Ceri Crossley

History and Reading: Tocqueville, Foucault, French Studies: Dominick LaCapra, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2000, 235pp., Price £13.00 paperback, ISBN 0-8030-8200-9

through the processes of modern economic production, political management and religious apostasy. This logic of decline, Benjamin intimates, however, might in some way be redressed by the production and interpretation of art. Indeed, he suggests that art can accomplish what politics cannot; it can intimate non-instrumental law, non-coercive justice and integral experience. These arguments might be ascribed a certain validity, if they are reflected as arguments exclusively about art. However, they certainly do not foster a political climate of responsible and rational-discursive accountability. Koepnick’s reading of Benjamin as an articulation of a straightforwardly political agenda thus simplifies Benjamin’s reflections on politics and art, and it assimilates him to a less complex, and more defensible political programme than he in fact represents. In his reflections on political aesthetics, Benjamin does not say specifically which political practices, or which modes of organization, might be served by art. In his aestheticization thesis, as Koepnick clearly points out (pp. 132, 161) he leaves us with a rather formulaic and insubstantial dichotomy between good (communist) art and bad (fascist) art. In his other works, he tends to obscure the precise content of politics in theological, metaphysical and aesthetic gestures, which are not satisfactorily distinguished from the imageries deployed by his adversaries on the right. Koepnick always shows an awareness of these problems in Benjamin, but the more fundamental questions of whether Benjamin was well-advised to abandon his earlier isolation of art from politics and metaphysics, and of whether his aestheticization thesis contributes in any meaningful way to political debate, are not addressed in any depth.