Re: Walter Benjamin - any takers?

[Dennis R Redmond <dredmond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 26 May 1999, L Spencer wrote:

> May I ask how many people on the Frankfurt School list are seriously
> interested in discussion of Walter Benjamin. He was only loosely
> associated with the Institute for Social Research and was an
> idiosyncratic thinker?

But he *was* a Frankfurter in the intellectual sense, i.e. his
theoretical innovations and categories broke crucial ground for Adorno's
later work, and his cultural criticism of Baudelaire, for example, remains
an absolutely stunning realization of the Frankfurt School's project, i.e.
creating a revitalized, non-Stalinist Left. Benjamin came up with the
whole notion of constellations, which Adorno later transformed into a
series of meditations on global history; Benjamin also pioneered radical
film studies, on many levels.

Folks on this list should realize that the old canard against the
Frankfurt School, that they were crotchety snobs who didn't know Mickey
Mouse from a '38 Packard, is historically untrue. If Benjamin had survived
WW II, he would've done just unimaginably fantastic things, but Franco's
thugs nabbed him on the Spanish border and he took his own life before the
Gestapo got their claws on him -- just one more of the innumerable and
horrific crimes of Fascism.

A long way of saying, yes, Benjamin isn't just appropriate for this list,
he's downright indispensable to it.

-- Dennis