The Philology of Life retraces the outlines of the philological
project developed by Walter Benjamin in his early essays on
Hölderlin, the Romantics, and Goethe. This philological program,
McLaughlin shows, provides the methodological key to Benjamin’s
work as a whole. According to Benjamin, German literary history in
the period roughly following the first World War was part of a
wider “crisis of historical experience”—a life crisis to
which Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) had instructively but
insufficiently responded. Benjamin’s literary critical struggle
during these years consisted in developing a philology of literary
historical experience and of life that is rooted in an encounter
with a written image. The fundamental importance of this
“philological” method in Benjamin’s work seems not to have
been recognized by his contemporary readers, including Theodor
Adorno who considered the approach to be lacking in dialectical
rigor. This facet of Benjamin’s work was also elided in the
postwar publications of his writings, both in German and English.
In recent decades, the publication of a wider range of Benjamin’s
writings has made it possible to retrace the outlines of a
distinctive philological project that starts to develop in his
early literary criticism and that extends into the late studies of
Baudelaire and Paris. By bringing this innovative method to light
this study proposes “the philology of life” as the key to the
critical program of one of the most influential intellectual
figures in the humanities.
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