Specters, ruins and chimeras: Management & Organizational History's encounter with Benjamin

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

^1. Benjamin's own turn of phrase in Thesis XVII.

^2. While the English version of the collected works was based on the Gesammelte Schriften, it does not contain the extensive notes provided by editors Tiedemann and Schweppenhäuser. These notes make up the third book of volume I and run into many hundreds of pages spread over the various volumes.

^3. This is published under a Creative Commons licence at http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/Theses_on_History.html.

^4. Benjamin used to keep hotel and restaurant bills as well as the postage wrappers of newspapers he had delivered to him, which he later used as paper to write on.

^5. Given the instability of the original text and its various translations we took the liberty to drift between various translations (either of the Theses in their entirety, or sometimes translations of fragments by critical commentators such as, for example, Weber 2008). Hence we will not provide traditional bibliographical references for our quotes from the Theses below, but simply note the actual number of the relevant thesis. We will also make use of certain fragments from convolute N, ‘On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress’, from Benjamin's uncompleted Arcades Project (Benjamin 2002), on which he was also working at the time of writing the Theses. That text has of course a well-documented reception history all of its own, about which we had best remain silent so as not to overburden this text. We will follow the notations of the Arcades Projects rather than page numbers to facilitate possible cross-referencing. Thus ‘AP N9a, 6’, for example, means that the quote can be found in the Arcades Project, convolute N, note 9a, 6.

^6. In Thesis IX Benjamin introduces his famous Angel of History (based on Paul Klee's painting ‘Angelus Novus’) who rather than ‘see the appearance of a chain of events’ in history, sees ‘one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage’.

^7. Consider this devastating exchange in Benjamin's (Arendt [1968] 1999, 113) essay on Kafka:

“We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come into God's head,” Kafka said. This reminded me at first of the Gnostic view of life: God as the evil demiurge, the world as his Fall. “Oh no,” said Kafka, “our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his.” “Then there is hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know.” He smiled. “Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope – but not for us.”

Benjamin comments in the follow-up essay: ‘There is an infinite amount of hope, but not for us. This statement really contains Kafka's hope; it is the source of his radiant serenity’ (Benjamin, in Arendt [1968] 1999, 142).