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Divining Benjamin: Reading Fate, Graphology, Gambling
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Journal Article
Divining Benjamin: Reading Fate, Graphology, Gambling
2011
Overview
Here, Benjamin unequivocally attacks what he calls the \"stupidity, low cunning, and coarseness\" of the contemporary modes of magical divination, \"the last pitiful by-product of more significant traditions,\" and he seems explicitly to include in his critique of magic and fortune- or future-telling the misguided \"hunger of broad sections of the people for happiness\" (Glückshunger).4 The resistance to magical thinking is obviously of a piece with his principled distaste for the tenets of \"Lebensphilosophien\"; for the phantasmagoria of commodity culture; the emergence of fascism with its \"magic of blood and glitter\"; and eventually, too, for that form of Marxism that divined future happiness in the fated progress of social history.5 In all this, Benjamin could be said to share (along with Freud, Mann, and others) in the skeptical, disenchanted enlightenment stance that gained such increased urgency amid the resurgent \"barbarism\" of the early- to mid-twentieth century.6 And added to this secular tradition, there was also a religious ground supporting Benjamin's suspicions of divination as well.
