ABSTRACT
Walter Benjamin, perhaps the greatest literary critic of his age, described himself in 1931 ‘like one who keeps afloat on a shipwreck by climbing to the top of a mast that is already crumbling’. Benjamin’s commitment to this ideology was however highly ambiguous and politically half-hearted, so that his belated rehabilitation by the New Left may have obscured as much as it has revealed. Benjamin’s devotion to the spiritual, the central importance to him of the religious sphere, and his belief in the transcausal connection of things and their rootedness in God, emerge clearly from Gershom Scholem’s account. In the correspondence from the spring of 1931, enclosed in the appendix to his book, Scholem shrewdly exposes the self-deception behind much of Benjamin’s Marxist theorizing, the ‘astonishing incompatibility’ between his ‘real and pretended modes of thought’. Scholem’s account documents this inner tension between metaphysics and materialism and throws a new light on the personal factors which shaped Benjamin’s intellectual development.
