Winging it with Wittgenstein and Benjamin

In this article, I consider the philosophical question of chance in the context of a comparative discussion of two early twentieth-century intellectuals, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), contemporaries who deliberately involved themselves in the risks of chance in the time of a hazardous historical epoch. In different ways they chose or liked to live on the edge, which invites us to consider how within that context they responded to chance in their own work. This might encourage us to think of their work not in terms of biography as narrative or the life-work made meaningful, but to consider something of the dialectical relation between the two as the irruption of chance moves in and out of their lives, their writing, the roles that it plays there and in our reading of them, starting with chance’s most intimate, intimidating and ineffaceable effect, the destruction of meaning itself. The essay concludes by arguing that Benjamin conceived the Passagen Werk as his retranslation of Proust into the realm of history, employing the method developed by Eisenstein for his film of Marx’s Capital. Wittgenstein, in turn, offers a model of how to read the Passagen Werk as if it were a film.