Peter Fenves (Northwestern University)

Werner Hamacher (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt a.M.)

Sigrid Weigel (International Walter Benjamin Association / Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin)

Bernd Witte (International Walter Benjamin Society / Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf)

Irving Wohlfarth (Université de Reims)

 

SESSIONS:

SESSION 1: LEGENDS OF BENJAMIN
(Chair: Detlev Schöttker)

Since the beginning of the 1950s the reception of Benjamin's works has passedgone through a number of stages and assigned him a variety of positions: from the theologically oriented metaphysician to the political, historical and sociological theorist and finally to the founder of cultural and media studies. These positions correspond to assumptions made about Benjamin's life: as an outsider and eccentric, a Marxist, and victim of political persecution during the period of National Socialism. The section will analyze the different stages of this reception, taking their presuppositions within historical contexts into account and correlating the various positions assigned to Benjamin with references from his texts. In view of the discrepancies posed by these presuppositions, Benjamin's fame might possibly be best described as a legend.

SESSION 2: MATERIALITY OF WRITING
(Chair: Davide Giuriato)

Benjamin was a "paperworker" (Papierarbeiter). Many of his texts were either the outcome of a long writing process or have never been finished. This gradual "fabrication of texts in the process of writing" has barely attracted any critical attention. Benjamin's texts are not only riddled with reflections regarding the medial and material conditions of writing, he also paid attention to all the aspects of the creational process. His micrological faithfulness to details is reflected in his careful but sometimes ambivalent scriptural praxis: Benjamin's meticulous accuracy of writing and archiving his texts contrasts with a frequent failure to finish his own texts. As a result, many of his manuscripts remained fragments. Proposals for this section should focus on Benjamin's aesthetic of text production, his poetics of material, e. g. his working techniques (writing tools and materials), the creative process of individual texts as well as oppositions such as between handwriting and the printed word, image and typography or the correlation between the theory and practice of the media.

SESSION 3: FAITHFUL TO BAROQUE
(Chair: Jane Newman)

Benjamin describes Baroque allegory in the following way: "Jede Person, jedwedes Ding, jedes Verhältnis kann ein beliebiges anderes bedeuten." Infidelity would seem to characterize Benjamin's Baroque in general as it too has taken on a veritable infinity of meanings, both as a particular period, style, and canon, and as a term to describe the several political, theological, and representational logics that shape Benjamin's main statement about the Baroque, the Trauerspiel book. This session will examine the ways in which Benjamin does and does not remain 'true' to the Baroque in his work. Papers should address his readings of Baroque drama and lyric or his claims about Baroque poetics, politics, theology, emblematics, and language theory. They may also question whether fidelity to the Baroque should be of central importance when reading the book he often referred to as his "Barockbuch," or whether it too can "ein beliebiges anderes bedeuten."

SESSION 4: KNOWLEGDE OF ART
(Chair: Sabine Flach)

"Many of those photographers who shape the character of this technique today, originally came from painting. They turned away from it after trying to relate its means of expression more closely to contemporary life. The more they were alert concerning the signature of their time, the more problematic became this starting point for them." Benjamin's concern with the point of departure expressed in his A Small History of Photography mirrors his faithfulness to painting, to art and the practices of the arts, all of which are used as a background for reflecting on new technologies of art and media. Among other topics, contributions should discuss Benjamin's interest in the alterations to the perception of the ambient world (the "optical unconscious"), his program of an "interpenetration of art and science" and his numerous reviews of art exhibitions. Thus, the panel aims to re-read the relevance and meaning of the arts in Benjamin's thinking.

SESSION 5: TRUE TO THE LETTER
(Chair: Bettine Menke)

To what extent is fidelity a means of identifying Benjamin's attitude toward citation, toward processes of writing and reading, toward words and letters? Is fidelity necessary in order to be true to his texts? Melancholic "fidelity" cannot be isolated from "betrayal". Benjamin's criticism is aimed at the "attitude of the philologist", who becomes easily caught up in the illusion of the immediacy of philological as well as historical givens and falls prey to a mythical concept of reality. A reading of Benjamin that pays close attention to his wordings takes a different path and confronts their decomposability (Zerlegbarkeit). This approach marks the manner in which fidelity to Benjamin's readings and to readings of Benjamin's texts can be assessed.

SESSION 6: TREACHEROUS FAITHFULNESS TO CITATION
(Chair: Gerhard Richter)

Walter Benjamin's radical philosophy of language and his politics of representation are inseparable from his concepts of citing and citation. Benjamin writes: "Before language both realms - origin as well as destruction - identify themselves in citation. And, conversely, only where they traverse each other - in citation - is language perfected." Proposals should pursue Benjamin's treacherous faithfulness to citation in the diverse areas of his writings - for instance, in his practice of literary reading, his media theory, his philosophy of history, or in the deconstruction of the concept of faithfulness itself.

SESSION 7: LEGACY AND WRITING
(Chair: Burkhardt Lindner)

We owe the present corpus of Benjamin's works to the history of their inheritance. The impact of his texts was belated, coming after the catastrophe of World War II. Their relevance hinges on their unique capacity to combine seemingly incompatible thoughts and ideas. Yet, many of his most popular texts have only been made available, because they were first selected and then edited on the basis of archived material. That this was possible is due to the author's decision to keep the majority of his sketches, manuscripts and notes for posterity: he conceived of them strategically as part of his legacy. This questions the principle of "Werktreue," according to which only the final version (Fassung letzter Hand) is authoritative. The section will address the consequences of this curatorial approach to reading and editing Benjamin's texts today.

SESSION 8: FIDELITY, POLITICS AND FETISHISM
(Chair: Jeanne-Marie Gagnebin)

When looking at Benjamin from a political perspective it is not enough to classify him and his writings as characteristic of a left-wing ideology; rather, it is also important to contribute to the critical transmission of his political thought. This implies that abstract research into Benjamin and the reception of his work using universal criteria are not sufficient. Instead, one needs to explore the specific historical and geographical determinations of this reception and evaluate cultural differences. In this section, the apparent "fatigue" of philological research on Benjamin in Europe will be confronted with approaches in countries having a shorter history of the reception of Benjamin's political legacy, where one can find more immediate and direct attempts to apply Benjamin's thinking to current political and social phenomena and conflicts.

SESSION 9: POPULAR BENJAMIN
(Chair: Justus Fetscher)

Simple renarrations of Benjamin's life (comics, novels, films) risk a reductive understanding of Benjamin as an esoteric thinker and a committed intellectual. While popularizations of Benjamin (Jay Parini, François Darnaudet etc.) seem to be appalling simplifications, they also represent genuine transformations of his opus and demonstrate the powerful and unavoidable interferences between fiction and theory. Benjamin's resistance to a compartmentalized approach to art, the flexibility of his theoretical reflections on the media, and the variety and virtuosity of his own writing techniques suggest the relevance of references to Benjamin, in which this aspect of his thinking transforms the cultural idioms of his intellectual heirs. Approaches that go further in the direction Benjamin specified, even to the point of distancing themselves from his views, might possibly come closer to what he himself propagated.

SESSION 10: CORRESPONDENCES
(Chair: Eckart Goebel)

There is a persistent myth that Benjamin was intellectually isolated throughout his life - at least in his years of exile - and that only a very limited number of personal relationships contributed to his intellectual development (e.g. Adorno, Brecht and Scholem). But the evidence, especially with reference to his correspondence (numerous letters addressed to Benjamin are either not or are only partly known today), demonstrates that his intellectual socialization took place in a dense network of relationships and acquaintances. Instead of wanting to remain true to an essential "genuine self" in this interplay of exchange, stimulation and criticism, he displayed a disposition to "receive a new being within himself" in his dealings with others. This section will explore the traces of accord and disagreement, productive adoption and indifference in these encounters, moving beyond mere biographical reconstruction by opening up hew horizons for the interpretation of specific moments in Benjamin's thought processes.

SESSION 11: PERFIDIOUS HISTORY
(Chair: Paul North)

Papers should address Benjamin's rejection of the historicist demand that historical scientists handle their objects in good faith. But the assertion that history betrays its objects does not go far enough. Can history remain faithful to itself as an idea? Do Benjaminian concepts that refer to history-from "unendliche Erstreckung" in the 1915 essay on Hölderlin to "Katastrophe" in the Paris arcades fragments, and many in between-not require more than one theory of history, perhaps even a historically articulated theory of history in order to be understood? Would a constant theory of history even survive the "catastrophe"? This section addresses the epistemological crisis that such a treacherous theory of history triggers and the critical response it receives in Benjamin's writings.

SESSION 12: TRANSLATIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS
(Chair: Karl Solibakke)

"If the kinship of languages manifests itself in translations, this is not accomplished through the vague similarity between adaptation and original." Rather, liminal spaces with clandestine meanings emerge, which have to be perceived as dynamic venues of translation: as possibilities to spawn new relationships, situations and interactions using translation processes. Starting from Benjamin's idea that translation is an agent of difference, the section intends to document concrete examples of recent efforts to translate Benjamin's works into foreign languages and cultural paradigms. Apart from "fidelity to the original", issues involving cultural transferal, liminality and reconfigurations of meanings should be addressed, especially those that have encouraged a "recharting" of Benjamin's intellectual legacy.

SESSION 13: RELIGION, THEOLOGY AND COMMEMORATION
(Chair: Arthur Cools, Vivian Liska, Daniel Weidner)

"The experience of commemoration forbids us to conceive of history in fundamentally atheological terms, however little one ought to attempt to write it in directly theological categories." Benjamin's "theology," his explicit and insistent resorting to religious concepts and practices follows a complex logic. Religion is, for him, simultaneously a paradigmatic model of tradition - which is also always an act of destruction - and its object, albeit an object requiring as much as preventing fidelity. As the quote suggests, this project oscillates between an experience marked by traces of the sacred, and the act of writing, in which these traces can be articulated in the first place. This section explores the interaction between Benjamin's recourse to the religious tradition and his modes of writing and addresses recent attempts to pursue this tradition in the work of Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben and others.