The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) - Hardcover

Fenves, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804757879 ISBN 13: 9780804757874

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

The Messianic Reduction is a groundbreaking study of Walter Benjamin's thought. Fenves places Benjamin's early writings in the context of contemporaneous philosophy, with particular attention to the work of Bergson, Cohen, Husserl, Frege, and Heidegger. By concentrating on a neglected dimension of Benjamin's friendship with Gershom Scholem, who was a student of mathematics before he became a scholar of Jewish mysticism, Fenves shows how mathematical research informs Benjamin's reflections on the problem of historical time. In order to capture the character of Benjamin's "entrance" into the phenomenological school, the book includes a thorough analysis of two early texts he wrote under the title of "The Rainbow," translated here for the first time. In its final chapters, the book works out Benjamin's deep and abiding engagement with Kantian critique, including Benjamin's discovery of the political counterpart to the categorical imperative in the idea of "pure violence."

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Fenves is Joan and Sarepta Harrison Professor of Literature, Professor of German, Comparative Literary Studies, and Jewish Studies, and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Political Science, and English at Northwestern University. His most recent book is Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth (2003).

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

THE MESSIANIC REDUCTION

Walter Benjamin and the Shape of TimeBy Peter Fenves

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2011 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5787-4

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................................................................................................xiNote on Abbreviations and Translations............................................................................................................xiiiIntroduction: The Course of the Argument..........................................................................................................11. Substance Poem Versus Function Poem: "Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin"...................................................................182. Entering the Phenomenological School and Discovering the Color of Shame........................................................................443. "Existence Toward Space": Two "Rainbows" from Around 1916......................................................................................794. "The Problem of Historical Time": Conversing with Scholem, Criticizing Heidegger in 1916.......................................................1035. Meaning in the Proper Sense of the Word: "On Language as Such and on Human Language" and Related Logico-Linguistic Studies.....................1256. Pure Knowledge and the Continuity of Experience: "On the Program of the Coming Philosophy" and Its Supplements.................................1527. The Political Counterpart to Pure Practical Reason: From Kant's Doctrine of Right to Benjamin's Category of Justice............................187Conclusion: The Shape of Time.....................................................................................................................227The Rainbow: Dialogue on Fantasy..................................................................................................................247The Rainbow; or, The Art of Paradise..............................................................................................................254Notes on an Afternoon Conversation................................................................................................................256From a Notebook Walter Benjamin Lent to Me [Gershom Scholem]: "Notes Toward a Work on the Category of Justice"....................................257Notes.............................................................................................................................................259Bibliography......................................................................................................................................291Index.............................................................................................................................................307

Chapter One

§1 Substance Poem Versus Function Poem "Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin"

A Technical Term

Benjamin generally shies away from introducing technical terms. Under certain circumstances he uses unfamiliar terms, many of which are derived from the addition of the suffix -barkeit ("ability") to a common noun. Among terms of this type, which can be found throughout his writings, "translatability," "criticizability," and "knowability" are particularly prominent. But none of these terms is technical in a strict sense: they do not owe their origin to authorial fiat. A typical formula for the creation of a technical term runs as follows: "Terminologically, I will call such-and-such x ." The advantage of a sentence of this kind lies in its capacity to disambiguate the term in view of future use. The disadvantage lies in the prominence of the "I" who presumes that it has a right to dispose over language. In his Berliner Chronik (Berlin chronicle) Benjamin formulates a stylistic imperative his work has hitherto obeyed: "Never use the word 'I' except in letters" (6: 475). The imperative corresponds to the requirement that technical terms be avoided whenever possible. In the "Epistemo-Critical Preface" to his Origin of the German Mourning Play Benjamin explains the rationale for the imperative that gives shape to his work: "The introduction of new terminologies, as long as they are not intended solely for the domain of concepts, is therefore worrisome within the philosophical domain. Such terminologies—a misfortunate naming, in which intention [Meinen] takes a greater share than language—betrays the objectivity that history has given the principal coinages of philosophical reflection" (1: 217).

On perhaps no other point is Benjamin more consistent. In all his writing, from beginning to end, he generally declines to introduce technical terms, for wherever they occur they are evidence of a certain disorder, in which the intention of the subject takes precedence over the historically canonized objectivity of philosophical terminology. In some of his later works, Benjamin draws attention to certain terms that are unknown to Greek, Latin, French, and German philosophical traditions; but these terms, including aura and flânerie, are neither newly devised nor defined solely for the sake of the subsequent discussion. They retain their aura, so to speak, and—to the consternation of many commentators—meander in their meaning. The exercise in category construction that characterizes the kind of philosophical project Heidegger undertakes in Sein und Zeit (Being and time) is altogether foreign to Benjamin's work, both early and late. The sense that his work is unsystematic and should thus be classified as "unphilosophical" stems in no small part from his refusal to construct a table of categories, even if only in the mode of its negation. For this reason, however, it comes as something of a surprise that an essay from late 1914 and early 1915, entitled "Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin"—which he would later characterize as his "first major work" (GB, 3: 157)—introduces a technical term in its opening paragraph, das Gedichtete, which will henceforth be translated as "the poetized."

In Einbahnstraße (One-way street), Benjamin proposes a series of recommendations for the production of "thick books." One of these tips corresponds to the disavowal of technical terms that finds expression in the previously quoted passage from "Epistemo-Critical Preface": "Terms for concepts are to be introduced that never appear in the entire book except in those places where they are defined" (4: 104). If "Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin" can indeed be called Benjamin's "first major work," then the proposal for producing "thick books" applies to his literary corpus as a whole. A newly devised term, the poetized, is laboriously defined, only to be abandoned in everything that follows. Stranger still is the fact that, around the time of Benjamin's death at the beginning of World War II, the term he invented at the start of World War I returns in its original context—as a way to capture the singular character of Hölderlin's late poetry. Benjamin is not responsible for this term when it returns, however; in his last major work, he explicitly sets himself against the one who takes over the idea of "the poetized," namely Martin Heidegger.

In retrospect, then, it is apparent that the poetized is like very few others terms in Benjamin's carefully crafted lexicon. And yet, the point of introducing the term is...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804757879
• ISBN 13: 9780804757874
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 333
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland