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  • Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics: Rethinking Religion through the Arts
  • David Brian Howard
Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics: Rethinking Religion through the Arts. By S. Brent Plate. Routledge, 2005. 192 pages. $22.95.

[O]ur attitude should not be reverence for Benjamin that would immortalize his words as the product of a great author no longer here, but reverence for the very mortal and precarious reality that forms our own 'present,' through which Benjamin's work is now telescoped

Susan Buck-Morss (viii)

In the last two decades scholarship devoted to the life and work of the German intellectual Walter Benjamin has accelerated to such an extent that his legacy now towers over the scholarly attention paid to other social critics more closely associated with the Frankfurt School, such as Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer. In his new book Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics: Rethinking Religion Through the Arts author S. Brent Plate notes how the notoriously complex Benjamin is analyzed and read in a variety of academic disciplines as diverse as sociology, anthropology, history, art history, urban studies, visual culture studies, film studies, philosophy, and literature. Rarely, however, does he arise as a topic within the frame of a religious studies perspective with one of the most notable exceptions being Eric Jacobson's Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, published in 2003. It is to Plate's credit, therefore, that he has written a study that not only highlights the stellar importance of Benjamin's work for contemporary religious studies but succeeds in weaving together and linking the importance of his theological relevance with his original and highly unorthodox theory of aesthetics, especially his radical reframing of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century allegorical aesthetics. Plate has successfully produced a significant, well-written, and tightly composed book that is a major contribution to the study of the relationship between religion and art in Walter Benjamin.

Central to Plate's argument is an aesthetic theory of religion, which draws extensively from Benjamin's reframing of the concepts of art and allegory. Chapter 2 highlights the mode of allegory, especially in Benjamin, which is reconfigured by Plate as a force that destabilizes "religious functions such as myth, symbol, memory, narrative, creation, and redemption" (9). Susan Buck-Morss, in her book The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, has observed that Benjamin "rejected as 'untenable' the established canon (which rested on Goethe's formulation) that the difference between 'symbol' and 'allegory' hinged on how idea and concept related the particular to the general" (168). Rather than representing a mystical symbolic holism Benjamin resituates allegory so that, "in allegory, history appears as nature in decay or ruins and the temporal mode is one of retrospective contemplation; but time enters the symbol as an instantaneous present...in which the empirical and the transcendent appear momentarily fused within a fleeting, natural form" (168). Although the reinterpreting of allegory along the lines of fragmentation and destruction would seem antithetical to a project seeking an aesthetic theory of religion, Plate argues to the contrary that "religion, and more importantly religious practice, is about process and movement; it is about creativity [End Page 560] more than creation, mythologizing more than myth, memory making more than memory, consecration and deconsecration more than the sacred" (9). Plate's extrapolation, from Benjamin's concept of allegory, of the dialectic between creativity and destruction inverts an orthodox preoccupation with transcendent and symbolic forms into a dynamic act of demythologizing and remythologizing but crucially "without a final stable order" (79). The implications of this reorientation of allegory in its relationship with the symbol cannot be overstated, not only for religious studies but for the study of the visual arts as well.

Building on the Benjaminian reinterpretation of allegory as an emphasis on movement and creative destruction, Plate moves in chapter 3 of his book to an analysis of art that draws on Benjamin's later classic essay "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility." In this chapter Plate links the destructiveness present in Benjamin's concept of allegory to the destruction of the auratic or transcendent quality...

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