Philosophy

The essay analyses the notion of ‘purity’ in the early writings of Walter Benjamin, focusing more specifically on three essays written around the crucial year 1921: ‘Critique of Violence’, ‘The Task of the Translator’, and ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’. In these essays, ‘purity’ appears in the notions of ‘pure means’, ‘pure violence’, ‘pure language’, and, indirectly, the ‘expressionless’. The essay argues, on the one hand, that the ‘purity’ of these concepts is one and the same notion, and, on the other, that it is strongly indebted to, if not a by-product of, Kant’s theorisation of the moral act. In order to make this claim, the essay analyses Benjamin’s intense engagement with Kant’s writings in the 1910s and early 1920s: ‘purity’ is a category strongly connoted within the philosophical tradition in which the young Benjamin moved his first steps, namely Kantian transcendental criticism. The essay argues that the notion of ‘purity’ in Benjamin, though deployed outside and often against Kant’s theorisation and that of his followers, and moreover influenced by different and diverse philosophical suggestions, retains a strong Kantian tone, especially in reference to its moral and ethical aspects. Whereas Benjamin rejects Kant’s model of cognition based on the ‘purity’ of the universal laws of reason, and thus also Kant’s theorisation of purity as simply non empirical and a priori, he models nonetheless his politics and aesthetics around suggestions that arise directly from Kant’s theorisation of the moral act and of the sublime, and uses a very Kantian vocabulary of negative determinations construed with the privatives-los and -frei (motivfrei, zweck-los, gewalt-los, ausdrucks-los, intention-frei, etc). The essay explores thus the connections that link ‘pure means’, ‘pure language’ and ‘pure violence’ to one another and to the Kantian tradition.

For the Western political tradition violence is usually deemed merely instrumental, and thus neither essential to, nor constitutive of, the bios politikos. Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” and Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence constitute an exception: in very different ways, both texts put forward a notion of violence which comes to coincide with pure praxis, that is, with pure political action, in great contrast with a political tradition which rather identifies in violence a non-political or anti-political form of action. The aim of the present study is to attempt to explain how this is framed and contextualized, and the hypothesis that guides and justifies a comparison is that Benjamin’s lasting interest in the Réflexions testifies for a deeper understanding of a text often – and still – underrated. Without trying to “Benjaminiaze” Sorel, this essay attempts a reading of his work in the light of some issues which guide Benjamin’s approach to the question of violence. The analysis will focus on the philosophy (or philosophies) of history in which, in different ways, the related concepts of strike, myth and ethics receive their peculiar meanings.

The essay relates Walter Benjamin’s analysis of boredom, especially in convolute “D” of the Arcades Project (“Boredom, Eternal Return”), to his critique of experience and thus to a number of central concepts in his work, like ennui, spleen and melancholy. In the notes for the Arcades Project and the Baudelaire book, boredom can be related to Erlebnis: it is the “malady” that accompanies the disintegration of the traditional forms of experience, which Benjamin called the “atrophy of experience.” However, thanks to its connection to allegory, boredom also plays a fundamental role in Benjamin’s revolutionary project: the melancholy gaze of the allegorist reduces the historical event to ruin, showing its facies hippocratica, its “death mask,” thus exposing the naked truth of the demise of experience. This is the dialectical potential of allegory and thus of spleen.