Walter Benjamin's Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels

Hanssen’s study appears at a time when there is a certain fatigue concerning Benjamin. After the first phase of Benjamin readings in the 1950s and 60s, which was marked by disagreement among his friends and contemporaries; after the politicization of Benjamin criticism in the aftermath of 1968, and a reconsideration of his “marxist” writings in the 70s, there has been since the early 80s what one might call a Benjamin boom. A 1993 bibliography shows more than 2100 publications between 1983 and 1992 alone. During the first two periods, Benjamin’s texts were often read very selectively and reductively, whereas one often gets the impression nowadays that Benjamin’s every word is accorded the utmost attention. Yet at the same time one cannot avoid the impression, to phrase it in Benjamin’s terms, that the “best” has almost been forgotten thereby: the actuality of his philosophical, philological and political work, a sense of the “now” and “here” in discussions of this thinker. It therefore seems that the most urgent task of any further reading would be to save Benjamin from the ghetto of inefficacy, even irrelevance, in which academic care threatens to enclose him.

Probably the most successful attempt in this direction was undertaken by Jacques Derrida at the beginning of the 90s with “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’” (“Force de Loi: Le ‘Fondement Mystique de l’Autorité,’” Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990): 919–1045; hereafter quoted as translated by Mary Quaintance), a reading of the essay “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” (“Critique of violence”) in the context of the question of justice. Since then, a new conformism has developed in Derrida’s shadow, perhaps due to the fact that questionable estimations of Derrida have been adapted over and over again without reconsideration. Hanssen departs from such conformism. Where Derrida grants in a somewhat patronizing way that Benjamin “was not deaf or insensitive to” the problem of animality, “even if his propositions on this subject remain quite obscure, if not quite traditional” (Derrida 973), Hanssen’s study draws the image of a thinker who articulates a fundamental critique of humanism and a hermeneutics of the senses, from the early “Program of a Coming Philosophy” to the late essays on Kafka and Leskov. Where Derrida in a characteristic gesture of repulsion had demarcated his own position from Benjamin’s with the somewhat superficial hint that this “text, like many others by Benjamin, is still too Heideggerian . . . for me” (Derrida 1045), Hanssen asks precisely to what extent one can speak of this “proximity” of Benjamin to Heidegger. She proves that Heidegger’s hidden anthropocentrism was one of the most prominent targets of Benjamin’s implicit attacks, when he coined the “materialist” category of “natural history” as an “other history,” one “no longer purely anthropocentric in nature or anchored solely in the concerns of a human subject” (48).

But above all, Hanssen’s investigation takes into consideration the immense suspicion under which Derrida has put Benjamin: that early essays like the one on the critique of violence belong “to the great anti-parliamentary and anti-Aufklärung wave on which Nazism so to speak surfaced and even surfed in the 20s and the beginning of the 30s,” and moreover that Benjamin’s early texts may possibly have to be blamed for their “complicity” with “the worst (here the final solution),” or that he at least cannot do justice to “a task and a responsibility” dictated by the “memory of the final solution” (Derrida 1045). If there were grounds for this suspicion, one would indeed have to deliberate whether it wouldn’t be better to say, like Derrida, “adieu or au-revoir to Benjamin” (Derrida 1037).

It becomes quickly clear that Hanssen, despite or maybe even because of her apparent debt to Derrida and the “poststructuralist” rereading of Benjamin, doesn’t share this opinion. In a very serious and rigorous analysis of both early as late...