The Beauty and Terror of Lebensphilosophie : Ludwig Klages, Walter Benjamin, and Alfred Baeumler

During the past two decades interest in Walter Benjamin and fascist aesthetics has extended well beyond the limits of any social and political focus. Strangely, a little investigation shows that this vogue has been fueled by the historical roots of Benjamin's theory as much as by the discourse he employed-- downplayed by current historians-- a mixture of aesthetic critical theory, ideas about temporality drawn from the philosophy of life [Lebensphilosophie], and an alternative philosophy of history.

Directly relevant to these connections is a document - unnoticed until now - that registers the interest a high ranking Nazi took in Walter Benjamin, or more concretely, an interest a Nazi Lebensphilosopher took in Benjamin's own fascination with Lebensphilosophie, the tool the latter believed might help him develop a total critique. The focus of this discussion, where radical politics met a radical critique, belongs to a third party, a relatively hidden site in the history of modern thought: the Lebensphilosophie of Ludwig Klages, the conservative and anti-Semitic popular philosopher, and his dedication to the work of another founder of this neo-Romantic discourse, Johann Jacob Bachofen.

Tracing the lineage of Lebensphilosophie in relation to the Bachofen- debate of the mid 1920s leads us to dark corners and antecedents of today's biopolitics, teaching us a great deal about where and when Benjamin's notion of life was used as a total critique, and where it collided with the totalitarian struggle for life. Moreover, it teaches us that in so many ways, current political philosophy is still led by the consequences of this collision and its horizon of expectations, "the wagon of catastrophes" as Benjamin calls it in an article dedicated to toys as psycho-cultural archetypes.