Introduction: Walter Benjamin in Latin America

And the transmission must go on.

—Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious ¹

If Benjamin Were Latin American . . .

What follows, for now, is mere speculation. I want to begin by entertaining a subjunctive possibility concerning the personal history of Walter Benjamin. It is a question partially inspired by Hermann Herlinghaus’s observation, in his article included in this issue of Discourse, that Erich Auerbach once tried to secure Benjamin a position at the University of São Paolo. The idea is astounding: what if Benjamin had left Europe in the mid-1930s and found his way to Latin America, specifically Brazil, and even more specifically, a classroom in Brazil? Beyond the interest this kind of question holds for speculative fiction, such a possibility would also make the title of this issue literally true: Walter Benjamin (actually) in Latin America. Furthermore, this “what if” scenario has the added benefit of placing Benjamin precisely in the position that was denied to him while in Europe: that of university professor. What if Benjamin were not only in Latin America, but also taught Latin America? What is astounding is the immediacy that this idea expresses: that Benjamin’s actual body might have been sent, as a kind of missive, to Brazil, precisely in order to teach, to transmit his legacy directly to his pupils.

If Benjamin were in Latin America, then what would that kind of pedagogical relationship look like? Or perhaps a better way to phrase this question would be: if Benjamin were Latin American, what kind of transmission would have taken place? These kinds of questions are certainly best left to the discourse of fiction, and for that reason I would like to turn briefly to Ricardo Piglia’s 1980 novel Respiración artificial. Piglia’s novel is exemplary in the way that it poses certain Benjaminian problems concerning experience, historiography, storytelling, and the transmission of knowledge or a legacy. The story in Artificial Respiration follows Emilio Renzi’s quest to meet his uncle, the historian Marcelo Maggi, who in turn is working on an unconventional biography of the fictional nineteenth-century figure Enrique Ossorio. In the second half of the novel, Renzi travels to Concordia to meet Maggi, but instead is met by a Polish émigré named Vladimir Tardewski, Maggi’s friend. Maggi never shows up, but Tardewski and Renzi end up speaking the entire night about a number of topics, including pedagogy. It turns out that Renzi’s uncle, Marcelo Maggi, was very interested in the way that European intellectuals formed “pedagogical pair[s]” with Argentine students. ² He cites, in particular, the relationships between Pedro de Angelis and Esteban Echeverría, Paul Groussac and Miguel Cané, and Witold Gombrowicz and Jorge Luis Borges. Tardewski explains Maggi’s theory to Renzi: “In those pairs the European intellectual was always, especially during the nineteenth century, the exemplary model, what the others would have wanted to be. At the same time many of these European intellectuals were no more than false copies, Platonic shadows of other models.” ³

While it might be difficult, from today’s perspective, to view Benjamin as a false copy of other (presumably more authentic) European models, this description nevertheless could serve as a way to imagine what Walter Benjamin would have looked like in Latin America during the 1930s and 1940s. Benjamin would have been able to offer the authority of his presence in the transmission of a legacy; nevertheless, this legacy would have become devalued precisely through this process of directly passing it on. In other words, by setting himself up as an authority to be emulated and copied directly, Benjamin would have counterfeited himself: he would have become, in effect, a counterfeit coin, infected by the very process of replicating himself in the name of a direct mode of transmission.

Let’s call this scenario “pedagogy in the age of its technological reproducibility.” While at first glance the direct presence of the teacher in Latin America would seem to a better way to transmit a legacy, in fact Benjamin’s notion of transmissibility precludes the immediacy of the event. In Benjamin...