Walter Benjamin & Bertolt Brecht: Story of a Friendship?
Event Date: 6 November 2009
10am – 5pm Room B36 followed by book launch and drinks in Room B04
The English translation of Erdmut Wizisla’s formidable study Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship is published this Autumn by Libris. No-one has a better view of the much disputed relationship between these two figures than Erdmut Wizisla, director of Berlin’s Benjamin and Brecht Archive. Greeting the German edition, Momme Brodersen spoke for many when he wrote: ‘If this book had appeared decades ago, it would have terminated an unproductive debate in one fell swoop: that of the influence – be it fruitful, be it disastrous – of probably the most significant German playwright and poet of the 20th century, Bertolt Brecht, on probably the most significant critic of his day, Walter Benjamin’. Our conference celebrates the book’s publication and explores the ways in which Wizisla’s study augments, challenges or re-constellates previous analyses (most notably the one emanating from that other ‘Story of a Friendship’, published in English in 1982, by Gershom Scholem).
The conference gathers together a number of leading scholars from across the Humanities, including:
Erdmut Wizisla (Berlin), Peter Thompson (Sheffield), Barbara Engh (Leeds), Tony Phelan (Oxford), Esther Leslie (Birkbeck), Chryssoula Kambas (Osnabrück).
Erdmut Wizisla will present and discuss the new edition of Walter Benjamin’s Collected Works – a vast undertaking of re-ordering, re-editing, re-annotating and revealing new materials – whose twenty-one volumes will appear over the course of the next decade.
Programme:
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Welcome and Opening words .
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Peter Thompson (Sheffield) Brecht, Benjamin and the Crisis of Modernity PLAY
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Chryssoula Kambas (Osnabruck) From West to East: An External Examiner Remembers PLAY
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Barbara Engh (Leeds) Friendship and Clang Figures PLAY
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Erdmut Wizisla (Berlin) The Benjamin Archive and the New German Benjamin Edition PLAY
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Tony Phelan (Oxford) Brecht on Benjamin: On the Philosophy of History PLAY
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Esther Leslie Constellations and Comradeship PLAY
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Final Questions and Close .
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Just to answer again the question about the difficulty of raising the difference between transcendence and the transcendental in Bloch and Kant I found the following today in a response by Zizek to Badiou. IN it he referes back, as he often does to Stephen King and the idea of the undead. He states: ‘ my idea is that this undead is the Kantian transcendental subject. It is non-human precisely in this sense; non-human not in the sense of the animalistic, but rather as the excessive dimension of the human itself. Seen in this way, there is something unique in that which Kant names the dimension of the transcendental’ (Badiou and Zizek Pjhilosphy in the Present, Polity 2009, pp. 78-79). Though it is kind of turned upside down, I think this is an interesting complement to what I was saying about Benjamin and Bloch in that the idea of an undead of the transcendental can also be seen as the not yet of the transcendental. It is something which emerges from but which is in excess to the human, is non-human and yet is a product of the human and, in many ways, can be seen as the future of the human. If we put a positive spin on this idea then the undead could also be termed the not-yet living. Rather than a descent of man into death via a transitional and transformative dimension we could actually see it as a stage in the process of human becoming, in the ascent of the human into the non-human, into that state of human becoming which promises to go beyond what is now understood as human. And yet that transcendence is not something out there, beyond the human but immanent, contained within the human as latent transcendence.