Resumo do artigo: Salvem Benjamin de
seus fãs!
Nome do aluno: Lúcio Emílio do
Espírito Santo Júnior
RA: 232291-9
Curso: Letras (02022-2)
Módulo: IV
Pólo: Luz
Nome original do
artigo em inglês: Save Benjamin from his fans!
Autor: Stephan
Wackwitz
Local: texto
traduzido do jornal Die Welt para o
site Sign and Sight
(http://www.signandsight.com/service/2089.html)
Data: 11/10/2010
Resumo
do texto
O texto de Stephan Wackwitz comenta a respeito da enorme admiração que o
pensador alemão Walter Benjamin desfruta hoje em dia, o que pode levar a pensar
que ele seja o maior poeta alemão, tal a popularidade e a freqüência com que
suas fotos são disseminadas na Alemanha.
Stephan comenta leu Benjamin em 1972, em sua juventude, e ficou muito
impressionado, tendo lido muito a respeito dele posteriormente, mas que hoje
considera que muitos dos seus conceitos e teorias são falsas (o artigo não
explica essa afirmação detalhadamente). O primeiro texto de Benjamin que o
impressionou foi Rua de Mão Única, que
Wackwitz leu várias vezes, passando a relê-lo com uma visão crítica depois de
alguns anos e, principalmente, de verificar como Benjamin é visto na Alemanha e
cultuado, a seu ver, em excesso e de uma maneira tola e barata. A seguir,
Wackwitz recapitula a vida de Benjamin, tornada, atualmente, uma vida
mitificada, de um santo. Ele supõe que Benjamin, ao misturar marxismo e
messianismo judeu em textos como Teses
sobre a Filosofia da História, jogou as sementes dessa mistificação,
estimulando também a fantasia mística de que a revolução aconteceria, apesar de
tudo em contrário.
Benjamin teria se tornado kitsch,
ou seja, teria se barateado e vulgarizado, daí a necessidade de criticá-lo.
Para Wackwitz, mesmo nos anos 60, as teorias de Benjamin presentes nos textos
tão cultuados hoje em dia já tinham sido ultrapassadas pelas de outros
pensadores e, na atualidade, somente seu estudo sobre o drama barroco alemão
ainda se sustenta em termos acadêmicos. Outro ponto é que, se a arte perdeu a
aura, conforme Benjamin, muitos imaginam que essa teoria justifica e simplifica
a adesão à esfera midiática.
Stephan responsabiliza uma certa má influência de Walter Benjamin por
causar danos aos estudos literários, uma vez que ele teria influenciado
negativamente ao permitir que se misture, de forma fragmentada, ensaio e
ficção, ciência e literatura, e essa mistura, desde os anos 60, tornou-se regra
na área e procedimento universalmente aceito. O resultado seria a perda de
prestígio dos estudos literários, com a subseqüente burocratização e
didatização desse campo de estudos.
Para exemplificar, afirma Wackwitz, hoje um autor sem rigor escreve um
texto obscuro, usando os conceitos de “aura”, “flaneur” e outros de Benjamin,
mas assim mesmo é aceito enquanto estudioso. Essa leitura equivocada e sem
rigor de Benjamin ajudou a tornar os estudos literários obscuros e desprovidos
de uma conceituação mais científica, a exemplo dos textos de Jacques Derrida. A
crítica de Stephan não é dirigida tanto a Benjamin, mas aos seus seguidores,
fãs e a uma determinada recepção que seus textos costumam ter (suponho, na
Europa continental e não no mundo anglo-saxônico).
Para Wackwitz um pensador com conceitos tais como Benjamin teria de ser
lido ao lado de Robert Walser e de Kafka e não enquanto aquilo que ele se
apresenta, como um teórico. Benjamin seria antes de tudo o ficcionista de Rua de Mão Única, ou seja, um ensaísta
não acadêmico e um autor de literatura.
Importância do texto para a área
Walter Benjamin é um autor muito influente nos estudos literários hoje em
dia, sendo muitíssimo aceito e apreciado, inclusive no Brasil. O texto faz uma
revisão, em poucas palavras, da vida e obra de Walter Benjamin, demonstrando
boa capacidade de síntese. É importante, no entanto, que ele não deixe de ser
lido de forma crítica. O debate sobre o que ele fez de acadêmico e de valor
científico também é importante, ainda que o conceito de científico deva ser
revisto para ser aplicado às ciências humanas e estudos literários. No entanto,
esse artigo critica sua influência e, particularmente, sua recepção deslumbrada
nos dias que correm.
http://www.signandsight.com/service/2089.html
German version
11/10/2010
Save Benjamin from his fans!
Author Stephan Wackwitz dissevers
literature from science, holiness from genius in the legend of Walter Benjamin
In 1972 I was twenty, a supposedly
not entirely untalented, deeply impressionable and utterly confused individual.
One week it was Maoism, the next it was poetry or fine art. The interminable
vacillations of a young man. Ersatz military service in Bad Urach, holidays in Paris , a patchwork university degree in Munich Italy Milan
One day, on a marble table top in an
Ulm
When, after flicking through it for
the first time, I returned Benjamin's "Einbahnstraße" to the marble
table top in the Ulm cafe (I was waiting for the
local train to take me to my home town of Blaubeuren Munich
My admiration for some of Benjamin's
writing, the elegance of his thinking and his language more than anything else,
has accompanied me throughout my intellectual life. And this in spite of the
irreparable damage I probably inflicted upon myself during my period of
obsessive Benjamin reading. Because the confusion of his thinking exponentially
propelled my own confusions to new heights, for many years. When you read
Benjamin, you must learn to strictly separate admiration and criticism.
The history of his influence is
suitabably paradoxical. Benjamin's writing, which was almost exclusively
intended to be scientific in method, makes strict claims to the truth, even
when it takes the form of aphorism, feuilleton, literary critique or memoir.
But Benjamin today enjoys the level of worldwide adoration that is otherwise
reserved for poets in Eastern Europe . He is
quoted so extensively, his photograph reproduced so often, he is the subject of
so many prominent congresses and meticulous exhibitions that you would be
forgiven for thinking he was Germany
An initial explanation lies in the
biography of the philosopher who was born in 1892 as the son of Jewish art
dealer in Berlin America
The paradoxical entanglement of
poetic consecration and scientific standards was however, prepared above all by
Benjamin himself. He pursued the project of a sort of concretising theory. He
believed that by describing a type of theatre, or novel, or form of
architecture in as precise terms as possible, these things would be brought to
life in "profane illumination" and spawn a theory of their own.
Benjamin, you could say, misinterpreted a Romantic poet's dream ("And the world
wakes up and sings, / If only you find the magic word") as research
programme. With Joseph von Eichendorff, it was a song that slumbered "in
all things, / Ever dreaming forth unheard" - whereas for Benjamin it was
historical materialism. Herein lies the failure of his monumental and
fragmentary lifework as scientific research and its enduring success as
Romantic literature.
Benjamin's writings on German
philology, history of philosophy, theology and architectural sociology had
already been superseded by the time they were rediscovered in the 1960s. Only
his dissertation on the early Romantic concept of poetry still has academic
relevance today. But even his contemporaries could not relate to these books in
scholarly terms. Benjamin's book on Baroque tragedy not only failed to get past
the Frankfurt doctoral committee, whose no-name, line-toeing academics could be
dismissed on grounds of bigotry; he also got the thumbs-down from pioneers in
Aby Warburg circles (Fritz Saxl and Erwin Panofsky for example). And Adorno's excoriation
of Benjamin's writing on Baudelaire is famous.
So how do you explain why his
writing, which fails to meet any traditional criteria, has been been so
phenomenally influential since the 1960s? The content argument points to
Benjamin's combination of "scientific socialism" with cabbalist and
messianic motifs (most prominently in his "Theses on the Philosophy of
History) which struck a chord with students' illusory hopes of revolution
against all odds. And the motifs in the essay on "The Artwork in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction" would certainly have been useful for a
generation where most people grew up wanting to become "something
media-related".
The most plausible (and depressing)
explanation for the triumph of Walter Benjamin's poetic theory, however,
springs from the observation that his rediscovery coincided with the rise of an
academic current which had abandoned the pursuit of traditional academic
standards in favour of creating diffuse meaning which could not longer be
verified in scientific terms. The later work of Jacques Derrida, the Frankfurt
Hölderlin Edition and the books of Giorgio Agamben could be classed as classics
of this academic current, and the reception of Jorge Luis Borges in the
eighties and of Heiner Muller in the nineties as their equivalent in the wider
world of the chattering classes.
Today the bureaucratisation,
didactisation and trivialisation of the humanities in the wake of the Bologna
I'm sure you know the reluctance to
continue reading a text if the first paragraph is sat under a chunky quote from
Benjamin's book on tragedy, and the remaining porridgy thoughts are generously
sprinkled with words like "aura", "flaneur" or
"shock". You want nothing more to do with it. The mixture of
poetising process with scientific claim to truth feels impure if not downright
unsavoury.
Let us instead take a few steps
backwards in literary history. Alexander von Humboldt was one of the great
natural scientists of his day. But we no longer read his reports of his travels
through South America out of
natural-scientific interest, but because he was also one of the greatest prose
writers of his time. It is it the fate of scientific prose that its scientific
relevance fades. The artistic relevance however, of scientists such as Wilhelm
von Humboldt and Sigmund Freud which they undoubtedly had and still have, quite
apart apart from their discoveries, are untouched by his ageing process. Dante's
"Divinia Commedia" was intended once upon a time as a scientific
description of the world. Outdated knowledge becomes unsurpassable poetry. And
this applies not only to outdated scientific prose, but also ideas that were
wrong from the outset. One famous 18th century example of this is Goethe's
"Colour Theory" that was appallingly off, even at its time of
creation, which does nothing to impair its artistic or literary qualities.
Benjamin's writings are the
"Colour Theory" of the twentieth century. If we could agree (and
science would almost certainly back us up here) to take his theories on German
philology, architectural sociology, media theory and history of philosophy with
a pinch of salt, his genius as a writer could get the recognition it deserves. Then
the literary essay – a paradoxical case of an illegitimate species which
nevertheless has rules – would shift to centre stage in his oeuvre. The
"Arcades Project" suddenly becomes a forerunner to Walter Kempowski's
"Echolot" and other forms of documentary literature and artistic
research; his literary criticism, a subtle intellectual autobiography played
out over several volumes. And his reports on interior and exterior travels
which we have always been been able to enjoy without regret, as fascinating
subjective documents.
This process clearly defines
Benjamin – his admirers take note - as the last, most important and most
brilliant representative of 20th century Jewish literary culture, a milieu so
full of talent that German literature has yet to recover from its eradication
at the hands of the Nazis.
Walter Benjamin should be studied
and admired as the third and perhaps most original mind in a trio of literary
giants of the 1920s, who all registered in erudite consciousness very late in
the game: he should be placed alongside Kafka and Robert Walser. And we should
stop stirring his intricately brilliant but almost entirely false theories into
theoretical blancmange, condemning Benjamin to keep delivering the ingredients.
Perhaps though that is the comeuppance for his own scientific hubris – although
he has long done penance for that.
This article originally appeared in
Die Welt on 24 September, 2010.
Stephan Wackwitz (1952) is an
essayist and novelist. "An Invisible Country" was published in
English in 2005 (more here).
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