Roberts, Julian. Review of WALTER BENJAMIN. NDPR (January 2010).

Steiner, Uwe.  Walter Benjamin: an Introduction to his Work and Thought.  Trans. Michael Winkler.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010.

Is concern with Walter Benjamin a form of political activism? Should it be? This question has divided commentators since the 1960s, when Benjamin served not only as a banner for the student revolt, but also -- in direct contrast -- as a model for the sober scholarship gradually returning to the German universities.

Undoubtedly the latter view has prevailed, if only in the sense that Benjamin today is a staple of the Ph.D. industry. Steiner's book, which in essence is a chronological catalogue of Benjamin's oeuvre, rather confirms this. There is nothing wrong with this, in principle. Certainly there is only a limited amount of mileage to be extracted from Benjamin's career as a martyr, moving though it may be. And his work provides little direct guidance for the class struggle.

Despite this, criticism of the universities, or more generally of intellectual practice in general, underlies Benjamin's whole project. From our perspective, it is not just the oft-lamented failure of Frankfurt University to recognise Benjamin's talents which need concern us. German universities were at the forefront of the whole Nazi "movement", as indeed were other major components of public culture including the legal system and even, in part, the Churches. All these institutions, little changed, still exist. Is it possible to do justice to Benjamin's work without raising questions which bear directly on modern academic life? This is an issue which Steiner, consistent with the sober approach taken by his book, does not pursue. Related topics which have to be mentioned because of their prominence in Benjamin's work, such as the "Strategist in the Literary Struggle", are firmly consigned to scare quotes. At the end of his book, when Steiner raises the question of Benjamin's "relevance", he rather despairingly finds it in the fact that academics seem forever able to discover "new and hitherto overlooked aspects in his oeuvre".

This strikes me as a little disappointing, and it certainly raises the question of what Steiner might have missed in his subject. If one thing is missing in Steiner's basically thorough account, it is not the leftist political background, which he explains quite fully, but something rather different, namely theology. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22449.

Osborne, Peter. "Walter Benjamin." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY January 18, 2011.

Walter Benjamin's importance as a philosopher and critical theorist can be gauged by the diversity of his intellectual influence and the continuing productivity of his thought. Primarily regarded as a literary critic and essayist, the philosophical basis of Benjamin's writings is increasingly acknowledged. They were a decisive influence upon Theodor W. Adorno's conception of philosophy's actuality or adequacy to the present (Adorno 1931). In the 1930s, Benjamin's efforts to develop a politically oriented, materialist aesthetic theory proved an important stimulus for both the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the Marxist poet and dramatist Bertolt Brecht.

The delayed appearance of Benjamin's collected writings has determined and sustained the Anglophone reception of his work. (A two-volume selection was published in German in 1955, with a full edition not appearing until 1972–89; English anthologies first appeared in 1968 and 1978; the four-volume Selected Writings, 1996–2003.) Originally received in the context of literary theory and aesthetics, the philosophical depth and cultural breadth of Benjamin's thought have only recently begun to be fully appreciated. Despite the voluminous size of the secondary literature that it has produced, his work remains a continuing source of productivity. An understanding of the intellectual context of his work has contributed to the recent philosophical revival of Early German Romanticism. His essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility’ remains a major theoretical text for film theory. One-Way Street and the work arising from his unfinished research on nineteenth century Paris (The Arcades Project), provide a theoretical stimulus for cultural theory and philosophical concepts of the modern. Benjamin's messianic understanding of history has been an enduring source of theoretical fascination and frustration for a diverse range of recent philosophical thinkers, including Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben and, in a critical context, Jürgen Habermas. The ‘Critique of Violence’ and ‘On the Concept of History’ are important sources for Derrida's discussion of messianicity, which has been influential, along with Paul de Man's discussion of allegory, for the poststructuralist reception of Benjamin's writings. Aspects of Benjamin's thought have also been associated with the recent revival of political theology, although it is doubtful this reception is true to the tendencies of Benjamin's own political thought. . . .

Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/.

Cfp: "Walter Benjamin: Convergences of Aesthetics and Political Theology," Universidade de Chile, October 20-22, 2010.

With his stress on the constellation of art, religion and politics, Walter Benjamin has become a key thinker for the contemporary debate on the role of religion in the public sphere. Benjamin placed philosophy –the practice of criticism- at the service of art, seeking to release a political and theological potential he called “messianic”, far from every theocracy and fundamentalism. Benjamin’s urgent demand for the “politicization of art” as an antidote to the fascist “æsthetizationof politics” is well known. The aim of this international conference is to understand and discuss the bridge between the aforementioned demand and the contemporary attempts, by many thinkers influenced by Benjamin, to “politicize theology”, now understood as an antidote to the fundamentalist theologization of politics. Organizing Institutions: · Universidad de Chile · Instituto de Humanidades, Universidad Diego Portales · Goethe Institut,Santiago de Chile · DAAD, Santiago de Chile Conference Committee: · Vanessa Lemm, Universidad Diego Portales · Horst Nitschack, Universidad de Chile · Pablo Oyarzún, Universidad de Chile · Eduardo Sabrovsky, Universidad Diego Portales · Miguel Vatter, Universidad Diego Portales Confirmed international speakers: · Hauke Brunkhorst, Flensburg Universität, Flensburg, Germany · Gertrud Koch, Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany · Bettina Menke, Universität Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany We welcome proposals for 20-30 minute papers on all topics relevant to the conference theme, including the following: The artwork’s aura and its effacement: Technical reproducibility or alterity of the absolute? The crisis of experience. The concept of “profane illumination”. Language and the sacred. The Angel of History and “dialectics at a standstill”. Allegory and melancholy from the Trauerspiel to Baudelaire. Benjamin and the question of sovereignty. The Benjamin-Scholem dialogue. Kabbalah and Messianism. Benjamin and Political Theology Papers on other relevant topics will also be considered. Early submissions are welcome. Conference languages are Spanish and English. We will work with simultaneous translation during plenary sessions. Please send an abstract of a maximum of 600 words and a short bio to conferenciabenjamin@gmail.com, no later than April 15th 2010. Notification of acceptance will be sent no later than April 30th 2010. For further information, please contact the organizers at conferenciabenjamin@gmail.com.

Jacobson, Eric. Review of Stephane Moses, THE ANGEL OF HISTORY. NDPR (November 2009).

Mosès, Stéphane. The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem. Trans. Barbara Harshav. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. Stéphane Mosès's The Angel of History is a classic in modern Jewish philosophy and a fine choice for the Stanford series Cultural Memory in the Present edited by Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries. The new translation by Barbara Harshav has made a meaningful contribution to this chain of tradition, carefully rendering complicated phrases from French that once served as interpretations in thought and deed from German. Since the first publication of this pioneering study in 1992, it is surprising to note how much has changed in the scholarship on Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. For one, it is no longer common to place Benjamin under the lens of Marxism. Equally, Rosenzweig is more commonly viewed in the light of Levinas, Expressionism and Heidegger today than in the shadow of Martin Buber. But perhaps even more, our picture of Scholem has considerably changed with the ongoing scholarship of the Kabbalah. We have generally come to see all three figures in their intellectual context more deeply rooted in modern German history and our understanding of the tensions evident in their work -- between thought and action, rupture and causality, and indeed a Jew in a Christian world -- has expanded considerably since the first publication of this book. The first English translation cannot help but raise questions regarding the study of modern German-Jewish thought two decades on. The book is divided into three equal parts with each figure receiving three chapters, yet Rosenzweig emerges as the dominant figure. This is perhaps inevitable from a scholar whose earlier work entitled System and Revelation is a close reading of Rosenzweig's magnum opus, The Star of Redemption. Still there are formal grounds for Rosenzweig's preeminence. An exchange of letters from 1921 establishes the influence of The Star of Redemption on Benjamin and Scholem. There is evidence to suggest that Benjamin shapes his early Messianism in relation to The Star. Scholem's debt to Rosenzweig is evident in many places, not least in a 1930 lecture delivered in Rosenzweig's memory. With Rosenzweig as the benchmark, Mosès seeks to uncover the affinities between the three figures in the notions of history, time and language. He is the first to recognize the conceptual mutuality of the three authors and the need to understand them as part of a common tradition. However, in emphasizing their commonality, thematic structures meant to suggest fraternity occasionally ring hollow and the contrasts insufficient. For example, the association of the three with the categories of "religion", "revolution" and "Zionism", as Mosès suggests in the opening chapter, yields very little ground. Whereas the religion as leitmotif for Rosenzweig is self-evident, there is a very narrow road to revolution in Benjamin and little practical Zionism in Scholem. Much stronger is the notion of a common approach to history, which Mosès understands as a revolt against the idea of progress, a history leading to greater forms of reason that finds an epiphany in Hegel. As he remarks: "Past suffering is not abolished even by a triumphant future, which claims to give them meaning, and more than thwarted hopes are refuted by the failures that seem to sanction them" (11). . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=18006.

PUB: Grech, John, ed. "Walter Benjamin and the Virtual: Politics, Art, and Mediation in the Age of Global Culture." TRANSFORMATIONS 15 (2007).

Two things prevail in the essays presented in this collection. The first is the intense interest in the work of Benjamin coupled with a desire to re-invest it meaningfully into theories concerning the living relations of each author’s world. The second is the diversity of positions, terms of engagement, and interpretations of Benjamin’s work the authors herein adopt. Perhaps this second feature ought to have been expected, for just as the virtual dispersion through the media has diluted the power of the producer to determine the meaning of the artifact, so too, a diversity of approaches, interpretations, and applications can be expected to be taken in relation to Benjamin. . . . Read the entire issue here: http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_15/editorial.shtml.

Conrad, Peter. "The Scrap Merchant Supreme [on Walter Benjamin]." GUARDIAN January 27, 2008.

'These fragments I have shored against my ruin,' says a nameless voice in TS Eliot's The Waste Land. The fragments are a collage of quotations, jumbled mementos of a lost world. For Walter Benjamin, this might have been the motive of cultural history: he, too, salvaged scraps from the wreckage of culture, anthologising quotes in the hope of reconstructing a past that he knew to be irretrievable. Having fled from Germany after the Nazi putsch, he tenderly reassembled memories of his Berlin childhood in a short, episodic autobiography that is also a tour of the city during the days of the Weimar Republic. In his Parisian exile, he conjured up the vanished Paris of the 19th century. . . . Read the rest here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,,2247445,00.html.

Szekely, Michael. "Rethinking Benjamin: the Function of the Utopian Ideal." CULTURAL LOGIC (2006)

Sustaining a general engagement with Walter Benjamin has proven to be an endless discovery of philosophical, as well as poetical, perspectives. However, adding the theme of utopia to the discourse presents yet another dimension -- one that, paradoxically, combines philosophy and poetics explicitly, and yet with great complexity. Exemplary of this are Benjamin's views regarding "utopia," a theme that figures somewhat multi-directionally in his overall philosophical montage (this latter being Benjamin's preferred method of theoretical exploration and discovery). On the one hand, utopia is an underlying aspect of his project, one crucial aspect among many. On the other hand, utopia might be said to be the over-arching aspect of his project, the ultimate goal to which all of his work adhered. Moreover, the possibility of utopia is seen as potentially both at hand -- i.e., existing immanently in the stories and products of material culture -- and latent, until activated within something of a collective unconscious laden with scattered dreams and wishes unfulfilled. . . . Read the rest here: http://clogic.eserver.org/2006/szekely.html.

Reviews of BERLIN CHILDHOOD AROUND 1900 by Walter Benjamin

Reviews of Berlin Childhood around 1900 by Walter Benjamin may be found:

• here (http://ejournals.library.vanderbilt.edu/ameriquests/viewarticle.php?id=114&layout=html) and
• here (http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/eras/edition_8/PDF/sleight2review.pdf).