Languages of self-portraiture

There is nothing self-evident about the notion that we should have confessional and literary writings by Walter Benjamin. After all, the abstractness and rigor that readers associate with his texts do not, on the surface, appear to conform to the sinewy and personal cadences characteristic of autobiographical reflection, from St. Augustine via Rousseau and Goethe to Nietzsche and the modernists, or to the aesthetic demands of literary discourse. From this perspective, to think of Benjamin as having written autobiographical and literary texts is, to borrow a phrase from one of his readers, “at first blush as implausible as an anthology of fairy tales by Hegel, a child's garden of deconstruction by Derrida.” Yet, both his confessional and literary texts belong in essential ways to the ever-shifting contours of his variegated acts of self-portraiture. Benjamin's autobiographical and literary texts stage his theory of the writerly self as one whose identity is defined by the condition of not being himself, that is, as one who negotiates the construction and dispersal of selfhood in language. As one critic, Fredric Jameson, reminds us, Benjamin poses a challenge not least of all because he “seems to dissolve into multiple readings fully as much as he turns into a unique 'self' that remains to be defined.”