Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Part Two, trans. David Luke (Oxford University Press, 1994).
For further background on “The Dipped Magic Wand,” see the editors’ introduction to “Against a Masterpiece” in Walter Benjamin, On Goethe, ed. Susan Bernstein, Peter Fenves, and Kevin McLaughlin (Stanford University Press, 2025), 340.
Benjamin, “Against a Masterpiece,” 213.
Originally “die Erfüllung ungesteigerten Menschenhaftigkeit.” The term “Steigerung” is difficult to translate into English, having connotations of intensification, enhancement, and verticalization (as in the process of the transition to bipedalism), but also evoking the process of enlightenment. My decision to translate “ungesteigerten” as “deflated” aims to capture the paradoxical formulation of “the fulfilment” of something which fails to steigern, which fails to intensify. This quote can be found in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6 (Suhrkamp, 1985), 99.
See my article “Unworldliness: A Pathology of Humankind (On Günther Anders’s Negative Anthropology),” e-flux journal, no. 147 (September 2024) →, wherein I make a similar claim about the dispute between Martin Heidegger and Günther Anders. Heidegger poses the relationality of the world as a way to supplement the subject. Anders will deny the human, that Mangelwesen, any relationality to the pseudo-idea of the “world.”
Walter Benjamin, “A Child’s View of Color,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Harvard University Press, 1996).
Carl Schmitt, Dictatorship, trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Polity, 2014).
Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy (Verso, 2006), 49.
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (1922; University of Chicago Press, 2005), 54–55.
The claims Benjamin makes here are echoed in “Against a Masterpiece”: “Kommerell’s image of classicism, insofar as it is lasting, lives off the claim to dominion (Herrschaftsanspruch) that he recognizes in classicism. The impotence of this claim (die Ohnmacht dieses Anspruchs), however, belongs as much to his image as to his title.” On Goethe, 212.
Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, trans. Howard Eiland (Harvard University Press, 2019), 56.
Benjamin, “Against a Masterpiece,” 209.
Benjamin, “The Dipped Magic Wand.”
Jacques Camatte, “C’est ici qu’est la mort, c’est ici qu’il faut sauter” (Here Is Fear, Jump Here), Revue Invariance, 1975 →. I quote from a forthcoming English translation by Marty Hiatt.
Walter Benjamin, “Stefan George in Retrospect,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Harvard University Press, 1999), 707.
Benjamin, “Against a Masterpiece,” 207.
Benjamin, “Against a Masterpiece,” 213. Translation modified.
Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Harvard University Press, 2006), 396. See also Benjamin, “Letter from Paris: André Gide and His New Antagonist,” trans. Charles Gelman, Barricade 1, no.1 (Spring 2018) →, where he goes into “the monumental character of fascist art” at length.
Benjamin, “Against a Masterpiece,” 213.
Benjamin, “Against a Masterpiece,” 213.
Benjamin, “Against a Masterpiece,” 207.
Walter Benjamin, Werke und Nachlass, vol. 19 (Suhrkamp, 2010), 133. My translation.
Irving Wohlfarth, “Walter Benjamin’s Secret Germany,” in Exile, Science, and Bildung, ed. David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer (Palgrave, 2005), 35.
For these points see Gabrielle Guerra, “Zur Literaturkritik des Konservativen,” in Literaturkritik heute, ed. Heinrich Kaulen and Christina Gansel (V&R Unipress, 2015).
In “The Dipped Magic Wand,” Benjamin states that “Kommerell has brilliantly demonstrated that the signs of decomposition found in Jean Paul’s work are a lower-class undertow that insists within the speculative idealism of the upper classes.” So while Kommerell does indeed account for Jean Paul’s humor, it is ultimately here that the fascist literary critic perceived a “danger” in Jean Paul’s work. See also Paul Fleming, “Max Kommerell and the Crisis of Art,” Modern Language Notes 115, no. 3 (2000).
Salomo Friedlaender, “The Antichrist and Ernst Bloch,” in The Critical Introduction to Salomo Friedlaender/Mynona, trans. Hunter Bolin (Rowan & Littlefield, 2025), 237.
Sigmund Freud, “Humor” (1927), in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, 1927–1931, ed. James Strachey et al. (Hogarth Press, 1961), 162.
Salomo Friedlaender, “The Middle Between Extremes: Preventing a Misunderstanding,” in Critical Introduction.
Salomo Friedlaender, “Polarity: Philosophical Lecture,” in Critical Introduction, 82.
Salomo Friedlaender, “The Carnival of Logic,” in Critical Introduction, 90.
Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 396.
Friedlaender, “The Antichrist and Ernst Bloch,” 225.
Salomo Friedlaender, “Aphorisms (Excerpts),” in Critical Introduction, 212.
Walter Benjamin, Werke und Nachlass, vol. 13.1 (Suhrkamp, 2011), 672.
Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Theory of Colors,” in On Goethe, 205.
Benjamin, “Goethe’s Theory of Colors,” 206.
Olaf L. Müller, Ultraviolett: Johann Wilhelm Ritters Werk und Goethes Beitrag – zur Biographie einer Kooperation (Wallstein Verlag, 2021), 49–50. My translation.
Detlef Thiel, Maßnahmen des Erscheinens (Verlag Traugott Bautz GmbH, 2022), 26. My translation.
Thiel, Maßnahmen des Erscheinens, 25.
Friedlaender, “Sketches: Ethics; Individual; Value; Colour,” in Critical Introduction, 187.
Friedlaender, “Polarity,” in Critical Introduction, 85.
Benjamin, “The Dipped Magic Wand.”
Bolin, “Unworldliness.”
See also Walter Benjamin, “The Rainbow: A Conversation about Fantasy,” in Walter Benjamin: Early Writings, 1910–1917, trans. Howard Eiland (Belknap Press, 2011). The translation of the title has been modified.
Nora Löbe, Matthias Rang, and Troy Vine, Seeing Colour: A Journey Through Goethe’s World of Colour (Floris Books, 2023), 50.
Benjamin, “Imagination,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1. The title of the essay would more correctly be translated as “Fantasy.”
