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Walter Benjamin’s Karl Kraus: Negation, Quotation, and Jewish Identity

2014; Purdue University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sho.2014.0022

1534-5165

Benjamin E. Sax,

Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism

This article considers Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay on Karl Kraus and explores how Benjamin uses Kraus (who was Theodor Lessing’s classical example of a self-hating Jew) to explain how Jewish theology can be transformed into secular Jewish cultural identity through quotation. Benjamin does this by focusing on what he believes to be the “Jewish” style of quotation in Kraus’s writing, or what George Steiner has termed a “hermeneutic of citation.”