Walter Benjamin and the Idea of Natural History. by EliFriendlander Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2024, <scp>ISBN</scp>: 9781503636552

In Walter Benjamin and the Idea of Natural History, Eli Friedlander defends two general positions: he argues that Benjamin's writing is a unified, rather than a heterogenous corpus, and he claims that Benjamin delivers one of ‘the most urgently pertinent philosophical elaborations of the natural in the human’ (2). The two positions are seemingly combined in Friedlander's statement of the aim of his book, which is ‘to show the continuity, rigor, and inner logic of Benjamin's thought on [the] fundamental theme [of natural history]’ (2). His previous book on Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait, had argued that Benjamin's writings constituted ‘a unique configuration of philosophy…with a deep-seated commitment to engage the philosophical tradition.’ In that frame, Friedlander had mentioned natural history as a ‘rich and complex issue in Benjamin's writings’, which ‘touches upon such central questions as humanity's mode of facing the recurring burden of myth’.1 Friedlander's new book similarly defends the view that Benjamin's writing is properly examined in a philosophical frame, although there is less emphasis on its connections to the philosophical tradition. The focus falls instead on the examination of Benjamin's treatment of natural history, a topic mentioned only in passing in the earlier work. Nonetheless, Friedlander's analysis of natural history returns to many of the themes prominent in the earlier work (such as corporeality, language, image, dream and myth), which makes this book a companion to his earlier study. The new book consists of thirteen chapters, which are organised into five parts: Nature in Language, Life and Fate, Body and Corporeality, Primal History and The Image of the Contingent. I will make some general points about the general approach before briefly describing each of these parts. Friedlander's choice of words such as ‘continuity, rigor and logic’ to present the book's aim, reinforce the classification he makes of Benjamin as a ‘philosopher’ rather than a ‘critic’. Among others, the classification intends to lift the bar for Benjamin commentary, which can fall prey to hagiographic commentary rather than analysis. In contrast to commentators who treat Benjamin's writing like sacred texts and who work hard to bring the infinite depths they suppose these texts to possess onto the surface of their commentaries, Friedlander's commentary is a model of conceptual precision. Still, one could ask if the classification ‘philosophical’ can better contain the interpretative difficulties raised by Benjamin's writing than other labels. Perhaps the labels different readers choose for it are a handy way to understand how a body of work so singular, one often considered unclassifiable, is being interpreted. The mirror between the preferred classification of the writing and the approach of the commentator is true of Friedlander's book. Adopting a philosophical approach, Friedlander identifies philosophical concepts and themes in the writing. However, it is crucial to qualify this point. Friedlander's approach involves a transformation of what may usually be understood as philosophical. The analysis in the book proceeds through reconstructive exegesis and commentary, anchored in the notion of the ‘philosophical unity’ of Benjamin's writing. The Introduction to the book raises some of the potential difficulties with the approach. For instance, Friedlander is aware of the objection that the line between what he brings to Benjamin's writing by way of reconstructive exegesis and what he finds in it may blur at points. The ‘philosophical unity’ he aims to present could, he writes, seem to be a ‘speculative reconstruction’ which ‘was never elaborated in that way in the corpus of [Benjamin's] writings.’ He continues; ‘[n]o doubt my sense of the unity of Benjamin's thought is informed by other work I have done, primarily on Wittgenstein and Schelling. Yet here I rarely stray from Benjamin's texts. I do not take myself to be ‘filling in the blanks,’ as it were, with ideas of my own. Every insight, every advance of understanding, is the result of a close and patient reading of Benjamin. I think of the chapters of this book as a series of commentaries: commentary need not forego new insight’ (9). Anticipating the objection that his commentaries may stray too far in the direction of ‘invention’, Friedlander insists rather that his effort is directed toward ‘translat[ing] Benjamin's …. highly concentrated language in the most analytical and precise way of which I am capable’ (10). There is another sense in which Friedlander's work departs from some of the conventions of philosophical analysis. Friedlander's philosophical treatment clarifies difficult aspects of Benjamin's writing that other interpretations skirt past, but the polemic against other interpreters he teases can feel like a shadow play, since their views are not considered in any detail, and proponents of unsatisfactory approaches are not named. This is noticeable in the Introduction of the book when the author writes that: ‘[s]ome [commentators] would go so far as to say that Benjamin's writing not only lacks the consistency of a weighty philosophical treatise but tries to make inconsistency and contradiction into a virtue’ (9). There is no citation or further discussion to support this view of the scholarship, despite the aim to deliver a ‘transformation…. of received views of Benjamin.’ One of the features of the hagiographic style of commentary is that Benjamin's writings are never criticised. As I noted above, Friedlander does not deliver hagiographic, but analytical commentary. In my view, part of such an analytical approach should be to point out problems in Benjamin's writing. I imagine that there are aspects of Benjamin's writing that are criticisable. However, this does not happen. For instance, Friedlander's generous view of continuity, which colours every aspect of his analysis, underplays the significance of the break in Benjamin's corpus that most commentators generally mark as occurring around 1925. A final point on the distinctive approach of this book is that the definition of ‘natural history’ proposed is a fusion of Benjamin's ideas and Friedlander's. The analysis of this idea proceeds in a manner that is not always anchored in citations from Benjamin's texts, but through Friedlander's paraphrased understanding of Benjamin's meaning. Indeed, Friedlander explains his method as resisting the temptation to quote since ‘[q]oting that parades as explanation can only lead to repeating formulas rather than reaching any deeper understanding. We need to overcome the tendency to hold to Benjamin's words and formulations as though they constitute an explanatory ground’ (9). Given this approach it is not surprising that the meaning of the term ‘natural history’ is rendered differently across the book. At its simplest, natural history is the ‘natural in the human’ (2), which means that ‘[w]e do not relate to…. nature from the outside’ (33). Instead, ‘[h]uman beings have the capacity to transform… nature, which expresses itself intensively in their existence’ (33). Friedlander frames the question of how the natural relates to the human as ‘the question of the actualization of natural life in meaning’ (3). This formulation has a Cavellian orientation in the reference to ‘meaning’ that seems closer to the idiom of Friedlander's thinking than Benjamin's. A few pages later, Friedlander deploys phrasing nearer to Benjamin's, when he writes, ‘identity is not a given but is to be actualized’ (6). Combining these formulations, ‘natural history’ is the name, according to Friedlander, for Benjamin's exploration of how human life actualises nature. It concerns the way nature expresses itself ‘in a variety of human practices, in the life of the individual as well as in the social form of life and in different configurations at different stages of history’ (33). The chapters of the book each tackle different aspects of how human life actualizes the natural, and this variation in context goes part way to explain why the term is rendered in slightly different ways throughout. Some key modes of actualisation include language, artistic form, love, technology, fate and violence. Friedlander's selection of these modes gives the reader a comprehensive view of some recurring, important themes in Benjamin's writing from the perspective of the idea of natural history, as well as the experience of viewing the topic of natural history through a conceptual array akin to a multi-coloured kaleidoscope. If one were to organise this book according to the dark and light colours of the spectrum, fate and violence would be modes of actualization that translate or express nature as a determining force, whereas love, artistic form, technology and language would be modes that provide occasions for its creative transformation. The first part of the book, ‘Nature in Language’, consists of four chapters that cover some of Benjamin's key early texts, notably the Essay on Language, Goethe's Elective Affinities, the Critique of Violence and the book on the Trauerspiel, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. In his discussion of these texts, Friedlander establishes important concepts for the chapters that follow. Benjamin's 1916 letter ‘On Language as such and on the Language of Man’, was an essay that Benjamin did not intend for publication. In it, Benjamin draws on the Biblical book of Genesis to develop his distinctively theological conception of language. He argues that God's creative word is the proper basis for all linguistic theory, and outlines a descending scale of value in which God's creative word brings the world into being; man's naming language has, through its relation to God's word, a cognitive relation to the essence of what it names; and bourgeois language is without either knowledge (naming language) or truth (God's creative word). In the mode of its relation to nature through merely arbitrary conventions, bourgeois language typifies an artificial and external relation to nature. Friedlander's commentary on this early Essay downplays its theological content, and emphasises both the creativity of human life in the activity of naming and the way that naming establishes the communicability of what is so named. Using this perspective, Friedlander considers ‘human language [as] the medium of actualization of the communication of created nature’ (33). He draws on the discussion of the Fall in Benjamin's essay, to argue that the ‘fall of man from his task of naming nature is the abandonment of nature’ with the consequence that nature ‘remains in its unfulfilled state’ (32). He thus proposes ‘natural history’ as an intensive and creative involvement between humans and nature; when human language communicates nature it also transforms, actualizes and fulfils nature. The conception of language developed in the first part is important background for the rest of the book. Although Friedlander describes his book as a ‘series of commentaries’, the component parts of the series build incrementally on each other. For instance, in the second part of the book, the titular terms of ‘Life and Fate’ are fundamental themes of the early texts treated in the first part of Friedlander's book, such as ‘Goethe's Elective Affinities’ and the ‘Critique of Violence’. These texts are here revisited in detail, alongside the essay ‘Fate and Character’. One of the highlights in this part of the book is Friedlander's treatment of the complex 1921 essay, ‘Goethe's Elective Affinities’, which is one of the most impressive and difficult works of Benjamin's career. Benjamin uses the novella about the young lovers in Goethe's novel as a critical perspective on both the novel (art) as well as its author (life). Art and life are understood in the book as different modes of ‘forms of life’. Across the three chapters of this part of the book, Friedlander considers how ‘“fate” is not a concept attributable to the life of plants or animals, and yet it is internally related to … the way life is in the human form of life’ (87). The theme of natural history is examined here primarily in terms of redemption. Friedlander contends that in the state of fulfilment one concentrates and abbreviates ‘what we already have’. It is this ‘concentration and miniaturization’ of a life that are the ‘key to the reversal from myth to redemption.’ Friedlander relates Benjamin's contrast in the Elective Affinities essay between choice, which is natural, and the decision, which is transcendent, to the distinction between ‘lived experience (Erlebnis)’ and ‘the unity and consistency of one's life experience (here Erfahrung)’ (107). The lover in the novella who dives into the dangerous current to rescue his beloved is described by Benjamin as staking everything on this moment of decision. For Friedlander, this lover dramatizes ‘what it means to act from that unity of life, by staking one's happiness on a moment in which all is risked’ (107). ‘Body and Corporeality’ is the part of the book devoted to one of the key themes of Friedlander's earlier book on Benjamin. In this third part, two chapters consider the place of the body in Benjamin's conceptions of language and action. In his discussion of Benjamin's ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ Friedlander addresses a potential objection to his claim of continuity across the corpus. He asks whether the 1934 essay signals ‘a shift in Benjamin's thought from the theologically oriented to an anthropological conception of language?’ (145). He argues that the essay ‘is essentially an extension and unfolding of the vision of man's actualization of nature in language’ (145) and that no shift of paradigm is involved. Noting that the problem of similarity is tackled in earlier works, he argues that what the 1934 essay adds to these is a foregrounding of ‘how corporeality belongs to meaning’ (145). Like the first part of the book, then, Friedlander's focus is on the transformative relation to nature that (corporeal) language facilitates. In ‘Primal History’, Friedlander returns to another topic central to his earlier study, Benjamin's Arcades Project. Across the three chapters of this fourth part, Friedlander discusses, in addition to the Arcades, Benjamin's writing on Proust, his famous essay on the artwork, as well as Benjamin's criticisms of Bergson's vitalism. There are three chapters in this fourth part, which together consider how Benjamin transposes concepts used and understood as relevant to the individual for the analysis of collective phenomena in history, including the concept of the dream. Friedlander examines in addition how collective phenomena such as fashion and technology express and actualise natural history. The final part, the ‘Image of the Contingent’, consists in one chapter of thirty pages entitled ‘Distorted Life’. The discussion in this chapter focuses specifically on the two versions of the exposé of the Arcades Project, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’. Friedlander gives an account of various strands from the preceding chapters through the lens of Benjamin's analysis of the nineteenth century. He intends to show that the dreams and wishes present in the utopian promise of the century are inseparable from ‘the burden and fatal character of myth’ (252). Friedlander uses both the Leibnizian figure of the monad and his own figure of ‘the image of the contingent’ to describe Benjamin's ‘ambition to refract the dimensions of a total form of existence, an abbreviation of the world of ideas – in the surroundings of the nineteenth-century Paris arcades’ (252). The chapter attempts to analyse Benjamin's ‘concrete presentation’ of a ‘form of life’ that preserves its two distinct tributary poles: the most ‘fundamental dimensions’ of the natural history of human life, as well as, on the opposite pole, ‘the most contingent and particular’ actualisation of human life. Perhaps the book's description of Fourier's significance for Benjamin best encapsulates how the Arcades Project relates to Friedlander's parsing of the idea of natural history: ‘Fourier presents us with a fantasy, a vision of utopia, that arises from the struggle to come to terms with the entry of the machine into the human form of life.’ It is not ‘the use of technology as the means for a variety of ends (the bourgeois conception)’ that Fourier presents. Rather, he ‘points to a far deeper transformation of humanity that incorporates technology into its corporeal existence. The incorporation of technology transforms the image of man and of man's relation to nature’ (255). This book represents an important contribution to the new wave of Benjamin scholarship, first advanced in Friedlander's masterful Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait. This wave of scholarship wrests Benjamin's difficult and fascinating writing away from its capture by Benjamin-hagiographers. Using interpretative reconstruction and exegesis this new wave focuses firmly on the importance of understanding and clarification of the writing through conceptual analysis. The idea of natural history emerges in Friedlander's treatment as an important theme able to bring together otherwise disparate topics and thereby shed light on their place in Benjamin's thinking. I would like to make two brief observations to conclude. First, Benjamin wrote to be cited. In his disciplined resistance to falling under the sway of Benjamin's formulations without undertaking the effort to understand or explain them, Friedlander stands apart from many other Benjamin scholars. Equally, his approach can give the book the flavour of treating Benjamin at a distance, and, as part of this, ascribing formulations and even agendas to Benjamin that seem closer to Friedlander's style of thinking, not least the insistence on the value of philosophy as the key tenor of Benjamin's thinking. The strength of the approach is clear: it sets aside the well-worn path of describing the diverse influences on Benjamin's thinking, and follows instead key conceptual themes. It is worth considering, however, whether problems and inconsistencies in Benjamin's thinking are downplayed when it is shorn of some of its literary or religious connections. The omission of the place of God in the early Language essay seems to be one such instance that allows views closer to those held by Friedlander than Benjamin to be centre stage. In the process inconsistencies across Benjamin's body of writing are cleared away. Second, the view proposed in this book that there is continuity and unity across Benjamin's work is worth careful reflection. Perhaps, despite the theoretically incompatible influences on Benjamin's writing over his career and, a strong scholarly consensus in Benjamin reception of a break in style and concerns around 1925, it is true that the way Benjamin considers and treats issues is consistently philosophical and rigorous. However, if it were argued that the theme of natural history undergoes no significant changes or reversals across the corpus, or that there are no contradictions and inconsistencies that can be identified in it, such a thesis becomes less persuasive and closer to the hagiographic style of commentary that Friedlander's Introduction rightly takes issue with.