Abstract
2011 saw the welcome addition of two books, one of and the other on the early writings of Walter Benjamin. Early Writings 1910–1917 is a collection put out by Harvard’s Belknap Press that is comprised first of some 30 of Benjamin’s first known works, almost all written between 1910 and 1913, and secondly some 15 works written between 1914 and 1917, several of which are major (albeit brief) forays into the realms of semiotics, philosophy, and cultural theory. The pieces in the first group are generally unavailable in English and are newly translated here by Howard Eiland. They comprise a miscellany of one or two page pieces written from 1910 when Benjamin was an 18-year-old high school student in Berlin, through his attendance at Freiburg University from 1912 to the summer of 1913, and then his attendance at the University of Berlin through 1915. Most of these pieces were published at the time in periodicals, pamphlets, and such. They range from poems and short stories to his CV, and include a number of essays related to Benjamin’s part in the German Youth Movement during the lead-up to World War I. These writings will be of interest primarily to Benjamin aficionados who do not speak German.
The pieces in the second group are by and large slightly revised English translations already available either in Selected Writings Vol. I: 1913–1926 (Benjamin, 1996) or Reflections (Benjamin, 1978), or both. They contain the brief but extremely dense pieces that constitute Benjamin’s oeuvre from 1914 to 1917. This is the start of one of his most fruitful periods, lasting into the mid-1920s, marked by Benjamin’s major work in semiotic theory ‘On Language as such and on the language of man’ (1916), described by Benjamin – pointed out by Fenves several times – as his ‘little treatise’. Also several other important if perhaps less known pieces are in this group. Notable in this regard is, ‘Two poems by Friedrich Holderlin’ (1914/15), in which Benjamin introduces his fundamental notions of the messianic reduction and the shape of time, introducing a vocabulary and conceptual framework without which many of his works on modern culture can seem impossibly opaque.
The publication of Peter Fenves’s book complements that of Early Writings 1910–1917. Indeed Fenves is thanked in the latter for his ‘advice concerning the preparation of this volume’ (2011: 13). Fenves explores Benjamin’s writings in the period of 1914 to1921. Included are readings of, respectively, ‘Character and fate’ (1919) and ‘Critique of violence’ (1921) that are not in the new collection.
‘Character and fate’, published considerably after ‘Two poems …’, further illuminates Benjamin’s notion of the messianic reduction. The two pieces are exemplars, as Fenves conveys, of the deep insights Benjamin is uniquely able to sift from cultural objects, insights that are perhaps his singular genius. Benjamin observes that the acts of the mythic tragic hero ultimately can be revealed by the Gods only in language. Oedipus is told he is someone who is sleeping with his mother having killed his father. If not revealed to him presumably he would be a great king. As Benjamin artfully puts it ‘there is no tragic pantomime’ (2011: 246). Thus the tragic revelation in myth, much like Scriptures, is messianic, a message of the Gods.
On the other hand, in Shakespearian tragedy (the adjective used by Benjamin) the tragic revelation remains, but the Gods have been subtracted out. This is the messianic reduction. With it an absence has come into being, an unknown and unknowable subject of fate. If there is a message at all there is no one to whom it communicates (except perhaps the poet and only for a transcendent moment). From the tragic form, then, Benjamin sifts the historic social sensibility haunting modernity, that of unknown, unknowable, but nonetheless inevitable forces at whose mercy each subject is.
Benjamin’s notions about the shapes of time are first expressed directly in two pieces written in 1916, ‘Trauerspiel and tragedy’ and ‘The language of Trauerspiel and tragedy’. It is developed further in, again, ‘Character and fate’. Tragedy – whether messianic or Shakespearian – occurs in fulfilled (also termed by Benjamin closed) time. Given the messianic reduction, what is happening in this time is not what the individual subjectively experiences, but rather what is determined ‘after the fact’. Neo-Darwinism, general equilibrium analysis (at the heart of the orthodox, neoclassical, economic theory) and Marxist/Leninist historical materialism are all examples of general models comprehended in fulfilled time. In unfulfilled (open) time the subject is experiencing the World, the other, in which, that is, the subject is always being re-created by the other, but also is necessarily re-creating it. Unfulfilled time is open in that it is continuously unique and becoming, and hence fundamentally uncertain, non-ergodic, as opposed to the ergodic revelatory nature of closed time.
Fenves’s focus on the messianic reduction and the shape of time is in its own right an important contribution to the non-specialist’s general understanding of Benjamin’s thought. However, there are I believe two serious weaknesses in Fenves’s reading that bear mentioning, one methodological and the other more substantive. The first is Fenves’s heavy reliance on Benjamin’s correspondence with Gershom Scholem, as well as on attributions to Benjamin in surviving notes taken by Scholem. Too often Fenves thereby is led down a path leading nowhere, or in a direction directly opposed to that explicitly taken by Benjamin in his finished works. An egregious example of this is found in Fenves’s reading of ‘On Language as such …’. He sees the latter through the lens of existing fragments of a prior letter from Benjamin to Scholem on the ‘infinitely difficult theme of language and mathematics’. Speculating that this letter is connected to ‘On Language as such …’ Fenves then attributes to Benjamin the thesis that language ‘is based on and refers to nothing beyond itself’ as suggested in the letter, but not actually advanced in the finished work, indeed quite the contrary. Fenves does not exactly dispute this, but instead makes the curious claim that ‘Benjamin arrives at this thesis by means of a reduction that is more apparent in the fragments of the letter than in the subsequent treatise’ (Fenves, 2011: Ch. 5, 131).
The more substantive weakness concerns a larger thesis Fenves seeks to develop as the book proceeds. According to it, Benjamin in these early writings is struggling to find a neo-Kantian conception of the messianic reduction and in the endeavor proves unable to resolve contradictions he himself (i.e. Benjamin) perceives. In short, Benjamin is said to perpetually think himself into cul de sacs. Thus, Fenves virtually reduces Benjamin to a failed, if interesting, neo-Kantian. Fenves pursues this thesis, however, by generally ignoring evidence that Benjamin in these early writings has already rejected neo-Kantian thought. Benjamin arrives at a resolution of the aporetic conjunction of the shapes of time in ‘On Language as such …’. And in so doing, he significantly departs from the neo-Kantian approach to semiotics, associated with Charles Peirce, and enters a new realm of thought, one that apparently – unbeknownst to Benjamin – was independently being explored by Mikhail Bakhtin and others in Russia (called the Bakhtin circle) during roughly the same period. In ‘On Language as such …’ Benjamin removes the Cartesian/Kantian ergodic (identity) axiom and, parallel to Bakhtin, enters the realm of dialogism.
In conclusion, Fenves’s book is certainly valuable as a serious introduction to key elements of Benjamin’s early thought, elements that have been relatively overlooked amidst the extensive literature on Benjamin. On the other hand, while it is a good start, the book should not, by any means, be read as a last word on the subject.