By Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings
Times Higher Education - 23 January 2014
Beset by turmoil, an inimitable critic wrote as if from the future. Joanna Hodge on a material force
Reading Walter Benjamin is notoriously a hazardous affair: the range and
variety of his writings seduce his readers into finding only that which
they themselves have sought out. Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem,
Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida have fallen foul of this rule, to
greater and lesser extents. Writing about him is even more challenging:
his writings are inimitable, both in the rigour with which they
anatomise their material, and in the elegance and efficacity of their
experiments with form, to do justice to that material. His writings
display a cumulative effort to develop modes of presentation adequate to
the turmoil of his times. They are innovative to the limit in ways that
still startle and challenge. This study, subtitled A Critical Life,
admirable in so many ways, appears to duck this challenge by opting for
the classical, chronological form of intellectual biography, starting
with a birth on 15 July 1892 and ending with the emblematic suicide in
1940.
Read more....
No comments:
Post a Comment