Continental · 1892–1940
Walter Benjamin
Berlin critic who joined Marxism, messianism and media theory
Benjamin argued that technical reproduction strips art of its “aura” and could make it political, and that history should be read against the grain, from the standpoint of the defeated. He died fleeing the Nazis in 1940.
Life and thought
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) came from a prosperous, assimilated Jewish family in Berlin. When his habilitation thesis on the German Trauerspiel (mourning play) failed at Frankfurt University in 1925, an academic career closed to him, and he lived as a critic, translator of Baudelaire and Proust, and radio writer. Friendships with Gershom Scholem and Bertolt Brecht drew him towards Jewish mysticism and Marxism at once. He fled to Paris in 1933; in September 1940, turned back at the Spanish border at Portbou, he took his own life.
In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” he argued that photography and film strip artworks of their “aura”, the unique presence of an original in one time and place. The loss could be liberating, letting art serve politics rather than ritual, though fascism could also aestheticise politics. In his last text, the theses “On the Concept of History”, he rejected faith in steady progress and asked historians to brush history against the grain, recovering the hopes of the defeated.
Works
Shaped by
1818–1883Karl MarxGerman philosopher, economist and revolutionary in London exileShaped
1903–1969Theodor W. AdornoFrankfurt philosopher, music theorist and critic of the culture industryMeanwhile, in other traditions
1889–1951Ludwig WittgensteinViennese-born Cambridge philosopher who overturned his own first philosophy1891–1962Hu ShiMay Fourth reformer who brought pragmatism to China1891–1956B. R. AmbedkarDalit leader, jurist and chief architect of India’s constitution1891–1970Rudolf CarnapVienna Circle’s great system-builder, later in Chicago and Los Angeles1893–1988Liang ShumingPhilosopher and rural reformer, called “the last Confucian”1895–1990Feng YoulanHistorian of Chinese philosophy and builder of a “new principle learning”On the record
Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is dated 1935.
1935 is when he wrote it in Paris exile; he reworked it between December 1935 and February 1936, and it was first published in 1936, in a French translation by Pierre Klossowski in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Later German versions followed until 1939.
Sources: Wikipedia, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Walter Benjamin”