Walter Benjamin reviewed

Peter Osborne

More books on Benjamin, and still the pile grows. If the previous fin de siécle in Europe ushered in an age which (in Wilde's phrase) 'reads so much that it has no time to admire, and writes so much that it has no time to think', how much more true is this of the academy today, as it gears up to full capacity, putting even its most industrious predecessors to shame. Benjamin's prose breeds commentary like vaccine in a lab. There are already half a dozen monographs in English which take Be njamin's name for their title - quite apart from such staples of the secondary literature as Michael Jennings's Dialectical Images (1987) and The Dialectics of Seeing (1989) by Susan Buck-Morss - to which Brodersen's biography (a revised ver sion of the German edition of 1990) and Howard Caygill's fine study may now be added. Brodersen refers his readers to a 'very limited choice' of twenty-nine volumes on Benjamin 'easily available' in English. And all this prior to the founding in Amsterdam last summer of an International Walter Benjamin Association. Meanwhile, the long-awaited magnum opus by Irving Wohlfarth, No Man's Land - rumoured to have sprouted into several volumes - broods ominously in the wings. Words enough, one migh t think, to blunt even the keenest enthusiasm. Yet still the pile grows.

It is remarkable that the literature on Benjamin in English maintains so high a standard of commentary, for all its voluminousness. This is testament, no doubt, to the historical power of Benjamin's writings, but also to a certain more contemporary nee d for what they have come to represent. For if Benjamin has prospered, in part, from the notorious multiplicity of his personae - and hence from a seemingly endless capacity for reinvention - how much more deeply has his writing been felt as the site of t he possibility of their convergence? Thus has the enigma of Benjamin the man (multiple yet one) come to underlie and secure the continued productivity of the work.

It is not the actualities of Benjamin's life which have been important here, so much as the image of victimhood - condensing Jewish, communist, and intellectual identities - with which it has become associated, thanks in no small part to the widespread reproduction of his photographic portraits. The promise of the writings is sustained as a promise, frozen, 'like time in a photograph', because the life was cut short. A study in interiority, the eyes in Gis&esvcute;le Freund's famous photograph (reprodu ced on the cover of Illuminations) cast a downwards glance, but they see only inwards. In the face of such images, it is all too easy to project Benjamin's end backwards, as unworldliness, into his life, suffusing it with the light of tragic resign ation, as if this were its essence. Yet this is to appeal to precisely that 'commonly regarded causal connection' between character and fate which Benjamin himself (in his 1919 essay, 'Fate and Character') argued was 'theoretically untenable', since 'no d efinition of the external world can disregard the limits sets by the concept of the active man': 'where there is character there will, with certainty, not be fate, and in the area of fate character will not be found.' For Benjamin, fate was the 'gu ilt context of the living', and as such essentially pagan. It is associated with nature and law, not religion or ethics or politics. It is always mythic in structure. Suicide, on the other hand, was for many of his generation (in the wake of Nietzsche) a heroic passion, a paradigmatic if paradoxical example of a free act.

This is just one instance of the pitfalls placed by conventional modes of interpretation in the path of a proper response to Benjamin's work. It might seem fitting that Benjamin, philosopher of the image, should find the reception of his works so domin ated by a particular set of images. (There are two films about him - drama-documentaries - in distribution.) Yet it is as an illustration of the highly charged ambiguity of imagistic attraction, alone, that this is so: that innervating immediacy wh ich can swamp, as easily as it can ignite, the immediacy of reflection. For there is no critical power in the image here. No disruption of the false continuities of narrated time. No rearticulation of historically disparate elements. Indeed, it is a mark of the mythic function of Benjamin's photographic image that it is used so often as the frontispiece of books, establishing identity without reflection, as a kind of logo for enigmatic intellectuality: a guarantee of quality indifferent to what lurks betw een the covers.

It was a heightened sense of the dangers of the ecstatic side of the image which drew Benjamin away from surrealism in the mid-1930s, with the rise of fascism, towards the affective rationalism of Brecht's notion of the epic; although the productive te nsion between these two poles of his thought was unresolved. It is ironic that Benjamin's writings, famous for their refusal of biographical criticism (he considered his contribution to German literature to lie in his abstinence from the word 'I'), should become so dominated by their author's image. Hardly surprising, though, from the standpoint of their analysis of aura, commodification, and cultural form.

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