(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

18
ROLF J. GOEBEL
reading its montage-like topography of Paris as the capital of nineteenthcentury
commodity capitalism in the context of Benjamin’s historical
materialism, philosophy of history, and views on cultural memory. He
argues that Benjamin’s opus maximum constitutes a pivotal link between
Heinrich Heine’s post-Romantic representation of Parisian modernity
and Paul Virilio’s postmodern critique of the global city in the age of telecommunication
and virtual reality.
Focusing on Benjamin’s last text, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,”
Marc de Wilde engages the writer’s political texts through the “experience
of disillusion.” It allowed Benjamin to formulate a radical critique
of totalitarian ideologies, whose forgetting of the past led to their complicity
with political violence. Critiquing former German foreign minister
Joschka Fischer’s ideologically pragmatic use of the slogan “Never again
Auschwitz” to justify his country’s engagement in the Kosovo conflict, de
Wilde differentiates Benjamin’s “politics of remembrance,” which focuses
on rescuing images of the past that refuse appropriation for dogmatic
ends, from a questionable “politics of commemoration” that reifies the
past for partisan political interests of the present.
Addressing a closely related theme, Vivian Liska analyses the radical
rereading of Benjamin’s messianic juxtaposition of theology and politics
by Giorgio Agamben, the Italian editor of Benjamin’s collected works and
a leading figure in contemporary European political philosophy. Agamben
seeks to liberate Benjamin from the views of previous commentators
such as Gershom Scholem, Theodor W. Adorno, and Jacques Derrida.
From Agamben’s vantage point, Liska arrives at a fresh interpretation of
Benjamin’s key theories of quotation, collecting, and historical tradition,
the “idea of prose,” and his paradigmatic reading of Kafka.
From a postcolonial perspective, Willi Bolle analyzes the significance
of Benjamin’s study of Paris as the quintessential European metropolis of
modernity for a new understanding of megacities on the “periphery” of the
global map, such as Ciudad de Mexico, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, São
Paulo, and also of Belém and Manaus, which claimed to be a “Paris on the
Amazon.” Drawing on the modernist Brazilian writer Mário de Andrade,
on a contemporary São Paulo rap band, and on the Amazonian playwright
Márcio Souza, Bolle explores interpretive categories that take account of
the different histories and present situations of these new metropolitan sites
while questioning the Eurocentricity of older hegemonic centers.
Dianne Chisholm charts the unexamined “perversity” with which
Benjamin imagines issues of gender, sex, and Eros in conjunction with
his themes of language, history, and technology in modernist society.
Her essay suggests radically new approaches to Benjamin in areas such as
androgyny, transsexual architecture, the work of sex in the age of technological
reproducibility, and the notion of an eco-technological Eros. Even
though Benjamin did not formulate an explicit theory of sexuality and