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Article: The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin: 1910-1940.
- Article from:
- Artforum International
- Article date:
- November 1, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 Artforum International Magazine, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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In his Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, Gershom Scholem insisted that Benjamin believed in God, but a God who "is the unattainable center of a system of symbols intended to remove Him from everything concrete and everything symbolic as well." As with Franz Kafka, that is perfectly consonant with the God of a cabala more gnostic than Neoplatonist. Perhaps that was why Benjamin thought that he (and Kafka) had "failed," since the Alien or Stranger God of gnosis necessarily resists all commentary. There are many uses to this new edition of Benjamin's letters, including the opening up again of the old puzzle of the supposed division in Benjamin between Marxist and ...