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Notes
1. Ross does not consider Benjamin to be a philosopher; she argues that his work often fails to reflect on its own intellectual commitments and lacks the rigour and systematicity of philosophy (4). But her reading of Benjamin’s work brings out questions, such as the relationship between image and meaning, or between mystified consciousness and truth, which evince Benjamin’s engagement with the concerns of philosophy. Throughout her study, Ross compares Benjamin’s treatment of sensuous form to Kant’s aesthetics. She also discusses a range of other sources, from studies of religion, myth and ritual, to literature and literary criticism, making hers an interdisciplinary reading.
2. Buck-Morss (Citation1991) takes the “interpretive power of images” to lie in their capacity to “make conceptual points concretely, with reference to the world outside the text” (113–114).
3. Ross highlights Missac’s (Citation1999) discussion of the dialectical image as a type of “surrealist metaphor”, which need not be approached logically, but which has its value in its ability to provoke thought. See Missac, pp. 109–110, and Ross’s discussion of it on pp. 110–111.
4. Whereas Ross thinks Friedlander is correct to emphasize the linguistic character of Benjamin’s dialectical image, she takes issue with two main points in his argument. First, Friedlander overstates the continuity between Benjamin’s early and his late work by erasing the differences between the dialectical image and the notion of the “constellation” introduced in the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” to his Trauerspiel book. Second, Ross argues that Friedlander’s recourse to the discipline of philosophy functions more to reassure himself of the “necessity and universality” of the dialectical image, without offering an explanation as to how a constellation of contingent materials could achieve such universality and necessity (Ross, 112–113). Her discussion refers to Chapter Two of Friedlander (Citation2012), pp. 37–51.
5. See Weigel (Citation1996), ix.
6. According to Pensky, the dialectical image involves “a radically new method for the conduct of a new mode of critical materialist historiography”, which harnesses a politically effective power to shock, and hence interrupt a condition that has become “second nature”. See Pensky (Citation2004), p. 179.
7. Ross’s focus in this section is on Benjamin’s identification of the image with myth. She therefore does not discuss all of his early writings relating to the image. For instance, she does not discuss Benjamin’s fragments on imagination and colour. Nor does she discuss Benjamin’s doctoral thesis on “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism”; the latter is a striking omission, since one could argue that this section revolves around Benjamin’s critique of the romantic project to re-enchant nature symbolically after the Enlightenment stripped it of its religious significance as Creation.
8. Priority is given here to Benjamin’s essay on “Goethe’s Elective Affinities”, which Ross reads as structured around a “primary” opposition between myth and the Revelation (further adumbrated to include a “family” of other antinomies, such as ethical life/ demonic nature; character/ fate; moral decision/ bourgeois choice; and the expressionless/ the semblance). Ross conflates this schema of oppositions in the Goethe essay with the binary structure of two other early essays: the 1916 essay “On Language as Such”, which opposes “mute” nature to the word of God; and the “Critique of Violence” from the early 1920s, in which Benjamin distinguishes between divine violence and mythic violence (Ross, pp. 1–2).
9. “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” in Walter Benjamin (Citation2003), Selected Writings Volume 1: 1913–1926, p. 327.
10. In Chapter Three, Ross re-signifies the opposition between Judaism and paganism in terms of the emergence of a written canon of law (i.e., Torah), and the consequent “ban on graven images” (75), but her main reference here is to an essay by Assman (Citation2006), rather than to Benjamin himself. It would be possible to flesh out the “Jewish” sources of Benjamin’s understanding of creation, revelation and redemption, and this would conceivably strengthen Ross’s argument. Notably, Benjamin discussed such topics with Gershom Scholem, and together they studied the work of Hermann Cohen, who contextualized the concepts of creation, revelation, and redemption within the Jewish textual tradition, and also discussed the “ban on images”, in this context. See Cohen (Citation1995). The influence of Cohen on Benjamin has been studied in numerous works, including Deuber-Mankowsky’s (Citation2000) monograph.
11. Ross acknowledges this in an indirect way when she observes that readers who approach Benjamin’s corpus as though it were a “sacred text” fall prey to precisely the kind of ambiguity against which Benjamin warns:
Although its practitioners’ avowed mantra is ‘the close reading of texts,’ a sacralising approach to criticism is their normal practice; Benjamin’s words are insulated from robust interrogation, since criticism of him would seem ‘irreverent.’ It is assumed that his entire oeuvre is faultless; the only difficulty is, as in the reading of a sacred text, endorsing in some form what Benjamin’s phrasing ‘conveys’ to its initiate reader. (1)
12. In an important letter, which Benjamin wrote to Florens Christian Rang in 1923 anticipating many of the moves he makes in his “Epistemo-Critical Prologue”, he writes that “criticism is identical with interpretation” (Selected Writings Volume 1: 1913–1926), 389.
13. Lijster (Citation2012) makes the argument that Benjamin views critique as interrupting and dispelling the power of myth (pp 156–74).
14. In Ross’s words,
The readings that superimpose on Benjamin’s opening distinction between the ‘materiality’ and the ‘truth’ of the work of art, a theory of how the art critic draws out the potential of materiality to arrive at truth are especially obtuse in respect of the meaning of the essay. (21)
15. Several of Benjamin’s texts are either engaged with the concept of criticism or are described as works of criticism, ranging from his 1919 doctoral thesis, The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, to his essays from the early Twenties, including “Critique of Violence” and “Goethe’s Elective Affinities”, to the 1924 “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” of his Trauerspiel book. Later works, including the “Theses on History” and the Arcades Project, could also be understood as critiques of persisting myths of modernity (such as the myth of historical progress, and commodity fetishism).
16. Benjamin discusses Goethe’s indifference to criticism, and the lack of distinction between empirical content and the ideal in Goethe’s ur-phenomena in “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” (Selected Writings Volume 1: 1913–1926), 315). Following from this, he writes: “Without distinctions, existence becomes subject to the concept of nature, which grows into a monstrosity” (315).
17. As Benjamin writes: “And where the presence of truth should be possible, it can be possible solely under the condition of the recognition of myth – that is, the recognition of its crushing indifference to truth” (“Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” Selected Writings Volume 1: 1913–1926), 326.
18. “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” (Selected Writings Volume 1: 1913–1926), 326.
19. Hegel claims that his method in the Phenomenology of Spirit involves no further contribution than to simply watch the emergence of forms of consciousness from one another: “since what consciousness examines is its own self, all that is left for us to do is simply to look on” (Hegel, Citation1977), 54.
20. Marx (Citation1975), “Letter to Arnold Ruge,” (Kreuznach, September 1843) in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 3, pp. 141–5.
21. Marx’s letter anticipates Benjamin’s language of waking up from a dream:
Our programme must be: the reform of consciousness not through dogmas but by analysing mystical consciousness obscure to itself, whether it appear in religious or political form. It will then become plain that the world has long since dreamed of something of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess it in reality. (Marx, “Letter to Arnold Ruge,” pp. 144)
22. One of the most interesting points that comes out of Ross’s treatment of the Goethe essay is the argument that Goethe was motivated by fear to repudiate myth – a fear that Ross understands in terms of the existential anxiety unleashed by the unfathomable meaning of images (31). Ross suggests an unmistakable parallel between Goethe and Benjamin when she argues that fear was the motivation for Benjamin’s arguments against total immanence (135). But while Benjamin adduces philological evidence for Goethe’s fearfulness, Ross does not do the same, leaving her suggestion that Benjamin was motivated by fear suspended in mid-air.