Melancholy and Praxis: Retrieving a (more) radical Benjamin (original) (raw)

Walter Benjamin’s analysis of melancholy, especially its early appearance in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, lends itself to a theological interpretation of Benjamin in which the moment of redemption is always forever far away. In such an analysis melancholy becomes a concept that illuminates a theory of language or being and becomes untethered from more immediate and obvious revolutionary activity. Such readings can be found in Gershom Scholem and Illit Ferber. Scholem himself goes so far as to proclaim this interpretation is evidenced by Benjamin’s final writing, On the Concept of History and Benjamin’s “Melancholic Angel”. However, I believe that such an interpretation misunderstands Benjamin’s use of melancholy and thus obscures Benjamin’s revolutionary commitments. Instead I propose that precisely in as strange and unrevolutionary a concept as melancholia – unrevolutionary in its fixation on the past, its sense of hopelessness, etc, etc – Benjamin finds a revolutionary potential. To demonstrate this, I re-examine Benjamin’s reading of Franz Kafka and the fact then even in the melancholic ruins of Kafka’s world he finds hope. In the final section of my paper I return to Benjamin’s On the Concept of History and show that when it is read alongside The Paralipomena to On the Concept of History and with a proper grasp of Benjamin’s understanding of melancholia, we see – contra Scholem - that Benjamin’s revolutionary commitments remained clear even at the end of his career.