Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait by Eli Friedlander (review)

Eli Friedlander’s book, Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait endeavors to understand the work of Walter Benjamin not primarily as a series of interconnected fragments, but as a totality of thought grounded deeply within the tradition of German philosophy. The writings of Benjamin have always spawned more questions than answers. His prevalence in the academic landscape has only increased over the last three decades even as scholars consistently struggle with his classification. Friedlander points out that even Benjamin’s closest friends and contemporaries thought of him as something other than a scholar in the traditional sense. Hannah Arendt imagined him as a “pearl fisher,” while Theodor Adorno saw him as having the ability to conjure his ideas “from secret depths” (1). In some way, all Benjamin scholarship grapples with these questions of his identity.

In his introduction, Friedlander laments the lack of engagement with Benjamin’s thought as a whole, “The reluctance to engage the rigor of Benjamin’s thought is evident in the often-encountered tendency to adopt his writings piecemeal . . . even his best readers sometimes treat his corpus of writing as a vast array of brilliant and idiosyncratic insights with hardly more to unify them than that they all bear the stamp of Benjamin’s unique and unclassifiable genius” (1). This point reveals an overwhelming resistance to Benjamin in his entirety. However, to trace the totality of Benjamin’s thought is no small task. For many reasons Friedlander’s book is a unique contribution to the field of Benjamin studies. However, his resistance to the trend toward isolating Benjamin—not only from himself, but also from philosophy—is one of the most luminous. Friedlander explicitly insists on an examination of the totality of Benjamin’s thought in conjunction with the form and content of his compositions. In doing so, he deduces from this newfound integrity a philosopher who was not as intellectually alone as past interpretations of him would seem to conclude.

This philosophical portrait is a nuanced study of both old and new questions. Friedlander’s central inquiry asks how one can understand the philosophical foundation of Benjamin’s œuvre: “It is thus an assumption of my work that Benjamin’s writing is everywhere informed by a philosophical task. Yet he is committed to working with and out of the historically concrete material, thus doing away with the organizing power of a systematic theory. In the face of such a lack of explicit philosophical elaboration, it is in the mode in which historical material is ordered and presented that one must recognize the face of necessity of history”(4). One cannot separate Benjamin’s form from his content. For Friedlander, Benjamin’s fragmented form does not point to a lack; rather it generates a mode by which recognition of truth is made possible for the reader. Friedlander makes this assumption of the philosophical in an attempt to “bring out the character of Benjamin’s thinking” (6). This “character” can only be understood as a totality of thought and it is best brought together in the language of Benjamin’s most seemingly fragmented work The Arcades Project, which is the focal point of this study. For Friedlander, “the gathering power of The Arcades Project, its capacity to hold broad expanses of meaning together (one might call this the sovereignty of thought manifest in it) is what also allows it to function as the centerpiece of my attempt to bring out the character of Benjamin’s thinking” (6). Accordingly, Friedlander’s own text is arranged in a manner reminiscent of the Arcades Project. Each of the nine chapters isolates and enriches the following ideas: Language; Image; Time; Body; Dream; Myth; Baudelaire; Rescue; and Remembrance. Within this over-arching structure there are three additional arrangements of thought (8). The first is the body of each chapter. These sections are fluently written and give the impression of a conversation between the author and Benjamin. This intense engagement reveals the inherent logic in Benjamin’s texts. To balance this feature, there are remarks...