The ideal of quote:

Lessing – Schlegel – Benjamin

Abstract

The writings of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich Schlegel and Walter Benjamin share an ideal of critique. In their attempt to rethink and reshape the figure of the critic as well as the act of criticism as such, all three were led to picture the transformation of that same ideal by referring to a number of fundamental concepts and disciplines that are said to incorporate the critical spirit as a particular gesture: philosophy, physics, anatomy, chemistry, or politics. Such an exercise in figuration is bound to play itself as a literal or physical prefiguration: just as Lessing became Schlegel’s model of the critic, so too was Schlegel himself at the root of Benjamin’s musings about the task and the technique of the critic. A large part of this mechanism of affinity and inheritance is put into motion by a concept that will prove central to Benjamin’s whole oeuvre: quotation. In many respects, the fate of Lessing’s and Schlegel’s ideal of critique is decided in Benjamin’s ideal of quotation.