Constellation: Nietzsche /Benjamin

This study is a particular realization of the relation between Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Nietzsche. An initial consideration of Nietzsche's role in the juvenile constellation of Benjamin's concerns up to the catastrophic suicide of Benjamin's friend Fritz Heinle is followed by four investigations of the mature relationship. The first of these considers Nietzsche's role in Benjamin's theory of tragedy as he articulates it in his 1927 treatise Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. Though Benjamin explicitly rejects the tragic theory in Nietzsche's Geburt der Tragodie, his discussion maintains an implicit sympathy with the radically skeptical potential of that book. Benjamin's and Nietzsche's complicity in denying that the present has the capacity to embody tragic meaning leads to a redefinition of philology in its relation to science and art. This redefined philology, outside the boundaries of discipline, is the subject of the second investigation. Benjamin's experimental counterpart to the Trauerspiel book, Einbahnstrasse , is read in the context of the emergence from Nietzsche's notebooks of the Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen and their subsequent collapse in the fragments of the unfinishable essay "Wir Philologen." The investigation concludes by identifying the asyndeton in Nietzsche's title Menschliches, Allzumenschliches with a vexed insistence on the relevance of specificity that conditions both Nietzsche and Benjamin. The third investigation traces Benjamin's subtle collaboration with Nietzsche through the 1930s, deriving a political relevance from the tension between Wanderer and Shadow by reading it in the context of Benjamin's discussion of Karl Kraus. What was tragic rupture and then anti-humanist asyndeton is here considered as a caesura in history itself, one that condemns the present in the name of a transformed future. The fourth investigation begins to explore the revolutionary path to that future, by considering Nietzsche's anticipatory posture as it reflects Benjamin's revolutionary notion of happiness.