Introduction to Walter Benjamin's Platonism

Abstract

The goal of this work is to show Plato’s place in Benjamin’s thought in relation and in contrast with the one occupied by Kant. Even though Benjamin’s most explicitly and extensively Platonic text is the “Epistemocritical preface” from the book on Trauerspiel, and the one anyone would expect to see analyzed in a work on his “Platonism”, another path is proposed here: one that implies to track Plato in Benjamin before that explicit and peculiar Platonic stance we read in the preface, and to do it, above all, in an earlier text, called “On the program of the coming philosophy”, which is dedicated mainly to Kant, but where the name of Plato is also featured. This proposition is based on the fact that it is against the limits that Benjamin finds in his relation to Kant (specially the limits he finds in Kant’s concept of experience) that the outlines of his profound bond with Plato are most clearly drawn (and that the exposition of that bond in the preface is much better under­stood).