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  • Crisis and Criticism
  • Michael G. Levine (bio)
Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings
Belknap Press
www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog
755Pages; Print, $39.95

In the summer of 1930 Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht agreed to work together to found a journal with the title Krisis und Kritik. The journal’s activity was to be anchored in a clear awareness of what Benjamin describes in a memorandum as “the critical situation at the foundation of today’s society.” As Eiland and Jennings note,

This proviso points to the etymologically informed understanding of the twin terms ‘crisis’ and ‘criticism’: at issue is the idea of a critical or decisive turning point, as one speaks of a crisis in the course of a disease. What is called for at such a moment is a thinking intervention, a strategy by which the bourgeois intelligentsia can take account of itself (the journal is emphatically ‘not an organ of the proletariat’).

Such an understanding of the relationship between crisis and criticism seems to inform the authors’ own sense of what it means to live and to write “a critical life.” Their life of Walter Benjamin is at once the biography of one of the most formidable social, literary and media critics of the twentieth century and a story of perpetual crisis. Indeed, it is through the figure of Benjamin that the authors bring the interrelated political, economic, social, technological, and intellectual crises of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into focus. Benjamin is not merely the lens through which these crises are viewed but himself their flashpoint. And while these crises are played out in his life, they are also critically reflected upon in his writings. More than mere reflections, these writings are, to use the authors’ apt phrase, “thinking interventions” in a constantly shifting human landscape.

Some of Benjamin’s most trenchant formulations seek to get a fix on this landscape. Often appearing at the limits of his texts, they mark the outermost reaches of his thought at any given moment. Thus, for example, at the very end of One-Way Street first published in 1928 he writes, “In the nights of annihilation of the last war, the frame of mankind (den Gliederbau der Menschheit) was shaken by a feeling that resembled the bliss of the epileptic. And the revolts that followed it were the first attempt of mankind to bring the new body under control (den neuen Leib in ihre Gewalt zu bringen).” Here the blind terror of explosions in the night during WWI is so unnerving, its aftershocks so pervasive, that the tremors are said not only to convulse the very frame of mankind but to shake it to pieces, giving it in the process a “new body” not yet under control and perhaps not altogether human. The postwar revolts are thus seen as the perpetuation of an uncontrollable shock, one powerful enough both to dismember and to organize out of the disjecta membra not only new human formations but an altogether different sense of the human collective and the human body itself.

These shocks may in turn be said to propagate through the body of Benjamin’s own text. As they do, we come to see the postwar revolts as themselves internally conflicted: as testimony at once to the after-effects of traumatic violence and to the desperately violent efforts to bring them under control (the German phrase in ihre Gewalt zu bringen underscores precisely this element of compensatory violence). Eiland and Jennings’s discussion of this passage takes this violently proliferating movement one step further. As though the convulsions touched on in the very last lines of One-Way Street could not be contained there, as if their seemingly uncontrollable repercussions had the residual power to re-articulate textual relations and force us to read one text through the body of another, the authors examine this passage in conjunction with The Origin of German Tragic Drama on which Benjamin was also working at the time. Thus, they note, “Here, as at many points in the study of the Baroque, the full thrust of Benjamin’s reading emerges only when the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels...

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