“Combustion-Focal Point”

Studying the Image in Benjamin’s “Life of

Students”

Peter Fenves

A
t the beginning of the first essay he published in a widely read jour-
nal, Walter Benjamin makes a series of strongly worded claims that
can be understood, in retrospect, as the nucleus of his subsequent
reflections on the concept of history. Entitled “The Life of Students,” the es-
say appeared in two versions during the early years of the First World War.
Because the essay is closely related to a series of speeches Benjamin made in
conjunction with his election to the presidency of the “free student-body” or-
ganization in which he actively participated, it is far more closely associated
with a specific social-political program than anything else he ever wrote. After
its opening paragraph, much of the essay consists of detailed programmatic
directives. The point of examining its opening paragraph is not to establish
the continuity of Benjamin’s thought—as if this were a value in itself—but
rather to identify its abbreviated but consequential theory of the image. And
the point of describing this theory is to assess a more general question: what
happens when a concept of history is so thoroughly permeated by a theory of
the image that concept and image cannot be disentangled from each other?
One response to this question can be found from one of the very first
readers of “The Life of Students.” The response runs as follows: any concept
of history that is thoroughly entangled with a theory of the image must be
contemplative and therefore conservative. Such is the verdict of Kurt Hiller,
who republished Benjamin’s essay in the first number of a yearbook entitled
Das Ziel: Aufrufe zu tätigem Geist (The Goal: Appeals for Active Spirit). It is not
readily apparent why Hiller decided to incorporate Benjamin’s essay into his
volume, especially since the opening paragraph of the essay denies that it rep-
“Combustion-Focal Point”  183
resents an “appeal to active spirit.” There was thus something of a mismatch
between the essay and the volume, and Hiller, for his part, came to regret his
decision to republish “The Life of Students.” Writing to Theodor Adorno in
the 1960s, as another student movement was beginning to emerge, Hiller
reiterates the distinction between his “activist” program and the putative pas-
sivism that pervades Benjamin’s writings, beginning with the essay he in-
cluded in the inaugural edition of his yearbook:

I published [Benjamin’s essay] in the first volume of Das Ziel, in 1916—not

because “I recognized his genius” (I still don’t recognize it now) but because I
wanted to encourage a twenty-something student (I was thirty), whose direc-
tion of thought then accorded with my own. With some effort, I overlooked
the rather banal and secondary sides of his not untalented essay. . . . Soon after
the volume appeared he turned away from me and everyone else. He consid-
ered the (humanitarian) activism to be shallow and false. The right path was
analytic contemplation—not to change the world but to try and grasp it. In
this way, as I saw it, he switched onto the Hegel-Husserl-Kassner line.1

Despite the condescension that characterizes this account of Benjamin’s

apostasy from the “activist” movement to which he never aligned himself,
Hiller identifies the basic question that emerges in the opening of “The Life
of Students” and gives direction to much of Benjamin’s subsequent thought:
by making the theory of the image an essential element of his concept of his-
tory, Benjamin appears to reverse the last of Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,”
insofar as he favors “analytic contemplation” over active engagement that
aims to change the world. The impression that Benjamin’s concept of history
stands in stark contrast to a Marxist one is only exacerbated by Benjamin’s
apparent disavowal of the tenets of historical materialism when he positively
refers to “utopian images” at the beginning of his essay. In appealing to such
images, moreover, Benjamin introduces an image of his own: an ambiguous
one in which the explosive character of combustion and the focal nature of
concentration are curiously combined. It is by means of this image, which is
itself a theory of the image as both combustive and focal, that he expresses
the concept of history to which “The Life of Students” and, arguably, the rest
of his writings, are dedicated. Here, in any case, is the opening of the essay:

There is a conception of history that, confident in the infinitude of time,

distinguishes only the tempo . . . with which human beings and epochs ad-
vance along the path of progress. This accords with the incoherence, lack
precision, and laxity of demand such a conception imposes on the present.
By contrast, the following meditation concerns a particular state in which
history rests, gathered, as a combustion-focal point, which is what, from
1 Kurt Hiller, letter to Theodor Adorno, 2 and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frank-
June 1965, quoted in Walter Benjamin, furt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972-91) 2:
Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann 916.
184 The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 56
time immemorial, history has been in the utopian images of thinkers [“Die
folgende Betrachtung geht dagegen auf einen bestimmten Zustand, in dem
die Historie als in einem Brennpunkt gesammelt ruht, wie von jeher in den
utopischen Bildern der Denker”]. The elements of the final state do not ap-
pear as formless progressive tendencies but are deeply embedded into every
present moment as the most endangered, scandalous, and ridiculed creations
and thoughts. The historical task consists in purely forming this immanent
state of perfection, making it visible and dominant in the present. This state
cannot be circumscribed with pragmatic descriptions of details… but can be
grasped only in its metaphysical structure, like the messianic kingdom or the
French-revolutionary idea.2

In reading the opening of “The Life of Students,” one can certainly sym-
pathize with Hiller’s response, for, despite its reference to the French revo-
lution, there appears to be something remarkably static about its concept
of history. Of course, Benjamin repudiates naïve conceptions of “necessary
historical progress,” but he does so not on the basis of a materialist notion
of practice, which requires specific forms of political organization, but rather
with reference to a “state of perfection” that seems to transcend history by
virtue of its perfection. Thus, the French revolution, far from being the ab-
breviation for a complex moment in the history of global social conflict, is
understood as a “metaphysical structure.” At the same time it is associated
not with specific social-political agents but, rather, with the Messiah—as if
there were no difference between the French revolution and the messianic
kingdom from the metaphysical perspective that the young Benjamin appar-
ently adopts. All of this may not condemn the essay to the category of the
“typically counter-revolutionary,” and it is probably not typical of anything
at all; but it does cast doubt on its author’s commitment to the secular-
progressive goals that a volume like Das Ziel promotes. Nevertheless, this
response to the opening of the essay is also predicated on the elision of its
central claim, which is itself intersected by the image of the Brennpunkt. This
crucial term can be translated in two opposed ways: it is both “focal point,”
where Punkt is interpreted as a spatial point of concentration, and “point of
combustion,” where Punkt is interpreted as the temporal point of diffusion.
Benjamin’s claim, then, is that under certain conditions, here called “states
of perfection,” history does not “flow” from past to future, with the present
as a real but nevertheless vanishing point of transition from one to the other;
rather, “history rests, gathered.” The function of the image is to represent the
double-edged character of this gathering as both explosive and concentrative;
there is combustion only where there is focus, and concentration is achieved
only when there is likewise explosive combustion. The support for this con-

2 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 2: 75; thor’s.

translations here as elsewhere are the au-
“Combustion-Focal Point”  185
cept of history, which replaces the notion of historical latent tendencies with
a sense of the tenseness of historical disclosure, does not derive from either
induction or deduction; that is, Benjamin neither amasses evidence from
the annals of history nor reconstructs the course of events on the basis of
a rational-dialectical schema. Rather, he seeks support for his image-laden
concept of history in the sphere of images, for it is the “utopian images of
thinkers” that attests to the truth of his claim.
There is something tautological about this point of support, however, for
any utopian image that does not present history as a combustion-focal point
cannot, by definition, be a utopian image of a thinker and may not even
be an image at all. What, then, is an image? By referring to “utopian im-
ages” Benjamin emphasizes that the images under discussion are not derived
from reality. This is why they accrue to thinkers. But “utopian images” are
not precisely images of utopia; rather, they are images that have so thor-
oughly broken away from any representational structure that they could be
called images to the second power, imaginary images, which are as remote
from sensuous reality as from Platonic Forms. Just as there is a tautological
character to the claim that “utopian images of thinkers” confirm Benjamin’s
concept of history, so the very phrase “utopian images” verges on the tauto-
logical, since the word utopia points toward a sphere of non-representational,
hence purely “imaginary” images. In a certain sense, the question, “what is
an image?” finds an answer in the image through which Benjamin presents
his concept of history: an image is whatever is explosive-concentrative. One
place-time in which explosiveness and concentration combine is precisely
student life. And the life of students can thus be seen as the very “utopian
image” toward which Benjamin’s thought thus tends.
There is only one major impediment to the line of thought that results
in the last statement: the life of students is a utopian image of a thinker—in
this case, Benjamin. The impediment is not the fact that Benjamin cannot
be counted among the rank of thinkers, for “The Life of Students” is, after
all, the first public expression of his thought. The impediment, rather, is that
the current lives of students do not form an image, one image that could be
described as “utopian” because it is altogether imaginary. In the remainder of
Benjamin’s essay, in a variety of ways, he emphasizes nothing so much as the
lack of unity in student life, a lack that has nothing to do with the absence
of coalescing “ideals,” much less with the absence of decisive “leadership.” A
review of Dostoyevsky’s Idiot that Benjamin published a few years after “The
Life of Students” presents the novel, strangely enough, as a reflection on the
“failure of youth,” and something similar applies to “The Life of Students”:
it is about the failure of students, which has nothing to do with academic
failure. To say that students failed to stop the war is a crude but accurate
statement of the failure in question. In this regard, Benjamin’s perspective
186 The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 56
mirrors that of the left-wing members of the German Social Democratic
Party who broke loose from the Party leadership as a consequence of the lat-
ter’s parliamentary vote to fund the German war effort. In the same respect,
Benjamin’s reflections on the category of the student are similar to those of
radical-socialist analyses of the proletariat. The question in the case of both
the proletariat and students is the same: how can they attain an awareness
of themselves such that they are themselves and not what others—call them
the “bourgeoisie” or “parents”—expect them to be? The basic problem as-
sociated with the program of awakening proletarian class-consciousness is
thus embedded in Benjamin’s essay, and his solution—if this is the right
word—consists in the theory of the image. The advantage of developing a
theory of images in relation to class-terms is that it tends to neutralize a num-
ber of objections that stand in the way of constructing a concept of history
that accords decisive importance to the ability of a class to attain awareness
of itself. As the double-generative in the relevant formula immediately sug-
gests, the image of the proletariat viz. student is one that the proletariat viz.
student must make of and for itself. It is therefore a self-generated self-image
that takes concrete shape only in the form of political-social organization. At
the end of the first paragraph of “The Life of Students” Benjamin subtly yet
unambiguously indicates that the life of students is indeed to be understood
as an image—or would be so understood if only the present were utterly
transformed. For this is how he defines the task of critique: “knowingly free-
ing the future from its mis-imaged form [verbildeten Form] in the present.”3

Despite Hiller’s assertion that Benjamin’s work is “typically counterrevo-

lutionary,” there can be no question that the first public expression of his
thought presents its aim as emancipatory. And even if one notes in response
that it is not the oppressed classes of human beings who are to be freed from
their oppressors but, rather, the future from the present, this scarcely makes
Benjamin more “counterrevolutionary” than Marx. Here, as a reminder, are
some of the opening words of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:
“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains
of the living. And just as human beings seem to be occupied with revolu-
tionizing themselves and things, creating something that has not yet existed,
precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the
spirits of the past to their service, borrowing their names, battle slogans, and
costumes in order to bring to stage this new scene of world history in time-
honored disguise and borrowed language.”4 The opening of “The Life of Stu-
3 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 2: 75. Here is a productive place to compare
4 Karl Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des “The Life of Students” with Derrida’s
Louis Bonaparte, reprinted in Marx/En- reflections on Marx and messianicity in
gels, Werke (Berlin: Dietz, 1972) 8: 115. Specters of Marx.
“Combustion-Focal Point”  187
dents” differs from its counterpart in The Eighteenth Brumaire only because
it concentrates the wide and colorful panoply of historical phenomena—
“names, battle slogans, and costumes”— into a single concept: verbildeten
Formen, here translated as “mis-imaged forms.” According to The Eighteenth
Brumaire, a new kind of revolution will emerge in the future, the “social
revolution of the nineteenth century,” which discards the borrowed phrases
and images that characterize all previous revolutions: “The revolution of the
nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its
own content. There, the phrase went beyond the content—here the content
goes beyond the phrase.”5
Marx is, of course, fully aware of the irony of invoking Biblical images to
present the liberation of the present from images drawn from the past, but
one could nevertheless ask whether this kind of irony, in which an image is
used to present a mode of revolutionary practice devoid of such historically
drenched images, does not serve as a replacement for a theory of the image.
An objection such as this to Marx’s use of the image in The Eighteenth Bru-
maire may have been one of the catalysts for the opening paragraph of “The
Life of Students,” where the apocalyptic image of the dead burying the dead
represents the polar opposite of student life. The primary response to Marx
does not, however, consist in the subtle displacement of one image and the
use of another; on the contrary, it resides in the altogether obvious replace-
ment of one class term by another. Instead of the proletarian class, there are
students, who are not defined by such extraneous qualities as their presence
in a generally recognizable classroom. Students are defined tautologically: as
those who study. The object of their study, which alone makes them students,
is the combustive-focal image. And to extent that students are themselves
combustive-focal, they study an image of themselves. The life of students is
therefore not formed in imitation of a model, least of all a model borrowed
from their putative teachers, but it is also not a mode of “free-forming” devel-
opment without precedents or antecedents. As the end of the first paragraph
of “The Life of Students” emphasizes—and Benjamin emphasizes this by
repeating the same claim in the final paragraph—the image in question is
not related to so-called reality, which is defined by the power of the present;
rather, it is related to the “mis-imaged form” that characterizes the present.
The task of critique thus consists in transforming the “presentist” mis-image
into a futurial image—where the phrase “futurial image” is perhaps the most
tautological of all. The image can only be “in” the future because it cannot
be determined by anything related to the present. This feature of the image
is nowhere more clearly evident than in the life of students, which must be

5 Marx/Engels, Werke 8: 117.

188 The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Vol. 56
thoroughly futurial in order for it to be their life. In this way, the emancipa-
tion of student life becomes the revolutionary program par excellence.
Thus, Benjamin insists that the students are not the young but, rather, the
elders, who confirm their advanced age by associating with children rather
than with adults. None of this was apparent to Kurt Hiller. By so closely
linking his concept of history to the image, Benjamin, in his view, adopted
a thoroughly “analytic contemplative” attitude toward historical events. This
verdict is not necessarily wrong. Indeed, it could be understood less as a
response to Benjamin’s essay than a vague recognition that there was some-
thing untimely about “The Life of Students” by the time it entered into his
hands. What was vital in 1915 was no longer so in 1916. Benjamin himself
may have responded to the essay in such a manner. But the very untimeli-
ness of the essay—which treats the life of students as if it were a matter of
decisive historical significance—may also indicate that its brief theory of the
image as combustive-focal still has a future. For, just as Benjamin replaces the
term “proletariat” by “students,” so his future readers can replace “students”
with—well, the replacement is only a matter of the moment, not something
that solicits predictions. In the life of Xs a combustive-focal image may still
take shape.

Northwestern University
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