Walter Benjamin’s Transit: A Destructive Tour of Modernity

307 Pages·2010·3.32 MB·English

by  Stephanie Polsky

WALTER BENJAMIN’S TRANSIT

WALTER BENJAMIN’S TRANSIT

A DESTRUCTIVE TOUR OF
MODERNITY

STEPHANIE POLSKY

ACADEMICA PRESS
BETHESDA - DUBLIN - PALO ALTO
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Polsky, Stephanie.
Walter Benjamin's transit : a destructive tour of modernity / Stephanie
Polsky.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN 978-1-933146-73-7
1. Fascism. 2. Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940—Political and social views. 3.
Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995. 4. Guattari, Félix, 1930-1992. I. Title.
JC481.P615 2010
335.6--dc22
2010009329

Copyright 2010 by Stephanie Polsky

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book
may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Academica Press, LLC
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to order: 650-329-0685
This book is dedicated to my grandfather Eugene Polsky, the other
Dr. Polsky of the Drs. Polsky, for whom every word was written
and whose legacy is founded in each chapter. It is in his honour
that I call myself a philosopher, one who pursues a love of
knowledge and cultivates a life of the mind. It is for him I write
with eternal gratitude.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword ix
Preface xiii

Transitlines: Walter Benjamin’s Destructive Landsurveying of History 1

Sternphotographie: A Constellation of Walter Benjamin’s
Moscow Diary 31

Catastrophising the Epoch: Benjamin's Atlas of Fascist Historiography 79

What Calls Technology? or Walter Benjamin's War 147

Idle Talk 195

Warring Vocabularies 223

Bibliography 273

Index 277

FOREWORD
The past is not to be remembered but to be tested. Such was Walter
Benjamin’s thesis on history and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s attitude to
yesterday’s revolutionary moments. This is a restless inquiry into, and a
revivication of, those elements of the past that might be utilised to overcome the
impasses of the present. Here the past is not finished or behind, but all around
us—coextensive with the present, waiting only to be actualised. History in these
terms contains within it a programme for the future; it is a pragmatics and a
practice that involves a prophetic calling forth to an as-yet-to-come. This is
history as lived by the artist and philosopher, the maker and the doer.
But there is another sense in which the past haunts the present: as Polsky
demonstrates in this compelling and timely book the fascism of Benjamin’s era is
also not finished, but continues uninterrupted—not only in the various brutal
nationalistic struggles and religious fundamentalisms we see today, but also in
what Deleuze and Guattari would call the micro-fascisms that hold even in an
apparently democratic society, perhaps especially here. This is the propensity to
fixity, hierarchy and to the top down exercise of power, but it is also the atomised
competitiveness and ‘individualism’ that arises from a society determined by
Capital and the market. Indeed, as far as the latter goes the struggle against
fascism is one that we must all be involved in, and the terrain of such struggles is
in very real terms our very own subjectivities.
For Polsky, both senses of history—the past as a Messianic potential to be
mobilised in the present and the past as a dark determining precursor of the
present—are at stake in a mythic war between two senses of what it means to be
human.
x Walter Benjamin’s Transit
Indeed, against the fascist body Polsky posits Benjamin as simply ‘a life’
contra fascism, when this is understood as not only a nomadic life lived ‘in
transit’, but also a life of observation and inquiry, an intention and commitment
to be the cartographer of fascism’s coils. It is here that we see the deeper logic of
the Benjamin-Deleuze encounter as presented in this synthetic work, for the latter
also thinks a life, of pure immanence, that always and everywhere continues
despite its transcendent overcoding and attempts at standardisation. This is life as
affirmation, as the very soul of the universe.
It is the case however that fascism also has an operating principle of ‘life’:
the ‘bare life’ of the less than human. In its own barbarous manner it reduces the
individual to its absolute minimum. A de-humanisation and ultimately an
extermination in a technologically determined death instinct. This life, or should
we not say anti-life, a nihilistic black hole of terror and despair, again, is one that
has not disappeared with the end of National Socialism in Germany. Two senses
of life also then to accompany two senses of history. In fact, two images of
thought, or of thought and anti-thought, when the former is that which
everywhere and always affirms difference and creativity over the latter that
violently repeats a homeostasis of the same. It is these two attitudes to life that
are the secret theme of this necessarily synthetic work. Two attitudes necessarily
pitched against each other in a war over, well, life itself.
Walter Benjamin’s Transit is then the writings of Benjamin seen through
a Deleuzian optic. This in itself constitutes a valuable contribution not only to
Benjamin studies, but also to the scholarship around Deleuze and Guattari that
often outlaws any connection to the German tradition of Critical Theory
(although Benjamin himself also problematises the latter categorisation). Indeed,
Benjamin’s life and writings ‘in transit’ are presented here, in Deleuzian terms, as
a minor history that stutters and stammers those more dominant or major
narratives that will often efface the individual and the idiosyncratic. As such,
Polsky argues, it is the very human encounters, real and imagined, that Benjamin
goes through—with Asja Lacis, Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka—as well as the