Walter Benjamin and the Critique of Political Economy - (Critical Theory and the Critique of Society) by Duy Lap Nguyen (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Exploring the connections between Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history and a Marxian Critique of Political Economy, Duy Lap Nguyen analyses Benjamin's early writings and their development into a distinct understanding of historical materialism.

Benjamin's historically materialist conception of history is shown to be characterised by a focus on the religion of capitalism, the mythology of the state, and messianic time. Revealing these factors, Nguyen joins up Benjamin's philosophical critique of the Kantian conception of history, alongside the historical trajectory of capitalism he subscribed to. Influenced by the theory of fascism outlined by German Marxist theorist Karl Korsch, we see how Benjamin's own theory of revolution and redemption in capitalist society developed into a sophisticated critique.

Essential to Benjamin's materialist critique was a recognition of the fallibility of the Enlightenment notion of progress, as well as the need to overturn the political and economic catastrophes which enable capitalism and fascism to thrive. In mapping the exact course of Benjamin's critical historical materialism, Nguyen fully explicates the unique contribution he made to western Marxism.

Review Quotes

"Nguyen's historically rich commentary on Benjamin ... is most notable for the detail with which it addresses Benjamin's engagement with the philosophical context of the early twentieth century." --Marx and Philosophy Review of Books

"In Water Benjamin and the Critique of Political Economy, Duy Lap Nguyen shows how Benjamin in his later work appropriates a Marx unsuspected by orthodox Marxists, one whose conception of historical time is no less messianic than dialectical. Through wide-ranging and detailed analyses, he demonstrates the fundamental consistency of this new, allegorically framed historical materialism in Benjamin with the earlier metaphysical anarchism that is understood to culminate in the 1928 Trauerspiel book." --Howard Eiland, Lecturer in Literature (retired), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA [preferred by-line: Howard Eiland, co-author of Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life]

"In a challenge to the dualism, sustained by many scholars and intellectual historians, opposing an earlier, pre-Marxist and Neo-Kantian Benjamin to the later, militantly anti-fascist but unorthodox historical materialist, Duy Lap Nguyen here argues the case for an ultimate, authorial will to synthesis, albeit one decisively mediated by Benjamin's often startlingly contemporary understanding of Capital and Marx's mature critique of political economy. In this way he comes as close as anyone has to presenting us with a Benjaminian opus adequate to the contemporary, acute crisis of capitalism. Along the way, Nguyen likewise educates both new and veteran students of Benjamin with careful and often novel interpretations of most of the major and many of the author's lesser-known works and, for example, recapitulates for explanatory as well as critical purposes the nineteenth century neo-Kantianism of now often forgotten philosophical and political sources of influence and authority (e.g., the Marburg School) over the revisionist European Social Democracy against which not only Benjamin but contemporaries such as Lukács and Ernst Bloch were at pains to redefine themselves, thereby helping to inaugurate modern 'western Marxism' in the process. This is a work of careful and often exhaustive scholarship." --Neil Larsen, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, University of California Davis, USA

About the Author