Besprechungen / Reviews S AMUEL W EBER : Benjamin’s -abilities. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard UP, 2008. 376 pp. $ 29.95. Walter Benjamin’s legacy in the critical debate today is marked less by a hermeneutic effective-history blessed with linear continuity and classical authority than by a complex story of interpretive reversals, contradictory assessments, and institutional conflicts among his exegetes. Benjamin’s fame, of course, has survived all these twists and turns, whereas the theories, perspectives, and critical paradigms employed for elucidating his work have been forced to recognize their own inevitable partialities and limitations. Thus, Benjamin’s reception history is largely a history of methodological self-reflection in the encounter with the persistent questions raised by his texts for a pluralistic and ever-widening scholarly community. As the pertinent entry in Burkhardt Lindner’s Benjamin-Handbuch (2006) argues, deconstruction is one of the critical paradigms that have sharpened their tools through their extensive Benjamin readings. However, few would argue that deconstruction is still on the cutting edge of the critical terrain; indeed, deconstructive approaches to Benjamin flourished especially during the 1980s and 1990s. Although it would be reductive to label Weber’s wide-ranging study simply as a deconstructive reading, it is very much indebted to this theory’s focus on the internal dynamics of language and the differential play of signifiers in the production of highly ambiguous and often paradoxical meanings. In this sense Weber’s volume may be a late hallmark, a somewhat self-reflexively melancholic testimony to the radical position that deconstruction once enjoyed. Weber himself is quite frank and modest about the historical status of his book. Spanning forty years, its chapters practice a «textual» approach that at one point marked a «pilot or pioneering project»; but «that has long since ceased to be the case» in light of the proliferating body of critical literature on Benjamin’s attention to writing, allegory, and reading (357). Nonetheless, it is the untimely character of this publication that now lends it an impressive capacity to look back, to recollect, and to rescue the achievements of deconstruction for the present Benjamin debate. Weber takes his cue from Derrida’s definition of iterability, the «power or potentiality to repeat or to be repeated» (6), in order to investigate how Benjamin’s conceptual language works along a series of idiosyncratic terms ending in -ability (-barkeit): criticizability, translatability, citability, legibility, recognizability, etc. For Weber, these concepts denote what Derrida refers to as a «structural possibility,» rather than an «actual realization,» and they can be traced back to Kant’s use of the suffix -mäßigkeit in the Kritik der Urteilskraft (39). In Benjamin’s work, -ability suggests not a fixed property or state, but an inherent predisposition to change, to become other, which defines the term’s virtuality. Thus, for instance, Weber shows that «translatability» suggests that artworks are not self-sufficient and autonomous (as classical aesthetics assumed), but contain an inherent propensity for being translated: «The paradox resides in the fact that the work can only be itself insofar as it is transported 176 Besprechungen / Reviews elsewhere, altered, transformed - in short, translated» (61). Therefore, Weber argues, translation for Benjamin does not communicate a discernible meaning but works to «point to - signify - the movement of symbolization itself» (91-92). Hence, Benjamin suggests, language is characterized by Mitteilbarkeit, which is to be understood less as a communicative function than as «impartibility,» as Weber translates the term more literally. This -ability constitutes language unmittelbar, i.e., not only immediately, but also «without means or instrumentality.» Language, then, is defined by its «immediate possibility of being imparted» (117). Or, to mention a third example, the famous concept of the now of recognizability (Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit), from the Arcades Project, suggests «not simply knowledge as reality, but knowability as everpresent possibility» (168). Following Benjamin’s own lead, Weber insightfully «translates,» explains him through a carefully literal reading, analyzing the hidden and sometimes cryptic implications of his conceptual language by focusing on the etymological roots and teasing out the «immediate» and direct meaning of the individual components of Benjamin’s terms. This attention to the structure of conceptual signifiers is something that, as Weber shows, existing translations have not always observed. On the whole, Weber’s deconstructionist explication of Benjamin amounts to one of the most precisely detailed and thoroughly text-oriented analyses of the internal workings of writer’s discourse that I know of. This is also the reason why Weber’s argument often defies paraphrase and summary, even though, unlike some other proponents of deconstruction, including Derrida himself, his own style is remarkably lucid and pedagogically helpful, taking even the non-expert patiently and step-by-step through Benjamin’s elaborate argument. And yet, the volume is somewhat unbalanced, even though it is impressively broad in thematic scope. Sometimes one wished Weber had taken his own approach a few steps further. In his illuminating chapter on the Arcades Project, he reads Benjamin’s representation of Paris streets in light of Derrida’s influential concept of the «generalized text,» whose endlessly deferred and never complete meaning «determines itself through the differential relations in which it is engaged» (228). Weber employs this concept to analyze Benjamin’s endlessly ramified montage project as exposing «nothing more or less than the allegorical cast of apparently material reality,» an exposure that «takes responsibility for the unknowable that sits at the heart of all efforts to decipher and decode, interpret and communicate» (229). This is an important insight but it raises a further, more far-reaching question underdeveloped in this volume: How does this allegorical structure of Benjamin’s city text function as the topographical stage for the comprehensive and virtually infinite citability and translatability (two of Weber’s key categories) of cultural traditions in nineteenth-century Parisian culture? As Benjamin shows, all kinds of past historical styles and foreign cultures are inscribed in the «generalized text» of the French capital, not so much as «presences» but as traces, citations, imitations, involuntary parodies, etc., giving world exhibitions, museums, the bourgeois interior, and the façades of buildings the phantasmagoric appearance of historical depth and cosmopolitanism, even while masking the power politics of colonialism, the manipulations of the capitalist consumer society, and the second-hand aesthetics of kitsch. To address questions like these may require Besprechungen / Reviews 177 a broader approach, such as the ones offered by cultural criticism, much of which Weber curiously chides for not doing what Benjamin does, who «never forgets that whatever his subject matter may be, its distinctive specificity always entails a certain structure of language, and hence, of its interpretation» (227). Weber does not indicate what branches of cultural criticism he has in mind, but his remark seems to disregard the strong tradition of cultural studies that has benefited from deconstruction and poststructuralism for sustained «readings» - quite in Benjamin’s sense - of material culture within the enabling or limiting parameters of their signifying practices, discursive networks, and self-representational strategies. Regrettably, it is only in passing that Weber discusses the best-known of Benjamin’s -ability terms, Reproduzierbarkeit (reproducibility), which informs Benjamin’s hugely influential critique of photography and film. Weber’s reading of Origin of the German Mourning Play in terms of history, myth, and allegory, is extremely thorough and often illuminating, but is only tangentially related to the -abilities theme. The same can be said of the chapters on the connection between Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, or Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben. Finally, it is somewhat puzzling to see how little Weber cites from the vast resource of the secondary literature on Benjamin, especially from more recent critics, a few notable exceptions, such as references to Werner Hamacher, notwithstanding. Is it that Weber prefers to engage Benjamin’s texts immediately, which of course would be illusory, especially for a deconstructionist? Or does he wish to remain untainted by what some have already denounced as a veritable Benjamin industry? Nonetheless, Weber’s interpretations are often innovative and refreshingly unorthodox, especially his reading of Wagner’s Ring cycle through the lenses of Benjamin and Derrida, where Weber argues that the two features that for Benjamin mark modernity - «on the one hand, it presents itself as nightmare; on the other, as its staging (Inszenierung)» - also define the notion of myth in Wagner’s tetralogy (283). This chapter is especially valuable because, owing to Benjamin’s own preference for visibility, image, and visual media, the topic of music has been rather neglected in the critical literature. All in all, Weber’s authoritative study will be of considerable interest to anyone wishing to learn more about Benjamin’s profoundly self-reflexive (proto-deconstructive? ) attention to the intricate and often elusive ways in which his own conceptual language works. University of Alabama in Huntsville Rolf J. Goebel R ICHARD D. C RITCHFIELD : From Shakespeare to Frisch: The Provocative Fritz Kortner. Heidelberg: Synchron Publishers, 2008. 223 pp. € 34,80. In seventeen tightly argued chapters this recent study offers a psychobiography of the renowned Austrian character actor and stage director Fritz Kortner whose struggle with his Jewish heritage is at the core of his life story. Growing up in Vienna, which had the largest Jewish population of any European city around the turn of the century, the resistance to Judaism was a pervasive and depressing experience for the impressionable and sensitive young man who, in his early adulthood, changed