Go Figure: Fredric Jameson on Walter Benjamin

Review of The Benjamin Files, by Fredric Jameson (London and New York: Verso, 2020. Pp. xi, 262).

Martin Jay

Fredric Jameson's new book, The Benjamin Files, gives him an opportunity to revisit a figure he initially discussed more than fifty years ago. At that time, he lamented what he saw as Walter Benjamin's melancholic resignation at the failure of his redemptive hopes; now, he wants to affirm the future-oriented implications of Benjamin's work as coming from a “time-traveler from some messianic future.” Focusing on theological strains in Benjamin's thinking, Jameson takes seriously Benjamin's Adamic view of a lost “language as such,” his nostalgia for a world of cosmic correspondences, and his adoption of the idea of apocatastasis—the redemption of all souls in the Final Judgment—and tries to integrate them with his historical materialist reading of history. That reading, Jameson avers, depends on a unified notion of history as a meaningful narrative, which, to be sure, is not equivalent to complacent notions of progress. But how one can reconcile Benjamin's advocacy of disrupting narratives of any kind and his spatialization of our relation to the past through synchronic “dialectical images” with a faith in a totalizing narrative of redemption is not clear. Jameson tacitly admits the difficulty when he falls back on Alain Badiou's notion of “fidelity to the event” and Erich Auerbach's ideas about figural iteration, which depend on a faith that past interruptions in conventional historical narratives, even failed attempts at revolution, foretell their completion in the future. As a result, it is hard not to be skeptical that the wind of world history is, despite all indications to the contrary, blowing us toward the restoration of cosmic harmonies, an Adamic “language as such,” and the universal salvation called apocatastasis.