《Benjamin's -abilities》

“There is no world of thought that is not a world of language,” Walter Benjamin remarked, “and one only sees in the world what is preconditioned by language.” In this book, Samuel Weber, a leading theorist on literature and media, reveals a new and productive aspect of Benjamin’s thought by focusing on a little-discussed stylistic trait in his formulation of concepts.

Weber’s focus is the critical suffix “-ability” that Benjamin so tellingly deploys in his work. The “-ability” (-barkeit, in German) of concepts and literary forms traverses the whole of Benjamin’s oeuvre, from “impartibility” and “criticizability” through the well-known formulations of “citability,” “translatability,” and, most famously, the “reproducibility” of “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Nouns formed with this suffix, Weber points out, refer to a possibility or potentiality, to a capacity rather than an existing reality. This insight allows for a consistent and enlightening reading of Benjamin’s writings.

Weber first situates Benjamin’s engagement with the “-ability” of various concepts in the context of his entire corpus and in relation to the philosophical tradition, from Kant to Derrida. Subsequent chapters deepen the implications of the use of this suffix in a wide variety of contexts, including Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book, his relation to Carl Schmitt, and a reading of Wagner’s Ring. The result is an illuminating perspective on Benjamin’s thought by way of his language—and one of the most penetrating and comprehensive accounts of Benjamin’s work ever written.

(20080331)

From Publishers Weekly

In this demanding book, Weber (Theatricality as Medium) analyzes Benjaminian theory and its potential, presenting a close reading of Walter Benjamin at his most energetic and complex. Focusing on the critic's favorite suffix, -abilities (invoked in his discussions of communicability, iterability, impartability, knowability and reproducibility), the author explores Benjamin's contention that just because something is communicable does not mean it is communicated; therefore, that sense of potential (as opposed to the activity itself) is where serious examination ought to begin. The book is not meant to be easy going and demands prior understanding of theory and critical and philosophical jargon to fully mine its gems—such as when Weber deftly extends Benjamin's seminal work on media to the present time and reasserts Benjamin's mastery of using theater as both metaphor and object of study. An essay on detail (the detail remains, even today, the uneasy residence that God is condemned by language to share with the Devil) provides lighter entertainment. Through Benjamin, Weber illuminates what happens between what is written and what is read and the true impossibility of defining any sort of straight line between those two points. (May)

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