Abstract

In 1968, twenty-eight years after Walter Benjamin’s death, Hannah Arendt published a literary portrait of Benjamin that questioned the Frankfurt School’s editorial infringements on and interpretive appropriations of Benjamin’s work. In recent discussions of her intervention in the debate that had escalated upon Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem’s publication of Benjamin’s letters in 1966, it has been neglected that Arendt published two versions of her portrait, American and German. This article shows that the American version differs significantly from the German as it amplifies a characteristic citation method through which Arendt performatively preserves and promotes Benjamin’s work. Thus, the American version indicates how Arendt transformed her strong editorial commitment to rescuing European Jewish cultural heritage after the Holocaust into a critical method. The initial occasion for Arendt’s portrait was her American Benjamin edition Illuminations (1968), toward which she had begun working since her arrival in New York in 1941. The edition’s continuing global distribution demonstrates the lasting impact of Arendt’s intervention.

摘要

1968 年，沃尔特·本雅明去世二十八年后，汉娜·阿伦特出版了一本本雅明的文学肖像，质疑法兰克福学派对本雅明作品的编辑侵犯和解释性挪用。在最近关于她干预因西奥多·W·阿多诺和格肖姆·肖勒姆于 1966 年出版本雅明信件而升级的辩论的讨论中，人们忽视了阿伦特出版了她的肖像的两个版本：美国版本和德国版本。本文表明，美国版本与德国版本有很大不同，因为它放大了一种特有的引用方法，阿伦特通过这种方法来表演性地保存和推广本雅明的作品。因此，美国版本表明阿伦特如何将她在大屠杀后拯救欧洲犹太文化遗产的强烈社论承诺转变为批判方法。阿伦特肖像的最初创作是她的美国本杰明版本《插图》（1968 年），自 1941 年到达纽约以来，她就开始致力于该书的创作。该版本在全球的持续发行表明了阿伦特干预的持久影响。