Nicholas Lambrianou (Bbk): ‘Philosophical Dramas of Temporality & History in Benjamin & Rosenzweig’

Walter Benjamin’s unique spatial (urban/geographical) and temporal (messianic/interruptive) understanding of history emerges out of a dense network of critical philosophical forebears – romanticism, Goethe, neo-Kantianism, Nietzsche – prior to his explicit engagement with Marx in the 1930s. I want to argue that it was Franz Rosenzweig’s work that provided Benjamin with a specific model of how these precursors, once read as a series of ‘philosophical dramas’, may be concentrated into the question of temporal and historical orientation. For Rosenzweig orientation is an experiential event which relies on a figurative image of disorientation or caesura, and is indebted to a specifically theatrical conception of ‘life’ interrupting ‘illusion’. At one key point, Rosenzweig took as his model a drama by 19^th C parodist WD Grabbe (who, by 1916 had been rediscovered by German Expressionism after a century of obscurity) as well as the expressionist dramatisations of agonised individualism which are prevalent in the war years (Rosenzweig’s ‘new thinking’ was at times described as ‘philosophical expressionism’ or even ‘a philosophy and theology of hyper-inflation’).

Despite his own interest in theatre as a source of historico-philosophical orientiation, Benjamin’s work is profoundly transformed via the prism of capital and technology and in particular his later engagement with Marx, Brecht and the avant-garde. And yet the question remains, particularly with regard to Benjamin’s late work, to what extent are the tensions between a materialist understanding of socio-historical transformation and a messianic concept of experienced time (interruption, memory, orientation) successfully resolved? Connecting materialism and messianism for Benjamin is constructed time, the models for which may be found in the spaces of mediated cultural memory (archives, museums, libraries) but which is also presented to experience by the spaces of modernity more generally: the urban, the arcade, cinema, the feuilleton and so on. It is these endlessly reconstructed and transient cultural phenomena that present the physiognomy of modernity itself, as that which repeatedly turns away from its disastrous present. And so for Benjamin, the ‘archive’ must be inverted to become, ironically, an archive of the present – or else it doomed to be nothing other than (lost) experience chasing its own tail, or a disastrous ‘infinite task’, the disaster disguised as ‘progress’.