How is freedom tied to tradition? What is the relation between the individual and the collective experience of tradition? To what extent is the experience of tradition part of a modern experience rather than only of an ancient one? This essay argues that these questions lie at the heart of Walter Benjamin’s early discussion of tradition. His peculiar reference to “Talmudic wit” and to Kant as a tradendum in letters to Scholem, alongside related Jewish sources, and his engagement with Kant in “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy” are used to address these questions. Thus the essay offers a concept of tradition as a transformative medium that prefigures Benjamin’s late and familiar inkling for tradition’s revolutionary potential. Additionally, it suggests that in this context an alternative to Kant’s concept of freedom is prefigured.
While Foucault referred to Benjamin just once in his entire corpus, scholars have long noticed affinities between the two thinkers, mainly between their conceptions of history: their emphasis on discontinuity, their historiographical practices, and the role of archives in their work. This essay focuses, rather, on their practice of critique and, more specifically, on their conception of the relation of this practice to exercise or askesis. I examine the role of askesis as a self-transformative exercise in Foucault’s late work and how this concept reverberates throughout his idea of critique as the exercise of an ethos demanding arduous work. Against this background, the role of exercise (Übung) in Benjamin’s Origin of the German Traeurspiel, his interest in ascetic kinds of exercise or schooling, and its ties to critique are discerned. This comparison reveals significant similarities in Foucault’s and Benjamin’s conception of philosophy, as well as different emphases in their inheritance of the Kantian critical project: critique as an exercise of an attitude attentive to possibilities for transformation in the present vs. critique as involving an attitude-transforming exercise; critique as a modern ethos that needs to be reactivated vs. critique as propaedeutic, as a preparation for a modern tradition.
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