Christopher Law

This co-written essay explores the concept of innocence in "Fate and Character" by Walter Benjamin, as part of a special issue on Benjamin's 1919 essay. We begin with a discussion of Benjamin's later text "Conversation Above the Corso: Recollections of Carnival-Time in Nice" (1935), in which Benjamin remarks that the exaggerated figures at carnival have a relation to innocence, which in turn has a relation to childhood. In "Fate and Character," innocence is harder to pin down: Benjamin writes that it "floats away." Innocence in the essay appears fleetingly, as, we argue, "a gaseous, transitory bi-product of an inquiry that has other ends." For Benjamin, we suggest, innocence is not simply an a priori or natural state, nor is it oppositional to guilt, but something produced through creativity.

In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre, the idea of electricity plays a significant role in the generation of surfaces, which Goethe considers necessary for the plurality of colours to attain to visibility. This paper proposes that the relation between electricity and colour registers a threshold between classicism and anti-classicism, which becomes particularly prominent in the wake of Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft. By arguing that this problem was also present in Walter Benjamin’s early, fragmentary work on colour and language, the paper suggests that Benjamin’s critical reception of Goethe’s scientific studies may be reconsidered.