Introduction (to Dossier on Walter Benjamin and Education)

Although it is well known that Walter Benjamin played a leading role in the antebellum German Youth Movement, withdrawing from the presidency of the Berlin Independent Students Association and from other reformist activities only with the onset of World War I, scholars often do not ask whether this multifaceted student activism had any effect on his later thought and writing. This dossier proposes to investigate the early writings on youth and educational reform and their discernible afterlife in the better known historical-materialist phase of Benjamin’s career, including his writings on radio, film, children’s literature, and children’s theater, as well as his studies of Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht. The introduction provides brief summaries of the ten articles comprising the dossier and their relation to one another, and it addresses the question of the relevance of Benjamin’s ideas on education to contemporary debates concerning pedagogy

Deconstruction of Violence

This article analyzes Benjamin's enigmatic essay of 1921, “Critique of Violence,” together with related fragmentary writings from the postwar period (including the “Theological-Political Fragment”) and, from 1931, “The Destructive Character.” Benjamin's deconstruction of violence (Abbau der Gewalt) is seen in the context of phenomenology. In addition, texts by Hermann Cohen and Georges Sorel are studied as principal sources, and critical commentaries by Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Werner Hamacher are discussed. Violence is considered an essentially moral phenomenon, a function of human actions and intentions; strictly speaking, there is no natural violence. The critique of violence itself bespeaks a kind of violence. Benjamin's critique of the reifying “mythic violence” that founds and administers the law presupposes an expiatory “divine violence” that reveals myth as such and thereby opens the possibility of justice beyond law and beyond the myth of possession fundamental to positive law and knowledge, including mathematized and strategically militarized knowledge.</jats:p

Mimesis and Monstrosity: T. J. Clark's <i>Picasso and Truth</i>

In the space of some thirty years, T. J. Clark's art writing has moved from the social history of art—something arising in reaction to formalist and “iconological” disciplines of the previous generation, with their characteristic claim of political and ideological neutrality—to a new defense of aesthetic distance directed against the current “regime of visual flow” and its comfortable assumptions about the artwork's necessary ideological bearing and belonging to the world. Remaining constant in his work through the years is not only a method of intensive close reading of visual images but a wide-ranging and engaged theory of modernism, one keyed to the question of mimesis in (a technological) modernity. Picasso is for Clark the representative modern painter, “the artist of the century,” whose constantly experimenting production influenced virtually all the other realms of modern art: with its radically ambiguous disposition of image space, cubism is the prototypical “theme of modernism.” Picasso and Truth focuses on the particular structure of spatiality that lends a deep-seated unity of concern to Picasso's oeuvre through all its manifest variation in style during his long career. This structure is termed “room-space.” Clark traces the development of Picasso's concern with interior and exterior space, with the problematic relation of proximity and alterity, surface and depth, in the postcubist phase of his painting, when the obsession with monster figurations of the nonhuman in humanity leads to the apocalyptic realism of Guernica.</jats:p

Language Matters

There is no getting around our residence in language—language understood not primarily as a system of signification but as the necessarily ambiguous existential condition of intelligibility in which we always already find ourselves situated, the historically evolving collective articulation of things. The ontological theory of language at issue here, with its concern for the problems of meaning and translation in particular and its methodological distance-in-nearness, entails a simultaneously concentrated and expansive allegorical experience of the world. Allegory brings out the word inherent in the thing—the word not as flat marker but as gravitating and radiating body of history. This essay touches on prominent nineteenth- and twentieth-century sources of this modernist theory of language and philosophical philology, thinkers who worked in different ways to open theoretical horizons while promulgating an art of reading. Such historically oriented and textually focused work of opening remains a political-educational imperative.</jats:p

The Fate of Philology

Drawing on writings of the German Romantic tradition, Werner Hamacher’s aphoristic Minima Philologica develops a philosophy of philology, one operating without the control mechanisms of instrumentalized thought but not without internal rigor. Hamacher conceives philology as an art of (slow) reading bound to the spirit of experiment and linguistic play. Versed in the conventions and operations of literature in order to do it justice, philology nevertheless speaks in another voice, one more ascetic and conjectural. Having broken with the positivism of the Alexandrian tradition of philologia, this other philology plays the trickster in humanistic disciplines. Its task today is twofold: to unmask the industrial manufacture of language, complicit as it is with hostility to the word; and, as remedy for reification, to reawaken the philia in philology by cultivating—with historically informed critical vigilance—the power of affect, the mimetic power, in language and discourse.</jats:p

Foundations of Western Culture II: Modernism

This course comprises a broad survey of texts, literary and philosophical, which trace the development of the modern world from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century.&nbsp;Intrinsic to this development is the growth of individualism in a world no longer understood to be at the center of the universe.&nbsp;The texts chosen for study exemplify the emergence of a new humanism, at once troubled and dynamic in comparison to the old.&nbsp;The leading theme of this course is thus the question of the difference between the ancient and the modern world.&nbsp;Students who have taken Foundations of Western Culture I will obviously have an advantage in dealing with this question.&nbsp;Classroom discussion approaches this question mainly through consideration of action and characters, voice and form