Handbuch proposes instead a different approach: to revisit Benjamin's writings by focusing closely on individual textsor thematic configurations. The best articles in the collection offeran introduction for the interested novice while also providing new insights into supposedly familiar,canonical texts.Burkhard Lindner's piece on 'Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzier barkeit' rises to this challenge in an exemplary manner. Stressing that none of the threeversions of the essay can layclaim tobeing definitive, he extrapolates the salient points ofBenjamin's argument through a 'synoptic' cross-reading of all threeGerman versions and the French translation. In an attempt tomove beyond narrow media theoretical interpretations,Lindner reads the 'Kunstwerk' essay as Benjamin's most sustained and self-reflexive contribution tophilosophical aesthetics and relates Ben I I92 Reviews jamin's positions to those of Hegel, Adorno, and Heidegger. The strength of this article lies in the fact that itdoes not simply recount Benjamin's argument but rather presents amore detached, systematic overview. Not all contributions are as successful: Eckhardt K6hn's piece on the closely related 'Kleine Geschichte der Photographie', forinstance, offers little more than an array of quotations coupled with some historical references,but fails toexplore thedense network of (self-)quotations and intertextual referenceswhich make this essay such a vital part ofBenjamin's ongoing engagement with thevisual media, theirhistoricity,and theirpolitical, aesthetic, and psychological dimensions. Alongside articles on individual texts or textcorpora, thehandbook also contains broader thematic contributions covering such topics as Benjamin's travelwritings and city portraits; his work for the radio; his writings on and for children; and his encounters with French and Russian literatureand culture. These articles are...

Deconstructive Justice and the “Critique of Violence”: On Derrida and Benjamin

This essay presents a critical interpretation of Derrida's deconstructive reading of Walter Benjamin's text, “Critique of Violence.” It examines the relationship between deconstruction and justice, and the parallel Derrida draws between deconstructive reading and Benjamin's account of pure violence. I argue that Derrida blurs Benjamin's distinction between the political general strike (which simply inverts state power relations) and the proletarian general strike (which non-violently disrupts such power relations). As a consequence, Derrida criticises Benjamin's metaphysical complicity with the violence that lead to the Holocaust. Derrida's deconstructive reading of Benjamin, I conclude, underplays its Marxist dimensions, privileging the theological and textual dimensions of Benjamin's thought over the political and historical.