On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections

by Gary Smith (Editor)

Bringing together the best critical essays on one of the most fascinating literary figures of our time, this book immediately takes its place as a major source for Benjamin scholarship. Hannah Arendt called Walter Benjamin the outstanding literary critic of the twentieth century when she introduced him to English-language readers in 1968 with the selection of essays entitled Illuminations. Since then, his life and work have entered the domain of literary legend. The seventeen essays collected here cover the full range of Benjamin's interests, from hashish to Goethe to the modern city. They include important critical essays by Gershom Scholem and Jürgen Habermas as well as several moving and evocative recollections of Benjamin by friends and colleagues such as Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch. Gary Smith served as coeditor of the seventh volume of Benjamin's Gesammelte Schriften and prepared both the German and English editions of Benjamin's Moscow Diary.

Paperback

First published August 1, 1988

About the author

Gary Smith joined the LAPD and worked as a motorcycle officer and ended up playing Hide and Seek with wanted warrant suspects. He retired in 1981.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

The essays in On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, offer a mix of biographical and intellectual development of one of the great thinkers of the 20th Century. Benjamin’s work as an essayist and philosopher, these pieces demonstrate, cannot be separated from the personal history of the man. The essay form which he adopted after the rejection of his habilitationshrift, the unfinished Passagenwerk, and Marxist-theological contents all were driven by the social, economic, academic and political milieu in which he lived. But as these essays demonstrate, though Benjamin was a man of his times as a materialist philosopher and essayist, his times did not determine or limit the import of his reflections.

Adorno figures prominently in this collection both as a contributor (the editor includes two essays) but also as one, along with Scholem and Brecht, of the friends and interlocutors who helped challenge and shape Benjamin’s works as well as sharpen his insights. Of the essays included here, I think I enjoyed those of Habermas, Menninghaus and Schweppenhauser’s most. These works did the most, for me, in explaining the concepts that Benjamin deployed such as myth, profane illumination, now time and passage as well as how these concepts are to be understood as constellations.

These essays complement the works by Scholem, Rosen, Mayer and Teidemann who trace the development of Benjamin’s works, finished, rewritten and those left unfinished. These different approaches complement each other and paint a clear picture of Benjamin the intellectual, a man whose explorations exceeded the categories of philosophy, literature and art precisely because of the precision of both his figurative and critical language.

The work ends with recollections of Benjamin the person. This second half of the book was interesting and illuminating. Heidegger once says, perhaps self-servingly, we need to know nothing of Aristotle to take a deep look into the profound insights of his philosophical thinking. These essays and recollections on Benjamin disprove that theory. Benjamin’s works indeed exceed the limits placed upon his works by his academic and publishing business arrangements, but they are also a reflection upon the material conditions in which such works were composed and in which his conceptual framework was deployed to illuminate the profane.