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Marion Picker, Der konservative Charakter: Walter Benjamin und die Politik der Dichter. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2004. 180 pages.
O.E. Tal, one of the many names of Walter Benjamin, never saw the light of day. It is not difficult to fathom why Benjamin might have had reservations about using this particular nom de plume in any of his publications. The palindrome of the Latin verb lateo-which derives from the Greek Cetho and means to be hidden, concealed, or secured-would have been a more telling pseudonym for either Freud (the theorist of the latent) or Heidegger (the philosopher of á-lëtheia). Appropriately enough, Marion Picker keeps "O.E. TaI" in the critical apparatus of her book Der konservative Charakter: Walter Benjamin und die Politik der Dichter (21). Her study nevertheless brings to light why Benjamin might have considered this particular pen-name in the first place: it obviously conceals, and thereby enacts, the very principle of pseudonyms. Benjamin's well-known predilection for hiding his proper name might very well be revealing in a biographical or psychological sense. (Heidegger, for one, argues that the false name as a matter of principle discloses the truth about an author, and Freud's vocabulary almost inevitably surfaces in Adorno's sketch of Benjamin's elusiveness.) The focus of Picker's work, however, is neither the biographical datum nor the psychological symptom. Der konservative Charakter instead examines the name, including the false one, as the site at which Benjamin's politics are hidden in plain view.
Two texts by Benjamin occupy a similarly obvious, and hence all the more effective, hiding-place in Picker's study. The title of her book evidently alludes to "Der destruktive Charakter," a portrait of sorts inspired by Benjamin's acquaintance with a certain Gustav Glück. But just like "Schicksal und Charakter," an essay which seeks to establish the mutual exclusiveness of its two key terms, "Der destruktive Charakter" never comes to the fore. A passage from the brief sketch serves as an epigraph to die introductory chapter, and Picker repeatedly mentions the longer essay in passing. Neither one of these two texts, however, becomes the avowed subject of sustained analysis. While this ruse might qualify Der konservative Charakteras a pseudepigraph (albeit one in which it is not the author, but the text at issue, which is in doubt)...