Translating Benjamin in de Man and in Deconstruction More Generally

We think and write in the wake of Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School, and some of us, with or against our predilections, in the wake of Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida (among other like-minded thinkers) who came to terms with Benjamin in some singular and less singular ways. In what follows I try to take the measure of what is happening in the understanding of Benjamin on translation by figures working in the mode of deconstruction, with a focus especially on the contested reading by de Man, not without an eye to some other powerful readings of the same text and topic. I cannot claim such readings are entirely representative of an encounter between what we clunkily, though with some reason, call deconstruction and what we also a little awkwardly call the Frankfurt School, but I believe the text for my closest attention, Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator," as read by de Man and others, is a resonant example.¹ Benjamin's text likely counts as "pre-Frankfurt School," though its publication falls exactly in the same year as the inaugural meeting that would lead to the formal opening of the Institute in 1924.² Still, it is not entirely clear that in the early 1920s Benjamin was on the same page as those who would constitute the Frankfurt School, even though it was not out of nowhere that Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness would make such a big, favorable impression on Benjamin when he read it in 1924 and have immediate consequences for his writing. (He had, moreover, years earlier, begun to engage with the work of Ernst Bloch—something of an influence on and fellow traveler of the Frankfurt School—and had become friendly with him.) Indeed, the problematics addressed in the "Translator" essay link up at numerous turns—directly, vividly—with any number of protocols, habits of thought, and concerns in many of Benjamin's later writings that are clearly in the orbit of the Frankfurt School. There are also strong affinities between this essay by Benjamin and several of Adorno's later works, such as the essays "Words from Abroad" and "On the Use of Foreign Words" (where Adorno explores how no language can abide in the putative purity of self-enclosure), as well as the late piece "On Tradition." Moreover, if we understand translation not so narrowly³—which Benjamin's essay itself compels us of its own accord to do—the ripple effects extend far and wide, intersecting with numerous core texts addressing history and representation by those in the Frankfurt School whose "members," even at their most sociological, scarcely abandoned attention to the complexities of language and translation broadly understood. Still, there is a difference in texture from the typical productions by Benjamin from the late 1920s (around the "Moscow period," say) or 1930s and those of his later readers working in, or associated with, deconstruction. Those later texts attend to the political-economic far more resolutely and so many of them respond directly or indirectly to the immediate force of fascism. My sense is that those working in deconstruction only sometimes and partly share an ethos and somewhat less so a politics with those of the Frankfurt School. They do share a troubling of received categories and concepts, including the congealed binary oppositions of metaphysics, even if their responses to that tradition take more and less dialectical forms. And a propensity for negativity.⁴ Practitioners of both modes learned a good deal from Hegel about how to think difference, though Adorno embraced an awful lot more of Hegel than Benjamin did, the latter having little or nothing good to say about the Idealist precursor of the Marxian tradition. Both "schools"—which are not exactly schools—have a suspicion of models of the organic when applied to cultural artefacts that are emphatically not that. This last informs how proponents of the two modes think about history, a site of overlap and divergence in the tendencies and texture of their work.

I think it is fair to say that neither...