In this paper we seek to examine the relationship between Walter Benjamin’s life and work as an aesthetics of existence (Foucault 1990, p.12) that materialises in three different domains where the writing process takes centre stage: an ethics of friendship, his quasi-messianic aspiration towards a communism of writing, and his considerations on the historian’s craft. 

The German philosopher and essayist has often inspired historians of education “to develop new ways of seeing pupils and teachers” (Lawn & Grosvenor, 2001, p.125). His thought-provoking appeal to “brush history against the grain” (Benjamin, 1969, p. 257) has often been interpreted as a motto to challenge “crude reductionism”, provide “counter-histories” (Grosvenor, 2019, p.646) and open up new possibilities and methodological approaches in the field of history of education (HE). The montage or juxtaposition of different sources, in addition to the use of historiography and theory, as a means to disrupt gender (Goodman, 2003), is a good example of how the HE has appropriated Benjamin’s work.

The author of Illuminations has also been a continuous reference in the history of childhood education (Grosvenor, 2002), as well as in studies on deviancy (Grosvenor & Watts, 2002; Charles, 2016), urban experience (Lathey, 2016; Pozo, 2019) and school architecture (Hardcastle, 2013).

It was during the visual turn that Benjamin became more appealing to the HE, most notably because, “at this intersection of visual and material studies” (Dussel & Priem, 2017, p.643), he had turned into the perfect companion in guiding historians through the “’new’ technologies of display” (Herman & Plein, p.272) and the conceptualisation of “the mechanical reproduction of images and the subsequent loss of aura and privilege in the aesthetic experience” (Dussel, 2017, p.672). 

Could Dussel's notion of aesthetic experience encompass or be applied to Benjamin’s processes as both a historian and a writer? And as a result, could the philosopher’s life and work – and the dialogue between them – be conceived as an aesthetics of existence, one that places the written word at its very core? In considering the HE’s narrative turn, Pozo (2023, p.1030) argues that “the historian's subsequent task is to transform him/herself into a storyteller, the type of artist that in Benjamin's opinion could not be further from the chronicler”. In fact "the historian has no choice but to adopt the skills and craftsmanship of the storyteller in order to build, from the fragments gathered in archives, an account compelling enough to find a permanent place in the memory of those who hear it".

Walter Benjamin developed the idea of the “operative writer” in his text The Author as Producer (1934/1999). Although he was not a fan of prescribing behaviours, he was certainly an advocate of messianic imagination. While witnessing the rapid development of technology and the massification of writing, Benjamin allowed himself to imagine a revolution that would put an end to the distinction between the author and the reader, the intellectual and the people, blurring and eventually putting an end to the lines that separate them. The writer would no longer be this venerated figure who dominates thought with his/her intellect, but a producer and an experimentalist like any other. He would declare the following: “an author who does not teach writers does not, in fact, teach anyone” (Benjamin 1934/1999, p.777). 

Analysing Benjamin’s writing processes, and his considerations on the exercise of writing as one of the main driving forces behind an aesthetics of existence, is a task that requires an exploratory reading of his complete works in search of specific fragments where the author describes his methodological choices and his views on the writer’s social role. One can identify hundreds of references to his writing praxis scattered in multiple essays, diaries, letters and notes on a number of different conversations or dialogues. In this preliminary phase, we were able to gather an array of citations and images on Benjamin’s writing practice as a technique of the self that can be divided into three main topics: (i) An ethics of friendship Studying Benjamin’s yearning for “a free life for youth unsupervised by parents or other authorities of the bourgeois world” (Witte, 1991, p. 23), while portraying the social and intellectual spheres he frequented, including the friends he kept in touch with when travelling or in exile, will allow us to identify a particular kind of literary community circulating both within and on the margins of academia (Witte, 2017; Pinheiro, 2020). (ii) Writing community/ies Collecting Benjamin’s statements on the democratisation of the written word will enable us to discuss his quasi-messianic aspiration towards a “communism of writing” while describing his stance towards the individual and “common property” of written texts. His desire of inhabiting a world in which the text has become a “common good” provides an opportunity to reflect more broadly on the idea of the research seminar as a space for imagination and projection into the future. (iii) The historian’s craft as a form of constructivism and disruption By studying Benjamin’s peculiar reflections on history and the historiographic process, we can access the author’s highly experimental archival and research practices while portraying the operative writer’s unwavering focus on method and methodological problematisation, in other words, on the experimental and constructive aspects of writing that are seldom discussed in present-day scientific and educational institutions. His fragmentary methodology (Ó & Vallera 2020) was in the service of generating an inventive and disruptive relationship with the present.

Benjamin’s ethics of friendship can be traced back to his desire for a free, unsupervised life. He ended up moving away from academic life, finding in his circles of friendship the support to advance in his research/life. These collectives developed into a communism of writing, where, in the company of others, every writer worked towards becoming more singular in an environment that sought to produce difference. “Is it possible to imagine a community based on the idea that each text is assembled according to its own ephemeral and internal method?” Just because a community is imagined or desired does not mean it is not real. Benjamin’s reflections on the writing of history seemed to be imbued with the strategic purpose of bringing the objects of the past to the present while simultaneously inserting the very texture of actuality in remote times (Bolle, 2007). He was interested in a new writing of history, an essayistic style echoing the metaphor of the “network city”, its inhabitants and products. His method? An assemblage of texts and images constituting a “reticular”, “cartographic” and “constellational” type of writing. His resolve? To delineate peculiar historical objects by “blasting” them away from the “homogenous course of history”, the sequenced progress, linearity or teleology of collective human experience, which Benjamin deemed deprived of a theoretical armature. His form of materialism, an open invitation to build singular or differentiated historical narratives, has encouraged historians to avoid the “eternal image of the past” cultivated in “historicism’s bordello”. Benjamin equates historiography, instead, with a form of inventive constructivism through which every new generation can “wrest tradition away from conformism” (Benjamin 1955/1969, p. 255 and 261-263) and “encounter the past in a new way” (Popkewitz et al., 2001, p.4), thus generating an original and disruptive relationship with the present.

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