PERSPECTIVES ON WALTER BENJAMIN

Winter 1999
Volume 25, Number 2

Two helpful anthologies of writing about Benjamin--one from two or three years ago edited by Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne and one from ten years earlier edited by Gary Smith--are explicit in their wish to present Benjamin in his aspect, or should one say semblance, as a philosopher; both are explicit in wishing to counter the dominating semblance of Benjamin as a great critic, as lent to him in the English-speaking world by Hannah Arendt's portrait and collection under the title Illuminations, as they are explicit in recognizing that Benjamin at best created, and aspired to, as Adorno put the matter, "a philosophy directed against philosophy," which they are also prepared to recognize as something that a creative canonical modern philosopher, since I suppose Descartes and Bacon, is rather bound to do.1 This gesture of a disciplinary or counterdisciplinary appropriation of Benjamin focuses two points of interest for me (I do not suppose them incompatible with those editors' intentions): (1) Benjamin's anti- or counterphilosophy may be seen specifically as immeasurably distant from and close to Wittgenstein's anti- or counterphilosophy in Philosophical Investigations; (2) there is an economy of inspiration and opacity in Benjamin's prose--sometimes it is, as Emerson puts things, a play of intuition and tuition--that suggests a reason that the idea of philosophy should not simply replace or succeed that of criticism in coming to terms with his achievement. Benjamin enacts, more or less blatantly, a contesting of the philosophical with the literary, or of what remains of each, that seems internal at once to the exceptional prestige of his work and to an effect of intimacy or concern it elicits from its readers.

A sense of affinity between Benjamin and Wittgenstein helped produce the signals in my subtitle, when, with the memory in my head of Benjamin's frequently cited letter to Scholem (17 April 1931) in which he expresses a phantasm of his writing as a call or signal for rescue from the top of the crumbling mast of a sinking ship,2 I came upon a piece of his with the title "Program for a Proletarian Children's Theater" containing these sentences: "Almost every child's gesture is command and signal," and "it is the task of the director to rescue the children's signals out of the dangerous magic realm of mere fantasy and to bring them to bear on the material."3 One hardly knows whether Benjamin is there identifying more with the director than with the child, whose world Benjamin of course enters elsewhere as well (apart from his interest in the history of children's books, I cite Jeffrey Mehlman's fascinating Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on His Radio Years).4 And I know of no other major philosophical sensibility of this century who attaches comparable importance to the figure of the child with the exception of Wittgenstein in the Investigations, which opens with Augustine's portrait of himself as a child stealing language from his elders, an autobiographical image that haunts every move in Wittgenstein's drive to wrest language back from what he calls metaphysics, and what we might perhaps still call the absolute.5

To the extent that opening a path for Benjamin's contribution to my field will be furthered by opening certain passages between his writing and Wittgenstein's Investigations--which is the object of these remarks--I have to give an idea of how I have wished to see the Investigations received.

1. See Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London, 1994); Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago, 1989); and Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1969).

2. See Benjamin, letter to Gershom Scholem, 17 Apr. 1931, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1892-1940, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson, ed. Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (Chicago, 1994), p. 378.

3. Benjamin, "Program for a Proletarian Children's Theater," in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, trans. Don Reneau et al., ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley, 1994), p. 233.

4. See Jeffrey Mehlman, Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on His Radio Years (Chicago, 1993).

5. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3d ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscomb (London, 1958), for example, §47; hereafter abbreviated PI.

Stanley Cavell is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value (emeritus) at Harvard University. He is the author, most recently, of Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1996), Philosophical Passages : Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (1995), and A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (1994).