Walter Benjamin and Phenomenology: an analysis of the doctrine of Eidos in the formation of his thought

Abstract

This article analyzes Walter Benjamin's relationship with phenomenology from his early years of university education to the publication of his unapproved habilitation thesis, The Origin of German Tragedy (1928). Using the doctrine of Eidos as a guiding thread, we propose that the recurrence of this topos allows us to decipher both his initial interest in the phenomenological school and the keys to his subsequent distancing from it. To test our hypothesis, we will trace references to phenomenology in Benjamin's concern with the question of eidos in chronological order, focusing particularly on two milestones: the unpublished fragment Eidos und Begriff (1916), which engages with the phenomenologist Paul F. Linke, and the presence of the term "essentiality" [Wesenheit] as a synonym for the idea in the "Epistemological Preface" to his book on the Baroque. In the latter, the remnants of phenomenology are manifested through the heterodox figure of the Alsatian thinker Jean Héring, whose definition of essentiality will allow us to appreciate the correspondences and divergences between Benjamin and phenomenology before he definitively distances himself from this current.