Walter Benjamin, Marxist literary theologian

[e_dog]

Been reading Benjamin's (posthumous) "Illuminations" and "Reflections" and "Selected Writings. Vol. 1".

it must be said that Benjamin is an incredible writer and philosopher. forget Heidegger. Benjamin is probably the best German philosopher of the twenties and thirties. (as always, the persecuted are wiser than the persecutors.)

Benjamin doesn't theorize. at times, he crafts enigmas that immediately inspire thought. a highly allegorical writer but also capable of solid historical criticism.

[e_dog]

Reflections on a Title


life, like
history,
is a
one way street.

now

you can occasionally
attempt to travel
backwards but
it carries a heavy risk.

[ZyzxzxzyZ]

offered a choice 'tween Herrr Doktor Heidegger and the strange marxist-theosophy of Benjamin, I would choose, um, neither: but return to the Tractatus, or darwin........

[e_dog]

well, Darwin wasn't writing much philosophy in German during the 1920s and 30s (the frame of my claim). Wittgenstein's views didn't attain the level of mastery until the Investigations, though some of his stuff from the thirties is heading in the right direction, e.g. the Blue and Brown Books. the Tractatus is an interesting but confused text on some levels. though i agree he's is better than Heidegger in any case. Benjamin like Wittgenstein but in different circumstances both died at the height of their intellectual/theoretical powers, judging by their late works, and there is no telling where they may have taken them if they lived longer.

in the case of Heidegger, his best contribution is that of producing a slew of heretical heideggerians who took the useful elelments of his thought, combined it with other thinkers (such as Benjamin or Wittgenstein, but more often Freud, Sassure, Levi-Straus, and Marx) and produced work better than the master. on the other hand, no Wittgenstein can come close to Ludwig himself. Benjamin, on the other hans, is the most under-rated of the bunch, at least amongst the philosophical crowd, yet his work is in my opinion the most profound and, indeed, relevant to today. Actually you can go through his works and see many of the themes developed by postmodernism in an intial form -- but often in a more vital and pregnant way -- in benjamin's writings. only Derrida sems to acknowledge the debt as explicitly but i believe there is a a whole lot more influence than is truly acknowledged out there.

[ZyzxzxzyZ]

I don't really know how one assesses philosophers any more. Having read some excerpts of Benjamin online, it appears he's sort of an existentialist as well as marxist, and since there are numerous problems with either of those "camps" I would tend to disagree with his programme. Isn't there sort of a mystical if not Kabbalahistic aspect to his writing as well? I do admire some of Adorno's political (and less dialectical) writings, though Popper and the analyticals were right in asserting most of the Frankfurtian writing was at best anecdotal (not all though). So I m sort of a leftist analytical, and I think the Tractatus is a more applicable and efficacious epistemology (as is Frege and early Russell), though with problems. And can be read as quite materialist and anti-platonic. I refuse to enter any further discussion regarding post.mod., Derrida, Foucault, etc, but will say I think Camille Paglia ripped them pretty well.

A scary pic of Rector Heidegger is included on this blog:
http://www.cinestatic.com/infinitethought/

[e_dog]

Benjamin's writing is efinitely influenced by the Judaic theological tradition, though i am not sure if Kabala per se is the relevant part thereof. what Benjamin does however, is make use of religious themes for their allegorical and parable-ic tendency to shed light on, as you phrased it, "existential" concern, though i think benjamin would hinself balk at being termed an existentialist; but, and here is how his writing neatly matches up with Adorno and other Frrankfurt scholians, his concer is always sociohistorical in a marxist vein, but he ties that concern up with a Jewish tradition of liberation of the oppressed a al exodus. thus, to use his image, their is a theology pulling the strings of the machine of historical materialism, much as marx tried to eschew religion as ideology.

Benjamin's writings, like most Frankfurtians, is very wide ranging an diverse in concerns and even styles so it is ridicualous to dismiss them with cursory remarks. for example, some of Benjamin's texts are enigmatic, quasi-theological tracts; others are clear works of critical scholarship and theory; most are a mix of both. see for example, his interpretations of Proust and Kafka in Illuminations for his literary scholarly criticism. In that same volume, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is an incredible survey of the significance of technology for modern artforms including photography and film, written in the early thrities but of better quality than mosty cultural studies work done today. And his Task of the Translator, ca. 1923,is a work of philosophy of language, art and poetics that would put most logical positivism of its day to shame, i.e. would enable to be revealed the thoroughly simplistic and unrealistic view of language and languages that infected logical positivism until its demise in and around the 1950s. that of course is not his target -- rather he is in that essay debating a tradition view of the nature of translation of poetry -- but the conception of language developed therein is, in my opinion, far superior to anything coming out of analytic philosophy at the time, including Bertrand and Ludwig and their admirers.