|
|
 |
|
Walter
Benjamin and the
Corpus of Autobiography
Gerhard Richter |
|
Although
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is considered one of the most significant writers
and theorists in twentieth-century Western culture, his enigmatic sense
of the political has eluded definition. Gerhard Richter shows that Benjamin's
engagement with the political cannot be understood in terms of unified concepts
and fully deducible theses that can be easily verified or refuted. Rather
than explaining his sense of the political, Benjamin enacts it in the movement
of his language. Richter traces Benjamin's radical notions of the political
through a series of corporeal figures in his often-neglected autobiographical
writings—the Moscow Diary,
the Berlin Chronicle,
and the Berlin Childhood around 1900.
Each text subtly mobilizes a different trope of anatomy:
the body, the ear, and the eye. Benjamin's preoccupation with the body becomes
visible as a political struggle that illuminates the relations among the
self, history, reading, and language. |
|
|
"As
the first full-scale study of Benjamin's practice of autobiography in any
language, Gerhard Richter's admirable work performs a major scholarly service.
Not only does it demonstrate the centrality of autobiography to Benjamin's
critical practice, it also shows—with great wit and charm—the
extent to which Benjamin's writing conforms to an apothegm he once wrote:
'Language has a body and the body has a language.'"
—Peter Fenves, Northwestern
University
Gerhard Richter is associate professor of German
and affiliate professor in comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin,
Madison. |
