This year I agreed to be a part of a translation project: alongside two fellow academics, the aim was to translate the fifty-something page Walter Benjamin essay, “Eduard Fuchs, collector and historian.” An issue soon arose concerning whether or not we should change the pronouns—which in the essay is usually “he”—to the gender-neutral “they.” I had initially suggested this change without giving it much thought. Another translator did not agree with my view that this was a relatively harmless change, rather insisting that we ought to maintain the translation of the pronoun as “he,” citing the necessity of “fidelity to the text.” To his mind, if this word was what was on the page, then we had to translate it as literally as possible: a one-to-one match. Translation must be free of interpretation, since interpretation is subjective, and subjectivity is, my colleague seemed to express, a bad word in the world of translation.
I thought at the time, and still do, that this seemed a little odd considering how much of translation actually requires interpretation. Indeed, I find company with the early Benjamin on this front, who asserts that no translation should strive for likeness to the original. Beyond the fact that we don’t have direct access to other’s thoughts, even when written down, we don’t really know what Benjamin meant a lot of the time. He’s a notoriously difficult, and famously weird thinker. His word choice and sentence construction can be convoluted (even in the original German) and, like his Frankfurt School contemporary, Theodor W. Adorno, Benjamin is often charged with intentional opacity and being a little bit elitist. Owing to this opacity, by the time we encountered the question of whether to make the pronouns gender neutral, we’d already offered several “subjective” interpretations for our translation. Apparently, this particular suggestion of changing “he” to “they” was a step too far. We had to stay loyal to the text; we had to keep our subjectivity out of the English version of Benjamin’s words.
My kneejerk reaction to this disagreement was that maybe Benjamin hadn’t really meant that much by choosing “he.” German articles and nouns are gendered. Nouns that end in -keit and -schaft are feminine, but I have yet to encounter a critical essay arguing that when Hegel talked about ethical life, or Sittlichkeit, what he meant was that ethical life is feminine. Hier ist die Rose, hier Tanze—is the rose a woman? To my mind, when Benjamin wrote der Historischer Materialismus, he wasn’t declaring that historical materialists are necessarily men; rather, it’s by a funny quirk of the German language, the invocation of the masculine article “der,” that his statements appear this way.
Unfortunately, there are many places in Benjamin’s oeuvre that give one reason to suspect that the choice of gender might be intentional. At last year’s biannual meeting of the International Walter Benjamin Society (IWBS), I attended a talk by another scholar who was exploring Benjamin’s use of the feminine. Mostly, these uses aren’t very flattering—like in “Life of Students” (1915), wherein Benjamin suggests that the “agency of prostitutes” is a punishment for the bourgeois life to which students have committed themselves. But sometimes they’re a little bit funny, as in “Metaphysics of Youth” (1913), where Benjamin remarks offhandedly that women don’t need to speak in order to communicate with each other. “The women remain silent,” he writes, “their conversation has freed itself from the subject and from language.” He doesn’t really elaborate on why this is the case, but the concept of a young Walter Benjamin observing two silent women from a distance and thinking to himself that this means they have somehow chanced to “perceive the perfection” of a circle is amusing.
Throughout his career Benjamin seemed to be in turn attracted to or repulsed by the so-called feminine mystique. And this makes itself apparent in all the different ways he goes on to talk about women, or reference them, all while never directly addressing them. Women are beyond language, since they know the secret of life but refuse to share it. The eroticism of women is a punishment for a wrongly-lived life, but equally they can give this life back to men, if only in their dreams. Jacques Lacan once said that Woman does not exist; Benjamin’s work is an anachronistic elaboration of Lacan, suggesting that because she is not a subject, Woman exists everywhere. “From the vantage point of death, every girl is the beloved woman who encounters us sleepers in our diary. […] This is the shape of love […]. Passion has slept its fill between us, and the woman is a girl, since she girlishly gives us back our unused time that she has collected in her death.” Behind the back of man—that is to say, in his dreams—woman, a girl, is there, offering something to him that he didn’t realize he was missing.
But just because women have, for Benjamin, succeeded in shedding the mortal coil he calls language, this doesn’t mean he envisioned an especially important role for them in the revolutionary project of the historical materialist. Per Benjamin’s “Theses,” the dialectician is “man enough” to blast apart the continuum of history—he lives in and is conscious of this continuum. Are women even, or can they ever be, aware that one exists, given that they live in the sensuous present, one that is not subject to the pitfalls of language or even the past? Women have left “the circle; they alone perceive the perfection of its roundness.” Woman’s status appears in Benjamin’s work to be at odds with the project of the historical materialist, given the relationship to the past “history” necessarily implies.
The charge that the role of dialectician or historical materialist necessarily excludes women, according to Benjamin, is complicated by his later essays—even as the most damning evidence for this gendered exclusion may be found there. This complication reflects anachronistically onto his early period, problematizing the tendency to periodize Benjamin’s work (already suggested by Howard Eiland) into the early, metaphysical period and the later, Marxist one to the extent that, as Louis Sterrett has argued, “critique in Benjamin’s pre-Marxist works takes on historical weight through the Marxism that he would carry for the rest of his life.” A throughline thus emerges between the early figures of the feminine, like the prostitute in “Life of Students,” and the rather late appearance of another, considerably more positive figure: the engineer.
The engineer, who first appears in One-Way Street (1928), prefigures the historical materialist in Benjamin’s work. But just what, or who, is the engineer? It’s old news that Benjamin had a longstanding affair with the Lithuanian playwright, Asja Lacis, and this relationship is near-universally affirmed as the catalyst which sparked the flame of Marxism that was to remain ignited for the remainder of his career. This female voice is often identified as the culprit who coaxed Benjamin into the open arms of Marxism—yet this feminine presence exceeds mere biographical fact, making itself known in Benjamin’s writing, too. It is in this sense that, as Justine McGill has claimed, Benjamin provided “a theoretical foundation for Lacis’ practical work” (a perspective affirmed also by Andris Brinkmanis). The principles of Lacis’ work distilled by Benjamin—such as we find in “Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theater” (1928)—would be applied to and adapted in his own writing, constructing the theoretical scaffolding for his later endeavors. The opening to One-way Street testifies that Lacis’ political commitments provided not simply ideological inspiration, but concrete, methodological grounding for the political transformations across Benjamin’s work.
Esther Leslie describes Lacis as modeling a particular political practice for Benjamin through her role in the political avant-garde as she worked to develop cultural practice for the Communist Party. Lacis’ career, which focused on proletarian pedagogy and children’s theater, also bears remarkable similarities to the intellectual Benjamin would later describe in “The Author as Producer” (1933)—a figure whose “political tendency” and technical proficiency, and so also their artistic success, are bound together and realized concretely through the labor struggle. The figure of the author as a productive individual who concretely maintains solidarity with the proletariat is prefigured by the interests of the engineer that Benjamin articulates in “Filling Station,” the opening aphorism of One-Way Street. There, Benjamin conceives of a new technical approach to authorship, accomplished through “leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards” that displays an affinity with the comingling of genre and literary style conceptualized in “The Author as Producer.” Such literary apparatuses one would scarcely think to call “literature,” but Benjamin maintains they are the best way to transform mere fact into “conviction,” something declarative enough to act on. “Only this prompt language shows itself equal to the moment,” and this prompt language, “opinion” or social criticism, is the oil capable of loosening the aging joints of the social machine. These being hidden, the critic must commit themselves to study so as to know where to find these hidden abodes, and so also to determine the appropriate means for loosening these outdated facets of the social machine. This critic is the engineer: Asja Lacis, who “cut” a street through the author, Walter Benjamin.
Lacis’ political projects, such as her commitment to a Communist pedagogy for children, paved a road leading only one way: toward class consciousness and the project of historical materialism. The engineer is, therefore, a blueprint, an early iteration of the figure of the historical materialist who Benjamin would expend much effort to articulate the contours of throughout his later essays. The woman, Lacis, is an engineer, while the historical materialist is “man enough.” Yet, neither’s work seems complete, or even possible, in the absence of the other—a situation that receives curious corroboration in the fact that the Arcades Project was conceptualized as “a historical version of Sleeping Beauty, predicated on a theory of collective awakening.” This gendered dichotomy gestures toward the hope of resolving the schism between the realms of production and reproduction articulated by Benjamin in 1915, of “the creative spirit (in the fraternities)” and “an unmastered force of nature (in prostitution).” This goal, of developing “a single community of creative persons,” hinged on “masculine” productivity being (re)united with the feminine, which is “not productive in a masculine sense.” This unification, an overcoming of the schism between the reproductive and productive realms induced by capital, further speaks to Lacis’ own theories regarding the revolutionary goals of her children’s theater: to “set productivity free on the basis of a generally high level of education.”
None of what I’ve said here settles the question of whether the historical materialist, being “man enough” to wrestle with the continuity of historical progress, can be a woman. However, neither can it be a truth universally acknowledged that Benjamin barred women from this practice, since the historical materialist is intimately bound up with other figures outlined by Benjamin—most notably the engineer. The idea of technique received from Benjamin along this trajectory—which anachronistically leads from Lacis-as-engineer to Benjamin’s concerns over youth education at last catapulting us into the devoutly Marxist praxis of the historical materialist—involves a productivity that consciously unifies the hitherto divorced spheres of production and reproduction which are characterized by the genders historically expected in each. Lacis’ children’s theater is the realization of production so unified, since the space of the theater serves as a platform for children’s creativity in the absence of an overdetermined, bourgeois ideal disciplining its direction. Is it, then, an infidelity to translate Benjamin’s “Fuchs” essay in such a way as to more clearly open up the role of the historical materialist to other gender identities? I take it that fidelity must be cast aside in favor of “the correct political tendency,” that is, the struggle over the productive sphere of labor which, in the absence of bourgeois domination, perhaps knows no gender.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Elisabeth Paquette or the Associate Editor Shadi “Soph” Heidarifar.
everet smith
everet smith is a PhD candidate at Emory University. They received their BA in philosophy at Appalachian State University in 2018 and their MA in ethics and applied philosophy at UNC Charlotte in 2021. Their research interests include Frankfurt School critical theory, historical materialism, Latin American philosophy, and psychoanalysis, among others. Their dissertation is a philosophical and historical investigation of the evolving relationship between suicide and freedom that develops alongside the emergence of a capitalist state. Their publications may be found in such places asPhilosophy Today (forthcoming, 2026), Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy (2026, 2024), and Aztlán: A Journal for Chicano Studies (August 2023).
