The Philology of Life: Walter Benjamin's Critical Program by Kevin McLaughlin (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Philology of Life: Walter Benjamin's Critical Program by Kevin McLaughlin Esther Leslie The Philology of Life: Walter Benjamin's Critical Program. By Kevin McLaughlin. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023. Pp. iv + 208. Paper $32.00. ISBN 9781531501693. This book is a concentrated contribution to the diverse field of Walter Benjamin studies, a crowded field but one that endlessly offers unploughed vistas, lending credence to Benjamin's own concern with the unfurling afterlife of works. Kevin McLaughlin's new study is about the life of creative work and its relation to life in general, as theorized by Benjamin in the early part of his writerly career, through essays written at a point when he was still a student under the umbrella of the university. Across three chapters, McLaughlin's study focuses on Benjamin's essay on two poems by Friedrich Hölderlin, "Timidity" and "The Poet's Courage," written around the start of World War I; "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism," Benjamin's PhD dissertation, submitted in 1919; and the long essay "Goethe's Elective Affinities," written around 1924, just before Benjamin was compelled to strike out as an independent scholar. These writings by Benjamin are compact, difficult works in which are developed and extended critical vocabularies of truth, myth, the poeticized, inner form and content, and so on. McLaughlin's central interest is in the ways in which the critical works initiate discussions of what he conceives of as a specifically Benjaminian take on the idea of the Book of Life. This is worked through in relation to a concept of densely layered textures in language, which evokes a complex notion of Geschichte (history or story), understood critically through its core embedded word Schicht or layer. McLaughlin's study undertakes an unpicking of terms, focusing on questions that revolve, in complex and unpredictable ways, around language. This is unsurprising. As well as being a renowned commentator and critic of Benjamin's contribution, McLaughlin is also one of the translators of Benjamin's Arcades Project. He has stared deeply into words, divining in them panoplies of connotation and resonance. Under investigation here is the meaning of the word philology, or more [End Page 501] broadly, the resources of the practice of philology for opening texts up to historical understanding, which means an opening up to lived life. Equally under examination are the caverns of meaning in the small word life and the ways in which it multiplies and repeatedly extends in Benjamin's work as Lebenden, Erdleben, Fortleben, and so on. How to translate these terms is put under pressure here: life, living, life on Earth, and continuing life might be only some ways of rendering the conceptual heft of these terms in English. To be attentive to resonances is to be alert to what theoretical insights are carried across in translations. A compound word used by Benjamin lends the book its title: Lebensphilologie. McLaughlin asks if this word has ever been translated into English. For him, to conceptualize what goes under its cover is to understand the special contribution of its author. The book's subtitle refers to Walter Benjamin's critical program, which is to be understood as the philology of life. Benjamin is a critic, and he developed in this period, so the argument goes, a programmatic sense of the capacities of criticism, which underpins and courses through the rest of his life as a critic. McLaughlin briefly outlines some details of the significance of criticism in Benjamin's later life in the coda. For Benjamin, as McLaughlin underlines, critical activity means exploring literature as a resource for conceptualizing what life has been, becomes, and might be. This involves understanding the inheritance of human and cultural sciences as passed down in religious thinking, but which also found their way into human and cultural science. It is from these contexts that a sense of life approached as a book is gleaned. In the Biblical version of this image, the Book of Life has written within it the names of those who will be saved. Benjamin, we are told, is more interested in saving what has not been written or in squeezing new...