work, and often includes the original German text when this is appropriate for his interpretation and commentary. The translator has chosen to preserve the German interpolations and to include, when possible, references to both the German editions and the standard English translation, using in the text the abbreviations listed here in order to reduce the number of bibliographic notes. Occasionally, the English translation has been altered and made to harmonize with Oyarzun’s interpretation; such modifications, wholly the responsibility of the translator, are noted parenthetically, as translator’s notes (TNs). Translations from German, when a text is not available in English, are the translator’s; they take into account the author’s Spanish version. When given in the text, the sigla listed below will include a Roman numeral indicating the volume and, when necessary, an Arabic numeral indicating the section, followed by page numbers.
| A | Walter Benjamin. Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. |
| GS | Walter Benjamin. Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Suhrkamp, 1991. 14 volumes. |
| O | Walter Benjamin. Origin of the German Trauerspiel, translated by Howard Eiland. Harvard University Press, 2019. |
| SW | Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996. 4 volumes. |
| WN | Walter Benjamin. Werke und Nachlaß: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. Suhrkamp, 2010. 21 volumes. |
Introduction “…beneath these clouds” Jacques Lezra
Are we truly, though, midway to making real what ought to be, as the historical discourse of the winners insists? If we pass a hand over that well-groomed story—but do so against the part and against the grain, as Walter Benjamin counseled—won’t it perhaps turn out that what this history holds to be “exceptional”—exceptions that constantly and forcefully occur, even in our days—can teach us more regarding the history of democracy in modernity, and about its current possibilities, than what that history recognizes as the “rule”?
Bolívar Echeverría, “El sentido del siglo XX”
beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.
Benjamin
Cuento is the name given to the bolster used to shore up what threatens to fall into ruins; hence the expression andar, o estar en cuentos, to be or find oneself en cuentos: to be in danger, and hold oneself together with handiwork and artifice.
Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, o española
How, who, what is Walter Benjamin “in Latin America”?1 What did and what does Benjamin teach Latin America? So asked a helpful collection of essays from 2010.2 For Benjamin’s influence in Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Brazil and elsewhere, in Portuguese and Spanish translation, though read in German and English as well, has been profound. His “Theses on the Philosophy of History” help Michael Löwy understand the theology of liberation that takes hold distinctively across the continent.3 Benjamin’s “For a Critique of Violence”—first in Héctor Murena’s 1967 version del alemán, “from the German,” then in a faulty translation by Jesús Aguirre, and most recently translated from German in 2007–2008 by Pablo Oyarzun and republished in 2017 in a revised edition, with an accompanying group of essays by distinguished Latin American philosophers—serves to organize the Latin American response to the failures and successes of revolutionary movements, from Central America to the Southern Cone. A Glosario Walter Benjamin: Conceptos y figuras was published in Mexico in 2016. Benjamin is studied from the perspective of exile and, in Brazil, of the philosophy and practices of translation. He shapes the understanding of Latin American literary and artistic modernism.4 He helps define what has been called the barroco de indias. He is read against, and with, authors such as Mariátegui, Bolivar Echeverría, Óscar del Barco, and Viveiros de Castro. He is received in agonistic relation to Derrida, Agamben, Hamacher and others—each also read differently, in the publishing and scholarly markets that run from Mexico to Brazil, from how they are read in Europe or the United States. And, of course, the reception of Walter Benjamin has differed depending on the institutional and political cultures in which each country has read him and on the moment and circumstance of each country. Reading Benjamin is a different matter under Pinochet from what it is under the long rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party in Mexico; it is one thing to read the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” under Videla in Argentina and quite another to hear news of it in Havana, where Benjamin had once hoped to find himself, with Theodor Adorno’s help. Latin American Marxisms—which do not map easily onto the European varieties—take on Benjamin’s texts with different degrees of reluctance, violence, enthusiasm, and misprision—or reject them, again, for various reasons.
What does the complex, controversial, partial, rich, differentiated reception of Benjamin in Latin America offer anglophone readers of Benjamin’s work? And why now? Why offer now, in English, these essays about Walter Benjamin written by one of Latin America’s foremost philosophers, translators, and essayists? There is one answer for both questions: partly because Pablo Oyarzun’s Doing Justice will help an anglophone readership understand what it means to take account of, and to be responsible for and to, the “now.”5 What is it about today, just now, that requires thought, particularly the thought of those whose world is made up in, and of, English—the language of global capital at the moment of its crisis, in other words now? I’ll say that crisis is not a moment; that every moment is critical; that the relation that thought bears to crisis is a matter of justice, of doing justice to, in, and through crisis, of justly translating crisis: I can move through these assertions, from one to the next, stepwise, in the wake of Benjamin’s work. I arrive at the last one: I find Pablo Oyarzun’s work waiting.
I want to be careful, though. What Oyarzun’s essays offer the anglophone reader now is inseparably related to his writing about Benjamin in Spanish. That, though, was not these essays’ goal when they appeared in Spanish and helped to form Benjamin’s reception by Latin America’s Spanish-speaking readership. Rather the opposite: Pablo Oyarzun’s essays were intended to provide an alternative—in Spanish, with Latin America as a backdrop, a goal, and a resource—to the industry of Benjamin readings in English, French, and German, flowing South in translation or in the original from New York, or Paris, or Berlin. For this reason, a translation of Pablo Oyarzun’s work should have the constant company of disarming questions: what does it mean to write in Spanish about works from a philosophical tradition from which Spanish has long been excluded? How does the value that a moment (“now”), or a state, or a complex cultural prejudice assigns to a language like Spanish affects how its philosophers can make claims? How does such a language describe? How true can it hope to be? (Even phrasing the question this way proves violent. We think it means: Can the generality of a thesis’ truth claims be separated from the language in which these claims are articulated? But in Castilian Spanish we would say: ¿Cuán verdadera puede esperar ser? and we bring time, waiting, esperar, into the expression. In Spanish, I wait where I hope; less so, much less so, in English. The burning question of philosophical untranslatability… To the anglophone world, Spanish remains largely a servile language—the language of abjection, of la bestia; the language spoken on the other side of the wall; the language of the European PIGS—Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain. In the age of Donald Trump, to reach for a philosophical timbre in Spanish will appear to some degree improper, or an act of defiance. These senses of Spanish are to be noted and understood as conditions of philosophical expression now, when the relation between Latin America and the anglophone world enters a different world, a world globalized