Taking Benjamin Seriously as a Political Thinker

Reading benjamin

Benjamin has long been known for his literary and aesthetic theory but political theorists, as well as other scholars who are interested in questions of politics, tend to downplay (or simply not notice) his contributions to an actionable rhetorical-political discourse. In terms of a politics that speaks directly to the ongoing crisis of global capitalism, existing power arrangements, and the effective depoliticization of the vast majority of people living under such conditions (very much including advanced liberal capitalist democracies such as the United States), it often seems that Benjamin might not have all that much to say.

That, at least, is the way that he is often read. Marxists, if they pay attention to him at all, tend to argue that Benjamin is not really a Marxist (despite his own claims to the contrary). His own understanding of Marxist concepts like commodity fetishism and the nature of historical materialism seem (and arguably are) far removed from more conventional Marxist understandings of such ideas.

Even some of his closest friends and intellectual allies seem to disparage the political applicability of Benjamin's work.¹ Adorno famously accuses Benjamin of abandoning properly Marxist dialectical theory in favor of "magic and positivism," arguing that he relies too much on a mystical belief in the revolutionary potential of the image or object as itself (1999, 283). (Adorno's argument with Benjamin is considered in greater detail by Karen Feldman in this issue.) Gershom Scholem saw the split in Benjamin between theology (and specifically, Jewish theology) and Marxism as producing "gleam[s] of ambiguity" and saw his Marxism as potentially serving as an "inhibiting factor" to the theological philosophy that he clearly preferred Benjamin to pursue (1981, 123). Arendt for her part writes in her introduction to Benjamin's Illuminations that "the trouble with everything Benjamin wrote was that it always turned out to be sui generis," implying that Benjamin's works are beautiful only as they are and thus cannot offer us much in the way of practical wisdom or political utility (1968, 3).

Many later thinkers who live in the shadow of Benjamin are similarly ambivalent about any politics derived from his work. Derrida, even as he is greatly (and generally openly) indebted to Benjamin for much of his own understanding of political theology, distances himself from Benjamin's unironic messianism. Derrida tells us that Benjamin is "too Heideggerian, too messianico-marxist or archeo-eschatological for [him]" (1992, 62). For Derrida, Benjamin is too "archeo-eschatological" because his thinking is too mired in the Bible, in ideas of prophecy and salvation, to amount to a practicable political philosophy.²

In all of these renditions, Benjamin's work emerges as lying at the uneasy intersection between the political and the theological, between a world of action and a world of faith and supernatural (or messianic) forces. In refusing to resolve that conflict (indeed, irresolution being the basis of the connection between the theological and the political), it seems that Benjamin is often seen as falling between these two stools; he's too mystical for the Marxists and too Marxist for the mystics.

Perhaps as a result of such ambivalences, much of the scholarship on Benjamin has focused on his role as a literary critic, on his views on art (and in particular on his "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"), and on his aesthetic theory (Arendt reminds us that "in the rare moments when he cared to define what he was doing, Benjamin thought of himself as a literary critic" [1968, 4]). And certainly the work that has been done on him in this regard is significant and powerful. But what if we read Benjamin as a political thinker as well?

One of the most important scholars in the United States who has read him as a political thinker is Susan Buck-Morss, whose monumental The Dialectics of Seeing imagines the book that Benjamin's Arcades Project might have been and—by extension—the kinds of politics that might have been produced out of such a book. In The Dialectics of Seeing...