Walter Benjamin on the task of the critic

“The critic asks about the truth"

A sketch I did of Walter Benjamin reading a book

Amidst a never-ending barrage of domestic and international crises, it can be difficult to remain hopeful. When those in power can create a constant state of emergency, dictating the terms of the conflict with seeming impunity, it can leave one feeling overwhelmed and powerless. Either one is raising the alarm all the time, or one gives in to apathetic despair. In such conditions, what can be done?

One answer can be found in an unexpected place: Walter Benjamin’s analysis of Goethe’s ‘elective affinities’. Imagining a giant funeral pyre in which all the books of the world are being burned, Benjamin writes:

“If, for the sake of a simile, one views (it) as a flaming funeral pyre, then the commentator stands before it as a chemist, the critic like an alchemist. Whereas, for the former, wood and ashes alone remain the objects of his analysis, for the latter, only the flame itself preserves an enigma: the enigma of whatever is alive. The critic, therefore, asks about the truth whose living flame continues to burn over the weighty foundering of what once was, as well as the light ashes of what was lived through.”

Two things immediately stand out. First, the image of the burning pyre brings to mind the well-known Heinrich Heine quote, “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people” (Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen). Secondly, Benjamin is making a tacit argument about the nature of philosophy in an era of crisis. How can one respond to a world that is on fire?

Benjamin’s insight is to distinguish between two ‘types’ of onlookers: the chemist and the alchemist.¹ Both are allegorical archetypes. The chemist focuses only on the fire and what burns. He is part of the ‘commentariat’, analyzing the scene as it appears to him. The alchemist, on the other hand, seeks to discern the truth in the social situation as such. He looks beyond the immediate crisis and explores the gap between what once was, and “what was lived through.”

There are also two types of flames. The flames that consume, and the “living flame” of truth and the way in which crisis demands a critical engagement with the world. Or, as Walter Benjamin puts it, we have here the difference between the subject-matter and the truth-of-the-matter. The task of the critic is to search for the truth. As Benjamin puts it later in the text, the subject-matter is like the wax seal on a letter: it must be broken in order to reveal the truth hidden behind it. This is the task of the critic; to help break the seal.

However, this should not be confused with taking a step back to look at things objectively. On the contrary, after the fire there can be no objectivity. The task of the critic is therefore to count himself radically ‘into’ the very frame of the Event he is analyzing. Standing amidst the ashes of the old world, the critic can only think subjectively, as there is no longer any vantage point (including the safe externality of ‘authority’ and received wisdom) to base himself on.

Benjamin also specifically targets the empty pleas for ‘peace’ and ‘common humanity’. Citing Kant, he derides such statements as a ““nauseating mishmash (…) “patched together” out of baseless humanitarian maxims and turgid, fallacious, legal instincts.” For Benjamin, “thoughts and prayers” is itself part of the problem. Both the desire for an objective understanding of the conflict, as well as an earnest moral outcry, simply underlie the very reason why the conflict continues in the first place.

The lesson to be learned from Benjamin is that there is no turning back. The past cannot save us. Likewise, we cannot allow our attention to be consumed by the spectacle of the unfolding ‘morbid symptoms’ (every news-cycle ushers in a new low-point, the unthinkable becomes normalized). Instead of a forced choice between outrage and cynicism, we must create a third choice. This can be done through studying, writing, reading, teaching, speaking, writing, organizing, etc. The goal is to stay engaged, and to stay empowered. To be free means to participate. Don’t let anyone tell you that your contribution isn’t doing something. This is also what Benjamin means when he refers to the flame as preserving ‘the enigma of whatever is alive’. To create something is to give others a license to create.

This is what Slavoj Zizek has called ‘resisting the hermeneutic temptation’. You don’t have to spend countless hours doom-scrolling and gorging yourself on horrific imagery. Instead, you can take this painful knowledge and turn it into something new and productive. By engaging in thought and partaking in a critical tradition of philosophy and criticism, we can empower ourselves and each other. This is why Benjamin chooses the figure of the alchemist to represent the critic. At the root of all alchemy is the desire to not only observe change, but to create it.

And of course Benjamin understood that the art of alchemy was and remains a fool’s errand. His vision for a critically engaged subject is therefore not so much a recipe for success, but rather the invocation of a certain spirit: "Be realistic, demand the impossible.” (Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible) As Benjamin famously put it, “there is hope, just not for us.” The critic as alchemist is therefore not just a figure of hope, but the spirit of promise. The figure of a future hope.

Julian

1. In another text (The sacramental also turns into the mythic), Benjamin goes on to characterize the dialectic as ‘demonic’, in keeping with the image of the philosopher-critic as an alchemist. “The spirit of the black mass here returns (…) Satan is dialectical.” It is worth noting that Benjamin is not moralizing against dialectical thought. His broader argument (elaborated in his theory of aesthetics) builds upon St. Anthony’s thesis that beauty cannot be holy, as it is a semblant of the divine, rather than the non-semblant entity of essence. In this precise sense, the dialectic is also non-holy) as it reconciles the very gap between essence and appearance by transposing the gap between essence and appearance into appearance as such. Benjamin’s reference to the dialectic as ‘satanic’ can therefore be considered to be somewhat in jest, a devilish dialectic, as it were.