Nietzsche's Nihilism in Walter Benjamin by Mauro Ponzi (review)

Walter Benjamin emerges from Mauro Ponzi's book as a thinker of history struggling with the problem of reconstructing the past. It is in this context that the image becomes crucial. Inseparable from its own simultaneity with the past, always twinned with memory and its work of reparation, while also overshadowing it, the image takes center stage when Benjamin studies Baudelaire. As Ponzi helpfully reminds us, the fall of the aura is not just one of Benjamin's theoretical tenets but names a historical moment of mechanization and industrialization (217). Ponzi recalls a passage that Benjamin quotes at the end of "Some Motifs in Baudelaire," from "Perte de l'aureole," about the poet losing his "insignia" (189). Baudelaire resisted and opposed the depreciation of people and things by depreciating the poet's own identity. In the footsteps of the French master, drawing a little on Marx (especially on the notion of reification), Benjamin focuses his interest on those places, like the city streets and the arcades, where commodification and the euphoria of goods are intoxicating, and therefore stand out in all their potential as allegories of modernity. A type of observer comes into being—a self-appointed witness to the eternal recurrence of the same—who is thrown into a world where all relationships are reified (209), where the beautiful appearance of goods rapidly falls into disuse (fashion), and where memory is transformed into an awareness of transience (197). Surely we have heard this account of modernity before, but the virtue of hearing it again in Ponzi's book resides in the capacity of the author to offer a vivid sketch of Benjamin's longing to become the greatest literary critic in the German language.

Baudelaire's new poetic language was inseparable from "the sensation of modernity," which could be had only at a price (190). Wanting to break bread with the artist, the literary critic in Benjamin imagines a shattered whole as the origin of everything, especially language and history. As for language, Ponzi remarks on the central role of voice in Benjamin's theory of language and of translation, and traces it to the dual modality of revelation. For the author, Benjamin's "duplication of the linguistic act as an original act" is indebted to the Hebrew tradition, with its paradigmatic double vision of writing that, while always being a comment on the law (Torah), is also a commentary on the verbal tradition (Talmud) (133). This dual modality is reinvented by Benjamin, Ponzi proposes, as the play of theological and political elements, with the former at once communicated and contradicted by the latter and vice-versa, "in a contrast full of tension" that recalls Moses descending from Mount Sinai, throwing the tablets of the law against the golden calf, and transmitting to the people the revelation of the commandments verbally (133). This theological-political connection frames Ponzi's book, opening the first chapter ("Capitalism as Religion") and resuming in the last chapter ("The Order of the Profane"), where he quotes evidence from Benjamin himself, from the fragment "Theory of Progress, Theory of Knowledge": "My thinking is related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to go to the blotter, however, nothing of what is written would remain" (256). As for history, Ponzi refers to the frequently referenced Angel of History in Benjamin's "On the Concept of History," whose alternative point of view counters a historical and cultural context incapable of responding to new possibilities with a new social order: "Where a chain of events appears before us, [the Angel of History] sees only one single catastrophe" (quoted in Nietzsche's Nihilism, 102).

The broken whole, the splinters of an Ursprache, the shards of the same vase (134–35): such is the Archimedean point from which Benjamin moves thought, manifesting his ambition "to recreate literary criticism as a genre" (Benjamin quoted in Nietzsche's Nihilism, 123n30). Benjamin's admiration...