A life richly lived
WALTER BENJAMIN
By Esther Leslie
192 pp. Reaktion Books $16.95
Review by Farhang Erfani
In a 1938 letter to a friend, Walter Benjamin wrote, “To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty, one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the figure of failure. The circumstances of this failure are manifold. One is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream. There is nothing more memorable than the fervor with which Kafka emphasized his failure.”
It is indeed a strange way of thinking of Kafka, an author of unquestionable fame. Thanks to Esther Leslie’s book on Walter Benjamin, the reader can begin to make sense of the complexity of Benjamin’s thoughts, and especially his life. Though Benjamin “was not a celebrated figure when alive,” Leslie shows us the remarkable intellectual continuity of the work that has defined his voice. From the beginning Benjamin valued failures and ruins.
Speaking of beginnings, Leslie tells us of Benjamin’s fascination with children. Not only do children devour the world and are they most “receptive” to their environment, they also engage the world; they are not passive recipients—a virtue whose lack Benjamin deplored in adult lives. Like Benjamin, children are drawn to “any site where things were being visibly worked on”; they are “irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework...By playing with the broken-down and the unwanted, children combine ‘materials of widely differing kinds in a new, intuitive relationship.’” This positive childish attitude, the inquisition into ruins for the sake of creativity, became the hallmark of Benjamin’s own writings and reflections.
Walter Benjamin is a difficult figure to classify. He is often associated with the Frankfurt School as a critical theorist, and Leslie’s book shows how closely Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer followed Benjamin’s work as he travelled from one place to the next, and it was usually the modest stipend which their Institute provided that allowed Benjamin to continue writing. Like many Germans of his time, Benjamin travelled a lot, partly because he valued travels—his greatest wish was “for distant and, above all, long journeys”—and mostly because intellectuals like him lived under the threat of Nazism and an impending war. He had a very difficult time with disciplinary boundaries, which is reflected by the wide use of his work across academic departments these days. He could not stand philosophy as it was taught; he found most philosophers to be “lackeys of the international bourgeoisie, because they are the most irrelevant.” Genuine writing—and his was distinctly philosophical as long as one expects that philosophy ought to matter—must address real issues.
Even in his famous Arcades Projects, which is a collection of minute analyses of Parisian life in the nineteenth century, he provided the greatest insight through single anecdotes about life and ideology. And his care for history comes from his belief that we are historical beings and ought to know the past as well as possible, but not uncritically, not as a collection of facts but as living history. He refused to use a single discipline’s jargon, choosing instead to critically engage social phenomena of his time and before. He was a Marxist, but an unconventional one. He wanted to secure his work against Marxist objections, but he also wrote and studied subjects like aesthetics and literature that were not typically appreciated by revolutionary Marxists. Above all, his work illuminates the fragile human condition in its historical situatedness; philosophy, literature, reflections on technology, or any other disciplinary angle—all are fit for analysis, provided it sheds further light on who we are.
The structure of Leslie’s book follows Benjamin’s life slowly and meticulously. As a displaced and out-of-place thinker, we see Benjamin maintain strong friendships throughout his life with many other famed thinkers such as Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Georges Bataille, and others. This network, which sustained him both intellectually and financially, cannot be underestimated. According to Leslie, Benjamin “was a man who lived through his connections to others.” We also see him through his marriages and love affairs; we read about his difficult relationships with his parents. In a remarkable passage, Leslie tells us how Benjamin viewed the traumatic past. At the age of five or six, his father came to his bedroom to tell him of a relative’s death. The young Walter knew that he could not grasp the news but also knew that this was a moment to recall, much like Proust whose work he diligently read and translated. Instead of trying to process the incomprehensible or dismissing the unknown, the young boy “imprinted onto his memory all the details of his room—because he felt ‘dimly’ that he would one day have to return to search for something ‘forgotten’ there.”
Above all, we see a man struggling through poverty, misery, and exile, who nonetheless remained committed to writing and to thinking, because he correctly sensed that the times were dire. He wrote clearly and carefully, but he knew that it “is indeed not the time to exhibit in kiosks what we believe to hold in our hands. Rather it seems to be time to think about bomb-proof storage for it.” What I find remarkably touching in this narrative is this exact commitment; Benjamin suffered from much, including exile and imprisonment. Especially for those of us who have experienced the former—and I am sure that the life of the latter is equally impossible to digest—I found myself in awe of Benjamin. It is all too easy—one could say that it is only human—to give up on matters of philosophy or thought in times of personal struggle. Through poverty and exile, Benjamin continued working; he continued writing. Even more remarkable, none of his work is escapist. Writing was not an evasion; it had to be done.
Leslie’s book is too rich to simply summarize here. It is full of glosses and tender moments. Very noteworthy are her long discussions of Benjamin’s interest in radio. Benjamin, as noted above, admired children for not being passive spectators. He found that modern media—film and radio—made the audience passive, a fascist trait that he continually deplored. He produced a number of radio shows, giving lectures on varied topics such as collapsed bridges and their significance. He broadcast works aimed at children. But he also experimented with the medium. Using Brecht’s model of the theatre, he explored everyday situations. In 1931, for instance, he produced a show called “Pay Rise?” The show would explore this situation in the first half and revisit it dialectically in the second half, seeing how one ought to have proceeded in the first place. The didactic model “was followed by live discussions.”
In the Afterword to her book, Leslie settles many themes and addresses a number of concerns that one might expect to find in the Introduction, specifying her approach to working on Benjamin. But it takes the work of the book to appreciate her claims. She rightly points out that there is now a “veritable Benjamin industry,” which Leslie’s work is a part of. She in fact has written a number of books and articles on Benjamin; she speaks and writes with an authority that is second to none. Her expertise, which genuinely shines through this book, allows her to deplore, without going into details, much of the current “industry’s” work.
Walter Benjamin was too multi-faceted. Yet commentators do not celebrate but chastise him on charges of inconsistency. Worse, some of his defenders seem to dismiss the multiplicity of his thoughts and commitments, fitting him within a box that serves their own purposes. His detractors accuse him of everything, “from left-liberal to communist to anarchist, from tragic defeatist to revolutionary optimist.” The virtue of Leslie’s book is that it shows that Benjamin transcends these divisions and that his complicated commitments, his refusal to be either a Jew or a communist, come from profound reflections and his refusal to go with the intellectual crowds.
Readers of Leslie’s book will learn an immense amount about Benjamin. She is a terrific writer, and her work engages the reader throughout. My main concern is that even though the book professes to write on Benjamin “as [a] life and work,” I worry that a fuller familiarity with Benjamin’s work might prove necessary in order to really appreciate Leslie’s book. For those who have loved the Arcades Projects or have read one of the many reproduced copies of the famed essays “The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” there is much to learn. Those unfamiliar with Benjamin in the first place will benefit from reading an uncanny narrative, but they will not quite understand the “work” even though the “life” is beautifully displayed. References from Benjamin’s work come largely from standard German editions, deepening this scholarly obstacle. Nevertheless, there have been a few lives as richly lived as Benjamin’s, and Esther Leslie’s Walter Benjamin is a beautiful testament to it.
Farhang Erfani is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Washington, DC and is a Research Associate at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in South Africa. He also created and edits www.continental-philosophy.org.
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