Gerhard Richter, <\/b>Inheriting Walter Benjamin<\/i><\/b>. London: Bloomsbury, 2016; 170 pages. ISBN: 978-1474251242. <\/b><\/p>\n
Reviewed by Alexei Procyshyn, Monash University.<\/i><\/p>\n
Gerhard Richter\u2019s Inheriting Walter Benjamin<\/i> is the latest addition to Bloomsbury\u2019s \u201cWalter Benjamin Studies\u201d series. This series, which began its life with Continuum, before the latter press was acquired by Bloomsbury, has published some of the best scholarship on Benjamin. The essays collected in edited volumes such as Walter Benjamin and Romanticism<\/i> (2002), Walter Benjamin and History<\/i> (2005), and Walter Benjamin and Art<\/i> (2005), the vast majority of which were previously unpublished, have set the scholarly standards for the field, shaped the contemporary reception of Benjamin\u2019s work, and set the research agenda for many Benjamin scholars. The fact that Benjamin is now treated as a thinker in his own right, whose work deserves attention for the range of rich philosophical ideas or positions it formulates and not merely as an informative adjunct, valuable for its heuristic ability to unpack a more significant philosophical project (e.g.<\/i>, Adorno\u2019s), is owed to a great extent to this series, which has kindled and sustained the interest in Benjamin\u2019s thought and brought out its salience for contemporary research.<\/p>\n
In comparison to the strength of previous publications in the series, Inheriting Walter Benjamin <\/i>is unfortunately a disappointment. Consider the bibliographic facts: of its 170 pages, only thirty-three consist of new, previously unpublished material. Specifically, of the six essays included in the volume, only the first (\u201cInheriting Benjamin Otherwise,\u201d 1\u201314, which also serves as Introduction) and second (\u201cErbs\u00fcnde<\/i>: A Note on Paradoxical Inheritance in Benjamin\u2019s Kafka Essay,\u201d 15\u201333) have not previously appeared elsewhere. The remaining four essays were published between 2010 and 2015, and only two of them\u2014\u201cCritique and the Thing: Benjamin and Heidegger\u201d (59\u2013100) and \u201cThe Work of Art in Its Formal and Genealogical Determinations: Benjamin\u2019s \u2018Cool Place\u2019 Between Kant and Nietzsche\u201d (101\u201321)\u2014have been revised for the current volume. Close comparison of the revised essays with the previously published versions yields a further disappointment: the revisions consist in minor cosmetic changes which, in merely tacking allusions to the notion of \u201cinheritance\u201d onto the original essays, add nothing substantive nor serve any significant ampliative function.<\/p>\n
One might easily push past these initial disappointments. After all, there are good scholarly reasons to republish a set of articles in a single volume. Whether for the ease of reference afforded by having a thinker\u2019s important essays all in one place, or an editor\u2019s hope that gathering together a thinker\u2019s (or group\u2019s) contributions to a specific problem or theme might prompt new insights, collections of previously published articles can be immensely valuable. Richter himself seems to want to position his book in the latter camp, when he writes,<\/p>\n
The chapters that follow can be read sequentially or individually, as they each maintain a specific, self-contained focus on a key aspect of Benjamin\u2019s thinking, rather than unfolding in a linear manner a prescriptive proposition about how to inherit Benjamin today.\u2026Collectively, then, these chapters conspire to yield a critical constellation\u2026that illuminates\u2026a heterogeneous yet related network of concerns about the inheritance of the Benjaminian archive and its legacy. (12\u201313)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Richter never spells out what these heterogeneous yet related concerns about the inheritance of \u201cthe Benjaminian archive\u201d are\u2014nor, for that matter, does he ever explain what precisely he means by the locution \u201cthe Benjaminian archive,\u201d whether this is to denote the physical <\/i>Benjamin archive, housed by the Akademie der Kunst<\/i> in Berlin, or else an \u201carchive\u201d in a more Foucauldian or Derridean sense. Nonetheless, he seems to suggest that Inheriting Walter Benjamin<\/i> engages with Benjamin\u2019s work and problematizes its reception. In this sense, the collection\u2019s unity is supposed to derive from its efforts directed at destabilizing the received wisdom of Benjamin-scholarship by reinterpreting key notions. Specifically, and going by the collection\u2019s title, its unity is to emerge from the problems associated with the notion of \u201cinheritance.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, Richter\u2019s discussion of \u201cinheritance\u201d (contained in the first two essays) is yet another source of disappointment\u2014and a particularly acute one at that\u2014because it is nothing short of a missed opportunity. Initially and as a matter of principle, the idea of approaching Benjamin\u2019s corpus or implicit philosophical project via \u201cinheritance\u201d is a very promising suggestion. It would track several persistent themes in his work, and help us collect his notoriously scattered and often enigmatic remarks under something resembling a coherent view of cultural criticism and cultural politics. Early essays like \u201cMetaphysics of Youth\u201d and \u201cExperience\u201d (1913\u20131914) explicitly touch upon the theme of inheritance. In them, Benjamin argues against accepting the values of a previous generation and extolls the creative potential of radically breaking with one\u2019s cultural heritage in the name of the newness and robust sense of possibility contained in \u201cYouth.\u201d Indeed, Benjamin\u2019s contributions to the Student Youth Movement and German educational reform pre-WWI target precisely the manner in which culture (Bildung<\/i>) propagates its guiding values, irrespective of their aptness, motivational import, or historical salience. His critique of education\u2014and his enduring love of children\u2019s toys, books, and play\u2014hinge on these concerns. Sketches dating from Benjamin\u2019s middle period, which culminates shortly after the Trauerspielbuch<\/i> (1928), have similar tenets. His short text \u201cThe Destructive Character,\u201d for instance, valorizes the need to clear the cultural ground in order to create something new, and his idea of a \u201cnew barbarism\u201d may even be read as articulating a rejection of \u201cinheritance\u201d as the paradigm of culture. Finally, Benjamin\u2019s remarks concerning history and historiography in his late writings seem to hit upon a similar concern with the manner in which we relate to, and take up the past. So there is a genuine sense in which Benjamin\u2019s project can be interpreted as attacking the very idea of a cultural heritage, of an easy transfer of cultural goods from one generation to the next, or indeed the idea that the future will resemble the past that it inherits and builds upon. (For an excellent discussion of this theme, see Caygill 2004.)<\/p>\n
Regrettably, these lines of thought are nowhere explored in the essays collected in Inheriting Walter Benjamin<\/i>. So far as I was able to determine, Richter mentions only one instance of Benjamin\u2019s explicit engagement with \u201cinheritance,\u201d in his essay \u201cOn Language as Such and on the Language of Man\u201d (22), but this remains a passing remark in the volume\u2019s second, impressionistic essay, which is devoted to the theme of tradition in Kafka and Derrida. Upon finishing this essay, a reader would be forgiven for thinking that Benjamin is a minor player in it, despite Richter\u2019s \u201cwager that learning how to read the language and logic of a single Benjaminian passage will help us learn to inherit the strange singularity and idiomaticity of his movements of thought and writing more generally.\u201d (20) Although the kind of \u201cmonadological\u201d analysis Richter wagers on could be particularly compelling and fruitful\u2014Bettine Menke, for instance, uses the strategy to great effect in her Sprachfiguren<\/i> (1991)\u2014it would require the kind of focused attention to detail and careful analysis that he never really musters. Indeed, Richter touches on Benjamin\u2019s concern with \u201cinheritance\u201d as one does a springboard: to vault into a discussion of Kafka and Derrida as inheritors of a sense of tradition that itself remains airy and intangible.<\/p>\n
Richter, in short, does not mobilize \u201cinheritance\u201d as an interpretative resource to offer a direct, hermeneutical engagement with Benjamin\u2019s corpus. Instead, he invokes it to introduce a meta-theoretical, \u201cquasi-deconstructive\u201d vantage. In his words,<\/p>\n
with each turn to a specific Benjaminian passage, the chapters of this book not only engage their respective tropes, they also inquire into the conditions of possibility that reading and inheriting his [i.e. Benjamin\u2019s] corpus pose for us today. Each chapter reads Benjamin and watches itself reading Benjamin, participating in the act of inheriting his resistant legacy while seeking to pose the question of inheritance in relation to the Benjaminian archive always one more time. (2)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Although the precise sense in which the activities of reading and inheriting Benjamin\u2019s work \u201cpose\u201d conditions of possibility for us remains unclear (if that\u2019s even the right way to parse that awkward sentence), on Richter\u2019s account, so far as I can understand it, the process of inheriting Benjamin\u2019s work provides an occasion to reflexively observe one\u2019s own interpretative strategies and to fend off the idea that there is one definitive meaning of Benjamin\u2019s\u2014or indeed anyone else\u2019s\u2014work. Richter\u2019s \u201cinheriting\u201d therefore would be something akin to Bakhtin\u2019s \u201cunfinalizability,\u201d i.e.<\/i>, the idea that the meaning or significance of a work will change over the course of its history as it interacts with its readers without any one meaning or interpretative encounter being definitive or final. As he puts it, \u201cto \u2018rescue\u2019 a phenomenon in the Benjaminian sense means to inherit it as the irreducible enigma that it is, and to interpret it always one more time. What remains in this particular form of rescuing is an interminable resistance to closure and completion, in other words, the never-ending act of inheriting.\u201d (10) Again, this suggestion does hold out some promise inasmuch as the idea that meaning is contextual and response-relative is crucial to Benjamin\u2019s own thinking.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, however, even this approach is left unrealized in Inheriting Walter Benjamin<\/i>. Indeed, Richter\u2019s notion of \u201cinheritance\u201d ultimately does no real work at all in the volume (most of the essays were originally published without any mention of it), and this on account of the two related problems already indicated. First, this idea of \u201cinheritance\u201d identifies a theoretical focus that is only nominally attached to Benjamin\u2019s writings, insofar as Richter\u2019s true interest seems to lie in his own modes of interpreting those writings. This is reflected in his questionable use of the adjectival construction \u201cBenjaminian\u201d throughout the essays collected in Inheriting Walter Benjamin<\/i> as if it were synonymous with the genitive \u201cBenjamin\u2019s.\u201d This leads to unhelpful ambiguities such as that concerning \u201cthe Benjaminian archive.\u201d Worse, though, by attributing a certain \u201cidiomaticity\u201d to Benjamin\u2019s writing, this sort of nominalization seems to run counter to Richter\u2019s intentions inasmuch as it invites the hypostatization of Benjamin\u2019s work and its transformation into the kind of cultural good that others could <\/i>inherit unproblematically. In this way, Richter\u2019s rhetorical strategies seem to facilitate the very thing he ostensibly wants to avoid.<\/p>\n
Second, Richter\u2019s sense of \u201cinheriting Benjamin\u2019s work\u201d remains a defensive gesture, insofar as it justifies not engaging with the extant debates and discussions in the field of Benjamin Studies. This becomes evident when we look at his choice of thinkers or images deployed by Benjamin in his writings: Kafka\u2019s \u201coriginal sin\u201d (Chapter 2), Benjamin\u2019s image of blotting paper soaked with ink (Chapter 3), the affinities between Benjamin and Heidegger as interpreters of Kant (Chapter 4), and Benjamin\u2019s relation to Kant and Nietzsche (Chapter 5). These themes have all been mainstays in the secondary literature for decades. Yet, somehow Richter manages to disregard competing interpretations and longstanding debates. Although he occasionally refers to a canonical view or scholar in the individual essays, he does so merely as a transition to some other theme. In short, Richter\u2019s notion of \u201cinheritance\u201d does not operate as a \u201cproblematizing device\u201d for any sustained engagement with the secondary literature on Benjamin\u2019s work.<\/p>\n
These two missed opportunities\u2014that of a direct, exegetical engagement with Benjamin\u2019s corpus, which would mobilize \u201cinheritance\u201d as an interpretative resource, and that of an engagement with the scholarly reception of Benjamin\u2019s writings, which would use \u201cinheritance\u201d as a way of shaking us out of unearned interpretative claims\u2014prevent Inheriting Walter Benjamin<\/i> from adding to existing scholarship in any significant way. Ultimately, Richter\u2019s book would be best characterized as a personal collection: it documents the thinkers, tropes, texts, and interpretative tendencies that have been formative or valuable for Richter as an academic, and it bears witness to his own struggles to understand and to \u201cinherit\u201d an intellectual tradition. Inheriting Walter Benjamin <\/i>thus turns out to be less about Benjamin and more about its author. In that sense, it is very much a self-archiving gesture, for which reason it cannot be recommended as a contribution to Benjamin Studies.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Additional Works Cited <\/b><\/p>\n
Caygill, Howard (2004), \u201cWalter Benjamin\u2019s Concept of Cultural History,\u201d in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin<\/i>, (ed.) D. S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 73\u201396.<\/p>\n
Menke, Bettine (1991), Sprachfiguren: Name, Allegorie, Bild nach Walter Benjamin<\/i> (M\u00fcnchen: Wilhelm Fink Verlag).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gerhard Richter, Inheriting Walter Benjamin. London: Bloomsbury, 2016; 170 pages. ISBN: 978-1474251242. Reviewed by Alexei Procyshyn, Monash University. Gerhard Richter\u2019s Inheriting Walter Benjamin is the latest addition to Bloomsbury\u2019s \u201cWalter Benjamin Studies\u201d series. This series, which began its life with Continuum, before the latter press was acquired by Bloomsbury, has published some of the best […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[41,124],"class_list":["post-5158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-critical-theory","tag-walter-benjamin","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 10:51:10","action":"Draft","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5158"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6952,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5158\/revisions\/6952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}