The Tangle of Evolution: Walter Benjamin as a Reader of Edgar Dacqué's Natural Philosophy

Obscured by the critical focus on his messianic theology (Caygill, 334), Walter Benjamin’s interest in the things of nature includes relevant explorations of natural history or the study of evolution. Benjamin was well informed about both contemporary trends in natural history and their political agendas: a rather bitter review of the paleontologist Edgar Dacqué’s 1928 lecture at the Lessing-Hochschule shows that the politics of nature inscribed in the natural history of the time singularly oriented Benjamin’s interests in cosmology. As I argue, the little-known essay “Krisis des Darwinismus?” (534–36), published in Die Literarische Welt on April 12, 1929 (Walter Benjamin Archiv, I, Dr 508), demonstrates Benjamin’s critical appreciation of Dacqué’s natural history. The text targets the gesture of ordering formal similarities and dissimilarities among organisms into a hierarchy of types largely predetermined by their genes (Benjamin, 534), while exposing this same gesture as arbitrary and ideological.