Walter Benjamin, an Aesthetic of Redemption - Monoskop

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Project, the new and the always-the-same, will first come under consideration there. 61
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Above all, Benjamin stresses the following point: "It is by all means important to emphasize that the philosophical
foundations of the book as a whole can not be comprehended, nor should they be, from the second part."62 His
message is clear. The section of the Baudelaire book commissioned by the Institute, that section dealing exclusively
with Baudelaire, remains in a crucial sense unintelligible without the accompanying two methodological sections, the
first of which (Part I) poses the theoretical problem: "Why do allegorical elements enter into Baudelaire's creative
activity?"; the second of which (Part III) presents the resolution in terms of the "metaphysical subtleties and
theological niceties" (Marx) of the commodity form. Thus, Part II merely supplies the ''material content" of the
study. At the same time, Benjamin remained convinced that the piece could stand on its own as a kind of
"philological study." His efforts to forestall a negative reception from the Institute through explanations of this nature
proved to be in vain.
The Baudelaire study had been anticipated by the inner circle of the Institute in New York as a literary event of the
first order, for it represented the first installment of a project with which Benjamin had occupied himself now for
approximately ten years. The disillusioned tone of Adorno's response reflects inversely the original expectations
which the work had evoked. It had become undeniably clear to Adorno that mere "differences in perspective" no
longer sufficed to account for the theoretical divergences that separated them. There was virtually no trace in this
study of the brilliant, theologically derived insights which had lent Benjamin's earlier work its unique powers of
illumination. "Motifs are assembled but not elaborated," Adorno charges. "Panorama and 'traces,'flaneur and arcades,
modernism and the unchanging, without a theoretical interpretationis this a 'material' which can patiently await
interpretation without being consumed by its own aura?"63 There was no longer any question as to which side of
Benjamin's self-avowed "Janus-Face" had, at least temporarily, won out. The influences of Brecht were omnipresent.
Yet, it was
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