Portrait of the artist as a jerk.
“It’s always disconcerting to discover a favorite writer was kind of a jerk. How does this realization affect our understanding of Walter Benjamin’s work?” Book Haven friend and writer Morgan Meis considers Howard Eiland‘s and Michael W. Jennings‘s new biography published by Harvard University Press, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life.
The resulting essay about the influential German essayist and critic in The Smart Set, “Jerk Reaction,” is bound to raise hackles. He begins:
It is hard to write a biography about a person who hides. Walter Benjamin really hid. The great critic and philosopher hid, often enough, right there in his writings. They are often elusive texts that can take years of reading, over and over again, before the mists begin to clear. What, for instance, is Benjamin really talking about in his famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility?” Is it a theory of art and historical change? Is it a political manifesto about the revolutionary potential of film? Is it a long lament about the loss of that magical quality “aura?” The more you read the essay (in its various versions), the harder it is to decide just what Benjamin is saying. But it is impossible to dismiss the essay altogether. The ideas contained within it have a way of staying put in your mind, festering there. That was Benjamin’s special talent, to elude and to linger.
This makes for a writer who has baffled interpreters for a couple of generations since his suicide while fleeing the Nazis in 1940. Some are convinced that Benjamin was primarily a Marxist. Some think of him as a cultural critic. Others detect the sensibilities of a religious mystic. Many see an aesthete, the last of the great European flâneurs. Not all of these interpretations are mutually exclusive. But some of them are, which makes Benjamin among that elite group of major intellectual figures about whom almost no one completely agrees. An accomplishment in itself.
Read the rest here.
