I had a number of complicated reactions to the recent article in the London Review of Books by Jeremy Harding describing the final day of Walter Benjamin’s life. Benjamin’s
death, perhaps more than any other of those theorists whose lives ended
in suicide or insanity (Nietzsche, Deleuze), holds me in a sort of
mournful thrall. I find myself obsessing over
the moment when Benjamin finally decided that there was no way out,
that he would be deported, loaded into a train, sent to a concentration
camp, and gassed—his body disappearing underneath hundreds of now
nameless Jews in a mass grave.
Harding’s article (a review of a recent memoir by
Carina Birman, one of the individuals who attempted to take Benjamin
across the Franco-Spanish border) meditates on what he calls the
“Walter Benjamin cult.” Benjamin’s death, according to Harding, is
symbolic to the point of unreality, an enactment more than an event, like the death of the Christain messiah and the disappearance of the ‘risen’ body, for so long a matter of ardent conjecture. In a ritual sense, Benjamin’s death is closer to Judaic purification than a redemptive sacrifice. Yet in the likeness of the scapegoat, he confounds even that tradition, evicted not by his own tribe but by their enemies, wandering a mountainous wilderness not with the misdemeanours of his people on his head-‘all their iniquities in all their sins’—but their innocence.
Benjamin is the Christ-figure of cultural studies, his unique writing style and eccentric concerns only heighten the sense of his otherworldliness: a materialist who nevertheless uses kabbalism and Jewish messianic thought to break open the homogeneous temporality embedded in much of historical-materialism. But it is in his death that Harding sees the birth of an academic messianic figure. Benjamin sacrifices himself attempting to deliver his final work (presumably a final version of The Arcades Project, but even this is heavily disputed by Benjamin critics) to the public. He, then, dies and his death magnifies the resonance of his work a thousand-fold. In Benjamin 's work popular culture meets the literary, the religious and the political, and it is in the wake of his death that all of these elements merge together in the ubitquitous and nebulous form of contemporary American cultural studies. American cultural studies is founded, in a large sense, in the haunting shadow of Benjamin's death. I can't help but wonder if my own work is not a mourning ritual for figures like Benjamin.

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