Walter Benjamin's Concept of the Image
Benjamin writes in ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ that ‘without distinctions, existence becomes subject to the concept of nature, which grows into monstrosity’ (SW I, 315). He counters this pallid, featureless space with the luminous space of the novella, in which ‘everything, sharply contoured, is at a peak’ (SW I, 331). ‘[I]f the novel,’ he writes, ‘like a maelstrom, draws the reader irresistibly into its interior, the novella strives toward distance, pushing every living creature out of its magic circle’ (SW I, 330). In the theses on ‘The Concept of History’ and in the Arcades Project the notion of ‘fulfilled,’ or ‘now time’ [Jetztzeit] does not reposition ‘major’ and ‘minor’ events into the indifferent homogeneity of time ‘without distinctions.’ Rather, Benjamin’s model of history as citation aims to demolish the distinction between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ events in order to restore to each moment of time its ‘sharp contours’ and true potential. These late works pursue, on an historical level, the claims made in his writing on Proust and Baudelaire for the significance of the experience of the child and the pristine experience disclosed in the perception of similitude. Like the early essay on Goethe’s novel in which the false totality of semblance is broken when it is contrasted with the prosaic truth of the novella’s revelation, so too in Benjamin’s Arcades the totalising idea of the past as complete is broken apart in the experience of the wishes lodged in the faded commodities. The faded commodity, like the ‘minor’ events of history, fulfils Benjamin’s aspiration to present the (historical) truth, such as the vitiated hopes of past generations, in an experienceable form. In all these examples, what is significant about the truth that is communicated is that it is univocal and this is because it does not appear in a silent, opaque, sensuous form, but as a citation.
This book has used the topic of the image to try to capture some of the major fault lines structuring Benjamin’s heterogeneous corpus. In some contexts, such as the opposition he deploys between the Judaic God and the Greek myth, the sensuous form of the image carries demonic force. In others—such as the perception of similitude in the case of the Proustian image of the past or the human ‘revelation’ of history’s truth in citation—it has redemptive potentials. Benjamin’s aversion to totalising aesthetic form pervades each of these specific contexts. What kind of conceptual vocabulary is best suited to capture this aversion and plot the different coordinates that determine his use of the concept of the image?
Points of escape from the (totalising) form are the object of Benjamin’s quest throughout his career. The strait gate through which the Messiah might enter, the creative word of God that binds nature’s forms to truth, and the baroque knowledge that sees in prosaic forms nothing of enduring value are so many points of escape. Such points are transcendent in the precise sense that they lead beyond the chaos and ambiguity of (totalising) form. The leitmotif of this approach revolves around the scrutiny of non- subjective intentions, which alone provides an exit from the entrapment in sensuous form. The creative word of God, like the historical index of (past) articulate human wishes in the nineteenth century, charges these words and wishes with emancipatory potential. They are opposed to the anxious and guiltinducing attempts to interpret presumed intent in sensuous forms that are expressly non-communicative.
It is curious, then, that in some scholarship, the implied assessment of Benjamin’s main doctrine is contrary to this conception. For instance, in Peter Fenves’s The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time, he claims that Benjamin locates redemptive value in a notion of ‘directionless’ time, accessed through specific kinds of ‘intentionless’ states. Fenves’s account is worth examining here since he considers a number of the topics treated in this book. He places these topics, such as the experience of the child and the critique of enclosure in sensuous forms, within a grammar that, I think, is ultimately foreign to the tenor of Benjamin’s thinking. In what follows, I will comment on the main components of Fenves’s position and then set out why its corollaries undermine Benjamin’s polemical position on myth and obscure, therefore, the thrust of his critique of the entrapment of sensuous form. The vocabulary of the transcendent, I will argue, provides a more adequate perspective on what it is that Benjamin intends by his critique of the totalising hold of the sensuous form than Fenves’s notion of ‘messianic reduction.’
Fenves puts forward the thesis that Benjamin’s early metaphysical writings combined two influences: his fascination with Husserl’s notion of the phenomenological reduction, which licensed the notion of the pure apperception of things; and Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgment, which allowed him to alter the mechanism for the Husserlian reduction. With Kant, the switching off of the natural attitude under which phenomena were disclosed did not need, on Fenves’s account, to rely on the conscious intentions of the subject.
Fenves equates the distortions of the natural attitude, which the reduction suspends, with what Benjamin intends by ‘myth.’ In his words, this attitude ‘consists in the general premises that there is a world of substantial things that lie outside of our consciousness and that our experience is the result of the manner in which these things affect us.’1 The formulation of these ‘general premises’ entails that the fault Benjamin finds with myth lies with the causal and constitutive effect of the sensible world on ‘our experience.’ At the same time, however, Fenves claims that perceptually acute forms elude the grasp of intention.2 Thus the problem that drives Benjamin’s thinking is pitched at the fundamental level of his objection to the causal interactions of ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ and it pertains, presumably, to the priority that could be given to either side of this equation.3
The possibilities that Benjamin identifies in the switching off of the natural attitude leads him, according to Fenves, to the conception of the ‘messianic reduction’ of time. The messianic reduction is understood to be a ‘higher power’ under which the redemption of time is possible. Fenves renders this ‘higher power’ not in the terms of a theological vocabulary, but in relation to the mathematical one of transfinite set theory. His grounds for this are the early letters exchanged by Scholem and Benjamin on the question of time, and their discussion of Scholem’s studies in mathematics. Put this way, the horror of the onslaught of material forms, which constitutes experience, on one side, and the empty domination of the subject who possesses a grounding will, on the other, are ultimately superseded for the ‘higher’ plane of the ‘messianic reduction.’ This plane is beyond either the limitations of a community or a person; it dislocates the will but is not reachable through it, as in the prototypical case of the experience of the child.4 Fenves also invokes the involuntary nature of the experiences of shame and fantasy to expound the position.5 Notwithstanding Benjamin’s polemical understanding of the limitations of conscious intention and the way that the child is used across his writing as a counterpoint to them, the plane of the reduction as Fenves describes it is formally identical to the type of sphere of immanence without a transcendent point of reference, hence without an escape point, that Benjamin objects to in myth. I will return to this point.
The idea advanced by Arendt, under the label of the Goethean ur-phenomenon, that Benjamin was interested in how a small thing could capture the truth of the whole is revised in Fenves’s account: for him, the key issue is not Benjamin’s supposed fascination with concrete things, nor is it about the way such an object might stage a rescue of the past, through (Proustian) involuntary memory. Benjamin’s sensitivity to the enclosure of sensuous form is managed by his deployment of a version of Leibniz’s monadology in which a moment in time captures the whole expanse of time: ‘Just as every monad mirrors the universe as a whole, so does every time recapitulate all of time. History, interpolated in the form of a “constellation”, acquires the monadic character of time by virtue of an epoché whose unity is of a higher “power” than that of any activity of thinking that directs itself toward immanent objects of thought.’6 The purity that this conception aims at comes out in the adjectives Fenves chooses to describe this notion of messianic time: ‘Not only is the shape of time unimaginable; it is inviolate—and thus innocent.’7 And this naturally raises the question, as Paula Schwebel has pointed out, as to whether Fenves’s presentation of the reduction in the example of a curve with no tangents, does not then count against his argument regarding its inviolability and un-presentability.8 Even though the fact that Benjamin conducts a critique of sensuous form is noted, Fenves ignores the consequences it entails. This can be seen in the terms he chooses to present the influence of Kantian aesthetics on Benjamin, as well as in his formulation of the thesis that the ‘higher power’ Benjamin seeks is not theological but mathematical.9 Fenves’s account removes the emancipatory anchor that Benjamin seeks for human life in the transcendent perspective of theology.
Fenves’s thesis that the natural attitude for Benjamin is not switched off by the exercise of an intentional will as it is in Husserl, but in instances of the absence of ‘intention,’ seems at first glance as if it could provide a different lineage for some of the themes I have treated here. For instance, Fenves likens the importance that Benjamin ascribes to the child’s relation to things to the attentiveness to form in the Kantian theory of aesthetic judgment. Fenves draws on the parallels between the switching off of the natural attitude in phenomenology and the specific disposition towards the appreciation of form that is cultivated in the Kantian theory of the disinterested aesthetic judgment. He claims that the Kantian influence on Benjamin is decisive for his amendments to phenomenology, because in aesthetic judgment it is ‘nature’ rather than the intentional attitude of the subject that switches off the natural attitude: what ‘prompts’ the ‘major modification of the “ordinary attitude,” ’ what ‘turns it off’ is ‘nature itself—or more exactly, . . . “free beauties” of nature, which are “there” only as correlates of aesthetic delight.’10 This description of ‘nature’ in its singular forms of beauty turning off the ‘ordinary attitude,’ but only doing so to the extent that it is ‘there’ as the correlate of the subject’s pleasure is presumably formulated this way so that it neither grants priority to the subject nor to nature’s forms. However, in Kantian aesthetics it is the ordering capacity of the mind’s faculties over nature’s singular forms, which renders these latter suitable occasions for the exercise of aesthetic judgment. Hence the complaint levelled against Kant by Nietzsche and Heidegger, amongst others, that his model of aesthetic judgment is spectatorial. The fact that nature, for Kant, does not determine the interactions of the faculties but is instead in-formed by their mode of interaction is especially noticeable in the case of the sublime. Here the imagination’s failure to synthesise form leads directly to the self-esteem of the subject’s practical reason over events like storms in which the power and magnitude of nature is itself on display. Still, to take the more moderate example of nature’s free beauties, the aesthetic pleasure that results from judgments of beauty is precisely the pleasure of the faculties on the occasion of their free play. The key point that singular forms of nature are not designed for our aesthetic pleasure and yet, in eliciting and sustaining the free play of the faculties, they show that nature has an interest in the human moral vocation is not close to the ambitious dislocation of the subject’s authority or will that Fenves’s argument requires.11 Moreover, even if it were, it would be difficult to make the idea that nature switches off the subject’s faculties compatible with the aversion Benjamin has to the monstrous form that nature takes when it is inserted into the semiotic codes of myth. Benjamin, it is true, derides the limitations of merely transitory human intentions. However, the perspective he develops on history credits the human hope for emancipation with the calibre of truth that parallels his early account of God’s creative word in the essay on language. In both contexts a transcendent, non-transitory intention unlocks the vice-like grip of nature’s totalising appearances on human life.
The structuring influence Fenves gives to Husserlian phenomenology and its style of wonder at how things appear in the epoché dims the polemical tone that drives Benjamin’s writing, not least in his critical understanding of Kant’s aesthetic attitude. Crucially, it removes any space in which the critical faculties of the subject could prevail, which is Benjamin’s objection to the pacifying effect of nature in myth. Hence Fenves’s re-formulation of the phenomenological idea that things appear as they ‘are’ emphasises that they appear this way without any mediation by an intention, and his account of the transcendental relation to phenomena emphasises total suspension and pure immersion. This way of erasing the intention is also central to his formulation of the Kantian aesthetic attitude as an attitude that is switched on by ‘nature.’
The terms of Benjamin’s rebuttal of Adorno’s criticism of his draft material for the Arcades as a ‘wide-eyed presentation of facticity’ are relevant for assessing Fenves’s position. Benjamin refers Adorno to his early polemic against the pre-eminence accorded to facticity in philology in his ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ essay. It is not just a ‘sharply contoured’ relation to things that Benjamin seeks, which could be rendered roughly compatible with aspects of the phenomenological ‘return to the things themselves’ or the heightened attention of the Kantian aesthetic attitude; his thinking specifically entails the view that it is the bond with the transcendent that secures such contours and determines the truth of revelation. This is the perspective of theology in the early work. Through it, Benjamin pits the logos against the image and truth against myth. Without this external point, the chaos of materiality overwhelms. The later perspective he takes on history retains crucial features of this early position: notably, that it is the legibility of the wishes of past generations that motivates revolutionary action.
The implications of Fenves’s shift from theology to mathematics as the ‘higher power’ are worth considering: he replaces the (pernicious) authority over human life that Benjamin calls ‘myth’ with the mathematical evocation of a directionless time that similarly leaves no place for human agency, drowning it within a disorientating direction-lessness. In Benjamin’s late work the redemption of each moment of the past, i.e., the history that is ‘citable,’ or articulable, in all its moments runs counter to Fenves’s conception of an anonymous, silent ‘time’ (SW IV, 390). It is the wishes of the past that gives new definition, structure, and direction to the present moment. The adjectives Fenves uses to describe the messianic reduction in fact emphasise a featureless topography: the reduction is ‘smooth’ and ‘neutral’; it discloses the ‘innocence’ of time. The choice of vocabulary seems to introduce in a new form ‘the coercive proofs of mathematics’ that trouble Benjamin in his Trauerspiel book (U, 28). For Fenves, then, and this is the crucial point—it is not just that with mathematics the image of time can be conceived as a smooth, uninterrupted plane, but that the impulse to escape from the entrapment of form and the finite such as the oppressiveness of the passing of ‘historical’ time would be moot since the conception of time he ascribes to Benjamin is ‘higher’ in the specific sense that it is directionless and therefore, in his estimation, ‘neutral’ and ‘innocent.’
Fenves does not deal in any substantial way with Benjamin’s important early essay, ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities.’12 The picture of Benjamin that Fenves sketches is, further, incompatible in important respects with the critical remarks that Benjamin makes about phenomenology in later works, like the Arcades. Benjamin is especially keen here to mark out the terms of his dispute with phenomenology on the question of historical time and the stakes involved in the presentation of sensuous forms: ‘What distinguishes images from the “essences” of phenomenology is their historical index’ (A, N3, 1, 462). Whatever its merits on specific points of interpretation, and whether or not one accepts the parameters of the small sample of Benjamin’s writing on which Fenves advances his account, an irrevocable distance separates the image of Benjamin defended in this type of scholarship from the statements made in works that Benjamin considered to be amongst his most important. In particular, this type of reading has an inbuilt fragility: it promulgates a conceptual vocabulary as if it were suited to unlock Benjamin’s writing, when its perspective can be sustained only on the basis of omitting the major works of Benjamin’s that would unequivocally contest it. When we recall that Benjamin’s concern is that the image is a sensuous form that entraps human beings in guilt and anxiety we are in a better position to determine the conceptual vocabulary best suited to describe the works of this singular writer.
It is undeniable, for example, that Benjamin’s writing makes many references to the concept and terminology of immanence.13 What is controversial is whether his thinking excludes the transcendent perspective, such as the position he gives to God in his early thinking, or more generally to language across his corpus, and if so, what this perspective entails. This question retains its pertinence even if, as I have suggested, some of his references to God could be understood, as in his essay on ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities,’ as akin to the solitude of moral reflection. After all, the crucial point in the case of the lovers from the novella is that they stand outside the calculations and interests of ‘mere life’ and that their position is articulated in a public setting. They ‘stride . . . over the stage of choice to decision.’ He continues: ‘only the decision, not the choice, is inscribed in the book of life. For choice is natural and can even belong to the elements; decision is transcendent’ (SW I, 346). These lovers are not prey to the ‘helplessness’ that infects the ‘semblance-like love’ of ‘passion and affection’ in the characters from the novel (SW I, 344). Benjamin is very clear that without ‘faith’ in something beyond mere life (SW I, 355), human life is reduced to being the plaything of natural forces, the chaos of nature. In such chaos, Benjamin writes, the ‘mythic face’ of ‘sensuous nature . . . triumphs in the comprehensive totality of its appearances’ (SW I, 315). Benjamin argues for a bond with the transcendent to escape this fate. In the early essay on language, in his Violence essay and in the essay on Goethe’s novel this transcendent, interruptive force is called ‘God.’ Hence, in this book I have argued specifically against those interpretations that take the references in his writing to immanence as an endorsement of a self-enclosed totality of sensuous forms, or a fascination with the idea that meaning is somehow embodied in or communicated through a silent, sensuous form. Whether in Benjamin’s discussions of the aggravated distance from the divine in the profane world of baroque eschatology, or in the formulations he gives of our ‘weak messianic power’ in his work on history, the key to understanding what such references entail is that in them Benjamin looks for a point of escape from enclosure in sensuous forms that transforms these to ‘myth.’ He would not trade this escape for the ideal of the putative ‘innocence’ of ‘directionless’ time, which puts forward another idiom of enclosure.14
This book has set out the different contexts in which Benjamin tackles the problem of the image. I have shown that the approach Benjamin takes to historical emancipation combines certain features from his conceptions of Revelation and myth that were opposed in his early thinking. The schema of oppositions that characterises Benjamin’s work up until the mid-1920s is eroded at the end of his career. Nonetheless, Benjamin’s preoccupation with entrapment in sensuous form remains. In the early work, entrapment means the demonic power of the mythic ‘nature’ (SW I, 303). Later, it refers to the understanding of history as an alien form. In the early work, Benjamin appeals to the creative word of God to shatter the captivating, semblance like nature. In his late writing, the revolutionary unearthing of the (lost) wishes of past generations, provides the way out. The changes in Benjamin’s conception of the image all cleave to this fundamental impulse: to provide every (totalised) form with an exit point.
1. Peter Fenves, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, CA, 2011), 2.
2. Fenves, Messianic Reduction, 13.
3. There is a large, rigorous literature on the different philosophical influences on Benjamin’s early writing. As I mentioned in my Introduction, the problem with these accounts is that their scope is limited to Benjamin’s early writing. It does not follow that his early interest in neo-Kantian thought is in any sense a default framework for his writing after 1925. It also seems to me that in reading Benjamin philosophically, such scholarship treats a writer who was by no means a systematic thinker according to the presumption that the history of philosophy would be the best frame to provide insights into his writing. These qualifications are not intended to impugn the very good scholarship in this field, but to raise the question of the adequacy of the handle that they provide for understanding the heterogeneous corpus that Benjamin authored and especially its literary orientation. Paula Schwebel’s review of Fenves’s book hones in on the issue of how he treats Benjamin’s early philosophical influences. Fenves, she writes, never quite manages to resolve the tension between pure receptivity to phenomena and pure generation of knowledge: ‘Fenves maintains that Benjamin shares Husserl’s ideal of a fully reduced world, and that Benjamin can thus be regarded as a phenomenological thinker. The goal of the reduction, in Fenves account, is to attain an attitude of “pure receptivity” to the phenomena, without the distortions that result from “theoretical presuppositions”. But Fenves’s claim that Benjamin sought an attitude of “pure receptivity” sits uneasily with his characterization of Benjamin as an adherent to certain tenets of the Marburg School, since the explicit goal of the latter was to eliminate any residue of receptivity to a given “thing-in-itself”, instead generating objective knowledge from the spontaneous activity of pure thinking.’ Paula Schwebel, Review of Fenves, Peter D., The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time. H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews. August 2012, 1–2.
4. Fenves, Messianic Reduction, 3; and for the discussion of the child, 65.
5. Shame is also a trope that Giorgio Agamben invests with enormous significance, independently of the works he has written on Benjamin. Fenves’s use of it as a key example for understanding Benjamin shadows aspects of Agamben’s treatment of shame and blushing as intention-less states in Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Zone Books: New York, 1999), chapter 3; see also, Fenves, 225–226. It is also worth mentioning here Fenves’s conception of Benjamin’s politics, which focuses primarily on Benjamin’s Violence essay and makes Benjamin sound as if he were endorsing Agamben’s notion of the politics of ‘pure means.’ Fenves glories in the category of expiation, which, as Benjamin states in the essay, is a feature of divine violence. Benjamin also specifies that such violence and its effects are not visible to human beings. Fenves tackles this challenge with the following paradox-ridden solution: ‘A life other than “mere life” would make itself apparent wherever this nonappearance itself appears’ (Fenves, 226). His account uses terms like the ‘symbol’ with their conventional meaning of a material form that gives expression to an idea or essence largely intact. If Benjamin objects to the lack of clarity in meaning suggested by the symbol (see my discussion in chapters 1 and 2), then Fenves’s amendment is unlikely to be reassuring. Since Fenves thinks it is the ‘nonappearance’ that makes the expiated life secured by divine violence ‘apparent,’ then rather than a material form, it is actually ‘nothing’ that is required for there to be a sufficient symbolic vehicle for its appearance. In his book Fenves argues that the absence of the flow of blood is the ‘nonappearance’ of the appearance of expiation, 226. The absence of distinction that is Benjamin’s core complaint against myth is thus intensified in Fenves’s idea of a non-apparent symbol, which presumably could be made to carry any meaning whatsoever. This conception of the nonapparent symbol would exacerbate the anxiety that Benjamin associates with the boundless signifying force of the symbol. Similarly, Werner Hamacher has put forward the view that Benjamin advocates for a conception of revolutionary politics as ‘pure mediacy.’ Such ‘mediacy’ would absorb within it all the terms Benjamin explicitly opposes, such as divine and mythic violence and also, on Hamacher’s account, supposedly stand as an adequate definition of ‘God’ (W. S. Hamacher, ‘Afformative, Strike: Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,”' trans. D. Hollander, eds. A. Benjamin and P. Osborne, Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience [Clinamen Press: London, 2000], 108–136, 108). Such accounts of Benjamin aim to defend the idea that his politics is the ‘politics of pure means.’ One of the key problems with the idea that Benjamin advocates a politics of pure means is that in Benjamin’s essay on violence the notion of ‘pure means’ has no necessary connection to politics and no connection at all to the category of divine violence. It is simply intended to mark those social relations and institutions that have no relation to the law, and it includes such politically innocuous categories as ‘conversation’ (SW I, 244–245). See Fenves’s references to Hamacher and Agamben, N.18, 288–289, N.18, 285, and N.35, 287. See my critical assessment of the utility of Agamben’s work for political theory, A. Ross, ‘Giorgio Agamben’s Political Paradigm of the Camp: Its Features and Reasons,’ Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 19.3 (2012): 421–434. See Sigrid Weigel’s criticisms of the distortion of Benjamin’s Violence essay in its Agambenian reception, Walter Benjamin: Images, the Creaturely and the Holy, trans. Chadwick Truscott Smith (Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, CA, 2013), xxvi–xxix, 48, 61. And see Jessica Whyte’s Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben (State University of New York Press: New York, 2013) for an account of Agamben’s politics as the politics of ‘pure means,’ 126.
6. Fenves, The Messianic Reduction, 243.
7. Fenves, The Messianic Reduction, 15.
8. Paula Schwebel, Review of Fenves, Peter D., The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time. H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews. August 2012, 2. Cf. Fenves, Messianic Reduction, 239–244.
9. Again, the avoidance in this type of literature, which I mentioned in my Introduction, of any critical discussion of Benjamin’s references to the figure of the Judaic God is remarkable. Why does the messianic reduction have such interest in the expiation of historical guilt and why is it that shame is supposedly its marker? This terminology assigns Benjamin’s conceptual framework to the framework of monotheistic religions (even if it is true that Benjamin’s treatment muddies this association).
10. Fenves, The Messianic Reduction, 8.
11. Kant’s theory of taste tries to secure a degree of autonomy for the subject that could parallel moral agency. As such, he is interested to catalogue the features of aesthetic judgment that strip the object of anything that could coerce or define the subject, such as the seductions of a rich colour. The ‘contingent accord’ with nature’s forms that is ‘discovered’ by the free play of the faculties ( CJ, §7, 31) is surprising precisely because the subject does not expect nature’s forms to have an interest in the moral vocation of ‘man.’ This vocation is the real point of the Critique.
12. As Fenves acknowledges, The Messianic Reduction, 17. Unlike those readers which propose the pertinence of a philosophical treatment for rigorously understanding Benjamin and try to grapple with some of the problems in his writing when it is viewed this way (e.g., Eli Friedlander’s Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait [Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2012]), Fenves both selects those works that he thinks service the thesis that Benjamin was influenced by specific philosophical schools but he also wishes to exempt him from ‘the protocols and procedures of traditional philosophical discourse,’ Fenves, 16. In the words of its author, the book makes no attempt at ‘full coverage’ (16). It makes almost no reference to works written after the rejection of Benjamin’s Habilitationsschrift in 1925, and even within that narrow frame excludes from consideration works that Benjamin considered to be his most significant, such as ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ (17).
13. See the comments in the ‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’ to Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book regarding the distinction between ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’: ‘[u]nlike the methodology of knowledge’ truth ‘does not derive from a coherence established in the consciousness, but from an essence’ (U, 30). ‘For the thing [that is] possessed’ in knowledge, its ‘representation is secondary; it does not have prior existence as something representing itself. But the opposite holds good of truth’ (U, 29). In the case of truth the essence ‘is self-representation, and is therefore immanent in it as form’ (U, 30). This position regarding the ‘immanent’ form of truth expounds his view that unlike knowledge ‘truth does not enter into relationships, particularly intentional ones’ (U, 35). ‘Truth is an intentionless state of being, made up of ideas. The proper approach to it is not therefore one of intention and knowledge, but rather a total immersion and absorption in it. Truth is the death of intention’ (U, 36). He goes on to define these ‘ideas’ as ‘linguistic’ (U, 36) and to claim that they ‘are displayed, without intention, in the act of naming’ (U, 37). These comments need to be seen in the prism of his conception of the paradisiacal state in which ‘there is as yet no need to struggle with the communicative significance of words’ (U, 37). Hence this position on truth echoes the reference in the Language essay to the ‘immanent magic’ of language (SW I, 71) and the general importance of naming language in his thinking as a release from the capture of human life by sensuous form. In the paradisiacal state of Adamic naming words are ‘removed from play and caprice’ (U, 37). When Benjamin claims that in ‘philosophical contemplation’ the ideas are renewed and that ‘in this renewal the primordial mode of apprehending words is restored’ (U, 37), he refers to the truth that words bear on account of their intimate relation with the creative intention of divine revelation.
14. In part Fenves’s book has this effect because the relation between the ‘reduction’ and the field of possible experience is not clearly specified. See Schwebel’s review on this point, 2.
Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Zone Books: New York, 1999.
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926. Eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA and London, 1996. (Abbreviation: SW I).
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940. Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA and London, 2003. (Abbreviation: SW IV).
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1999. (Abbreviation: A).
Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. Verso: London and New York, 2009. (Abbreviation: U).
Fenves, Peter. The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time. Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, Ca, 2011.
Friedlander, Eli. Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2012.
Hamacher, Werner S. ‘Afformative, Strike: Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence.”’ Trans. Dana Hollander. Eds. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne. Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience. Clinamen Press: London, 2000. 108–136.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. W. S. Pluhar. Hackett: Indianapolis, 1987. (Abbreviation: CJ).
Ross, Alison. ‘Giorgio Agamben’s Political Paradigm of the Camp: Its Features and Reasons.’ Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 19.3 (2012): 421–434.
Schwebel, Paula. Review of Fenves, Peter D., The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time. H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews. August 2012. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=34907, accessed 4 January 2014.
Weigel, Sigrid. Walter Benjamin: Images, the Creaturely and the Holy. Trans. Chadwick Truscott Smith. Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, CA, 2013.
Whyte, Jessica. Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben. State University of New York Press: New York, 2013.