(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

INTRODUCTION: BENJAMIN’S ACTUALITY
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gender, his remarks may advance contemporary feminist and queer theory
and even have implications for social/sexual emancipation.
Exploring Benjamin’s actuality may also involve broadening the
scope of his concepts in intermedial ways. With recourse to Theodor W.
Adorno, Adrian Daub frees Benjamin’s notions of flânerie and phantasmagoria
from their predominantly and one-sidedly visual focus to explore
acts of auditory flânerie as an avenue into the investigation of operatic
phantasmagoria, by which he understands a type of illusory performativity
that conceals its own material conditions of production. Daub discusses
two operas of Franz Schreker (1878–1934) as instances where the technological
and aesthetic aspects of phantasmagoria are self-reflectively built
into the very structure of the modern artwork itself. Thus Daub’s contribution
helps fill the gap in the largely unexplored territory of Benjamin’s
relevance for aural phenomena and musical culture.
As these brief synopses suggest, the goal of the contributions is not to
appropriate Benjamin’s positions to justify the fashionable tendencies of
today’s culture. Rather, the essays work through specific differences and
similarities that define the historically contingent constellations between
Benjamin’s texts and our time. In order to allow these constellations to
emerge, the arrangement of the contributions does not strictly follow the
chronological timeline of Benjamin’s writing career. Benjamin’s writing,
although obviously changing in themes and methods, does not really follow
a linear intellectual development but moves, spiral-like, among recurrent
and yet variable concerns, themes, and categories. In fact, Benjamin
frequently borrows entire passages from his earlier writings for later texts
while revising earlier definitions of key concepts. His work remains a ruin
in the negative sense — damaged by persecution, misunderstanding, and
suicide — and in the positive sense — as an assemblage of fragments and
torsos that point into a void that stimulates the readers’ interpretive imagination
without being filled by it. Correspondingly, the essays in this volume
sometimes overlap in some aspects while offering different, perhaps
even contradictory viewpoints in other instances. Needless to say, the
Companion does not pursue some kind of illusory completeness. Rather,
the volume’s intersections and interstices, including the gaps — the texts
or issues not addressed by any of the essays — are intended to spur readers’
own interpretive interrogations without aiming at a hermeneutic closure
with definite answers and permanent explications. In this sense, the
question raised at the beginning — whether actualization is akin to the
common notion of self-actualization, in the sense of realizing or fulfilling
one’s own innate potential — must be answered in the negative. But recognizing
that Benjamin’s potentiality can never be fully realized — least of
all by this Companion — is not such a bad thing at all. For ultimately, the
Companion wants to send the reader back to where any study of Benjamin
must, of course, begin and end: to the inexhaustible texts themselves.