Judaism, Experience, and the Secularizing of Life: Revisiting Walter Benjamin’s Montage of Quotation

Abstract

Most scholarship on the life and thought of Walter Benjamin does not seriously engage the phenomenon of religion or the philosophy of religion in his thought. While some scholarship considers Benjamin a German-Jewish thinker, placed in the company of luminaries such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem, most readers assume that Benjamin’s secular identity motivated most of his inquiries and critical thinking. However, focusing on a secular sensibility obscures important elements of religious traditions in Benjamin’s writings. In fact, Benjamin suggested that widely contemporary institutions like capitalism, art, and even at times science contained poignant traces of religion and religious thought. In this article, I examine these traces by revisiting his montage of quotation, which, I argue, is where we see the most salient aspects of the use of Judaism in Benjamin’s thought. His desire to secularize life was inexorably related to his interpretations of experience and of Judaism. I will argue that not only did Benjamin, in fact, use Jewish theological language and imagery through his montage of quotation, but also, he used this method to secularize contemporary theological-political-aesthetic paradigms. I will also argue that this method—primarily understood through his idiosyncratic use of Jewish imagery—is critical to the writing of history.