By James Martel
In Textual Conspiracies, James R. Martel applies the literary, theological, and philosophical insights of Walter Benjamin to the query of politics and the challenge of the modern left. in the course of the lens of Benjamin's theories, as encouraged via Kafka, of the fetishization of political symbols and symptoms, Martel seems on the ways that quite a few political and literary texts "speak" to one another around the gulf of time and house, thereby making a "textual conspiracy" that destabilizes grand narratives of strength and authority and makes the narratives of other political groups extra apparent.However, in line with Benjamin's insistence that even he's complicit with the fetishism that he battles, Martel decentralizes Benjamin's place because the key theorist for this conspiracy and contextualizes Benjamin in what he calls a "constellation" of pairs of thinkers and writers all through background, together with Alexis de Tocqueville and Edgar Allen Poe, Hannah Arendt and Federico García Lorca, and Frantz Fanon and Assia Djebar.
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Additional resources for Textual Conspiracies: Walter Benjamin, Idolatry, and Political Theory
Sample text
For Benjamin, allegory is an evil, satanic practice, a product of the fall. He writes: “Evil . . ”53 Such a claim might seem baf›ing to a reader who comes to understand that for Benjamin the practice of commodity fetishism is itself the “evil” that allegory serves to resist. Yet for Benjamin, as we have already seen, there is no such thing as untainted or innocent knowledge. Insofar as allegory is a form of knowledge, it too is “evil” and satanic, even as it also crucial in resisting Satan’s effects in the world.
33 The pronoun in the second sentence,“Sie,” could refer to both Baudelaire and the allegories as being in on the secret, but it suggests a mixing of human and nonhuman elements together (exactly the ambivalence that the brings up this question in the ‹rst place) that is unusual in German. Without some additional clari‹cation, which Benjamin does not provide, “Sie” seems to refer only to the allegories themselves, not so much eliminating Baudelaire’s subjectivity as grammatically edging him out of the sentence.
In fact drunkenness and irresolution only provide an opportunity for conspiracy to occur, and, as Machiavelli would say, opportunity must be seized in order for it to become effective. Accordingly, in addition to his appreciation of the value of failure, Benjamin provides a strategy for resistance, for rendering failure and compromise into a means for achieving nonintentionality. I call this Benjamin’s strategy of the antidote. At various points, Benjamin employs the term “antidote” to describe his strategy for resistance.