Spectres of Benjamin

Textual Practice

Volumn 19, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 415-443

  Rapaport, Herman ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Arcades project; Benjamin; Communism; Derrida; Frankfurt School; Genre; Inoperability; Later Derrida; Marxism; Phantasmagoria; Specters

Indexed keywords

EID: 33845255907     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09502360500329703     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (1982; New York: Columbia University Press (rev. edn), 1994), p. 201. Wolin's accessible account of the Benjamin/Adorno debate is presupposed. In it, one can see the power of phantasy in terms of what Adorno had hoped and expected Benjamin would produce versus his disappointments. How the Benjamin/Brecht friendship affected the Benjamin/Adorno relation is also something I will not be able to develop for reasons of length and therefore point the reader to Wolin's account.
2. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Complete Correspondence, ed. H. Lonitz, trams. N. Walker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 283, 284 (emphasis added).
3. The Arcades Project, ed. R. Tiedemann and trans. H. Eiland and K. Mclaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). References are to convolute passages that follow each citation or entry.
4. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Michael Holland et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) was originally published as La communauté désoeuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986). Derrida's Politics of Friendship, trans. G. Collins (London: Verso, 1997), is largely a response to this book's thesis: that community is, strictly speaking, an impossibility (see p. 299 for Derrida's direct comment on Nancy's notion of inoperability). Nancy's statement, 'community is revealed in the death of others' (p. 15), is fundamental to Specters of Marx, which again could be read as a response to Nancy. (The spectre notion occurs in both texts, since they are, in fact, two volumes that belong to a single project whose context was given in seminars in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The seminar, 'Eating the other', which Derrida did not redact, is yet a third instalment which deals with the ambivalence of loving as devouring, tenderness as violence. Clearly, a reconstruction of the seminars would be required in order to properly understand Derrida's rather lengthy appropriation of the inoperability theme. Finally note that on p. 154 of Specters, Derrida clearly reveals his awareness of spectrality and disadjustment in Benjamin's corpus, something he appears to have purposely bracketed in order to keep Specters in check.
5. Derrida's monograph Force de loi (Paris: Galilée, 1994) has as its intent the demonstration (made clear in an interview by Derrida) that Benjamin's theory of violence was not so far removed from fascist theories. In fact, the aim of Derrida's writings on Benjamin, Scholem, Rosenzweig and other Jewish figures of the pre-Second World War period was to show that the 'difference' between their ideas and certain aspects of fascist thinking is not always distinguishable, though obviously he was not trying to simply collapse the two either. This aspect of Derrida's thinking mirrors, in my view, some of the vicissitudes of French intellectual thinking of the 1930s an early 1940s which did not always maintain a rigid border between left- and right-wing thinking. Note, for example, the career of Blanchot; also Derrida's own hybridization of Heidegger/Marx in Specters.
6. 'Two poems by Friedrich Hölderlim', in Selected Writings, vol 1, ed. M. Bullock and M. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 29.
7. Jacques Derrida, 'The law of genre', in Acts of Literature, ed. D. Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 264. Originally published in Glvph 7 (1980).
8. 'La Loi du genre', in Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986).
9. Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 33.
10. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. A. Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986; Gallimard, 1980), p. 73.
11. Derrida's monograph-length essay is included in Hélène Cixous: croisées d'une oeuvre (Paris: Galilée, 2000).
12. Introduction, Boundary 2, 30: 1 (2003), p. 5.
13. 'On the banks of a New Lethe', Boundary 2, 30: 1 (2003), pp. 89-104.
14. Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, 'Ce que taisent les manuscripts: les fiches de Walter Benjamin et le mythe des passages', in Penser, classer, écrire: de Pascal a' Perec, ed. B. Didier and J. Neefs (Saint Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1990), pp. 105-16.
15. Cited in New Formations: Reading Benjamin's Arcades, 54 (2004/2005), p. 24.
16. Of course, Derrida's entire analysis within 'Fors' comes into play here as exception, crypt, supplement, reserve and so on. See 'Fors', in Cryptonomie: Le Verbier de l'homme au loups (Paris: Flammarion, 1977).