INTRODUCTION

Quine is an advocate of naturalism, a view comprising two theses, one negative, one positive. The negative thesis is that there is no adequate first philosophy - that is, there is no a priori or experiential ground outside of science upon which science can either be justified or rationally reconstructed, as was the wont of many traditional epistemologists. The positive thesis is that it is up to science to inform us about what exists and how we come to know what exists.

On the negative side, if there is no adequate first philosophy, then epistemologies as disparate as Descartes' and Carnap’s fail of their purpose. While Descartes sought to deduce the truths of nature from a foundation of clear and distinct ideas, (early) Carnap sought to rationally reconstruct scientific discourse from a foundation of elementary experiences. Quine advances a series of philosophical arguments and considerations designed to establish the untenability of Descartes-like and Carnap-like epistemic projects. In short, Quine argues that Descartes-like efforts fail because not even the truths of arithmetic, let alone all the truths of nature, can be deduced from a (consistent) foundation of clear and distinct ideas, and he argues that Carnap-like efforts fail because a theory’s theoretical terms cannot be defined, even contextually, in observation terms.

With the appearance of Harvard University Press's edition of Walter Benjamin's Selected Writings, the great range of this thinker, critic, social commentator, and theorist has become even more apparent in the English-speaking world. Making this range more readily available will undoubtedly prompt the discussion and understanding of Benjamin to move beyond the limited number of essays that have achieved canonical status wherever the name of Benjamin is evoked, particularly in Anglo-American criticism. Admittedly this access to a wider range of material in English will complicate the received picture of Benjamin even as it offers greater scope to track the development of his thought and the concepts through which it was expressed. In many ways, this Cambridge Companion has been edited with a view to providing a guide to the concepts and issues that will come under scrutiny as this fuller evaluation of Benjamin's thought gets under way within the English-language interpretation of his writings.

The organization of the volume has been guided by two concerns. First, to achieve an adequate account of key elements in Benjamin’s thought and, second, to place these elements in relation to each other so that the shifting emphases and material through which Benjamin developed his thinking can be discerned. The organization is then thematic, taking up issues that traverse Benjamin’s writing. While every attempt has been made to be comprehensive, the essays commissioned for this volume do not exhaust the wealth of interest in philosophical, cultural, theological, or historical materials exhibited by this critic.

Scarcely any twentieth-century author rivals Walter Benjamin's influence on the contemporary understanding of art and the aesthetic implications of new media. His thought has left its mark on all areas of contemporary theory and practice, from architecture, painting, and sculpture to installation art, photography, and film. From his research as a graduate student on truth and experience in idealist philosophy to the enormous study on the nineteenth century, the Paris Arcades Project, that consumed him for the last decade of his life, Benjamin investigated the formal, historical, and political dimensions of visual phenomena with unparalleled creativity. In a similar vein, the academic discipline of art history preoccupied him from an early age and, throughout the course of his life, he would continue to reflect on its methodologies and practices.

The Arcades Project is the centerpiece of what Benjamin called his “Parisian production cycle,” an archeology of the emergence of high capitalist modernity that engaged him from the late 1920s until his death. Begun as an essay that was to offer a historical ground for One-Way Street's phenomenology of modern life (1928), the Arcades Project had expanded to thirty-six copious folders (known as “Convolutes”) of notes and reflections by the time Benjamin was forced by the Nazi Occupation to flee Paris and the Bibliothèque Nationale where he had spent twelve years sifting through “the rags, the refuse” that he deemed his preferred materials of historiographical construction (Arcades, 460; n1a, 8). Benjamin was never to transform his notes into a finished work, taking his own life in September 1940, after having been denied an exit visa to Spain. On his final failed journey across the Pyrenees Mountains, he was reported to have been carrying a large black briefcase filled with a manuscript, which was never recovered. Glittering like one of the allegorical emblems dear to its owner, this briefcase gives concrete form to the simultaneous atmosphere of loss and possibility that enshrouds Benjamin's Arcades Project, whose notes and citations raise questions central to the entire materialist project, that, however, dissipate into pregnant and repetitive brooding, dense though evocative aphorisms, the dust of the nineteenth century.

Any argument that starts with the claim that it concerns a theory of modernity is constrained to account for the nature of modernity's inception. Even in working with the assumption of modernity's presence there would still have to be a description of that which was located in its differentiation from the modern. Part of the argument to be developed here is that for the major thinkers of modernity its occurrence is thought in terms of a break or an interruption. Here, the particular project is to locate that thinking in the writings of Walter Benjamin. A context therefore is set by those writings and the presence within them of attempts to develop a relationship between modernity and its necessary interarticulation with a philosophical conception of historical time. Given this context, the opening question has to concern the specificity of interruption within those writings.

How is interruption to be thought? What is the conception of interruption at work within Benjamin’s writings? Although it appears as a motif in his engagement with Romanticism and is then repositioned – if not reworked in the later writings in terms of a thinking of historical time – interruption as a mode of thought within Benjamin’s work can be identified under a number of different headings.

The year 1924 produced a series of crucial turns in Walter Benjamin's career. The years leading up to 1924, to which he later referred as his “apprenticeship in German literature,” saw Benjamin intent on a reevaluation of German Romanticism, and the development of a theory of criticism with deep roots in that very Romanticism. His major published works of the period included studies of Goethe's novel Elective Affinities, a dissertation on Friedrich Schlegel's theory of criticism, and, in 1924, a major study of German baroque mourning plays, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama; in each of these texts, Benjamin develops his own literary theory from concepts and procedures evident in the works themselves, only to turn the new theory back on the text from which it in some sense sprang. The rhythms of Benjamin's practice and theory of criticism in these years contain two intertwined movements. On the one hand, his criticism entails the demolition or demystification of the unified work of art – what we today call its disenchantment. Benjaminian criticism reduces the apparently coherent, integrally meaningful work to the status, to name but a few of Benjamin’s figures, of ruin, of torso, of mask. In the study of The Origin of the German Tragic Drama he writes that “criticism is the mortification of works” (Origin, 182; trans. modified).

Language is the “alpha” and “omega” of Benjamin's thought, forming an elaborate, ornate mosaic that encompasses all of his writings, from the early essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (1916) to the materialist work of the mid and late thirties. Even the image-oriented, iconographic Arcades Project, dedicated to the exegesis of dialectical images, was to find its epistemological justification in the statement that the historian eminently chanced upon such images in language. Laboring untiringly on a comprehensive philosophy of language, in which the whole proved larger than its composite parts, Benjamin wove comments on language into almost every single essay, faithful to his early belief that it constituted the “arche,” or origin, of all intellectual expression.

Like the Early Romantics, who used fragments and “mystical terminology,” or Nietzsche, who wrote aphorisms as a way of developing a new, seemingly antisystematic system, Benjamin produced reflections on language that appeared to defy conventional codes of systematization.

The famous sentence from Benjamin's seventh thesis on the philosophy of history describing documents of culture as documents of barbarism appears in the context of a reflection on culture as the plunder of history's victors. Faced with the barbaric documents of culture and their transmission to the present, Benjamin continues, it is the task of historical materialism to “rub history against the grain.” The general references to historicism and historical materialism in the seventh thesis obscure the original significance of the sentence as part of a specific reflection on the limits of cultural history. The same phrase also appears at a crucial point in the 1937 essay on the Marxist cultural historian “Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian.” At this point the sentence, “There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” continues: “No cultural history has yet done justice to this fundamental state of affairs and it can hardly hope to do so” (SW III, 267). The burden of Benjamin's critique of previous cultural history rests on its never having done “justice” to the negative or barbaric aspect of culture, an act of reparation for past injustice that he thinks it can “hardly hope” to achieve. Nevertheless, in spite of this stricture, Benjamin's 1937 prognosis for cultural history is not entirely bleak: some small hope remains for what he calls a “dialectical cultural history.” The analysis of the concept of a dialectical cultural history will thus give a concrete illustration of what it might mean to “rub history against its grain.”

Psychoanalysis is a science that attempts to explain normal and pathological states in the human mind, as well as a clinical practice of treatment for the latter. It began with Freud's rejection of hypnosis and shock therapy as cures for hysteria and his development with Josef Breuer of the “talking cure,” a technique of analyzing patients' free associations that was to become a central feature of the psychoanalytic session. In Freud's account, psychoanalysis did not truly come into its own until he began to analyze the network of associations that arise in dreams; this was the breakthrough of his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams. Describing dreams as the “royal road to . . . the unconscious,” Freud insisted that their images arise from the interaction between whole systems of repressed thoughts, as a result of which no single meaning can be affixed to any image.

Although this approach may seem reminiscent of the structuralist linguistics emerging around the time Freud was writing, nothing like it had existed before in the realm of dream interpretation.

When the young Benjamin finally decides, in 1917, to jettison Kant for the Romanticism of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis as the topic for his doctoral dissertation at the University of Berne, the choice reflects no arbitrary shift of interest. Benjamin had already been struggling to rescue Kant's thought from what he perceived to be its fatal slide into scientific positivism in the hands of the neo-Kantians of his time. Whether it was the failure of this rescue or another reason (according to a letter from Benjamin to Scholem, it was the “very unpleasant” experience of finally getting around to reading the philosophy of history expressed in Kant's essays on “Ideas for a Universal History” and “Perpetual Peace”), this shift toward the Romantics marks a clear break with the dominant philosophic thought of his day. Moreover, since this was a movement away from the various ideologies of progress espoused both by the neo-Kantians (and also used by one of them, Hermann Cohen, to justify the German war effort) and by the German youth movement with which Benjamin had been involved during the years preceding 1917, the stakes are immediately high.

If Benjamin’s renunciation of Kant during the war years is linked, at least in his own mind, to the conformism he sees implicit in the latter’s portrayal of history as an endless inexorable progress toward a pre-established goal – the “infinite task” – it is also crucially informs his rehabilitation of the Romanticism that flourished at Jena under the influence of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel in the late 1780s and early 1790s.

Languages of self-portraiture

There is nothing self-evident about the notion that we should have confessional and literary writings by Walter Benjamin. After all, the abstractness and rigor that readers associate with his texts do not, on the surface, appear to conform to the sinewy and personal cadences characteristic of autobiographical reflection, from St. Augustine via Rousseau and Goethe to Nietzsche and the modernists, or to the aesthetic demands of literary discourse. From this perspective, to think of Benjamin as having written autobiographical and literary texts is, to borrow a phrase from one of his readers, “at first blush as implausible as an anthology of fairy tales by Hegel, a child's garden of deconstruction by Derrida.” Yet, both his confessional and literary texts belong in essential ways to the ever-shifting contours of his variegated acts of self-portraiture. Benjamin's autobiographical and literary texts stage his theory of the writerly self as one whose identity is defined by the condition of not being himself, that is, as one who negotiates the construction and dispersal of selfhood in language. As one critic, Fredric Jameson, reminds us, Benjamin poses a challenge not least of all because he “seems to dissolve into multiple readings fully as much as he turns into a unique 'self' that remains to be defined.”

The extremes as points of orientation define the via regia of philosophical investigation for Benjamin. The first sentence that opens the main body of Benjamin's The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, after the epistemological preface, categorically states the direction as “the necessary direction toward the extreme” (Origin, 57). The extreme as point of direction and orientation, even as the “norm of conceptualization” (Origin, 57), is set off from a logic that defines the norm by the normal, the average, and the middle. It is in this direction toward the extreme that Benjamin finds his own intellectual procedure intersecting with that of Carl Schmitt, whose essay on the concept of sovereignty appealed to Benjamin above all because of this methodological intersection with his own mode of thought. When Benjamin, in his book on German tragic drama, explicitly quotes the one-sentence paragraph with which Carl Schmitt opens his book: “Sovereign is he who decides over the state of emergency,” his own epistemological preface has already articulated the logic of the extreme that underlies Schmitt's procedure. For Schmitt, the concept of the “sovereign” is a liminal concept (Grenzbegriff). “A liminal concept, ” he writes, “is not a confused concept as it is in the popular literature, but a concept of the extreme sphere. Accordingly its definition cannot be tied to the normal case, but to the liminal case.” At this point the intellectual worlds of Benjamin and Schmitt come to their closest encounter; from here they will move away from each other in opposite directions. Schmitt will become and remain a fundamentalist, Benjamin will remain a marginalist, being faithful only to the liminal border lines.

Reading this well-known entry from the “N” convolute of Benjamin's Arcades Project, even the most seasoned Benjamin expert might be forgiven a feeling of helplessness in the face of such a powerful and enigmatic array of claims. The breathtaking evocation of an alternative temporality that this quote contains in characteristically elliptical and compacted form, the glimpse at an entirely new conception of historiography that breaks with previous categories of interpretation, the notion of an image-based historical sensibility as the genuine mode of historical interpretation – these are as fascinating and compelling as any moment in modern philosophy. But, at the same time, one cannot avoid the feeling that this quote, and others like it in Benjamin's Arcades Project, is a theoretical promissory note that would prove difficult if not impossible to redeem. What possible philosophy of history could explicate the difference between the past and “what-has-been,” between the present and the “now”?

Abelard's philosophy is the first example in the Western tradition of the cast of mind that is now called nominalism. Although his view that universals are mere words (nomina) is typically thought to justify the label, Abelard's nominalism - or better, his irrealism - is in fact the hallmark of his metaphysics. He is an irrealist not only about universals, but also about propositions, events, times other than the present, natural kinds, relations, wholes, absolute space, hylomorphic composites, and the like. Instead, Abelard holds that the concrete individual, in all its richness and variety, is more than enough to populate the world. He preferred reductive, atomist, and material explanations when he could get them; he devoted a great deal of effort to pouring cold water on the metaphysical excesses of his predecessors and contemporaries. Yet unlike modern philosophers, Abelard did not conceive of metaphysics as a distinct branch of philosophy. Following Boethius, he distinguishes philosophy into three branches: logic, concerned with devising and assessing argumentation, an activity also known as dialectic; physics, concerned with speculation on the natures of things and their causes; and ethics, concerned with the upright way of life.