Walter Benjamin: An Arcade of Reflections

Too many have written about Walter Benjamin, but too few have written like Benjamin.There are weighty biographies, innumerable academic articles and monographs, meticulous editions which embalm his work, and soon a film starring Colin Firth as this attractive-tragic figure.Alan Wall's short book is remarkably different. It thinks with Benjamin. About the same matters which preoccupied him. In much the same form: compressed but lucid sentences, each worth thoughtful re-reading, a montage of intricately particular but resonant observations, a constant interweaving of unexpected connections. Concerning language, texts, ISIS, John Soane's museum, the experience of cities, postcards, Kafka, commodities, memory, Marx, Freud - not as disparate or dutiful topics but comprising an enmeshed constellation, calmly focussing the continuing dilemmas and aporias of modernity, the politics of our fractured now. Benjamin's own work thus becomes what he termed a dialectical image. Alan Wall is his interlocutor, not merely his commentator.Benjamin tried to write poems and stories as well as the scores of hack reviews and ephemeral newspaper feuilletons which earned him a precarious income. In 'The Author as Producer' he proposed that the revolutionary contribution of a writer is to change the mode of production for writers to come. Alan Wall is already an inventive poet and impressive novelist (try Bless the Thief or the extraordinary Badmouth), which is one reason why Benjamin, had he posthumously reviewed it today, might well have argued that reading Alan Wall's compact new book is probably the closest one can get in English to actually reading Benjamin himself, for us, now.