Abstract

The thesis argues that the genesis of Walter Benjamin's theory of "redemptive" criticism becomes intelligible as a consistent and coherent intellectual project if interpreted as a personal and theoretical response to melancholia. The thesis attempts a reconstruction of Benjamin's development from his early, "esoteric", mystical theory of literary criticism, through his adoption of Marxist and Surrealistic doctrines, to his final version of "materialist historiography" of the Passagenwerk, and proposes that each stage in this process of development can be seen as Benjamin's attempt to reconcile apparently contradictory elements in his own thought--contradictions involving the competing urges toward immanent and transcendental criticism, between esotericism and exoteric, materialist forms of critical sensitivity, between private wisdom and political praxis. ;Benjamin understood these contradictions as elements of his own melancholy character, maintaining that melancholia, more than a merely personal subjective disposition, was in fact a highly theoretically sophisticated mode of cognition, one that promised a form of spiritual insight into the structure of historical reality, but which also threatened the subject with incapacitating sadness. Benjamin's project can be understood as the attempt to transform his own melancholia in such a way that its critical power of insight would be preserved, while the paralyzing sadness and despair of the melancholy vision of the world could be abandoned. ;After a discussion of the historical and cultural background of Benjamin's melancholia in the "metaphysical sadness" of modern Jewish messianism, the thesis analyses the idea of Trauer in Benjamin's early writing, suggesting that the inherent contradictions of the idea of Trauer point toward an attempted resolution which takes the place in the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. A reconstruction of the history of melancholia serves as a basis for the argument that Benjamin deliberately turned to the idea of melancholia for this resolution, and that all of his work after the Ursprung book concerns the attempt to reconcile melancholia and politics. A discussion of the relation of melancholia and redemptive criticism in the Passagenwerk reveals the ambiguous, highly qualified "success" of this program