The space of the essay in the philosophyof the young Walter Benjamin

Abstract

The following paper aims to investigate how the form of Walter Benjamin’s essays is related to his youth thesis concerning language and the differing forms of philosophical exposition, pointing how the essay can be thought as a form that gathers image fragments, displaying them in a manner that simultaneously organizes and keeps them in constant tension. With this goal in mind, we return to Benjamin’s theory of language as it is presented in his 1916 essay On Language as Such and on the Language of Man and in The Task of the Translator from 1921, observing how the German author identifies a self-referential character in language, presented by the idea of medium. This self-referentiality is also present in his doctorate thesis The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism, in which the activity of critique is thought as a process of self-reflection from the work of art. In these works, Benjamin presents a form of thinking through fragments, that does not reduce them to a preestablished totality, but organizes them in an attempt to express another form of relation with the truth birthed by the interaction of the fragments with themselves. As a form that breaks apart from the temporal linearity, the essay operates by interrupting and tensioning in a manner that relates to a spatial logic, illustrated by the idea of the constellation.