Walter Benjamin’s “On The Topic of Individual Disciplines and Philosophy,” 1923
For Walter Benjamin, critique uncovers truth through a confrontation with the object that is not timeless but particularly historical. This historical specificity is not to be misunderstood as historicism, which is a jettisoning of critique, but rather as a function of the standpoint of the proletariat. Benjamin is critiquing the unmediated concept of time for the bourgeoisie.
— Louis Sterrett
It has to be shown that the “contradictions” by means of which the individual disciplines seek to discredit philosophy are to be found just as much in the individual disciplines themselves. At every point in them, moreover. Furthermore, they do not contradict the concept of truth, because there is no truth about an object. Truth is only in it. And the truth in an object may become manifest, depending on the time and the context, in fundamentally different forms that only appear to contradict each other — namely, with regard to a point of view about it, not however with regard to a point of view in it.
Our gaze must strike the object in such a way that it awakens something within it that springs up to meet the intention. Whereas the reporter who adopts the stance of the banal philosopher and specialized scientist indulges himself in lengthy descriptions of the object at which his gaze is directed, the intensive observer finds that something leaps out at him from the object, enters into him, takes possession of him, and something different — namely, the nonintentional truth — speaks from out of the philosopher.
This language of the intentionless truth (that is to say, of the object itself) possesses authority. This authority of the mode of speaking is the yardstick of objectivity [Sachlichkeit]. It, not the empirical object, in which the intentionless truth subsists and against which it cannot measure itself, since it cannot discover the object outside itself. On the contrary, this authority stands in opposition to the conventional concept of objectivity because its validity, that of the nonintentional truth, is historical — that is to say, anything but timeless; it is bound to a particular historical base and changes with history. “Timelessness” must therefore be unmasked as an exponent of the bourgeois concept of truth. The authority we have described, then, contains within it a precise concept of time, since it comes and goes depending on the temporal constellation. But it does not come into being merely because an opinion is gradually declared to be “correct” and so becomes correct. On the contrary, it leaps into existence as the result of an immersion of the object in itself provoked by the external gaze.
This authority proves its worth by testing itself against forms of expression, even nonobjective ones, as befits the legitimacy of every authority. So much so, that the decisive factor at the moment becomes that meticulousness [Akribie] which is the least objective tool of a broadly conceived philosophical methodology and also the guarantor of a sovereign mastery of all the methods for creating an authority that would eliminate this same meticulousness. This is how it should be understood in my work on the Baroque. Insofar as truth is intentionless, it seizes the whole inductive apparatus, which has now become external, and thrusts it back into the work. There, secure in the heart of the matter, it manipulates it — playfully, at will — in the interest of authority.
The objectivity of science, therefore, is of exactly the same type as the alleged objectivity of criticism. //
Thomas Demand, Archive. 1995. Guggenheim.
El Greco. Laocoön, c. 1610. National Gallery of Art. Artstor.
Guillermo Kuitca, The Family Idiot, 2018 © Hauser & Wirth. Ocula
From Walter Benjamin, “On the Topic of Individual Disciplines and Philosophy,” in Selected Works: Volume 1, 1913 – 1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Rodney Livingstone, et al. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2004), 404–05.