The task of critic in Benjamin as part of a new Enlightenmentg

RICARDO IBARLUCÍA; SIGRID WEIGEL; REYES MATE; JEANNE-MARIE GAGNEBIN; FRANCISCO NAISHTAT

San Martín, Pcía de Buenos Aires

Simposio; Walter Benjamin Enlightenment and Secularization; 2015

Centro de Investigaciones Filosóficas-UNSAM-PICT 2968-UBA

The task of criticism (Kritik/critique) in Benjamin as part of a new EnlightenmentFrancisco NaishtatThe importance of the concept of criticism in Walter Benjamin?s thinking is unquestionable. As Uwe Steiner points out in his entry ?Kritik? in the Benjamins Begriffe edited by Opitz and Wizisla (2000), criticism is simultaneously an organon and the object of Benjaminian reflection, throughout his entire production. Not only did this constitute how Benjamin realized his theoretical activity, but it was also the permanent focus, in view of its radical renovation, of his philosophical thought, as seen in his endeavor to issue an essay aptly named The Task of the Critic, which the author intended to publish at the beginning of the thirties in a book together with his The Task of a Translator, which had appeared a decade earlier. Moreover, criticism has been the frame of reference with which Benjamin looked at himself and valued his activity, as Arendt highlighted when she mentioned the 1930 letter Benjamin wrote to Scholem in which he manifests his desire ?d?être considéré comme le premier critique de la littérature allemande?, as he wrote in French (Briefe 505). Literature, however, is far from being the only scope of Benjaminian idea of criticism as it is is intertwined with philosophy in various directions: epistemology, philosophy of experience, philosophy of language, critique of historical knowledge, critique of progress, critique and renovation of Marxism. This is without disregarding the idea of a ?Redemptive Critic? as Richard Wolin has affirmed in his now classic essay on the German philosopher (1994) by connecting the idea of Benjaminian criticism to the political promise of emancipation. These vastness of planes in which Benjamin inscribes his exercise and reflections on criticism is perhaps comparable only to the vastness in which Kant deployed his program of critical philosophy one and a half centuries earlier. This reference to Kant is reinforced if we bear in mind that Kant had been Benjamin?s first philosophical interlocutor in early works, particularly in his renowned program of future philosophy, in which the metacritique of Kantian critique is its dominant axis. And while setting this Benjaminian exercise in critique, the ideal of a philosophical system, which is constitutive of the Kantian idea of criticism, is radically suppressed, together with the Kantian notion of experience and his core idea of subjectivity/objectivity. The purpose of this paper is to compare the scope of the critical object and task in Benjamin with the horizon of a new Enlightenment, in the sense that the urgency to renovate and revitalize critique not only connects with Benjamin?s break with -and destruction of- the dogmas of Enlightenment, but also with a certain renovation of the tradition of Enlightenment and its potential for emancipation in the sphere of theory and practice.