Approaches to Walter Benjamin’s «The Arcades Project»

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Frequently Cited Editions

References to the following books will be made parenthetically in the text:

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Philosophical Approach

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Adam Lipszyc

Return of the gaze. The name as idea and dialectical image

Abstract: The paper offers a detailed analysis of the development of Walter Benjamin’s epistemological project from his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels to the Arcades Project. The author sets the development against the background of the linguistic turn, the essential feature of the 20^th century philosophy, understood here as an attempt to focus on the singular. Benjamin is seen as moving from the epistemology conforming rather clearly to the general move of the linguistic turn to the one which sets the paradoxical ‘image in language’ at the very center of the epistemological endeavors. By referring to Lévinas, Gadamer and Foucault by means of contrast and comparison, the author argues Benjamin’s focus on the image, far from undoing the linguistic turn, in fact rescues its very essence.

Keywords: Walter Benjamin; linguistic turn; image; name; Hans-Georg Gadamer

The most characteristic mark of the 20^th century philosophy was the linguistic turn. This gesture, undertaken in different ways by thinkers representing different philosophical schools, essentially boiled down to the establishing of an unbreakable bond between human thought and the realm of language. If we set aside early Wittggenstein and a few similar philosophical enterprises, we may say that the linguistic turn was to break with absolutist claims of modern philosophy, or perhaps of the philosophical tradition as such. The linguistic notion of cognition was to account for human finiteness, individuality and corporeality, as well as for our involvement in the historical element and for the variety of human experience. Now, the acceptance of such a notion often puts such categories as image, vision and gaze into the enemy’s camp, into the camp of those who defend the realm of absolute concepts purified of the contigent word. Thus, on the one side of the barricade we would have the concept and the image, the Platonic belief in the possibility of conceptual vision of the absolute truth outside of the cave, and on the other side – the word, understood as the basic element of the relative and the plural.

The essential point of reference of my rather modest inquiry is a certain general point about the 20^th century linguistic turn and about its hostility towards the visual. It states, roughly, that when philosophy gives up vision as such and embraces the idea of the linguistic mediation of experience, it risks a dialectic return to the oculo- and logocentrism it tried to escape; on the other hand, the liguistic ← 13 | 14 → notion of human experience can defend its intellectual assets, if, paradoxically enough, at its very center it will accept a certain notion of the image.

It seems that one of the prominent figures in the 20^th century philosophy that has understood this (or whose intellectual development at least agrees with the above postulate) was Walter Benjamin. In the following I will simply try to show how and why at a certain stage of development a theory of image becomes a central part of Benjamin’s philosophy of language.

Having expressed these two high-flown declarations (the one concerning the linguistic turn as such, and the other concerning the general structure of Benjamin’s thought), I may now submerge into the element of the schoolish in which I shall move in this essay. The plan is simple: first, I shall sketch Benjamin’s theory of the idea and of the origin presented in the foreword to his book on Baroque and then I shall take a look at certain aspects of the thoery of dialectical image as presented in the file N of the arcades project. Similarities and contrasts between these two theories should give some substance to the general declarations I have formulated. Yet, in order not to bore the reader with Benjamin only, from time to time I shall be referring also to Emmanuel Lévinas, as well as to Michel Foucault and Hans-Georg Gadamer.

It is well known that the methodological foreword to the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels is one of the most eccentric of all Benjamin’s texts (see The Origin of German Tragic Drama, pp. 27–56). Certainly, to a large extent it can be blamed for the fact that nowadays we refer to Benjamin’s book on Baroque as “would-be Habilitationsschrift”. The foreword is composed of short pieces with separate titles, but the whole text can be easily divided into three bigger parts. The third part deals mostly with the failed reception of the German Baroque drama and, although highly interesting, will not be my concern here. The first two part, on the other hand, are of strictly philosophical nature and present a deeply insane methodology of the work. The first of the two – from the beginning of the text till the fragment entitiled “Das Wort als Idee” – presents Benjamin’s theory of ideas, while the second one develops it further by introducing the category of the origin. Let as have a look at this idiosyncratic conceptual edifice.

In its critical dimension the first part of the foreword is an attack on the notion that truth may become the object of cognition. Cognition is an intentional relationship; it is a form of possession. Yet, truth does not enter any relationships and in particular – any intentional ones. “Truth – according to the famous formula – is the death of intention” (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 36). Benjamin identifies the intentional, possessive act of cognition with vision which is characteristic of Neoplatonic paganism. Hence, he claims quite consistently ← 14 | 15 → that truth cannot become the object of the mystical, intellectual or of any other kind of vision.

It is perhaps worth noting that if we take into account the identification of the philosophy of vision with paganism as well as the Biblical sources on which Benjamin draws, the criticism is reminiscent of Emmanuel Lévinas’s attack against the ontological approach in theology. The author of Totality and Infinity insisted that the relation with transcendence cannot be of intentional nature, for the intentional cognitive act would violate the strict otherworldliness of the divine. He also liked to link such an immanentist approach to paganism. The solution which Lévinas offers is to recognize the ethical nature of the true relation with transcendence. God is present in the world only as a trace which we come into contact with only by doing good to the other.