(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

6: One Little Rule: On Benjamin,
Autobiography, and Never Using
the Word “I”
Eric Jarosinski
In our childhood we know a lot about hands since
they live and hover at the level of our stature.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
TO READ WALTER BENJAMIN’S autobiographical writings is to engage
with much more, and much less, than the story of his life. What they
might lack in coherent detail, especially in regard to Benjamin’s adult life,
is an absence indicative of the many questions they articulate about the
identity of the self, the nature of experience, and the possibility of giving
expression to both within modernity. While the figure of Benjamin has
assumed numerous guises in the now nearly seventy years since his death
in 1940 — among them, the Marxist critic, the Jewish mystic, the “last
European” — the image he presents of himself in his own writings is too
variegated to allow for any single designation to be adequate. The task
confronting the reader is to engage with the image Benjamin constructs
of himself as carefully and critically as when approaching one of his own
enigmatic constellations or “thought-images.” This is a challenge complicated
by what is perhaps an ironic twist in the course of Benjamin’s
reception, as his image has become imbued with a certain cult value in
recent decades, at times generating an overly reverent aura around the
same thinker who famously diagnosed its demise.
How then to picture Benjamin today? His autobiographical writings
seem a good place to start. First, however, it is important to realize that
in sketching Benjamin, or for that matter sketching Benjamin sketching
Benjamin, we are also portraying ourselves at a given moment: our critical
categories, theoretical assumptions, and modes of representation. It
should probably come as no surprise that, in addition to an ever-growing
literature on Benjamin’s life and work, with each study showing traces of
its own intellectual, disciplinary or political agenda, there are now Benjamin
pages on Facebook and MySpace, lending such Web sites dubious