Books 1: Habermas, Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Sartre
Introduction
The New College of Florida tossed hundreds of books in a dumpster two weeks ago. The college insisted that it was an apolitical “standard weeding process” wherein old and damaged books were removed from the library. Others – supporters and detractors alike – read the dump as part of the college’s broader attack on so-called ‘Cultural Marxism’. It’s a book ban. The historical analogue is obvious: the dump is the most recent iteration of the disgusting global tradition of book burnings. This event should not be collapsed into the broader story of far-right politics in the U.S., couched between reproductive rights and immigration policy as yet another transgression. No – this is analytically unique.[1]
We are simultaneously in the midst of a broader, slower book crisis. Readership is collapsing: 46% of Americans did not finish a single book in 2023. Who can blame them? Organizations like The School of Practical Philosophy are increasingly removing the work of hermeneutics from learning. They follow the slightly older tradition of online reading ‘tools’ like SparkNotes. Publishers know this: they have overwhelmingly pivoted their focus to the works of celebrities and established names. Vapid self-help books continue to dominate best-seller lists. We’ve lost any tradition of popular, theoretically rich cultural commentaries: we’ve replaced One Dimensional Man and Gender Trouble with Freakonomics and Sapiens. Where, for example, are the texts that articulate the truth of the #BlackLivesMatter or Occupy movements to both academic and popular audiences? We are instead left with a disgusting heap of identical books on Donald Trump and little else.
This is, I want to suggest, an opportunity to think through the meaning of ‘the book’. Why do these bounded pages carry such fright? What else can they mean? What are we missing? Can the works of 20th century social theory help us understand this constellation? I argue that Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere contains an ideal typical representation of the prevailing instrumentally rational understanding of ‘the book’.[2] Read through Max Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason, Habermas appears as a confirmation of the dominant scientist worldview. This, I hold, prevents us from really understanding our current crisis. More exciting – and more necessary for our time – are the heterodox understandings of ‘the book’ in Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library” and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea. For both Benjamin and Sartre, I argue, the book contains an infinity of imaginations, memories, connections, separations, fears, fantasies, and emptinesses. It is this sensitivity to the mystical dimension of ‘the book’ that can help us understand the present crisis of ‘the book’. This essay thus provides 1) a theoretical response to the ‘book’ crisis and 2) an innovative linkage of three theorists along an underexplored axis.
Habermas, Horkheimer, and the Instrumentality of the Book
We typically think of books as instruments: they serve a function. The cookbook delivers the recipe, the guidebook locations, the comedy laughs, and the poem tears.[3] This reading finds its clearest articulation in German philosopher Jürgen Habermas’s classic 1962 text The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
Habermas’s argument, simply put, is that a rare and powerful democratic ethos was cultivated in the salons, coffee houses, and dinner parties of 18th century France, Germany, and England. These were explicitly public spaces in which all members (supposedly) disregarded status differences and had equal access to texts for conversation. The book was the crucial instrument by which to bring about rational-critical debate. Two attendees’ ownership and capacity to read a given text allowed for genuine democratic conversation. This is, I think, the apparently bourgeois fantasy of many public intellectuals.
Crucial for our purposes is Habermas’s insistence on the publicness of the text: Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th century invention of the moveable type and Martin Luther’s 16th century translation of the Latin Bible form a sort of teleology of reason made public.[4] Indeed, Habermas’s crucial point here is the transformation of the text into a commodity form.[5] He thus writes:
“To the degree, however, to which philosophical and literary works and works of art in general were produced for the market and distributed through it, these culture products became similar to that type of information: as commodities they became in principle generally accessible. They no longer remained components of the Church’s and court’s publicity of representation; that is precisely what was meant by the loss of their aura of extraordinariness and by the profaning of their once sacramental character.” (Habermas [1962] 1991: 36-37, my emphasis)[6]
Habermas repeats this instrumentalizing move in his reading of letter writing and diary entries. He writes:
“In the intimate sphere of the conjugal family privatized individuals viewed themselves as independent even from the private sphere of their economic activity - as persons capable of entering into ‘purely human’ relations with one another. The literary form of these at the time was the letter [...] through letter writing the individual unfolded himself in his subjectivity. [...] The diary became a letter addressed to the sender, and the first-person narrative became a conversation with one’s self addressed to another person.” (Habermas [1962] 1991: 48-49)
This is a convincing account! The letter and diary – books in miniature – offer the bourgeois citizen an opportunity for the generation of a subjective interiority: ‘who am I for myself?’. This is a noble achievement, but it – again – transforms the book into a tool used to achieve something else. Both literary forms are quickly passed through: they are a medium through which to discover a deeper truth, never a truth in themselves. In Habermas, the book is thus an instrumentally rational tool by which to circulate information among broad publics and foster (democratic) conversation. It serves the creation of European bourgeois public life, analogous to the role of the aqueducts in Rome, the irrigation channels in Ancient China, or the caravans in the Wild West.
Even Habermas’s most incisive critics maintain this reading of ‘the book’ as instrument. The Marxist-feminist response to Structural Transformation, with all of its calls for counter-publics and historical exclusions, challenged the boundaries of the public sphere without questioning the basic relationship between participant and book. Nancy Fraser demanded that women and the poor get access to the book as instrument!
This is all a symptom, I think, of Habermas’s larger failure to take Horkheimer’s critique of ‘instrumental reason’ seriously. In brief, Horkheimer laments the absence of ‘substantive reason’ in modernity. Where previous ages found universal meaning in philosophy and religion, the post-war period instead faced the emptiness of positivism and empiricism. “According to the philosophy of the average intellectual”, Horkheimer writes, “there is only one authority, namely science, conceived as the classification of facts and the calculation of probabilities” (Horkheimer [1947] 2013: 24). Science has no respect for ‘the book’, except as a medium for the delivery of numbers and figures.[7] Horkheimer thus writes:
“A hike that takes a man out of the city to the banks of a river or a mountain top would be irrational and idiotic, judged by utilitarian standards; he is devoting himself to a silly or destructive pastime. In the view of formalized reason, an activity is reasonable only if it serves another purpose, e.g. health or relaxation, which helps to replenish his working power. In other words, the activity is merely a tool, for it derives its meaning only through its connection to other ends” (Horkheimer [1947] 2013: 37, my emphasis)
The gender studies books at The New College of Florida, the philosophy texts re-interpreted by artificial intelligence, the lost traditions of One-Dimensional Man and Gender Trouble – all of these are hikes to the river that are relegated by both Habermas and the modern scientific worldview as “irrational and idiotic”. Their failure to generate democratic conversations mirrors their broader non-productivity. The book thus appears to us as art appeared to Horkheimer:
“But no living relation to the work [of art] in question, no direct, spontaneous understanding of its function as an expression, no experience of its totality as an image of what once was called truth, is left. This reification is typical of the subjectivization and formalization of reason.” (Horkheimer [1947] 2013: 40)
Habermas, then, cannot help us understand our current book crisis. I propose that we turn to Benjamin and Sartre.
Benjamin, Sartre, and the Meaning of the Book
Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay “Unpacking my Library” and Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1938 novel Nausea contain two analogous accounts of the of ‘the book’.[8] They both sit with the materiality of the book, explore its content beyond the delivery of information, and get lost in its overflowing meanings. I will here trace a few of those resonances.[9] [10]
First, the materiality of the book. Absent in Habermas is any meditation on the book as an object, with its leather bindings, illustrated covers, damaged pages, or annotated margins. In Sartre, however, we can find a beautiful reflection on the ruined book: the pages “soiled by excrement”, “dry and fragile as dead leaves”, “pounded to a pulp”, and “twist[ing] and tear[ing] themselves from the mud” (Sartre [1938] 1964: 10). Even more, this materiality is immediately confused with that of the human body. Roquentin, mad as ever, likens the treatment of those pages to his own hands: “the rain had drenched and twisted it, it was covered with blisters and swellings like a burned hand” (Sartre [1938] 1964: 10). Roquentin terms this “a sort of nausea in the hands” (Sartre [1938] 1964: 11). This same dynamic re-appears nearly one-hundred pages later when Roquentin, in the throes of self-doubt, stabs his own hand and:
“watch[es] with satisfaction, on the white paper, across the lines I wrote a little while ago, this tiny pool of blood which at last stopped being me. Four lines on a white paper, a spot of blood, that makes a beautiful memory.” (Sartre [1938] 1964: 100)
And just a moment later:
“I buy a newspaper along my way. Sensational news. Little Lucienne’s body has been found! Smell of ink, the paper crumples between my fingers. The criminal has fled. The child was raped. They found her body, the fingers clawing at the mud. I roll the paper into a ball, my fingers clutching at the paper; smell of ink; my God how strongly things exist today.” (Sartre [1938] 1964: 100)
The book, then, appears simultaneously as a wound, of nature, agential, like the human body, a memory, part of a mixture, news, the object of frustration, and a proof of existence.
Second, the book (and specifically Sartre’s library) appears as an oasis of order in a world of fear, loneliness, and confusion.[11] “As long as you stay between these [library] walls”, Sartre writes, “whatever happens must happen on the right or left of the stove” (Sartre [1938] 1964: 76). Books, then, “serve at least to fix the limits of probability” (Sartre [1938] 1964: 76). Benjamin too dreams of the order of the catalogue, insisting that the “true freedom of all books is somewhere on [the collector’s] shelves” (Benjamin [1931] 2019: 6).[12] This works as a “damn against the spring tide of memories which surges towards any collector as he contemplates his possessions” (Benjamin [1931] 2019: 2).[13] Sartre’s Self-Taught Man, for example, faces the terrifying challenge of mastering all academic knowledge by sorting authors alphabetically, thus convincing himself that he will eventually know everything.[14] This is his only way to manage that “universe behind and before him” (Sartre [1938] 1964: 30).[15] I suspect that many academics share in the experience of a world of fear and confusion stabilized by the dim promise of making progress in a reading.
Third, the book exceeds the reader. Unlike Habermas’s democratic citizen, Benjamin’s collector approaches the book as something greater than a text. The pursuit of the book, for example, transforms Benjamin’s understanding of the modern city. He writes:
“Collectors are people with a tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationary store a key position. How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!” (Benjamin [1931] 2019: 5)
He adds that “to a true collector the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth” (Benjamin [1931] 2019: 3). He continues, in a particularly beautiful passage:
“One of the finest memories of a collector is the moment when he rescued a book to which he might never have given a thought, much less a wishful look, because he found it lonely and abandoned on the market place and bought it to give it its freedom” (Benjamin [1931] 2019: 6)[16]
The book, in every sense, appears like something more than the reader: it is “not that they [books] come alive in him; it is he who lives in them” (Benjamin [1931] 2019: 10).
Sartre’s Roquentin too lives in his books, losing himself in their excessiveness. He, knee-deep in his work on M. de Rollebon, admits that he “now represents the only justification for [his] existence” (Sartre [1938] 1964: 70).[17] He later continues: “M. de Rollebon was my partner; he needed me in order to exist and I needed him so as not to feel my existence.” (Sartre [1938] 1964: 98). Where Benjamin’s collector gives life to the book, Sartre’s Roquentin finds (empty) life in it.
Fourth and finally, the book is a social relationship. Sartre’s Roquentin, having just received a letter from an estranged lover, states: “I go out; I hold the envelope between my fingers, I dare not open it” (Sartre [1938] 1964: 60). The letter appears not as a carrier of content, but an imagined potential, a hopeful promise of what a lover could say. Fittingly, Roquentin is filled with “disillusion” upon opening the letter, insisting that he doesn’t know “how Anny [his lover] manages to fill up her envelopes: there’s never anything inside” (Sartre [1938] 1964: 60). The letter thus constitutes the imagination of a social relationship and the confirmation of its emptiness.
Roquentin predictably returns to the book in his actual encounter with Anna: he fixates on her bedside copy of Michelet’s History of France, unable to engage with her new life. Recall that this is one of two significant, extended conversation partners Roquentin has over the entire course of the text. Like Anny, Roquentin too “live[s] surrounded with [his] dead passions” (Sartre [1938] 1964: 145). The book grounds his asociality. Roquentin can thus rightly say that “it seems as though I have learned all I know of life in books” (Sartre [1938] 1964: 64). The contrast with Habermas could not be clearer.
Conclusion
The book means more than we know. Habermas’s Structural Transformation depicts a basically instrumental relationship wherein the book facilitates democratic dialogue. Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason exposes the emptiness of that instrumental relationship. Benjamin’s “Unpacking my Library” and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea outline a four-part model of the meanings of the book: materiality, order, excess, and sociality. These are not definitive features, but proofs that there’s more to the book than Habermas lets on.
My own copy of Nausea helps make this point. I bought the book from a discount cart outside a used bookstore for $3. It was in bad shape: the spine was breaking, the pages were curling, and it had a big blue ink stain in the upper right-hand corner. You barely notice it at first – its hidden under the curls. But then it starts getting worse. It spreads. Page by page, the stain grows a little bigger, slowly approaching the words on the page. At the very same time, Sartre’s novel descends into madness: Roquentin is overtaken by nausea. The ink replicates the narrative. The further I got into the text, – the more I fidgeted with the cover and wrote on the pages – the more the ink stain grew. The book contained a history, a figurative representation of a narrative, and the narrative itself. Benjamin opened his essay by asking us to “share with [him] a bit of the mood” (Benjamin [1931] 2019: 1). This, I think, is our contemporary challenge.
Refrences
Benjamin, Walter. [1931] 2019. “Unpacking My Library”. Pp. 1-10 in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Mariner Books.
Habermas, Jürgen. [1962] 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Horkheimer, Marx. [1947] 2013. Eclipse of Reason. Bridgeport, CT: Martino Publishing
Sartre, Jean-Paul. [1938] 1964. Nausea. Translated by Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation.
[1] It has become increasingly en vogue to postulate a single theoretical framework for the entirety of the contemporary conservative movement: populism, fascism, authoritarianism, Christian nationalism, and so on. My approach, instead, tries to find the unique logic behind one small part of the phenomenon. This is analogous to Hannah Arendt’s reading of Walter Benjamin, specifically her comments on ‘pearl diving’.
[2] I am here following the Hegelian tradition of immanent critique, most clearly elaborated in Marx’s engagement with Adam Smith. Following Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen, I link this approach up with Max Weber’s concept of the ‘ideal type’. See their reading of Ernesto Laclau and 21st century populist movements.
[3] Heidegger’s understanding of poetry is a helpful corrective here.
[4] We might extend this historical account to include more recent developments in (global) literacy rates and the digitalization of previously rare texts.
[5] This notably rejects the emptiness of the commodity form so clearly articulated in Marx’s 1844 “Philosophical Manuscripts”.
[6] Habermas’s terminology is interesting. He first refers to the book’s transformation into a commodity as a “loss of their aura”. This is an explicit adoption of Benjamin’s famous reflections on ‘aura’ in his 1935 text “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. Habermas’s invocation, however, lacks the depth of Benjamin’s: he misses the ambivalent movement between a nostalgia for the loss of deeper meanings, an excitement for film’s new innovations, an uneasiness at film’s alienating effects, and a terror in the face of film’s recruitment into fascist politics. This is a product of the broader tension between the two theorists on the issue of the movement of history. This tension is lost, however, in Habermas’s subsequent introduction of the (here undertheorized) Durkheimian language of the ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’.
[7] Interestingly, Horkheimer relegates ‘the book’ to the status of a hobby, not a functional task. He writes: “The person who indulges in a hobby does not even make believe that it has any relation to ultimate truth. When asked in a questionnaire to state your hobby, you put down golf, books, photography, or what not, as unthinkingly as you enter the figure of your weight” (Horkheimer [1947] 2013: 38). This is not a problem for my analysis. Rather, it charts a second, equally fruitless trajectory: either we can follow Habermas and instrumentalize the book, or we can depoliticize the book. We can here think of readers of romance novels, snuff, and comic books – the book becomes an escape, a pause on an otherwise productive life. This is the theoretical logic behind Adorno’s humorous comment that he ‘has no hobbies”, and it potentially sheds light on Horkheimer and Adorno’s decidedly weird reading of the cartoons.
[8] It is interesting to ask if my move from Horkheimer to Benjamin (and Sarte, but he is less relevant here) commits a return to mythology. Recall that Horkheimer and Adorno we terrified of the new myths of the Enlightenment. Chief among these was the scientific obsession with perfect knowledge that supposedly kills classical mythology. This is Bentham.
[9] I previously likened the contemporary ‘book crisis’ to the longer tradition of book burnings across the world. It is interesting, then, that I should suggest turning to two pre-WWII texts for answers. Yes, Horkheimer’s post-WW2 text provides the theoretical impulse to reject Habermas, but Benjamin and Sartre give us the real answers.
[10] Much of this, I think, comes from the biographical character of these accounts: Benjamin’s personal experience as a collector and Roquentin’s diary. These approaches let us follow the subject before and after they encounter the book in its default location (ex. library). They also provide a view of mental processes.
[11] Benjamin is silent on the library. We might interpret Sartre’s libraries as “one of his [the collector’s] dwellings, with books as building stones” (Benjamin [1931] 2019: 10). This comparison, among other things, minimizes the difference between the publicness of library and privateness of the collection. This is especially interested when related to the aforementioned issues of the commodity form.
[12] Benjamin’s notion of ‘freedom’ is undoubtedly less developed than that of Sartre. Still, it is interesting to ask how an object might be free. Recall Benjamin’s tragic lack of any freedom of movement in his final years.
[13] Notice Benjamin’s usage of ‘possessions’: he, like Habermas, recognizes the specificity of the book as commodity form. Unlike Habermas, however, he refuses to reduce the book to that form: it overflows! Still, it is worth asking how Benjamin lines up with this Marxist line of thought. He at one point admits that he “might have never acquired a library extensive enough to be worthy of the name if there had not been an inflation” (Benjamin [1931] 2019: 4). A few pages later, he admits that “inheritance is the soundest way of acquiring a collection” (Benjamin [1931] 2019: 9). These dreams, it seems, as the product of financial luck and privilege! Benjamin too gives us a classically Weberian account of the diversity of economic relationships: “the purchasing done by a book collector has very little in common with that done in a bookshop by a student getting a textbook, a man of the world buying a present for his lady, or a businessman intending to while away his next train journey” (Benjamin [1931] 2019: 5). There is a separate, always interesting intellectual history question of whether Benjamin actually read Weber.
[14] Recall Adorno and Horkheimer’s notes on the mythologies of total scientific knowledge.
[15] It is especially interesting, then, that the novel’s climactic horror – the Self-Taught Man’s molestation of a young boy – happens in a library! Order becomes transgression.
[16] This wonderful passage is immediately followed by a reprehensible comparison: “the way the prince bought a beautiful slave girl in The Arabian Nights” (Benjamin [1931] 2019: 6). We must here admit that Benjamin is ignorant on issues of enslavement. The text loses little if we strike through this line.
[17] Nausea is a short novel: my edition is just 178 pages. It is interesting, then, that Roquentin does not mention the subject of his own book, M. de Robellon, once between pages 18 and 57, 70 and 94, or 102 and 140. This is odd! He is an obsession that is so repeatedly forgotten.