Benjamin refused esoteric development out of solidarity with shared political experience

Evidence

If I refused on that occasion, for the sake of my own productive interests, to appropriate an esoteric development of my ideas, and to that extent to carry on as usual without regard to the interests of dialectical materialism or the Institute, it was in the end not just out of solidarity with the Institute or mere loyalty to dialectical materialism, but out of solidarity with the experiences which we have all been through in the last fifteen years. It is therefore a matter of my very own productive interests here as well. I won’t deny that these interests may now and then violently contradict my original ones. There is an antagonism here which I would not wish to be without in a thousand years. Overcoming it is what constitutes the problem in the work, and the problem is one of how to construe it. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 888

Categorization

• QUESTION: Benjamin’s claim that the antagonism between his productive interests and dialectical materialism is something he ‘would not wish to be without’ deserves unpacking against the ch28-29 reconstruction of his method.
• XREF: connects to: Benjamin rejected the autonomy of intellectuals, siding with the proletariat over Geist. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 1514; Adorno rejected Benjamin’s equation of commodity with the archaic — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 617

Broader Connections

• Benjamin rejected the autonomy of intellectuals, siding with the proletariat over Geist. #expands (0.82) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 1514
• Adorno rejected Benjamin’s equation of commodity with the archaic #corroborates (0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 617