(The German philosopher and essayist Walter Benjamin Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)

Why does Walter Benjamin, a philosopher of the twentieth century, keep prompting more and more publications in the twenty-first century as well? Not only do new editorial commentaries on his work keep appearing, but every year books also come out that deal, directly or indirectly, with his figure and his intellectual legacy. And that is true in philosophy, and above all in literature.

It is as if his German suicide’s corpse, buried in 1940 in the seaside cemetery of Portbou (a small border town between Spain and France), were emitting a frequency from the future, a future where there are no borders between thinking, cultural criticism and literary creation.

It was to Portbou that the poet and storyteller Álex Chico moved, with the aim of reconstructing the last moments of the German philosopher’s life (when he was trying to escape Nazi persecution and found out that it would not be possible to cross into Portugal). But after numerous visits to the town, Chico realised that the story nobody had yet told was that of Portbou itself, whose importance has dwindled only over the last twenty years. And that because of the removal of the borders and the new high-speed rail line.

After Chico turned his attention to Benjamin’s story in relation to this town, a new novel came into being, written in the manner of an essay and with the pulse of poetry. The novel, titled Un final para Benjamin Walter (A Finale for Benjamin Walter), shows why the author of Einbahnstraße (One-Way Street) is still so alive and among us: Benjamin is an exceptional teacher and reader of urban space.

That is why another poet, the American Kenneth Goldsmith, chose Benjamin’s unfinished project on Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century as the model for his ambitious conceptual project Capital, which portrays New York as the symbolic centre of the twentieth century. Benjamin’s Arcades Project is an archaeology of the metropolitan past that is, in fact, a machine for reading the megalopolis of the future.

“They dragged the chairs. Miss Ángela, alias Baldomero, had asked them to lift them, but they dragged those chairs over her golden voice of Angelus Novus,” we read in Mandíbula, the new novel by the writer Mónica Ojeda. And she goes on: “the voice of the sleeping-angel-of-history, which dictates the past, although they are inevitably pushed by the present — like those chairs — towards the promise of a future of twenty-three skirts, five smiles with braces, three Tory Burch watches, twenty-one iPhones, thirteen iPads and one rosary.”

If the young Ecuadorian writer, as an iconoclast, turns the famous fragment of the Theses on the Philosophy of History (in which Benjamin makes a painting by Paul Klee into a symbol of progress) into an inventory of ironic and wild postmodern objects, it is only partly thanks to another Benjaminian virtue — the uncertain light of our twenty-first century. I mean here his ambiguity. Or, in other words, his polysemy.

To this day we do not agree on what Angelus Novus means. Nor on what Benjamin understood by his Aura. Not only was his system of thought fragmentary and open, but his style of writing was so literary that it is impossible to settle a univocal meaning of his words (not two, not three). His work cannot be fully grasped, and that is why it never stops seducing and prompting new interpretations.

In Latin American literature, from the Argentine writers Ricardo Piglia and Beatriz Sarlo, born in the 1940s, to the Spanish authors Miguel Ángel Hernández Navarro or César Rendueles, who could be their children, we can map an intergenerational and transatlantic obsession with the author of Berlin Childhood around 1900. If we took into account all the international literature dealing with Benjamin, the topography of our map would become immeasurable.

Benjamin spent part of the period between 1932 and 1933 on the island of Ibiza. As another poet and expert on his work, Vicente Valero, tells us in his exceptional essay Experience and Poverty, Benjamin was known there as “the wretch”, for he showed the signs of a vagabond. This comparison underlines why Benjamin’s work speaks to our epoch: together with his strategies for reading space and the semantic openness of his literary prose, there is also a third reason: precarity.

He was one of the first freelancers. A journalist, a translator, an enterprising editor: an autonomous worker who reads and writes. His nomadic insecurity is familiar to many of us, his unexpected contemporaries.

I translated this from the Spanish original, published on 29 April 2018 in the Spanish edition of The New York Times. Link to the source: https://www.nytimes.com/es/2018/04/29/walter-benjamin-filosofia-cultura/