A critique of the Work. Cassirer and Benjamin, in Kunstkritik

Walter Benjamin’s concern with Ausdruck/Expression, as it unfolds in his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, finds an echo in the development of Cassirer’s thought as the focus of it shifts from the Ausdrucksfunktion to the Ausdrucksphänomen in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, and, then, from these to a culturological conception of Ausdruckswahrnehmung and the originary phenomenon of Expression in his late works. It is precisely this originary acceptation of the phenomenon of Ausdruck that sheds light on the philosophical relationship between Cassirer and Benjamin. In the Orphic word Elpìs, as the ultimate originary phenomenon that Benjamin takes up from Goethe, is an anticipation of and perhaps a move beyond Cassirer’s account of Werk. Accordingly, the ideal transition from his Basis Phänomene to the Logic is clarified, in that the irreducibility of the work as originary phenomenon alludes to das Ausdruckslose/the Expressionless, the critical power of the truth concealed in the work, and in the beauty of the work of art. It is this power that determines the symbolic world as semblance, and the works as torsos of truth, «plant-like» muteness and still life.