Action: Handlung

Abstract:This essay situates Walter Benjamin's widespread and still rising stardom in the context of a paradigm shift in criticism and theory that over the past century gradually has moved us away from praxis to inoperativity, from acts of the will to the interpretation of signs, and from the iron laws of historical determinism to the chance events of aleatory encounters and constellations. Against the grain of this new consensus, the reading picks up on the active and interventionist underside of "Fate and Character" to conclude with the provocative suggestion of a Benjaminian pragmatism.