ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author examines the critical activity of Brecht’s first major commentator, Walter Benjamin, in relation to Brecht’s theatre. Benjamin finds a figure of this dialectic at standstill in Brecht’s aesthetic. The concept of dialectic at a standstill is Benjamin’s unorthodox corrective intervention in dialectical, historicized thinking, and this essay on Brecht’s theatre concludes with a characteristic Benjaminian gesture: a description of the activity of the dialectic that, in its rhetoric, yearns to stage the dialectic for us itself. Benjamin would like us to understand the Verfremdungseffekt as a ‘dialectic at standstill’, a lightning blast of astonishment that brings human thought to a screeching halt, however temporarily. The activity of commodification, the reification of human reality into a universe of goods, is explicitly tied by Benjamin to the theory of the dialectical image. The modelbooks are also incitements to creativity designed for employment within a specific historical situation dominated by ruins, during a period of catastrophe and collapse.
