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Gaining Sovereignty: On the Figure of the Child in Walter Benjamin’s Writing

2010; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 125; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mln.0.0270

1080-6598

Nicola Gess,

Franz Kafka Literary Studies

Gaining Sovereignty: On the Figure of the Child in Walter Benjamin’s Writing Nicola Gess (bio) In Walter Benjamin und sein Engel, Gershom Scholem recalls that Benjamin was drawn to the “Welt des Kindes und kindlichen Wesen mit geradezu magischer Gewalt.”1 And in fact, especially from the mid-1920s onward, his texts are stamped by a clear interest in childhood: in children’s activities and objects, their games, toys, and books, which Benjamin first explores (starting in 1924) in a wide range of reviews, and then (starting in 1931) in reflections conveyed by his own childhood memoirs. This interest is also manifest in both his concern with contemporary literature and in his writing on the philosophy of history formulated in the context of the Passagenwerk. Benjamin was well-informed about work on child psychology and child education published in his time; but with some exceptions, he criticized it sharply.2 In place of a domestication of the “Kinderseele” through analysis, conceptualization, and educational practice, [End Page 682] as proposed in the Kolonialpädagogik3 he condemns, he advocated an approach that was “nicht psychologisch . . . , sondern sachlich” oriented4—which is to say not around the “child’s soul” but rather around toys. This approach would involve formulating a physiognomy of the child’s objects and activities that, in its essayistic form, avoids both being used practically and—crucially—any fashionable talk of the child as a “better person.” For in striking contrast to the reformist pedagogy of his age, in Altes Spielzeug Benjamin emphasizes the “grausame, . . . groteske und . . . grimmige Seite im Kinderleben,” the “Despotische und Entmenschte an Kindern,” their “[E]rdenfern[e]” and “[U]nverfroren[heit].”5 How are we to understand this? I would like to argue here that in Benjamin’s writing, the child plays a central role in an enchanting/disenchanting—that is, dialectic—treatment of history and of that which is strange—in this way serving as an inspiration for his late Passagenwerk. There and elsewhere, the child functions for Benjamin as a utopian figure. This is, however, not in the sense inherited from Romanticism, of an embodiment of plenitude in harmony with nature, but rather in view of both the “barbaric” and “primitive” tendencies that children display. Their destructive and mimetic potential come together in the games children play, leading dialectically to a gain of sovereignty in which intimacy with history or the strange, analytical destruction and steady new creation mutually specify each other. The Child as “Barbarian” As addressed in the satire Neues Kinderspielzeug by Myona (Salomo Friedländer) or Joachim Ringelnatz’s Geheimes Kinderspielbuch,6 what emerges in this side of a child’s life is joy in destruction and the amorality tied to this, or rather the child’s situation beyond morality, as revealed in games involving burglary, theft, arson, bombing attacks, and murder.7 But in this mimesis of the world of adults, the child exposes above all the fragility of their moral ideas—and that is certainly the [End Page 683] main concern of Friedländer and Ringelnatz. In any event, beyond this satirical and socially critical dimension, the attention Benjamin pays to the child’s destructive pleasure is tied to the disenchantment of the romantic view of childhood practiced by psychoanalysis. For Freud, children are not only subject to the same drives as adults, but live out these drives in relatively undisguised form, since the inhibiting authorities are still undeveloped.8 For instance, children not only possess an infantile sexuality, which they act out, but are inclined, Freud argues, towards paraphilia—in other words, towards needs and activities connected with suffering of persons or victims. Whereas in Freud’s early theory of drives this destructive form of sexuality can only be understood as a perversion (the child, we read, is “polymorphously perverse”), in the late theory it can be understood as a manifestation of the death drive, whose effects are also manifest in child’s play. Benjamin repeatedly refers to Jenseits des Lustprinzips, where Freud of course develops the concept of the death drive—we find such a reference a few months after publication of Altes Spielzeug. And he does so in connection with child’s play, whose...