Benjamin’s Materialism: Anthropological, Historical, or Dialectical?

Taking the debate between Benjamin and Adorno as a guiding framework, this chapter engages with the peculiarities of Benjamin’s materialism. While Adorno warned that Benjamin’s alleged “anthropological materialism” would stand on “the crossroads of magic and positivism,” the chapter explores these crossroads—their beaten tracks, productive dead ends, and epistemo-political trajectories. Although Benjamin’s heterodox materialism is “neither Frankfurt nor Brechtian nor vulgar” (M. Cohen, 1993), its elements can be traced to anthropological, historical, and dialectical materialisms. Avoiding a reconstructive approach of the intellectual history of Benjamin’s materialism, I concentrate on three key elements: (1) Benjamin’s materialist anthropology of image space and body space; (2) ideology as material relation of phantasmagoria and dialectical images, and (3) the materiality of commodity society and Benjamin’s adaptation of Marx’s theory of the fetish character of the commodity. In unpacking these three elements, the chapter aims to show how Benjamin’s reworkings and adaptations of anthropological-materialist, Marxian, neo-Marxist, phenomenological, psychoanalytical, surrealist, and post-Kantian motifs paved the way for a new type of materialism, exceeding the scope of a merely epistemological concept of ideology and image production.