THEOLOGY AND NEW ENLIGHTENMENT IN BENJAMIN

NAISHTAT, FRANCISCO

WASHINGTON DC

Conferencia; GERMAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION 39TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE; 2015

GERMAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION

As Mac Cole wrote (1993: 306) there is a prevailing assumption that Benjamin rejected the root and branch of Enlightenment, but he argues however that Benjamin?s relationship to the Enlightenment remains ?among the most persistently misconstrued aspects of his work? (306). In fact Benjamin rejected in very hard terms, as early as in 1918, through his ?Program of coming Philosophy? the conceptual framework, both of experience and of subjectivity, of the enlightened tradition. However Benjamin recognizes the centrality for his vision of the Kantian approach to philosophy as a question of a reflection and criticism, seeing the problem of the validity of knowledge as a key question for new philosophy. So Kantian criticism in this very text appears as a precedent for the destructive strain in Benjamin?s conception of a new philosophy, observing that criticism and reason provided the new paths ?through the barren forest of reality?. Already in his early work, Benjamin resisted the ideological simplicities of idealist and vitalist calls to overcome the prejudices and ingenuity of the Enlightenment. Therefore there is a benjaminian ambivalence toward the philosophy of Enlightenment, that will assume different figures in benjaminian later work. And criticism will remain ?the organon? and ?the object? of benjaminian thought (Uwe Steiner, 2000: 479). In this paper I intend to situate benjaminian Theology in the frame of a benjaminian renewal of Enlightenment. This relationship will appear through the heretic idea of theology as a kind of ?methodology? and invisible ?organon? of philosophical thought , different from doctrine and from theological faith and hope.