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One-Way Street: Childhood and Improvisation at the Close of the Book

Walter Benjamin's One-Way Street emerges from a profoundly subversive orientation in his thought. It is the application in the present of a skeptical posture toward the European cultural legacy, a skeptical posture typical of Benjamin in his relation to the university institution. The proximity of One-Way Street to disruptions in the processes securing cultural transmission appears in the transformation of the book's relation to Gershom Scholem and Asja Lacis, the antithetical colleagues closest to Benjamin at the time he wrote it. The satirical force originally associated with his student friend Scholem and their shared parody the “University of Muri” gives way to an ever greater sensitivity to childhood per se as a principle of counter-experience, a sensitivity Benjamin found embodied in Asja Lacis's proletarian children's theater. At the intersection of the satiric university that debunks all prior authority and the proletarian children's theater that vests an unexpected pedagogic potency in the future generation, One-Way Street gestures toward everything adult authority necessarily obliterates and by which it must eventually be obliterated in turn.