The Reckless Mind by Mark Lilla

Author:Mark Lilla
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2016-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

1. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, edited and annotated by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, translated by Manfred Jacobson and Evelyn Jacobson (University of Chicago Press, 1994). The problems with this edition are many, beginning with the fact that owing to contractual constraints the University of Chicago Press was unable to add any critical apparatus, leaving readers in the dark about many oblique references made by the correspondents. Then, for reasons of its own, the Press chose to offer little information about the book’s relation to the German original, and some of that is incorrect. A short “Note on Sources” makes the strange claim that, while the original edition was copyrighted in 1966, it “was published only in 1978.” (In fact, the German original book was published in 1966; the 1978 edition was a revised one.) It then notes that 33 of the 332 letters were originally translated in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932–1940 (Schocken, 1989), without further elaboration. That important volume, however, is the translation of a 1980 German collection that includes a great number of Scholem’s own letters to Benjamin, which were miraculously preserved in an East German archive and only released in 1977. The relation between the Chicago volume and these four other volumes—the two German editions of the Benjamin letters, and the German and English editions of the Scholem–Benjamin correspondence from 1932 to 1940—is left utterly obscure. Nor do we learn that new editions of Benjamin’s letters are currently being prepared in Germany, one of which has now appeared in English translation: Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940 (Harvard University Press, 1999).

2. This letter, not included in the English edition and only incompletely in the Gesammelte Schriften, is translated from the original copy in Jerusalem by Anson Rabinbach in his “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Messianism,” New German Critique (Winter 1985), p. 96.

3. Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981), p. 53.

4. Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis (Schocken, 1976), p. 187.

5. “Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik,” Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. I.1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972–1989), p. 51.

6. The Messianic Idea in Judaism (Schocken, 1971), pp. 10, 321, 21.

7. Unpublished letter of 1937, translated in David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Harvard University Press, second edition, 1982), p. 31.

8. A less-than-satisfactory translation of this work, recently reissued, is The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Verso, 1999).

9. Benjamin cites Schmitt as an inspiration in a curriculum vitae, which is translated in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 2 (Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 77–79. He also made the following cryptic remark in a diary entry of 1930: “Schmitt / Agreement Hate Suspicion” (Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. II.3, p. 1,372). The large literature on the Benjamin–Schmitt relation is summarized and analyzed by Horst Bredekamp in “From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via Thomas Hobbes,” Critical Inquiry (Winter 1999), pp. 247–266.

10. On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, p.

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