Benjamin's Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory (review)

Of late when yet another book on Walter Benjamin is published, the reader interested in the philosopher's work cannot but wonder whether the theoretical enterprise was led by the iconic quality Benjamin has assumed in the academic publishing trade, or whether the act of reading the book will result in revelatory insights and thought-constellations. Furthermore, if a book—like Gerhard Richter's most recent edited volume of essays Benjamin's Ghosts—bears an evocative title, the reader's trepidation may skyrocket and the questions about the theoretical approach to Benjamin's multifaceted, "obscure" texts become even more urgent: will the author/s elucidate Benjamin's thought? Will the book be accessible or obscure—like Benjamin's work—in its turn? Will the author re-frame the philosopher's work from the perspective of contemporary cultural, ethical or political concerns?

Feminist critic Sigrid Weigel opened her book Body-and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin (Routledge, 1996) with the remark about the widespread custom in Benjamin scholarship to write about Benjamin's Aktualität since at least the post-1968 revival of Benjamin. She argued that the concept however is used against Benjamin's own interpretation of it, because it is intended as the usefulness of his thought for "problems of current interest and concern" or to express whether the philosopher's "theoretical observations can be appropriated for the purposes of contemporary analysis and reflection." (4). In contrast, she argued that the issue of Aktualität is about the "attitude adopted towards ideas and constellations encountered, of the modes of approaching and working with the signs and the material of history and culture." (Ibid.) In short, she critiqued the typical invocation of Benjamin's actuality, for it disregards Benjamin's manner of thinking and analysing as fundamentally grounded—in its mode and materials—in the image. Thus, often, scholarship has missed out on the chance to look at the present differently, in a Benjaminian way, so to speak, and enact—perform—Benjamin's actuality.

Gerhard Richter's suggestive title situates the author's intention along the lines of Weigel. Richter adopts the term "ghosts" from Benjamin's own writings in order to launch a Benjaminian investigation of the present state of critical thought and its ties to the past and future (or, rather, future perfect) of theory, the humanities, in particular the role of literary, cultural, ethical, and political methods of investigation of the present within the contemporary corporate university. The ghosts of the dead live (haunt) in the present, which hence also coincides with the non-lived future of the past, namely the dead. On the one hand, then, the ghost of Benjamin occupies this multi-dimensional space-time. However, in his crystal-clear and insightful introduction, Richter speaks of the ghostly in yet a second way. If the "dead" Benjamin's thoughts are returned to us as our ghosts, on the other hand, the ghostly is a specific feature of Benjamin's always ungraspable and unusable concepts, as Richter had already demonstrated in his previous book Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography. Here he pointed to the political implication of the Benjaminian ghostly concept—as not yet conceived concept, one that can never be fixed within a pre-given system, or come to identify one. It is this political quality of Benjamin's concepts that motivates Richter's collection of essays in the guise of the ghostly.

The ghostly, as Richter specifies, shares the "transitory quality of thought and writing" that also characterizes the "in-betweenness" of the Schwellenkunde (4). In this respect, Richter's focus on the ghostly for his collection of essays brings to the fore the related questions about the strategic function of a (cultural) politics of the "performative". The performative is Benjamin's enactment through and in his texts of a concept that cannot be "quoted" as is, as stable essence or nucleus, but that instead unfolds textually...