Review: Get the Balance Right. On "Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life" by Michael W. Jennings and...

ESSAYS & REVIEWS

Get the Balance RightBy SAMI KHATIB APRIL 17, 2014

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“‘A man who dies at the age of thirty !ve’, said Moritz

Heimann once, ‘is at every point of his life a man who

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dies at the age of thirty-!ve.’ Nothing is more dubious

than this sentence – but for the sole reason that it

violates time. A man so says the truth that was meant

here – who has died at thirty-!ve will appear to

remembrance at every point in his life as a man who

dies at the age of thirty-!ve. In other words, the

statement that makes no sense for real life becomes

indisputable for remembered life.”

Walter Benjamin, who wrote these lines, died in September 1940, aged 48, at

the border of occupied France and Francoist Spain. His violent end still casts

its light on his entire life. He was driven to suicide a"er the group of refugees

he was traveling with was denied passage through Spain on their way to the

U.S. If he had just arrived a couple of days earlier or later, the border would

have been open, and Benjamin might have enjoyed the life of a distinguished

New York scholar like his friend Hannah Arendt, who took the same escape

route shortly a"er his ill-fated last journey.

Despite a belated reception, today Benjamin has arrived in the o#cial

pantheon of global humanities. Depending on theoretical trends and political

interests, his German and later international receptions have depicted the

contradictory image of a heterodox Marxist, Marxist Rabbi, conservative

anarchist, proto-Postmodernist, mystical theologian, le" cultural critic, or

prophetic art and media theoretician. However, even with his posthumous

fame as a modern icon, the image of his life has more or less remained the

same. It is the image of a man who died as a radical le"ist intellectual and a

stateless German-Jewish refugee. Be it his sheltered Berlin childhood around

1900, his failed entry into German academia, his broken marriage and $eeting

a%airs, his impoverished exile a"er the Nazi takeover in 1933, or his

incomplete Parisian work on the Arcades Project, it seems that his suicide in

1940 has retroactively turned the vicissitudes of his life into the story of a

fateful tragedy. Benjamin’s work is read through his life, characterized by

intellectual ingenuity, yet inhibited by failure, melancholia, and existential

ambiguity.


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With every biography the question of temporal presentation is posited anew.

How can we tell the story of a life in a strictly chronological order? How are

we to construct a non-linear temporality in which we can narrate a life

without the anticipation of its factual end? How can we restore in narration

the multi-layered actualities of a life that could always have taken a di%erent

course? For Benjamin in particular, how can we do justice to a “critical life,” a

life that is always on the verge of crisis, of turning from one extreme into the

other? The insight of Benjamin’s messianic-materialist concept of history was

that history can only be written from of the partisan perspective of this

dangerous moment, the critical point of parting ways. How can Benjamin’s

critical life be told?

In his essay “The Storyteller”, Benjamin conceives of this !gure as a secular

chronicler. In contrast to modern historians and their linear, fact-based

accounts, the history-teller as chronicler interweaves di%erent layers of time

and various types of documents without making the space-time of narration

submit to the laws of temporal succession or logical deduction. For him, the

task of a modern chronicler is to !nd new ways of producing historical

evidence and biographical meaning.

In their new biography Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, Michael Jennings and

Howard Eiland have assembled the material body of such a modern chronicle.

Both authors are among the very few scholars alive who know virtually every

piece of Benjamin’s scattered production. They have researched probably

every document available that could shed light on Benjamin’s life, including

his writings, notes, letters and eye-witness accounts of his various

acquaintances, friends, and interlocutors. Jennings and Eiland are also editors

of the standard English edition of Benjamin’s Selected Writings. Given this

expertise and long-term research, one could be astonished that in the end

their Benjamin biography comes as a handy 750-page book and not as a series

of multiple volumes. Despite its numerous predecessors, this biography is the

!rst of its kind to succeed in uniting most of the previously published

biographical material in one book, including translations of documents which

were until now only available in German. With the still-growing interest in

Benjamin’s thought, one can expect this book to become the standard


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English-language biography on Benjamin.

In A Critical Life, the contours of Benjamin’s day-to-day life become graspable

for the !rst time. It is fascinating to read about his whereabouts and travels,

the people and places that formed the stages for his life and thought. The

authors chose to present their !ndings in an accessible mix of journalistic and

scholarly prose. Long passages on Benjamin’s networks of friends and

acquaintances alternate with instructive excursions on his major works.

Following the austere convention of presenting all biographical data in

chronological order, the theoretical parts of this book modestly refrain from

o%ering an overall interpretation or conceptual lenses with which to read

Benjamin’s main theoretical !gures. Instead, they remain introductory

summaries to his key texts, which at best could motivate the reader to start

her own readings. This biography is also an intellectual biography, which puts

the reader herself in a position to navigate the labyrinth-like edi!ce of

Benjamin’s thought. For this alone, this biography proves to be a landmark

achievement in the history of Benjamin scholarship.

The book’s greatest merit, however, corresponds to its shortcomings. Uniting

the diverse pieces of biographical information to form a coherent image of

Benjamin’s intellectual persona can only go smoothly once his incompatible

facets become assimilated to today’s narrative patterns. The biography’s

narrative thrust is achieved through of a series of psychologizations and

historicizations, which involuntarily echo today’s reading cultures and their

retromanic desire to gain full accessibility to the past. Instead of posing the

question of presentation as its main challenge, this biography begins ready to

tell a chronological story by establishing a causal nexus among various

moments of his life.

Ironically, the historicist method of telling a “sequence of events like the

beads of a rosary” is applied to Benjamin himself, the !erce critic of

historicism. In fairness to the authors, refraining from avant-garde techniques

like montage might have been the preferable mode of presentation simply

because it avoids mimicry of Benjamin’s own literary technique (at least as

deployed in the Arcades Project). But what this choice leaves unanswered is how


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it is that bits of his biographical data can be arranged in a way that appears

factually coherent, when “everything factual is already theory,” as Benjamin

quoted Goethe. The authors write as if they have found the “neutral” ground

within a force !eld charged with tensions, the point of indi%erence from

where Benjamin’s life and thought can be told.

Despite its merits, this biography’s mode of presentation su%ers the fate of

every historicist enterprise: it does too much and too little. Too much because

there are simply not enough details, facts, letters, and eye-witness accounts to

!ll in the gaps of information. Given Benjamin’s fragmented oeuvre, his

scattered production, the disappearance or total loss of much of his personal

property and intellectual production (not to mention the still-unsolved

mystery of his lost heavy briefcase on his !nal journey), even the most

meticulous reconstruction has to rely on speculations, insinuations and the

construction of !ctitious causalities. Too little because the construction of the

image of Benjamin’s life !rst requires the destruction of the clichés and

commonplace views which his friends circulated a"er his death.

Paradoxically, it is precisely the authors’ painstaking e%ort to balance the

presented views of Benjamin’s contemporaries with other accounts and to

create an unbiased image that turns into its opposite. Who is the Benjamin

that we see through the panoramic widescreen optics of a historicist

chronology? A man who remains at all times the man who dies his tragic

death in Port Bou in September 1940. In this teleological view, even

Benjamin’s various meditations on suicide – the modernist trope – become

anticipations of his own !nal death, part of a suicidal inclination of his entire

personality. This kind of biographical plausibilization sidesteps the

unbearable arbitrariness of his death – his last journey could have literally

taken a di%erent course.

A historicist view of the past, as Benjamin’s “Theses On the Concept of

History” relentlessly remind us, is tantamount to taking the victor’s

perspective – the perspective of those who have victoriously survived and

shaped history. In other words, the “neutral” backdrop of an seemingly

unbiased historicist view is biased itself, and it conceals its inscription and


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be it with Jula Radt-Cohn,

Asja Lacis, Gretel Karplus,

Inge Buchholz, or Anna

Maria Blaupot ten Cate and

their respective partners

investment in its object. In a book review, Benjamin wrote: “What is at stake is

not to present literary works in the context of their age, but to present the age

that recognizes them – our age – in the age during which they arose.” De-

mythologizing Benjamin’s life can only succeed if we perceive the time of his

life as such a literary work, a text in which the gaze of our age is inscribed.

The inevitable question is: what does Benjamin’s life tell us about our age?

Rather than historicizing Benjamin’s life only in the context of its age, the task

is to organize the presented material by a prismatic optics, which recognizes

itself as intended in the biographical image and, while constructing it, re$ects

its own time in it. Yet how to construct such a prism, providing a di%erent

narrative perspective, neither historicist nor mythologizing, is yet to be

revealed.

A"er hundreds pages of this biography, the reader is le" with an image of

Benjamin she probably knew before: the Janus-faced Benjamin who led a

personal life marked by close yet contradictory friendships, an ill-fated

marriage, and unlucky love relationships. His love life has been subject to

speculation in the past and the authors reproduce the image of Benjamin’s

contemporaries according to which he was for the most part the losing third

of a love triangle

. The meticulous reconstruction of these love

triangles is among the book’s most original

sections and succeeds in making legible a certain

psychological pattern of Benjamin’s personality.

But the reconstruction of his erotic adventures is

$awed by anachronistic conclusions which re$ect

the morals of our time rather than shed light on

the nature of his inclination to put himself – deliberately or not – into

libidinously charged force !elds beyond the classic heterosexual couple. The

narrative style of the book symptomatically misses the precarious

constellations of past anti-bourgeois life forms, which exceed in their

outmodedness today’s horizon of standardized couple relationships and their

exceptional “rendezvous.” As a result, Benjamin’s inclination for love triangles

is depicted as an external cause for his precarious and ill-fated sexual


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relations, as if the fragility and imbalance of these relations were not their

internal obstacle and, at the same time, exactly their source of pleasure.

If biographies can be gates to the lives of di%erent times, their beauty and

relevance consist in interweaving the threads of life and work in a way that

both can illuminate each other without ever becoming identical. The

presentation of this non-identical unity, however, is equally threatened by

historicist biographicizing (externalization) and atemporal dehistoricizing

(internalization). How can we construct an internal web of cross-references

within a work and link it to biographical circumstances in a non-deterministic

manner, without sealing a work o% from its historical and political context?

This question is most crucial in the case of Benjamin’s political thought.

There is a long tradition in Benjamin scholarship of separating his

philosophical thinking from his political positions, the latter of which are

mostly presented as mere rhetoric without reaching the kernel of his thought.

To this extent, Jennings’ and Eiland’s biography represent the most re!ned

example of this mainstream view – despite all their precious discoveries and

precise reconstruction of his peculiar kind of Marxism.

Introducing Benjamin’s famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of

Mechanical Reproduction” and lucidly presenting its key arguments, the

authors inform the reader that “the insistent political rhetoric of the opening

and closing sections of the essay, which seek to discriminate fascism’s

aestheticization of politics from Communism’s politicization of art, needs to

be seen in the larger historical context of a Europe on the verge of war.” The

contrast between an under-complex historicization (“the larger historical

context”) and a sound presentation of Benjamin’s very complex argument on

technology, perception and art is striking. This is even more surprising since

the authors continue to carefully reconstruct Benjamin’s failed attempts to

defend the politically explicit (that is: communist, Marxist, and anti-fascist)

agenda of his essay against the internal censorship of the editors of Max

Horkheimer’s Journal for Social Research. The treatment of the Work of Art

essay is symptomatic of the entire book: even in its !nest sections (and the

presentation of this essay is one its most compelling parts), the book remains

blind to the inherently political nature of Benjamin’s thought.


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The unity of Benjamin’s philosophical and political thought can be traced

back to his pre-Marxist writings, particularly in his 1921 essay on the “Critique

of Violence”. In this essay he invokes the term “divine violence” – a term that

designates both a paradoxically non-violent (or non-alloyed, “pure”) violence

and a tautologically violent (“waltende”) violence. Divine violence remains

inaccessible to human attempts to de!ne it in advance or monopolize it;

however, under certain circumstances, it might be embodied by human

agency. Despite all instructive philological information, in its short

introduction to this essay the biography fails to grasp the non-identical

correspondence of Benjamin’s theological and political thinking. Missing his

strategic deployment of the term, the authors suggest that, “Benjamin was not

yet in a position fully to reconcile his political and his theological ideas.”

But in fact Benjamin never reconciled his political and theological ideas.

Instead, he drew on the irreconcilable discrepancy of politics and theology to

seal o% his political concepts from both political theology and the conformist

language of political professionals. In the same spirit, in “Critique of Violence”

he invokes divine violence as problematic, yet inaccessible limit-concept to

put forward his revolutionary anarchist politics of “pure means,” the

unconditional purpose of which (why he calls it pure means, in contrast to

means conditioned by a means-end-calculus) is the “depositing” (Entsetzung)

of the law and the destruction of state power without establishing a new one.

The displaced language of theology here neither refers to an apocalyptic

intrusion of some divine power nor functions as a theological legitimization

of profane politics. It introduces a non-instrumental language, which proves

to be useless for the dialectics of “mythic violence,” that is, the self-

deconstructing, yet irresolvable contradiction between the violent

preservation of an existing law and the violent establishment of a new law.

Against this $awed dialectics, Benjamin calls for “revolutionary violence, the

highest manifestation of pure violence by man.”

With Benjamin we enter an elliptically shaped intellectual cosmos that puts

itself into force !elds of irreconcilable extremes, not to rest there but to make

these force !elds productive without balancing or annulling their dialectical

tensions. Benjamin thinks theologically and politically at the same time


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without con$ating these two realms. He never sought a reconciliation of their

tense relation but maintained their asymmetric polarity, which also organized

the structure of his last re$ections in “On the Concept of History”. The

precarious existence of his critical life was not merely the result of external

historical crises (capitalism, fascism, Stalinism) and internal psychological

dispositions but also of his paradoxical, yet deliberate strategy of radicalizing

these tensions up to their point of turning or reversal. The motto of his life

and work can be summed up as “always radical, never consistent.” The same

goes for his incompatible circles of friends (among them Ernst Bloch, Hannah

Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Theodor W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Asja Lacis,

Florens Christian Rang, Siegfried Kracauer, Franz Hessel, and Alfred Sohn-

Rethel). Assuming that Benjamin ever strove for some middle way between

these extremes is to turn his intellectual biography into the story of a failed

synthesis.

In the no-man’s-land of extreme tensions, there is no solid ground, no already

established position on which one could rely. The task of !nding the right

balance, the “neutral” zone of indi%erence in the midst of these unstable force

!elds appears to be a hopeless endeavor. His critical life poses a challenge to

any form of biographicizing narration. But equally, Benjamin’s own

theoretical writing entails some hints of how the modern chronicler must

proceed. First, you must rid yourself of the historicist empathy with your

object of inquiry. You have to question your established patterns of historical

understanding by aiming at a new narrative style that seeks to distance itself

from its object without taking the God’s-eye perspective of historicism.

If Benjamin’s life is not the story of a man who dies at the age of 48, we have

to question the temporal form of causal chains and to resist assimilating

Benjamin’s non-contemporaneousness with our time. In search of Benjamin’s

lost time we need to !nd a de-naturalizing principle to organize the massive

data with which today’s scholarship provides us. These highly condensed

concepts are needed to parse the wealth of biographical information beyond

journalistic plausibility. As Benjamin wrote in the Arcades Project: “All

historical knowledge can be represented in the image of balanced scales, one

tray of which is weighted with what has been and the other with knowledge of


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what is present. Whereas on the !rst the facts assembled can never be too

humble or too numerous, on the second there can be only a few heavy,

massive weights.”

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Review: Get the Balance Right. On "Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life" by Michael W. Jennings and...

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