Philosophizing beyond philosophy

Abstract

promise of ʻthe advent of a new law .̓ Caygill s̓ Walter Benjamin is not for the philosophically faint of heart, but it repays close attention. It is by some distance the most philosophically sophisticated work on Benjamin in English. Readers inclined to disagree with it will need strong grounds for doing so. Those who want their cultural theory without philosophy will have to stop reading Walter Benjamin. In the light of the present Brodersen and Caygill offer different ways to read Benjamin – the life and the work – as a whole. The remaining three books under review are concerned with more specific aspects of his thought, and, in particular, the vexed question of its ʻactualityʼ or contemporaneity. The question is vexed, first, because how we are to go about determining the historical meaning of the present is one of the main things at issue in Benjamin s̓ thought; and, second, because, under the influence of various French thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s, contemporary Anglo-American literary and cultural theory operates at considerable remove from the philosophical presuppositions of Benjamin s̓ work. Weigel s̓ Bodyand Image-Space is made up of eleven loosely related essays on Benjamin, subdivided according to the themes of ʻimages and body ,̓ ʻgender ,̓ and ʻmemory and writing .̓ ʻWith the Sharpened Axe of Reasonʼ presents papers from one of the international conferences commemorating the centenary of Benjamin s̓ birth in 1992, held in Sydney, Australia. Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History collects pieces first delivered in the North American academy. All three books are actively concerned to insert Benjamin s̓ work into new intellectual contexts in order to uncover hitherto concealed or neglected dimensions of its productivity: the modernism/postmodernism debate (the Fischer and Steinberg collections), poststructuralism and feminism (Fischer and Weigel), psychoanalysis (Weigel), and cultural and post-colonial studies (Steinberg). The determination to avoid what Fischer calls ʻthe adulatory-identificatory approachʼ is refreshing, but thinking through such engagements critically is a trickier business than some of the contributors here seem prepared to acknowledge. For example, it is not particularly useful or illuminating to be told that Benjamin ʻanticipatesʼ poststructuralist theories of textuality and ʻvarious motifs of Postmodernismʼ (Docker, in Fischer, p. 76); or that his idea of ʻthe language of thingsʼ represents ʻan expanded concept of writing (anticipating Derrida)ʼ (Weigel in Fischer, p. 96). Not only do such parallels lack all theoretical specificity or point, but the language of anticipation tends to be used in a crudely historicist manner: as if the more recently propounded theory is for some mysterious reason preferable on the sole grounds that it occupies a chronologically subsequent time. Benjamin himself, of course, was insistent on the theological character of such implicitly providential historicism. It is odd that Weigel should lapse into this way of writing, since elsewhere she is, at least formally, fairly ferociously anti-historicist. Bodyand Image-Space opens with a polemic against the concept of actuality in use in most of the centenary commemorations, in the name of Benjamin s̓ own conception of actuality, as it is found in the extraordinary, ecstatic conclusion to his ʻSurrealismʼ essay,