Benjamin, Wittgenstein, and Philosophical Anthropology: A Reevaluation of the Mimetic Faculty

摘要

Theodor Adorno once commented that Benjamin's work is characterized by a lurking romanticism, that it is too concerned with the subjective, that it is almost anthropological. But if the unifying thread of Benjamin's oeuvre is the documentation of experience, one can without being disparaging call it an anthropology-or, to be precise, a philosophical anthropology. For Benjamin, the fundamental human ability is imitation. Benjamin concludes the first half of his oeuvre with an account of "man's" mimetic powers, placing the mimetic capacity at the center of humankind's constitutive activities: there "is perhaps not a single one of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role."