(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

INTRODUCTION: BENJAMIN’S ACTUALITY
21
14
On the dialectics of Benjamin’s appropriation by popular culture and his
resistance to assimilation see also Gerhard Richter’s “Introduction: Benjamin’s
Ghosts,” in Benjamin’s Ghosts, 2–3.
15
See Nadine Werner, “Zeit und Person,” in Lindner, Benjamin-Handbuch,
3–8. Standard biographies are Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual
Biography, trans. James Rolleston (Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 1991); Momme
Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography, ed. Martina Dervi, trans. Malcolm
R. Green and Ingrida Ligers (London and New York: Verso, 1996); Willem van
Reijen and Herman van Doorn, Aufenthalte und Passagen: Leben und Werk Walter
Benjamins; Eine Chronik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001).
16
For an analysis of Benjamin’s concepts of allegory and montage in the context
of the avant-garde critique of classical aesthetics and the bourgeois “institution of
art,” see Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1984), 68–82.
17
See Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 2001), 14–18. For a more
detailed discussion of the Passagen-Werk and its significance today, see Karl Solibakke’s
contribution in this volume. Ward and Solibakke both refer to Paul Virilio’s
critique of the subversion of the real by electronic communication media.
18
For a critique of Benjamin’s theory of art see Bürger, Theory of the Avant-
Garde, 27–34.
19
See also Wolfgang Bock, Medienpassagen: Der Film im Übergang in eine neue
Medienkonstellation. Bild — Schrift — Cyberspace II (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2006).
20
On the return of the aura in the postmodern culture of commodity capitalism
and digital communication, see Lutz Koepnick, “Aura Reconsidered: Benjamin
and Contemporary Visual Culture,” in Richter, Benjamin’s Ghosts, 95–117, as
well as his contribution in this volume.
21
See also Samuel Weber’s recent discussion of Benjamin’s notions of history
and actuality in the context of “recognizability” and other such “–abilities” (Benjamin’s
–abilities (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 2008), 48–52).
The difference between Benjamin’s notion of –abilities and comparable terms in
Kant “can be interpreted negatively, as the impossibility of ever realizing, in a
full and self-present act of cognition, the ‘abilities’ involved; or it can be interpreted
positively, as a virtuality that, precisely because it can never hope to be
fully instantiated or exhausted in any one realization, remains open to the future”
(14). As Weber explains, “Benjamin’s concept of history knows neither goal nor
‘global integration’ [Deleuze’s notion of the “actualization of the virtual,” 32]
but at best, an ‘end.’ This end does not come ‘at the end’; rather it is always
actual, always now” (51).
22
Peter Bürger, “Benjamins Kunstheorie: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen ihrer
Aktualisierbarkeit,” in Schrift Bilder Denken: Walter Benjamin und die Künste,
ed. Detlev Schöttker (Berlin: Haus am Waldsee; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
2004), 168–83.
23
Bürger, “Benjamins Kunstheorie, 180–83.