Li Gongming
The Biography of Benjamin, by Howard Allan/ Michael Jennings, translated by Wang Pu, Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House/Yiwenzhi eons, July 2022 edition, 908 pages, 145.00 yuan
Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (2014) by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, senior scholars of Benjamin in the United States, shanghai literary and art publishing house, is considered an "outstanding and landmark" biography of Benjamin," two authors' depictions of the vast and detailed legacy of Benjamin's life. A keen and intricate analysis of his philosophical thought allows us to appreciate Benjamin's great intellectual achievements." (Anthony Phelan, Times Literary Supplement) This nine-hundred-page biography is based on a solid compilation and study of all of Benjamin's extant sources (writings, letters, diaries, memories of friends, etc.), and comprehensively restores the life of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) to the European historical context of his time, deeply depicting Benjamin's life experience. The labyrinth of ideas and its complex connection to the spiritual and cultural map of Europe. The "Introduction" at the beginning of the book and the "Afterword: The Possibility of Commentary" at the end of the book are also very helpful for the reader's reading comprehension.
The Introduction is clear about the book's approach: "Pursue a more comprehensive approach: unfolding in strict chronological order, focusing on the everyday reality in which Benjamin's writing was born, and providing an intellectual-historical context about his major works." The author argues that this orientation is concerned with the historicity of each stage of the Life of the Master and the works that arise from it, "which are rooted in concrete historical moments and in Benjamin's own intellectual concerns—and at the same time we must give sufficient credibility to such a remarkable and perceptible trajectory of thought." (p. 8) It should be said that for thinkers and writers like Benjamin, who had a very rich spiritual production in the relatively short course of life, only a rigorous historical narrative can provide a solid basis for the study of their ideas. However, the translator also touched on a question in the "Afterword": Is such a rich detail really necessary? Some commentators have suggested that the biography gives the impression that "the details of life take precedence over the achievements of ideas and their connotations"; Some commentators have argued that the book is known for its "insignificant details" and fails to effectively link the "subsections" of life with the "general trend" of politics and history and the "broader debate" of thought. The translator argues that these comments are not fair, but what does need to be considered is: "How do the details 'weave' out of the 'whole' of Benjamin's life work, and how is the 'task' of the biography possible?" Later, in the process of translation, the energy gradually released by the details was gradually realized, "and it is only in the concrete contours of the living world that Benjamin's thought work emerges as experience." (p. 871) It can be said that this is also the feeling that I have constantly generated in the process of patiently reading this biography: fragments and details do often have important meanings for Benjamin. The polyphony, multifacetedness of his thought images, conceptual tones and intellectual production, and the so-called "contradictory and fluid whole" reject any simplified, labeled "thematic narrative." The translator argues that David Ferris's views in the book review represent a general evaluation of the book by the English-speaking community: it does not present a subversive view of Benjamin, but only constructs a "meticulous and precise synthesis" "calmly, calmly, and convincingly." Adam Kirsch said the biography was "a collection of works that fill the gaps in current Benjamin research... Show us clearly how Benjamin was shaped by the History of Europe in which he lived." For a biography, I think these are already very good reviews.
But on the other hand, even from the point of view of the richness of the historical material presented, I feel that there are still deficiencies in the use of pictorial historical materials. It is unknown how illustrations were used in the original book, but the Chinese translation contains a total of thirty black-and-white illustrations, all of which are photographs of people, except for a painting by Paul Klee, a sculptural head by Yura Cohen, and a reader card of Benjamin's National Library in Paris. In fact, I have only the Walter Benjamins Archive (Bilder, Texte und Zeichen, 2006, edited by walter Benjamin Archive; Translated by Li Shixun, Beijing Normal University Press, September 2019), the scenic postcards of the place where Benjamin lived, the toy photos he wrote with text descriptions, the eight color overprint cards of female prophets collected by him, the photos of the furniture of the living room, and the various large and small notes that recorded his ideological imprints are the most interesting pictorial historical materials in the biography. Benjamin once wrote in his letters: "I can say that these pages and small pieces of paper present me with an image of anarchism in a private printing house. (p. 2) This is a bit irritating, and "anarchist images of private printing houses" could well be a wonderful exhibition of visual images. In his Preface, the editors of the archives say that for these pictures, texts and symbols, "one can see them and touch them, but they also store experiences, thoughts and hopes that record and analyze the composition of the deposits". I believe that these images are all components that should not be missing in weaving Benjamin's images of life and thought.
In fact, no matter how deeply and meticulously hooked, woven and synthesized, Walter Benjamin may not be able to appear to the world as a highly unified whole. Just as Benjamin cherished the collection, books, albums, works of art, photographs, children's toys, etc. are all multi-dimensional and true reflections of his spiritual world in the objects, and the various ideological portraits of benjamin marked and depicted by researchers, interpreters and even myth-makers are indispensable aspects of a real Benjamin. As the author outlines at the end of the book, this puzzle of Benjamin's thought: "The angry communist Benjamin and the Frankfurt School neo-Hegelian Benjamin stand side by side, the latter of which delays political action indefinitely; The Messianic Jewish mystic Benjamin confronts benjamin, a citizen of the world and a naturalized Jew, who is even fascinated by Christian theology; The deconstructivist Benjamin, who preceded the term 'literary deconstructionist', coexisted, with the former lost in the hall of mirrors of what we call language, and the social theorist Benjamin, who envisioned the reform of the modern medium to bring about a complete renewal of the human senses. (p. 814) Compared with these formulations based on the study of thought analysis and literary criticism, there are many more vivid and private accounts in our history of Benjamin's reading and reception, such as the cultural nomads of Bohemia, the scavengers of arcade streets, the sentries of visual production, the friendly armies of left-wing literature and art, the alternative in avant-garde art, the experimenter of stylistic media, the prophet of historical redemption, and so on. Benjamin's real existence is refracted in the prisms of all these different sides, and finally converges into the "contradictory and flowing whole". If necessary, it is also possible to dye all these sides with a layer of aesthetic emotion, that is, frustrated, marginal and not without sadness.
In Benjamin's history of reading and receiving, there is also a factor that cannot be ignored, that is, the "misreading" produced by reading and receiving in a particular historical context, from which issues such as "Benjamin and we" arise. In my personal reading experience and spiritual growth, Walter Benjamin has always occupied a rather unique position, always with a heterogeneous spirituality. The first Chinese translation of Benjamin's work I read was his Lyric Poet in the Age of Advanced Capitalism (translated by Zhang Xudong and Wei Wensheng, Sanlian Bookstore, March 1989), at the turn of the autumn and winter of the year the book was published. "Baudelaire's Paris of the Second Empire" begins with Marx's words of bohemians, conspirators in taverns, incendiary bombs, revolutionary alchemists... In the end, "the barricades were re-erected and stronger and safer than ever." ...... Just as the Communist Manifesto ended the era of professional conspirators, the Paris Commune put an end to the dream of controlling proletarian freedom. It shatters the illusion that the task of the proletarian revolution is to join hands with the bourgeoisie in the undertaking of 1789." (p. 194) What comes to mind, of course, is not Haussmann's plan for the renovation of the streets of Paris, not even for a moment what Benjamin has done, but of the whirring history felt in the words "barricades," "end," "illusion," and so on, the imagery of the Song of Labor in 1850: "Citizens, pierce their tricks, / In the red lightning / To the evildoers / Reveal the face of your great Medusa!" (pp. 193-194) Benjamin then says that the failure of the uprising was due both to the lack of revolutionary theory and to the eagerness to seize power and to build a new society. He also said that this enthusiasm sometimes won the working class over the best elements of the bourgeoisie, but the result was that it was defeated by the worst elements of the proletariat. I still don't understand the specific meaning of this sentence. Even more thought-provoking is the last sentence of the book: "The idea of dialectics is the key to the awakening of history." Each era not only dreams of the next, but also drives its awakening when it dreams. It conceives its results within itself and reveals it speculatively—something Hegel has long recognized. As the market economy flourished, we realized that the monument of the bourgeoisie was in ruins before it collapsed. (p. 195) Actually, it will be a few years before this is really understood. This historical context of reading and acceptance has overshadowed Benjamin in my mind from the very beginning with a tragic aesthetic and a defiance of politics, which is not the impression that can be obtained by reading in the study.
After that, in my course "Selected Readings of Western Classics", Benjamin's Lyric Poet in the Era of Advanced Capitalism was never absent. Until last year, I spoke of Benjamin's figurative characteristics in my reworked textbook for the course: studying academics but not a fixed career, financially difficult but surviving. Insist on non-professional writing and refuse to be socially integrated. Sensitive, vulnerable, wandering, experiencing shock, experiencing loneliness in the noise and crowds. Sensitive to any kind of delicate experience, rebel against the government and the bourgeoisie, and accept the spiritual baptism of Marxism. I once knew a clever and beautiful Russian female Bolshevik who was fascinated by a radical and sad spiritual force. Forever torn between hope and despair, between the masses and the individual, between politics and theology. Hannah Arendt's Va Benjamin: 1892-1940 (included in Benjamin: Works and Portraits, edited by Sun Bing, Wenhui Publishing House, 1999) is also introduced, and Arendt's important work is also introduced. Then we talk about the history of the encounter and acceptance of young Chinese intellectuals with Benjamin and Baudelaire in the 1980s - the modernist literary circle on campus, the "West Malaysia" circle, when the 1980s ended, Baudelaire died, Benjamin died. Their Paris was rapidly alienated—and the poets who wandered because of their deep melancholy were also alienated into narcissistic old white-collar workers who looked forward to narcissism in bars. It was the academic circles and chambers of commerce that brought Benjamin and the others back, and at this time had little to do with the wanderers and rebels. The final film was Wong Kar-wai's fallen Angels, which seems to be a certain poetry of wandering, loneliness, messiness and defiance... In fact, I think that once it is stained by Benjamin's "spiritual atmosphere", even a cat wandering in the boulevard or crouching in the bookstore, it can become a symbol of Benjamin-style loneliness or resistance in your eyes.
Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin, Benjamin grew up in an exploding urban capitalist modernity metropolis, where he was active in the radical student movement and literary activities as a student. He was frequently involved in various organizations and publishing institutions of the German youth movement, and also had the desire to become the thought leader of a certain group. In 1932, as he looked back at his student days as he was about to go into exile, he unhesitatingly acknowledged that the youth movement was doomed to failure, "as a heroic last effort to change people's attitudes without changing their circumstances." (p. 54) In fact, his idealism and personal character were not needed for political struggle. Thus, "the spiritual and political fervor of the wild years, which eventually transformed into a more insidious radicalism, marked the character of his life, and, although the romantic tendencies in his thought would fade and in favour of a materialist and anthropological attitude, in a fundamental sense he would remain a wandering student, constantly searching for new beginnings". (p. 92) If there are a few places in this biography that particularly touch me, this is one of them, perhaps because it connects to the moment when I first read Benjamin's book.
At the outbreak of World War I, Benjamin stood against Germany's involvement in the war and did not hesitate to break with his mentor Gustav Veneken, who had a great influence on him. In November 1914, Wienerken gave a speech in Munich entitled "Youth and War", calling on young people to join the war and defend the motherland. In a letter to his classmates, Benjamin denounced him as "an unparalleled disgrace and atrocity"; In a letter to Verneken, he said: "You have sacrificed young people as sacrifices to the state, and the state has taken everything from you. (pp. 93-94) But Benjamin did not say much about the war, and he even refused to write articles for anti-war publications. Political stance was one of several key issues in Benjamin's life. In 1924 Benjamin met a female revolutionary from the Soviet Union, Athea Lasis, and read Georg Lukács's History and Class Consciousness, and the exciting power of the fierce meeting of love, reading and politics is self-evident; Coupled with the growing shadow of European fascism, Benjamin's turn to the left was natural. Benjamin's trip to the Soviet Union in December 1926 gave him a vision of a country that "completely renounced private independence" and knew that this society demanded "uniform clarity." The concern for "private life" and the protection of freedom of thought and dissent in Benjamin's ideological background, although he did not openly express a clear "position" on the Russian question, in fact his position was consciously contradictory. "For the years to come, he will remain a freelance writer, 'no party, no profession.'" (p. 332) However, the Marxist tendencies in Benjamin's thought became more pronounced in 1929, which was closely related to his growing connection with the ideas of Adorno and Horkheimer and, more importantly, with the friendships forged by Bertolt Brecht. The author notes that the foundations of Benjamin's mature ideological position had already been laid in 1929: "Radical left-wing politics, the multi-schooled theological concerns of liberal judaism and Christian doctrine, the depth of knowledge of the German philosophical tradition, and a cultural theory sufficient to deal with the diversity of objects of study in a rapidly changing modern environment—the combination of these four will shape his subsequent work." (p. 390) The combination of these four aspects will also be a critical path to understanding the core of Benjamin's thought.
Benjamin in 1929, painted by Lee Gongming
In all cases, it is the basic position of the thinker to maintain the independence of the mind and to refuse unreserved access to and control over a certain creed or belief system. However, the question of the "position" of "thought" is in fact very complex, often full of subtle or accidental factors. As for Benjamin's deep influence on Brecht and the prominent marxist theory, his friends feared that Brecht's so-called "rough thoughts" would have an impact on Benjamin's mind and the subtlety of his work, "fearing that Benjamin's own subtlety would be sacrificed on the orthodox altar that demanded devotion." Benjamin said in a June 1934 letter. His thoughts are always oscillating between extreme positions, which allows him to maintain "the freedom to juxtapose seemingly irreconcilable things and ideas." (p. 528) The author argues that "it was this instability, this resistance to fixed and dogmatic things, which partly gave his writing the exciting, 'living' temperament that appealed to generations of readers." (Ibid.) This is a profound generalization of Benjamin's ideological position and spiritual temperament. In the late thirties, Benjamin, in order to consolidate his relationship with the Institute of Social Studies, carefully molded himself in the way he imagined the other side expecting him to be: "A left-wing thinker, neither too dogmatic nor too radical, and at the same time a critic of the Enlightenment who has confused the world." (p. 705) Although it speaks of a state of mind in a relationship, it is not contradictory to his description of the true condition of his thoughts.
As the author points out in the "Preface", the political problem became more pressing in the last two decades of Benjamin's life, a theoretical continuation of the pre-war youth student movement. While talking about "communism" and the rights of the proletariat, which evolved from "anarchism," he still advocated the "true humanity" and beneficial moral skepticism represented by the cultural tradition since Goethe. (p. 10) "In both early and late times, he was not so much a hardline ideological theorist as an imaginary insurgent. Perhaps we can say that, for Benjamin himself, as an unruly 'left-wing outsider', political problems boil down to a set of contradictions at the individual and societal levels. Conflicting claims between politics and theology, between nihilism and messianism, cannot be reconciled within themselves. (p. 11) The thinker, who has always stood at the crossroads of ideological frontiers and partisan politics, is called a "fanciful insurgent," which is very graphic and contagious. In the post-war years, Benjamin's ideas did not really spark debate until the rise of the student movement in the mid-sixties, because of dissatisfaction with the legacy of Benjamin's ideas compiled by Adorno, and a debate that began in philology soon became a clash of ideas about the use or abuse of Marxist politics in the Western world. (p. 813) Benjamin's intellectual journey seems to have to be revived in the blood of the student movement to find new sources of combustion, and the torrent of Benjamin's research that arose in the early eighties does not seem to provide more impetus for Marx's "transformation of the world" beyond the production of knowledge and the manufacture of myths. What we should therefore believe is the author's words at the end of the book: "Future generations of readers, in their encounter with his lifelong work, the 'contradictory and fluid whole,' will undoubtedly find their own Benjamin." (p. 814) The "fanciful insurrectionist" will reappear in the future history of Benjamin reading—or, more rather, the readers summoned by Benjamin more like "fanciful insurrectionists."
Editor-in-Charge: Huang Xiaofeng
Proofreader: Yan Zhang