Rev Left Radio - Walter Benjamin: Marxist Philosophy and Art Criticism

Episode Date: January 31, 2022

Jon Greenaway returns to the show, this time to discuss the life and intellectual legacy of the German Jewish Marxist, philosopher, and cultural critic Walter Benjamin. We discuss his biography, his major works, his use of marxism and historical materialist, his art criticism, the role that jewish mysticism played in his work, the frankfurt school, his tragic suicide, and his overall legacy. Check out the Horror Vanguard here: https://soundcloud.com/user-317910500 Outro Music: "Stumblingblock" by Blvck Svm ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have back on the show, longtime friend of the show, friend of mine, John Greenaway, aka the Lit Crit guy, to talk about the life and work of Walter Benjamin in my best German accent or in my worst American accent, Walter Benjamin. Fascinating Marxist, Jewish intellectual, who combined, German idealism and romanticism, with Western Marxism, with Jewish mysticism, and many other things. And just a really fascinating thinker that I think perhaps a lot of people on the

left might have heard of, but don't really fully understand or know quite where to place him in the tradition of Marxist intellectuals. And hopefully this episode will assist with that. As always, if you like what we do here on RevLeft Radio, you can support us on patreon.com forward slash rev left radio we are have been and will remain a thousand percent listener funded and in exchange for a monthly donation on patreon you get access not only to monthly free episodes but our entire back catalog and me and uh producer dave we're talking about this uh just yesterday i think probably we have hundreds of of patreon episodes going back almost five years now i mean we're entering february we started this in in february of 2017 so i think we're coming

up on our five-year anniversary of the show. And that is a lot of extra episodes that was never released to the public that people can go back and check out. This month we had on Matthew Furlong from our dialectic deep dive episodes just to talk on our Patreon episode about the psychology and the politics and the philosophy of the Sopranos. And it was a really fascinating, lovely conversation with my friend Matthew. So that is the most recent Patreon episode. But again, we have a whole back catalog. Thank you to everybody who supports the show. We literally could not do this stuff without you. We will never have corporate advertisers for many reasons,

not least that we're a communist podcast. Or we'll never have big money donors. All we have is our listeners, and we deeply appreciate that support. So without further ado, let's get into this wonderful episode with my good friend John on the life and work of Walter Benhamene.

Enjoy. Hello, everyone in. My name is John. I go by the Liquor Guy Online. I am a writer, content creator and podcaster from the North of England. I've been lucky enough to be on Rev. Left a few times talking about kind of key thinkers and people whose work and writing It should be more well known.

I'm also the co-host of a podcast called Horror Vanguard, which is where we talk about radical politics, theory, philosophy, and scary movies to try and help us understand the ways in which capitalism has a kind of monstrous potential. And I'm super excited to be back. Absolutely. I'm always excited to have you back. Love the Horror Vanguard. If anybody has not gotten on that yet, you need to rectify that as soon as possible. I don't know how many times you've been on.

at this point but I think you're definitely in the pantheon of the most appearances on the show probably top three at the very least if not the top spot itself always a pleasure to have you back and specifically certain sort of thinkers you are particularly well suited to address and I think Walter Benjamin or Walter Benhamim is exactly one of those thinkers so for those who don't know and I think this is probably a good way to start kind of just who was uh Walter Benhamene, how did you come to be an admirer of his work, and sort of why is he important? Yeah, so Ben Amin is a super fascinating figure. This messianic Jewish philosopher committed, if very unorthodox Marxist, a writer, an aesthetic critic, he wrote for the radio, he wrote journalism, he was basically kind of invented the field of cultural studies in a way.

was also a translator and popularizer of Baudelaire and an expert on German the Trauer spiel, the tragic drama. I first came to Benjamin's work through a very late piece of his work called On the Philosophy of History, which we will get into in more detail, because I think that's really a great way in. And what you find is that he's kind of unlike any other writer from this time period, extremely fond of aphorism. So, like, to generalise

for a second, in the kind of, like, philosophy on the left, we tend to have kind of two kinds of thinkers, which are thinkers who gravitate towards totality, right? The big systems level explanations. You know, the obvious fit here

is Georg Hegel. And then you have writers and philosophers and thinkers of the very particular who tend to, to go towards things which are a little more fragmented or individual or unique. And Ben Amin is maybe the very best thinker and theorist of the singular object. So, yeah, I found him through his work on the philosophy of history, firstly, but there's almost no aspect of kind of his society at the time that he was not engaged with.

He wrote about drugs. He wrote about the radio. he wrote about arts, he wrote about contemporary politics, he wrote about theater. So this is a thinker who is kind of keenly sensitive to the world around them, and I think is still incredibly important for us to pay attention to. Yeah, absolutely. And his work is just as relevant today as it was then. Before we get into the ideas and his major works,

can you kind of talk about his biography, like kind of give us a brief sketch of his biography, which is fascinating. and the broader historical context he was working in all the way up until his infamous and tragic suicide. Yeah, absolutely. So Ben Amin is born to a successful Jewish family in Berlin. He's born in July in 1892. He writes about this kind of very, very comfortable middle class upbringing in his, in a collection of essays, reflections on a Berlin, on a Berlin childhood around 1900. He kind of rebels against this. It's a very common thing for a lot of like the academics and writers of that time to do

to kind of rebel against middle class successes of your parents. And he is kind of drawn into this kind of intellectual and cultural scene of of Germany and Europe generally in the first half of the 20th century. So he's part of maybe the most kind of exciting politically and culturally radical moment of 20th century European history. There isn't, there's, there's, there's,

there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, kind of thinker or artist that he doesn't seem to have some connections with. He's good friends with the German Marxist, um, utopian thinker Ernst Bloch. He's very good friends with Berthold Brecht, the, the communist playwright. He knows, uh, knows, uh, knows of at least, uh,

Georgi Lukash, um, author of history and class consciousness. Um, he's very closely associated. associated with Theodore Adorno and the Frankfurt School, the Institute for Social Research. And he travels around Europe a lot. So he's

bound up in these first kind of three, three, three, four decades of the 1900s are this time of almost kind of inconceivable change. He goes to the Soviet Union in the 30s after he kind of openly associates

himself as a Marxist and a communist. But he's also, he's also born in this window of history, which, you know, to borrow a phrase from Victor Serges is midnight in the century, right? It's an incredibly dark, very dangerous political time. And his writing about, his writing about fascism is extremely prescient. And he, he sees a lot of the dangers coming in ways that are deeply tragic in retrospect. He's often extremely financially precarious and

not in very good health so he's briefly he's briefly imprisoned by the Nazis and as you say very tragically he is desperately trying to get out of Europe

in 1940 mostly because of his friend most of his friends have already left Brecht is out of Germany the Frankfurt School Adorno and Hawkemeer have made it to the states and he's trying to get an exit permit to leave Europe via Spain

this kind of sick very unwell man the border crossing is closed and in 1940 at the 26th of September he takes an overdose of morphine and commit suicide yeah absolutely brutal

and just a little bit more on that suicide he was also close I think with Hannah Arendt who was a sort of protege and then, like, lover of Heidegger, but, like, actually, I think they had a romantic relationship. But she famously said that had Benamine went to that Spanish border one day earlier, it would have been open and he would have got through. And one day later, it was sort of common knowledge at that point that that border was closed. And so I don't know if that is exactly true or not, but she seemed to be convinced that, you know, it was just like this tragic coincidence that he went on. this one day was turned away and then sort of convinced that the only other option for him was to go back to

the Nazi prisons or worse and so he decided to take his own life instead and he died at the age of 48 it's deeply tragic it's deeply tragic and when you kind of understand a little bit more about his own writing on history it makes it kind of incorporates his own his life and his very sad death into it's a way of helping us to understand history in a new way actually you know it isn't just the kind of sad story but it demands once you once you see um his own writing about a kind of marxist philosophy of history there is there is something about benjamin's own life which i actually think um demands a kind of response you know um this this singular moment of decision is enormously powerful.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's get into his work now with some of that historical context aside. And, of course, it's always a tragedy when you talk about, you know, some of these brilliant thinkers who die so young. Because the next question is, you know, what if they had lived another 10, 20, 30 years? You know, with such a brilliant mind, it would have been fascinating to see him cover the 40s, the 50s, and into the 60s for sure. Absolutely. Yeah. But Ben Amin is known among other things, as you mentioned earlier, for his,

many disparate influences and the wide range of topics that he could speak and write authoritatively about. Can you talk about these influences and sort of what made their combination so unique? Yeah. So there is, I would argue there are broadly three kind of strands, ways of thinking that he tries to draw together in very unique and powerful combinations. So firstly, is the tradition of German Romanticism, which is, again, not really surprising. So this is tied up in older forms of German writing, particularly linked to the first movements around German idealism, but the high point is probably someone like Nietzsche a couple of decades before Ben Amin, which is very kind of repulsed.

German Romanticism was very much repulsed by the conditions of contemporary capitalism. it saw capitalist society is essentially degrading to human existence and it would look backwards to a pre-capitalist past the Benymin scholar and sociologist

Michael Lurvey points out that this can have a kind of this can have a reactionary character quite obviously but it can also have a revolutionary character and Benymin was not a kind of was not simply a nostalgic right, but was using the past in very particular ways when it combined, when that German romantic background, which he was kind of raised and educated in, collided with two other

kind of very, very clear traditions of thought. The next one is his Judaism and his interest in messianism. So he was born in a Jewish family. He was very close friends with Gersham Shorlem, who went on to be a professor of Jewish mysticism at the University in Jerusalem, and was widely regarded as the great expert on Kabbalah in the 20th century. He had a very long relationship, very close friendship. They wrote letters to each other constantly. Shorlum was an ardent Zionist, but in a kind of utopian sense, this idea that actually there could be something almost redemptive about it. Ben Amin was kind of disillusioned

with it and he said that actually he didn't really kind of his Jewishness was lived through his relationship with Sholam but this principle of messianism which we'll come back to was a very important strand in his thought

and the third thing that it influences Beniamen's writing particularly probably from the mid-1920s onwards towards the end of his life is a commitment to Marxism and it's it's not at all a kind of what we call orthodox Marxism he's he is in fact viciously critical of kind of vulgar materialism he is not a teleological thinker if you think about the tradition of Marxism that was dominant at the time there was a real strand of kind of almost technological inevitability right this idea that things history would just advance and Benjamin is like scathing about this notion of kind of evolutionary progress for very deeply held

and actually very carefully thought through reasons so he had spent time in the Soviet Union but was deeply skeptical and quite suspicious of Stalin saw the Soviet Union as perhaps the best hope against fascism but was never a kind of orthodox or straightforward Marxist he was too interested in too many things to be sort of like to toe the party line know, to be a dogmatist on certain things.

So it's this synthesis, it's this synthesis of kind of Jewish theology and mysticism, a tradition of aesthetic and cultural criticism that comes from German Romanticism and Marxism that kind of feeds into a lot of his work. And some people will criticize his work by saying that it's trying to resolve contradictions which can't be resolved. But I think to do so misses the kind of. depth of his thought. And I do want to linger on that point a little bit about the rejection of the sort

of mechanical teleology that can, you know, very much is present within Marxism, but can be over-emphasized for sure to make it seem like a sort of inevitability. And he thought, and correct me if I'm wrong, but that Marxist should actually reject the bourgeois conception of progress, inevitable progress, and sort of de-emphasize the inevitable teleological aspect of Marxism, right? Yeah, and this is actually part of the reason why I think he's so important, which is that

he talks in on the philosophy of history about brushing history against the grain is the great phrase that he uses. And it's this idea that we're told the story of history but actually it's a very particular story about triumph and progress and

constant success. And Benjamin says, no, actually history is a series of catastrophic defeat. The things that he touches on are the 1848, the Paris Commune, revolutionary struggle. But there is a, those defeats give us not only resources for the present,

but give us a revolutionary responsibility towards the past. He talks about the necessity of redeeming the dead, right? And this is where his kind of more theological strain of writing comes in, which is that not only do we have all of this kind of historical knowledge, but we actually have the means by which we can redeem and fulfill

the struggles of all those countless unnamed thousands he died. And this is why in the context of the philosophy of history, Benyman's focus is not on that kind of smooth, easy teleology, but on the necessity of class struggle. He's a writer who is exceptionally invested, actually, in the

primacy of class struggle, but done in the awareness that the end point, the meaning of it all is not determined by anything other than those who are engaged within it, which I think those who favor a more mechanistic or teleological view of history would see as being quite pessimistic. But in a way, Benjamin would say, yes, that that pessimism about history is important because it means that we stop easily and naively accepting the idea that things will work out okay in the end. What matters is that if there is to be a better future, it has to be struggled for. Yeah, absolutely. And living in the time in the country that he was living in and seeing what he was seeing, I think it makes it even harder, you know, to hold that idea that this is all

just a nice march, you know, progressively into the future. There are plenty of, uh, uh, of cul-de-sacs and dead-ends and detours and just the failure of the entire human project that could come into the way of that. I mean, he makes a really good point about fascism, where he's very critical about, you know, vulgar Marxism or the social democratic parties of the time that saw fascism as kind of an aberration. You know, at the time, fascism is seen as this regression, you know? Yeah. But Benjamin says, no, absolutely not. it is in fact it is a culmination of modernity in in very clear ways it isn't this this regression into a kind of less civilized past this is what this is what this is what progress

looks like this is your this is your smooth uh mechanistic stage of history reaching its it's apotheosis yeah biting well this next question is is going to be uh very large so so feel free to take it in any direction you want but you know what were some of his major works and what key concepts did he introduce through them? Yeah, this is a huge question. But we can kind of run through some of them. Primarily the biggest work, the work that was unfinished at the time of his death, is what is now known as the Arcades Project.

It is still, it is this huge kind of biography. It is intended to be this kind of philosophical investigation of 19th century Paris and what it is instead of being finished it's the series of notes drafts suggestions and ideas for how Benyman was going to finish this work

but it's enormously suggested for his project as a whole and some of the kind of methodological choices that he makes things which are maybe a bit more approachable for people who've never read Benjamin before on the philosophy of history or the the thesis on the philosophy of history

which is a series of kind of a manifesto of sorts really a selection of numbered theses, some being a few lines, some being a few paragraphs which in very typically Benjaminian fashion outline his understanding of how

one is to respond to history and what does it mean to have a historical materialist approach to the past and the present on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction is i think probably the most famous benjamin work um which we will get onto in in more detail but some of some of the concepts i think that are the really important are uh the thought image is one which is the notion that a that instead of a kind of like systematic exposition of a particular idea

images can communicate in a second information that kind of dialectically transforms our perception of reality as a whole. So he's very drawn to this notion of the instability of not just not just reality but kind of history. History he says kind of flits before us for a second and we have a moment where we can seize hold of something and it communicates something in its image. The thought's image is a very Benjaminian phrase. The other idea is this of the image of the rag picker. So he says that given that history has kind of told stories about the great and the powerful, we are, you know, if we're looking for resources from the past, what we need to be is something akin to the ragpicker who walks along the shore at low tide and in the waves

finds kind of ruins and remnants and things that might actually have value if we are prepared to look at it in a different kind of way. So he's a really interesting writer because he's so interested not in like systematically outlining his positions but but piecing things together that will kind of transform the way that you look at things. Yeah and a lot of people talk about this as like fragments, right, fragmentary sort of analysis and that is, It's not, as we said earlier, this system building like Marx or Hegel where everything is all included in this world system sort of approach. But these more very hyper-specific things that he's pointing out and sort of addressing here and there. You mentioned the arcades, and I don't know if this is really super worth it, but do you want to mention what that actually was?

Do you have what's your understanding of what the arcades was? Because I mean, people hear that in the modern day and probably have a very different idea of, of what is meant by that, because I think it connects up with his overall approach and work on cities, right? Yeah, yeah. So it's published under the name

the arcades project or the Passagenwerk in German. And it is, it's just, so the arcades that it's referring to are these kind of covered passages which were lined with shops. And as Ben Evin put it,

they were the kind of driving force. they're this kind of focal point for the development of a certain kind of bourgeois capitalism in the 19th century but also a certain kind of bourgeois subjectivity because it encouraged a he uses the term the flaneur and this is a kind of

it's very antiquated now but it's the idea of just wandering through the city and encounter kind of people watching being idle just exploring the space. And this is what those arcades were designed to help assist him. It's, it was only, like I say, it was only published in, for the first time in the 1980s, but it was written over the course of about 13 years and is this huge collection of notes and ideas and sketches. And he's, he's trying to basically use Paris, this kind of city of the 19th century capitalist system as a means by which we can, explore basically modern European urban culture more generally

it's it's a colossally ambitious work and it's such a shame that it was never finished but it's full of these like enormously suggestive details and ideas and insights into his into his kind of philosophical perspective

yeah when I think about the arcades I kind of think like these big as you're walking down the streets of Paris the old Paris these huge glass and iron structures that basically were, I think, initially made in order to serve the wealthier, you know, more privileged, higher classes to sort of window shop and, and is sort of moving in the direction of what would ultimately come mass consumption. If you walk down any major city, a European or American city today, you can see it is all

very consumeristic, very, you know, glass and iron and window shoppy, et cetera. And so to analyze it on that level, I think, was what he was doing and saying, like, you know, what is this? What is this imply about where European civilization is going, et cetera? Yeah, absolutely. And you can totally, you can totally see in it the ways in which kind of contemporary urban life has maybe been hollowed out, right? It's, you know, instead of the, instead of the arcades of 19th century capitalism, you have, like, hostile architecture, you have the privatization of space. you have the increasing attempts of bombarding us

with digital information and advertising and it's really interesting to see how Benyman understood the development of this urban capitalism and the ways in which the kind of urban capitalism that we live in now has kind of completely kind of destroyed the things

about the arcades that would encourage you to kind of like be part of a city instead you'll kind of shuck away from these urban centers, right? Yeah, absolutely. All right, so we talked a little bit about his Marxism, and I kind of want to linger on this point

and dive a little deeper because there is some tension here. I mean, certainly he broke with more orthodox Marxism in a lot of different ways. He was related in some way to the Frankfurt School, and the whole Frankfurt School is very sort of suspicious of, let's say, Marxism, Leninism, and, you know, we're trying to solve the question

of why haven't the proletariat, you know, done the thing that Mark said that they were probably going to do by this time. And I think even Orno, his friend, mentioned sort of scathingly that sometimes Abenomene's use of Marxism was maybe rather shallow or even maybe a way out of certain problems, et cetera. So there is this sort of tension even within some of these members of the Frankfurt School. So can you kind of talk about his relationship to the Frankfurt School, whether or not

he can be considered a member of it or sort of on the outside of it a little bit? and just sort of what his Marxism sort of was overall his contributions to the new left etc take that in any direction you want yeah so firstly the relationship to the Frankfurt School is as maybe I think the word

I would use is slightly fraught so he is his friends with Adorno and Adorno's wife he knows Hawkeheimer Max Hawkeimer but he's never a kind of fully fledged member of the in group

as it were. So he writes for the journals writes for the Frankfurt School's journal and it's often the way that he's able to pay his bills is by writing reviews or essays for them, usually from Paris.

And his relationship with Adorno particularly is interesting and quite complicated. So Adorno is often extremely critical of Beniamen's work because finding it to be kind of too strange, too subjective, too interested in things like dreams or or theology, but also Adorno is very encouraging.

The point about Benjamin's Marxism being shallow, I think is perhaps a little unfair, but is maybe better said as being slightly unorthodox, right? non-dogmatic and he does he does spend as I say he spends time in in Moscow he spends time in the Soviet Union but he is there are a couple of things that make him not a kind of easy fit with the kind of prevailing trends of trends of thought the first one is is this like very profound deep skepticism even suspicion of kind of evolutionary progress You know, he says this, you know, suspicion all the way down the line. This trust is the order of the day, right? This kind of a sort of revolutionary pessimism, which automatically puts him at odds with predominant schools of thought immediately post-1917 in the Russian Revolution, right?

It seems kind of out of time in a way, right? this idea of like at a time of kind of the great success, the kind of building of a genuine social estate, it seems very, very kind of strange and almost contrarian to be talking about the necessity for pessimism, the necessity for suspicion. But I think I mentioned this just a little while ago, but the kind of key defining feature is this insistence upon the class struggle.

That's easily, I think, in the philosophy of history, the most important point that he talks about, which is progress is never a given. Progress is always unstable. The past is full of not really success. It's only success for a particular point of view. And actually there's a huge amount of defeat and death. You know, the thesis on the philosophy of history talk about this.

The enemy has not ceased to be victorious. That's the kind of brutal facts. contemporary history of being a historical materialist. You're confronted with the fact that history is a record of crushing defeat, but those defeats are not, cannot ever be totally finalized. Benyemin talks here about the kind of fanning the spark of revolutionary possibility. So revolutions are fought for and made by struggle, but struggle is never predetermined. determined in advance. So struggles can be won. The class struggle

can be won, but it's also necessary to confront the fact that historically it's been violent defeat after violent defeat. Right. And I think this is the key point that he does not fit easily within

either either kind of the contemporary Marxism, Leninism of the time. He's, as I say, not a fan of Stalin. rigid dialectical materialism and thinks it's far too simple and he doesn't necessarily fit in

with the what we might call more academic pessimism of somebody like Adorno there's a really interesting way that Michael Lervey puts it which is that he is he is using modernism

to critique modernity itself so he's using the techniques of like literary and philosophical modernism as a critic of modernity so he isn't he isn't just a nostalgic he's looking back to the pre-capitalist past

and he isn't just a kind of naive utopian he's looking forward to the point where the class struggle is going to be one forever but he is looking looking into the past for resources and kind of philosophical insights

that will heighten the strength and ability of the class struggle in his time yeah really well said and it leads I mean perfectly into this next question which is just his focus on history and his use of historical materialism. So can you talk about how he viewed history as distinct from the past and sort of how he utilized historical materialism in a unique way?

I know you've touched on it, but maybe we can dive a little deeper. Yeah, absolutely. So, as I say, the most famous work here is on the concept of history or on the often referred to as the Theses on the Philosophy of History. He starts it with, I'm just going to read it, actually. He says, the opening thesis, thesis one. The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a counter move.

A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hooker in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. actually a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet's hand by means of strings one can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device the puppet called historical materialism is to win all the time it can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology which today as we know is wizened and has to be kept out of sight which is a great it's a great image it's an incredibly striking image but what he's trying to draw attention to is the necessity of what Ernst Bloch would call anticipatory illumination, right?

This idea that there is a kind of utopian or messianics end point that will in some sense kind of shape the narrative of history. So historical materialism by itself lapses into

this kind of very dry, dogmatic mechanistic view of history. It becomes just a puppet that can be moved around. But if it has this animating messianic core to it, then it's, no matter what it might appear to be, we might have to keep the theology out of sight. But it can win all the time, right? It's that synthesis of those two things, which is so important. Yeah, absolutely. Do you want to touch on a little bit that distinction between the history and the past? Yes. This actually, I think, is, is best exemplified by the ninth thesis. And this is the really famous one that people quote all the time. So he's talking about a painting called Angelus Novus by Paul Clee. It says a painting named Angelus

Novis shows an angel looking as though he's about to move away from something. He's fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise. It is caught in his wings with such violence the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows

skyward. This storm is what we call progress. Damn. It's an incredible bit of writing but in it you see this distinction right, this idea that actually what we think is history.

What we think of as this kind of connected causal, very smoothly progressive evolutionary narrative. It's only that from the perspective of kind of comfortable historians Right. If we look through the eyes of the historical materialist, if we look at it as Marxists,

we recognize that it is this contingent, often very violent, often very unclear, you know, series of disasters. And I think this is this is Beneman's great contribution to the philosophy of history, which is to always question this notion that there is a singular given shape. right because to impose something to impose this kind of this idea of like well we're just telling things how they are it's like no we're making choices about the story that we tell about the past history is is is a slight of struggle in and of itself right telling telling the story of history is is necessarily about choosing which version of history we choose to we choose to kind of make into this coherent shape.

And the great value of Benyman's kind of point is to go, actually, what is left out, what is excluded, what is forgotten is likely to be phenomenally valuable. You know, it's Michael Lervey calls it a kind of Gothic Marxism, right? It's a Marxism that is alive to that which is often which would often be excluded as kind of trash or the debris of history, stuff we need to kind of move on past. It's a kind of an approach to history that circled back around to look for that

and to find in it resources for political struggle in the present. Yeah, very, very interesting, beautifully written, fascinating imagery. And anybody can go and find this work online. It's on the concept of history. It's free, and it's under 10 pages. And it is sort of these like, almost like in Gita boards, society the spectacles or the aphorismic sort of paragraph by fragments of insight and it's very readable and very short so I would encourage people if any of that sounded interesting

you to go check that out I found it challenging in some ways but also rewarding and interesting as well now let's move on to to art a little bit well I do want to say quickly you mentioned gothic Marxism and I just have to say I think that was the first time you ever came on the show was to do that gothic Marxism up yeah so that's kind of started started it started at all. So it's kind of cool to come back to that. But last time you were on, we discussed the life and work of the Marxist art critic John Berger. In that episode, the seeds of this episode were actually planted, since there is perhaps some overlap between their work. I mean, they are both sort of Marxist art critics, among other things. So can you talk about this

possible overlap, but perhaps more importantly, Abenhamene's major contributions to art criticism? Yeah, so Berger was very heavily influenced by the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction when it was translated into English. It was written in 1935 and it

is an argument about what happens to art when the kind of technological relations of a society change to favor reproducibility and speed. And Ben, in some

ways this argument is a little bit, might seem to be a bit antiquated now, but he makes the point about authenticity, the, as he calls it, the aura, the uniqueness of a particular objecta, the uniqueness of a particular painting is because of its singularity. It occupies a specific place or a specific space, but he says, actually now we exist in a society where these things are almost endlessly reproducible. And so the meaning of that original has been lost, but as Berger would point out later, this means that new meanings can be made, right? In a way, you can see this is either, you can see this is either possessing kind of like a democratizing tendency because it means that art and culture is kind of more

accessible and more distributed, or you can see this, and this is where Beny means kind of German romanticism comes out, you can see it as a kind of potential loss of something kind of intangible. And in a sense that, what is it, Benjamin says that even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element, its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happened to be located.

And he says that that artistic authenticity is kind of outside of the sphere of technological or mechanical reproduction. You know, you can make as many copies, of the Mona Lisa or the Sistine Chapel ceiling as you want, but it won't ever, it will, it won't have the same kind of, again, he uses

the term aura as encountering it in that time and in that place. Right. So like just to drill down on that a little bit more like, you know, let's just use, you know, Van Gogh's a starry night, for example. There is the the aura of the time

and place when Vincent Van Gogh actually made that work of art and it was a singular piece of art that you had to hold in your hands, right? The original, but over time it's been able to be replicated. Now you can go out and obviously get like a print of it at Walmart, a poster of it. You can get it on a coffee mug, et cetera. And so it loses something, but perhaps also something is gained, right? It's like a little bit of like both there's a silver lining here and there's like sort of something lost here as well, right?

Yeah, exactly. You have the cultural and political authority of art. because of that has been lost, right? Art is no longer the kind of highest arbiter, right, because it's been incorporated. You know, Berger said that images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, available, valueless, and free. But in order to maintain the authority of art, Berger said, well, you put it into the language of economics. You know, certain art is valuable, not because it has a kind of cultural or cultic value, but because it has an economic value, because it's become a commodity. And so the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

is an extremely interesting bit of writing, especially because it understands art. In a way, it's almost a kind of throwback. It's a glimpse into a culture or into a period of history where art still had a kind of political function, right? And this, This is not surprising, given that it was written by a German Jew in the 1930s, where the Nazis were talking about the dangers of degenerate art. Certain artwork was being banned. Certain artwork was being destroyed. Artists were being forced to flee the country. So in some ways, again, you might think that it's slightly strange, or it shows some kind of, I suppose we might say that he's being a bit of a snob.

But actually, it's very aware of something that other people may have missed, right? That art still at that time had a very clear social and political function. And when that starts changing because of the means of production, because of those relations of production, what art is and what it can do also changes. Yeah, absolutely. Well said. I do. He's operating during the time of, like, photography and the cinema.

And, of course, he died. I think it was in, as you said, 1940. So then after that we see the rise of mass-produced television and then eventually the digital world we live in now of the internet and memes and streaming services, etc. So I only wish that he could continue. I guess Berger can be seen as an acolyte that carried on that analysis into the future

a few decades forward, but still even in the last 10 years, things have radically changed. And so I would just be interested to see what he thought about that. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So another aspect of his work that obviously fascinates me in particular, and people that listen to Revliffe know that this is a huge interest of mine was his interest in and use of mysticism,

but more specifically Jewish messianic mysticism as a cornerstone of his work. Now, this is sort of something that is more or less anathema to Marxists, you know, major Marxist thinkers. They weren't overly interested in things like mysticism. And the fact that he wove this into his work does add, to the complexity and uniqueness of it. So can you talk about the role that this played in his life and work, what it added to it?

And maybe we can even start by talking about what is even meant by the term Jewish mysticism. Yeah, so it is primarily the big influence, I think, here is Kabbalah, the kind of linguistic and metaphysical tradition of Judaism. When I was prepping for this episode, I found a great quote by the scholar Margaret Cohen talking about this. talking about it in the context on the concept of history and they say that Benimin also turned to Jewish mysticism

from model of praxis in dark times inspired by the Kabbalistic precept that the work of the Holy Man is an activity known as Tikun according to the Kabbalah God's attributes were once held in vessels whose glass was contaminated by the presence of evil and these vessels had consequently shattered disseminating their contents to the four corners of the earth to Kun was the process of collecting the scattered fragments in the hopes of once more piecing them together.

And I think this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is not just the future, but how is the past redeemed? And he sees that the job of the kind of historian is to is to piece together those fragments. and see if they can be in some sense not reconstructed but retooled for the present situation and then Cohen goes on to say Benin fused to Cun with this surrealist notion that liberation would come through releasing repressed collective material to produce his celebrated account of the revolutionary historiographer

who sought to grab hold of elided memories as they sparked into view at moments of great danger. And I think this is a really great way of kind of unpacking this synthesis, right? It's, in some senses, it's very, it's very orthodox Marxist historiography, but that, that mystic tradition, that the, the process of Tikun actually gives, it gives all of this a kind of, a really clear, practical edge to it as well, right? Yeah, what role exactly does the Messiah? Because I see it in his work, he mentions the Messiah and obviously people know that in the Jewish tradition you know Christianity came out of

this idea that the Messiah was here right people that continued to be Jewish were saying that actually Jesus Christ was not the Messiah etc so I'm just wondering if you have any insight into what role that figure that archetype in general played here well he talks about he talks about the idea of this weak messianic power or he says that there's never a moment where the Messiah might enter and he's not he's not talking here kind of sort of literally, but it is this idea of kind of historical rupture. Right? So the

point is that just as the past is never finally foreclosed, the future because the kind of the Benyminian way of looking at it is, go, if you accept this very smooth, easy view of history, you're generally conceding way too much

about the future. If you go, well, the past has been written in this way and that's inescapable, the kind of brutal horror is, well, you must think that about the future as well in some sense right but benjamin talks about this idea of a kind of like

I think rupture is the way to term it right this idea that just as the past has never been foreclosed so the future is in some ways still an open question again I think there's a lot of overlap here with somebody like Ernst Bloch the other kind of great German Marxist

in the 20th century who wrote enormously insightfully about hope and the utopian impulse which is this idea that actually within all aspects of human existence there is this

kind of quite in in in Bloch's work a very philosophically sophisticated model of kind of process hegelianism that is working towards utopia this idea of and that can emerge through points of rupture this

so Benjamin is deliberately kind of co-opting this figure because it is such a theologically loaded idea the entry of the Messiah but it isn't it isn't done in simple or reductive terms and again if we kind of circle

back to the point that Benyman's big concern is the practical importance of the class struggle it's also a way of reinforcing the extent to which history does not condition totally

the contours of what that's problem might be. I see. I see. Yeah, that's really interesting. I've been reading or reading into and studying lately the work of Kierkegaard and obviously, you know, the father of existentialism and a Christian. And he talks about, you know, the entrance of Jesus Christ, the, you know, the Messiah as exactly sort of this way, like this ruptural moment in history that, you know, you can see before and after. And a lot of the paganism and rituals and beliefs before Jesus, you know, they didn't have this ruptural moment. They go back into the mists of human evolution, but with the, you know, the coming down of Jesus Christ into the world, there is this ruptural moment. And of course, you know, dialectics, we think

about revolution as a ruptural moment, right? You can talk about like quantity turning into qualitative difference and all these different ideas about how it's not this slow march of progress and particularly under liberal bourgeois social orders, we're given this idea that it is this, you know, slow, there's some speed bumps on the way, but we're more or less marching in a singular direction. And they take out of the picture, the need for ruptures in the historical leaps that have happened in the past and that, you know, if humanity survives, will need to happen in the future. So this idea of rupture, I think, is really crucial to all of this. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think it's, the kick gods is super interesting.

point of comparison, right? Kickagod's very, very, very concerned with the individual, right? It's the singular choice, the singular subject. And in a way, what I think Beny means Jewish mysticism gives him an appreciation for is this act of collective rupture. There you go. Questions of identity and community and the kind of moral and ethical responsibility in a social sense, I think is also running under the search.

emphasis of this as well. Yeah, absolutely. I do have to do an episode on Kierkegaard. It's just kind of a side note, but, you know, earlier in my life, as I was in, like, philosophy in my early 20s and stuff, I found Kierkegaard to be wholly uninteresting because I was going through my new atheist phase, you know, so the Christian jargon and everything was completely off-putting to me. But only after I grew, I developed, and I actually went through like spiritual and existential crises, does the figure of Kierkegaard re-reize in my horizon? and become, you know, lately at least a very central figure and a very fascinating a figure, particularly to engage with as you're working through, you know, spiritual and

existential crises and growth. So it's sort of funny that it wasn't, you know, Kierkegaard's Christianity that was the problem, but it was my existential immaturity at the time that didn't allow me to see the beauty and profundity of Kierkegaard. Yeah. Perhaps that's for another time. Back to Benhamene. And I want to talk about his relationships to other major thinkers we mentioned some of his close friends.

And after he tragically committed suicide and passed, there was, you know, a little, I don't want to call it a Tiff necessarily, but a little bit of like a little struggle between specifically Adorno and Hannah Arendt regarding how to carry forward his work, even some of the translations and words that were used. There's an interesting back and forth you can find online of the letters that Hannah Arendt. rent and Adorno sent back and forth to each other. Very polite, but also there's this underlying tension between, you know, there's slightly different interpretations of Walter Bendamine and his work. So can you kind of talk about some of these connections and the role they played in getting his work out in the wake of his suicide? Yeah. So I think that is a really important point to bring up, right? Because in so many ways, what you get is a struggle over who exactly this person was, like intellectually. And Arandt says that it's a mistake to call Benjamin a philosopher.

He's the kind of, he's the last great European man of letters. He's a critic, not a philosopher. And Adorno disagrees and says that he's never been able to think of Benjamin's work as anything other than philosophical, but it's philosophical in a sense that doesn't fit neatly into the kind of schools and positions of contemporary European philosophy. And in a way, in a way, it's very easy to go, well, if he's a critic or he's a kind of esthetician or a cultural critic, maybe we can kind of ignore some of the more sweeping kind of claims about what he argues. But yeah, after Benjamin dies, like a lot of his work doesn't receive huge amounts of attention when it's first published. Theses on the philosophy of history is published as a kind of like in a small print run book done by the

Frankfurt School's press over in America and mostly kind of intended for friends or colleagues as a way of commemorating some of his work the French translations do a little bit better the arcades project for a long time

was only found because Ben Amin left it at the library in Paris with the librarian George Bataille who hung onto it for a very long time so in a way a lot of his work

could well have fallen out of kind of circulation. But despite the kind of struggles and various kind of wranglings over his legacy over who this person was kind of intellectually and what it all means, it does eventually kind of find an audience, but it only finds an audience because Adorno and other colleagues that maybe he had a kind of like quite, I suppose not tense, but maybe slightly fractious intellectual relationship with whilst he was a lot, very much championed his work after he passed away.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. We talked about his influence on John Berger. I was wondering if you can think of any other thinkers of the last half century or more that you can draw a straight line from Walter Bendamine's work to and like other thinkers that he went on to influence that, you know, are big in our, in our current modern world. Somebody like, you know, Frederick Jameson perhaps jumps to mind, but I don't exactly know the connections there. Jameson, Jameson's written about Benyman, but it's probably not directly influenced in so many ways.

Giorgio Agamben, the theorist of biopolitics, was a Benymin translator. And has said famously that Benjamin is one of his biggest intellectual influences, mostly for his interest in the aphorism, and how much can be communicated, how much can be concentrated and brought to a point in kind of crystallizing an idea. And you can see that in Agamben's interest in certain situations. He kind of takes this idea of like the thought image. You know, he writes about the camp historically.

He writes about monasticism historically. And it's this idea of taking kind of a snapshot moment and stretching that throughout its historical construction, which is very much something that I think Ben Umin would resonate with. Absolutely. So like sort of getting towards the end of this conversation, ultimately what is his legacy? And why should people today read him, particularly on the revolutionary left? I think reading Beny Min is extremely, one can be very frustrating, but also always deeply challenging. I think the advantage is he gives us an attention, an appreciation and attention to detail.

like for benjamin nothing is insignificant right even even like trivial matters or fragments from history are actually if we give them careful attention capable of unlocking a really profound political and philosophical points for us the smallest stuff of history is deeply significant right and and i've said this a couple of times but i think in a moment where where you know mark fisher would say we don't really have a vision of the future Right. What we have is a vision of now, but maybe slightly better or slightly worse. Right. Right. Right. We have to kind of invent the idea of the future. We have to have a kind of vision of what would that rupture look like. And in that case, I think it's incredibly valuable to have a record of someone writing at a time where, where fascism was on the rise, where fascism was present and a very real dangerous threat. where, you know, I think about Brecht's famous comment, you know, about the fascists. They're planning for 30,000 years ahead, right? They're planning their 10,000-year Reich. And Beniamen's philosophy of history not only gives us an appreciation of what has gone before us, but also gives us a way of seeing that as not just something that's lost,

but something that is at hand, as it were, right? It's something that is a set of resources and practices, traditions, symbols, tools, and ideas that are valuable for kind of inventing a future. If the past is open and understood as this ongoing thing that can still be engaged with, then the future can be as well. Very well said. Very well said. So the question I definitely want to finish off on here is just the idea that his writing can be, you know, notoriously. difficult for like a lay person to just sort of enter into and fully understand. So given that, if you had to recommend a way into his work, what recommendation would you offer? There are a couple

ways in. I think one really good way of getting to know a thinker, especially if they have a kind of dense style, is through their letters. Benyman wrote letters throughout his entire life. He wrote them to some of the most well-known people. He wrote to Gersham Shorlem. He wrote to Bertolt Brecht. He wrote to Adorno. He wrote to Hannah Arendt. And you can find collected editions of his letters pretty easily.

If you would like a way into on the concept of history or the thesis on the philosophy of history, easily one of the best books to really gain an appreciation, not just for that very short work, but for his method as a whole is a book. called Fire Alarm by Michael Lurvey and it's a phenomenal reading of it and a phenomenal way of kind of unlocking Benyman's method

but lots of his work is very short and is often his more philosophically dense stuff can be a little complicated but a lot of the stuff he writes about is actually really accessible so I would start there but I would also just encourage people

to find his His essay collections is one called Illuminations, and there's one called One Way Street. Maybe he won't click with everybody, but I think any, like he's an excellent stylist as well as being a really interesting thinker. So I would

do that. Yeah, those are great recommendations, and if somebody's looking for more of a secondary explanatory source akin to what this podcast is, I can never over-recommend the podcast philosophies this by Stephen West. has a whole series on the Frankfurt School. Every episode is roughly 20 to 30 minutes, and he has, I think, two specific episodes just on Benamine and his work. And you can listen to

that and then go back and listen to his episodes on the Frankfurt School more broadly. And for me, especially when you're going to enter, you know, the initial source of a text, and it can be difficult for various reasons. Having some of the main ideas fleshed out beforehand can be very helpful going in. So you kind of have an idea of what this, this person is doing and you can orient yourself to that and then go and read some of the more complex work so philosophize this is is wonderful for that as well before i let you go john um first of all thank you again for coming on the show always a pleasure to talk and learn from you every time you come on i learn from you as as does my audience can you please let them know where

they can find you and your work online uh yeah absolutely you can find me um you can find me online at The Liquit Guy. You can also find more of my work over at Horror Vanguard. Horror Vanguard available wherever you get your podcasts from. So do check out the show where we talk about scary movies. We talk about communism. We talk about theory. And do you come say hi on Twitter? Absolutely. I will link to all of that in the show notes.

Thank you again, my friend. We will have you back on, no doubt, very soon. Thank you so much. Surruli and stay my fingers and hands I'm in a dark wing ducking speed traps in the scans I'm not trying to have another traffic stop with the clan the red and blue made me nervous pray I'm not the next to be stolen from earth people I love and higher purpose lately it's been consuming my mental first time I got stopped and frisked on Drexel it seemed so inconsequential the second one I awakened the third one was invasive the fourth officer threatened to tase me for my impacist instead of writing a statement I tell it to you with rhythm and

I dream of watching them crumble. I'm eager for their replacement. I'm sick of seeing their faces. And the way my heart raises from locked, gazes in casual conversations. No hell of people who quietly satisfy with its stasis, but loudly taken from our culture and occupying our spaces. I see it daily. No exaggeration. No longer causing me agitation. Think I'm cold to it now. Same moderate that Dr. King told us about. I temper my expectations because I know what they bow. I'm four and old. Still living and learning. Inferno under me burning. My cerebellion It's churn them. I journal pages are turning.

I don't share them too often, but all these thoughts been exhausted and they keep within me. Sometimes I feel like they're holding me hostage. I'm not here for your pity, really, just wanted a vent. Feeling more at peace, but still I'm far from content. Mom and Dad, if you're listening, I promise I'm good. Been a minute since they stopped me last. Knock on wood.

Thank you.