Peter D. Fenves. The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time.
Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2011. 336 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8047-5787-4; $24.95 (paper),
ISBN 978-0-8047-5788-1.
Reviewed by Paula Schwebel (Universiteit Antwerpen)
Published on H-Judaic (August, 2012)
Commissioned by Jason Kalman
Walter Benjamin’s Reduction of Mythology and the Messianic as “Total Neutrality”
Peter Fenves’s recent book is a welcome addition
to Benjamin scholarship for several reasons: First, it
is an expert work of historical excavation, unearthing
a wealth of detail about Benjamin’s intellectual forma-
tion during his student years (1913-25). Second, Fenves
presents a nuanced history of ideas, situating Benjamin’s
early work at a crossroads between two major schools
of German philosophy in the interwar period–namely,
Husserlian phenomenology and Marburg School neo-
Kantianism (i.e., Hermann Cohen and Ernst Cassirer).
Third, Fenves offers a “systematic” interpretation of Ben-
jamin’s early, mostly fragmentary, work, demonstrating
how Benjamin navigated between Husserl and the Mar-
burg School to develop his own philosophical position (p.
16).
Benjamin’s relationship to neo-Kantianism has else-
where been more fully explored, but Fenves’s sugges-
tion that Benjamin was critically engaged with Husserl
breaks new ground.[1] In light of the evidence gathered
by Fenves, Benjamin’s engagement with phenomenology
can no longer be ignored. In the preface to the Origin of
the German Mourning Play (a text written in 1925 that
represents the culmination of the period under discus-
sion in Fenves’s book), Benjamin challenges two pillars
of Husserl’s philosophy, arguing against the intentional
character of consciousness, and rejecting the method of
eidetic intuition.[2] Because Fenves restricts his analy-
sis to Benjamin’s early work, he does not address Ben-
jamin’s contention, in the Arcades Project (1927-40), that
1
Husserl’s notion of eidetic intuition lacks a “historical in-
dex.”[3] Yet, Fenves’s discussion of “temporal plasticity”
and the “shape of time” (chapters 1 and 4) anticipates
some aspects of Benjamin’s late philosophy of history,
as Fenves suggests in the conclusion (pp. 242-244).
Fenves’s argument does not intend to provide an ex-
haustive account of Benjamin’s references to Husserl,
or his relationship to phenomenology more generally.
Rather, under the titular designation of the “messianic
reduction,” Fenves explores a specific point where Ben-
jamin diverges from Husserl. According to Fenves, Ben-
jamin does not reject the task of reducing the “natu-
ral attitude”–an attitude that Fenves describes as the
“mythological” belief that experience results from the
causal interaction between substantial things and a con-
scious subject (p. 165). What Benjamin does dispute, in
Fenves’s view, is the intentional character of Husserl’s
reduction: it is not within a subject’s power to “turn off”
the natural attitude. If such a reduction can be accom-
plished, it is referred to a “higher power”–an idea that
Fenves interprets in the mathematical terms of transfi-
nite set theory, rather than in theological terms.
Fenves argues that Benjamin fashioned various per-
spectives from which the methodological priority of tran-
scendental consciousness could be “turned off,” such as “a
child’s view of color,” the “coloration of shame,” and “the
colors of fantasy” (chapters 2 and 3). Notably, these per-
spectives cannot be willfully adopted by a subject. Col-

ors, as seen by a child, are not defined by an interest in
the existence of things, or the judgment of inherence in
an underlying substance (p. 63). Hence, Fenves argues
that the child’s view of color guarantees the existence of
a fully reduced world, or an attitude of pure receptivity
to the phenomena (p. 3). But a guarantee of existence
is not a method; the child’s view of color, like childhood
itself, is “evanescent,” and therefore cannot be intended
or universalized (pp. 64-65).
Fenves maintains that Benjamin shares Husserl’s
ideal of a fully reduced world, and that Benjamin can thus
be regarded as a phenomenological thinker. The goal of
the reduction, in Fenves’s account, is to attain an attitude
of “pure receptivity” to the phenomena, “without distor-
tions that result from theoretical presuppositions” (p. 3).
But Fenves’s claim that Benjamin sought an attitude of
“pure receptivity” sits uneasily with his characterization
of Benjamin as an adherent to certain tenets of the Mar-
burg School, since the explicit goal of the latter was to
eliminate any residue of receptivity to a given “thing in
itself,” instead generating objective knowledge from the
spontaneous activity of pure thinking.
Fenves finds the link between Husserl and the Mar-
burg School in their common anti-psychologism (p. 227).
But the tension between pure receptivity and the pure
generation of knowledge runs throughout Fenves’s book
without being fully resolved. In contrast to chapters 2
and 3, where Fenves reads Benjamin’s 1915-16 studies on
color as aiming towards an ideal of pure receptivity, in
chapter 1, Fenves shows the influence of Cassirer’s “func-
tional” generation of reality on Benjamin’s 1915 essay,
“Two poems by Friedrich Hölderlin.” Fenves notes that
this tension between Husserlian phenomenology and the
Marburg School shaped not only Benjamin’s early philos-
ophy, but also much of German philosophy during the
first part of the twentieth century (p. 6). It is to Fenves’s
credit that he traces these dizzying oscillations in Ben-
jamin’s work, without imposing a simplifying schema.
Ultimately (in chapter 6), Fenves argues that Ben-
jamin “declines” to follow either Husserl or Cohen (p.
167). Whereas Husserl replaces the subject-object model
of experience with a primordial “stream of conscious-
ness,” and Cohen replaces transcendental subjectivity
with the “fact of science,” Benjamin seeks to ground
a new concept of experience in a “ ‘pure epistemo-
theoretical (transcendental) consciousness,’ which no
one can claim as his or her own” (p. 167). Fenves parses
this complicated idea by describing it as a unity that is
“higher” than the transcendental unity of apperception.
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This unity corresponds to a “sphere of total neutrality,” in
which both the subjective and the objective poles of the
natural attitude have been reduced (p. 172).
Presumably, such a “sphere of total neutrality” would
correspond neither to an attitude of pure receptivity to
phenomena, nor to their pure “functional” generation,
raising the question of how this sphere enters into re-
lation with the phenomenal world of possible experi-
ence. The answer to this question has high stakes, since
Fenves suggests that the relationship is, at least struc-
turally, equivalent to the relationship between the pro-
fane world and the “messianic.” Fenves’s answer is pri-
marily negative, indicating that this sphere of total neu-
trality cannot be anticipated or foreseen. But Fenves also
employs certain mathematical models to think about the
“shape” that the messianic reduction might take. While
it is not inconceivable that a mathematical model could
leave “open-ended” what cannot be anticipated or fore-
seen (p. 3)–and Fenves provides the example of a curve
that has no tangents (pp. 239-244)–it seems that his neg-
ative argument is threatened to the extent that he suc-
ceeds in mathematically representing what, according to
his own argument, is unrepresentable.
Although Fenves does not explicitly state as much,
the unity of his argument seems to revolve around an at-
tempt to think through the meaning of Hölderlin’s no-
tion of “holy sobriety,” which was also a key idea for
Benjamin (pp. 38; 45; 77). Sobriety receives various for-
mulations in Fenves’s argument, from a pure receptiv-
ity that is “untouched” by objects (p. 49), to the afore-
mentioned “sphere of total neutrality,” corresponding to
a fully reduced world. Such sobriety is “holy,” accord-
ing to Fenves, because it coincides with the elimination
of mythology (p. 175). With this notion of sobriety, we
also find the underlying link to Fenves’s argument about
the “shape of time.” Fenves amplifies the idea of a curve
without tangents to include a broader interpretation of
the “untouched”: tangentless, the temporal curve is also
“inviolable,” and thus “innocent” (p. 241).
Fenves’s “messianic reduction” runs the risk of re-
ducing not only the natural attitude, but also anything
resembling the critical capacity of a subject. In the first
place, Fenves suggests that Benjamin upholds an ideal of
pure receptivity, but if the goal is simply to receive what
is given, then any attempt to change the world is deemed
impure. Pure givenness is regarded as untouchable, and
this untouchability is sanctified as an “innocent” world.
As a consequence, the political charge of Benjamin’s
messianism is neutralized. Moreover, Fenves’s appeal
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to a mathematical “higher power” yields to an author-
ity that is untouchable in yet another sense. As Ben-
jamin argues in the preface to the Origin of the German
Mourning Play, the inevitability and necessity of math-
ematical proof is “coercive.”[4] Fenves’s invocation of a
mathematical “higher power”–in the name of reducing
the “myth” of the psychological consciousness–may yield
to the mystification of mathematical truth.
Notwithstanding the density and difficulties of
Fenves’s argument, this book performs a great service to
scholars of Benjamin, interwar German philosophy, and
German-Jewish thought. One of the book’s greatest as-
sets is its inclusion, in an appendix, of Fenves’s original
translations of two short texts of Benjamin’s from 1915
or 1916 (“The Rainbow: Dialogue on Fantasy” and “The
Rainbow; or, The Art of Paradise”), as well as a remark-
able document, attributed to Benjamin and recorded in
Gershom Scholem’s diary of 1916 (“Notes toward a work
on the category of justice”), which Fenves interprets in
chapter 7. In a field that is often moribund due to the rep-
etition of the same few passages, Fenves’s introduction
and analysis of this new material makes an exciting con-
tribution to Benjamin scholarship, while preparing the
ground for further study of Benjamin’s relationship to
phenomenology.
Notes
[1]. See, for example, Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky,
Der frühe Walter Benjamin und Hermann Cohen. Jüdis-
che Werte. Kritische Philosophie, vergängliche Erfahrung
(Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk 8, 2000).
[2]. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed.
Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols.
(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1972-91), v. 1: 215-16.
[3]. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, v. 5:
577.
[4]. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, v. 1:
208.

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Citation: Paula Schwebel. Review of Fenves, Peter D., The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of
Time. H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews. August, 2012.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=34907

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