Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions.

Gross, David S.

The collection of essays Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions is based on papers given at a conference on Benjamin at Yale University in 1991. The nine contributions are by professors - for the most part, of comparative literature - in America, Germany, and England, including such prominent comparatistes as Samuel Weber and Rodolphe Gasche and such Benjamin scholars as Rainer Nagele.

In the preface the editor David Ferris points out that the Benjamin conference took place twenty-five years to the day after the famous 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins which inaugurated the movement toward poststructuralism and deconstruction in the United States. These essays are definitely imbued with the values of poststructuralism, especially those of what we used to call "the Yale school," specifically Paul de Man. The editor's own essay is particularly marked by its political agenda, seeking to prove that the "appropriation" of Benjamin by political theorists of the Left has been wrongheaded, inappropriate.

Ferris ends his essay with the striking assertions that "Benjamin's understanding of the historical is useless to political organization" and that "Benjamin will be useless to the rebirth of theory as political and cultural critique." Ferris's own critique seems haunted by the ghost of de Man and seems aimed at some imagined vulgar Marxist opponent who would decry the undecidability and indeterminacy which Benjamin's conception of history does in fact share with poststructuralism, whereas the most interesting uses of Benjamin in leftist cultural theory have emphasized the anti-Stalinism and antipositivism in Benjamin's critiques of both "historical materialist" and more conservative conceptions of history and uses of discourse.

There are some good moments in the collection. Ferris's own essay contains this nice parenthetic observation: "(And can history be anything other than the movement of understanding, when the only alternative is to reduce it to irrefutable lists of facts, which are irrefutable only to the extent that they are not historical?)" Weber's essay titled "Art, Aura, and Media" in Benjamin is interesting, and Gasche's on "the Sober Absolute" in Benjamin's theorizing makes an important contribution. He argues that in Western thought since the Romantics, culminating in Benjamin, "the Absolute becomes desacralized, de-divinized by reflection - in an intellectual and conceptual process of an intuiting no longer intuitive (anschaulich) but soberly rational, down-to-earth. . . . The sober Absolute is an Absolute that has forfeited its transcendence."

Nagele's essay on Benjamin's reading of Baudelaire is thoughtful and perceptive. His consideration of Benjamin's relations with Marxist thought is a useful alternative to that of Ferris. His stress on the importance for Benjamin of all Art being grounded in "the existence of man in society" connects Benjamin to Habermas and "the lifeworld" and to Bourdieu's notion of the "habitus."

Since these essays from 1991 were written well before the appearance of Derrida's Specters of Marx (1994), their atmosphere is unfortunately that of antipolitical deconstructionists like de Man. From Derrida and elsewhere in leftist theory today we see how those very aspects of Benjamin's work which link him with poststructuralism are those which make his work most relevant for those seeking to advance a progressive political agenda as Benjamin's century of catastrophe comes to a close.

David S. Gross University of Oklahoma