Abstract
If critical theory is to claim its place in philosophy as not merely an attitude or a set of alliances, but also as a coherent philosophy, then what is necessary most of all is to specify the nature of what it means to be critical in a manner that is both methodically concrete and original to this movement. This chapter proposes turning to the early and middle writings of Walter Benjamin in order to give such a formulation. The concept of critique or criticism (Kritik) points toward the inner core of early critical theory’s development because it cuts across two of the central concerns of the first generation of critical theory: art criticism and social critique. Walter Benjamin’s work has an especially strong significance in helping us understand the entwinement between these two dimensions of the concept of critique. This is because, the author argues, critique is ultimately for Benjamin an epistemological category that cuts across both the reception of art and the participation in political life.
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Notes
- 1.
In German, there is merely one word that can be translated as either critique or criticism: Kritik. In light of this, I employ these two terms as synonyms. The term Kritik gains much of its meaning in German philosophy from the way in which successive generations of philosophers redefine the same term in order to combine older resonances with new ones.
- 2.
I am indebted to the work of Lijster (2012). The present chapter represents, in some sense, an effort to combine my own prior approach to this problem with some insights gained from Lijster. For my prior approach, see Ross (2015b). Specifically, I combine reading of critique as directed against mythology with my own prior argument that the concept of critique is inherently set up in opposition to instrumental and capitalist modes of thought.
- 3.
- 4.
As Rebecca Comay writes, Benjamin sees a connection between the modern concept of criticism and the commodification of objects of experience: ‘The Enlightenment project of evaluative critique had drawn its secret energy from the field of commodity exchange.’ (Comay 2004; 140) Benjamin thus understands the Romantic concept of critique as a pushback against this kind of commodification.
- 5.
This logic of dissolution, progression and sublation between art forms in the Romantic theory places them in a kind of unacknowledged proximity to the aesthetic philosophy of Hegel, who also thought of all other arts as ‘sublated’ into poetry, and poetry as sublated into prose (Comay 2004; 142).
- 6.
- 7.
He also makes a similar formulation in a letter to Christian Range from around the same time: ‘My definition is: criticism is the mortification of the works. Not the intensification of consciousness in them (that is Romantic!), but their colonization by knowledge’ (Benjamin 2004; 389).
- 8.
A work might be seen as ‘uncriticizable’ in the sense of the cliché phrase: poetry is what cannot be translated. That is, art is construed as the abyss of critical insight, in which any attempt to interpret results in detracting from the ineffable richness of the work. Benjamin associates this view of art and the art critic with Goethe, whom he contrasts to the Romantics view that works exist for the sake of criticism (Benjamin 2004; 179).
- 9.
As Eiland and Jennings write: ‘The task of criticism is the differentiation of truth from myth, or rather the purging and clarification of the mythic element so as to purge the true’ (Eiland and Jennings 2014; 166).
- 10.
References
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Ross, N. (2017). What Does It Mean To Be Critical? On Literary and Social Critique in Walter Benjamin. In: Thompson, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55801-5_17
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