Writer and Thinker

Abstract

Fredric Jameson's latest book, wittily entitled The Benjamin Files, reaches back to an early concern of the author. As he stated in an interview published in 2006, “I was probably the first [American] to write on [Theodor] Adorno, on [Ernst] Bloch, maybe even [Walter] Benjamin” (Buchanan 2006: 120). Indeed, what has been called “the deliberate scandal of Jameson's method”—namely, his urbane “capacity to gather honey from every flower” (Arac 1987: 261), his intellectual heterogeneity—has clear Benjaminian roots. This in no way prevents him from mounting weighty criticisms of Benjamin's vocabulary and critical procedures, or from pronouncing on the aging of the work. As one would expect from a specialist in Stilstudien (“style studies,” as it was called in the 1950s, when Jameson wrote his dissertation on Jean-Paul Sartre under Erich Auerbach at Yale), he has illuminating things to say about the varied Benjaminian mode of presentation, especially as it relates to that of Bertolt Brecht and as it tends toward a pragmatic—that is, situational and political-educational—model of criticism. The thrust of this richly provocative study is to map out what, in the author's view, remains relevant in the writings of Walter Benjamin. His conclusions in this regard have to do with an engaged, multifaceted writerly practice and a theory of language informed by radicalized concepts of mimesis and translation.

The book is organized in nine chapters that move more or less chronologically through Benjamin's career, focusing on a series of mostly well-known individual works.¹ Jameson has little to say about the early writings, which he somewhat dismissively characterizes in terms of a “youthful linguistic mysticism that culminates in Benjamin's notorious ‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’ (to the Origin of the German Trauerspiel)” (148), although it should be said that he appreciates the importance of Benjamin's 1916 essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” with its conception of a “primary mimetic reality” in which “the world is already a language” and perception a reading (197; see also 48–49, 239). The Trauerspiel book itself he regards as “scarcely more than a tissue of quotations . . . disguised as a discourse” (35)—tortuous, blocked, and not altogether coherent eloquence devoted to an unworthy subject. The ending of the Trauerspiel book, concerned with dialectical reversal and the motif of apotheosis in the Baroque mourning play, he finds “frustrating,” especially as compared to “the rich description of Baroque subjectivity in Part I” (71–72). He mentions the “great montage” known today as Berlin Childhood around 1900 (27), but the focus is mainly on One-Way Street (“Benjamin's only real book” [17]), The Arcades Project, and essays of the 1920s and 1930s on literary subjects and on the technological reproducibility of the artwork, with a concluding chapter on Benjamin's last known work, “On the Concept of History.”

Jameson showcases Benjamin the writer—“an immense continent,” as he puts it in Allegory and Ideology (Jameson 2019: 3). In that earlier text Benjamin appears as the heroic precursor of Theory, an antiphilosophic (that is, antisystematic) philosopher more in line with Theodor Adorno's portrait of his friend—Adorno, whom Jameson (echoing Benjamin himself) likes to refer to as “the disciple” but who nevertheless remains “the skeleton that forever hangs in Jameson's closet” (West 1982: 179). In The Benjamin Files, Jameson makes use of Roland Barthes's term “writerly” (scriptible) to highlight both the variety of Benjamin's production—from treatise and translation to feuilleton and radio play, from essay and book review to letter, journal, and travelogue—and the pivotal role therein of the individual sentence in its transition or lack of transition to surrounding sentences. Jameson's second chapter, “The Spatial Sentence,” concerns, not aphorisms exactly, but “separated stops on [a] journey” (18), where “journey” points to the uncircumscribable quality we like to call essayistic. “Benjamin converts the humble essay form into a well-nigh symphonic display of tones and levels, a virtuoso performance” (40). There is a whole repertory of Benjaminian “small forms” (39), and the assemblage of quotations becomes in his hands practically a new genre. The scholar and editor share the stage with the raconteur and chronicler. If it is true, in Jameson's memorable formula, that the writer in Benjamin incessantly interferes with the thinker and vice versa, then Benjamin's immersive micromanagement of the heterogeneous (as collector of files), along with his development of a provisional aesthetic of interruption—practices Jameson sees as anticipating the “postmodern”—puts this complex tension to work.

Benjamin's writerly practice, then, displays affinities with both the Brechtian epic theater, in its anatomizing of individual acts or events, and Sergei Eisenstein's cinematic “montage of attractions,” in its distilling of similitude through discontinuity (6; Jameson mentions also, in this connection, Ezra Pound and Jean-Luc Godard). Benjamin the writer has at his disposal a number of distinct languages, as he modulates across different “language fields”: “His writing reveals a process of perpetual translation from one of these language clusters to another,” while at the same time bringing out their individual specificity (3). Such mediation by translation of “discontinuous monads. . . . within a larger monadic field” (8) makes for a volatile “new form” (9), a form at once concentrated and expansive, comprising the constellation (not synthesis) of disparate or even incommensurable elements, events, meanings.² This modern monadology deploys “a new spatial language”³ attuned both to a decentered global network and to “a new kind of perception” (5)—that is, to an experience arising in the wake of “the historically new collective dynamics” (10), with its proliferating, multilevel traffic. The spatial sentence—the sentence that, by virtue of its “arresting fulguration” and “underground tremors,” makes room for itself—is a reflection of “the spatiality that pervades all of Benjamin's thought and writing” (19, 29, 106). Invoking Benjamin's own, essentially experimental conception of the Denkbild (figure of thought), and fully cognizant of the high-modernist context, Jameson proposes the term “figuration” for this mediating spatial form. To illustrate, he invokes the nineteenth-century institution of mass entertainment figuring in both One-Way Street and The Arcades Project—that precursor of cinema, the panorama, with its jolting lateral movement from station to station, its “discontinuous sequence” (5) of revolving images, each a threshold into the past. By such means, the near and the far would converge. Multiperspectivity and polyphony, he rightly concludes, are the forms thinking characteristically takes in the later Benjamin.

As for specific issues, Jameson raises at the outset one of the most controversial, persisting as it does, in one form or another, “from the beginning of Benjamin's career to its end” (12)—namely, the concern with theology. In Allegory and Ideology, there is a mention of Benjamin's “flirtation with theology” and of his having recourse to the term theological in order mainly to placate his insistent friend Gershom Scholem (Jameson 2019: 33). No mention is made of Benjamin's extensive reading in Christian theology. In The Benjamin Files, we are told unequivocally that “theology, in his sense, has nothing to do with God” (9)⁴ and that it must be considered a language or code rather than a system of beliefs. “The theological is to remain a distinct language-field . . . with which . . . other languages are put in contact in order to measure the extent of their possibilities of meaning” (10). This particular theological code emerges, with the appearance of “genuine historical thinking” in the late eighteenth century, as a reflection of the ever-widening “gap between individual and collective dynamics” (10). It cannot itself reconcile the incommensurables, but it can translate between them. In this connection Jameson adduces “the paradoxes of the so-called moralistes” (he mentions Niccolò Machiavelli and Baltasar Gracián), understood as a discourse that “sees the personal-ethical as the political” (10). Theology in general he understands as “a compromise between secular logic and figuration” (11). Benjamin's own conception of bodily presence of mind “seems to mean an attentiveness beyond mere awakened secular perception” (12). At any rate, “theology has its uses,” especially in developing collective categories “unavailable in the . . . individualizing ‘values’ of modern ethics or legality” (229). But key terms associated with the Benjaminian theological in its later phases—particularly “dream” and “phantasmagoria”—he deems unsatisfactory, and he cites in support Adorno's well-known criticisms of Benjamin's archaisms in the mid-1930s. He does not explicitly consider Benjamin's (1999a: 389) philosophical-historical formulations, in The Arcades Project, concerning “that dream we name the past”; what we call the past (Gewesenes, “what has been”), is not simply past but also in some degree active or dormant—as a host of intercommunicating energies—in waking life, a kind of dead speech full of phantasmal possibilities and imperatives we may or may not recognize and “carry out” (durchmachen). The dialectic of “historical awakening,” expounded in the Arcades, requires an anamnestic waking to the past, as to a labyrinthine underworld, in order to waken from it. Once we are no longer in their grip, the powers of the dream can inspire new forms of life.

Jameson emphasizes that Benjamin's way of thinking about social change differs from “what is available in more secular modes (including Marxism)” (13). The difference has to do with Benjamin's idiosyncratic approach to history as “periodization without transitions” (53), his “monadic historicism” unfolding “a new kind of temporality [in which to] encompass what look like incommensurabilities” (245). Jameson refers (not always approvingly) to the Benjaminian “dialectical image” that looks simultaneously backward and forward in time, and to “the famous ‘now of recognizability’ [that] becomes a strangely fitful stereoscopic gaze” (157). Such “now time” eventuates when a moment from the past comes alive in a present moment uniquely attuned to it, as though the past had a claim on that present: “A moment of the past draws enough energy from the present to gain a new (and perhaps only momentary) lease on life, like the ghosts who drink the blood Odysseus offers them in his underworld sacrifice” (228). Interpenetration of nearness and distance structures the awakening. For Benjamin, it is a fundamentally educative process. Jameson calls attention to “Benjamin's careful observance and measurement of the ways in which instruction comes to society,” and he argues not only that the Benjaminian collage of quotations is pedagogically motivated (34) but also that the various characters populating Benjamin's writings—preeminently the child as preindividual consciousness and as “secret subject of so much of Benjamin's writing and perception” (27)—are “always objects of pedagogy” (42).⁵ He goes on to suggest that it is this social-educational process, and this charting of the collective pedagogies at work in daily life, that allows for the coexistence of political and aesthetic dimensions in Benjamin's work.

Benjamin's signature essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” is the point of departure for Jameson's discussion of aestheticization and of what he takes to be an anti-aesthetic strain in Benjamin. In the last section of the second version of the essay, Benjamin (2002b: 120–21) speaks of the “aestheticizing [Ästhetisierung] of political life,” a phenomenon conditioned on what he calls the increasing proletarianization of today's humanity and the increasing formation of masses. Citing Emilio Marinetti's glorification of war, he claims that such aestheticizing—its roots traced back to the nineteenth-century cult of l'art pour l'art—culminates in fascism, a claim that, as is well known, occasioned Adorno's vigorous defense (Jameson calls it a fetishizing) of the artwork's relative autonomy. For Jameson, Benjamin's attack on aestheticizing, conditioned as it is on the merging of economy and culture and the triumph of the commodity form, anticipates Guy Debord's theory of the society of the spectacle. The mesmerizing “aestheticism of spectacle society transforms our consumption of information itself, with a subsequent deterioration of traditional aesthetic experience and a reappearance of tribalisms that have a family likeness to the traditional fascisms,” Jameson writes in The Benjamin Files (156). Aesthetic appearance, then, schöner Schein, serves “to mask the poverty of capitalist existence,” of “our aestheticized commodity world” (188, 217). The decay of aura, of traditional experience of beauty, as Charles Baudelaire already recognized, spells the end of aesthetics as such. “Theory . . . has itself become a purely aesthetic and consumerist process” (207).

Jameson thus downplays the possibility of any Benjaminian aesthetics of film; the “Reproducibility” essay, he comments, doesn't mention a single film. In fact, the essay mentions Charlie Chaplin's A Woman of Paris and The Gold Rush, as well as Max Reinhardt's adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Carl Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc. Benjamin shows familiarity with the German, French, and Russian cine-scenes of the 1920s here and in essays published in the weekly journal Die literarische Welt after his return from Moscow in 1927. His theory of film's “prismatic work,” by means of which it discovers “unexpected stations” in ordinary milieux, opening up a vast new field of action (Spielraum), bears comparison with other significant film theory of the day, such as that of Siegfried Kracauer and Jean Epstein.

Although he faults the “Reproducibility” essay for its “incorrigible lack of focus” (218), a symptom of the general “episodism of Benjamin's thought” (221), Jameson can speak of the possibility of drawing “new energies from [Benjamin's] prophecies” (207) and of encountering in the new televisual forms and in certain unique specimens on view in the international film festivals “an aura of a new type” (217–18). There is a good archaic as well as a bad. Mythic reification is countered in Benjamin by cosmic absorption, aestheticized semblance by mimetic reality. It is not the end of history, then, but it is not a happy ending, either. Early in the Benjamin book, Jameson speculates: “Perhaps literature itself, around which so much of Benjamin revolves, is itself outmoded in the era of the media, new and old, and in the age not just of reproducibility . . . but of computability and big data, the PowerPoint and the algorithm, artificial intelligence, translation machines and posthuman high-frequency trading” (25). At the end, regarding the experience of defeat ostensibly announced by Benjamin's “angel of history” in his last work, Jameson suggests that what is at stake today in this image of the wreckage of history is the meaning and viability of experience itself. It is a matter not of resignation but of “an active and energizing pessimism” (235).

• • • •

Similar notes are sounded, in a different register (that of a professional philosopher), at the beginning of Pablo Oyarzun's Doing Justice: Three Essays on Walter Benjamin. In a prologue, after stressing the importance of “a singular experience” at the basis of the three essays to follow—an experience of mourning, he says, in which time seems to sink into itself—Oyarzun turns to a pivotal moment in the recent history of his country, Chile. He does so in the service of “a truth that requires experience and testimony, the infinite fragility of testimony” (xxxiii). The moment is September 11, 1973, date of the death of President Salvador Allende, which occurred in the course of the military coup d’état led by Augusto Pinochet. The moment is seen from the perspective of a moment forty years later, in 2013, when “many things were written and said in commemoration of these fateful events” (xxxvi), and when Oyarzun, who had personally experienced the events as a young man, claims to have first recognized the meaning of Allende's final words: “May you persevere in the knowledge that, sooner rather than later, they will open up [abrirán] once again the great avenues along which a free human being walks, so that a better society might be built.” It is, in effect, a Benjaminian “now of recognizability,” the calling out of a moment from the past to an attuned present—although Oyarzun leaves it to the reader to draw the connection with Benjamin in this case, not to mention the biblical resonance of “forty years”:

Oyarzun goes on to speak of “the ruthless regime of the passive voice [during Pinochet's rule from 1973 to 1990] . . . , with the daily surveillance and the kidnappings and disappearances, with the places where ‘it was known that’ or ‘it was said that.’ ” At the same time, he distinguishes this deliberately evasive and repressive usage of the passive voice from the promissory “justice will be done,” wherein the use of the passive bespeaks an altogether different situation. To characterize this promissory directive, entailing responsibility and a task, Oyarzun adopts Walter Benjamin's term “messianic.” He accordingly refers to a messianic passive voice and a demonic passive voice, both marked by the reflexive pronoun se in Spanish (xlii). The “fateful equivocity of the passive voice [del ‘se']” (xxxix) reflects the struggle to separate justice from vengeance.

Oyarzun does not enter into the possibility that demonic powers may act in the name of the messianic. Rather, he argues that it is precisely in his tension-filled messianism that Benjamin is the “thinker of justice” (xxxix). This appears most clearly with relatively early works like “Fate and Character” and “Critique of Violence,” works in which, distinguishing justice from law, Benjamin seeks “to differentiate demonic violence from a radically different kind of violence, one that is erased in the very instant in which it is unleashed, because it has emancipatory force” (xxxix–xl). Where the institution of the law, according to these early works, betrays its archaic origins in a demonic realm of vengeance, justice takes the form of care for the creature—and “everything is a creature, on condition that it be perceived in its irreducible and unrepeatable singularity” (106). The issue here is “doing justice to the creature, whatever its ontological signature” (xliv), by attending closely to it, treating it with care. The relation between justice and law cannot be resolved a priori but only on the basis of the particular case and particular situation (xl). “Justice ‘does’ nothing; . . . it can only prevail or fail, and if it fails, it does so without limit” (xxxvi). The call for justice remains, then, “a call that can maintain itself only in its own uncertainty, as a promise and commitment” (xli). Manifest here is a historically mediated, future-oriented immediacy: “To justice belongs the immediacy of a now that is nothing but the imminence (the coming now and, as such, the present moment) of the justice that will be, that will be done” (xlv).⁶ Such paradoxically mediated immediacy—a coming both distant and near—at once shatters and empowers. For “in the word ‘justice,’ language speaks beyond itself and beyond . . . all that language can accomplish and . . . all that can be done. . . . This call for justice points in a direction that radically outstrips the world as what is given. . . . ‘Justice will be done’ names the secret force that awakens responsibility, that encourages the effort” (xxxiv, xlvi–xlvii). In the end, passivity is not absent in those who are summoned by the promise, but such passivity as constitutes a threshold—to the all-important work (we would add) of education.

Oyarzun's prologue functions as a grand and passionate overture to the subsequent three essays, each of which focuses on a short work by Benjamin while sounding themes announced in the prologue, above all the theme of “dilated time” (xxxii), such as the experience of mourning opens. It is demanding reading—at times perhaps more reminiscent of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida than of Walter Benjamin—in a fluent translation. Though more narrowly focused than Jameson's study, the book is teeming with ideas and with incisive formulations. As its subject would say, it is eminently quotable.⁷

The first essay, “On Benjamin's Concept of Translation,” written in 1990, focuses on the essay “The Task of the Translator,” with attention also to the posthumously published “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” While assuming, throughout the book, a distinction between “early” and “mature” stages of Benjamin's career as thinker, Oyarzun takes the early work more seriously than does Jameson. To be sure, Benjamin's ontological theory of language as revelation involves “an absolute brush with mysticism, yet only a brush” (15). It is finally a matter of “strict paradox” (32). If “everything happens in language,” this is because language—the articulation of beings—“is something more than itself” (xlii). The question of language, of its limits, opens “an abyss that is constitutive of all thought” (5). The brush with mysticism has to do, in particular, with the problem of immediacy. Just as “justice . . . is immediate . . . because it is pure mediacy, deprived of all ulterior and exterior ends, realized and actualized in itself” (xlv) so “the mediateness of language—which, in a radical sense, is something other than mediation—is determined as its immediacy” (12). “Benjamin attempts to think communicability (Mitteilbarkeit) and immediacy (Unmittelbarkeit) at the same time” (15; see Benjamin 2011b: 253). “The outcome,” Oyarzun writes, “is a mimetic conception of communication” (15). Where Jameson unfolds a Benjaminian mimetic reality, Oyarzun describes an inversion of the hierarchy between logos and mimēsis (9). Both men refer, in this context, to the Baudelairean motif of correspondances, to a revealed atmospheric dimension wherein meaning is necessarily temporalized, which is to say, fluid and subject to transformation. It is here—in the context of a philosophic eventism—that the concept of translation comes into play, a concept grounded, for Benjamin, “in the deepest stratum of linguistic theory,” where it spells the virtual equivalence of translation and mimesis (Benjamin 2011b: 261; quoted in Oyarzun, p. 17). Oyarzun adduces a passage from the 1916 language essay concerning translation as “the carrying over [Überführung] of one language into another through a continuum of transformations” (Benjamin 2011b: 261). Like Jameson, he recognizes the long unrecognized theoretical centrality of translation, writing in Doing Justice: “Translation itself is what Benjamin thinks to be the determining factor of the essence of language, of all language” (19).⁸ The translatability of languages points to “the performative essence of language” (21)—language as continually renewed systemic event. “Thus, ‘being’ itself is outdone in favor of an understanding of the eventual” (36). As with Jameson, object is process in a continuity of interruptions. In other words, the name “language” “does not refer back nostalgically to some kind of primordial identity that one might attempt to restore, reducing the Babelesque linguistic and historic dispersion to the point of abolishing it” (37). Language as such necessarily entails irreducible multiplicity coordinated through translation. Intrinsic to this multilevel translation process is a certain reserve and renunciation, “an a priori betrayal”; for “the wellspring of the translatable . . . is the untranslatability at the core of the translatable, and that is the incommunicable” (33).

The second essay, “Four Suggestions about Experience, History, and Facticity in the Thought of Walter Benjamin” (written in 1993 and 1995), originally served as an introduction to Oyarzun's translation of “On the Concept of History” and related texts. (The “four suggestions” refer to the four sections of Oyarzun's essay.) Like Jameson, Oyarzun believes that Benjamin—with “his completely singular procedure within philosophy”—finds “the crucial problem [to be] concentrated in the question of experience” (41, 44). Benjamin's language-theoretical critique of reason greatly expands the concept of experience. Citing Aristotle's definition of experience (empeiria) as knowledge of singulars, Oyarzun specifies the determining traits of the inherited concept of experience as singularity, unforeseeability, and testimoniality. In the traditional exegesis of this inherited concept, these traits are subordinated to reifying ideas of presence and identity, ideas with which Benjamin (particularly in the wake of Friedrich Nietzsche's critique) fundamentally breaks. Underscoring “the dislocating power of experience and . . . the indelible character of death at its core” (48)—that is, the historicity of all facticity—Benjamin conceives experience in terms of the structure of awakening. This means, first of all, that experience presupposes a “radical alterity as that which has irrevocably determined me while it was withdrawing from the capital of my present knowing” (50). Ultimately at issue in this conception of experience, we've seen, is historical awakening both to and from that dream we name the past. In Oyarzun's formulation of this fundamental paradox: “The past remains pending” (61). Benjamin, then, seeks “to build the concept of history on the fragile, deferred and deferring efficacy of the past” (69). The “pledge of presence is determined by what is past. . . . This determination opens in the present a difference that constitutes it” (59–60). The integrated presence of the past is the condition for the possibility of new experience. Thus, in its educative tenor, Benjamin's historical dialectics⁹ evinces “an ineradicable political element” as well as a theological intensity—“not a theology absorbed in the speculative contemplation of eternal divinity, but rather one that sinks deep into history,” theology in quotation marks (65, 54, 55).¹⁰ It is a procedure different, as Oyarzun explains at the essay's conclusion, from both the deductive idealism of progressivism and the inductive positivism of historicism, both of which share the conception of a homogeneous continuum of time, as opposed to Benjamin's thickened, dialectically intertwined time (verschränkte Zeit).¹¹

The third essay, “Narration and Justice” (2008), originally introducing Oyarzun's translation of “The Storyteller,” poses anew the question of experience and its putative decay. It makes clear at the outset that Benjamin is concerned with storytelling not primarily as a literary genre but as a social praxis; what interests him here is not so much aesthetic quality as ethical significance. Storytelling is inspired, Oyarzun argues, by a vocation for justice. This is not to dismiss the fundamental generic opposition between story and novel at the center of Benjamin's essay; Oyarzun writes suggestively about the novelist's rupture with oral tradition and with the voice of the anonymous storyteller, itself echoing the ever-renewed, death-infused “voice of nature” (Benjamin 2002a: 159; quoted in Oyarzun, p. 99). The technological mediation of communication (starting with the printing press)¹² occasions a growing distance from immediate experience and a deepening perplexity:

Like Jameson (see Benjamin Files, pp. 100–101), Oyarzun is ultimately critical of Benjamin's treatment of the novel, suggesting that his analysis “may not do justice to the specificity of the novel precisely with respect to experience” or to “the multiple possibilities that the novel continues to bear within itself” (87). Moreover, the childlike “And then?” that, according to Benjamin, arises exclusively at the conclusion of a story surely appertains in some cases to the novel as well, despite its will to closure (95). Oyarzun elaborates Benjamin's distinction between novel and story by referring to “the organic principles of storytelling” and to its “aural” or auratic character (82, 85), features tied to the preindustrial artisanal community that Benjamin opposes to the individualized consumption of the novel. The ancestral magic of storytelling is atmospheric. It is a communal power, bestowing for the moment of dilated time a “strange anonymity” (99) on both tale and teller; storytelling is “surrounded by a halo of archaism, as if it were about a story that has been and will be told throughout time forever” (89). “The magic of storytelling responds to an urge . . . to renew” (96). Such magic is not a blinding spell, in other words, but the opening of a still viable “aural depth”: “This depth is perhaps responsible for all the folds in Benjamin's conceptual apparatus. It can be considered both the inextinguishable remnant of magic and the indelible portent of redemption. It is the unforgettable. . . . In its most intimate gesture, storytelling would be the prophecy of the return of the unforgettable” (102). Oyarzun alludes to Benjamin's invocation of the chronicler as one for whom nothing that has ever happened should be lost to history. The storyteller likewise acts as advocate (Benjamin's word is Fürsprecher) of the creature, striving to do justice to the creature by literally and figuratively speaking for it—and, we recall, everything in its singularity is a creature. “In storytelling the creature is . . . given room to play—in the space of language—so that storytelling can make the irreplaceable traits of its individuality resonate. . . . Storytelling's justice is nothing but care for the creature” (106). Doing justice is here tantamount to stewardship, a kind of saving or rescue, Rettung. Understood nonlegalistically as both the dismantling of dogma and the cultivation of worldly attentiveness,¹³ it can be a key not only to the ethical significance of storytelling but to Benjamin's whole unfinishable literary-philosophical project.

Notes

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