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  • The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time
  • Michael Powers
Peter D. Fenves. The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2010. 336 pages

Walter Benjamin’s name has become commonplace across a wide array of fields and theoretical schools. While the boom in Benjamin scholarship testifies to the richness of his variegated oeuvre, research has typically centered on a limited number of texts that have achieved canonical status. In The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time, Peter Fenves draws on lesser-known, early writings—some of which he offers in translation for the first time—in order to highlight an often overlooked, yet essential, aspect of Benjamin’s early thought: its relation to phenomenology. In the process, this rigorous study suggests a different trajectory in the development of phenomenological thought in the early 20th century that culminates in the theory of [End Page 1144] Benjamin, instead of Husserl’s most recognized student, Heidegger. With great philological acumen, Fenves reconstructs Benjamin’s early intellectual career—focusing on his university years (roughly 1913–1925)—through a series of challenging chapters that deftly draw out the intricacies of Benjamin’s early philosophical program.

The central and guiding thesis of Fenves’s book is that Benjamin radicalizes Husserl’s phenomenological reduction by denying the possibility that any philosopher is capable intentionally of fully “turning off” the “natural attitude” that “experience derives from causal interaction between the mind and the world” (2–3). Fenves convincingly shows how, for Benjamin, no single “unity of consciousness or community” can successfully perform such an act of volition (3). In Benjamin’s reworked conception of the reduction, a non-affective, pure sphere of reception still exists, but the subject’s ability deliberately to access such a realm is fundamentally called into question, particularly to the extent that such a sphere presupposes a dyadic relation between subject and object.

As its title suggests, Fenves’s book argues that for Benjamin the problem of phenomenological reduction is translated into theological terms. Man’s fallen state, importantly characterized by guilt, stands for the “natural attitude,” and the sphere of pure reception is replaced by paradise. Although there is no returning to paradise after the fall, Benjamin’s insight, according to Fenves, lies, firstly, in his identification of the existence of a pure, paradisal sphere in the absence of its direct accessibility, and, secondly, in conceptualizing the irreducible tension that separates and simultaneously links the human and the divine, the intelligible and unintelligible. Thus the Benjaminian “messiah” signals not only the superhuman force required to reduce or bridge this divide, but also the very striving and failure to do so. This is what Fenves, quoting Benjamin, identifies as the “tension toward the messianic” (77).

Within the contours of this book, Fenves elucidates the many implications of Benjamin’s powerful revision of Husserl’s groundbreaking theory while at the same time mapping out a host of philosophical influences instrumental in the development of Benjamin’s early thought. While Bergson, Nietzsche, and Plato all factor prominently in these formative years, two influences stand out: neo-Kantianism and, as already mentioned, phenomenology. Accordingly, Fenves describes how the ideas of “pure logic” (Cohen) and “pure knowledge” (Husserl) informed Benjamin’s program of developing a “pure aesthetics” which would transcend psychologism and “poetic subjectivity” alike (20–22).

In the first chapter, Fenves explores Benjamin’s connection to neo-Kantianism—in particular to the work of Cohen and Cassirer—via an analysis of Benjamin’s 1914–1915 “Höderlin” essay. With insight and originality Fenves analyzes the notions of space and time in Benjamin’s essay through the lens of Cassirer’s writings on mathematics. He also offers an interpretation of the tension between “the poetized” (das Gedichtete) and its “methodological ideal,” the “pure poetized.” This section outlines the key questions that preoccupy Benjamin during this early period, central among them the possibility of naming “something like the shape of truth”—a concept for which “no such [End Page 1145] word [exists] in the philosophical tradition” (38–42). Fenves ends by convincingly speculating that “doctrine” (Lehre) comes closest to what Benjamin had in mind...

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