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2011 37: 167Philosophy Social CriticismBenjamin Loveluck

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The redemption ofexperience: On WalterBenjamin’s ‘hermeneuticalmaterialism’

Benjamin LoveluckEcole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France

AbstractThe aim of this article is to show how philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin related to thehermeneutical tradition – and tried to move beyond it by ‘redeeming’ human experience, whileavoiding the pitfalls of the philosophy of ‘authenticity’. Though convinced that questions relatingto historicity were central to any understanding of modern human experience, Benjaminexplicitly rejected the Heideggerian alternative, and chose a path closer to Hans-GeorgGadamer’s. He attempted to combine theological interpretation with dialectical materialism,always grounding hermeneutics in the concrete manifestations of social life, inaugurating a methodwhich I suggest could be called ‘hermeneutical materialism’. At stake was a politically motivateddefence of the ‘mimetic faculty’ – understood as (re)interpretation – in the modern, technologi-cally organized world.

KeywordsWalter Benjamin, experience, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Martin Heidegger, hermeneutics, historicalmaterialism, historicity, mimesis

Introduction

Philosophy condenses into experience so that it may have hope. But hope appears only in

fragmented form.1

The appearance of historical self-consciousness is very likely the most important

revolution among those we have undergone since the beginning of the modern epoch.

Corresponding author:

Benjamin Loveluck, 50 avenue Claude Vellefaux, Paris 75010, France

Email: [email protected]

Philosophy and Social Criticism37(2) 167–188

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Its spiritual magnitude probably surpasses what we recognize in the applications of natural

science, applications which have so visibly transformed the surface of our planet.

The historical consciousness which characterizes contemporary man is a privilege, perhaps

even a burden, the like of which has never been imposed on any previous generation.2

With the emergence of industrial society in the 19th century, the most salient features of

what came to be characterized as ‘modernity’ were already falling into place. Dramatic tech-

nological improvements, but also other shades of formalized rationality such as bureaucratic

procedures, legalism and contractualism, and the formalization of market mechanisms sig-

nalled an increasing efficiency in providing the most reliable means to the desired ends. In

this context, however, questions about the specificity and ‘authenticity’ of the human ‘expe-

rience’ of the world, and how it related to the unfolding of human history, emerged in a par-

ticularly acute form. Especially after the First World War, the tenability of the conception of

a linear ‘progress’ was challenged, and the reign of reason in its instrumental form was sub-

mitted to closer scrutiny, with many philosophies and social theories emphasizing the ‘inter-

pretative’ (verstehende) capacities of the agent in the face of both positivism and idealism. In

Germany, the long-standing tradition of ‘hermeneutics’ sought to assert the distinctiveness

of the human sciences against rationalism and natural scientific methodology.

It is against this setting that Walter Benjamin conducted his politically and theologically

informed excursions into culture, history and society. In the first part of this article I will thus

broadly outline the historical and theoretical dimensions of the hermeneutical approach, in

order to demonstrate how Benjamin’s concerns with human experience and temporality

both relate to this current of thought and distance themselves from it. After setting up this

background, I will then expose in the second part the specificity of Benjamin’s understand-

ing of the modern attitude towards the past, and seek to show how this transpires in his meth-

odological convictions, in particular his understanding of dialectical materialism. I will

argue that the ‘Janus-face’ of Benjamin’s theory, his theological and his Marxist influences,

combine to form what could aptly be called a ‘hermeneutical materialism’, since his

approach displays a theological concern for interpretation which, however, is grounded in

the most profane and concrete manifestations of social life. In the final part of this article

I will draw the implications of Benjamin’s conception of experience within modernity for

his understanding of social interaction and of the forces at play in society. This will enable

me to circumscribe what constitutes the properly political moment for Benjamin in relation

to lived experience, namely the open-ended dialectical understanding of otherness – in

particular of the past – which for him defines the task of the critic in the modern era, and

which he set out to ‘redeem’.

I The hermeneutical tradition, or towards a dialectics ofexperience

1 The rise of historical consciousness: experience confronts time

‘Hermeneutics’ is an excessively general term, which is often taken to refer to the branch

of intellectual activity dealing with ‘interpretation’ or the ‘science of interpretation’.

Its roots are numerous,3 but can be traced back in particular to the theological and

168 Philosophy and Social Criticism 37(2)



philological interpretation of Scriptures, historical documents, or literary works. Its more

recent origins are closely associated with the ‘Romantic hermeneutics’ prevalent in

19th-century Germany: Schleiermacher and later Dilthey, in particular, were intent on

establishing the autonomy of the Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences) against the

expanding reach of natural sciences methodology, and especially in reaction to the rise

of industrial society, by insisting on the specificity of human subjectivity. These

philosophers, theologians and historians, however, still clung to an ideal of objectivity,

which they thought could be attained through a recovery of the subjective intentions of the

agent or author. This implied ridding oneself of one’s prejudices, in the belief that one

could somehow recover the inner experience (as Erlebnis) of the subject, and that such

a process of psychological empathy could lead to an objective knowledge of subjective

intentions and actions. Thus Erlebnis constitutes the ‘ultimate unit of consciousness’4 for

Dilthey, and the basis of his Lebensphilosophie (life-philosophy): experience is integrated

into a meaningful whole available to interpretation in order to construct knowledge.

The hermeneuticists of the 19th century sought to distinguish their conception of

experience from the scientific and Kantian notion of Erfahrung, or sensory experience.

Husserl, following Hegel, further developed this distinction in his phenomenological

approach, and for him experience stands for an ‘intentional relation’, a unit of meaning

which possesses teleological properties. Therefore in the words of Hans-Georg Gadamer,

‘both in Dilthey and in Husserl, both in life philosophy and in phenomenology, the con-

cept of Erlebnis is primarily epistemological’,5 since it acquires its significance in the

context of the meaningful whole of knowledge. In this sense then, it does not depart

radically from the empiricist and Kantian interpretation of Erfahrung. Furthermore,

Benjamin in particular had only harsh words for the attempted rescue of a romanticized

Erlebnis, which he thought was in fact a reactionary move, the culmination of idealism

entailing potentially disastrous consequences:

Since the end of the last century, philosophy has made a series of attempts to lay hold of the

‘true’ experience as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured

life of the civilized masses. It is customary to classify these efforts under the heading of a

philosophy of life. Their point of departure, understandably enough, was not man’s life in

society. What they invoked was poetry, preferably nature, and, most recently, the age of

myths. Dilthey’s book Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung represents one of the earliest forms

of these efforts which end with Klages and Jung; both made common cause with Fascism.6

As we shall see, the concept of experience is also central to the work of Benjamin, but

neither under the established sense of Erlebnis nor of Erfahrung. Refusing to surrender

either to the primacy of the object or to that of the subject, Benjamin understood expe-

rience as both a dialectical and a temporal phenomenon, which occurs intersubjectively

in the transmission of knowledge – an approach which bears many similarities to Gada-

mer’s account of hermeneutics.

For Gadamer indeed, the original attempt to transcend the objectivism inherited from

classical science and thus entrench the specificity of human experience is to be

welcomed, but he recognizes the limitations of a conception of experience which is still

reduced to an epistemological function in classical hermeneutics. The real, for Gadamer,

Loveluck 169



is not merely what is manifest and scientifically observable as sensory data, and on

the other hand the experience of understanding reaches beyond intentionality: it is a

‘happening’, which cannot be seen as the appropriation by subjective consciousness

of an external reality it could somehow distance itself from. Hence the dialectic which

he suggests is essential to being – and thus to meaning in a universal sense – is one

between the known (qua tradition) and the unknown, the familiar and the strange, the

pre-judgement and the not-yet-judged. It is a ‘fusion of horizons’ as the mediation of

historical alienation,7 by which the hermeneutical task consists essentially in a process

of perpetual integration and rejection. Indeed, in this context the problems of historical

determination and historical understanding emerge particularly saliently, and are corre-

spondingly dealt with at length by both Benjamin and Gadamer.

According to Gadamer, hermeneutical reflection is prompted by the ‘rise of historical

consciousness’8 derived from a consciousness of loss of or estrangement from tradition, a

sentiment which is itself linked to the problem of interpreting texts written in a past context.

The existence of such a sentiment may thus reach back as far as the emergence of writing, but

it acquired an unprecedented dimension with the diffusion of the printed book: if the

theological and philological origins of hermeneutics signalled a concern for the ‘correct’

interpretation of meaning derived from written texts – which were supposed to express a reli-

gious, historical, etc., truth – then such a technological change as the development of print

posed the problem in ever more acute terms, profoundly affecting the relationship to

tradition of society as a whole. Gadamer singles out both Schleiermacher’s insistence on the

need to ‘reconstruct’ the past and Hegel’s concern for its (dialectical) ‘integration’ as

manifestations of and responses to the problem of ‘historical consciousness’.9

Thus Gadamer concurs with Benjamin’s intimation that the difficulty facing philosophy

in both its empiricist and its idealist guises resides in their integration of the temporal

dimension in their accounts. The question of history was central to the conception of

human experience which constituted the focus of the Geisteswissenschaften. However,

the Diltheyan attempt (following Schleiermacher) to a reconstruction of the past did not

differ essentially from the objectivism of the ‘historical school’ of Ranke and Droysen.10

Following Husserl’s attempt at a phenomenological overcoming of the ‘epistemological

problem of history’,11 eventually the centrality of consciousness as historically

conditioned, and the embeddedness of experience in time, came to be fully recognized

by Heidegger, jettisoning the static separation of subject and object: thus ‘experience’

could no longer be understood in the abstract, and metaphysics had to be abandoned

in favour of an ‘ontology of being’.

2 ‘Historicity’ and experience: beyond the Heideggerian alternative

Heidegger’s crucial insight was that understanding, and more generally the experiencing

of the world, is never only about being but is being itself. At the same time, Dasein

(being as being-in-the-world) is caught up in its historicity, since it is both ‘thrown’ in

the world and ‘projects’ itself in the future. Thus experience and understanding stand

precisely at the historical knot linking past and future, through and as existence. Instead

of positing a transcendental ego and the objects apprehended by its understanding, the

relation between the two is stressed, and understanding appears not as the activity of




consciousness but as ‘a mode of the event of being’. The ‘forgetting of being’ which

Heidegger denounces amounts to a forgetting of both the finitude of being and its

constitutive part in the existence of meaning. For Heidegger in contrast, being only exists

within meaning, and not merely, as is characteristic of metaphysical thinking, as a mind

which apprehends meaning (i.e. truth, or the forms, etc.). Understanding thus acquires a

much larger, ontological significance, which has major implications for hermeneutics:

Dasein or human existence essentially consists in being raising questions about Being,

aware of its being-in-the-world. Thus instead of ‘representational thinking’ Heidegger

proposes das andenkende Denken, a thinking that recalls, since Dasein’s understanding

of itself and of the world depends on an interpretation inherited from the past, a

pre-understanding acquired within the concrete social context.

Similarly, Gadamer endeavours to show how the strangeness of temporal distance is

enabling, and not something to be overcome by ‘transposing oneself into the spirit of the

age’. The individual cannot be separated from the community which provides him or

her with fore-understanding, and as such cannot relinquish the historically developed

dimension of such fore-understandings: her or his experience of the world is essentially

historical because it is essentially of a collective nature, and this collectivity is always in

the process of mediating past and present. Thus there exists an ontology of understanding

prior to judgement, constituted by pre-judgements or prejudices, which then appear in a

new, positive guise as the very conditions of experience:

The important thing is to recognize temporal distance as a positive and productive condition

enabling understanding. It is not a yawning abyss but is filled with the continuity of custom

and tradition, in the light of which everything handed down presents itself to us.12

Furthermore, the fundamental principle which Gadamer calls ‘historically effected

consciousness’ (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein)13 then represents the initial

precondition, realized through language, of ‘the real power of hermeneutical conscious-

ness’, namely ‘our ability to see what is questionable’.14 There is then no ultimate

self-knowledge, but rather a continuous coming-into-being of meaning, through the

experience of dialectical questioning – a questioning which is itself made possible by

the recollection of tradition and prejudices: the past is not there to be restored in its pristine

condition nor to be forgotten, but rather to be mediated with the present.

For dialectical understanding to be truly meaningful, it must be ‘open’ in a radical

sense, reminiscent of the Socratic ‘knowledge that one does not know’. The openness

to and awareness of resistance, non-sense, concealedness, nothingness, finitude, or

absence are as essential to being as what ‘is’ in a more tangible sense: indeed being

is not merely ‘there’ but is dialectically structured, through understanding, with what

is not – that which is foreign to it, and which challenges both itself and its perception

of the world at the same time. ‘Logically considered, the negativity of experience

implies a question’,15 and understanding is always an existential experience, the con-

frontation of the familiar with the foreign. As we shall see, for Benjamin the acknowl-

edgement of such a finitude of being through the recognition that the unknown enters

into a dialectical relationship with the known is the essential teaching of the religious

sentiment.

Loveluck 171



Thus instead of the illusory ideal of total disclosure (or, say, Absolute Knowledge)

conveyed by methodical objectification, it appears that the essential task of thought and

understanding lies not in attaining an objectivity of consciousness. Rather, at its core

it consists in experiencing the dialectical nature of being (in concealment and uncon-

cealedness) through the encounter with the radically different/other, and accepting that

truth lies in the historically determined tension between the foreign and the familiar

(and not merely in what is disclosed). Furthermore, the insistence that cognition is a

productive as well as a collective process of re-cognition over time implies that under-

standing always happens within a moral perspective, and hermeneutics thus presents

itself as awareness of the ethical-historical domain pervading experience and understanding.

Such an assertion collapses the Kantian separation between theory of knowledge and

philosophy of values, and moreover leads to Gadamer’s focus on the notion of application.

In this, however, Gadamer already reaches beyond the limitations attached to Heidegger’s

conception of the ‘historicity of Dasein’, which for the latter is subordinated to the quasi-

metaphysical investigation which he is pursuing, namely the question of the ontological

meaning of Being – the quest for ‘authenticity’, in fact an unfortunate attempt to grasp Being

outside or beyond practical social relations.

For Benjamin the question of the changes in the way the world is experienced, and the

extent to which this is linked to altered notions of temporality, are also crucial but in a

decidedly political sense. In what follows I will be arguing that despite major differences

in their approaches and especially in their conclusions, Benjamin’s undertakings share

the hermeneutical concern of Heidegger and Gadamer for notions of ‘being’ and ‘time’

and how these interact as dialectical ‘experience’. The main divergence, however, is the

materialist and thus political twist which Benjamin gives to these themes, and which

helps him avoid the pitfalls inherent in ‘the jargon of authenticity’ (as Adorno called

it).16 Susan Buck-Morss comments on how Benjamin’s enterprise, in particular through

his celebrated work on 19th-century Paris (the Passagen-Werk or Arcades project), can

be understood as an attempt to provide hermeneutics with a truly concrete grounding in

modernity:

The Paris Passages built in the early nineteenth century were the origin of the modern com-

mercial arcade. Surely these earliest, ur-shopping malls would seem a pitifully mundane site

for philosophical inspiration. But it was precisely Benjamin’s point to bridge the gap

between everyday experience and traditional academic concerns, actually to achieve that

phenomenological hermeneutics of the profane world which Heidegger only pretended.17

II The dialectical image: awaking from the narcotics of history

1 Benjamin both mystic and materialist, neither theologian nor Marxist

As is well known, both the Jewish theologian Gershom Scholem and the Marxist writer

Bertolt Brecht were friends of Benjamin, whose intellectual achievements may be char-

acterized as ‘Janus-faced’, as he himself referred to his theory. Benjamin’s early thinking

is distinctly theological in its thrust, and his endorsement of a Marxist political orienta-

tion in the late 1920s eventually led to the ‘Konigstein program’ of 1929 (decisive in the




intellectual trajectory of both Benjamin and Adorno), where he recognized the need

to work with both orientations concomitantly.18 Benjamin realized that his study

The Origin of German Tragic Drama (completed in 1925) was already tending towards

the approach he wanted to develop in what came to be known as the Passagen-Werk –

the historical study of 19th-century Paris which was initiated in 1927 and was to repre-

sent Benjamin’s major work. This project, which he worked upon until his death in 1940,

was never to be completed in a form other than a collection of notes and historical frag-

ments, but for Buck-Morss ‘[a completed Passagen-Werk] might now be valued as not

only the most important cultural commentary on modernity, but one of the greatest lit-

erary achievements of the twentieth century (as, in its absence, has often been conjec-

tured)’.19 Benjamin himself, aware of the political significance of his historical

outlook, and demonstrating how seriously he took the ‘rise of historical consciousness’,

wrote: ‘This work – comparable, in method, to the process of splitting the atom – liber-

ates the enormous energies of history that are bound up in the ‘‘once upon a time’’ of

classical historiography. The history that showed things ‘‘as they really were’’ was the

strongest narcotic of the century.’20

Benjamin’s work has fallen prey to various misrepresentations – either by commen-

tators from the left, by Jewish thinkers, or by ‘postmodern’ philologists, each neglecting

different aspects of his writings in order to appropriate him.21 The most common assess-

ment concerning Benjamin’s status as a philosopher or cultural critic, however, is that he

attempts to fuse theology and historical materialism, but fails to provide a convincing

synthesis: thus Scholem characteristically reacted against the materialist strand in his

works, Brecht mistrusted the theological overtones of his formulations, while Adorno

felt nervous with both.22 Such attitudes may be understood as the result of a presumption

that the categories of tradition and the religious are incompatible with historical materi-

alism’s allegiance to a critical and secular methodology. However, Benjamin’s interest

in tradition does not imply a reverence or nostalgia for the archaic and the mythological,

and his Marxist influences do not amount to any crude economic determinism. Such

assessments do not do justice to the specificity of Benjamin’s thought, and to his funda-

mental reworking of conceptions of time and space in relation to human – and in partic-

ular political – experience. Approached from a hermeneutical standpoint, what first

appear as irreconcilable antitheses do not in fact amount to mutually exclusive stances.

Benjamin’s theological sensitivity allows him to take seriously the pivotal role of reli-

gious experience permeating bygone eras, as well as inspiring his enterprise with the

affirmative spirit of redemption, while his historical materialism grounds his elabora-

tions in the concreteness of critique. Further, in this manner, Benjamin’s undertaking

is profoundly hermeneutic, inspired as it is by the Kabbalist tradition of theological inter-

pretation (through the influence of Scholem), and yet attached to the most material and

profane manifestations of social life.

The crux of the Kabbalist approach is the notion that the ‘concern for tradition is in

the interest of its transformation rather than preservation’,23 and the implicit recognition

that the past is always contained within the present, albeit in a radically different form.

The need to revere the past is understood as a way of departing from it, thus unleashing

the future (in particular its ‘Messianic possibilities’) rather than remaining trapped in a

petrified present: to face the past – especially in its alienness – is to acknowledge the

Loveluck 173



temporal nature of both collective and individual experience, and perhaps avoid the

erection of self-referentiality as absolute, or hailing as ‘progress’ what merely parades as

the new. The historicity of experience, whereby ‘truth’ is not an absolute but is to be found

in the monad constituted by the present’s relation to the past,24 is in some ways akin to

Nietzsche’s conception of ‘untimeliness’25 and more specifically to the Gadamerian ‘fusion

of horizons’ outlined above, and has crucial implications for Benjamin’s theoretical

elaborations. He would later write, while working on the Passagen-Werk, that:

Resolute refusal of the concept of ‘timeless truth’ is in order. Nevertheless, truth is not – as

Marxism would have it – a merely contingent function of knowing, but is bound to a nucleus

of time lying hidden within the knower and the known alike. This is so true that the eternal,

in any case, is far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea.26

Benjamin did not perceive Kabbalism’s anti-systemic approach to exegesis to be incom-

patible with historical materialism, although he admittedly infused a radically novel

meaning to the latter, as is clear in particular from the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of

History’.27 However, Buck-Morss notes that Kabbalism’s influence on Benjamin, though

strong, was relatively indirect, and that his familiarity with Kabbalist texts was in fact lim-

ited. In contrast, Benjamin felt a crucial affinity with the Surrealist movement’s literary

explorations (in particular Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris, but also Andre Breton’s

Nadja, etc.), in which he found echoes of his early interest in German baroque tragic

drama, and which were to prove of greater practical significance for Benjamin’s thought

than Kabbalism.

2 The constellation or dialectical image as ‘awakening’

Especially in the Passagen-Werk Benjamin’s enterprise presents itself as one of collecting,

gathering objects (in particular citations from 19th-century writers) and assembling them in

a particular montage. Such ‘constellations’ or ‘dialectical images’ are ascribed meaning or

‘light’ by virtue of their theologico-political orientation, their capacity to ‘blast open the

continuum of history’28 by unearthing specific alternatives in the mediation of past and

present. In the Passagen-Werk Benjamin thus intended to construct elaborate ‘constel-

lations’ by piecing together the citations and documents he had assembled in such a way

that they would reveal a dialectical tension to the present reader and onlooker: the

bourgeois interieur, the shopping arcades, the photographic medium, but also characters

which he deemed particularly significant such as the flaneur, the prostitute, or the

gambler were to be presented under a new light, pregnant with monadological truth.

To achieve this result, it was necessary to present the material in such a way that one

could relate to it, and yet feel its alienness: namely, provoke a hermeneutical understanding

of the past.

Benjamin recognized that Heidegger was attempting to deal with the same ‘crisis’ in

thought which had been brought about by historical consciousness, and was aware of the

intellectual nodal point at which he found himself. In this sense the concerns of ‘classical

hermeneutics’ were also his own, but for him only the direction indicated by Surrealism




constituted a properly revolutionary and constructive alternative, as opposed to the

reactionary path which he thought Heidegger’s Holzwege amounted to:

Of vital interest to recognize a particular point of development as a crossroads. The new

historical thinking that, in general and in particulars, is characterized by higher concrete-

ness, redemption of periods of decline, revision of periodization, presently stands at such

a point, and its utilization in a reactionary or a revolutionary sense is now being decided.

In this regard, the writings of the Surrealists and the new book by Heidegger [Being and

Time] point to one and the same crisis in its two possible solutions.29

In his essay ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’,30 Benjamin

indeed emphasizes the ‘crisis ... of the humanistic concept of freedom’31 reflected by

Surrealism’s recognition of the primordiality of language (thus decentring the self), and

paradoxical insistence on the demystifying potential lying at the heart of the ‘experiences’

of dreams and narcotics:

Breton notes: ‘Quietly. I want to pass where no one yet has passed, quietly! – After you,

dearest language.’ Language takes precedence.

Not only before meaning. Also before the self. In the world’s structure dream loosens

individuality like a bad tooth. This loosening of the self by intoxication is, at the same time,

precisely the fruitful, living experience that allowed these people to step outside the domain

of intoxication.32

The ‘given’ of experience and the boundaries of certainty are thus radically challenged in

these experiments, undermining any naturalization of a reality presented as fixed and

unchanging. Thus Benjamin’s turn to Surrealism enabled him to successfully integrate

his Brechtian influences – Surrealist techniques bearing particular resemblance to

Brecht’s practice of Verfremdung (estrangement): to reveal what seems natural and

immutable as historical, and thus subject to revolutionary change. However, Benjamin

did not unreservedly endorse all the tenets of Surrealism, and for him ‘the true, creative

overcoming of religious illumination’ resides in a ‘profane illumination’ of ‘materialis-

tic, anthropological inspiration’ rather than indulging in religious and drug-induced

ecstasy, or even surrendering oneself completely to dream.33

His treating of 19th-century industrial society as a ‘dream world’ was tied to the idea

that, in the words of Rolf Tiedemann, ‘under capitalist relationships of production,

history could be likened to the unconscious actions of the dreaming individual, at least

insofar as history is man-made, yet without consciousness or design, as if in a dream’.34

He was thus echoing Marx’s notion of ‘phantasmagoria’ or ‘commodity fetishism’, the

ideology begotten by the abstraction of value in capitalist production,35 as well as

Lukacs’ notion of ‘reification’, whereby commodity exchange obscures and ‘objectifies’

the social relations at play in society.36 Following the Marxist vein on this count, he

sought to develop a broader understanding of ‘phantasmagoria’ by extending the notion

to the realm of cultural values, and retaining the critical thrust of a historical materialist

outlook.37 If Surrealism’s practice of a ‘fusion of horizons’ blended dream and life, past

and present, sacred and profane, intoxication and soberness, Benjamin (like Gadamer)

Loveluck 175



held fast to a dialectical differentiation between these categories, through his notions of

‘awakening’ and ‘recognizability’. He writes about the Passagen-Werk that ‘whereas

Aragon persists within the realm of dream, here the concern is to find the constellation

of awakening’.38 If the historian must to some extent ‘take up the task of dream interpre-

tation’, it is also necessary to recognize ‘[a] particular dream-image as such’.39

And the ‘trick’ of ‘substitut[ing] ... a political for a historical view of the past’40 meant

that this awakening took the form of a dialectic, as it entered into a constellation with

remembrance, with the past.41 Influenced by Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du temps

perdu, Benjamin was acutely aware of the relationship between the shock of awakening

and the capacity for remembering already laid bare by the Surrealists, and sought to

incorporate this insight in his understanding of dialectics:

Is awakening perhaps the synthesis of dream consciousness (as thesis) and waking

consciousness (as antithesis)? Then the moment of awakening would be identical with the

‘now of recognizability’, in which things put on their true – surrealist – face. Thus, in Proust,

the importance of staking an entire life on life’s supremely dialectical point of rupture:

awakening. Proust begins with an evocation of the space of someone waking up.42

The phenomenon which Benjamin refers to allegorically as ‘awakening’ consists in a

discontinuity provoked by an image ‘wherein what has been comes together in a flash

with the now to form a constellation’. It is not merely that ‘what is past casts its light

on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past’: such a perspective would

implicitly fix either the past or the present, so Benjamin insists that ‘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 dialectical: it is not progression but image’.43 Benjamin, in the Passagen-

Werk in particular, aimed at ‘showing’ rather than ‘saying’, in the sense that he saw his

task as informed by the notion of immediacy which an image can convey, but taking

place in the realm of language. In Buck-Morss’ words ‘what was needed was a visual,

not a linear logic’:44 Benjamin’s intention was to construe linguistic images as ‘dialectics

at a standstill’ instead of seeking an ideal resolution or Aufhebung of the dialectic. Hence

the unsettling tension or ‘force field’45 between both parts of the dialectic was to be pre-

served, so that the conceptual elaboration thus constructed preserved the dynamic and

openness of experience, instead of marring it by either fixing the pre-given categories

or lapsing into the mere shock of the new – Heidegger’s semantics being a prime

example of an attempt which on many counts is guilty of both. Thus he writes that ‘only

dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one

encounters them is in language’.46

Indeed, Benjamin’s notion of awakening is a far cry from Heidegger’s support of a

‘National Awakening’, betraying the darker side of Heidegger’s elaborations on the

‘historicity’ of Dasein in Being and Time. This ultimately led him to reify a concept

of Being construed as an absolute, and rely on the emergence of a historical subject –

the Volksgemeinschaft under National Socialism – in order to attain ‘authenticity’,47 and

can be linked to his political engagement with the Nazis.48 His later writings concerning

Seinsgeschick (the ‘implacable fate’ of the ‘destiny of Being’) are further evidence that

the concept of ‘Being’ had been essentialized and that his purported transcendence of




metaphysics was somewhat exaggerated, despite the critique of ‘logocentrism’ (‘of the

intrinsic and inalienable link between ‘‘reason’’ and ‘‘power’’’) which he initiated.49

In contrast, experience as awakening is understood by Benjamin in terms of ‘redemp-

tion’, whereby utopia is not presented as a telos of history but rather as the ever-present

possibility or ‘weak Messianic power’ inherent in the praxis of ‘now-time’ (Jetztzeit) –

not the single culmination of an absolute emancipatory move then, but rather a constantly

recurring event which takes place through the ‘now of recognizability’.50 It represents a

capacity for openness towards the ‘revelation’ which is experienced when one is confronting

past and present. In this sense, Benjamin’s notion is akin to the stress laid by Gadamer on the

‘event’ or ‘happening’ of being, which is permanently caught up in the process of re-

cognition, of creatively mediating its pre-understanding with the unknown or foreign to

which it is confronted and constantly forming new pre-understandings. Thus emerges the

micro-capability of initiating change, especially for the cultural critic, rather than succumb-

ing to a certain ideology of causality:

Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments

in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical

posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of

years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of

events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has

formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the

‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.51

However, in order for time to unleash its revolutionary or ‘Messianic’ potential, the ‘now

of recognizability’ is for him entrenched in the concreteness of experience. Time

becomes a tangible component of experience, while, for instance, Heidegger’s claims for

authenticity remain confined to the abstract nature of his formulations:

What distinguishes images from the ‘essences’ of phenomenology is their historical

index. (Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly through

‘historicity.’) ... Every present day is determined by images that are synchronic with it: each

‘now’ is the now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point

with time. (This point of explosion, and nothing else, is the death of the intentio, which thus

coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth.)52

Thus Benjamin provides a distinctive approach which cannot be subsumed under either

the orthodox categories of Marxism or theological study.53 Following Buck-Morss, for

Benjamin ‘theological illumination that redeems past history, and political education that

condemns it, are one and the same endeavour’,54 which is to say that both reverence for the

past as fixed, and extreme criticism levelled against it (for instance, in certain manifesta-

tions of deconstructionism) are fruitless. Moreover, they risk lapsing into a legitimation of

the status quo either by entrenching a petrified ‘reality’ of historical linearity or by advo-

cating a rootless (and aestheticized) subjectivism. To confront theology and materialism is

to confront the ‘foreign’ of the unknown which only faith sustains but which is open to

interpretation, to the seemingly ‘familiar’ of concrete, disclosed linear logic.

Loveluck 177



History then dissolves from a naturalized continuum (subject to what are deemed

natural laws of development) into the discontinuities provoked by a confrontation of

foreign and familiar: the unknown causes a break, which challenges the known in an

endless process of dialectical mediation. For Benjamin, however, if this process is not

to be degraded into the individual experience of mere shock, it needs to recover the

collective basis of its dynamic, itself manifest in what he called the ‘mimetic faculty’:

the concrete illustration of the ‘hermeneutical experience’ which has been dealt with

‘in the abstract’ until this point. Otherwise thought risks being frozen in reification – the

extreme manifestation of which can be observed, according to him, in society’s relation

to technology. The result of Benjamin’s literary and historical explorations revealed to

him a ‘change in the structure of experience’55 of far-reaching consequences for notions

of the subject in relation to time and space.

III Mimesis and human experience

1 Stars in their eyes: the ‘mimetic faculty’

Nothing distinguishes the ancient from the modern man so much as the former’s absorption

in a cosmic experience scarcely known to later periods. Its waning is marked by the flower-

ing of astronomy at the beginning of the modern age. Kepler, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe

were certainly not driven by scientific impulses alone. All the same, the exclusive emphasis

on an optical connection to the universe, to which astronomy very quickly led, contained a

portent of what was to come. The ancients’ intercourse with the cosmos had been different:

the ecstatic trance. For it is in this experience alone that we gain certain knowledge of what

is nearest to us and what is remotest to us, and never of one without the other. This means,

however, that man can be in ecstatic contact with the cosmos only communally. It is the

dangerous error of modern man to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable, and

to consign it to the individual as the poetic rapture of starry nights. It is not; its hour strikes

again and again, and then neither nations nor generations can escape it, as was made terribly

clear by the last war, which was an attempt at new and unprecedented commingling with the

cosmic powers.56

Although the establishment of such a link between human social experience and stellar

observation may seem remote, only tangentially significant, or even unacceptably ‘eso-

teric’ and speculative, the above passage captures the deep sense in which for Benjamin

the experience of the world changes across time. Benjamin’s depiction of the individual

‘poetic rapture of starry nights’ reveals the extent to which experience has been reduced

to the subjective level of a self abstracted from its socio-historical context, and reminds

one of Kant’s evocation of ‘the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me’.57

The science of astronomy – the origins of which are as old as the first documented

evidence of human civilization itself – provided early philosophers with a stimulus to

go beyond the immediacy of life. But the interest in interpretation (namely, hermeneu-

tics) derives essentially for Benjamin from a religious impulse, and from the astrological

outlook on the stars – as the attempt at interpretation or understanding of the messages of

the gods, an interpretative yearning which would later be directed towards the Scriptures.

Analogies and magical correspondences were central to human experience, since




looking for signs and manifestations of the future, or explanations for the past and

present meant that society took an active part in the constitution of these truths: the

signs had to be ‘interpreted’, and significant events or perceived manifestations of the

religious truth were repeated through the crucial experience of ritual.

Benjamin’s essays ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ and ‘Doctrine of the Similar’58 set out

to show how the power to perceive and reproduce similarities lies at the core of expe-

rience, and how the religious behaviour alluded to above in fact expresses a deeper

urge towards imitation. Benjamin notes that mimicry, the production of similarities,

is a widespread natural phenomenon, but that in human beings such a behaviour has

become so sophisticated that it is barely recognizable. Thus the ability to see simila-

rities and reinterpret them is according to him a remnant of ‘the once powerful com-

pulsion to become and to behave mimetically’. It must be stressed, however, that the

‘mimetic faculty’ does not refer to mere repetition: reproduction is never a strict imi-

tation of what is encountered insofar as the difference which triggers the mimetic

impulse is not to be subsumed into sameness. Rather it is an appropriation of what

is encountered, but through reinterpretation: Martin Jay, following Philippe Lacoue-

Labarthe, characterizes it as a paradoxical logic or ‘hyperbologic’ which ‘follows

from the fact that mimetic substitution means both the need to imitate what already

exists and the realization that what exists is itself insufficient and must be supplemen-

ted by the imitation’.59 It is thus originally not the exact reproduction of something

construed as authentic or genuine, which mimesis would merely duplicate because

of a yearning for total identification with an absolute. Rather, for Adorno such an

understanding signals ‘a general mimetic abandonment to reification which is the

principle of death’.60

Benjamin remarks that the mimetic compulsion can be most clearly observed in

children and childhood experience: ‘Children’s play is everywhere permeated by mimetic

modes of behavior, and its realm is by no means limited to what one person can imitate in

another. The child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher, but also a windmill and

a train.’61 This can be understood for Benjamin as the ‘ontogenetic history’ of the mimetic

ability, but it is also necessary to uncover its ‘phylogenetic history’ in order to fully grasp

its significance, and the form under which it manifests itself. In particular, Benjamin

establishes a link between the religious interpretation of signs and linguistic development,

whereby language and writing constitute the ultimate repository of a secularized mimetic

power, the non-sensuous (i.e. conceptual) guise of what was originally a sensuous

apperception of similarities:

‘To read what was never written.’ Such reading is the most ancient; reading prior to all

languages, from entrails, the stars, or dances. Later the mediating link of a new kind of

reading, of runes and hieroglyphs, came into use. It seems fair to suppose that these

were the stages by which the mimetic gift, formerly the foundation of occult practices,

gained admittance to writing and language. In this way, language may be seen as the

highest level of mimetic behaviour and the most complete archive of nonsensuous

similarity: a medium into which the earlier powers of mimetic production and compre-

hension have passed without residue, to the point where they have liquidated those of

magic.62

Loveluck 179



2 Language and community

‘Perceiving and producing resemblances’ thus appears as the grounds for (concept-based)

abstraction, originating in a compulsion to behave/become like something else.

This faculty has essentially moved from magic, ritual and divination into language, but

what is important to note is that in this process of repetition, be it in its originary sensuous

form or its non-sensuous one, lies the very possibility for the passing on of tradition:

namely, the establishment within time of a community. It then appears that the temporal

component is crucial for the entrenchment of a sense of belonging. Adorno, for whom

mimesis would become a central theme, especially in the Dialectic of Enlightenment

written with Max Horkheimer, claims that ‘The human is indissolubly linked with imi-

tation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings’.63

The behaviour of others which the individual seeks to imitate, the enacting of dances

and rituals, is not merely a contingent phenomenon but provides the historical dimension

without which intersubjectivity is seriously compromised. If the handing over of

tradition is a major consequence of the mimetic capacity, Benjamin stresses that the

modalities of this passing on of tradition have changed as the mimetic capacity has

changed in nature. Indeed, in two essays in particular, ‘The Storyteller’ and ‘On Some

Motifs in Baudelaire’,64 Benjamin emphasizes the way in which linguistic experience

has altered itself because the modalities of remembrance qua mimesis have changed.

In ‘The Storyteller’ Benjamin remarks that ‘the art of storytelling’, the oral transmission

of experience, is ‘coming to an end’ and that one early symptom of this decline can be

found in the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times, reflecting the solitary

nature of Erlebnis.65 He further notes that the development of the press also signals a

radical change in the epic form and the emergence of a new medium of communication,

namely ‘information’, where ‘verifiability’ takes the precedence over any involvement

with the interlocutor.66 For if ‘the value of information does not survive the moment

in which it was new’, in contrast storytelling does not limit itself to the object which

is its concern but reveals a relationship between subject and object: ‘It does not aim

to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing

into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again.’67 Here again,

Benjamin then draws on the ontogenetic manifestation of storytelling in childhood to

prove his point: ‘The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because

it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story.’68

And so in the information age the demands placed on memory are lessened (there is

no need to retain what is told), and the individual involvement in the sharing of experi-

ence recedes as the ‘community of listeners’ dissolves and remembrance of tradition is

devalued. Such a conception of community, however, does not necessarily entail that a

mythical state of unimpaired dialogue is to be restored in order to abolish power

relations, through a hypostatized notion of rational argumentation and rational will

formation tending towards ultimate recognition and ever-improving knowledge (as can

be found in theories of discourse ethics, for instance). The point is rather that the encoun-

ter with otherness need not be resolved either in terms of sameness/identity, or in terms

of difference organized as hierarchy: regarding history, this means that the encounter

with the past can be understood neither as the positivist application of self-same




categories across time, nor as the idealist unfolding of progress. Instead, for Benjamin it

is a question of redeeming the active reinterpretation of tradition, despite the fact that in

modernity experience is generally construed as an individual matter and social relations

are downplayed.

IV Technology the modern experience

1 Technology and alienation: ‘To the Planetarium’69

Deeply moved by the experience of the First World War, Benjamin remarks: ‘Wasn’t

it noticed at the time how many people returned from the front in silence?’70 The extent

of the incommunicability of such an experience he thought was revealing of its total

alienness, in the sense expounded by Marx. A war such as the First World War, and its

aftermath in the interwar period eventually leading to the even less communicable expe-

rience of the Second World War, was indeed the epitome of forces created by modern

society, which then came to turn against it and dominate it as an uncontrolled and

coercive ‘second nature’. As action is devolved to technology, it is also our capacity for

intersubjectivity and interpretation as located in community which are threatened.

Through writing, and especially with the advent of the written book, human involve-

ment in the repetition process already came to be limited since a certain reification is

operated when words are fixed in print, leading to the illusion that the past can be known

‘as it really was’. Furthermore, the need for public narration as the basis of collective

memory is then undermined, since the risks inherent in linguistic mediation are

made more acute with the written word: ‘The habitus of a lived life: this is what the

name preserves, but also marks out in advance.’71 As technological changes unfold, the

tendency to congeal the past is exacerbated through the proliferation of the image (in

particular, photography and film), a theme which emerges for Benjamin in particular

in the essays ‘A Small History of Photography’72 and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of

Mechanical Reproduction’.73

Experiences are lived similarities.

There is no greater error than the attempt to construe experience – in the sense of life

experience – according to the model on which the exact natural sciences are based. What

is decisive here is not the causal connections established over the course of time, but the

similarities that have been lived.74

If Benjamin insists that experiences are lived similarities, and that an existence

concerned merely with causal connections is debased, it is because only a lived similarity

can give rise to the properly human creative potential of a ‘fusion of horizons’. In con-

trast ‘the extreme point in the technological organization of the world is the liquidation

of fertility’,75 that is, the fertility of human reinterpretation. Technology is never just a

tool. As his surrealistico-Marxist approach revealed to him, the world of commodities

‘dreamt’ by 19th-century industrial society was no innocuous fantasy. It was a Phantas-

magorie, a fetishized world into which his own era was still caught and from which we

ourselves have presumably not awoken, where mimesis could degenerate either in the

‘eternal return of the same’ with the mechanical reproduction of commodities, or into

Loveluck 181



the mere shock of the new epitomized by fashion. Both cases in fact amount to the same

thing, since the absence of historical grounding means that one can either succumb to the

‘ideology of progress’, of the ‘most modern’, even of total novelty, or persist in the

affirmation of ‘timeless truths’ – the two sides of a same coin.

The dreamworld’s hegemonic hold means that history is ignored, and no dialectical

understanding is possible:

The dreaming collective knows no history. Events pass before it as always identical and

always new. The sensation of the newest and most modern is, in fact, as much a dream

formation of events as the ‘eternal return of the same.’ The perception of space that

corresponds to this perception of time is superposition.76

Such a state corresponds to a false resolution of what is essentially an open-ended

dialectic. In this context, for Benjamin it is significant that tradition or history is increas-

ingly objectified in a very concrete sense, by being devolved to ‘technology’.

2 The aura: returning the gaze in the age of technology

The ‘aura’ was a generic term used by Benjamin to denote, in particular concerning a

work of art but also a past document, the enigmatic within the other: the simultaneous

manifestation of sameness and difference. Thus what makes art more than an object, for

instance, and tradition or history more than a collection of facts is that despite their other-

ness or remoteness they exhibit a capacity to engage in dialogue with the onlooker, to

return the gaze since there is something essentially human about them:

Experience of the aura ... rests on the transposition of a response common in human relation-

ships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man. The person we

look at, or who feels he is looked at, looks at us in turn. To perceive the aura of an object

we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.77

The concept of Erlebnis which Dilthey and Husserl developed as industrial society was

on the rise can be interpreted from Benjamin’s perspective as alienated experience, just

as Benjamin presented the character of the gambler seeking the ‘isolated experience’ of

shock as typically modern when, precisely, taken to its extreme ‘The ideal of the shock-

engendered experience <Erlebnis> is the catastrophe’.78 The shock-like nature of mod-

ern experience resulting in the demise of the hermeneutical and dialectical confronta-

tion of familiar and foreign, is also underlined by Benjamin in the Baudelaire essay.

Baudelaire writes of the emergence of the city, and of the ‘decisive, unique experience’

of being jostled by the crowd as the sensation of the modern age. Baudelaire indicated

the price which had to be paid for such a sensation: ‘the disintegration of the aura in the

experience of shock’.79

Human behaviour is acquired by attempting to reinterpret the behaviour encountered

in the society in which one is ‘thrown’. At the linguistic level, this is what Benjamin,

referring back to Genesis, calls the gift of ‘Name-giving’ attributed to man by God.

In this idea of mimesis are concentrated all the possible contradictions open to experience,




in particular the tension between the reproduction of the same as destructive conflation of

differences, and the creative emergence of the new. This defines the hermeneutical

moment as a political moment, bearing resemblance to what Hannah Arendt refers to as

‘action’.80 Drawing on Aristotle’s praxis philosophy, which is also central to Gadamer’s

concept of application, Arendt shows how humankind is extending the control of nature to

the control of itself: active involvement and practical reasoning are replaced by the

security of making as opposed to doing, as rule and formal procedures are substituted for

action and speech. Rationalization and the technical application of science enable a

reliable and even replicable (thus predictable) organization of life, but from Arendt’s as

well as Benjamin’s perspective the fundamental human capacity for reinterpretation is

relinquished in the process.

The epitome of such a state of affairs is for Benjamin the diffusion of photography.

From the vantage-point of the Jewish taboo on graven images or Bildverbot, photogra-

phy exemplifies the heretical nature of strict imitation. In particular such reproductive

techniques lead to incommunicability because ‘the camera records our likeness without

returning our gaze’.81 Technology is always a ‘new configuration of nature’82 for

Benjamin, demonstrating that there exist no fixed categories of the ‘natural’ in relation

to the ‘man-made’. This is what a ‘historically effected consciousness’ (for Gadamer) or

‘historical materialism’ (in the particular sense in which Benjamin uses the expression)

reveals: that humanity’s trajectory on earth is neither governed by immutable ‘natural’

laws, nor is it the continuous unfolding of the new as man-made improvement or

progress – namely, it is no eternal repetition of sameness.

The ‘loss of the aura’ is significant because it attests that the reification of social rela-

tions is equivalent to a debasement of what is distinctive about human experience: the

capacity for (re)interpretation, as basis for the existence of a tradition and a politically

conscious – that is, dialectical – historical perception. Hence Benjamin’s assertion that

‘It is the inherent tendency of dialectical experience to dissipate the semblance of eternal

sameness, and even of repetition, in history. Authentic political experience is absolutely

free of this semblance.’83

Conclusion: redeeming experience, or, ‘le temps retrouve’?

To preserve the interpretative moment in mimesis by insisting on the monadological

nature of its temporal dimension, such is then the aim of Benjamin’s gazing at the stars,

and his erection of historico-political constellations. As indicated from the outset, his

approach could be dubbed ‘hermeneutical materialist’: a mystic opposed to mystifica-

tion, a materialist decrying commodification, he set himself the task of shedding astral

light on the power relations permeating the mediation of past and present, and society’s

potential for creating coercive forces – in accordance with the notion that ‘the genuine

conception of historical time rests entirely upon the image of redemption’.84

The standpoint of ‘redemption’, however, does not imply that Benjamin is referring

back to some original or authentic experience. He is neither looking beyond modernity to

a chimerical ‘postmodernity’, nor adopting a romantic or anti-modern attitude, a yearning

for a mythical golden age; rather, following Rimbaud’s injunction ‘il faut etre absolument

moderne’, like the poet he seeks to drive the possibilities of ‘now-time’ to extremes. Only

Loveluck 183



thus may the dream-like quality of modernity be revealed for what it is, and the petrification

of myth into fate avoided. But this critical attitude is not to be understood as teleologically

guided by the projected revolutionary upheaval of a historical subject, which would lead

humanity to a utopian state of absolute freedom. Although Benjamin’s Messianic inspira-

tions sometimes seem to ascribe to the proletariat just such a potential, for him the critical

task is primarily a Sisyphean one, whereby ‘in every era the attempt must be made anew to

wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it’.85 This is so because

dreams and myths are not eradicated by technological advances, and in fact modernity’s

faith in capitalistic accumulation, rational organization and mechanical reproduction seems

to indicate a surrendering to the more destructive side of mimesis. Hence now perhaps more

than ever is it necessary to heed the storyteller’s wisdom:

The wisest thing – so the fairy tale taught mankind in olden times, and teaches children to

this day – is to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and with high spirits.86

It is then not a question of retrieving the originary plenitude of a forsaken, pre-industrial

experience from the depths of history. Such a moment, the paradigmatic image of which

is the blissful unity of man before the Fall, does not present itself for Benjamin as the

metaphysical model of a genuine experience which has been ‘lost’: it represents rather

the experience of loss, of an estrangement from and yet an affinity towards the past

which, as noted, is central to the rise of historical consciousness in the 19th century.

Adorno would later concur to say that in fact, the existence or not of a redeemed state

is beside the point:

The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in the face of despair is the attempt

to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of

redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is

reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange

the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear

one day in the messianic light. ... The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for

the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered

up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the

possible. But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unre-

ality of redemption itself hardly matters.87

Notes

1. T. W. Adorno, ‘A Portrait of Walter Benjamin’, in Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981),

pp. 240–1.

2. H.-G. Gadamer, ‘The Problem of Historical Consciousness’, in P. Rabinow and W. M. Sullivan

(eds) Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look (Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles and London:

University of California Press, 1987), p. 89.

3. In Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,

1983), p. 113, R. Bernstein singles out classical and medieval rhetoric (with Vico as its last

great proponent), practical philosophy as represented by Aristotle, legal history and




jurisprudence, Renaissance humanism, and the post-Reformation discipline of biblical

interpretation. See also H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed & Ward, 1989),

pp. 173–84 and 307–41.

4. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 65.

5. ibid., p. 66.

6. W. Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1973),

p. 158.

7. H.-G. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles and London:

University of California Press, 1976), p. 39.

8. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 165. See also H.-G. Gadamer, ‘The Problem of Historical

Consciousness’, as well as Adorno, in Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,

1978), pp. 52–5.

9. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 164–9.

10. ibid., p. 198.

11. ibid., pp. 242–54.

12. ibid., p. 297.

13. ibid., pp. 300–2.

14. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, p. 13.

15. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 366.

16. Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,

1973).

17. S. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

(Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1989), p. 3. Adorno also writes: ‘The provocative

assertion that an essay on the Paris Arcades is of greater interest philosophically than are

ponderous observations on the Being of beings is more attuned to the meaning of his work

than the quest for that unchanging, self-identical conceptual skeleton which he relegated to

the dustbin’ (Prisms, p. 232).

18. See S. Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin,

and the Frankfurt Institute (Brighton, Sx: Harvester Press, 1977), pp. 22–3. Buck-Morss’

seminal study on the Frankfurt School theorists provides an enlightening account of

Benjamin’s intellectual itinerary, in particular concerning his relationship with Adorno. See also

Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography (London: Verso, 1996) for further details.

19. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 335. On the significance of the Arcades project see

also Rolf Tiedemann, ‘Dialectics at a Standstill: Approaches to the Passagen-Werk’, in Walter

Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard

University Press, 1999), pp. 929–45.

20. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, N3,4.

21. See E. Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London and Sterling, VA: Pluto

Press, 2000), pp. 219–35. Leslie concludes: ‘One conspicuous aspect of the ‘‘Benjaminiana’’

of the last quarter-century has been to argue that inasmuch as Benjamin was a Jew, he was less

a Marxist. Inasmuch as he is drawn to Marxism he can do so only by wrestling with his

Jewishness. He is torn between the messianic and the material, or, more extremely, between

heaven and hell. Angelic Benjamin floats in theory as a half-figure – half-Marxist, half-Jew

– and the partiality of his identifications makes it impossible to locate his theory, and it

places him on a border that cuts through all his work, and even (deconstructively? actually?)

Loveluck 185



killed him.’ The impact of this statement is compounded by the knowledge that Benjamin com-

mitted suicide precisely on the border separating France and Spain, in a desperate attempt to flee

from the Nazis and salvage a mysterious manuscript which could have been a preliminary draft

for the Passagen-Werk (see the Afterword in Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, pp. 331–40,

as well as ‘The Story of Old Benjamin’ by Lisa Fittko in Benjamin, The Arcades Project,

pp. 946–54).

22. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, pp. 245–8.

23. ibid., p. 233. See also Irving Wohlfarth, ‘On Some Jewish Motifs in Benjamin’, in Andrew

Benjamin (ed.) The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin (London and New York:

Routledge, 1989).

24. The initial development of the concept of ‘monadological truth’ is to be found in Benjamin’s

study The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: New Left Books, 1977).

25. See in particular ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in F. Nietzsche,

Untimely Meditations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).


27. Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 255–66.

28. ibid., p. 264.

29. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, S1,6.

30. Walter Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’ and Other Writings (London and New York: Verso,

1979), pp. 225–39.

31. ibid., p. 225.

32. ibid., p. 227.

33. ibid.

34. Tiedemann, ‘Dialectics at a Standstill’, in Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 933.

35. Tiedemann writes: ‘Phantasmagoria: a Blendwerk, a deceptive image designed to dazzle, is

already the commodity itself, in which the exchange value or value-form hides the use value.

Phantasmagoria is the whole capitalist production process, which constitutes itself as a natural

force against the people who carry it out’ (ibid., p. 938).

36. See Georg Lukacs, ‘The Phenomenon of Reification’, in Georg Lukacs, History and Class

Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1971), pp. 83–110.

37. He distanced himself, however, from a crude application of the notions of economic base and

ideological superstructure: ‘In the case of one who sleeps, an overfull stomach does not find its

ideological superstructure in the contents of the dream – and it is exactly the same with the

economic conditions of life for the collective. It interprets these conditions; it explains them.

In the dream, they find their expression; in the awakening, their interpretation’ (The Arcades

Project, M�,14). Tiedemann thus refers to Benjamin’s approach as ‘materialist physiognomics’

rather than ideology critique (in Benjamin, The Arcades Project, pp. 939–40).

38. ibid., N1,9.

39. ibid., N4,1.

40. Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’ and Other Writings, p. 230.

41. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, K1,3. See also K1,2.

42. ibid., N3a,3.

43. ibid., N2a,3.

44. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 218.

45. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, N7a,1.




46. ibid.

47. See R. Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 75–95.

48. ibid., p. 9.

49. R. Wolin, The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststruc-

turalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 127–8 and 138.

50. ‘On the dialectical image. In it lies time. Already with Hegel, time enters into dialectic. But the

Hegelian dialectic knows time solely as the properly historical, if not psychological, time of

thinking. The time differential [Zeitdifferential] in which alone the dialectical image is real is

still unknown to him. ... All in all, the temporal moment [das Zeitmoment] in the dialectical

image can be determined only through confrontation with another concept. This concept is

the ‘‘now of recognizability’’ [Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit]’ (Benjamin, The Arcades Project,

Q�,21).

51. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 265.


53. For instance, Jurgen Habermas in an essay on Benjamin (‘Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive

Criticism: The Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin’, New German Critique 17 [1979]: 30–59)

dismisses the latter’s project on the grounds that a Messianic understanding of history is incom-

patible with Marx’s theory of history, but for Buck-Morss such an interpretation is unwarranted:

‘Cognitive explosiveness in a political sense occurs, not when the present is bombarded with

‘‘anarchistically intermittent,’’ utopian ‘‘now-times’’ (Habermas), but when the present as

now-time is bombarded with empirical, profane fragments of the recent past’ (Buck-Morss, The

Dialectics of Seeing, p. 251).

54. ibid., p. 245.

55. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London:

New Left Books, 1973), p. 110.

56. Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’ and Other Writings, p. 103.

57. I. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956), p. 166.

58. Both in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap

Press of Harvard University Press, 1999).

59. M. Jay, ‘Mimesis and Mimetology: Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe’, in Cultural Semantics:

Keywords of Our Time (London: Athlone Press, 1998), p. 129.

60. Quoted in Jay, ‘Mimesis and Mimetology: Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe’, p. 130.

61. Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 720.

62. ibid., p. 722.

63. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 154.

64. Both in Benjamin, Illuminations.

65. ibid., p. 87.

66. ibid., pp. 88–9. See also pp. 160–1.

67. ibid., pp. 91–2.

68. ibid., p. 102.

69. See Benjamin’s last aphorism in ‘One-Way Street’ (Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’ and Other

Writings, pp. 103–4).

70. Walter Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 731.

71. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Q�,24.

Loveluck 187



72. In Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’ and Other Writings.

73. In Benjamin, Illuminations.

74. Benjamin, ‘Experience’, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 553.

75. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, S9a,2.

76. ibid., M�,14. See also D10a,5: ‘The belief in progress – in an infinite perfectibility understood

as an infinite ethical task – and the representation of eternal return are complementary. They

are the indissoluble antinomies in the face of which the dialectical conception of historical

time must be developed.’


78. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, O14,4.

79. Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 195–6.

80. H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press,

1958), p. 175 ff.


82. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, K1a,3.

83. ibid., N9,5.

84. ibid., N13a,1.


86. ibid., p. 102.

87. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 1974), p. 247.




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