Walter Benjamin's Image of Interpretation

The dissimulating harmony that Carol Jacobs elicits from her analyses of selected texts by Nietzsche, Rilke, Artaud and Benjamin marks an instructive contrast from the unmediated vision that Geoffrey Hartman derived twenty-five years before from his close readings of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke and Valery. Each of these remarkable first works emerges with consistent but antithetical patterns of far from merely formalist patterns of discovery. Reading, both critics know, is not the activity of an innocent eye (I began, writes Hartman, eat of the tree of knowledge, so that my eyes were multiplied'), and there are many forms of critical guilt. Whereas Hartman still acknowledges a debt to such teachers as Erich Auerbach, Jacobs writes under the impact of Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida

Art · Art history · Interpretation (philosophy) · Linguistics · History · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation

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  Miriam Hansen, Miriam Bratu Hansen•October•2004

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