Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions 9781503615878

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Walter Benjamin THEORETICAL QUESTIONS

CONTRIBUTO RS

Alexander Garcia Duttmann Peter Fenves DavidS. Ferris Hans-]ost Frey Rodolphe Gasche Carol Jacobs Tom McCall Rainer Niigele Samuel Weber

Walter Benjamin THEORETICAL QUESTIONS

Edited by David S. Ferris

Stanford University Press Stanford, California 1996

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1996 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America CIP data are at the end of the book Stanford University Press publications are distributed exclusively by Stanford University Press within the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Central America; they are distributed exclusively by Cambridge University Press throughout the rest of the world.

Preface

The essays collected in this volume are based on papers presented at a conference on Walter Benjamin that took place on October 18 and 19, 1991, at the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University. This conference, had it intended any biographical significance, would have been untimely, since it fell on neither the fiftieth anniversary of his death (1990) nor the hundredth anniversary of his birth (1992). If dates are to be the rationale for convening conferences on the work of single author, then in the case of this conference, there is another date to be taken into consideration, a date to which each of the papers collected here are indebted in one way or another. By sheer coincidence, this conference on Benjamin and literary theory took place twenty-five years to the day after a conference that did so much to introduce those elements of contemporary European thought that were subsequently to become what is now called literary theory. 1 Although the Benjamin conference took as its title what v

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would appear to be a rather modest topic, "Walter Benjamin and Literary Theory," it reflected a passage within literary study in the United States. As it was not in the early 1970's, it is now possible in 1991 to speak of literary theory as a pervasive presence within the humanities. However, to speak of literary theory now, one must do so at the risk of considerable imprecision. Indeed, what constitutes literary theory can no longer be construed with any clarity. To organize a conference around Benjamin's writings on literature and the contribution that these writings have made to literary theory in the United States is to pose a question about the relation between Benjamin and the theoretical context into which he has been so easily received. More accurately, we should perhaps speak here of a context whose defining characteristic has been its ability to assimilate Benjamin to the demands of one critical discourse or another. To exemplify this appropriation in terms of Benjamin's own work, one would be forced to speak of the reproducibility of Benjamin as literary theory. 2 In doing so, one would also have to recognize an irony in this turn of events. While Benjamin's essays "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility" and "The Task of the Translator" have facilitated this appropriation more than any other of his works, these same well-known texts afford a critique of the reproducibility that caused the aura of Benjamin to arise in the first place. Indeed, within Benjamin's remarks on reproducibility, one may already discern an attempt to resist the way in which a critical discourse seeks to justify its claim to knowledge by appealing to an authentic, auratic source for that knowledge. The critique undertaken in these two well-known essays is, however, no isolated example in Benjamin's writings. Already in the university thesis he wrote on the early German Romantics, his work elaborates the necessity of undertaking a study of how the conjunction of aesthetic reproduction and theoretical knowledge takes place within a history marked by a problematic that cannot be restricted to any single historical period. This emphasis on a history constituted by a problematic is hardly without relevance to the history of literary theory, and in particular, its recent history. Indeed, such an emphasis would have to be forgotten as a condition of appropriating Benjamin. It is the attempt to broach the question of a history no

Preface longer understood as a mode of reproduction that produces the greatest challenge of Benjamin's work, as well as the greatest challenge to his appropriation. To ignore this challenge is to risk being contented with an understanding no better and no worse than that possessed by the puppet in the story told by Benjamin in the first thesis on the philosophy of history: The story is told of an automaton contructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of its opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet's hand by means of strings. Deceived by the reproductive power of mirrors, one may never see the deception that allows the puppet to win every time. Moreover, thanks to these mirrors and this repeated ability to win, one might well wish to ascribe a prodigious knowledge to the puppet. The most challenging question at the center of this story is posed when Benjamin unveils the hunchback. If the puppet stands as a model of history (and at the end of this story Benjamin names the puppet "historical materialism"), then the question posed by Benjamin's work is how to understand a history no longer sustained by an expert in the aesthetic properties of mirrors. It is this question that the essays presented here address. To this end, the essays in this volume attempt not only to interpret Benjamin's writings on literature and language, but at the same time to examine the relation of these writings to a critical scene that resists theory by appropriating it. In this appropriation one can recognize the critical aura that has grown around Benjamin, an aura that has been attached to those writings where it is most resisted. What is at stake in this appropriation is the need to make Benjamin become the puppet of literary criticism or even literary theory. But as Benjamin's unveiling of historical materialism indicates, the hunchback does not always win. Before detailing the particular debts of this volume, a special word of thanks must be offered to Peter Schmidt and the Goethe-

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Preface Institut of Boston for their generous support toward the conference from which the idea for this volume originated. The Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University is also to be thanked for its willingness to host and provide significant financial support for the conference. Thanks are also owed to the Departments of Comparative Literature, English, and Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University for their support. In addition to those whose contributions could be included in this volume, particular thanks are owed to Susan Blood, Christopher Fynsk, Eva Geulen, Anselm Haverkamp, Kevin Newmark, and Avital Ronell for the sustained quality of their responses, as well as to Paul Fry for his concluding remarks at the conference. Geoffrey Hartman, Michael Levine, Jacques Lezra, and Anette Schwarz deserve special mention for their willingness to act as gracious yet firm moderators. In addition, I would like to thank all of the following for the kind of indispensable help that so often goes unnoticed but without which no conference could have run so smoothly: Ulrich Baer, Kristina Chew, Lance Duerfahrd, Mark Georgiev, Caroline Loewald, and Henry Pickford. For the present volume, special thanks are owed to Michael Shae for his fine translations of Hans-Jost Frey's and Alex Garcia Diittmann's essays. Our copy editor, Bud Bynack, must also be thanked for his sterling work. The essays by Rodolphe Gasche and Carol Jacobs included in this volume first appeared in Studies in Romanticism 31 (winter 1992): 433-53 and 501-24. They are reprinted here courtesy of the Trustees of Boston University. Rainer Nagele's essay first appeared in Diacritics 22, no. 3-4, 146-60. D. F.

Contents

Contributors

XI

Introduction: Aura, Resistance, and the Event of History DAVIDS. FERRIS

Mass Mediauras; or, Art, Aura, and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin

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SAMUEL WEBER

The Sober Absolute: On Benjamin and the Early Romantics

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RODOLPH£ GASCHE

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Contents

The Genesis of Judgment: Spatiality, Analogy, and Metaphor in Benjamin's "On Language as Such and on Human Language"

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PETER FENVES

Walter Benjamin: Topographically Speaking

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CAROL JACOBS

The Poetic Ground Laid Bare (Benjamin Reading Baudelaire)

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R A I N E R N AGE L E

On Presentation in Benjamin

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HANS-JOST FREY

The Violence of Destruction ALEXANDER GARCIA DUTTMANN

Momentary Violence

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TOM MCCALL

Notes

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Index of Names

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Contributors

ALEXANDER GARciA DUTTMANN is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Essex. He is the author of La parole don nee: Memoire et promesse (1989), Das Gediichtnis des Denkens: Versuch uber Heidegger und Adorno (1991), and Uneins mit Aids: Wie uber einen Virus nachgedacht und geredet wird (1993). PETER FEN v E s is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and director of Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of "Chatter": Language and History in Kierkegaard (1993), and A Peculiar Fate: Metaphysics and WorldHistory in Kant (1991). He is also the editor and translator of Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Kant, Transformative Critique by Derrida (1993), and Werner Hamacher's Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan. o A v 1 o s . F E R R 1 s is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University

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of New York. He is the author of Theory and the Evasion of History (1993). He is currently completing books on the relation of politics to aesthetics after Kant and on the aestheticization of Greek art and history within Romanticism and German Idealism. H AN s - J o s T F REY is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Zurich. His recent publications include Studien uber das Reden der Dichter (1986), published in English as Studies in Poetic Discourse: Mallarme, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Holderlin (1996), Der unendliche Text (1990), and Worter und die Wiedervereinigung der Worter (1994). RODOLPHE GASCHE is Eugenio Donato Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His latest books include The Tain of the Mirror (1986), and Inventions of Difference: On jacques Derrida (1994). Currently, he is finishing a book on Paul de Man tentatively entitled Wild Cards. cAR o L J Ac o Bs is Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is the author of The Dissimulating Harmony (1978), Uncontainable Romanticism (1989), and Telling Time (1993). ToM MccALL is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Houston at Clear Lake. He is completing a collection of essays on Sophocles, Holderlin, and Benjamin. RArNE R NAGELE is Professor of German at Johns Hopkins University. Among his recent books are Unej3barer Schrift gleich: Text, Geschichte und Subjektivitiit in Holderlins Dichtung (1985), Reading After Freud: Essays on Goethe, Holderlin, Habermas, Nietzsche, Brecht, Celan, and Freud (1987), and Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity (1991). sAMuEL wEBER is Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he also directs UCLA's Paris Program in Critical Theory. He is the author of Unwrapping Balzac (1979), Institution and Interpretation (1987), The Legend of Freud (1982), and Return to Freud: jacques Lacan's Dislocation of Psychoanalysis (1991). Mass Mediauras, a collection of essays, is forthcoming, and a study of Walter Benjamin's conception of the media, Benjamin's -abilities, is in progress.

Walter Benjamin THEORETICAL QUESTIONS

David S. Ferris

Introduction: Aura, Resistance, and the Event of History L'histoire est comme ]anus, elle a deux visages: qu'elle regarde Ia passe ou le present, elle voit les memes chases. History is like ]anus, it has two faces: whether it looks at the past or the present, it sees the same things. -Maxine Du Camp, in Benjamin, 'Passagen-Werk'

The role played by the writings of Walter Benjamin in the recent history of critical thought has been considerable, even if it has demanded that Benjamin possess more faces than the Janus image he evoked when speaking about his own writing. 1 While each of these faces can be traced to one aspect or another of Benjamin's interests, the attraction of his work for the increasingly disparate concerns of critical practice threatens to leave behind any vestige of a central critical (never mind theoretical) question that can be traced through the evolution of his sociological, political, and aesthetic investigations: a question that each of these investigations presupposes, namely, the relation of history and criticism. Although Benjamin's work could be said to be framed in the most literal sense by such a question (from his first published work, The Concept ofArt Criticism in German Romanticism 2 to one of his last writings, "On the Concept of History"), there has been little recognition of how the historical reflection that characterizes Benjamin's thought is crucial to

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the development of a concept of criticism (never mind how such a concept is central to the possibility of a politics). 3 Still less has such a question been broached by the contemporary appropriation of Benjamin, and, in particular, the appropriation of Benjamin within the otherwise competing tendencies that define the historical, cultural, and political concerns of contemporary criticism. It would seem that Benjamin is immune to the divisions that have caused critical thought to establish its differences in an increasingly contentious manner. This uncritical adoption is also the way in which a resistance to the writings of Benjamin has taken place. Despite the problems posed by Benjamin's textual corpus, such an adoption has proven to be a strategy of unquestionable critical power, since it allows a concept of criticism to prevail without ever having to resolve the questions posed by Benjamin's attempt to determine and account for such a concept in his reflections on history and politics. That this attempt resurfaces continually within Benjamin's critical thought underlines the extent to which Benjamin's work already performs the resistance through which it is unavoidably appropriated. Resistance in this case is nothing less than the adoption of a critical faculty that has not only granted historical exi;;tence to a concept of criticism, but has done so by adopting history, culture, theory, politics, and so on as its objective content. Ironically, this reduction or confusion manifests itself most clearly in a criticism that proclaims its historical and political significance even as it resists the questions raised by the historical and the political status of art, that is, by its status as an object of criticism. Despite Benjamin's own critical tendencies, Benjamin's work is witness to the fact that such questions have a habit of persisting despite all attempts to resolve them, because criticism, like resistance, cannot exist without being complicit with what it criticizes and thereby resists: criticism is always a resistance to the ground of its critical power, and this is why resistance is always the ground of criticism. 4 Resistance to what Benjamin calls the "aura" of the work of art is precisely how the aura is reproduced and thereby persists. Invoking the relation between history and criticism as the introduction to these essays on Benjamin is as much an attempt to articulate a question about the contemporary situation of criticism as

Aura, Resistance, and the Event of History it is to position this issue within Benjamin's work. To articulate such a question will require not only an examination of Benjamin's contribution to literary theory from the perspective of Benjamin's own reflections on the historical and its virtual synonym, the political, but also it will require an examination of how these reflections have made the critical appropriation of Benjamin possible as well as inevitable. What will then be at stake is why any question about the relation of history to criticism should be ignored at the very moment when the theoretical, cultural, and political (i.e., historical) concerns that define Benjamin's work have reappeared within a polymorphous, yet, as Adorno observes, essentially conservative critical understanding ofliterature. 5 While the reappearance of these concerns reflects an essential aspect of Benjamin's critical project, this reappearance has tended to regard history as a source of critical reference. To this end, the central issue to be confronted in the reception of Benjamin concerns the question posed by the relation of history and criticism in his work. A consequence of raising this issue requires that we also ask why a failure to respond to this question should be so attractive to and so appropriated by subsequent criticism. The contemporary appropnatwn of Benjamin to a specific critical or even political position is not without historical precedent. As Benjamin himself noted in a 1938letter to Gretel Adorno, part of an essay he wrote on Goethe's Elective Affinities had already led to him being cast as a follower ofHeidegger. 6 Although the reason for such a characterization of Benjamin may be traced to the political tendency that defined the journal in which this critique of Benjamin occurred (it appeared in a volume of the German language journal Internationale Literatur/ which was published in Moscow in the 193o's), such an explanation misses the refusal of history that informs this criticism to Benjamin. To portray Benjamin as a disciple of Heidegger not only requires a considerable disrespect for history (Benjamin completed the essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities in 1922; Heidegger's Being and Time is not published until1927), but also it reveals a considerable ignorance of both Benjamin's and Heidegger's work. In this case, to present Benjamin as a follower of

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Heidegger is not just to refuse factual history, but to do so in the name of a politics that refuses to recognize the substantial place occupied by the historical in both Benjamin's and Heidegger's thought. Over and above its historical context, this early example of the appropriation of Benjamin possesses a general significance that has been present in the contemporary embrace of Benjamin. Despite its political motivation, this early example indicates how the critical appropriation of Benjamin is facilitated by an aversion to the theoretical reflection that accompanies the historical inquiry undertaken in his work-this aversion being equally present whether the intent of the criticism is positive, or, as in the above example, negative. Here, a refusal of history defines the possibility of a politics of criticism. In this respect, such a refusal (and its consequent lack of critical distinction) is already paradigmatic for the modern critical reception of Benjamin, since what is at stake in such a reception of Benjamin has been the production of a modern concept of criticism. In order to question this reception and its critical character, the remarks that follow will first concentrate on the relation already posed by this example: the relation of Benjamin's historical thought to Heidegger. 8 This question will not be pursued in the interest of defending Benjamin from critical attacks such as those made by Internationale Literatur, but rather because this relation is fundamental to defining the historicism that would now claim Benjamin as one more of its victims. 9 In a letter to Gerschom Scholem written in 1930, Benjamin first describes his own work and then goes on to speak of the relation between his work and Heidegger's in the following terms: For this book [Paris Passages] as well as for the book on the tragic drama, I will not be able to go beyond an introduction that bears upon the theory of knowledge-and, this time, above all, on the theory of the knowledge of history. It is there that I will find Heidegger on my path, and I expect some spark from the reciprocal shock [entre-choc] of our two very different ways of envisaging history. 10

In retrospect, Benjamin's chosen site for this meeting with Heidegger, a path, could hardly have been more appropriate, given Heidegger's later use of this same image for his own thought. Yet it is

Aura, Resistance, and the Event of History not through the similarity suggested by this parallel choice of image that the relation of Benjamin to Heidegger is to be thought. 11 This relation is already part of the path that Benjamin intends to take, since it is on Benjamin's path that Heidegger will be found. Accordingly, Benjamin's description of where Heidegger lies in wait for him poses the following question about his relation to Heidegger: If Benjamin will find Heidegger on his path, does this mean that Heidegger is already on that path? Does the path taken by an introduction that bears upon the theory of the knowledge of history lead by necessity to Heidegger? If so, Benjamin's theory of the knowledge of history must also account for the possibility that Heidegger has not only taken this same path but that the path on which Benjamin finds Heidegger may belong equally to Heidegger. Such an eventuality raises considerably what is at stake in this relation, since in the case ofHeidegger, such a path is frequently understood in conjunction with the political organization of Germany in the 1930's. 12 In this case, the difference Benjamin discerns between himself and Heidegger would suggest that Benjamin's understanding of history might also be the source of a conflict within the political-a conflict that would affect the critical status of both history and the political. To pursue the issue of this relation demands first of all some reflection on what the name Heidegger stands for in Benjamin's letter to Gretel Adorno. This reflection cannot be avoided, unless Benjamin's thinking on history is to be seen in simple opposition to a relation that, in the case ofHeidegger, reduces (all too quickly and therefore all too easily) the political and the historical aspects of Heidegger's thought to an event such as the Rektoratsrede of 1933. Yet in Benjamin's own words, no such simple opposition is tenable, since, if the path on which Heidegger must be faced is Benjamin's own path, then Benjamin must face a shock produced by his own understanding of history. In this instance, the use of the word entrechoc 13 underlines the similarity of the situation faced by both Heidegger and Benjamin: on each other's path, their meeting is viewed by Benjamin in terms of a reciprocal shock, a shock that may belong as much to the path as it does to either Benjamin or Heidegger. The terms in which Benjamin describes his anticipated encoun-

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ter with Heidegger already reveal how Benjamin understands, or to use a word from the letter to Gretel Adorno, "envisages" this meeting. The encounter itself hardly has the status of an event, and not merely because it has yet to take place; rather, its significance resides in the expectation of an image, a "flickering or sparkling of light" ("j'attends quelque scintillement"). While this scintillement will mark the point where the sharpest difference between Benjamin and Heidegger is to occur, it is not in any way described as if it will be the result of some collision. According to Benjamin, this scintillement arises from "two different ways of envisaging history." Consequently, this flickering or sparkling of light is the mark of a difference produced out of the attempt to envisage history. By characterizing his meeting with Heidegger in such a way, Benjamin already defines his relation to Heidegger according to his own frequent use of the verb denoting a flash of light ( aujblitzen) whenever he speaks of history. It is this repeated image that situates Heidegger within Benjamin's theory of the knowledge of history, since, according to Benjamin's language, he must face his own theory of the knowledge of history when he finds Heidegger on his path. For this reason, any first approach to the question of Benjamin's relationship to Heidegger will be a question about this flash. In the fourth section of"On the Concept of History," Benjamin offers one of the most well-known examples of this image of the flash. Benjamin writes: "The true picture of the past flits [huscht] by. The past is held fast only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognition, never to be seen again ("Nur als Bild, das auf Nimmerwiedersehen im Augenblick seiner Erkennbarkeit eben aufblitzt, ist die Vergangenheit festzuhalten") (1.2: 695). At the outset, it should be noted that this flash is not an image of the past; the flash is rather the sign that marks the occurrence of such an image. Since, as Benjamin remarks, the flash is the moment in which the past is held fast as an image, Benjamin's discovery ofHeidegger on his path will itself be a source of history to the extent that this meeting produces some spark (quelque scintillement). In the case of this meeting between Benjamin and Heidegger, this holding fast of the past does not arise from history in the sense that their meeting can be defined as an event. Still less can this holding fast of

Aura, Resistance, and the Event of History the past be described as a knowledge about what has happened. What will stand as knowledge in this instance can occur only as the result of two ways of envisaging history. This is why Benjamin speaks about the theory of the knowledge of history and not just the knowledge of history: Benjamin's discovery ofHeidegger on his path is nothing other than a discovery of the place in which a theory of the knowledge of history happens. Within Benjamin's writings, it would be difficult to trace this theory to something that would have the status of a historical event such as Benjamin's anticipated discovery of Heidegger on his path. Despite Benjamin's explicit statement that he will find Heidegger on his path, his writings reveal little direct evidence of such a meeting. Benjamin's references to Heidegger are sparse, even in the theoretical introduction to the Passagen- Werk that Benjamin described in his letter to Scholem. Yet this does not mean that Benjamin avoids or could avoid such a meeting, it simply means that this meeting does not take the form of extended textual quotation and analysis of Heidegger's writings. In the manuscript material that Benjamin describes as the introduction to his Passagen- Werk in the letter to Scholem, Heidegger is mentioned by name only twice. 14 On both occasions, Heidegger is referred to in parentheses, and in each case Benjamin speaks in general terms. On the first occasion, Benjamin simply makes the following remark: "Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly, through 'historicality'" ( "Heidegger sucht vergeblich die Geschichte fur die Phanomenologie abstrakt, durch die 'Geschichtlichkeit' zu retten"; 5.1: 577; N3, 1). On the second occasion, Benjamin characterizes Heidegger's understanding of history as a "secularization of history" (5.1: 590; N8a, 4). 15 While these brief remarks reflect the materialistic and messianic position that Benjamin frequently stakes out in his historical thought, they also reflect an understanding of Heidegger defined largely by the phenomenological method of Heidegger's Being and Time. 16 From these two references to Heidegger in Konvolut N, it becomes clear that Benjamin's approach to history involves a critique of Heidegger's abstract understanding, but not necessarily a critique of phenomenology. Articulating precisely what constitutes the difference

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David S. Ferris between Benjamin and Heidegger is crucial in this case, for on it hangs not just the possibility of a phenomenology of history, but also the question of whether Benjamin's reflection on history can sustain a phenomenological method from which Heidegger increasingly distanced himself. Benjamin's reflection on history must therefore be read through this movement, a movement that does pose the question of what relation may exist between Benjamin's critique of Heidegger and Heidegger's so-called turn from the project of Being and Time. Articulating this difference must also pose the question of what role criticism plays in establishing Benjamin's difference from Heidegger. For the literary appropriation of Benjamin's work, this question will be absolutely crucial, since if such a difference is the effect of a criticism whose function is merely negative, then criticism would itself be the source of history; criticism, that is, negation, would be in effect the source of all historical knowledge. As such, the entrechoc would be the effect of a negation in which criticism recognizes itself as the advent of historical as well as political significance. In the section of the Passagen- Werk where Heidegger's attempt to rescue history for phenomenology is described, Benjamin begins to elaborate an understanding of history through images that would be set against the abstractness of what Heidegger refers to as historicality. In order to differentiate himself from Heidegger, Benjamin speaks, in this section, of images as being distinct from the understanding of essence associated with phenomenology. Leaving aside the question of what relation there is between the essence of phenomenology and historicality in Heidegger, Benjamin states that such a distinction rests upon the "historical index" of the image: "What differentiates images from the 'essentiality' of phenomenology is their historical index" (5.1: 577; N3, 1)Y Such images are not only the key to Benjamin's understanding of history, but through their "index" they are also how history happens for Benjamin. But as Benjamin explains, these images do not belong to the kind of history that measures the historical as if it were to be defined by the same understanding of temporality that allows one to decide whether or not an event belongs to the past. Benjamin expressly states that "the historical index of images does not only say that they

Aura, Resistance, and the Event of History

belong to a specific time [einer bestimmten Zeit], above all it says that they first enter into legibility at a specific time [sie erst in einer bestimmten Zeit zur Lesbarkeit kommen]" (5.1: 577-78; N3, 1). The index, which Benjamin makes the property of the image, has a double historical function; it is both the recognition of a specific historical time to which the image belongs and the recognition of another time in which such an image first became legible or readable. An index that is properly historical, for Benjamin, must not only comprise these two moments, but it must also include the possibility of recognizing them. In other words, the possibility of this index coming to legibility is described by Benjamin as a characteristic of the image itself. In the sentence following the one just cited, Benjamin says as much when he states that this" 'coming to legibility' is a specific critical point of the movement within these images [ein bestimmter kritischer Punkt der Bewegung in ihrem Innern]."

Here, the double historical recognition that constitutes the index is attributed to a movement that defines the image as essentially critical. The understanding of image Benjamin advances in these sentences stands in direct contrast to what he dismisses as the "'essentiality' of phenomenology," that is, an essentiality divorced from the historical. Benjamin is explicit in this regard, as evidenced by the first reference to Heidegger that follows immediately upon the introduction of the dialectical image in Konvolut N of the PassagenWerk. To repeat, Benjamin states in this remark that "Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history abstractly for phenomenology through 'historicality'" (5.1: 577; N3, 1). However easy it may be to accept Benjamin's remarks on the image by espousing this critique of phenomenology, it must be stated that history possesses a more complicated position within both phenomenology (especially in Heidegger) and Benjamin's theory of the image. In Benjamin's case, this complication arises immediately in the continuation of the passage already discussed from Konvolut N. After describing how the image enters legibility through a movement that includes a "specific critical point," Benjamin adds the following sentence, which contains the phrase that has been the most cited whenever Benjamin's notion of the dialectical image is under discussion: "Every present

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David S. Ferris [Gegenwart] is determined through those images that are synchronic with it: every now is the now of a specific recognizability [jedes ]etzt ist das fetzt einer bestimmten Erkennbarkeit]" (5.1: 57778; N3, 1). If Benjamin's understanding of the image is to be distinguished from phenomenology, this distinction would have to be derived from the synchronic relation between the image and the present that this sentence explicitly describes. Without such a relation, the image would be abstract in the sense that Benjamin understands Heidegger's term "historicality" ( Geschichtlichkeit). To avoid such abstractness, Benjamin describes the image as double; it is both history and its recognition. Everything that would answer to the name of history, everything that could possess the eventful moment announced by "now," must take place in what Benjamin goes on to refer to as simply the "now of recognizability." If, as Benjamin argues, everything that achieves presence only does so through this now of recognizability, then history cannot belong to the past, but rather, it must belong to a present. This present is constituted by the image as the sole means by which the image itself can be recognized. This image cannot therefore provide any means to recover the past in the present. The relation of past to the present (in which one is always the image of the other) is, in any case, a relation that Benjamin discards because of its demand for temporal continuity. 18 To Benjamin, history becomes legible and therefore readable through a relation of "what was" with "now," that is, through a relation that can be articulated only from a present that belongs to the image and not to the passage of time that history is supposed to reflect. Benjamin explains: It is not that the past casts its light on what is present or that what is present casts its light on what is past; rather, an image is that in which what was [das Gewesene) comes together like a flash of lightning in a constellation with the now. In other words: an image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the past to the present is a purely temporal one, the relation of what was [des Gewesenen) to now is dialectical: it does not have a temporal but an imagistic nature. Only dialectical images are genuinely historical, that is, not archaic images. The image that is read, that is, the image at the now of recognizability, bears to the highest degree the

Aura, Resistance, and the Event of History

stamp of that critical, dangerous force [den Stempel des kritischen, gefahrlichen Moments] that lies at the source of all reading. 19 (5.1: 578; N3, 1)

While the relation of past and present is defined by the continuous passage of time, such a passage has little to do with what Benjamin recognizes as the historical. Indeed, from these remarks, it becomes clear that history arises not from the passage of time, but from the ability to read the image that interrupts such a passage. Since this interruption, for Benjamin, is what allows the historical to become legible as if it were a text, legibility can be nothing less than the arrest of a dialectic-a dialectic in which the terms "what was" and "now" are incommensurable with the categories of "past" and "present." This distinction is crucial for Benjamin's understanding of the historical: through the categories of past and present, history becomes a list of events that can be used to represent one another, whereas the terms "what was" and "now" signal Benjamin's awareness of the essentially dialectical nature of historical understanding. (And can history be anything other than the movement of understanding, when the only alternative is to reduce it to irrefutable lists of facts, which are irrefutable only to the extent that they are not historical?) For Benjamin to say that the historical emerges from the dialectical is for him to understand the source of history as external to the event it describes. This emphasis on the dialectical provenance of historical understanding signals the point at which Benjamin's attempt to distinguish his understanding of history from the abstract history perceived in modern phenomenology also leads him to distinguish his understanding of dialectic from that present within the phenomenological method of Hegel. When Benjamin speaks of the "coming to legibility" as a result of the movement that takes place within the image, he repeats the narrow relation between movement and dialectic described by Hegel: "Wherever there is movement, wherever there is life, wherever anything is carried into effect in the actual world, there, dialectic is at work." 20 Although Benjamin's insistence on movement within the image defines his rescue of phenomenology within Hegelian terms, earlier notes for this Konvolut reveal

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David 5. Ferris Benjamin's clear attempt to distinguish his understanding from a Hegelian dialectic. It is at this point that Benjamin's understanding of the historical comes most under question, since it demands a distinction that is derived from what it would most distinguish itself from, namely, the dialectic of Hegel. This contradictory aspect of Benjamin's thought prompts the most serious questions about his understanding of history. Why does Benjamin distance himself from Hegel by means of a dialectical movement defined by Hegel? The attempt to distinguish his thought from the dialectical method of Hegel indicates the extent to which Benjamin's thought already defined not just modernity, but a modern concept of criticism through the negation of Hegel-as if the historical or cultural necessity of this negation were enough to sustain its distance from the perceived abstractness of Hegelian thought. In the notes that served as the basis of Konvolut N, it is clear that Benjamin's historical thought recognizes the necessity of facing Hegel if he is to follow the path on which Heidegger will be found. In these notes, Benjamin refers explicitly to Hegel in the course of an early formulation of the dialectical image. Benjamin writes: "On the dialectical image. Time is involved in it. Already in Hegel time is involved in the dialectic. But, this Hegelian dialectic only knows time as the purely historical [eigentlich historische] if not psychological time of thought" (5.2: 1038; Q0 , 21). By his own admission, Benjamin's dialectic has, in common with Hegel's, a relation to time; however, it is through this common relation that Benjamin seeks to distinguish their understanding of dialectic. To Benjamin, Hegel's dialectic recognizes time only in the form of actual history or as the passage of thought. Benjamin's explanation of the dialectical image must therefore be read according to this attempt to distinguish one dialectic from another on the basis of a temporality. In this respect, Benjamin's attempt to rescue phenomenology also turns, and decisively so, on the understanding of time that constitutes the dialectical image. To be more precise, the now of recognizability (which is to say the legibility of the dialectical image) turns upon a concept of temporality that defines this moment, this now of recognizability, in terms other than the historical passage of time through a present in which past and future are related.

Aura, Resistance, and the Event of History In distinguishing the dialectical image from the dialectic of Hegel, Benjamin speaks of a "temporal differential" (Zeitdifferential) through which this image becomes real (5.2: 1038, Q0 , 21). In the concluding sentences of the passage just cited from his early notes for the Passagen- Werk, Benjamin goes on to insist that this temporal differential is not only unknown to the Hegelian dialectic image, but must also be distinguished from what he refers to as real time: "Real time [Das reale Zeit] does not enter into the dialectical image in its natural capacity-not to mention its psychological capacity-but rather in its slightest form [in ihrer kleinsten Gestalt].The temporal moment allows itself to be mediated in the dialectical image only through its confrontation [Konfrontation] with another concept. This concept is the 'now of recognizability' ["das ]etzt der Erkennbarkeit")" (5.2: 1038; Q0 , 21). Neither psychological nor real time plays any part in the temporality Benjamin speaks of in reference to the dialectical image. Rather, this image effects a mediation of time, and this mediation arises from a confrontation occasioned by what is consistently referred to as the "now of recognizability." According to what Benjamin says, there could be no dialectical image without this confrontation, since it is only at the now of recognizability that such an image arises. Hence, if a crucial question in Benjamin's later work concerns the definition of what the dialectical image is, then this is a question about what constitutes the now of recognizability. The temporal differential (which is to say the dialectical image itself) on which Benjamin's rescue of phenomenology hangs depends essentially on this now of recognizability, and, indeed, is distinguished only through this moment. In the paragraph already cited from Konvolut N, the image that arises at the now of recognizability is described as "dialectics at a standstill." It is thus a function of this now of recognizability to bring the dialectical relation of what was and the present ( Gegenwart) to a standstill. This coming to a standstill is what is described by Benjamin as "a flash of lightning" in which "what was" comes together "in a constellation with the now." In this case, the temporal differential Benjamin speaks of in the dialectical image is attributable to a recognition that interrupts the temporal relations out of which this image arises. Consequently, such an image must be

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David S. Ferris thoroughly dialectical, and this includes the moment when it is brought to a standstill. In other words, the standstill of dialectic cannot be thought except within dialectics, which for Benjamin means outside of real and psychological time. (These forms of time occur only in the slightest form of the dialectical image.) What Benjamin attempts to think through the now of recognizability is thus something that must make a difference to the understanding of temporality that constitutes the dialectical thought of Hegel, as well as dialectical thinking in general. The standstill of dialectics indicated by Benjamin is not therefore an arrest of dialectical thinking in its entirety (as if dialectics could be brought to a halt so easily, or even deconstructed in so predictable a fashion, and despite the ease with which such a moment could be readily thematized as a resistance to dialects). Rather, the standstill is the moment through which Benjamin attempts to think a common ground for dialectics and a historicality whose model is no longer given by the passage of time. Benjamin's writings are explicit on this issue: it is a "temporal differential" through which the dialectical image becomes real or "genuinely historical (echt geschichtlich)" (5.1: 592; N9a, 4). Thanks to this differential that constitutes the now of recognizability, the dialectical image becomes, in Benjamin's own phrase, "the primal phenomenon of history" (Ibid.). As a result, what is genuinely historical to Benjamin can be nothing less than the temporal differential that occurs at the moment when the image arises at the now of recognizability. 21 This historicality is nothing less than the attempt to arrest a dialectical movement through the temporality that constitutes it. For this dialectic to be arrested, time must stand still, and must do so in the form of an image.ZZ Why Benjamin's understanding of history remains so dependent on dialectic at the very point where it would arrest its own dialectical movement may be traced to an understanding that seeks the only possible means to preserve a ground for the historical and political critique that determines the configuration of Benjamin's dialectical imageY Such a preservation is implied when, in the last sentence of the passage already discussed from Konvolut N, Benjamin warns that reading the primal phenomenon of history (the dialectical image) possesses a danger: "The image that is read, that

Aura, Resistance, and the Event of History

is, the image at the now of recognizability, bears to the highest degree the stamp of that critical, dangerous force that lies at the source of all reading" (5.1: 578, N3, 1). For Benjamin, the historicality that occurs through such an image is open to this danger because it is only by entering into legibility that the historical occurs in the form of the dialectical image. Danger arises because the dialectical image, if it is to make a difference, must be read. What constitutes the danger that Benjamin associates with reading is not developed further in the course of Konvolut N. Benjamin, in thesis 6 of "On the Concept of History," does, however, speak of danger in a context that is concerned with distinguishing the historical from any form of transition between past and present. The reference to danger, as well as the repetition, in this same context, of the metaphor Benjamin calls upon to describe how the dialectical image occurs, emphasizes further the proximity between these two texts in Benjamin's thought. 24 To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was" (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at the moment of danger [im Augenblick einer Gefahr]. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past as it appears unexpectedly to a historical subject at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the continued existence [ Bestand] of the tradition and its receivers. The danger is one and the same for both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to win tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. (1.2: 695)

According to this passage, no articulation and no image of the past can take place without a moment of danger. In this moment, the historical articulation of the past is threatened by a conformity that affects both tradition and those who receive and continue the existence of that tradition. As Benjamin's notes for "On the Concept of History" confirm, tradition is being thought here as a force of discontinuity that can disrupt a history (of conformity) in which the present (or the now) is always understood as a moment of transition: "Tradition as the discontinuity of the past as opposed to history as the continuum of events" ("Die Tradition als das Diskontinuum des Gewesnen im Gegensatz zur Historie als dem Kon-

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David 5. Ferris tinuum der Ereignisse") (1.3: 1236). While tradition is emphasized in the context of this thesis, an account of its discontinuity is provided only through Benjamin's historical thought. In this case, tradition is threatened not because it is identical to the historical, but because without the historical, tradition could not be thought (at least not in terms of what resists conformity). At the same time, as this thesis indicates, tradition, like the historical, cannot exist without being also open to a conformity that Benjamin defines in political terms ("tool of the ruling classes"). With this remark, Benjamin indicates that the danger does not arise simply from conformity, but from the disruption of conformity. (There is no danger from conformity unless it is disrupted; by the same token, one cannot know what conformity is unless its disruption is performed.) Accordingly, the source of the danger that tradition cannot avoid is the discontinuity through which it is itself denied, which is to say, the source of this danger arises from Benjamin's understanding of the historicality that defines tradition, the now of recognizability, and the dialectical 1mage. As Benjamin's account of the danger that threatens tradition and the historical makes clear, there is a political factor in this understanding of the historical, and this factor involves nothing less than the attempt to think a relation between history (as the continuity of past and present) and politics (as a turning over of the past as a fixed poi;lt). The nature of this relation is clarified in a series of observations from the beginning of Konvolut K that refer, significantly, to Proust, the probable source for the word entrechoc that characterizes Benjamin's account of an encounter with Heidegger's historical thought. In the following passage from Konvolut K, Benjamin specifically defines politics as what obtains primacy over history by means of a dialectical movement: "The Copernician revolution in historical perception is this: man held to the 'past' as a fixed point and saw the present pain itself to bring knowledge to this firmness. Now this relation must turn itselfround [umkehren] and the past change into a dialectical turning around [ Umschlag], a collapse of waking consciousness. Politics obtains primacy over history [Geschichte]" (5.2: 490-92). In this instance, history refers to the movement of continuity that Benjamin regards as being dis-

Aura, Resistance, and the Event of History rupted by the truly historical. Consequently, it is through the discontinuity brought about by tradition, the now of recognizability, and the dialectical image that Benjamin conceives of politics. A fragment belonging to the theses on history clarifies further this relation between history, tradition, and the political when Benjamin writes: "History ( Geschichte) is the shock between tradition and political organization" (Fragment 72, 6: 98). In this fragment, history is not only a source of discontinuity, it also occurs as a "shock," or rather, the entrechoc between tradition and political organization, which is quite different from the politics that Benjamin associates with the historical. Furthermore, the occurrence of history as the shock distinguishing tradition from political organization points to Benjamin's understanding of the historical as what arises only through confrontation. In this respect, the advent of the historical repeats the way in which the age of technical reproducibility becomes recognizable. That the historical may be thought in terms of art is also already clear from Konvolut K of the PassagenWerk, where Benjamin writes that "the new dialectical method of the historical [Historik] presents itself as art" (5.1: 491; K1, 2). 25 It is thus from the redefinition of art in terms of technical reproducibility rather than aura that the relation between politics and the historical ought to find its clearest expression. The political character of an art defined according to its technical reproducibility is explicitly stated in the introduction to "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility." Benjamin remarks that concepts such as technical reproducibility are "completely useless for the purposes of Fascism ... on the other hand, [they are] useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art." 26 Here, the change in the history of how the work of art is defined indicates that technical reproducibility offers a resistance to the political organization and conformity demanded by Fascism. Yet according to Benjamin's argument, the age in which the work art accedes to technical reproducibility is directly attributable to the advent of the mass as a social phenomenon: "The mass is the matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form" (1.2: 503). In this instance, technical reproducibility finds its source in what Fascism sought to orga-

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David S. Ferris nize, since, as Benjamin states in the epilogue to this essay, Fascism may be understood as the attempt to organize the "newly created proletarian masses" according to the very property relations these masses sought to eliminate (1.2: so6). Aesthetically speaking, Fascism represents the continuation of aura in the age of technical reproducibility: Fascism adopts how the work of art previously was understood and then applies this understanding to what Benjamin regards as the matrix of non-auratic art (the masses). So understood, technical reproducibility operates, like the historical index associated with the dialectical image, as the shock between a continuous tradition (of the aura) and political organizatio.n (Fascism). This similarity in position does not mean that the understanding of the historical presented in the Passagen- Werk should be read as a mode of technical reproducibility or vice versa; however, it does mean that both are called upon by Benjamin to make a distinction that functions as a resistance to political organization, to the extent that political organization (Fascism) as it is understood in the essay is the continuation of what had previously existed. Such political organization represents the continuity of history. In this respect, the image that would bring dialectics to a standstill finds its aesthetic counterpart in a concept, technical reproducibility, that would mark the end of the historical continuity represented by the aura of the work of art and, at the same time, resist political organization in the name of a politics that arises in and out of the dialectical image. Here, the historical distinction made by the advent of technical reproducibility owes its ability to function as a mode of resistance to a further distinction between politics as the practice of art and the denial of the source of this practice in political organization. The distinction between politics and political organization is explicitly made in a passage from the fourth section of the essay. In this passage, the link between aura and tradition (here, tradition is understood in its more customary sense denoting continuity) not only repeats the relation of past to present that occurs within the dialectical image, but does so in a way that confirms the dialectical relation between aura and technical reproducibility. It is from this relation that politics now arises as the reversal of the social function of auratic art:

Aura, Resistance, and the Event of History

The uniqueness of a work of art is identical to its embedding in the complex [Zusammenhang] of tradition .... Originally, the embedding of the work of art in the complex of tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual. ... for the first time in world history, technical reproducibility emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree, the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.... But the moment the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total social function of art is overturned [die gesamte soziale Funktion der Kunst umgewiiltzt]. Instead of being based on ritual, it establishes its foundation on another practice: politics. (1.2: 480-82)

By describing the movement from an understanding of art based on authenticity to an understanding based on politics as a turning over, Benjamin not only repeats the movement that leads to the primacy of politics over history in Konvolut K, but also follows what was for Hegel the distinctive movement of dialectical thought, the "extreme of one state or action suddenly shifting into its opposite." 27 The suddenness of the flash of light that Benjamin constantly associates with the understanding of history announced in the dialectical image emphasizes further the extent to which Benjamin's dialectical thought has difficulty in distinguishing itself from Hegel's. 28 This opposite, as Benjamin's words indicate, is the result of the social function of art becoming based on the practice of politics. Yet what constitutes politics in this instance, that is, what constitutes its recognizability, is not articulated directly by Benjamin, but is determined negatively: from the definition of the aura, its opposite, politics, is indicated. The aura is thus a necessary concept in Benjamin's articulation of the political as the advent of a present, a now that disarticulates the continuity of the past and, in so doing, heralds a politics that will be known as a revolution. 29 The verb used by Benjamin to describe the shift from authenticity to politics indicates this explicitly: the political (and with it the dialectical image) is always to be thought in revolutionary terms: umwiilzen: to rotate, revolve, roll over, overturn, revolutionize, overthrow. In this overturning or revolution of the social function of the aura, one can recognize the

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occurrence of what Benjamin refers to here as politics. To the extent that this overturning of the aura produces a politics, it is strictly comparable to that moment in which Benjamin's historical and political thought is defined: the flash of lightning, the shock, the now of recognizability in which dialectics and history are said to stand still. If, as Benjamin argues, this defining moment "presents itself as art" (5.1: 491; K1, 2) then what constitutes this moment (and it is a moment-Augenblick) 30 that marks the advent of politics and technical reproducibility is tied irrevocably to the necessity of what Benjamin calls the decay (Verkummerung) of the aura. Given this necessity, any account of the historical or of the political in Benjamin must rest upon the necessary decay of what constitutes the continuity of art, and therefore its history. As a result, the central question about what Benjamin is attempting to think by means of his concept of a dialectical image may now be posed as a question about what constitutes the moment in which politics, not to mention technical reproducibility, happens as a turning around of the aura. According to Benjamin's remarks in "The Work of Art," technical reproducibility reverses the social function of the work of art because the work of art no longer finds its uniqueness expressed in ritual. The loss of this uniqueness is the loss of what Benjamin calls the aura of the work of art. 31 At this point, it is instructive to consider what constitutes the aura, rather than accept it as a fact of artistic history and its continuity. What forms the uniqueness of the aura is first defined by Benjamin in the essay when the aura of a work of art is compared with the aura of a natural object. In the case of a natural object, the aura is attributed to what Benjamin identifies as the "unique appearance of a distance" ( "einmalige Erscheinung einer Ferne"; 1.2: 480-81). From this description, it is already clear that what the work of art loses with the advent of art as politics is understood by Benjamin in terms of a difference between the work of art and its viewer. In the case of the auratic work of art, the difference named by this distance is derived from the continuity of history as a witness of the past. This continuity constitutes the aura by virtue of an authenticity that Benjamin defines as "the sum of all that is transmissible since its origin, from its material duration to its

Aura, Resistance, and the Event of History

historical testimony" (1.2: 477). Since the authenticity of a thing is what cannot be reproduced, then, according to Benjamin's own argument, what cannot be reproduced is the aura's testimony to the history on which its uniqueness is based. The inability to reproduce such a testimony to history is embedded in the continuing material existence of the work of art. It is here that the conjunction of phenomenal understanding and historical continuity is most marked in Benjamin, since, in the case of both the natural landscape and the work of art, what constitutes the aura is the phenomenalization of the categories of time and space in a material, visual object. The phenomenalization of time and space may be discerned from Benjamin's emphasis on materialistic and measurable indices, for example the spatial distance between a viewer and a distant mountain range, or the temporal difference measured by the changes or damage that a work of art undergoes during its historical existence. 32 In each of the examples just cited, the aura depends on the persistent historical existence of a work of art-that is, history, in the case of the aura, has no other ground than the sheer continued duration of an object's materiality. Here, Benjamin's repeated tendency to refer to visual works as examples of art in the essay should not be overlooked, since visuality always defines art with regard to a material object. But for Benjamin, in this period of his work, even language is included within this understanding of the work of art. In a footnote to the essay "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Benjamin argues that "words also have an aura" ("Worte konnen auch ihre Aura haben") and then cites Karl Kraus by way of explanation: "The closer you look at a word the greater the distance from which it looks back" ( "Je naher man ein Wort ansieht, desto ferner sieht es zuriick"). 33 Again, the aura is based on a difference whose source is to be found in a phenomenal understanding that is now directed toward language, the medium of this same understanding, as iflanguage were analogous to the mountain range whose aura, Benjamin states in "The Work of Art" essay, may be experienced because of its distance from the viewer. More significantly though, the citation from Kraus underlines that, in Benjamin's eyes, the aura is not at all an attribute of the work of art; rather, it is a way of experiencing a work of art; the aura exists as perception, not as art: "Experience of

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David S. Ferris the aura ... rests on the transposition of a response common in human relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To perceive the aura of an appearance means to invest it with the ability to return our look [den Blick aufzuschlagen]" (1.2: 646-47). The distance that constitutes the aura is less a property of the faraway object than the result of investing the object looked at with the ability to regard its viewer. Given the terms in which Benjamin presents the aura in this essay on Baudelaire, its perception requires what Paul de Man analyzed through the trope of anthropomorphism in his discussion of Baudelaire's lyric poetry. 34 What Benjamin defines as the aura requires, in de Man's words, a "union of phenomenal and epistemological properties." 35 For Benjamin, this union is carried out by the mediation of the viewer by whatever is being viewed. Here, the viewer attains self-consciousness (that is, becomes a subject capable of perception) by being mediated through what it views. As de Man notes, such a mediation involves a negation, since the perception of consciousness is derived from a discontinuity it cannot account for in terms of itself. What the object reflects is the viewer as a metaphor for the object's ability to view and reflect the viewer. As a result what decays with the aura is, in effect, a phenomenology of the work of art that unites the material existence of the work of art with perception, in particular with the perception of its authenticity, its essential uniqueness. Because this decay dissolves the art object's authenticity, the decay of the aura is the decay of the concern with essences from which Benjamin wishes to rescue phenomenology. If the experience of shock is to be traced to this decay, as Benjamin states at the end of the Baudelaire essay, then just as anthropomorphism is the experience of aura, shock is the experience of its decay. This is why shock occurs between history and political organization-both are auratic for Benjamin. What is not under question in Benjamin is this ability, to recognize both shock and aura in experience, and this is why he seeks to preserve not only a phenomenology, but also a dialectic-what Benjamin understands by the historical would be unthinkable without either of these. The central question of Benjamin's historical thought (which is to say his

Aura, Resistance, and the Event of History political thought) is, then, the question of what difference shock makes to phenomenology. The question may also be posed in the terms discussed in an earlier part of this introduction: what difference does Benjamin's understanding of the history that enters with the dialectical image make for the continuity to which it stands in a critical relation? On the answer to these questions rests the possibility of the phenomenology of discontinuity that Benjamin wishes to rescue from both the abstract historicality of Heidegger and the essentialism of phenomenology. Here, Benjamin's meeting with Heidegger becomes a question within Benjamin's own thought to the extent that Benjamin, in his own words, sought "to shatter Heidegger" ("Heidegger zu zertri.immern"). Heidegger comes to represent a history as continuous as that of the aura, which by the time of the Baudelaire essay no longer undergoes mere decay ( Verkummerung), but suffers the shattering that Benjamin sought to do to Heidegger: "the shattering of the aura in the experience of shock" ("die Zertri.immerung der Aura im Chockerlebnis"; 1.2: 653). In this context, the understanding of history and politics that underlies Benjamin's work in the Passagen- Werk, the theses on the concept of history, as well as the essays on the work of art and Baudelaire, may be read as consistent examples of Benjamin's attempt to account for a difference, an entrechoc, that would allow politics and history to become the source of a critique that would not be complicit with what it critiques. What is at stake at this juncture is less a confrontation between Heidegger and Benjamin than a historicality that leads to politics. Such a stake requires no direct confrontation between the thought ofHeidegger and Benjamin, since it is a confrontation with Benjamin's own thought that is being externalized in the name of Heidegger. For this reason, no extended textual confrontation need take place in Benjamin's writings. 36 The question Benjamin must face is whether phenomenology can be saved from itself and still be recognized as a phenomenology that will lead to a theory of the knowledge of history. 37 The difficulty of this confrontation within Benjamin may be seen in the way that his thought is forced to articulate a moment, or rather, an Augenblick, as the condition of arresting an essentialist phenomenology. 3 " In each instance, this arrest is also witness to a

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danger that finds its source in the reading of a politics and a historicality that flashes by without duration. In the example of this flash, what Benjamin describes as the historical is powerless to prevent a force that has "not ceased to be victorious" (1.2: 265). While the historical may be Benjamin's name for what is useless to Fascism or political organization, it is not immune to the danger that allows it to be recognized, that allows it to be represented as the flash oflightning in which the dialectical image appears. As Benjamin notes, when the historical happens, it accedes to legibility but, as Benjamin also notes, to become readable is to be marked by the danger that lies at the source of all reading. This danger is the return of the aura as the condition of a phenomenology of discontinuity. The aura is not a historical era, but a mode of perception that can be overturned only by associating it with a continuous history. The historical in Benjamin cannot overcome, but can only resist, which is to say, reproduce the danger that is the source and the effect of its recognition, its readability. Accordingly, if Benjamin can speak of the historical as something distinct from what he refers to as historicism, it is because his ability to speak of the aura is unquestioned. 39 Because of the difficulty posed by this attempt to distinguish a moment of discontinuity within the continuity of history (a difficulty that is at the basis of the attempt to distinguish historicality from history), one is forced to speak about this moment as if it were a flash, a shock, even an entrechoc, whose condition of existence is its immediate decay or disintegration. This is why Benjamin's understanding of the historical is useless to political organization: such an understanding is the testimony of an event, that is, of a dialectical image, that must last long enough to be critical, but be cut off from what it criticizes, lest the dialectical complicity of its ground be revealed. Benjamin writes: "The dialectical image is a lightning flash. What was must be held fast as it flashes its lightning image in the now of recognizability. The rescue [Rettung] that is thus-and only thuseffected can take place only for what, in the next moment [ im niichsten Augenblick], is already unrescuably [ unrettbar] lost" (5.1: 59192; N9, 71).

A flash that does not last is not the same as a flash that has no duration. The now of recognizability in which such a flash occurs

Aura, Resistance, and the Event of History must possess a duration if it is to make any difference at all and if, in the context of Benjamin's writings, there is to be any historical and political position other than that of historicism and political organization. It is from this moment that the critical force of Benjamin's thinking is derived, since it is only on the strength of a now that is other than the continuity of the present and the past that it is possible to maintain a critical position for history and politics-and the political significance of Benjamin's rescue of history, phenomenology, and so on depends crucially on establishing such a critical position. This political significance requires that Benjamin hold fast to the possibility of a criticism that is grounded in discontinuity, even as he admits that this ground cannot be sustained-to sustain such a ground is to repeat the auratic union of perception and phenomenology. As Benjamin remarks, the rescue that occurs in this lightning flash (and what is criticism-since at least Kant-but the rescue of itself?) is "already unrescuably lost in the next moment." From one moment to the next (von Augenblick zu Augenblick), discontinuity cannot be sustained. To sustain discontinuity is to refuse the aura absolutely, since, in such sustaining of discontinuity, the aura will never see the reflection of its ability to look. It is the duration of this discontinuity that rescues the essence of phenomenology and at the same time ensures Benjamin's inability to rescue phenomenology. In the moment (both Moment and Augenblick) of this discontinuity, Benjamin attempts to think a politics, albeit a politics defined by its own inability to save itself, which is to say that politics can have no history other than an inability to resist its ungroundable relation to history. And this is also why the standstill of dialectics will always be incapable of arresting dialectics; this standstill is the unrescuable victim of the dialectic it sought to arrest. To isolate this moment of historicality or politics (the moment of the now of recognizability, the dialectical image, and the flash of lightning) is to repeat an essential phenomenology in which the moment of shock (the shattering of the aura) will be preserved as the continuity of modernity. This moment opens Benjamin's dialectical image to a temporality as the condition of its discontinuity, its Zeitdifferentia/. 40 Through this opening, Benjamin's theory of the knowledge of history will indeed lead Benjamin to Heidegger with a shock that will

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David S. Ferris be less thematizable than Benjamin's notion of shock, for it is the shock that comes from the recognition of a path that Benjamin sought to avoid, but to which he is inevitably led by this attempted avoidance. This recognition also accounts for why Benjamin will be useless to the rebirth of theory as political and cultural critique. Since a mode of criticism is unthinkable without a theory of the knowledge of history, Benjamin is an unlikely source for a criticism that would turn to Benjamin in order to rescue itself from the textual concerns of a reflexive and therefore theoretical inquiry-and do so in the name of history. As Benjamin comments, history, at any moment, can only be quoted: "To write history ... means to quote history." But, even here, the danger is not past: to read the citation of history is to invite the danger that no reading can resist. Such is the advent of history. Such is the event of theory. In this moment, Benjamin's contribution to literary theory will have to be thought as a contribution that offers no more than the aura of resistance in the question of theory.

Samuel Weber

Mass Mediauras; or, Art, Aura, and Media

in the work of Walter Benjamin

I

You get the picture, don't you? Perhaps it will become somewhat clearer if we recall some dates: 1936, Walter Benjamin publishes, in a French translation, his essay on the "Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility"; 1937, Benjamin begins work on a Baudelaire book that is to be a "miniature model" of his projected study of "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" -the famous Arcades project (PassagenWerk); 1938, an initial text on Baudelaire and Paris is completed but encounters strong criticisms from Adorno, who finds the treatment of Baudelaire too economistic; 1939, Benjamin completes a second study of the French poet, "Some Motifs of Baudelaire," and sends it off to New York shortly before the Wehrmacht marches into Poland .... In 1938, some 6oo kilometers east of Paris, on the other side of the border, Professor Martin Heidegger is invited by a local Society 27

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for Medical and Scientific Research to participate in a lecture series devoted to the topic "Foundations of the Modern View of the World" ("Begriindung des Weltbildes der Neuzeit"). My translation, although idiomatic, is not quite accurate. The topic is not exactly the modern "view" of the world but rather, more literally, the modern "image" or "picture" of the world. At any rate, out of this invitation emerges first a lecture, and much later-after the wara published essay bearing the title "Die Zeit des Weltbildes," which has been translated into English as "The Age of the World View," but which is better rendered literally as "The Time of the World Picture." To insist on a literal translation of Weltbildes here seems important, given the fact that in the essay Heidegger emphatically distinguishes between world view, or Weltanschauung-a word that at the time played an important role in Nazi political discourseand world picture: "Once the world has become an image, the human position grasps itself as a Weltanschauung." 1 And as will become evident shortly, there are reasons to insist on a literal translation of Zeit as well. Why, however, complicate the picture with this detour via Freiburg, a detour that Benjamin himself could not make? If, as has long been argued, most recently by Rolf Tiedemann, editor of Benjamin's works and one of those most familiar with them, "the concept of the image [Bildes]" is "central" for all of Benjamin's work relating to the Arcades project; and if, beyond that, a certain pictoriality or figurality (Bildlichkeit) distinguishes Benjamin's own style of writing and of thinking from the very first, then an attempt such as Heidegger's to situate the question of the Bild at the problematic center of modernity can hardly be indifferent to Benjamin's project. If it is clear that the Arcades project was concerned with a specific and delimited historical period and geographical region-Paris as "capital" of the nineteenth century-it is no less evident that Benjamin's concern with this period is in turn part of an even more comprehensive effort to rethink modernity. Benjamin's analysis of the French nineteenth century builds quite extensively therefore on his study of the German Baroque and in particular on the theory of allegory. In the context of this attempt, it is striking that for both

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thinkers, however different they are, pictoriality, Bildlichkeit, acquires a pivotal significance. 2 Let me begin, then, by attempting to recall certain salient aspects of Heidegger's approach to the question of the world picture in the "Weltbildes" essay. Seizing upon the phrase that names the subject of the lecture series in which he was participating, Heidegger argues that what characterizes modernity since the Renaissance-in German, the Neuzeit-is not the fact that it substitutes one world view for another, but rather that it defines itself through the attempt to "conquer the world as image" ("die Eroberung der Welt als Bild") (87). To determine the world as having the structure of a picture or image is thus to embark upon a project of conquest in which the heterogeneity of beings is accepted only insofar as it can be objectified and represented, vorgestellt, a word in regard to which Heidegger urges his audience to "seek out the originary naming power [Nennkraft]." This Nennkraft consists in a double, or dual, movement: that of setting things out in front of oneself ( "vor sich hin") and at the same time bringing things toward oneself ( "und zu sich her Stellen") (8s). Entities are brought closer to the subject and yet at the same time kept at a safe distance from it. This "back-andforth," to-and-fro movement (85), however, Heidegger stresses, is subordinated to the overriding aim of putting things in their place. This movement of Stellen, by fixing things in place, thereby confirms the place of the subject, which, through the power to represent, becomes the "reference point of beings as such" (81). When such a movement is understood as encompassing the totality of beings as such, the "world" itself has become a "picture" whose ultimate function is to establish and confirm the centrality of man as the being capable of depiction. The time of the world picture thus turns out to be that of the presentation, the Vorstellung, the bringing forth and setting before (the subject) of all things. Those familiar with Heidegger's later writings on technics will recognize in this analysis of the world picture as a process of placing, of Stellen, the anticipation of what will later be understood as the essence of modern technology: that total availability of being placed and displaced at will designated by Heidegger as Bestellbarkeit, the

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susceptibility of being placed on order. 3 If, however, in this perspective, things are allowed to take place only insofar as they can be put in place, this entails a radical change in the traditional manner of conceiving the relation and constitution of place and space. Already in his 1938 lecture, Heidegger mentions as instances of this transformation through modern technology the "destruction of great distances by the airplane" and, correlatively, the ability of the media, in particular radio, to render the remote instantaneously present through the flick of a switch (87). In this abolition of distance and of difference he sees particularly conspicuous and symptomatic effects of the determination of the world as picture and the correlative determination of the human as the founding, constitutive subject. Heidegger's 1938 talk, addressed as it was to a nonspecialized public-and, of course, to a quite particular public in the Freiburg of 1938-seeks to make available to a larger audience the critical interpretation of technology that he was at the time engaged in elaborating. As a result, however, the essay, even in its published version, enriched by a series of supplements, remains at a relatively schematic level. It raises far more questions than it can elaborate, much less explore. It is the unanswered, unelaborated space of these questions that will lead us back to Benjamin. One of these questions concerns the schematic itself, the second of two structural characteristics that Heidegger attributes to the world as picture, the pictorialization of the world. In addition to its pretensions to universality and totality, which Heidegger will also refer to as the "planetary" ambitions, and indeed reality, of technology, he emphasizes its tendency to be schematic or systematic: "Where the world becomes a picture, the system becomes predominant, and not only in thinking" (93). The systematicity of this system, according to Heidegger, consists not in the mere bringing together of diverse elements, but rather in the representational structure ( Gefuge) to which they are expected to conform. However, this structure, as we have seen, is anything but simply static. It consists in a highly ambivalent oscillation of bringing forth (her-stellen) and setting before ( vor-stellen), with the aim of securing the foundations of the subject at and as the center of things. The dynamics of this process of vor-stellen must be kept in

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mind if one is to understand one of the most obtrusive characteristics of modern technics cited by Heidegger: the tendency to move with ever greater velocity and, perhaps even more significantly, with ever greater acceleration. If the growing preponderance of speed in determining movement undermines the basis of traditional spatial relations, the question remains to be addressed of just how pictures, Bilder, can contribute to this race for speed and acceleration, particularly when it is driven by the more or less hidden agenda of securing the place of the human subject. In short, Heidegger's interpretation of the subject -securing function of the world picture raises the question of what might be called the kinetic or "cinematic" structure of that picture, the question that, of course, leads us directly back-or is it forward?-to Benjamin. This detour via "The Time of the World Picture" allows us to approach Benjamin's work in what might be called the "shadow" of Heidegger's writings. This shadow is named explicitly in the essay I have been discussing as what does not quite fit into the world as picture. Once the human has been determined as subject and the world as picture, Heidegger remarks, an "invisible shadow is cast over all things," a shadow that prevents them from ever being put fully into their proper places, that is, being fully depicted. This shadow is not simply external to the world as picture; it is an inseparable part of it. The world as picture reveals itself-which is to say, conceals itself-as shadow. But "shadow" here does not name "simply the lack of light," or even less "its negation." It designates what escapes and eludes the calculating plans of total representation, of which it at the same time is the condition of possibility: "In truth the shadow bears overt and yet impenetrable witness to the concealed glow" (104). Concerning the "truth" of this shadow and the "glow" to which it "bears impenetrable witness," Heidegger can say only that it "points toward something else, the knowledge of which is denied us today" (88). But, he warns, "man will not even experience and meditate on this refusal so long as he busies himself merely with the negation of his age." Rather than exhausting itself in negation, real thought today, Heidegger concludes, must open itself to a certain "in-between" (Zwischen). The thinker, however, who, more than any other-with the possible exception of Heidegger him-

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self-explored the relation of the "age" with that interstitial zone was Walter Benjamin. And while we will see that he too followed the lead of a certain shadow, the direction in which it led him was as far removed from the path ofHeidegger as Paris is from Freiburg. As far ... and as close. II

From the "Time of the World Picture" to the "Work of Art in the Time of Its Technical Reproducibility" the leap is a large one, but it takes place in the space of a shadow. Despite its obvious awkwardness, I use the word "time" here, rather than the more idiomatic "age," to translate Zeit in both texts, because what is involved in both is precisely a question of time and of an alteration in its relation to space. In each text, the question to be explored is presented at first in narrative, historical terms, as a gradual emergence that, while reaching back to the origins of Western culture, assumes distinctive form in the modern period. For Heidegger, the decisive turn is identified with Descartes, who, he emphasizes, stands in a tradition that he continued but also transformed. For Benjamin, the decisive turn took place in the middle of the nineteenth century, when, with the increasing mechanization of reproductive techniques, the traditional distinction between production and reproduction began to break down. The index of this steadily accelerating breakdown Benjamin finds in the progressive elimination of what he calls the "aura" of artworks. "The process," Benjamin remarks, "is symptomatic": its significance points far beyond the realm of art. The technique of reproduction, to formulate generally, detaches what is reproduced from the realm of tradition [lost das Reproduzierte aus dem Bereich der Tradition ab ]. In multiplying reproduction [of the art work], it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener [dem Aufnehmenden: the receiver, but also-significantly-the recorder, as a photographer, cameraman, recording engineer, etc.] in their particular situation, it actualizes what is reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition that is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both

Mass Mediauras processes are intimately connected with contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is film. 4 This quotation follows by and large the published translation by Harry Zohn. Although Zohn's translation of this passage is essentially "correct," attention to the literalness of Benjamin's German opens up perspectives that tend to disappear in the more fluid, idiomatic style favored by Zohn and by most of Benjamin's translators. What does not change in a more literal rendition of the passage is the fact that the withering of the "aura" of artworks as a result of their technical reproducibility constitutes a phenomenon, event, or process-none of these words are entirely appropriate-whose implications far exceed the aesthetic sphere in which they are generally situated. The decline of the aura constitutes a "tremendous shattering of tradition," a historical shock that plunges humanity into a crisis even while holding out the possibility of its "renewal." What also appears clearly in the English translation is that this critical possibility is associated on the one hand with "contemporary mass movements" and on the other with "film." What, however, is far less legible in the published English translation than in Benjamin's German is the way this association is rooted in the structure of technological reproduction itself. In the Zohn translation, the latter process is described in terms of "plurality": "By making many reproductions, it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence." But a more literal rendering of the text would read: "In multiplying the reproduction [of the artwork, the technique of reproduction] replaces its unique occurrence with one that is massive or masslike, massenweise [setzt sie an die Stelle seines einmaligen Vorkommens sein massenweises]." The work of art, which throughout the tradition was conceived in terms of a single and unique here and now, takes its place qua reproduction, not simply as a plurality, that is, as a mere collection of individual occurrences, but rather as a mass. When Benjamin therefore goes on to draw a connection between this process and "the mass movements of our day," he is merely continuing a line of thought that has its roots in the massive, masslike character of reproduction. However this mass is to be construed, its emergence is therefore closely tied to the structure and operation of the reproductive technique itself.

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Samuel Weber But what are we to make of this mass? Nothing could seem more dated than this heavy-handed notion of mass, which reeks of the collectivist discourses of the 1930's. And yet, the word returns sufficiently in this and other late texts of Benjamin's to suggest that he, for his part, did not consider it to be as inert as it might seem today. Let us therefore take a closer look at the way Benjamin uses this word. We can begin by noting that, in the passage quoted, Benjamin does not speak simply of the "mass" or "masses," but of "mass movements." This practice turns out to be consistent with his use of the word elsewhere. Whatever else is meant by "mass" in his writings, it entails a dynamic element that demands attention. Mass movements are the result, or rather the corollary, of that movement of detachment, ablOsen, that marks the decline of aura. Aura relates to mass not just as uniqueness does to multiplicity, but also in spatial terms, as a fixed location does to one that is caught up in an incessant and complex movement. This is why aura is intimately related to the idea of a setting, or even a case. 5 The shift from the uniqueness of the original work of art to copies that from the very start are made to be reproduced and exhibited (ausgestellt) involves not just the substitution of one kind of work for another, but rather a modification in the way works of art quite literally take place. To be considered an original, or capable of originality, works of art must, as Benjamin puts it, be "embedded" in the tradition, which is to say, they must have their unique and uniquely inimitable site in respect to which their uniqueness is constituted. But what does it mean to be thus embedded in a tradition, and what guarantees the unicity of place in which the work of art can, as original, take place? In order to elucidate this question, Benjamin resorts to the following image, or rather, scene: "On a summer afternoon, resting, to follow a chain of mountains on the horizon or a branch casting its shadow on the person resting-that is what it means to breathe in the aura of these mountains, of this branch" (1.2: 479; 222-23). You begin to get the picture now, surely, for it recalls in certain essential respects that discussed by Heidegger in "The Time of the World Picture": the world brought forth and set before the subject, whose place thus seems secured by the object of

Mass Mediauras its representation. What holds the aura of originality in place is the subject as its point of reference, just as, conversely and reciprocally, the subject is ensconced, embedded, held in place and at rest, by the scene that it both observes and also "breathes in" (this phrase is omitted in the English translation). The only difference between the world of this picture and Heidegger's world picture is that Benjamin's subject is depicted as being "in the picture" and that being in it, it cannot quite get the picture in its entirety (despite the fact that in German "getting the picture" is expressed as being "in" it: im Bilde sein, an expression that Heidegger cites). The aura that Benjamin here attempts to depict is therefore not simply equivalent to the world picture itself; it is somewhat separate from it. That separation defines the difference in Benjamin's approach to the picture and Heidegger's. This suggests why, in regard to Benjamin's use of imagery here and elsewhere, it might be more fitting to speak of setting a scene than of painting a picture. But it is not only the subject that is "in" Benjamin's scene or scenario. There is also that "shadow" that falls over the resting subject and that is therefore not simply invisible in terms of the world picture, as Heidegger emphasizes, but rather that has become quite visible, providing we are prepared to read it as marking the space within which the relation of subject to object takes place. Distance and separation are therefore explicitly inscribed in the scene, or even the scenario, of the aura from its inception. In this sense, the "decline" or "fall" -der Veifall-of the aura is not something that simply befalls it from without. The aura is from the start marked by an irreducible element of taking leave, 6 of departure, of separation. Were this all there is to the matter, then the narrative, sequential, "historical" aspect of the aura, expressed in a movement of decline and fall, would simply be part and parcel of its mode of being. So understood, aura would name the undepictable de-piction of distancing and separation. But if aura, also designated by Benjamin as the "unique appearance of a distance, however close it may be," is inseparable from a certain separation, this can also help to explain something that Benjamin himself at times seems to have had difficulties coming to terms with: the fact that the aura, despite all of its withering

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away, dilapidation, and decline, never fully disappears. Far from it, since it returns with a vengeance in those forms of representation that would, according to Benjamin's acco}lnt, seem most hostile to it: film, for instance, and, we can now add television as well. The aura is able to return in the age of technical reproducibility because, as the appearance or apparition of an irreducible separation, it is never uniquely itself, but is always constituted in a process of selfdetachment: detachment from the self as demarcation of a self. The aura is something like an enabling limit, the emanation of an object from which it removes itself, a frame falling away from a picture and in its fall, in its Verfall, becoming light: a bright shadow. This process of falling or falling away is described by Benjamin as the result of a tendency of "the masses" to reduce or overcome distance: "To bring things spatially and humanly 'closer' [naherzubringen] is a no less passionate inclination of today's masses than is their tendency to overcome the uniqueness of every given [event, Gegebenheit] through the reception [Aufnahme] of its reproduction" (1.2: 479; 223). The "passionate inclination of today's masses" is passionate not simply because it is intensely felt, but because it bears witness to an aporia: to bring something closer presupposes a point or points of reference that are sufficiently fixed, sufficiently self-identical, to allow for the distinction between closeness and farness, proximity and distance. However, when what is brought closer is itself already a reproduction-and as such, separated from itself-the closer it comes, the more distant it is. 7 This tendency is rooted not only in works that are, from the very start, constituted as reproductions. It results no less from the nature of those to whom such works are addressed. Nothing indicates more clearly the fact that these addressees are not merely a massed version of the traditional contemplative subject than the word that Benjamin uses, with great frequency, to describe the function of this mass. It is a mass of Aufnehmenden, and its function with respect to the technical reproduction of art is that of the Aufnahme. But just what is meant here by Aufnahme? Aufnehmenden? What does it mean to try to bring works or images closer to an Aufnehmenden? In the passage under consideration, I have translated Aufnahme as "reception": the masses tend "to overcome the uniqueness of ev-

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ery given through the reception of its reproduction [durch die Aufnahme von deren Reproduktion]" (1.2: 479; 223). Literally, aufnehmen is "to take up" or "apprehend," and its most obvious meaning, in the context of Benjamin's remarks, is indeed "reception." But what is striking for the reader of Benjamin's German text is that the same word is used to describe the process of reproduction itself as it goes on in the film studio. For instance: For the first time human beings come to the point of having to work with their entire living being but without its aura. For aura is tied to its here and now. It cannot be depicted [Es gibt kein Abbild von ihr ]. The aura that surrounds Macbeth on the stage cannot be separated from what for the living audience surrounds the actor who plays him. What is peculiar to the shots taken [der Aufnahme] in the studio is that they replace the audience with the camera [Apparatur ]. (1.2: 489; 229)

If Benjamin is obviously fascinated by the techniques of film production, it is because he is convinced that what happens on the set and what goes on afterward both involve a similar, if not identical, process: recording, reproductive inscription, aufnehmen. In place of living subjects, be these conceived as producers, actors, or receivers (audience), the techniques of reproduction set up an "apparatus," a camera or instrument of reinscription (photographic, phonographic, cinematographic). Such an apparatus "takes up" the "given" and does three very strange things to it: first, it apprehends it the way a policeman apprehends a suspect, arresting what seems to be its spontaneous or intrinsic movement and submitting it to a series of operations that have nothing to do with its "natural" inclinations; second, it opens the way for those elements to be dislocated and relocated, broken down into elements and recombined into ensembles that have little to do with their initial state; and finally, the finished product is placed into circulation, accompanied by the semblance of what has been radically undermined-publicity about the "personalities" of stars, directors, and producers. The cinematic cult of personality imparts the aura of individuality to a product that "takes place" in many places at once, in a here and now that is multiple and that cannot be said to have any "original" occurrence. But an obvious objection must be considered. If it is true that

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Samuel Weber such simultaneous taking place is unthinkable for the prototypical works of plastic art that Benjamin has in mind in introducing the notion of aura, it is far less obvious just how the reproducibility of photographs or of film is different from that of a piece of music or a work of literature, in which the here and now of the aura seems to be entirely compatible with the proliferation of its material embodiments (books, performances, scores, etc.). In reflecting upon the peculiar way that the "mass" "takes up" what it seeks to "bring closer," however, the singular configuration of aura, image, and mass movement in the Age of Reproducibility begins to emerge. Benjamin gives us a suggestive hint of how the notion of mass is related to that of reproducibility when he elucidates the specific difference between the traditional painter and the cameraman-in German, Operateur-by comparing the practice of the magician to that of the surgeon. Both seek to heal, but in very different ways: The magician maintains the natural distance between himself and the person being treated, or more precisely, he reduces it-by laying his hand on the patient-only a little and increases it, by virtue of his authority, considerably. The surgeon proceeds inversely: he reduces the distance to the patient considerably-by penetrating into his interior-and he increases it only a little-through the careful movement of his hand among the organs. In a word: by contrast with the magician (who still survives in the general practitioner), the surgeon at the decisive moment abstains from taking his distance and confronting the patient face to face [Mensch zu Mensch]; he penetrates him operatively [operativ ]. (1.2: 496; 233) Benjamin's comparison of the therapeutic practice of cameraman and surgeon brings out, by contrast, the violence involved in their respective "penetration" and reminds us that, in English at least, a film is said to be "shot." Like the projectile from a gun, it "penetrates deep into the fabric of the given," violating bodily integrity and producing images that are very different from those of the painter. The latter are "total," whereas those of the cameraman are "torn apart" -zerstiickelt-cut into pieces that must then "find their way together again in accordance with new laws." Those laws, which, for Benjamin, are above all those of the cutting table, where the film is edited, pertain to the massed public that "takes up"

Mass Mediauras (aufnimmt) no less than to the film "itself," which has already been "taken up" (aufgenommen)-"shot" in the studio (or on location). The fact that the same German verb-aufnehmen-is used to designate cinematic production as well as reception suggests that both ends of the process may share some very basic features. One of those features is designated by Benjamin with a German word that is difficult to translate, but that perhaps holds the key to the transformations his essay is attempting to articulate. That word is Zerstreuung. In the English translation of Benjamin's text, this word is generally translated as "distraction" and occasionally as "absentminded(ness)," as in the famous remark: "The audience [of a film] is an examiner, but an absentminded one" (1.2: sos; 241). Once again, however, the literal resources of the German word, and hence its connotations, are far richer than the essentially privative terms "distraction" and "absentminded" might lead one to believe. The root of the German word-the verb streuen-is cognate to the English "strew, strewn" and carries with it a strong spatial overtone. Moreover, the word has its history, in Benjamin's writings no less than in those of Heidegger, and it demonstrates that its significance can in no way be encompassed by the concept of "distraction," however important that notion undoubtedly is. In his essay investigating the question of "Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference" in certain of Heidegger's texts, Jacques Derrida has devoted several extremely suggestive pages to Heidegger's use of the word Zerstreuung and its variants, both in Being and Time and in his lectures of 1928, from which it emerges that Dasein, far from simply losing itself in a movement of dispersion, is constituted through its scattering, its Zerstreuung or Zerstreutheit. Although this is not the place to engage this discussion in any detail, I will simply note that it establishes a link between Dasein's physicality-or more exactly its "fleshliness," its Leiblichkeit-and its fragmented, dispersed ways of being. This dispersed corporeality or fleshliness Heidegger describes by using a neologism, Mannigfaltigung, which can be rendered as "manifolding," a term that comes close to designating the kind of dispersion that Benjamin considers to constitute an essential quality both of the film itself and of the public, or mass, that "takes up" its Aufnahmen. 8

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But it is the history of the term in Benjamin's own writings that bears directly on the questions we are investigating. In his study of The Origin of the German Mourning Play, completed and published three years before Being and Time, Benjamin describes the mode of signification peculiar to the German Baroque mourning play-allegory-and in particular its relation to emblematics in the following terms: Allegory ... in its most developed form brings with it a court [einen Hof]; around the figural center, which is never missing from genuine allegories, in opposition to conceptual circumlocutions, a host of emblems is grouped. They seem arbitrarily arranged: The Confused "Court"-title of a Spanish mourning play [by Lope de Vega]-could be cited as the schema of allegory. "Dispersion" [Zerstreuung] and "Collection" [Sammlung] name the law of this court. Things are brought together according to their meaning; indifference to their being there (Dasein) disperses them once again. 9 When one remembers that the German word for "court," Hof, which Benjamin uses here in order to describe the collecting and dispersing of emblems around their allegorical center, can also, in contexts not so very different from this one, be translated as "aura," 10 certain aspects of his later work emerge in a somewhat different light. First, the tendency toward dispersion that Benjamin discerns in the collective structures specific to the nineteenthcentury metropolis no longer appears to originate with the emergence of urban masses, but rather to go back at least as far as the seventeenth century in Germany. Second, the dispersed, centrifugal structure of mass phenomena shows itself to be bound up with articulatory processes at work long before Baudelaire began to "fence" with "the ghostly crowd of words" (1.2: 618). Baudelaire's words are ghostly not simply because they represent or present something that is absent, but because as words, they have a tendency to buckle under the shocks to which they are exposed.11 They are ghostly because, like the apparition of the passerby in Baudelaire's poem "A une passante" ("To a passerby") they come to be only in passing away: "A flash ... then night!" In the middle of the phrase, three dots or points punctuate and puncture the suspended allegorical center of a certain Hof-court or street. What is

Mass Mediauras comes to pass as nothing-but a certain aura. The passante emerges from the deafening din of the street as a visual figure set off against the inchoate noise of the amorphous crowd of pedestrians. But in thus setting itself off from its pedestrian surroundings, this emergence also sets itself apart and reveals thereby its affinity with everything pedestrian. It is the affinity of an apparition. The passante appears, only to disappear almost instantaneously. It is in the invisible but legible space of this quasi-instant that the poem takes place. Arresting the "fugitive beauty," as in a photographic snapshot, the poem repeats the balancing act of the woman herself, "swinging seam and fringe" as she passes by. Unlike the subject of Heidegger's world picture or that of Benjamin's auratic scene, however, the poet does not merely "breathe in" the scene-he imbibes it. And it is hardly insignificant if the spectacle he both absorbs and is absorbed in consists not so much in visible objects as in the source of vision itself-the woman's eye, which is also the eye of a storm: "Moi, je buvais, crispe comme un extravagant I Dans son oeil, ciellivide ou germe l'ouragan." 12 The flash that intervenes-"A flash ... then night!" -is suspended by the same three points or dots that mark the passing of the passante and allow its Medusa-like gaze to hold out the promise of a resurrection: "Whose glance let me suddenly be reborn." Organized around its allegorical center, those three dots, the poem suspends the shock by reinscribing it in a narrative sequence of death and rebirth. This suspension is itself allegorical in the sense given to the word not by Benjamin, but by Paul de Man, for what it does is to temporalize and temporize the disruptive force of an encounter that comes as a shock insofar as it interrupts temporal narrative and progression. 13 The shocking encounter with the abysmally ambivalent apparition of the passerby is sorted out by the retrospective glance of the poet, which Benjamin aptly describes as "love not so much at first sight as at last." Such love at last sight imposes direction and meaning upon an apparition whose transfixing power, Benjamin insists, reposes exclusively upon a mass that as such is never depicted or named. 14 The mass here, invisible and nameless, is precisely that ambivalent, divergent movement that carries the passante even as she appears to emerge out of it. The movement of

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Samuel Weber the mass is ambivalent because it entails stasis no less than agility, suspension no less than progression. It is a movement that is going nowhere, and yet it is never just marking time. A concrete instance of such a movement can be seen in this reemergence of allegory in the nineteenth century. The seventeenthcentury conception of what Benjamin called "Natural History"history as the permanent decline of a world that, in the wake of a positive theology, discovers itself to be infinite in its finitude-continued in the nineteenth century, except that the disintegration did not congeal in a focus upon the corpse as its privileged emblem, as in much German Baroque art and theater, but rather in the fascination with something far more inchoate and amorphous: a mass. "Baroque allegory sees the corpse only from outside. Baudelaire sees it also from within," writes Benjamin in one of the notes published later as Central Park (1.2: 684). The corpse "seen from within," however, is another form of the mass: that mass of organs on which the surgeon-and the cameraman-operate. It is the transformation of the body from an organic form into an allegorical mass that the apparition of the passerby both announces and conceals. The law of dispersion and collection that governs the ambivalent movement of the allegorical mass can therefore be designated by the phrase coming to pass. The mass, qua crowd, appears as what it is in withdrawing before what seems to be an individual, feminine figure, that of the passante. But the ostensible individuality of this passerby is anything but in-dividual: she comes to be only in passing by. And in so doing, she reveals herself to be the allegorical emblem of the mass, its coming to be in and as the other, in and as the singularity of an ephemeral apparition. The mass movement-the mass in movement-produces itself as this apparition, which provides an alternative to the formed and mobilized masses of the political movements of the 193o's, to which we-with Benjamin-will have occasion later to return. But if the encounter of the poet with the passerby is an alternative to the collectivist spectacle of the mobilized mass, it also sets the stage for the mass movements to come. What is inseparable from the fleeting encounter is the desire to mingle and to mix, to dr!nk in and to be absorbed into the condition of all spectacle: the

Mass Mediauras gaze of the other. This specular desire, however, does not lead to the fantasy of a direct and present union or reunion; rather, it takes the fugitive passage of the passante as the point of departure for a reflection that, in explicitly stating its own fictionality, can still entertain the fantasy of a certain reciprocity: "You whom I should have loved, you who knew it too." Desire invests and seeks to appropriate the other as the sujet suppose savoir, if not the sujet suppose aimer. 15 And the means designed to effect this appropriation is the insertion of the chance encounter in a narrative. The elusive spectacle is thus to be appropriated as a moment of retrospection. The undecidable present of a coming to pass is recalled and reinscribed as the imperfect past of a "once upon a time." Such narrativization is the temporal correlative to the prosopopoeia that both de Man and Benjamin place at the origin of lyric poetry. The passante is thus put in her place-the past of a voluntary recollection-by this poeticonarrative reinscription, thus accomplishing the defensive function of shock as Benjamin describes it: "Perhaps the special achievement of shock defense may be seen in its function of assigning to an incident a precise temporal place in consciousness at the cost of the integrity of its contents (1.2: 815; 163). What Benjamin refers to as "shock," however, is invariably ambivalent: it designates both the traumatic incursion and its defensive warding off. Perhaps this is what is most shocking about shock: the inseparability of danger and of the effort to defend against it. Such ambivalence also characterizes the techniques of reproducibility with which Benjamin is concerned, as his remark about photography suggests: "The camera [der Apparat] imparts to the instant an as it were posthumous shock" (1.2: 630; 175). In German, the word translated here as "instant" is Augenblick, that is, literally, "eye look." And it is precisely in the space, or time, of an eye look, or, as the word is often mistakenly but suggestively translated in English-in the "blinking of an eye" -that the decisive transformations take place in the relations of picture and world, of original and reproduction, of mass and movement, and last but not least, in Benjamin's own theory-or theories-of the aura itself. The encounter of the poet with the passante, and through her with the mass and its movements, should remind us that Benjamin's

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theory of the aura is as little unique, as little independent of the laws of a certain reproduction, as is the process it purports to describe and to comprehend. His theory of aura disintegrates, falls, verfiillt, into at least two theories, which repeat each other while yet saying very different things. In "Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Benjamin takes up the theory of the aura, but in a context that is quite different from, if not unrelated to, his earlier account. Instead of designating the unapproachable distance of a unique here and nowthat of the work of art embedded in the tradition-aura is now described by Benjamin in the following manner: What in the daguerreotypes must have been felt to be inhuman, even lethal, was the (prolonged, by the way) staring into the camera [Apparat], since, after all, the camera takes a person's picture [das Bild des Menschen aufnimmt] without returning his glance [ohne ihm dessen Blick zuriickzugeben]. The glance, however, expects inherently to find a response wherever it gives itself. Wherever this expectation finds such a response ... it experiences aura to the fullest. "Perceptibility," remarks Novalis, "is a kind of attentiveness." The perceptibility of which he thus speaks is none other than that of the aura. The experience of aura thus rests upon the transfer [ Ubertragung] of a form of reaction that is current in human society to the relation human beings have with the inanimate or with nature. The person who is looked at or who believes himself to be looked at looks up [schlagt den Blick auf]. To experience the aura of an appearance is to endow that appearance with the ability to look up [den Blick aufzuschlagen]. (1.2: 646; 188) Baudelaire's poem "A une passante" articulates this experience of the aura, an experience that is, it turns out, more the experience of a desire than of a unique and unapproachable reality. At the same time, the most powerful desire remains unfulfilled. Baudelaire succumbs most entirely to the fascination of "eyes that do not see": "the fixed eyes/ Of Satyresses or Nixies" (1.2: 649; 190 ). If such eyes can hardly be called "human" any longer (ibid.), they are perhaps of the same family as the even more "inanimate" eye to which people relate increasingly in the age of technical reproducibility: the eye of the camera. What is peculiar to this eye however, is that it is always ready, always prepared ( apparare) to take in and take

Mass Mediauras

up everything without ever looking back. The recording apparatus, whether visual or auditory, never returns the glance. It blinks but never winks. Instead, it arrests and separates and reproduces the here and now again and again in a proliferating series of images that go here and there, a mass of pictures that cannot keep still, even if they are instantaneous "snapshots." The German word for such "still photos" -Momentaufnahmen-indicates that what is ultimately arrested, "taken up," broken down, spliced back together again and then let loose ... is the moment itself. The time of reproducibility is the time of this "posthumously shocked," immobilized, dispersed, recollected, and finally forgotten moment, ever on the verge, always coming to pass. But in a world on the verge, traversed and indeed constituted out of such circulating series of images, it is difficult to establish the kind of set and secure position that Benjamin initially associates with the aura and Heidegger with the world picture. These are pictures that you do not get-you are gotten by them. To such pictures there can be a number of very different responses, and Benjamin describes several of them. Of these, I will here touch on only two. First of all, there is the very real possibility that aura will be reproduced in and by the very media responsible for its "decline." What is clear from Benjamin's discussion, even though he does not say it in so many words, and what has become increasingly evident ever since, is that aura thrives in its decline, and that the reproductive media are particularly conducive to this thriving. In a remark that is prophetic beyond its presumed intention, Benjamin observes that "radio and film transform not only the function of the professional actor, but also that of those who, like politicians in power, present themselves before them" (1.2: 491 n. 20; 247 n. 12). This remark suggests how and why the media would in fact go on to reduce the difference between the two categories, actor and politician, to the point of allowing the one to become the other. The star and the dictator had a similar function and origin. In both, the "amorphous mass" could find a face and a voice that it might call its own, or if not its own, that it could at least recognize and use to secure its own position. It was a face with eyes that seemed to look back and a voice that seemed to address one directly.

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Samuel Weber This is what emerges at the end of the essay on the "Work of Art" when Benjamin comes to utter what has doubtless become the most cited phrase he ever wrote, even if-or perhaps because-it is one that means little separated from the arguments leading up to it. And the more this phrase is quoted, it seems, the less those arguments are read. The statement, that Fascism entails "the aestheticization of politics," does not in itself say very much about how that aestheticization is to be conceived. Let us therefore reread the arguments that precede it. Benjamin introduces the postscript to his essay by noting that "the growing proletarianization" and the growing formation (Formierung) of the masses are "two sides of one and the same occurrence." But what, we must ask in the light of our previous discussion, does the "formation" of masses entail if one of their distinguishing characteristics turns out to be a certain amorphousness, a certain dispersion? "Fascism," Benjamin responds, "attempts to organize the growing proletarian masses without touching [antasten] those property relations that these masses attempt to do away with." But if Fascism is able to avoid "touching" property relations, how is it able nevertheless to win the allegiance of the "proletarian masses"? It accomplishes this feat, Benjamin suggests, by offering them something quite different: "Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a means of expressing themselves." Fascism offers the masses self-expression. In what does this self-expression consist? We must go to a footnote to find out. Here, in alluding to the weekly newsreel, Benjamin observes that "mass reproduction [Der massenweisen Reproduktion] is aided especially by the reproduction of masses. In big parades and monster rallies, in mass sporting events and in war, all of which today are brought before the cameras [der Aufnahmeapparatur zugefiihrt: literally, brought before the recording apparatus] the mass looks itself in the face" (1.2: 506; 251). Fascism allows the mass to look itself in the face and thereby to find a gaze that ostensibly looks back. Fascism thus reinstates the aura of the world picture by means of the very media that undermine it. By contrast, in his study of Baudelaire, Benjamin, as we have seen, insists on the fact that urban mass, although it is omnipresent in Baudelaire's poetry, is never repre-

Mass Mediauras sented or depicted as such. In short, it is never made the object of a picture, although its effects and workings are everywhere. The contrast with the Fascist formation of the masses could hardly be more striking: through the use of the media, above all film, what is in its innermost structure dispersed and distracted is given a form and a shape, a voice and a face. 16 The reproductive apparatus that creates the mass as a dispersed and faceless phenomenon-or rather, as a movement that is not simply going anywhere-at the same time restores the semblance of a face to that amorphous mass. The same could be said for its voice as for its body. But since what is represented and depicted beneath the monumental forms and figures, voices and faces, remains tied to a movement of dispersion, Zerstreuung will always be very close to Zerstorung, "destruction." In Marinetti's Futurist manifesto, war is exalted as a domain in which the movement of dispersion and destruction can be given a figure and represented as form: "The fiery orchards of the machine guns" and "the dreamed-of metallization of the human body" conceal the ghastly mutilation of that body through the impact of that same metal. Such depictions are still very much with us today and indeed have given a new resonance to the notion of journalistic "coverage." 17 It is this giving of voice and face that one of the most incisive readers of Benjamin, Paul de Man, in a rather different and yet by no means unrelated context, identified as the rhetorical process of prosopopoeia. 18 If de Man saw this device as constitutive of much of what we call literature, Benjamin-and this brings me to the second response to the elusiveness of the world picture-speculates that the auratic projection of the reciprocated glance constitutes one of the origins of poetry itself. Once again, this conjecture is hidden away in a footnote. In that note, Benjamin asserts that the "endowing" (Belehnung) of others-whether human, animals, or inanimate being-with the "power of looking up" ("den Blick aufzuschlagen") is a major source ( Quellpunkt) of poetry. And yet, as his study of Baudelaire makes clear, in the age of mass reproduction and on the threshold of the arrival of mass media, such a source grows increasingly problematic. What Baudelaire encounters-and indeed, what then gives him a certain intense pleasure-is the hu-

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man equivalent of the apparatus: eyes that "look up" but do not look back, or even look at. And with this glance that does not look back and yet sees, a very different kind of aura emerges: a singularity that is no longer unique, no longer the other of reproduction and repetition, but their most intimate effect. What Benjamin calls the "decline of aura" emerges here not as its simple elimination, but as its alteration, which, however, turns out to repeat what aura always has been: the singular leave-taking of the singular, whose singularity is no longer that of an original moment, but of its posthumous aftershock-"A flash ... then night!" 19 But Benjamin did not need to wait for Baudelaire and nineteenth-century Paris in order to discover this "eclair." Fifteen years before, he had already concluded his reading of Goethe's Elective Affinities by singling out the "falling star" above the heads of the illfated lovers as the allegorical emblem of the work. Or, as Benjamin called it at the time-he had not discovered allegory yet-as "the mystery": "Mystery in the dramatic is that moment in which the latter overshoots the realm of its own language toward a higher and unattainable one. It can therefore no longer be expressed in words, but only through presentation [Darstellung]; it is 'dramatic' in the strictest sense." 20 Although Benjamin does not indicate just what this "strictest sense" of the dramatic might be, its etymology suggests that it has to do with a happening or an event. Mystery happens dramatically when language overshoots its semantic-thematic function and takes place as an event. To the extent to which it eludes or exceeds signification, such an event can only be fugitive, fleeting, like a falling star or a flash. What this meteoric event leaves behind in its wake is what I would be tempted to call-if a neologism can be allowed-the "mediauric": auratic flashes and shadows that are not just produced and reproduced by the media but that are themselves the media, since they come to pass in places that are literally inter-mediary, in the interstices of a process of reproduction and of recording-Aufnahme-that is above all a mass movement of collection and dispersion, of banding together and disbanding. In this movement, different elements collide with and glance off one another. Those who attempt to get their bearings by looking for a look that looks back are doomed, as Benjamin says of Baudelaire, and as

Mass Mediauras he had already said of the seventeenth-century allegorist, to depart empty-handed, gehen leer aus. And yet in such an empty-handed exit, something both very new and very old makes itself felt: the irreducibility of a certain separation, of a stage that is not simply the setting of a picture or the scene of a glance, but at the same time a scenario of inscription. It is not necessarily a scenario concerning images alone, for, as Benjamin reminds us, "words too can have their aura. Karl Kraus has described it thus: 'The closer you look at a word, the more distantly it looks back"' (1.2: 647 n; 200, n. 17). What this distant "looking back" of words announces is perhaps the advent of those uncanny eyes that will no longer look back at all in order to keep on seeing. This aura of words offers a very distinct alternative to the Fascistic, aestheticizing use of aura. What one "sees" in the ever more distant word is not simply a reproduction of the same, but something else, a distance that takes up and moves the beholder toward what, though remote, is also closest at hand, in the sense of the "optical" or "tactical/tactile" ( taktisch) unconscious that Benjamin discerned in the most familiar, habitual gestures. This distance embodies therefore the "decline and fall of the aura," its "shrinking" and "withering away," but also its resurgence, which Benjamin did not live to explore, but which his work, like perhaps none other before or since, prepares us to understand. What is condemned in the Age of Technical Reproducibility is not aura as such, but the aura of art as a work of representation, a work that would have its fixed place, that would take its place in and as a world picture. What remains is the mediaura of an apparatus whose glance takes up everything and gives nothing back, except perhaps in the blinking of an eye.

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The Sober Absolute: On Benjamin and the Early Romantics

According to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy in The Literary Absolute, Walter Benjamin's dissertation, The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism, has revolutionized traditional studies in German Romanticism. Indeed, Winfried Menninghaus remarks, Benjamin's dissertation is the most frequently cited work in studies on that period of German thought. The reason for the breakthrough effect of Benjamin's dissertation is quite clear: his analysis of the major concepts characteristic ofJena Romanticismthe concepts of art, literature, critique, irony, etc.-is fundamental, in that he shows these concepts to be the cornerstones of a very specific philosophical position distinct from those of the major conceptual power brokers of the time: Kant and the German Idealists. 1 Even though Benjamin's assessment of the specificity of Romantic thought was made on the basis of the few writings accessible at the time, and, moreover, on a narrow selection of the available material, there is no doubt that his dissertation continues to give us a correct 50

The Sober Absolute

and fruitful view of the early Romantic philosophical conceptions. Yet it also remains true that the dissertation is thoroughly flawed, not only for philological, but for discursive-argumentative reasons as well. As Menninghaus has forcefully shown in Unendliche Verdopplung, Benjamin's work abounds with loose argumentation and makes such free use of citations that they are made on occasion to say the exact opposite of what they say in their original context. Furthermore, the exegeses of some concepts (such as the major one of reflection) are essentially limited and distorted. A number of fragments are either consciously perverted in their semantics or forced in certain directions. Finally, the dissertation makes an extremely selective use of the material-selective to the point of being silent about, perhaps to the point of annihilating, what does not fit his conception. This is especially true for the first part of the dissertation, in which Benjamin lays the general philosophical foundation for his analysis of the chief concepts of Romantic thought. And yet, in spite "of these numerous and partly more than marginal violences," Benjamin's "derivation of the cardinal concepts of Romantic poetology from the theory of reflection" remains valid. But even the first part, "On Reflection," where Benjamin finds "the trace of a dominating systematic signification of the Romantic concept of reflection with its two 'moments' of immediacy and infinity," as Menninghaus notes, demands admiration in spite of all its philological and argumentative difficulties. 2 The question thus arises as to what explains this strange paradox of an interpretation that yields correct results despite its poor textual basis and systematic distortion. From whence does the surprising confidence that Benjamin demonstrates in his violent penetration of the recalcitrant text material originate? Menninghaus suggests that Benjamin's sagacious analysis of early German Romanticism follows not from any brilliant intuition, but from his own theoretical proximity to the fundamental problems raised by Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. Menninghaus writes: "The avenues of Benjamin's access to the romantic theory of reflection are already preprogrammed by his own largely Romantic theory oflanguage." 3 The divining rod with which he approaches the sparse corpus of Romantics' writings available to him would thus be made up of conceptions and concepts intimately

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related to the Romantic project itself. At first sight, such a conclusion seems warranted. This thesis of a fundamental affinity of Benjamin's thinking with that of the Romantics seems plausible, not only because a great number of topics that Benjamin dealt with throughout his career-from the question of translation to that of the mechanical work of art, not to speak of the notion of critiquewere already broached in the dissertation, but also because his own theories on these subjects appear closely related to what in the dissertation he had claimed to be the Romantics' position on these matters. However compelling and fruitful such an affinity thesis may be to account for what Benjamin achieved in his dissertation, its limits come to light as soon as the specificity and originality of Benjamin's own thinking is established. Above all, it is incapable of accounting for Benjamin's repeated, if not systematic, criticism of Romantic philosophy. Indeed, The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism is anything but a wholesale appropriation or celebration of Romanticism. Its presentation of the main axioms of Romantic thought is not without ambivalence. At times, Benjamin shows little sympathy for, or even direct hostility toward, the Romantics' insights. As we shall see, he accuses the Romantics of obscurity, of failing to clearly differentiate between their concepts, of having become embroiled in unresolvable contradictions, of having developed a metaphysics that is of limited interest, and finally, and not least, of having committed the philosophically unforgivable crime of confusing and mixing levels of thought-a metabasis allo eis genos. In the following, I would like to bring Benjamin's criticism of the Romantics into relief in order to precisely determine his point of departure from Romanticism. The vehicle for this demonstration will be the concept of critique itself. Benjamin understood his objections to Romanticism as philosophical objections. More generally, he conceived his overall approach to the Romantics as a philosophical one. From the very beginning of the dissertation, the task to write a "history of the concept of art criticism" (as opposed to a "history of art criticism itself") is said to be "philosophical, or more precisely, the task of unfolding the problem in a historical perspective" (u).< The quali-

The Sober Absolute fication in question is necessary, since Benjamin distinguishes two philosophical tasks: one is concerned with a historical problematic; the other is systematic. The dissertation is limited to a philosophical inquiry of the first type, but pushes its investigation, as Benjamin notes, to a point where it "indicates, with complete clarity, a systematic connection" (117). In the introduction to the dissertation, Benjamin gives some indication as to how he wants the "philosophical" task to be understood as "historical." After having demarcated such a task from questions concerning the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history, he evokes "a metaphysical hypothesis": "the whole of the history of philosophy in the proper sense is at the same time and ipso facto the unfolding of a single problem" (12). His analysis of early German Romanticism focusing on a historical problematic, is, I hold, geared toward exhibiting this single problem of philosophy in the historical configuration of Romantic thought. Once this philosophical task has been achieved, it would be possible to proceed to a systematic evaluation of the way this problem has taken shape in Romanticism and to eventually solve the difficulties that it poses. In order to bring the single problem constitutive of all philosophy as such in to view, one must "determine the entire philosophical scope [Tragweite]" of the Romantics' positions, Benjamin remarks (77). It is a matter of analyzing the Romantics' concepts-and in particular the concept of critique-in a manner that brings out what they contain in themselves and what is clear from the subject matter they address, a manner that treats the concepts "in keeping with their own most philosophical intentions" (nach seinen eigensten philosophischen Intentionen), as Benjamin puts it (So). In other words, a philosophical analysis, that is, analysis regarded from a historical-problematic perspective, has to focus on what, from a philosophical viewpoint, are the most proper intentions of the Romantics' concepts, as well as on Romanticism's "positive and negative sides" (77). Obviously, an analysis of this kind will have to stretch the meaning of the concepts well beyond what the Romantics themselves intended. Benjamin undoubtedly accords to the early Romantics a very special privilege: for him, Romantic criticism's superiority is at least double. Romantic criticism is "the principal overcoming of dog-

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Rodolphe Gasche matic rationalism in aesthetics" (71). Indeed, "the Romantics did not grasp form, as did the Enlightenment, as a rule for judging the beauty of art, [or regard] the observance of this rule as a necessary precondition for the pleasing or exalting effect of the work. Form did not count for the Romantics, either as itself a rule or as dependent on rules" (76). But Romanticism did not only repudiate the eighteenth century's celebration of conventional aesthetic rules, it also "overturned the destructive moments that were present in the theory of Sturm und Drang," with its "boundless cult of productive/creative force as the mere expressive force of the creator" (71). By finding "the laws of the Spirit in the artwork itself" (ibid.), early Romanticism thus enjoys the historical privilege of having overturned both the major aesthetic ideologies of the time. Early German Romanticism's privileged position is further accentuated by a comparison with contemporary criticism. Although contemporary criticism shares with Romantic criticism the overcoming of dogmatism, this overcoming has become "the painless legacy of modern criticism," and Benjamin notes that the criticism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has once again sunk below the Romantic standpoint in that it makes "the artwork into a mere byproduct of subjectivity" (ibid.). Although it is in truth the offspring of Sturm und Drang aesthetics, modern criticism overlooks the fact that the liberating negation of dogmatism by the Romantics rested on the presupposition of the art work's immanent and objective laws. This negation "secured a basic concept that could not be theoretically introduced previously with any definiteness: the concept of the work" (ibid.). With this, the Romantics deduced "from the side of the object of formation that very autonomy in the domain of art that Kant had lent to the power of judgment in the Third Critique" (72). Contemporary critical thought, by contrast, according to Benjamin, is "not determined by any theory, but by a deteriorated praxis alone" (71)-for it, critique is what is most subjective. Romantic theories of art criticism thus hold a definite advantage. Today, the "state of German philosophy of art around 1800, as exhibited in the theories of Goethe and the early Romantics, is [still] legitimate," one reads toward the end of the dissertation. Although from a theoretical viewpoint, Benjamin believed, the

The Sober Absolute

Romantics' position on art criticism had not been surpassed, this does not mean that he uncritically promoted a return to their theories. In spite of his unmistakable valorization of Romantic thought, quite the opposite is true: "The basic cardinal principle of critical activity since the Romantics, the evaluation of the work by immanent criteria, was obtained on the basis of Romantic theories, theories that in their pure form certainly do not completely satisfy any contemporary thinker" (72). The philosophical or historical-problematic presentation of early Romantic thought thus has a critical edge. Indeed, if for such an analysis it is a matter of drawing out the Romantic concepts' proper philosophical intentions, a certain ambiguity of Benjamin's approach comes into view: to analyze the Romantic concepts of art criticism according to their own most proper philosophical intentions means to measure them against the single problem constitutive of philosophy and to critically radicalize concepts whose own radicality, in the words of Benjamin, is grounded in "a certain unclarity" ( "eine gewisse Unklarheit ist der Grund dieses Radikalismus") (105). A philosophical investigation of critique is warranted "because criticism contains a cognitive moment," Benjamin claims (11). This generalizing statement acknowledges the fact that the Romantics inherited the concept of critique from Kant. As Benjamin remarks, they raised this concept "to a higher power, because they referred by the word 'criticism' to Kant's total historical achievement and not only to his concept of criticism" (52). As a result, the epistemological underpinnings of their concept of criticism still had to be made manifest. Although with Romanticism "it is a matter of criticism as art criticism, not as an epistemic method and philosophical standpoint" (13), their "higher criticism" (51), as they called it, "is thoroughly built upon epistemological presuppositions" (11). It therefore becomes indispensable to explicate, isolate, and exhibit that theory of knowledge, and this is Benjamin's task in the first part of his dissertation: "On Reflection." Right from the start, it becomes clear that, for the Romantics, epistemology and metaphysics were intimately linked. Their philosophy, as presented by Benjamin, comprises a theory of the Absolute as a medium of reflection, and a theory of absolute or immediate

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Rodolphe Gasche intuiting of this Absolute. With the idea of the Absolute as a "medium of reflection" (Benjamin is responsible for coining the expression), the Romantics laid the groundwork for an entirely original philosophical position in the aftermath not only of Kant, but of Fichte as well. By releasing reflection from the restriction to a selfpositing 'T' that it had in Fichte, by extending reflection-and that also means immediate cognition, according to Benjamin-to mere thinking, or thinking in general, reflection becomes "the infinite and purely methodical character of thinking" (29). Apart from thus reintroducing infinity into the sphere of theoretical knowledge, a sphere from which it had been excluded by Fichte, the early Romantics redefined infinity, seeing it no longer, in contradiction to Fichte, as continuous advance, but rather as an infinitude of connectedness. And rather than implying emptiness, for the Romantics, infinity was a "filled infinitude" (erfullte Unendlichkeit) (26). But, as Benjamin argues, this immediacy of knowing in reflection is also different from the immediacy of intellectual intuition that Fichte ascribed to the self-knowing and self-positing "I." The immediacy characteristic of Romantic thought is intellectual; not grounded on thinking's intuitive nature, it is purely conceptual. It must be noted that, for the Romantics, thinking is "proper to everything, for everything is a self" (29). Consequently, the medium of reflection is both an infinity of interconnected centers infinitely increasing or potentiating reflection and also the immediate knowing that these centers have of themselves and others. The Absolute as a medium of reflection is the totality of these thinking centers. This succinct presentation of the Romantic Absolute must suffice for the moment. A more detailed picture of it will arise when, in a moment, I proceed to a discussion of the difficulties that Benjamin has with this conception. First, however, I must briefly address the Romantics' contention that this whole-the Absolute, or the System-can also be absolutely grasped. If there is, indeed, such a thing as an absolute grasping of the whole in a mode of comprehension that is not intuitive, in the sense of anschaulich, but intellectual, it is because the whole, as the center of all centers, "grasps itself immediately in closed and completed reflection" (31). Indeed, if Schlegel can search for "a nonintuitive intuition [ unanschauliche Intuition]

The Sober Absolute

of the System" (47), it is because the Absolute, as the very medium of reflection, cannot escape the logic of reflection. Everything is thinking, and hence thinking must grasp itself reflectively, that is, immediately, as well. This theory of the reflexive medium and its absolute comprehension does not merit Benjamin's undivided approval. Although his objections appear as marginal and passing remarks, as footnotes, and are never developed or even substantiated, they occur with such frequency and insistence that the task of reading "The Concept of Art Criticism" becomes the task of construing their underlying rationale.5 Of this theory, Benjamin says that it "has been established with a limited metaphysical interest [in begrenztem metaphysischen Interesse]," in other words, it is of limited use or importance to metaphysics. Moreover, any attempt to clarify from a "pure criticological interest" what of this theory the Romantics have left in the dark risks ending in darkness as well. It is a theory, Benjamin concludes (in a footnote) that "in its totality leads to pure logical and unresolvable problems" (57-58). Let me try then to elicit from Benjamin's critical remarks throughout the first part of the dissertation the reasons for the preceding devastating appraisal of the Romantics' theoretical presuppositions of their concept of art criticism. I shall do so by first circling back to the question of releasing reflection from the bounds of the "I." With Fichte, the Romantics shared the insight that "the epistemologically authoritative form of thinking" is "the thinking of · thinking." It is a form of immediate knowing that "constitutes for the early Romantics the basic form of all intuitive cognizing and thus obtains dignity as method; as cognizing of thinking, it comprises under itself all other, lower-level cognition" (28). For Fichte, thinking as the thinking of thinking-or in Benjamin's terminology, second-level reflection directed upon first level reflection whose subject matter is mere thinking, with its correlative, thought-achieves completion in the self-positing "I." Yet such thinking occurs incessantly, according to the Romantics, and in everything. "Accordingly," Benjamin writes, "the thinking of thinking turns into the thinking of thinking of thinking (and so forth), and with this the third level of reflection is attained .... The third level of reflection,

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Rodolphe Gasche compared with the second, signifies something in principle new" (30 ). For Fichte, the thinking of thinking is constituted by "the OrForm, the canonical form, of reflection." However, for the Romantics, this epistemologically authoritative form of thinking is made up by the infinitizing thinking of thinking of thinking that constitutes the medium of reflection. According to the Jena Romantics, this boundless thinking is not only the form of intuitive cognizing par excellence, but in its universality, it comprises all other forms of thinking as well. Although Benjamin discards the objection that the Romantics' theorem is abstruse by referring to its axiomatic presuppositions, first and foremost to the assumption that infinitude for them is filled and substantial, his discussion of the relation between the OrForm of thinking and the Romantic conception of absolute thinking begins to show clear signs of strain. Benjamin holds that "in face of the Absolute," "the strict form of reflection" dissolves. This dissolution [Zersetzung] manifests itself through a "peculiar ambiguity" in the third-level reflection. The rigorous Or-Form of second-level reflection in the third-level reflection occupies the position of both the object and the subject of thinking. "The strict form of reflection" is thus shaken and assaulted by this ambiguity," Benjamin remarks. He stresses that "this ambiguity would have to unfold into an ever more complex plurality of meanings at each successive level," and he sums the matter up in the following passage. "On this state of affairs rests the peculiar character of the infinitude of reflection vindicated by the Romantics: this consists in the dissolution of the proper form of reflection in face of the Absolute. Reflection expands without limit or check, and the thinking that is given form in reflection turns into formless thinking that directs itself upon the Absolute" (30-31). Two things need to be underlined at this point. Reflection, strictly speaking, becomes formless. From being characterized by self-limitation and the continual coiling back upon itself that marked Fichte's "I," reflection becomes unbounded, and thus able to direct itself upon the Absolute. Secondly, the Absolute itself becomes characterized by increasing, and ultimately inextricable and irredeemable ambiguity. As Benjamin argues, in "a line of thought not thought

The Sober Absolute

through by the Romantics with clarity," they, and Schlegel in particular, "saw immediately and without holding this in need of a proof, the whole of the real develop itself in the stages of reflection in its full content, with increasing clarity up to the highest clarity in the Absolute" (30 ). The thesis of a continuity between the two kinds of reflection, the Ur-Form of reflection and absolute reflection, is for Benjamin the bone of contention. With Benjamin's emphasis on the unbounding of the strict form of reflection, i.e., of the lower form of reflection, and the ambiguity of absolute reflection, a problem, indeed, surfaces. The Absolute, rather than yielding the desired clarity, becomes characterized by increasing ambiguity-and, as we know from essays written before the dissertation, or at the same time, for Benjamin, this is the terrible signature of nature, fate, myth-more generally, of the profane. It is the disastrous consequence of directing the illimited and hence formless form of the strict kind of reflection upon the Absolute itself. As Benjamin remarks in the footnote to which I have already referred, the logically unresolvable problems with which the theory of the medium of reflection is ridden climax "in the problem of the Ur-reflection" (58). As a result of the contention that there is a steady continuity between lower forms of reflection and absolute reflection, the Absolute loses its distinctness, its univocity, in short, everything that separates it from the lower orders. Yet, what about the Absolute itself? It grasps itself, as well, in immediate reflection, or cognition, Benjamin notes. He writes: "Reflection constitutes the Absolute and it constitutes it as medium. Schlegel in his expositions placed the greatest value on the continually uniform connection in the Absolute or in the System, both of which we have to interpret as the connectedness of the real, not in its substance (which is everywhere the same), but in the degrees of its clear unfolding" (37). For the Romantics, the movement in the medium of reflection is made up by either the potentiation of reflection or its decrease-to quote Navalis with Benjamin, "by reciprocal elevation and abasement" (ibid.). But in the footnote to which I have already made recourse several times, Benjamin takes issue with this contention. After having remarked that in spite of statements to the contrary, cognition for the Romantics could only mean

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Rodolphe Gasche intensification or potentiation of reflection, he writes: "Reflection can be intensified, but can never be diminished. Only an interruption [Abbrechen], never a diminishing of reflective intensification, is conceivable. The entirety of the relations of the centers of reflection among one another, not to speak of their relation to the Absolute, can consequently, rest only on intensifications of reflections" (57). For reasons of principle, what Benjamin says here about the intensifying reflections between the centers, or from the center to the Absolute, is valid for what happens in the Absolute as well. Indeed, Benjamin's critical statement, which gives the Romantics the lie, is an objection (Einwand), "an isolated critical observation," he claims (ibid.). What he objects to is not only the illimited potentiation of reflective cognition in the relation of the centers to one another, and in particular to the Absolute, but especially its use as a model for understanding the way the Absolute comprehends itself. To conceive of the Absolute as grasping itself in a process of a continually increasing reflection is, for Benjamin, an illegitimate projection of forms (or unforms) or movements specific to lower orders onto the Absolute itself. I have pointed out already that Romantics believed that "an absolute immediacy in the grasping of the context of reflection [or the Absolute] is thinkable in the virtual sense" (27). Of Schlegel, Benjamin writes that "he did not investigate the Absolute systematically, but instead sought to grasp the system absolutely. This was the essence of his mysticism" (45). What Benjamin thinks of such a possibility becomes clear when he says that "the fatal character of this attempt [das Verhiingnisvolle, another word linked to the order of fate] did not remain hidden" from Schlegel himself (ibid.). Indeed, when Benjamin claims that Schlegel characterizes this idea of the absolute comprehension of the system with the question "Are not all systems individuals?" (46). Schlegel's mystic is denounced as mysticism. Just as little as Schlegel neglected "to distinguish mysticism as something nonauthentic from mystic" (96; versiiumen, "to neglect," is another significant Benjaminian term), he paid insufficient attention to the difference between the Absolute and individuality. If Schlegel's attempt to characterize the Absolute as an individual fell on unsympathetic ears with Benjamin, it is, as we shall

The Sober Absolute

see in a moment, because, according to the latter, it rests on an illegitimate mixing of levels of thought. For Benjamin, such immediate grasping of the Absolute in the case of the Romantics must be clearly demarcated from what takes place with the mystics. Whereas mystics call upon intellectual intuition and ecstatic states, the Romantics were indifferent to intuitability: Rather, he [Schlegel] searches for, to put it in a summary formula, a nonintuitive intuition [ unanschauliche Intuition] of the system, and he finds it in language. His terminology is the sphere in which his thought moves beyond discursivity and intuitability. For the term, the concept, contains for him the seed of the system; it was, at bottom, nothing other than a preformed System itself. Schlegel's thinking is an absolutely conceptual, that is, linguistic thinking. Reflection is an intentional act of the absolute comprehension of the System and the adequate expression for this act is the concept. (47)

The absolute grasping of the Absolute is thus based on a nonintuitable individuality of the Absolute, an individuality provided by concepts, rather than names: "In the concept alone the individual nature, which Schlegel ... vindicates for the system, finds its expression" (48). Such individuality, however intellectual, is still an individuality. And as such, Benjamin seems to suggest it is incommensurate with the Absolute. Benjamin admits that some, but only some, propositions of this, in his eyes, dubious theory of the medium of reflection have achieved a peculiar fruitfulness in the theory of art. 6 Art is a determination of the medium of reflection, however, it is not a privileged one, as Benjamin sees it, because for the Romantics all things are centers of reflection. Yet it is argued in the dissertation that the Romantic theory of art in which the medium of reflection is one of forms "reaches immediately and with incomparable greater certainty [than in other Romantic determinations of the medium] the metaphysical depth of Romantic thinking" (62). Hence, this theory should, while permitting a grasp of the greatness of Romantic thought, also be the privileged place where this thought can be critically examined. After having recalled that all the laws that generally hold for

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objective knowledge (and that Benjamin had discussed in his exposition of the early Romantic theory of the knowledge of nature) hold good in the medium of art as well, Benjamin claims that the task of art criticism becomes determined as "knowledge in the reflection medium of art." He writes: "Criticism, therefore, has the same value as observation does in the face of natural objects; they are the same laws that are modified in different objects" ( 65). If observation in the realm of natural objects means moving or inciting a thing into self-consciousness, then criticism achieves the same goal in the medium of art. "Thus, criticism is, so to speak, an experiment performed on the artwork through which the latter's reflection is called awake, through which it is brought to consciousness and to knowledge of itself" (ibid.). Hence, the cognition to which Romantic art criticism gives raise is the work's self-cognition. Criticism in the medium of reflection is not only entirely objective, but for the Romantics, it is also entirely positive: "the ultimate intention of criticism," Benjamin says, "is the intensification of the consciousness of the work" (67). Every critical knowledge of an artistic formation is, as reflection in it, nothing other than a higher, self-actively originated degree of this formation's consciousness. This intensification of consciousness in criticism is infinite in principle; critique is the medium in which the limitedness of the single work refers methodologically to the infinitude of art and in the end is transported [iibergefiihrt] into that infinitude, for Art, as it is obvious, is, as medium of reflection, infinite. (67) Romantic criticism is predominantly positive in that through its intensification of the self-consciousness of the work, the artwork becomes transported, or converted into Art itself. Compared with this positive transformation, the "moment of self-negation," that is, the destruction of the work in its limitation, is negligible. By dissolving the single work into the medium of Art, Romantic critique renders the finite absolute. It perfects it, as Benjamin's remarks on Schlegel's paradigmatic critique of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister indicate: "the criticism is not meant to do anything other than discover the secret plans of the work itself, execute its concealed intentions. It belongs to the meaning of the work itself, i.e. it is in its reflected form that

The Sober Absolute the criticism should go beyond the work itself, make it absolute. It is clear: for the Romantics criticism is much less the judgment of a work than the method of its completion" (69). Thus, in a letter to Schleiermacher, Benjamin reports, Schlegel refers to his critique of Wilhelm Meister as the Ubermeister (67). Criticism, indeed, is "perfecting, positive" (70 ), in that it is an Ubersetzung, a translation of the necessarily incomplete work into its own absolute idea. For Benjamin, this idea of critique as translation hinges on the Romantics' conception of the artwork in terms of form understood as self-limited reflection. As form, the work of art is necessarily a contingent reflection of the medium of reflection. Critique, consequently, must drive these self-limited reflections outside themselves and dissolve the original reflection into a higher reflection. He writes: "In this labor, criticism rests on the germ cells of reflection, the positive formal moments of the work that it resolves into universal formal moments. In this criticism, the relationship of the single work to the idea of art is exhibited, and therewith the idea of the single work itself" (73). In short, then, critique in the medium of art is an objective movement in which self-limited reflection, or form, is released through a potentiation of the reflection frozen in the singular work and through which that work becomes dissolved into the medium of reflection, the continuum of forms, the idea of Art itself. While discussing this concept of critique in view of the Romantic theory of assessment, Benjamin introduces a term that shows to what extent critique is anchored in the work. "Criticizability" (Kritisierbarkeit) is an objective characteristic of the artwork and is the reason why critique, as well, is "an objective instance in art" (85). This criterion of art-criticizability-summarizes, as Benjamin puts it, "the entire art-philosophical work of the early Romantics" (no). It formulates in no uncertain terms the dependence of Romantic art criticism on the Romantics' understanding of the work as formed, that is, limited, reflection, and hence the objective need to free reflection from its contingent limitation as work into the medium of reflection itself. Critique-a concept that, as Benjamin had noted, is an exemplary instance of the Romantics' mystical terminology (so )-is thus

Rodolphe Gasche

a positive concept: "to be critical means to elevate thinking so far beyond all restrictive conditions that, so to speak, the knowledge of truth magically springs forth from insight into the falsehood of these restrictions" (51). But according to Benjamin, this generally positive valuation of critique notwithstanding, the Romantics also "understood how to preserve and apply the unavoidable negative moment of this concept" (ibid.). One would have expected him to refer here to the inevitable destruction of the work that comes with its elevation into the Absolute, or to Schlegel's valorization of polemics as the extermination of the mass of bad art, an extermination required before productive critique can begin. 7 Instead, Benjamin picks out the "vast discrepancy between the claim and the accomplishment of their theoretical philosophy" in order to suggest that by characterizing their own theoretical pretentions as critique, the Romantics admitted the failure of their enterprise-of critique as a positive procedure, and of the attempt to relate the finite to the infinite, first and foremost. Critique also names "the necessary incompleteness of infallibility," "the inescapable insufficiency of the Romantics' efforts" to grasp the Absolute absolutely, Benjamin claims. With this we can proceed to Benjamin's fundamental objections against what the Romantics called "critique." Yet Benjamin's fascination with Romantic thought is also a fact. Hence, my task will be double. Apart from establishing what he finds fault with, I shall try to determine not only the reasons for his critique, but to outline succinctly his own conception of critique. In the chapter "The Idea of Art," Benjamin notes that Romantic art theory culminates in the definition of the medium of absolute reflection as art, or, more precisely, as the idea of Art. Since "the organ of artistic reflection is form, the idea of art is defined as the medium of the reflection of forms. In this medium, all the presentational forms hang together constantly, interpenetrate one another, and are brought into the unity of the absolute art form that is identical with the idea of art. Thus, the Romantic idea of the unity of art lies in the idea of a continuum of forms" (87). Benjamin's critique of Romantic criticism commences by putting into question the Romantics' philosophical competence to determine the nature of this unity of forms, or Absolute, on which their whole theory of art and

The Sober Absolute art criticism is based. Benjamin concedes that Schlegel's philosophical efforts "indicate how much he strove for definiteness [Bestimmtheit]" (91-92). Yet trying "to give expression to the determinateness and fullness in which he conceived the idea," he merely came up with the concept of individuality, Benjamin claims. Undoubtedly, when speaking of the reflection medium of forms, Schlegel characterized it as an individual. To conceive of the unity or continuum of absolute forms, the Absolute, in short, as an individual, is, for Benjamin, to overstretch concepts and "to grasp at a paradox. Otherwise, the notion of expressing the highest universality as individuality was not to be consummated" (8g). He admits that in making recourse to this paradox, Schlegel aspired "to secure the concept of the idea of art from the misunderstanding that it is an abstraction from empirical works already present." This "valuable and valid motive" is the reason why Schlegel's thought about the individuality of the Absolute is not simply "an absurdity or even only an error," Benjamin concedes. Yet what Schlegel did in characterizing the Absolute as an individuality was to "simply give a false interpretation to a valuable and valid motive." It was certainly correct, Benjamin continues, to try "to define this concept [of art] as an Idea in the Platonic sense, as a proteron te phusei, as the real basis of all empirical works." 8 But it was a mistake-indeed a huge mistake, the mistake par excellence-to hope to achieve this with the help of the concept of individuality. Schlegel, in Benjamin's eyes, committed "the old error of confounding 'abstract' and 'universal' when he believed he had to make this Idea into an individual" (89-90). Only because he confused the universal and the abstract could Schlegel have sought to determine the Absolute as individuality, or a "work." For Schlegel, individuality is intellectually and conceptually purified-as is obvious from his reference to "the invisible work that takes up into itself the visible work" (go). His characterization of the unity of art, the continuum of forms, or art itself as a work, is an infringement upon the rule that forbids mixing genres of thought. Benjamin also calls it a "mystical thesis" (91). Benjamin thus criticizes Schlegel for not having clearly grasped the philosophical nature of the highest universal and for having contaminated it with concepts that belong to another

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ontological sphere. Even the sphere of pure concepts is incommensurate with the realm of the idea, or the Absolute. Schlegel was a mystic for Benjamin in that he believed that pure concepts such as "individuality" or "the invisible work" could bring the Absolute within reach. Benjamin has no quarrel with the Romantics about the necessity of thinking the Absolute; he parts company with them only when they bring the Absolute into the intellect's range. Made present as an individuality, or a work, the Absolute is stripped of what makes it absolute, cut off, not only from all sensible but from all intellectual presentation. As individuality or work, the Absolute has been surrendered to the profane. To present-darstellen-the idea of art "in conceptual concentration" (93) is, indeed, a function of the Romantics' theory of reflective intensification. In his discussion, of the "poetry of poetry," another Romantic attempt to present the idea of Art itself, Benjamin describes it as "the comprehensive expression for the reflexive nature of the Absolute." He adds: "It is poetry that is conscious of itself, and since, according to early Romantic doctrine, consciousness is only an enhanced spiritual form of that of which it is conscious, thus consciousness of poetry is itself poetry. It is poetry of poetry. Higher poetry" (96). In short, the Romantic theory according to which the centers of reflection can be elevated to the medium of reflection itself through reflexive intensification condemns the medium of reflection, or the Absolute, to being only the enhanced reflection of whatever is reflectively raised to that higher level. By holding that the totality of all works is a work-however invisible or purely intelligible it may be-is to determine the Absolute as a mere potentiation of the singular works that it embraces. Such an understanding of the Absolute (or of consciousness) entails a loss of the force of transcendence and the relativization of difference. Against the backdrop of this Benjaminian critique, another aspect of his suspicions about the concept of reflection comes into view. A reflection that knows only intensification, and not the possibility of diminishing, presupposes and asserts a continuity between the profane and the Absolute that can make the Absolute tangible only as something profane. Benjamin makes the distinction between the profane and the

The Sober Absolute Absolute in an effort to specify further what the Romantics understood by art criticism and what they saw as its task. The distinction is borrowed from Schlegel himself. "The organ of transcendental poetry as the form that survives in the Absolute the downfall of profane forms Schlegel designates as the symbolic form," Benjamin remarks (ibid.). After having denounced the ambiguity of "symbolic form" and discarded the mythological content of the expression, which in that sense "does not belong to the context" in which the distinction between profane and symbolic form is made, he defines the latter as "the marking out [Auspriigung] of the pure poetic Absolute in the form itself" (97). Symbolic form is exhibition, or presentational form (Darstellungsform), purified of and distinguished from the profane forms of exhibition through its reference to the idea of art or the Absolute. Yet the "purification" or "survival" of symbolic or absolute form after the downfall of everything profane is a function of a reflection that elevates itself to the Absolute. "The 'symbolic form' is the formula under which the bearing of reflection for the artwork is comprised," Benjamin notes (ibid.). Yet precisely for that reason, the important distinction between profane and symbolic or absolute form becomes blurred. It loses its cutting edge. When Benjamin remarks in a footnote that for the Romantics "the exhibitional form does not as such have to be profane, but can, if entirely pure, participate in the absolute or symbolic form, or finally become it" (97-98), it is clear that for him, the latter form is only the reflectively enhanced profane form. Art criticism, Benjamin suggests, is the reflective movement between the poles of this dulled distinction. He writes: "Art criticism exhibits this symbolic form in its purity; it disentangles it from all moments alien to its essence to which it might be bound in the work and finishes with the dissolution of the work" (98). Benjamin could subscribe to this definition of criticism as pursuing the double task of Ablosung and Aujlosung in the perspective of the Absolute. Yet he is quick to add that "in the framework of Romantic theories, full clarity can never be reached in the distinction of profane and symbolic form, of symbolic form and critique." Such lack of sharpness "forces itself upon our inspection," he declares without elaborating. But haven't we seen that for reasons of principle-conceiving the

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Rodolphe Gasche relation between profane form and symbolic form as one of reflection-the Romantics could not make this distinction as sharp as their own philosophical intentions would have it? At this juncture, Benjamin makes an explicit statement that dramatizes the gist of what up to this point had mainly been implicit in his objections: "Only at the price of such blurred delimitations can all the concepts of the art theory that in the end the Romantics strove for be drawn into the region of the Absolute" (93). In other words, Romantic art criticism is anything but critical: it fails to distinguish and to set apart as trenchantly and vigorously as the concept of criticism calls for. As a consequence, the Absolute-the critical concept par excellence-is not only not demarcated from the profane with the necessary rigor, but everything profane is drawn into the region of the Absolute, polluting what, in principle, is to be kept pure of all alien ingredients. The positivity of Romantic critique thus becomes suspicious. But this positivity, with its attendant lack of a discriminating and analytical rigor, is not accidental. It stems from the Romantics' metaphysical credo of a continuity between the profane and the Absolute. Criticizability, Benjamin notes, presupposes transition ( Ubergang) from the realm of ideas "to the single works such as exist in the medium of art, from the absolute form to the single forms." It also rests on the assumption that all singular works can "vitally coalesce into the unity of the idea itself" (114). Indeed, as Benjamin holds, "art was the region in which Romanticism strove to carry through in the purest form the immediate reconciliation of the conditioned with the unconditioned" (ibid.). Criticizabilitythe principle that the entire art-philosophical work of the early Romantics sought to demonstrate-is thus tied up with what impedes criticism and against which criticism ought to prevail: transition, continuity, reconciliation between what can be brought together only at the price of paradox, false interpretation, or in other words, a complete surrender of the critical notion of the Absolute to the profane. However, such radical abandonment of the highest universal to the region of the profane is also an accomplishment of major-and fatal-proportions. Benjamin makes this point in the course of his analysis of the Romantic concept of the novel. For the Jena Roman-

The Sober Absolute tics, the novel was the "comprehensible manifestation" (fassbare Erscheinung) of the continuum of forms, or the poetic Absolute. "It is this thanks to prose. The idea of poetry has found its individuality, for which Schlegel was seeking, in the form of prose; the early Romantics knew no deeper and better determination for it than 'prose'" (100). But what is "prose" if it is to be the most proper individuality of the poetic Absolute? In order to conceive of prose's "unifying function," its role as the "creative ground" of poetical forms (101), it is necessary that it be understood in all its senses: that is, in an indistinct, and equivocal manner. Prose certainly has the meaning of ungebundene Rede (109), of a writing style distinguished from poetry by its greater irregularity, variety of rhythm, and its greater proximity to ordinary speech. Benjamin makes it quite clear that "prose" does not mean "ornate prose," which-and in this he follows Navalis-"has nothing to do with art, but a lot to do with rhetoric" (101). For Benjamin, prose is something transparent and colorless (farbloser ... Ausdruck) (ibid.). But in addition to its proper meaning, prose has a figural, improper meaning, namely prosaic, plain, ordinary, sober. Furthermore, this improper meaning cannot properly be distinguished from the proper. This lack of differentiation, this ambiguity of meaning, predestines prose to become the comprehensible manifestation of the Absolute. Yet if only "the purely prosaic [form of prose] fulfills this task" of conferring individuality upon the Absolute, the individuality in question can only be a "prosaic unity" (101). However paradoxical it may seem to conceive of the prosaic, the plain, or the sober as the highest possible manifestation of the idea of art or of the poetic Absolute, it is "in truth [a] very profound intuition ... an entirely new basis for the philosophy of art. On this basis rests the entire philosophy of art of early Romanticism, especially its concept of criticism," Benjamin claims (100). It is also a conception "historically rich in consequences'' (103). Indeed, Benjamin hints that with it began a new era of thought, an era that extends into the present. With the Romantics began the epoch of absolute sobriety. Benjamin points out that the Romantics shared this "basic philosophical conception" of the prosaic with Holderlin, although the realm of Holderlin's thought remained only a "promised land" for

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Rodolphe Gasche them (105). Still, as far as the "principle of the sobriety [Nuchternheit] of art" is concerned, he stands in a philosophical relation to them. This principle is the essentially quite new and still unpredictably operative basic notion of the Romantic philosophy of art; what is perhaps the greatest epoch in Western philosophy of art is marked out by this notion/principle. The connection this has with the methodical procedure of that philosophy, namely, reflection, is obvious. The prosaic, in which reflection as the principle is stamped out in its highest form, is, to be sure, in ordinary use straightaway a metaphorical designation of "sober." (103) Benjamin's demarcation of this conception of art from that of Plato's further shows that the greatest epoch in the Western philosophy of art, an epoch that began with the Romantics, is characterized by a sobering of the Absolute. The Absolute becomes desacralized, dedivinized by reflection-in an intellectual and conceptual process of an intuiting no longer intuitive (anschaulich), but soberly rational, down-to-earth (and hence distinct from the mystics' intellectual intuition of the whole). But not only is reflection sober, the Absolute to which it becomes potentiated-the medium of reflection and the continuum of forms-turns prosaic as well. It is an Absolute only relatively different from the profane forms, one that has been divested of its separating and discriminating force. The sober Absolute is an Absolute that has forfeited its transcendence. On this principle of absolute sobriety rests the concept of Romantic criticism. It proceeds on the assumption that the core of the work is "filled with prosaic spirit" (106). Art, for the Romantics, is mechanical, akin to manufacturing, and has its seat entirely in the understanding (105). Benjamin writes: "By means of mechanical reason the work is soberly constituted even still in the infinite-at the limit value oflimited forms" (106). If the Absolute-what transcends everything profane as the highest universal-achieves presentation as a "work," it has become something inherently profane: profanity itself. And the incarnation of such prosaic Spirit in a comprehensible shape is no less profane. To exhibit this prosaic kernel of all art is the "final ... determination" of criticism, Benjamin argues (108). "Criticism is the ex-

The Sober Absolute hibition of the prosaic core in every work. In this concept, 'exhibition' is understood in the chemical sense, as the production of a substance through a determinate process to which other substances are submitted" (109). The Darstellung of the prosaic present in every work-the profane Absolute-is a production on the basis of potentiating reflection. This legitimation of criticism by its prosaic nature and the prosaic nature of its task has some distinctive consequences. On several occasions, the dissertation shows that, for the Romantics, critique has no pedagogical aim. Its function is not to assess or judge the work. Romantic critique "needs no motivation," Benjamin claims (ibid.). In other words, critique is not a function of a purpose heterogeneous to the work; rather, it is exercised for its own sake. "Criticism is a formation whose origin is, indeed, occasioned by the work, but that persists independently of it. As such, it cannot be distinguished in principle from the art work itself" (108). It has the same ontological nature as the work of art. Like the work from which it originates, critique is, according to the Romantics, a fact (Faktum). Benjamin quotes Schlegel: "A so-called recherche is a historical experiment. The object and the result of this experiment is a fact. What is meant to be a fact must have strict individuality" (108). As a fact, then, critique is indistinguishable from the work. Although a potentiation of reflection, critique has no deciding or transcending thrust. This sheer positivity marks critique's departure from what must have been its own most philosophical intentionto separate what cannot be of the same nature. But what of the prosaic Absolute presented by critique? Presented in the individualizing mode of prose, the sober Absolute appears as something absolutely prosaic-itself a fact, only the potentiation of the transitory contingency of the singular work. Benjamin notes: "By limiting itself in its own form, the artwork makes itself transitory in a contingent shape, but in the shape of the way to pass away, it makes itself eternal through criticism" (us). Absolutizing the created work, rendering it eternal, criticism presents the Absolute as fact. Yet in spite of the fact that criticism is indistinguishable from the work, Schlegel, paradoxically yet inevitably, "valued criticism more highly than the art work" because the critical activity of absolutizing the work is higher

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than the creation of art, Benjamin concludes. "This can be illustrated in an image as the production of blinding brilliancy [Biendung] in the work. This brilliancy-the sober light-extinguishes the plurality of the works. It is the Idea" (119 ). These final lines of Benjamin's dissertation speak a final critical word about Romantic criticism. The sober light of the prosaic Absolute that criticism exhibits in all works is a blinding light. It is so dazzling that it becomes deceptive. In its brilliancy, all differences fade absolutely. Its spell, the fascination it exerts, is that of the fact -of the Absolute become secular. Benjamin's massive and intransigent criticism of the Romantic conception of art and its concept of criticism thus seems finally to be an outright rejection. And yet, this conception is said to have inaugurated "perhaps the greatest epoch in Western philosophy of art." His recognition of and admiration for the Romantics' achievements is evident, and hence I must return to the question of Benjamin's relation to early Romanticism, to his debt to the Romantic concept of criticism that he so vehemently criticized. Considering the unyielding and unrelentingly negative critical gesture that dominates the whole of the dissertation, Benjamin's own concept of criticism arises from motifs that appear only in an understanding of the most extreme implications of Romantic theory. Indeed, the greatness of Romantic thought is linked to its conception of a secular Absolute, of critique as the primarily positive dissolution, and the connection of the finite to such an Absolute-in other words, to Romantic thought's total relinquishing of transcendence. From everything we have seen, such a conception of the Absolute, and of the critical relation as a movement in the continuum between the finite and an equally finite infinite, cannot satisfy Benjamin. His critique of the Romantic Absolute and the Romantics' notion of criticism is made in the name of the proper philosophical intentions of the very concepts, according to which the Absolute has to be distinguished absolutely and critique must be a movement or rigorous separation, demarcation, scission. Compared with the Romantic concept, his is an Ubercritique in the sense in which Schlegel could speak of his critique of Wilhelm Meister as the Ubermeisteran ultracriticism or hypercriticism. Benjamin agrees with the Ro-

The Sober Absolute

man tics that all critique must take place in view of the Absolute, but in view of an Absolute that is absolutely transcendent, radically distinguished from everything profane or finite. Between it and the latter, no continuity is thinkable. Yet critique is a relating to such an Absolute. It is the movement of transcendence in the realm of the profane or finite. However, since the Absolute-or rather truth, as Benjamin would call it-is entirely of another order than the profane, all critical relation to it must necessarily lack the certitude of truly transcending the given. Such certitude is not in the power of the critical act. For Benjamin, critique's eventual success in pointing to the Absolute, in enacting a pure separation or difference, can be guaranteed only by the Absolute itself. Yet even such authentification of the critical relation by the Absolute, were it to occur, would be beyond the cognitive reach of all critique. In contradistinction to the Romantic epistemological optimism that constituted the bedrock of their concept of critique, but whose price was a total sobering of the Absolute, Benjamin's concept of critique is characterized by an essential agnosticism. It is a critique, however, and as such it must take its aim at the Absolute, which it severs from itself in absolute purity. Hence, of that Absolute, nothing can be known, and least of all that the Absolute has authenticated the critical relation to begin with. With this, both the rationale for Benjamin's critique of the Romantics and his debt to them come into view. He shares with them the insight into the inexorably sober nature of the critical relation. Yet this sobriety, with the extremist implication of a radical loss of transcendence within early Romanticism, becomes for Benjamin the sign that the transcending gesture of critique depends on a redemptive justification. Although beyond critique's own reach, such justification is required by what it, as critique, must mean according to its own most philosophical intention. If all critique is finite, and if, by itself, it can reveal only a sober Absolute, the pure distinction that it calls for as krinein (and the absolutely Other toward which it nevertheless incessantly gestures) require that critique be suspended in relation to an Absolute whose power would finally fulfill its critical intention. Paradoxically, the universal sobriety in which Romantic thought loses itself turns into the thought of an absolutely "non-

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sober" Absolute capable of a post-factum endowment of the transcending movement of critique, of conferring actual transcendence upon critique. No finite certitude, no empirical security guarantees that such a conferral has taken place or shall occur. However, in order to avoid squandering (versiiumen) the possibility of such a conferral by which the very intentions of critique would become fulfilled, critique must be critical to the utmost-unrelentingly and uncompromisingly negative. Of such criticism, Benjamin's dissertation on the Romantic concept of positive critique is a most fulfilling example.

Peter Fenves

The Genesis of Judgment: Spatiality, Analogy, and Metaphor in Benjamin's "On Language as Such and on Human Language"

Phenomenological criticism was one of the more short-lived trends in the study of literature in America. Doubtless the difficulty of assimilating the complex writings of Edmund Husser! and his students contributed to this lack of interest. Husserl's own concentration on the constitution of subjectivity and the structure of the mental seemed to leave little room for something like a text. A phenomenology of interpretation would perhaps be a desideratum, but a reading of a particular text seems at first glance to run counter to the founding gesture of phenomenological reflection: the epoche as the bracketing of beliefs, the disregarding of sedimented meanings, the suspension of all judgments regarding the existence and value of whatever is under consideration. But if, as Husser! insisted, phenomenology simply is philosophy, every other "philosophy" being more or less disguised dogmatism, then it would be difficult to dissociate any literary theory whose relationship to philosophical questions was anything but casual from seeking a clandestine link with 75

Peter Fenves the epoche. And indeed, criticism informed by phenomenology not only produced some fine works, it has a way entering without announcing itself into otherwise oriented discussions. The recent interest in, for instance, Kant's Critique of Judgment and, above all, in the "Analytic of the Sublime" not only touches upon the founding gesture of phenomenology, it follows Husserl in suspending sedimented judgments so thoroughly that the mental character of the act of judgment appears as a sediment of something more original than the judging mind itself. The fruitfulness of the recent confrontations with Kant in literary theory owes a large part of its bounty to the work Husserl accomplished through his refutation of psychologism and his rigorous application of the epoche-an application against which the concept of rigor itself can be measured. Carried out with ever greater vigilance, this "skeptical" gesture kath exochen not only puts every previous philosopheme and philosophical system into question, it might also be seen as a constituent moment in all literary modes of knowledge. The specificity of the literary then would consist in the rigor of its suspension, a skepticism in which indeterminacy does not so much undo the dependence of meaning on particular acts of intention as, generate and articulate the field of meaning. Criticism might then develop out of this epoche as something other than a branch of evaluative aesthetics; it might become a descriptive science of the specific modes of suspension operating in literary texts, and its universality-the sure mark of scientificity-would, in turn, be rooted in the single methodological starting point of the one universal science. And yet this program, however cogently it can be stated, runs into a grave problem. Conceived in these terms, it skips over a constituent element ofliterature: it leaps over language. Nothing has contributed so much to the perception that phenomenology is not only incompetent in matters of literature, but incompatible with literary studies than the curious ways in which its founding gesture must-and yet cannot-suspend language in order to guarantee its access to phenomena whose very phenomenality consists in the always incomplete bracketing of their linguisticity. Such curiosities generate new languages and metalanguages, each of which tries to catch up with the countless suspensions already at work in

The Genesis of Judgment

language, suspensions that operate at the very least in its tropological dimension. The complexities to which the suspension of judgment is driven when implicated in the irreducible linguisticity of phenomena-the linguistic character of mental "things" -has contributed to the deployment of ever new strategies of desedimentation, Destruktion and, of course, reconstruction. 1 Walter Benjamin's unmistakably metalinguistic meditation"On Language as Such and on Human Language" -does not skip over language, nor does it deploy a complex strategy of sedimentation; rather, it dissolves with one gesture every sedimentary layer, that is, all those conceptual mediations through which phenomena in the traditional sense are supposed to appear. 2 Since, moreover, Benjamin's dissolution is immediately implicated in language and in the reading of a particular text (Genesis 1-2), its transformation of the phenomenological program can perhaps indicate its future, all the more so since this transformation has hardly been noticed in the commentary on this much-discussed work. So radical is Benjamin's reduction of conceptual mediation that it altogether suspends judgment; the dissolution has room for "words" and "names," but not for the abstract combinations of what we call "words" and "names" into judgments. Every word in the essay, until the critical moment of the Fall, emerges in response to an epoche, and the suspension of this suspension, which is precisely the crisis, creates those things against which its critical powers are mobilized; the end of the epoche-which is to say, our epoch-"creates" abstractions, nonnames and nonwords. And the origin of this creation of nothingness, which is not simply noncreation and is not simply not creation either, is perhaps the judging word, the judicial word, judgment, in the ambiguity to which the history of philosophy bears witness. Both as predication and accusation, as both logos apophantikos and kategoruo, as "sentence" in its unresolvable philosophico-juridical ambiguity, the judging word is perhaps the origin of abstraction. Perhaps the origin of abstraction-Benjamin emphasizes his hesitation (2.1: 153-54). At this point and on this topic, the audacity of Benjamin's essay is tempered, while the direction of further research is set. It is, of course, against theories of language based on abstraction that the entire essay is written, and this dedication to

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undoing abstractions, and the concomitant commitment to retraction, retrogression, reduction, associates Benjamin most closely with the phenomenological movement. His highly condensed notes on the left-wing phenomenologist Paul Linke's article "The Right of Phenomenology" demonstrate as much. 3 Benjamin's displacement and reinscription of phenomenology comes down to the question and to the crisis of abstraction, just as Husserl's own turn toward the concrete sphere of the "life world" and his attempts to generate genealogies of the mathematical sciences were undertaken in recognition of the strange resiliency of abstraction. At issue in each of these investigations-and one could easily add Being and Time-is the origin of abstraction itself: the genealogy of European science since its mathematization, the becoming abstract of "being" at the inception of the metaphysical tradition, and the retraction of language all omit the concrete and cognitive element, namely, the name. In each of these programs, the prepredicative designates the primary field of research, and so Benjamin's prepredicative, prejudicial language can be seen to provide a basis for a renewed attempt to reduce abstraction. Once the program is carried out, an altogether nonabstract philosophy-a "real philosophy," perhaps even an "ontology" -can be expected. The original suspension of judicial language implies the derivativeness of subjectivity, for subjectivity has its home in judgment. The forms of judgment furnish the table of categories because each category is a function of the cogito. Judgment in turn secures the objectivity of empirical knowledge. From its inception in the scholastic problem of transcendentals, unum, verum, bonum, ens, transcendental philosophy has depended on the strict identity between judgmental and categorical forms, and since the Critique of Pure Reason it has anchored this identity-and the ability to recognize anything as one thing, to identify anything as something-in the transcendental unity of apperception. Only this unity could claim to be "before" any particular judgment, but it is itself altogether judgmental: it consists in the act of judging in general. In his notes on "Perception" and, more fully, in his "Program for the Coming Philosophy," Benjamin had drawn on Marburg neo-Kantianism

The Genesis of Judgment

and, less explicitly, on Husserlian phenomenology to suggest the character of prepredicative experience: it could not be, as the subjectivist and psychologistic epigones of Kant had assumed, an experience of sense data; experience itself could not be equated with empirical knowledge; rather, experience-without subject and object-would have to be an experience of experience, from whose vantage point the presentation of doctrine (Lehre) could take place. Although Benjamin remains silent about it in his program, as he well knew, having read Husserl's "Philosophy as a Rigorous Science," 4 this retrogression to the transcendental level of constitution and the concomitant presentation of "doctrine" defines phenomenological research. Indeed, it is nothing other than the epoche itself: not experience as knowledge of empirical objects, but an emancipation of experience from such psychologistic and scientistic naivete. The aim of the reduction is to disclose the pure layer of sense (Sinn); this layer, as the logical space of truth, can then be expressed in judgment. Understanding judgment to be an expression of sense, not an abstraction from sense data, defines antipsychologism. The crucial issue, then, is the nonjudgmental crucible of expressionits possibility, origin, and constitution. To quote from one of the younger, but not for that reason one of the more insignificant opponents of psychologism and its theory of judgment: "[sense] 'incorporates' the logical; and as immanent to the process of judgment, it can be called the content [Inhalt], the logical side of judging. The judgment of logic is sense." 5 Even if this statement leaves the crux of judgment untouched, it is clear such content is not "psychic," but is, if any term is to be used here, spiritual (geistig). Spiritual content-geistiger Inhalt, to use Benjamin's prominent locution-is what opens up the possibility ofknowledge and is the "thing" known, its "being." The experience of such thingliness is not therefore the experience of an object, and it is in no way equal to empirical knowledge. As the nonpsychic, noematic, or "spiritual" content of judgment, sense is related to language not only insofar as it constitutes the "logical" side of judgment and is thus implicated in logos, but also insofar as language expresses sense. So long as language expresses sense, its content is not psychic, but rather noematic, and thus "spiritual." Geistiger Inhalt, however conceived, constitutes the

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kernel of language. Language, conceived in this way, is expressive of pre-judicial content. Nothing else is stated at the outset of Benjamin's own essay on language. The opening sentence of the essay calls for a transcendentallogic of various spheres of human activity: "Every utterance of human spiritual life can be conceived as a kind oflanguage, and this conception, in the manner of a true method, discloses new questions to pose. One can speak of a language of music and of the plastic arts, a language of justice that has nothing immediately to do with the language in which German or English legal speech is formulated; one can speak of a language of technology that is not the disciplinary language of the technician" (2.1: 140). If this essay were to be read as a contribution to transcendental phenomenologyand nothing prevents one from doing so at this point-these lines could easily be understood as an appeal to elaborate in a methodical manner the transcendental logics appropriate to the specific ways in which sense (Sinn) is given in various regions of the "mental." And like Husserl's famous appeal "Philosophy as a Rigorous Science," Benjamin's disclosure of a true method-a true path, and thus a path on which truth shows itself-does not hesitate to distinguish between two "attitudes": a naive attitude of knowledge and an attitude wherein such knowledge is first experienced as such. But Benjamin, like Husser!, does not stop with suggestions for methodically innovative investigations into various regions of the mental; rather, the method discloses a path to the root, to the universal foundation from which all such regions draw their strength and significance, and this foundation is a transcendental one insofar as it specifies the conditions under which each modality of spiritual content gives itself, and therefore under which each regional activity can be carried out. The argument Benjamin adduces for this transcendental turn is the one and only argument in his presentation; it marks the single place where an argument is required in the presentation of philosophical doctrine, since everything else in the course of the presentation need only exhibit itself in its newly discovered transcendental dimension. This argument is thus decisive; it stamps the character of the subsequent exhibition. And yet, from the beginning, Benja-

The Genesis of Judgment min cuts himself off from the classical sources of legitimation for claims to transcendental status. Since he cannot call on the transcendental character of judgments as functions of the cogito, he cannot proceed to secure his exhibition of "spiritual content" in consciousness or reflexive subjectivity. Because the "transcendentals" of scholastic philosophy are themselves defined in terms of categories and therefore in relation to already formed judgments, he cannot even base his argument on the overstepping and underlying function of such transcendentals in all discourse and all thought. Benjamin's plan to develop certain of his "fundamental thoughts" into a Habilitationsschrift on "scholastic analogies" could perhaps be traced to his attempt in the essay on language to explicate a transcendental dimension of language no longer grounded in reflexive subjectivity, and Benjamin's extraordinary presentation of reflexive consciousness in his dissertation can doubtless be seen as its propaedeutic.6 But in the essay on language, Benjamin's transcendental argument relies on neither scholastic nor Cartesian interpretations of transcendentality. And so Benjamin is left with only one other understanding of transcendence: the one from which the Critique Of Pure Reason departs and to which Husserlian phenomenology never ceases to appeal-the transcendence, that is, of "pure intuition" as constitutive of the experience of the knowable world. If, according to the schema Kant introduces, the transcendental character of knowledge is not to be located in judgment as "logical" functions of the cogito, it has to be sought in intuition-not, to be sure, in the intuition of sensible objects, but in pure intuitions, the intuitions on which every phenomenological investigation rests, which, in turn, are seen as the intuitions of "essences" or of "spiritual contents" (Sinne). Just as Kant demonstrates the transcendental ideality of space at the beginning of the first Critique with the argument that "we can never represent to ourselves [sich vorstellen] the absence of space, though we can well think it as empty of objects," 7 Benjamin likewise finds the justification for the transcendental character of language in our inability to represent to ourselves and thus to "imagine" its total absence: The word "language" in such uses is absolutely not a metaphor. For it is a completely content-filled cognition that we can represent to

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ourselves [uns ... vorstellen] nothing that does not communicate its spiritual content in expression; the greater or lesser degree of consciousness with which such communication seemingly (or really) is connected cannot change the fact that we can imagine a complete absence of language in nothing. A being that is entirely without relation to language would be an Idea, but this Idea cannot bear fruit in the region of Ideas whose circumference designates those of God. (2.1: 141) 8

In these words, the entire essay, along with its program of research, is projected. They give the basis for the nonmetaphoricitythe propriety, the genuineness, and thus the authenticity-of the word "language," if not oflanguage as such. No text on language to say nothing of human language, can ever hope to say anything "on" language unless "language" means first of all language as such; otherwise, the text is not on language but is rather on something else, or perhaps on, or hovering over, nothing at all: iiber, on, or over, in other words, an absence of language that does not simply amount to speechlessness, infantilism, or silence. And Benjamin's original definition of language-a definition that is, as Leibniz would say, 9 "merely nominal" and not "real" -does indeed differ from what is, as a rule, called "language": "every imparting of spiritual content is language" (2.1: 140 ). This definition becomes "real" only when a transcendental argument supports its limitations. Since, however, the support is sought not for a limitation, but instead for a certain lack oflimitation-the specific infinitude oflanguage-the realization of the nominal definition as the demonstration of the conditions of its possibility runs into at least one difficulty: namely, defining real language; delimiting, in other words, nonnominal "names." Indeed, Kant's transcendental exposition of metaphysical concepts had no other point than the realization of their definition, and this was done by showing the limitations, not precisely on the concepts, but on their application, limits that were, in turn, defined in terms of specifically human "forms" of intuition: "it is, therefore, solely from the human standpoint," he concludes in the transcendental exposition of space, "that we can speak of space" (A 26; B 42). Benjamin, by contrast, concludes from our inability to represent to ourselves and thus "to imagine" the total absence oflanguage an ability

The Genesis of Judgment to speak with impunity of language without limits. The conclusion from an inability of representation to an ability of language itselfan ability soon to be called communicability-is not an arbitrary one, to be sure; it signals the alteration of Kantian critique and of its radicalization in transcendental phenomenology: an alteration, at the very least, from the problematic of Vorstellung to that of Mitteilung, from that of placing before and representing to that of imparting and parting with. But this alteration is itself undertaken in view of what retreats from both representation and communication: the absolute lack of language. And the view of this retreat, of this "nothing," cannot help but project itself onto the surface of doctrine the moment any question of alteration-into judgment and its logico-temporal framework, for instance-takes place. Benjamin does not alter Kant's argument in order to overcome the limitations of Kantian thought. The slogans under which the massive programs for the mastering of these limitations were carried out-"intellectual intuition," "dialectical mediation" -are far removed from his own slogan: nonintellectual immediateness, or, stated without negation, "magic." Nothing else would be spoken in the famous slogan of phenomenology, "to the things themselves," if only-a significant "only," since it separates Benjamin from Husserl and Hermann Cohen no less than from Schelling and Hegelif only these things were absolved of all relations to a "to" and hence released from all intentional relationality, if only they were understood as "transcendental intransitives" and the "essences" disclosed in phenomenological investigation were themselves the things imparted in an infinite language. The experience, not of objects, but of the modes of their disclosure, would then anchor the presentation of doctrine, and it would be an experience strictly parallel to the pure intuition of space: it would be an analogue to geometric experience, in which everything experienced is constructed in experience and the experience of this construction-the experience of this experience as the very experience of knowing-is archetypal, typizing, "symbolic," and therefore never merely ectypal or schematic. Pure geometric experience would be, if not divine, at least its analogue, and the analogy of being-analogy itself 10 being a geometric experience-would consist of the pure system of coordinates in which

Peter Fenves

things are not only experienced but experienced in their spiritual dimension: experienced, in other words, as they were created. Benjamin's argument for the transcendental character of language is not only constructed on an analogy with that of space, the analogy oflanguage in its newly disclosed transcendental dimension to the transcendental exposition of space as a "form" of intuition whose formality is neither conceptual nor categorial but rather medial 11 is exact: just as space is, according to Kant, singular, incommensurable, immediate, and infinite, so, too, is language. An incommensurable and singular infinitude inhabits every language, according to Benjamin (2.1: 143), and the "in" of such inhabiting"in" being the word on which Benjamin places the greatest emphasis-consists of every language's inherence, not in a substance, but in its own mediality. The immediacy of spatial representation, which is, for Kant, the single guarantor that our experience is not condemned to subjective idealism and that our judgments can therefore achieve "validity," becomes in Benjamin's essay the immediacy of language, its much discussed "magic." 12 Just as, for Kant, the discovery of the medial character of spatial immediacy allows for the first time the solution to the fundamental problems of theoretical philosophy, and just as, according to Husser!, the immediacy of pure intuition is Kant's only genuine philosophical discovery, the discovery of the medial character oflinguistic immediacy, according to Benjamin, allows insight into the fundamental problem of linguistic philosophy. This insight, then, generates the thoroughgoing analogy between language and space. Not only can this analogy make sure that the word "language" does indeed mean language as such; not only can it therefore secure language against metaphor, hence against all impure, categorial distortions of analogy, Benjamin himself correctly translates "analogy" as "proportionality" during his central discussion of the scholastic notion of analogy of being, which, when displaced from the register of categories into that of noncategorial and nonjudgmental "equations" between spiritual and linguistic essence, yields nothing less than a theory of translation: the solution, in other words, to the fundamental problem of linguistic theory. Exactly determining the proportionality between spiritual and linguistic being specifies the

The Genesis of Judgment

mode in which the two are "equated" (gleichgesetzt). The equation does not amount to an identification-and here Benjamin departs from his intricate analysis of the relation between "forms of intuition" and spiritual being 13 in his reading of Holderlin-nor does this equation consist in an inverse proportionality, since the possibility of revelation demands that the equation be understood as the relation of thoroughgoing analogy (2.1: 146). And so it is no surprise that when Benjamin illustrates the medial character oflinguistic immediacy, he chooses a spatial metaphor. In its transcendental dimension, represented as being without objects but not representable as being altogether absent, space is as contentless as language. "There is no content of language; as imparting, language imparts a spiritual being, that is, a communicability pure and simple. The dif-

ferences of languages are those of media that, as it were, distinguish themselves according to their density [gleichsam nach ihrer Dichte], therefore gradually; and this with regard to the density both of the communicating (naming) and of the communicable (name) in the communication" (2.1: 146). Benjamin employs the word "density," Dichte, not simply because of its obvious relation to Dichtung, but because each language is the expression of, "as it were," a spatialmaterial proportionality; "as it were," because "density" metaphorically expresses a linguistic-spiritual proportionality. From the analogy "space is to language as matter is to spirit" the metaphor of density is born. This intersection of analogy and metaphor is then the nexus of the exhibition: language shows itself to be, strictly speaking, the analogy of spiritual being. Being spiritual is speaking without an "is," without judgment: speaking, in other words, in names, each of which is equal to spiritual being, the nature of this equation being proportionality. Language, in short, is analogous to space, and analogy is the spatialization of the logos. In the analogy of language to spaceana-logy itself-the analogy of being is transposed to the point where it can disclose a transcendental dimension no longer derived from the forms and functions of judgment. That the Benjaminian reduction oflanguage does not disclose "spiritual essences" and indeed insists on maintaining the distinction of spiritual and linguistic essence in their proportional equation not only indicates Benjamin's

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interest in rescuing the overall Kantian "typic" (2.1: 165-66) against those who, like Husserl, would relegate it to dogma, but it also shows how little his reduction and retrogressive elucidation of origins has to do with the constitutive activities and activations of consciousness, even a transcendental one. The reduction, not unlike the one that sets Being and Time into motion, does not yield noeticnoematic correlations; rather, it lays out in a systematic fashion the prepredicative structure of proportional relations in which something like a "spiritual content" or noema could be expressed in the first place. Benjamin thereby cuts the Gordian knot in which so much of Husserl's Ideas is entangled: namely, the knot created by the intricate interlacing of noetic and noematic layers, a knot Husser! at first tries to untie by finding a "pure, logical medium" 14 of expression and, in defeat, attempts to undo by anchoring both layers in the fundamental and altogether concrete "life world." The medium of expression is, for Benjamin, already found: it is not "mental," certainly not "logical" as distinct from linguistic, and it therefore has nothing to do with intentionality; it is language pure and simple. Such is the methodological breakthrough. The medial character of language lies in its immediacy; its expressive character resides in its analogical and therefore nonintentional equation with spiritual being; in the analogy of space, finally, language is secured against metaphor-against a tropological intrusion that would deny Benjamin's discourse the right to present itself as science. Benjamin's suspension of judgment-his critique of judgment and his epoche-does not make room for the intuition of singular appearances or of eidetic objects, but instead opens up the space of language, opens language to its own special spatiality in which spiritual being can be imparted in the first place. No longer does Benjamin even need a noetico-noematic correlation. No mental act, least of all judgment, attends the intuition of noema; expression is not at first a matter of empty intentions teleologically destined for fulfillment; rather, the spiritual content expresses itself in the dimension of language as the imparting of its linguistic essence, and so the communicability of spiritual content is always already linguistic, just as our intuition of material things is, for Kant, known a priori to be spatial. Imparted in every language is not "something" -a

The Genesis of Judgment content-but rather its position in language as such, and this position, not "sense" or "meaning," is its doctrinal content, the spiritual essence of things. If language is a "form" and its formality is inconceivable according to any categorial determinations, and if, therefore, language can be understood only as a medium in which languages are immediately imparted, then there must be a multiplicity of languages. The infinite multiplicity of languages in the medium of language is as fully justified as the infinite multiplicity of spaces in the medium of space. The infinite multiplicity of language implies an infinite language: a language of the infinite, a divine language. Since every other language inhabits this language, every one is intensively infinite. For this reason, spatiality is intimately bound up with the topic of eschatological historiography-a bond to which many of Benjamin's later writings return. The methodological breakthrough at the opening of the essay can no longer be understood, moreover, in terms of a transcendental logic or of a transcendental linguistics, as long as the latter is dominated by a conception of "form" as concept or eidos. And yet one step is still missing; it is a step in which the problematic of judgment-and therefore of the cogito, of consciousness, of "inner time consciousness," of time, and so forthreturns to assault the presentation of doctrine in the newly exposed transcendental dimension of language. Taking this step on the surface of doctrine is tricky, for it cannot be undertaken without disrupting the analogy of language to space. When the analogy is disturbed, it moves: it not only turns into a trope-into metaphor-but it also turns toward a court of appeal to settle its rightful place. If the medial character oflanguage implies the multiplicity of languages in which each language is immediately imparted as a coordinated multiplicity expressive of a determinate linguistic-spiritual proportionality, it does not at the same time entail that these languages are nonhuman, and if they are all human, if language as such is a human medium, just as space is a specifically human form of intuition, then the word "language" is no longer secure against metaphor: the analogical relation to space from which its transcendental dimension was shown can become alogical or logical, a matter of metaphor or of judgment, in either

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case nonanalogical and nonproportional. Metaphor, as a correlate of judgment, begins its dominance over language, and this movement of metaphor, this metamovement in which something is carried from one spot to another, this trans-latio from one domain to the next, displaces the word "language," if not language as such. The direction of this displacement is not difficult to determine: it is, as always, to an Idea, the Idea of the utter lack of language, an Idea of nothingness-perhaps of the nothingness of "nothingness" -to which none of Kant's categorial determinations of nihil correspond, and to this extent, an Idea in which the regulative function of the concept of reason, to deliver up a task, is ruled out. That the theory of translation is central to Benjamin's texts on language is a truism; so too is the statement that "translation," itself a translation of metaphora, draws its metaphorical character from spatial displacement. No more informative is the assertion that both translation and metaphor presuppose space as the medium in which they take place, positing in advance of their operations one place over another in the medium of space. The spatiality of language is as unavoidable in metaphor as it is in analogy, but the space of metaphor and that of analogy are at the very least askew, since, to say the least, the motility of metaphor implies time, whereas analogy is distinctly spatialY It is of central importance to Benjamin's early essay on language that translation be at first "proportionate," hence analogous, and not at all metaphorical; it is imperative that the analogy of language to space, analogy as such, be primary. Translation is not to be understood at first as translation between human languages; otherwise, the word "language" would be metaphorical, a transference from human modes of expression to nonhuman expressivity. If, in sum, translation is at first metaphorical, if it is not indeed trans-latio and Uber-setzung of incommensurable languages in the medium of language according to the analogy with space, then language in general is itself a "translation" of an "original"namely, human language-whose own originality consists in being immediately imparted in the medium of language. The original, in other words, is derivative at the origin. No talk of a circle will suffice here; the medial character oflanguage guarantees that its metaphoricity, if "language" is ever indeed a metaphor, will generate a vortex

The Genesis ofJudgment in which nothing original and therefore, strictly speaking, nothing at all can be imparted: abstraction will be ineluctable, irreducible, indestructible. Such a vortex is more than an index of a crisis; it is the crisis itself. And it is, of course, in the crisis of language that language "falls" into-what else? -a translation of translation from translation as such to human translation, a translation of translation from analogy to metaphor, a translation of translation from name to judgment. The space of translation breaks down, but since the space of translation is itself "translated," this breakdown undoes the very spatiality of translation: human languages, as the language of names, "goes outside itself" (2.1: 153); it becomes "exterior" to itself. And the self-exteriorization oflanguage expresses itself in judgment, each of whose functions includes a temporal dimension and therefore excites an "awakening" (2.1: 153), if not intentionality and consciousness itself. Each translation properly speaking-but what is properly speaking here?-withholds this movement or metamovement into time insofar as it reduces the language of things to human language. Reduction means here reducing the residuum. The residuum to be reduced is the "nameless, dumb language" of nature (2.1: 157). Such a reduction is possible only as long as there is a language of things in the first place; things speak, properly speaking, only to the extent that their linguisticity is not once again a matter of metaphor. Reducing the language of things, holding back judgment, suspending judgment, carrying out an epoche so radical that the roots it leaves behind demand a renewed investigation into the origin of abstraction-all this presupposes a decision, indeed, a judgment, on the word "language," and never more so than when Benjamin clarifies the nature of the reduction as "solution" (Losung) of the "password" (Losung) that is the word of things (2.1: 157). The Losung of the Losung is the original task of translation; the residuum is reduced, purity sealed, when the language of things is carried over and into that of man: "By receiving the dumb, nameless language of things and carrying them over [ ubertriigt] in the names into sound, man solves this task" (2.1: 151). Once carried over, ubertriigt, language is no longer simply analogical; every such carrying over makes human language-not the language of things, the Losung, not the Lo-

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Peter Fenves sung-metaphorical as well. Proof of this irreducible metaphoricity is found in the word Ubertragung as the "translation" not simply of "metaphor" and not simply of "translation," but, at this precise point, of the Kantian word "spontaneity": the locus, that is, of consciousness, judgment, categories; the logical locus par excellence. Translation, properly speaking, is the reduction. But "translation" is itself irreducible and untranslatable. The untranslatability of "translation" -of analogy, of "affinity" (2.1: 151), of metaphor, of carrying over-does not mean that there are no names into which it can be translated or simply that there are too many words into which it has been translated, but that "translation" translates into word and name at the same time, each translation of the language of things yielding a name and at the same time turning human language, the language of names, the language oflanguage, into a metaphor for "language," a metaphor that can very well turn against language. Before the translation of translation from translation as such into human language, before the Fall, therefore, "translation" -this word, this receptive-spontaneous process-is untranslatable: no translation into the purely spiritual can be carried out; no analogy can guard itself against metaphor, and so the organizing analogy of the essay-"language is to spirit as space is to matter"is itself a proportional metaphor. The untranslatability of "translation" does not, to be sure, draw translation to a close, nor does it imply, as it doubtless suggests, an end to movement; on the contrary, the irreducibility and untranslatability of "translation" engenders a heightening of movement, and the name of this heightened movement, as a movement of "sublimation and purification" (2.1: 153), is judgment. Judgment decides on the untranslatable without ground and without guarantee in God, for the untranslatable is, if anything, groundless and godless. The untranslatability of "translation" nevertheless demands a decision at the very least on the word "language": whether the word "language" is, for instance, a word, whether it means "language" as such or whether it perhaps expresses, metaphorically, nothing at all. As translation, Benjamin's "solution" -his reduction-operates against "itself." Far from suspending judgment, this reduction, in which the Gordian knot

The Genesis ofJudgment complicating all phenomenological labor is cut, engages judgment. This means two things: the reduction engenders critique-cutting, scission, and decision wherein, for instance, the metaphorical is distinguished from the analogical without ground and guaranteeand it also awakens an awareness of an indebtedness to textuality as such. Benjamin does not, of course, use the word "textuality." Its functions are distributed among two words: Geschwiitz and Gesetz ("chatter" and "law"), one of which is drawn from Kierkegaard, the other from the Torah. The relation between these two words is established in judgment: the judicial word judges chatter according to an "eternal law." The word judged under this law-the only law and the law of temporalization-is not merely judged to be idle and empty, it is judged to be a word in the first place. Outside of judgment, it is, as Benjamin writes, nichtig, null and void (2.1: 152), while in judgment it names-and this name completes and depletes the act of naming at the same time-linguistic nothingness: "It is Geschwiitz in the deep sense Kierkegaard grasped this word" (2.1: 153; italics added). 16 Geschwiitz does not simply designate idle and vain discourse, it names, according to Kierkegaard, every word that escapes the all-important disjunction-the either/or of judicial judgment-in which decision itself is lodged; it names therefore everything that eludes decision, everything that suspends the disjunctive either/or, including the disjunctive decision on, for instance, analogy or metaphor. The law, on the other hand, is the demand for a decision; together, they constitute the textuality oflanguage. As one moment suspends disjunctive judgment, the other demands it; as empty talk eludes disjunction, the law calls for its execution; as chatter idles language, legality makes language into the vehicle of its actions. Out of this rigorous play of judgment the "human" word is born, and intrahuman translation from, say, the Danish to the German language is instituted: "This judging word kicked the first human beings out of paradise; they themselves excited it, following the eternal law according to which this judging word punishes its own awakening as the only, the deepest debt-and expects" (2.1: 153). This is not an elegant or even an idiomatic translation, but it is nev-

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Peter Fenves ertheless necessary to express the idiomatic character-and perhaps even the idiocy-of judgment. According to an "eternal law," the judging word must punish its own awakening. But this word does not simply fall on itself; judgment does not simply judge itself It does not condemn itself, but only its awakening. The judging word must therefore give rise to something that can take the place of "itself," and this fallen "something" to which judgment gives rise is, in short, the self. Every judgment accuses someone of having woken up judgment. In this way, language becomes a means of accusation through which everyone accused-and whoever uses language for the purposes of judgment stands accused-is immediately and thus "magically" guilty. But if the magic of the judging word does not, as Benjamin writes-citing a poem by Morike-"blessedly rest in itself" (2.1: ISS), what incites this agitation? Which is to ask: at what moment is language temporalized? Benjamin indicates an answer: temporalization does not follow upon the Fall; following (zufolge) an "eternal law," the judging word not only punishes but "expects" (erwartet) its own awakening. The genesis of judgment lies in this expectation-of judgment. The judging word expects its own awakening before it has yet awakened, and this paradoxical expectation demands an "excited" -and thus temporalizing-self: a self that excites judgment because in endless anticipation of itself, it is sheer excitement. Benjamin is doubtless concerned with a famous difficulty in scriptural interpretation-the nature of the snake's promise-but this difficulty, for all its uniqueness, represents an unsurmountable difficulty of understanding: understanding-or to use both Benjamin's and the snake's term, "awakening" -is always only expected. Here, where temporality unexpectedly arises, expectation is altogether empty: "nothing" is expected. And it is for this reason that the judging word is forever "chatter." Judgment can never rid itself of the empty expectation of being awake, because it is from this emptiness that it arises in the first place. Thus, it can never abandon its vigil and its wake. The law under which the judging word carries out its sentences makes this prelegal command: "expect." One could perhaps add: "expect yourself," if it is understood-and hence expected-that "you" are as empty as the judging word. Ex-

The Genesis of Judgment pect, therefore, "nothing," not merely "death" as the absence of representations, not merely the absence of things, not even the nihil negativum that represents the accomplishment of all acts of negation, but, instead, expect the endless absence of language: an Idea more akin to matter than to mind. And this, too, is the lesson of Benjamin's attempt to deduce doctrine.

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Walter Benjamin: Topographically Speaking

Letter to Walter Benjamin Dear Walter: Your last letter, in which to my joy I found at least some biographical information about you, lies before me, and I implore you to realize that in this regard you can never do too much of a good thing for me .... Accept my most cordial regards and pardon my brevity on such a boundless subject. If you cannot or will not reply, send me at least a picture postcard with your photo and autograph. 1

In the winter of 1932, or perhaps earlier, Walter Benjamin began a series of passages he entitled Berlin Chronicle. By the fall of that year, his editors tell us, Benjamin may or may not have finished the Chronicle and have turned to transforming pieces of it into Berlin Childhood Around 1900 (6: 799). 2 In a letter of February 28, 1933, Benjamin wrote to Gershom Scholem that Berlin Childhood might 94

Benjamin: Topographically Speaking be considered finished, since he had just composed the last piece" serially the first." 3 Yet that passage, entitled "Tiergarten," had appeared almost a month earlier in the Frankfurter Zeitung. Moreover, another version of it was serially also the first of the Berlin Chronicle, so that if we are to believe the history of that earlier text, "Tiergarten" was already at least partially composed in 1932. If the speculations on dating the Chronicle lead us into something of a maze, this is no less the case with the order of its pages; Scholem, the first editor of the manuscript, puzzles over the way in which Benjamin "for no explicable reasons jumps ... repeatedly over a page" 4 and also upsets the "natural order of the pages" on a number of occasions so that content and transition force one to move back and forth in reading. Scholem goes on to surmise that a page, at least, must have been lost. This would explain the fact that whereas Benjamin speaks of five guides who introduced him to the city, Scholem can find only three, the second and the third seemingly having gone astray with the lost leaf. The editors of the Collected Works, Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser, however, insist on finding the missing guides "very well named" (6: 804) within the pages at hand for anyone who knows how to read. The impossibility of chronological certainty in the biographical facts, the problematic continuity of the passages, the question of the lost page-all these may seem extraneous issues, though not quite as outrageously extraneous as another to which we will come, the name of the woman who, years later, was to first decipher the manuscript of the Berlin Chronicle, Steinschneider. 5 And yet each of these issues enters Berlin Chronicle at crucial moments. We might call them primal "entrances into the labyrinth" (6: 491), the "reading labyrinth" (4.1: 278) that is at once Benjamin's life and text; for it is the author himself who explicitly distinguished the Berlin Chronicle from autobiography: Memories even when they go on extensively do not always present [darstellen] an autobiography. And here it is certainly not one, not even of the Berlin years, the only ones in question [Rede ]. For autobiography has to do with time, with lapse [Ablauf], and with what makes up the continuous flow oflife. Here it is a matter of space, moments, the discontinuous. For even if months and years emerge

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Is this not Benjamin's answer before the question to those who seek an uninterrupted flow of text and a factual, ordered representation of life? The Berlin Chronicle is not a chronicle, if that term suggests the "continuous register of events in order of time; a historical record ... in which the facts are narrated without philosophic treatment, or any attempt at literary style" (OED). What poses as an autobiographical work is one of the many detours the contemplation begun in The Origin of the German Mourning Play has taken. It is no coincidence, therefore, that in the Berlin Chronicle, as in the habilitation thesis, it is a question of Darstellung: "Memories ... do not always present [darstellen] an autobiography." Darstellung (representation, presentation, performance), Benjamin tells us, is the characteristic question that philosophy must continually confront. 6 "It is characteristic of philosophical writing, at every turn, to confront the question of Darstellung anew" (1.1: 207; OGTD, 27). 7 Of the philosophical treatise, Benjamin writes: "Renunciation of the uninterrupted flow of intention is its primary characteristic. Persistently, thinking always begins anew; in a roundabout way it goes back to the matter [Sache] itself. This unremitting drawing of breath is the most inherent form of existence of contemplation" (1.1: 208; OGTD, 28). Darstellung takes place in an intermittent, broken rhythm as an unceasing brokenness of breath. This is the method of the treatise or esoteric essay that Benjamin offers as exemplary of his own treatise on the German mourning play and apparently of Berlin Chronicle as well, where Benjamin also renounces "continuous flow" for the rhythm of interruption. Of the treatise Benjamin also writes: "Darstellung is the epitome of its method. Method is digression [ Umweg ]. Darstellung as digression" (1.1: 208; OGTD, 28). Benjamin's method is also Darstellung as Umweg, representation or performance as digression, detour, ruse. Digression, detour, and ruse in which it is a question of space, moments, discontinuities (6: 488; 28E); Berlin Chronicle is performed as a collection of disconnected snapshots (Augenblicksaufnahmen). 8 Like those disparate picture postcards Benjamin was wont to send Siegfried Kracauer, among others, through the early 1930's, they are

Benjamin: Topographically Speaking sent to us from another time, another place, or rather other times and other places. One ponders whether to view the images or read the writing and wonders wherein the difference might lie. 9 This relation between image and writing is the central point of the first fragment of that larger fragment entitled Berlin Chronicle. "Serially the first," biographically the last, the opening passage is a primal entrance and yet already a detour and ruse that nevertheless leads us into the "story labyrinth" (6: SIS; s6E): But at the end of Bendler Street loomed the labyrinth, which was not lacking its Ariadne: the maze surrounding Friedrich Wilhelm III and Queen Luise, who on their image-covered pedestals struggled right out of the flower beds as though turned to stone by the magic strokes that a small canal wrote in the sand. Rather than to the figures, my eyes turned to the pedestal because what was happening there-even if unclearer in its context [Zusammenhang]-was nearer in space. (6: 465; 3E)

Hardly have we entered the maze than we arrive at what Berlin Childhood calls "the goal" (4.1: 237): Friedrich Wilhelm and Queen Luise. 10 And yet, in this originary, though not Edenic, garden, at the center of the labyrinth lies another labyrinth, the writing in the sand of a small stream of water, whose magic strokes have had a startling effect. This writing, it would seem, has the Medusa-like power to transform humans into realistic figures of stone. ll For this reason, perhaps, the child looks neither at those magic signs nor at the lifelike representations of the rulers (4.1: 237), but deflects his eyes instead to the images at the base of those figures. Benjamin remains silent on the object of his glance, yet at least one guide describes these as child-filled scenes "symbolizing ... the enjoyments of the Thiergarten." 12 No escape for this child in the Tiergarten, then, from the powers of the Gorgon, but also no coherent representation of the particular onlooker. Clarity and coherence sacrificed in the name of a certain space, Benjamin tells us, which-in anticipation-we might call a memorial stone. Caught in the folds of the Tiergarten labyrinth, then, we find at its center not only the historical, celebratory figures of Friedrich Wilhelm and Luise-the statuary version of biography-but also the seemingly accidental writing that has the power both to petrify

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Carol Jacobs the rulers and to deflect the eye of the observer to another mode of image cut in stone. That the gaze is inevitably detoured among these in their intertwined relations prefigures the entanglements of what is to come. This much should be clear. Benjamin's place for viewing is middle of the labyrinth. Probably one will never become master of anything in which one has not known impotence, and whoever concurs in that will also know that this impotence does not lie at the outset or before all endeavor with respect to the matter, but rather at its center. I am coming then to the center of my Berlin life ... impotence with respect to the city. It was doubly grounded: first in a very poor sense of orientation; if it took thirty years until knowledge of left and right became flesh and blood [in Fleisch und Blut iiberging], until I made out how the map of a city is used, knowledge [ Wissen] about this ineptitude was still far from familiar. (6: 466; 4E)

How shall we understand this unconsciousness, this inability to orient his body or decipher a map, and especially the phrasing that equates a visceral sense of direction in one's body with the ability to read a map of Berlin? All this is doubled and compounded by a subsequent failure to recognize this first failure of knowledge. Caught in the middle of both Berlin and life (one begins to suspect they are almost interchangeable), Benjamin doesn't know which way to turn. If he indeed learns to read the city map, he does not necessarily master reading himself; knowledge about his ineptitude remains unfamiliar. But, perhaps, finding his way is not Benjamin's goal after all, or merely its contrary. Not to find one's way in a city-that could be uninteresting and banal. Unawareness is needed, beyond that, nothing. But to go astray in a city-as one goes astray in a wood-that already requires a completely different schooling. Then sign boards, street names, passersby, roofs, kiosks, or taverns must speak to the individual forced to wander like a breaking twig under foot in the wood, like the terrified cry of a bittern from afar, like the sudden silence of a clearing in the middle of which a lily shoots up. Paris taught me this art of straying: it fulfilled the dream whose

Benjamin: Topographically Speaking earliest traces were the labyrinths on the blotter leaves of my school notebooks. ( 6: 469; 8-9E)

Should the city speak as Benjamin would have it, speak (not incidentally, transformed by simile into its other) in the privileged mode reserved for those who have gone astray as in a wood, then signs, names, people, and objects alike cannot be read as one learns at school. They must rather be disarticulated and disread, heard as a breaking, a shriek, an abrupt silence: no act of translation can render these humanly articulate. Yet it is this, rather than finding his way, that fulfills Benjamin's dream. There were earlier signs of it, as always, for labyrinths, despite misleading indications to the contrary, have no beginnings and no ends here. Benjamin's labyrinth points us toward the involutions on the blotting pages of his childhood copybooks: thus, another foliage replaces the simile of the wood (among so many metaphorical forests figured in the Berlin Chronicle); page and leaf, Blatt (as in the half-forgotten English of another era) are inextricable in German. Perhaps these "school notebooks" provide the "completely different schooling" that, we are told, makes possible going astray in a city as in a wood. The first traces of Benjamin's dream appear in the incidental script, the maze of fluid ink left not by what he purposefully penned in class, not by what remained on the written page, but by its excesses-magic lines layered one over another and side by side on leaves designed to blot rather than to preserve and delineate.' 3 And this labyrinth is hardly distinguishable, or is at least inextricable, from those of the Tiergarten, with its mazes of foliage and waterscript, as the opening lines of Berlin Childhood Around 1900 insist (4.1: 237). And yet, "for many years," Benjamin writes, "actually, I have indeed been playing with the notion of articulating the space [Raum] of life-Bios-graphically in a map" (6: 466; sE). Despite his disavowal of autobiography, despite his doubly grounded disorientation, intermittently and in flashes, Bios as graphe appears on the scene as an ironic possibility. 14 "I think of an afternoon in Paris to which I owe insights into my life that overcame me in a flash with the power of an illumination. It was precisely this afternoon that my biographical relationships to people, my friendships [Freundschaften] and comradeships [Kameradschaften], my passions [Lei-

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Carol Jacobs denschaften], and love affairs [Liebschaften] revealed themselves in their liveliest, most hidden [verborgensten] interweavings [ Verflechtungen]" (6: 490; 30E). Are we then out of the woods, no longer lost in the labyrinth, grounded in "friendships" like that of which Scholem would write, at last in the biographical, which proves so elusive in Berlin Chronicle? As in the forest of that earlier passage, there is a strange language that speaks to us here, one that is silent or all but silenced for those who listen only for the integrity (rather than the breaking) of words and meaning. Its significance is confirmed by certain echoes one page later. The revelation that is crucial here leaves behind the static nouns of friendship, comradeship, and so on (all marked in German by the suffix- schaft) to insist on the movement of their hidden interweavings ( Verflechtungen, a gerund marked by the suffix -ung). It is less the passions and love affairs that interest Benjamin than their interconnectings, and it is these that will be marked down in the written life. "I say to myself: it had to be in Paris where the walls and the quais, the asphalt, the collections and the debris, the railings and the squares, the arcades and the kiosks teach us such a strange language that our relationships to people in the loneliness that surrounds us, our sunkenness in that world of things, reach the depths of a sleep in which the dream image awaits them, that reveals to them their true face" (6: 490; 3oE).

The lightninglike revelation celebrates intertwinings rather than what is intertwined. This, then, is the face of our relationships, so sunken in a world of things as to become grammatically indistinguishable from them, revealed only in the dream image of a deep sleep. But what fashions this image; who dreams it? I want to speak of this afternoon because it made so apparent [kenntlich] what kind of command it is that cities have over the fantasy and why the city, in which people most relentlessly make claims on one another ... [allowing] no contemplative moment to the individual, takes its revenge in memories [Erinnerungen] and the veil that it has clandestinely [im Verborgensten] woven out of our lives shows less the images of the people than the arenas [ Schauplatze] in which we met others or ourselves. (6: 490-91; 30E)

Benjamin: Topographically Speaking What has taken place in this auto-bio-graphy? It is not Benjamin who remembers the city and maps it out along with his life. At best, as we shall see, he leaves a space for a strange forest of trees to grow, a forest in which he, of necessity, must lose himself. Benjamin is here all but woven out of the city's remembrances-woven out while woven in. The city takes our lives and takes its revenge in a veil of memories produced from them in secret (im Verborgenen), for we now see clearly that the city is the artisan of the "most hidden [verborgensten) interweavings" of which we read above (6: 490; 30E). The images of people give way to the arenas of their encounters with others and themselves. People become outskirts of the city's privileging of" Schaupliitze." 15 The images of Schaupliitze are those places to view, those endless theaters that, one could claim, are the critical scene of Berlin Chronicle, and not just because the term turns up so often. In the images of Schaupliitze, the space oflife is articulated Biosgraphically (6: 466; sE). It is here the hidden interweavings are revealed. To be sure, the main actors on these stages are not people: "The more often I come back to these memories, the less it appears incidental to me how slight a role people play in them" (6: 490; 30E). Thus, it can be no coincidence that at the moment of sudden illumination Benjamin forgets the person for whom he waits, as though the city's remembering and his forgetting of self and others were inextricably intertwined: "On that afternoon, then, of which I will speak, I was sitting in the interior space of the Cafe des deux magots ... where I was waiting, I forget for whom" (6: 491; 30E). "I forget for whom" is precisely who comes, and comes to an 'T' who is equally marginalized, forgetful of self. Not only does the idea of mapping life graphically come over Benjamin as from elsewhere, what he writes is also written by another hand. "There, all at once and with compelling force, the thought came over me to draw a graphic schema of my life, and I also already knew in the same moment exactly how that was to be done. It was a very simple question with which I searched through my past, and the answers drew themselves as if of their own accord on a page [Blatt) that I pulled out" (6: 491; 30-31E).

Perhaps it goes without saying that the page is lost, blotted

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Carol Jacobs out-in a sense the page whose absence Scholem couldn't help sensing-the page of autobiography in which the self as author was from the beginning out of the question: "One or two years later when I lost the page, I was inconsolable. Never again have I been able to produce it as it was formed [enstand] before me then, resembling a row of genealogical trees" (6: 491; 31£). 16 Benjamin is inconsolable, not over the loss of his past, but over the loss of the page: from that lost leaf [Blatt]-a wood of sorts in which to go astray-there comes another blotter page [Loschblatt]labyrinth of unintentional writing: veil, city, autobiography in which the enigmatic center one might call self or fate is of no concern. Now, however, when I would wish once again to establish [wiederherstellen] its outline in thought, without precisely reproducing it [wiederzugeben], I would rather speak of a labyrinth. What is housed in the chamber of its enigmatic center, self or fate, should not concern me here, all the more so, however, the many entrances that lead to the interior. These entrances I call primal acquaintances; each one of them is a graphic symbol of my acquaintance with a person, whom I did not meet through other people, but rather through relations of neighborhood [Nachbarschaftverhaltnisse], familial relationship [ Verwandtschaft], school comradeship [Schulkameradschaft], mix-up [ Verwechselung], travel companionship [Reisegenossenschaft]. (6: 491; 31E)

The graphic symbols of primal acquaintance, the entrances to the labyrinth, are primal acquaintance as accident-moreover, as a series of contexts for relationship upset once again by the seemingly accidental gerund among the static nouns-in this case, Verwechselung, confusion, mix-up, that which leaves individual identity irrelevant. If the individual identity is relegated to the shadows, language, here, the graphic symbol, (isn't this what Benjamin is telling us?) is always primal: even if (or perhaps inevitably) unintentionally found and accidentally lost, even if fundamentally impossible to reproduce, its origination never to be repeated and certainly not by the person who writes it down. Another hand weaves the text, puts forth the symbol, whose only face is a dream image revealed in the depths of sleep-memory woven by a concealed artisan in which the image

Benjamin: Topographically Speaking of people is always, possibly, a question of mistaken identity, and nevertheless our passageway to the past. If the living individual-iflife-is not the stuff of which memories or consciousness [Eingedenkens] is made, how are we to understand the figures that haunt Benjamin's Chronicle? "For even if months and years rise up here, it is in the figure [Gestalt] that they have in the moment of remembering [Eingedenkens ]. This peculiar figure-one could call it fleeting or eternal-in no case is the stuff of which it is made that of life. And that is divulged still less in the role that my own life will play here than in that of the people who in Berlin-whenever and whoever-were closest to me" (6: 488; 28E). What, then, of those closest to Benjamin? How do they figure here? Who are they and how can we situate them in all this when we have clearly read a few pages later-impatient to learn the outcome of the drama before establishing the stuff of which it is (or isn't) made-that their role is slight, displaced by images loomed by the memories of another. "The atmosphere of the city that is here conjured grants them only a brief shadowy existence. They steal along its walls like beggars, rise up ghostlike in its windows to then disappear, sniff around thresholds like a genius loci, and when they even fill [eifiillen] whole quarters with their names, it is in the manner in which the name of the dead [fills] the memorial stone on his grave" (6: 488-89; z8E). Like beggars, like ghosts, like a genius loci-Benjamin's similes progressively intensify the marginality and the depersonalization. With rapid gestures of discontinuity, in blinks of the eye, before we know it, he shifts from the space of life ("they steal along its walls like beggars") to the other side, from an apparently human realm where possession and desire still reign to what appears in the name of place ("loci"), and even in the name of death's textual display of absence. To be sure, all this follows upon Benjamin's withdrawal from autobiography: "Here, however [we speak of] space, moments [Augenblicke], and the discontinuous" (6: 488; z8E), he had written, you remember. No doubt this makes the context clearer. Let me digress to apologize for not always tracing the Chronicle in order, for doubling back and skipping around, thus sometimes losing sight of such

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Carol Jacobs logical connections. It is difficult to orient ourselves in this text, even if we heed Benjamin's admonition to renounce the center, difficult to find points of entry, to locate a place for commentary as a vantage point from which to contemplate, a window, perhaps, a threshold that might open before us the slate of Benjamin's text. But these, after all, are the neither here nor theres, the borderlines from which all critical writing inevitably takes its place. Even in the name of death, then: these figures of the Berlin Chronicle might fill entire neighborhoods with their name (as was the case of Aunt Lehmann in an earlier passage to which we have yet to come), but such moments of apparently sovereign influence occur in the manner in which the name of the dead fills the memorial stone, marking the areas as their burial site. 17 And thus it is with those closest to the author-and who was closer to Benjamin than his former, childhood self? Their place is delineated as such nonplaces between: windows, thresholds, gravestones. And yet, as the saying goes, nothing is written in stone, and certainly not the tomb inscription that might fix the relation of the city to those who once inhabited it. It is impossible to determine whether the names of the dead bear witness to the city or the other way around, whether Benjamin, say, bears witness to Berlin or the city weaves the veil of memories. "Berlin ... has, however, no less but rather more than many other [cities], the places and moments where it bears witness to the dead, shows itself filled [erfiillt] with the dead" (6: 489; 28E), filled with their names like the tombstone that at once memorializes and pronounces absent what is in the earth beneath. This, too, makes up Benjamin's labyrinth, not just the meanderings of city streets, not just the interweavings of personal relations that dead-end, or perhaps come alive, in the possibility of mistaken identity. And isn't this where we began-the ever changing positions of witness and witnessed, of inscription and inscribed, in the labyrinth of the Tiergarten? No less than these are the involutions of recollection and forgetting, for there is no path of memory here that is not crossed with forgetting, nothing remembered if not half-forgotten, nothing present to mind if not also a dream, if not interrupted by what "Toward the Image of Proust" calls the "Penelope work of forgetting." For

Benjamin: Topographically Speaking Benjamin, the interweaving of remembering and forgetting that creates his passages leads seamlessly back and forth to its other version in the interpenetration of life and death. Benjamin writes of childhood, and like Rilke before him, 18 he writes of its indifferent openness to life and death: "the memories of childhood ... so difficult to grasp ... so ... like half-forgotten dreams. For childhood, which knows no preconceived opinion, also knows none for life. It comes to the realm of the dead, where it projects into that of the living, just as preciously connected ... as to life itself" (6: 489; 28E). It is these thresholds, then, that Benjamin haunts, the locus of the interweavings [ Veflechtungen] (6: 490 ), and of mix-up [ Verwechselung] (6: 491), where we find what Benjamin calls the "topographical tradition [of the city of Berlin] that presents [darstellt] the connecting [ Verbindung] with the dead of this ground" (6: 489; 2829E). We have only begun to explore this topography, which is filled less with people than with their names, less with things than with their images: it is to the second half of the nineteenth century, Benjamin or someone writes, "that the following images [Bilder] belong, not in the manner of general images, but rather those that according to the doctrine of Epicurus constantly separate themselves out of things and condition [ bedingen] our perception [Wahrnehmung] of them" (6: 489; 29£). 19 Those images that make up the Berlin Chronicle are no more "thing" than they are the stuff of which life is made (6: 488; 28E). Yet the inevitable mix-up of the object of our perception is such in the grammatically uncertain phrasing above that these images might determine our perception of either the image or the thing. Moreover, lost in the translation is another turn of phrase, literally rendered: "those [images] that ... separate themselves out of things [Dingen] also 'bething' [bedingen] our perception of them." That the image in its disconnection might create the (illusion of) thing and even be taken for it is the pervasive possibility of mistaken identity and of the fragility of our perception. Perhaps this is why in "Doctrine of the Similar" we read the startling suggestion that it is what is meant [das Bedeutete) that gives the name; that "the letter beth has the name of a house" (2.1: 208). All this is in the name of a tradition Benjamin calls topographical (in ironiC relief, no doubt, to the bio-graphical), the space of

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Berlin replacing once again the life of Benjamin, Schauplatz in place of the human. But Benjamin's topography as it performs its connecting to the dead is hardly a question of mapping a surfacerather, it is a displacement and upheaval of that surface in search of one's past. The passage that explores that search claims to define the relation of memory [ Gediichtnis] to the past, the issue of autobiography-treasure, then, in this labyrinthian text where nothing has proven more disorienting than locating its point of departure. That relationship, we read, is unmistakably signified by language: "Language has signified [it] in a way that cannot be misunderstood" (6: 486; 25E).

And yet, as the passage continues, its language becomes so involved that although one readily understands what Benjamin is getting at, one is still at a loss to know how to follow. Language has signified in a way that cannot be misunderstood that remembrance [Gediichtnis] is not an instrument for the gathering of information about the past, but rather its theater [Schauplatz ]. [Remembrance] is the medium of what has been experienced, as the earth [Erdreich] is the medium in which dead cities lie buried in debris. Whoever endeavors to approach his own buried [verschiitteten] past [Vergangenheit] must act like a man who digs. That determines the tone, the bearing of true memories [Erinnerungen ]. (6: 486; 25-26E)

If it is language that has signified unmistakably that memory is the arena for exploration of the past, rather than an instrumental means to the past as a graspable end, this is because language and remembrance, while not identical, often tend to share the same turf. One need only return to the early essay "On Language as Such and on Human Language" (1916) to recall that. 20 As in the reference to Epicurus, it is a question of bringing forth an image that has a precarious relationship to the thing, and we will never keep straight here the difference between the images in Benjamin's text and those he proposes digging out of his past. Benjamin's buried past is like the interred ruins of a dead city, and if his faculty of remembrance is less an excavating spade than one that buries, it is also in the power of individual memories, it would seem, to disinter. "That determines the tone, the bearing of true memories [Erinnerungen ].

Benjamin: Topographically Speaking They must not shun coming back over and over to one and the same matter-to scatter it around, turn it up as one turns up the ground. For [such] matters are only deposits, strata that yield only to the most careful investigation what constitutes the true worth that lies hidden within the earth" (6: 486; 26E). And what are these treasures that give themselves only to that persistent return to the same, which at the same time disperses what it explores? How are we to imagine this strange "mine" of Benjamin, if I may be permitted the play on words? What constitutes that genuine value is "the images that, broken loose from all earlier associations, stand as valuables in the sober rooms of our late insight, like ruins or torsos in the gallery of the collector" (6: 486; 26E). 21 And, after all, "allegories are in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things" (1.1: 354; OGTD, 178). 22 We come back to the question ofEpicurus's imagesdisconnected from their things, perhaps victim of the hand of an overzealous archaeologist who brings forth the work of art, but only as a ruin. In a sense, Benjamin has told us in the most unmistakable manner just how to view the matter at hand. What we find is severed from its context and in itself broken-an artifact of the human figure destined to become object in a world of art rather than of biography. And yet, if we can find our way back to the beginning, a context is woven from which, it would seem, nothing can ever extricate itself: the insistence on medium and the return to the same, the layerings and deposits in which we are to strew the earth about as we engage in a performance that renders unintelligible the difference between digging up and burying. As we dig about in the past, we indeed seem to inter it, and not only because what is found is not what was. Language has told us that remembrance cannot unearth the past, but can serve only as its place to be viewed, its Schauplatz. Benjamin's passage transforms in a layering of similes and images that tell us nothing of the author's past, but everything of the scene of finding it. Remembrance becomes so like the earth in which dead cities are buried (once again turning any fixed relationship between Berlin and the human realm on its head) that she who is in search of lost time must bear herself like one who works not with pen, but with spade in hand, contenting herself with what can

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Carol Jacobs be spoken of only as resembling the ruins of someone else's era. The Chronicle's linguistic performance, then, carries out both the archaeological dig and self-burial through a maze of rhetorical figures that leaves nothing as it was. But, then again, Benjamin admonishes us about what should be written down in all this. "The careful, probing cut of the spade into the dark earth is indispensable, and he deceives himself out of the best who preserves in what he writes down only the inventory of the find and not also this dark good fortune [Gluck] of the place and spot of the finding itself" (6: 486; 26E). The finding, then, must enter into what he writes down rather than simply what is found, but we must not forget also the failure to find that slides to replace it. "Futile searching belongs there as much as the fortunate [searching], and therefore memory must not proceed narrating, all the less reporting, but rather, in the strictest sense, epically and rhapsodically to try its cut of the spade in ever different places, searching in ever deeper strata [Schichten] in the old ones" (6: 487; 26E). All this, it would seem, is an image for the manner in which the past must and must not be told-neither as conventional flowing narrative nor, certainly, as report, but as epic and rhapsody, literary forms that marked their own ruptures for BenjaminY The passage breaks off here, and yet we have not finished exploring in Benjamin's mine, where, following his directions, we must dig at once in a different spot and yet dig even deeper in the old one. No doubt, it will seem I cheat myself of the point when I choose an earlier moment apparently for its "find," the thematic appearance of an actual mine. Something of a relief after the rhetorical layerings of the later imagery, this passage is a narrative, or perhaps even a report of his boyhood visits to his aunt. And if Berlin Chronicle did not hide both Proust and Benjamin's Proust essay at every turn, most clearly where the French author is not mentioned, the visit to Benjamin's aunt might seem to be the real thing-even though it opens with a simile and with a fairy tale. When the mine appears, it does come forth as the real thing, placed right before the eyes of the careful observer-a real thing, and yet, let us not forget it, a toy, or, as Berlin Childhood phrases it: a "toy-if one may call it that" (4.1: 249). This could not escape the

Benjamin: Topographically Speaking notice of Benjamin, the assiduous collector in later life-not of archaeological fragments, but of toys. It is a real thing, then, but also a thing for play [Spiel-zeug]: a miniature (as the passages of Berlin Chronicle and Berlin Childhood have so often been called), an image of the real thing, or perhaps of the mine of images some pages later in the text-of Benjamin's mine of images (constituted of images and designed to mine them, itself the image of remembrance), and yet presented as the real thing. Still, what's the difference? It's aU Benjamin's mine. This passage will tell us, perhaps more than any other, how to think Benjamin's past, how to map Berlin, how to read its street signs like the cry of a distant bird in the wood. Just as there are for children fairy tales in which a witch or even a fairy rules over an entire wood, so as a child I knew an entire street that a woman had under her sway and that she filled up [ausfiillte], although she was always enthroned in her bay window one minute from the house in which I was born: Aunt Lehmann. She was the governor of Steglitz Street. To her room the stairs climbed [stiegen] steeply up right behind the hall door; it was dark on them until the door to her room opened and the fragile voice bade a good day in a glasslike manner [glasern] and gave the order to put the glass [glitsernen] rhombus on the table for us that enclosed the mine in which little men pushed wheelbarrows, toiled with a pickaxe, and shone lanterns into the shafts [Stollen] in which transport baskets were always on the move up and down. (6: 472; uE) If the metaphorical mine of the later passage calls on us to recognize the difference and then to forget it between bringing up a find and searching for it in vain, something similar to that takes place here. Though the activities never cease, nothing becomes available beyond the enclosed glass rhombus. Still, something is always on the move up and down-in and out. No treasure as substance is transported across the threshold between the realm of the toy and the "real" world without. Yet, in the unlit corridors between the two (those that no crack of the door and no lantern can illuminate for us) flit the same valuables that gave themselves up to "the most careful examination" of the probers in the earth (6: 486; 26E): images broken loose from their former contexts. Just as in Paris the mazes above are mimicked by those

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Carol Jacobs below, 24 just as in Paris an underworld labyrinth of tunnels (Stollen) connects to and repeats those above, so in the hermetic realm of Steglitz Street the steep, dark stairway to the apartment is repeated in the shafts of the miniature. If a simile sets Aunt Lehmann as the fairy who rules over an entire wood (the wood itself, as we know, in turn metaphorical for Berlin and Berlin, for the forest of genealogical trees and blotter leaves), in a later passage, the connection is made to the treasure that lies in her province, "The treasure keeper . . . in the green pine forest . . . the fairy who grants one wish" (6: 494; 34E). Moreover, like the toy she owns, Aunt Lehmann, too, is enclosed by a glass rhombus, the bay window in which she sits like a doll, "always under the same black cap and in the same silk dress," bidding her nephew "welcome ... from the same armchair" (4.1: 248; 32E). 25 We have marked some of the similarities, but have hardly fathomed the nonsensuous connection between the toy mine and its apparently real surroundings-a connection that, especially in English, remains all too transparent. It is the voice of the aunt: ordering forth the "glass [gliisernen] rhombus," astonishingly a "breakable" voice that itself speaks "glasern," in a glasslike manner, and whose uncertain, crystalline quality thereby shatters any protective sense of glass that window or toy case might have offered. The apartment with its staircase and the mine; the bay window and the glass rhombus: these are no parallel worlds, separate and contained, but rather realms evoking one another through a certain voice whose frangibility places them on the line. Aunt Lehmann is here conjured into brief existence: ghostlike, she rises up in the window like a genius loci-filling, we are told, the whole quarter-coincidentally that of Benjamin's birth-with her name, a name and a voice that will prove to be indistinguishable. Are we at last to understand how the names of the dead fill the memorial stones over their graves (6: 488; 28E), even though this is not quite what takes place? Aunt Lehmann "fills up an entire street" -she is the "place holder" [Statthalterin] of Steglitz Street: her rule is a question of name, and yet in what name does that rule take place, and is her name a question of rule? In the parallel passage in Berlin Childhood, "her good North

Benjamin: Topographically Speaking German name vouched [biirgte] for her right to hold, her life long, the bay window under which Steglitz runs into Genthiner Street" (4.1: 248; 32E). Yet one wonders if that name could possibly be "Lehmann," which designates its bearer as vassal to another's land and hardly as an enthroned ruler who might rule in her own name. 26 If Benjamin's aunt fills and governs an entire street, it is with a name that is and is not quite hers-one with all the crystalline fragility already ascribed to her voice. Both woman and street have their names transformed through similarities we have yet to trace. "Because of this aunt and her mine, Steglitz Street could now never again for me be named after Steglitz. A goldfinch [Stieglitz] in its cage had more similarity with this street in which the aunt was lodged [hausen] in her bay window than the Berlin suburb, which said nothing to me. Where it runs into Genthiner it may be counted among those that remained the most untouched by the changes of the last thirty years" (6: 472; 12E). Only that, Berlin Childhood continues, "during this period of time the veil that covered it for me as a child fell" (4.1: 248; 32E), that is, the veil of its acquired name. What is it, then, that does speak to Benjamin? In this quarter in which the aunt is lodged (but let us not forget the other sense of hausen, "to wreak havoc," in which the aunt could always create a decided disorder) both street and relative are invaded by a certain "I." Because of his childhood experience, the street does not take its name from the suburb of Steglitz, is not bound to place or direction as such designations are wont to do. (Although, strangely enough, Steglitz Street was never oriented in the direction of its namesake.) But then again, left and right had not become visceral for Benjamin, who hadn't learned to read a map or to understand his own ineptitude. What says something to Benjamin, rather, is Stieglitz, "goldfinch" in English, the vocal creature that the aunt must resemble, sitting in her window like a bird in its cage. And yet -and this is what makes the passage so difficult to grasp, so like the figures of a half-forgotten dream-if the aunt holds the place of Steglitz as Stieglitz, giving up her family name (Lehmann), teaching us to disarticulate the street sign in the name of the cry of a certain bird, this is not because of what one thinks one sees as through a glass clearly-not because, or not exclusively

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Carol Jacobs because, the aunt is like the goldfinch. It is not precisely aunt and bird that are the terms of the comparisons: "A goldfinch [Stieglitz] in its cage had more similarity with this street in which the aunt was lodged in her bay window." If it is Steglitz Street that the Stieglitz resembles, the similarity can take place only in language. The Stieglitz, whose name, in German at least, seems onomatopoeically derived from the sound of the goldfinch's voice 27 reverberates its call and name in another sense in the relevant passagesas Steglitz, Stieglitz, to be sure, but also as those stairs that lead to the flat "eine Stiege aufwi:irts," "one flight up," (4.1: 249), as "stiegen die Stufen," "climbed the stairs," (6: 472), in the rule of the aunt over a realm into which she does not descend: "ohne noch je darein herabzusteigen," "still without ever descending there," (4.1: 248), or as the mine workers of the toy, "Steiger," "mine inspectors," (4.1: 249)-which explains why it is the "aunt and her mine" (6: 472; 12E) that transform the name from Steglitz. How can one fail to sense here a connection to the moment in "Doctrine of the Similar" (1933) where Benjamin asks: "In other words: can sense [Sinn] be made to underlie the proposition that Leonhard ... asserts: 'Every word is-and the entire language isonomatopoeic'" (2.1: 207). Benjamin insists on the onomatopoeic just when he sets forth the concept of "nonsensuous similarity," forcing the reader to abandon the conventional definition of onomatopoeia as an association of language with the natural sound of the object it represents. It is in this manner that we might read the shift from "every word" to "the entire language," because Benjamin rejects Sinn as sense perception for another sense of Leonhard's phrase, namely, that the entire language is onomatopoeic with respect to itself. Perhaps we are to read the term literally as a making of the name. Language makes itself, each instant anew, leaving behind the kind of sensuous similarity of Stieglitz, in its etymological derivation from the sound of the bird's call for the chorus of reverberations among terms that have no sensual link to the sounds of the objects they may seem to name. Werner Hamacher has said something similar as he works out with exceptional acuity the relations among Berlin Childhood, "The Doctrine of Similarity," "On the Mimetic Capacity," and "The Task of the Translator." 28

Benjamin: Topographically Speaking If the question becomes, both in "The Doctrine of the Similar" and in Hamacher's essay, a question of translation, we might go on to say that for Benjamin, all languages are onomatopoeic also with respect to one another; and this has everything to do with his notion of translation. From the very early essay "On Language as Such and on Human Language," a radical concept of translation is already at play within the act of naming, a hint of Babel and therefore of a fall before the Fall (2.1: 150-51; 325E). Thus, language signifies in a way that cannot be misunderstood-but neither can it be understood-that remembrance is not an instrument for gathering information about the past, but rather the medium and theater in which it is embedded and performed. The past is articulated in a glasslike voice-at once window or enclosure and yet brittle and cracking, threatening to shatter itself and its object, and our view of it as well. It is nothing and no-thing, images severed from their context, (all this we dis-covered before imagining we might lift the veil), genealogical trees that speak of familial relations and those of neighborhood, and always of mistaken identities. Thus, in Berlin Childhood, too, the city had woven a veil [Schleier] (4.1: 248) in the name of Stieglitz. The bird Stieglitz gave her the name. And was the aunt not lodged in her aviary like a bird that can speak? Whenever I entered it, it was filled [erfullt] with the twittering of this small black bird who had flown away across all the nests and farmsteads of Brandenburg, where the clan once had its scattered seat who held both names in memory, those of villages and those of the kindred-which so often were exactly the same. My aunt knew the relationships by marriage, the residences, the strokes of luck, and the misfortunes of all the Schoenflies, Rawitschers, Landsbergs, Lindenheims, and Stargards who had once been situated in Brandenburg or Mecklenburg as cattle or grain merchants. (4.1: 248-49; 32E)

Of course, only in Benjamin can the song bird Stieglitz speak. And what it says is not only Stieglitz-Steglitz-Steiger-stiegen-Stiege, but above all the names. The cage is "filled" [eifullt] by names-thus, the aunt fills both apartment and street beneath, just as tombstones are filled with the names of the dead. Is this, then, where name and thing might ultimately coincide? The aviary is filled with a twitter-

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Carol Jacobs ing-so run Benjamin's memories-both the names of family and of the places from which they came "so often ... exactly the same." "But now her sons and perhaps even her grandsons were settled here in the West End, in streets that bore the names of Prussian generals and often also of the little towns from which they had come.... There a cracked and brittle voice bade me glassily good day" (4.1: 249; 32-33E). Place and name, then, are no longer the same. Isn't this Benjamin's point as he continues? What she may have chirped as family history with all the interweavings of family relations (family trees, so to speak, not entirely unlike those her nephew would find himself drawing years later in a Parisian cafe), what she has in memory as the coincidence between place and name, is inevitably for Benjamin their dissolution (just as Steglitz and Lehmann were never "the same," or were so only when place and name are transformed into Stieglitz. Place and name are cracked asunder and yet as similar as BE-RL-IN and BE-NJAM-IN, each bearing witness to the other. In Berlin, a broken voice speaks glassily-like the mosaics formed of capriciously broken pieces of glass to which Benjamin compares the thought fragments whose worth is all the more decisive the less they are capable of measuring themselves on a fundamental conception (1.1: 208; OGTD, 29). There in West End, the bay-window apartment is a space (4.1: 249; 33E) in which something valuable is protected, perhaps even hidden. "Doubly secured was this bay-window apartment, as is appropriate for rooms that have something so valuable to shelter" (4.1: 249; 33E). The thing of value (Kostbares) in Aunt Lehmann's room, must we not understand it, this too, as the thingified version of images broken loose from their earlier context in Benjamin's metaphorical mine? The latter's treasure was the images that stand as valuables (Kostbarkeiten) in the sober rooms of our late insight (6: 486; 26E). Not only the enclosed glass mine, then, is protected and hidden here. Of the elderly servants who worked for his aunts, Benjamin tells us: "They shared a treasure [Schatz] with their mistresses, even if it consisted of memories kept silent" (4.1: 250; 34E). That the treasures of the flat are the silenced memories should not surprise us, for between silence and twittering (as between speaking and twittering) there is, after all, little difference.

Benjamin: Topographically Speaking So many mines of treasure-and yet a last to which I must return, if only to give a sense of retracing the thread. It is a mine that so resembles the others that we must recognize it as next of kin. As in the metaphorical mine of memory, here, too, the things of value are archaeological objects in the gallery of the collector that appear and that threaten in their crucial moment to break apart into fragments. They are figure and image, we are told, above all, images cut in stone that cannot but remind us of the Tiergarten labyrinth and, perhaps, of the first decipherers of Benjamin's text, Steinschneider and Scholem. Once more, a return to Benjamin's mazes: one that follows immediately upon the series of family trees written down in a Paris cafe and that seems an answer to so many questions that have come before. And therefore we are tempted to insist that we have indeed found Benjamin's lost page (if not quite Scholem's), for the long passage presents to us, if not the graphic schema (6: 491; 30E), at least one elaborate labyrinth of interrelationship-friendship, comradeship, passions, and love affairs in their most vivid and hidden intertwinings. Against the background of the city, the people around Benjamin close together to form a figure-"against the background of the people who were the closest to me at that time, the world of things contracted to a similarly deep symbol ... in four rings" (6: 492; 32E). Benjamin and his friends enter the flat of a dealer in antiquities on the Kupfergraben (a name that once again suggests the locus of digging), where they admire through glass cases (not unlike that of Aunt Lehmann's mine, no doubt) an array of ancient jewelry. Four rings are chosen that bind together those there, Benjamin, Alfred Cohn, and the latter's fiancee Dorothea J (but also Ernst Schoen, Jula Cohn, Greta Radt, and, perhaps, Benjamin's wife to be, Dora). They are bound together in involutions of relationship that are, perhaps, impossible for the reader to grasp, unless, like Benjamin in the Cafe des deux magots, one gives in to the compulsion of drawing the genealogical tree that might explain them. Many years were needed before what at that time was in part beginning to unfold in its germ and in part was still dormant emerged into the light of day in its context: the fate by virtue of which she,

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Carol Jacobs who stood in the most intimate relation to her brother, which by its tenderness filled to the very edge the limits of sisterly love, was to become the girlfriend of her brother's two closest friends-the recipient of the ring with the head of Pompey and me-to finally find her husband in the brother of the woman who married her own brother as her second husband-and she it was, on the day I am speaking of, who received from me the ring with the Medusa's head. (6: 493-94; 33-34£)

And if a graphic schema can be drawn from this, have we not won back, at least in part, the leaf whose loss left Benjamin so inconsolable, reconstructing at least one of his family trees? Benjamin closes the passage by telling us that a few days later he wrote to the recipient of the fourth ring and enclosed a sonnet, a poem that was sent as a commentary on a stone into which was cut "foliage entwining a lyre" -symbol of poetry covered by leaves, covered in turn by Benjamin's leaf, with the poem: "To your finger, to which it confided itself ... " "Broken off," Benjamin's editors tell us in brackets (6: 494; 34E). It seems the page with the sonnet has been lost. And how could it be otherwise? That we are bound to lose a page is inevitable, even and especially when we think we can pen it ourselves. No doubt this is something of what is implicit in the description of the ring Benjamin had chosen. It returns us to the Tiergarten and to the magic strokes of its water writing and to those other figures cut in stone, to the question of the Medusa and to the plea of Benjamin's reader for "biographical information" or "at least ... [his] autograph" in the letter from Gerschom Scholem that opened this essay. It was the most fascinating ring I had ever seen. In a dark solid garnet it presented [darstellte] a Medusa head .... Worn on the finger, the ring seemed simply the most perfect of signet rings. Only he entered into its secret who took it off and then contemplated himself [sic] with the head against the light. Since the various strata of the garnet were variously translucent, the thinnest, however, so transparent that it glowed with rose hues, one thought one saw the somber bodies of snakes of the head rise up above the brow under which two deep glowing eyes looked out from a face that with purple-black sides of the cheeks receded once more into the night.

Benjamin: Topographically Speaking Later I tried several times to seal with this stone; it showed itself to be easy to crack and in need of greatest protection. A short time after I gave it, I broke off my relationship with its new owner. (6: 493;33E)

A certain insight is offered here with the power of an illumination. Perhaps this, after all, is Benjamin's answer to the letter with which I opened. Perhaps the labyrinths of which (and in which) he writes, like the snakes of the Medusa head, are always moving. The skill of the gem cutter is such that only when one removes the ring and holds it to the light does one begin to understand. Benjamin is fixed by the glowing eyes of the Medusa in a gesture he insists on calling self-contemplation. 29 No doubt Benjamin tried to write, and if not to autograph, then to sign his letters with the ring that appeared, on the finger at least, to be the most perfect instrument for the purpose. But like the voice of his aunt, like the fragment from the metaphorical mine, it threatened to crack, and so he was forced to concede that its secret lay in distancing it from himself, in an act of mirroring contemplation. No doubt this is why, instead of his signature, he wrote the Berlin Chronicle.

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The Poetic Ground Laid Bare (Benjamin Reading Baudelaire) Drum, mein Genius! tritt nur Baar ins Leben, und sorge nicht! Therefore, my genius! just step into life, bare, and don't care! -Friedrich Holder/in II a suffi de quelques graffiti sur un mur pour que les souvenirs qui sommeillaient dans mes mains s'emparent de rna plume. Et pour que les doigts comandent Ia vue. Some graffiti on a wall were enough that the memories sleeping in my hands take over my pen. And that the fingers command the vision. -Edmond ]abes

I

According to Walter Benjamin, the emergence from the abyss characterizes the specific beauty of many beginnings of Baudelaire poems (1.2: 657). 1 The quality of beauty, the grounding category of a specific tradition of aesthetics-a quality that shifted the concept of aesthetics itself from a doctrine of perception to a philosophy of the beautiful-is staged here as a mise en abime of the poetic ground. The beginning of the poem, a ground at least for its unfolding, setting its tone, meter, and rhyme, opens up, through its beauty, to an Abgrund. Benjamin's formulation occurs close to the beginning of a manuscript of 46 unbound sheets of notes on Baudelaire under the u8

Poetic Ground Laid Bare somewhat enigmatic title of Central Park. 2 It is preceded by a critical note on certain conventions of literary criticism: "Lafargue's hypothesis about Baudelaire's behavior in the brothel sheds light on the whole psychoanalytic method that he applies to Baudelaire. This method is in complete complicity with the conventional 'literary historical' method" (1.2: 657). Most psychoanalytic and literary historical approaches to literature tend to base their claims on the presupposition of a firm ground, represented in a more or less stable metalanguage, to which the literary text can be causally linked or in which it finds its "proper" articulation. Benjamin's essays and notes on Baudelaire are part of an ambitious project to develop a theory and praxis of historical materialism. Benjamin did not invent this concept, but he found it necessary to rethink its consequences for cultural theory and critical praxis. To a certain degree, this rethinking takes shape as an implicit and explicit critique of most prevailing forms of "Marxist" criticism in the name of a return to Marx. Benjamin's critique seems to be aimed less at so-called "vulgar" Marxist attempts at drastically foregrounding the social and economic conditioning of cultural phenomena than at "sophisticated" cultural and historical theories that smuggled the formative terms of an idealist aesthetic tradition back into historical materialism. In order to attack the latter, Benjamin goes a long way to allow room for the former, or so it seemed to his friends Scholem and Adorno. Adorno saw the original sin of vulgar Marxism in Benjamin's essay: the construction of an unmediated, even causal connection between socioeconomic facts and cultural phenomena. I have shown elsewhere that Benjamin is doing something very different.J Yet if Benjamin's claim for the historical materialism of his project is to be taken seriously, the question of cause and ground cannot be simply discarded. When Benjamin began his critical project, the articulation of the relation of the socioeconomic and cultural spheres as a hierarchical relation of basis and superstructure was firmly established within Marxist discourse, no matter how different and complex the elaboration of this hierarchical structure might have been. The basis-superstructure relation has its clearest textual basis in Marx's preface to his "Political Economy," where it is presented in

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the form of an inversion. Marx's inversion of the hierarchy of consciousness and being is paralleled by his famous figural inversion of Hegel, who is to be turned from standing on his head to walking on his feet. The figure has its own vicissitudes that have been traced and read elsewhere. 4 In view of Benjamin's historical-materialist attempt at a reading in a Marxist frame that would suggest a grounding of poetic "superstructures" on a firm base, and the poetic mise en abime of the ground in the category of the beautiful, the question of inversionpresented also in Holderlin's poetological reflection as a poetological necessity-assumes a particular relevance. For Holderlin, inversion is a question of syntax, of Stellung, the position and arrangement of words or entire periods. The position and arrangement of the words, their Stellung, constitutes the Darstellung, the mode of presentation of the text. Is it possible to think of the Darstellung as a kind of primal inversion, that is, an inversion that turns a pre-positional being, the presupposed ground of what is presented, into its phenomenal position? Inversion could then be considered like one of the four labors of the dream in Freud's terminology as Rucksicht auf Darstellbarkeit, consideration for (re)presentability. But it is precisely the "re" of the representation that is radically bracketed through the inversion as a mise en abime of the pre-positional ground. Benjamin's gesture toward the abyss, however, seems at first glance much more local and limited, pointing only at the beauty of some beginnings of Baudelaire's poems, whereas the overall project of a historical-materialist reading of Baudelaire seems to aim precisely at a firm grounding of the poetry in its historical and socioeconomic context. One might even be tempted to see in this confinement of the abyss the difference between Benjamin's late work and his earlier writings, where poetry as a whole is assigned its ground in the ungroundable. Against Romantic and post-Romantic attempts at a quasi-religious transfiguration of poetry, Benjamin insists that "poetry does not descend from God, but rises up from the unfathomable realm [dem Unergrundlichen] of the soul" (1.1: 159). The unfathomable emerges at the point of the crucial difference between ground and origin that separates the work of art from ere-

Poetic Ground Laid Bare ation. As creator, the artist occupies God's position: primal ground ( Urgrund) and cause; as origin ( Ursprung), he signifies the place of a primal leap, or crack, or perhaps even of an inversion that knows no preceding version. The unfathomable soul then is less a romantic mystification than the result of a rigorous epistemological necessity that allows for a fundamental ground only in a theological discourse. When Benjamin returns to the intersection of ground and abyss in the book on the mourning play, the emphasis seems to have shifted to the ground of poetry and art. Against the "abyss of aestheticism" (1.1: 281) that Benjamin sees opening up in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, human existence is now claimed as a ground of art. Benjamin's grounding is articulated as an inversion of Nietzsche (1.1: 281-82). While Nietzsche (according to Benjamin) posits human existence as a product and projection of art, Benjamin posits art as a product and projection of a prejected existence. The human being is claimed as the subject of art in a complex way. The position of the Elective Affinities essay is asserted again, and with it the possibility of a nonground, an unfathomable abyss: the artist is not the creator of the work of art. The strongest possible mode of causality is negated. The artist as person seems to disappear completely from the subject position, where instead, his or her existence (Dasein) appears as an "eternal prejection." Human existence is posited as an ever preceding ground that seems to be subject more in the sense of an underlying ground than of a productive, active cause. Indeed the following genitive "of its formations" is ambiguous: read as an objective genitive, human existence could be understood as the formative subject of artistic formations, but read as a subjective genitive, art would be the formative agent on the ground of human existence. Dasein takes the position of a historical ground when Benjamin invokes against Nietzsche "the concept of the hard, the historical datum [Gegebenheit] of Greek tragedy" (1.1: 282). In the double quality-emphasized by the repetition of the article-of "the hard, the historical datum," the given has the "hard" resistance of being and the historical specificity of a Da. Yet it is not simply there. Benjamin invokes it as "the concept

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of the hard, the historical datum." The Da of the datum is always already prejected, a Vorwurf, that, once grasped, is a conceptum. The historicity of the Dasein is constituted by an "eternal before" ("Dasein als den ewigen Vorwurf") that as such is not graspable, but insists as a nagging reproach (the other meaning of Vorwurf) against any idealistic presumptions. Art, then, is founded (as Benjamin will always insist against the ideologies of the l'art pour l'art) on the hard ground of human Dasein. But this ground is ontologically not a primal ground, or an Urgrund, and epistemologically it is not a tangible presence, but the abyss of an eternally withheld before. TheDa of this ground is constituted by an irreducible Fort. II

If the hard ground of human Dasein also offers a firm ground for Benjamin's move toward the historical-materialist project that includes the essays on Baudelaire, we must ask what happens to the mise en abime of the ground in this project. The tone and content of the two completed essays, "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" and "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," seem to leave little room for discourses of the abyss. As if to guard themselves against this abyss, the two essays are marked by an almost ascetic sobriety that is reinforced by the seemingly brutal inscription of Baudelaire's poetry in its sociohistorical contexts, especially in the first of the two essays. Benjamin's second essay, "Ober einige Motive bei Baudelaire," is both a revision of the first essay and a new text. The revisions take Adorno's critique into account by refuting it in an implicit rephrasing of the question of the ground and the cause. The German title of the essay gives a hint: "Ober einige Motive bei Baudelaire." In German, the word Motiv connotes both the English "motive" and "motif." While Benjamin's essay clearly seems to refer to the literary motif, the other meaning, the motive as a causal motivating ground, also enters the problematic of the essay. Benjamin's choice of his title is overdetermined. Compared with the title of the first essay, it seems like an escape from the dangerous minefields of socioeconomic and political problems, whose

Poetic Ground Laid Bare treatment Adorno had criticized so strongly, to the realm of pure literary criticism. From "The Second Empire in Baudelaire" the essay modestly retreats to "Some Motifs in Baudelaire." The gesture is reinforced by a consideration of the place of this concept in German literary criticism. In Germany, the term gained prominence in Benjamin's time especially within a powerful trend of literary criticism that understood itself as geisteswissenschaftlich. Against a positivist tradition, it emphasized the inner formation of literary works as ideational products. Among its most prominent representatives were Wilhelm Dilthey and Oskar Walzel. Benjamin's title seems to place his second essay in a context that represents almost a polar opposite to the field delineated by the first essay. A reading of the essay will quickly dispel any notion of idealistic pieties under the sign of the motif. But there remains the sign, and its prominent position in the title turns it into a signal. Benjamin's title signals the bold strategy of implanting central terms from the "hostile" critical camp into his own criticism in order to radically transform them within a project of historical materialism. This transformation includes not only categories of the literary Geisteswissenschaft, but also those of Marxism and of the Frankfurt School. The concept of the literary motif presents us with the difficulties of the simple and evident: we seem to recognize a motif when we see it, but its definition as a concept is elusive. The word itself seems enigmatic. While its derivation from the Latin motivus, corresponding to the Greek kinetikos, suggests a moving force, its common associations point more toward stable, even static, fixed images and situations that tend to be repeated, sometimes stereotypically (especially in fairy tales and folklore), sometimes in refined and subtle variations. The stereotypical insistence of the repetition might indeed point at a strong motivating force, producing the motif with the insistence of a symptom. Psychoanalytic criticism did not miss this connection and proposed it in a Festschrift for Oskar Walzel in a constellation with Erlebnis. 5 Freud invokes the Motiv as an intersection of motive and motif in a letter to FlieB on October 27, 1897, at the moment when psychoanalysis begins to take shape: "In the determinating force I di-

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vine great, general frame motif/ve/s, as I might call them, and others, fill-in motif/ve/s that change with the experiences of the individual." 6 The motif appears as the material incarnation of the motive, the phenomenalization of a ground that opens up as an abyss. While the literary motif became a favorite object of formalistically oriented criticism, its foundation in the motive tends to explode the reassuring frames of formal and structural considerations. The points of irruption are seductive to metaphysical speculations. Against such seductions, the structuralist concentration on formalizable, repeated traits forms a certain counterforce of sobriety. The motif as a "typical situation that is ever repeatable" offers an initial ground of "structural stability" to the literary critic. 7 But the structural stability based in the repetition opens up in the critic's quest for its meaning: "The motif is a repeated, typical, that is [das heifit] therefore humanly significant [ bedeutungsvolle] situation." 8 In das heifit, "that is" or "that means," the bar that separates the signifier from the signified is introduced. It cuts through the identity of the stable structural frame of the motif. In the enumeration of typical lyrical motifs, the bar reappears as a gesture of transcendence, pointing at a beyond. Lyrical motifs such as "the flow of the river, the grave, the night, the sun rise, the farewell" are "genuine motifs" only when they are grasped as "significant situations," "pointing beyond themselves." And in the lyrical situation, this pointing beyond themselves consists in the fact "that they become the experience of a human soul" ("daB sie einer menschlichen Seele zum Erlebnis werden" ). 9 In the second essay on Baudelaire, Benjamin's critical concentration focuses on the conjunction of terms that might be called one of the strongest critical motifs from Dilthey to Kayser: the conjunction of Motiv and Erlebnis. Erlebnis, in this critical tradition, is the term of an irruption into the structural stability of the motif, a kind of transcendental signifier that guarantees its significance. III

The valorizing ground of the poetic motifs in the critical tradition opens as an abyss in Benjamin's reading of Baudelaire as the poet of modernity. The poetic motifs and their treatment in Baude-

Poetic Ground Laid Bare laire's poetry are read as a radical mise en abime of experience as a poetic ground and thus of poetry itself: "One cannot deny the fact that among his motifs are some (treated in this essay) that problematize the possibility of lyrical poetry" (1.2: 651). 10 Where the motif dissolves the motive of poetry, supplementary motivations take their place; where the rhetoric of the abyss tempts with intoxication, a calculated sobriety of style is called for. Benjamin introduces Baudelaire as a calculating poet. Rechnen ("to count," "to calculate," "to reckon") is the first activity attributed to the poet and is repeated twice on the same page: "Baudelaire hat mit Lesern gerechnet" (Baudelaire reckoned with readers); "Er rechnete mit einem Lesertyp" (He reckoned with a type of reader); "Es hat sich ergeben, daB das eine weitblickende Berechnung gewesen ist" (It turned out that this was a far-sighted calculation) (1.2: 607). The calculating will and clear consciousness of the poet are suggested as the ground of poetic production where other grounds are rapidly vanishing: "Baudelaire wanted to be understood" ("Baudelaire wollte verstanden werden") (1.2: 607). "Such poetry would suggest a high degree of consciousness; it would invoke the notion of a plan at work in its production. This is true of Baudelaire's poetry" ( "Eine solche Dichtung miiBte ein hohes MaB von BewuBtheit erwarten lassen; sie wiirde die Vorstellung eines Plans wachrufen, der bei ihrer Ausarbeitung im Werke war. Das trifft auf die Dichtung von Baudelaire zu" (1.2: 614). In the romantic tradition, calculating will and consciousness are usually perceived as a problematic, if not impossible, foundation of lyric poetry. But Benjamin's own theoretical framework also sheds a dubious light on such motivations. The frame is provided by Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Benjamin quotes as Freud's "fundamental" assumption that "consciousness originates in place of the memory trace" and "that becoming conscious and leaving a memory trace are incompatible within the same system" (1.2: 612). Consciousness would thus bar memory, the very source and ground of experience and poetry. As a protection and shield against stimuli (Reizschutz), consciousness seems questionable, even as an organ of perception. It appears as the source of Erlebnis (immediate experience) and thus as incompatible with Erfahrung (Benjamin's concept of true experience): "the more incessantly consciousness has to be

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Rainer Nagele on alert as a protection against stimuli, the greater is the success with which it operates, the less experiences [Eifahrungen] enter; the more the concept of immediate experiences [Erlebnisse] is fulfilled" (1.2: 615). The success of consciousness is the failure of true expenence. Benjamin introduces Baudelaire as a poet who makes his calculations in view of a very uncertain reading public: he "reckoned with readers for whom the reading of poetry posed difficulties" (1.2: 6o8). It is, however, a calculation riddled with strange inversions. Baudelaire seems to make his calculation with a "will to be understood" ("wollte verstanden werden") that demands a high degree of consciousness. His will to be understood is directed at a reading public that has very little "willpower" ("Mit ihrer Willenskraft ... ist es nicht weit her"). This apparent opposition between poet and readership is countered by the willful assimilation of the poetic "I" to the reader: "Hypocrite lecteur,-mon semblable,-mon frere!" At this point, Benjamin makes another inversion: "It is more productive if one reformulates [ umformuliert] the state of affairs [Tathestand] and says: Baudelaire wrote a book that from the outset had little prospect [Aussicht] for an immediate public success." But another piece of evidence counters this lack of prospect and turns it into a farsighted calculation: in the long run, Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal turned into the last mass success of a lyrical oeuvre. The vertiginous sequence of inversions leaves no ground unturned. If there was a lyrical tradition that had some kind of ground in the receptiveness of a readership, Baudelaire's investment in his readership builds its poetry on a ground more volatile than sand. But he invests with a cunning turn: he overinvests-not in the trustworthy, empathetic reader of the Romantic tradition, but in the untrustworthiness of the "hypocrite lecteur," declaring him as "mon semblable." If Romantic poetry is constituted in the suspension of the split between subject and object, in a lyrical identity, Baudelaire's apostrophe to the reader shatters this identity in the abyss of the minimal difference that separates identity from similarity. "Mon semblable" is born by the semblance of an almost identity that has its ground in the dissimulations of hypocrisy.ll Benjamin presents the situation in spatial terms of proximity

Poetic Ground Laid Bare and distance. On the side of the subject of investigation, the likelihood of the assumption presents itself as the proximity of the contiguity ("so liegt es nahe, sich vorzustellen"); on the side of the object of investigation, a lack of contiguity and proximity between poetry and the experience of the reader is perceived ("nur noch ausnahmsweise den Kontakt mit dem Leser wahrt"). But the observer who relies on what lies near at hand ( liegt es nahe) finds himself embarrassed, or literally "dislaid" ( verlegen), and perhaps also waylaid by his object and its changed structure. In this situation (In dieser Lage) of lying in the embarrassment of the unfamiliarity of what is near, the observer moves away from the nearest object-experience-and shifts into a sphere that conventional wisdom tends to place at a distance from experience: "In this situation one will search for an answer in philosophy" (1.2: 6o8). It is not self-evident that philosophy should be the most apt place for the search for the structure of experience. But one does encounter an interesting fact there ("stOB man auf einen eigenti.imlichen Sachverhalt"): "Since the end of the previous century it [philosophy] has staged a series of experiments [stellte sie eine Reihe von Versuchen an] to get hold of 'true' experience in contrast to an experience that results from the standardized, denatured existence of the masses" (1.2: 6o8). Philosophy can become the scene of an investigation of experience to the degree that it stages experiments and could thus be an Erfahrungswissenschaft, an experiential science. But Benjamin's vocabulary seems strangely inappropriate for the philosophy to which he refers as Lebensphilosophie. The rhetoric of this philosophy tends to emphasize the living, soulful, and spiritual human sphere as an irreducible object of its investigation, in contrast to the factual, "external" objects of the (natural) sciences. In the vocabulary of this philosophy, experience is more likely to appear in the lived, subjective, and immediate quality-emphasized as Erlebnis-rather than in the Erfahrung that continued to play a role in the "hard" sciences. Benjamin, whose valorization of Erfahrung against Erlebnis can be traced to his earliest writings, 12 seems to move into dangerous territory. It is the same territory where the motifs of Benjamin's title also play an important role, marked by Wilhelm Dilthey's influential

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book with its manifestolike title, Erlebnis und Dichtung. This book gives the signal to Benjamin's cool and violent attack: Dilthey's work is presented as "one of the first in the series" that "ends with Klages and Jung, who gave himself over to Fascism" (1.2: 6o8)Y According to Benjamin, the philosophy that speaks in the name of life and asserts the lived experience as the ground of poetry disregards the ground that Benjamin posited for all art in the mourning play book: the Dasein of man, which is here further qualified as the existence of man in society" ( "Dasein des Menschen in der Gesellschaft"). 14 Bergson's work Matter and Memory is granted a special position within life philosophy because "it preserves more than the others the relationship with the exact sciences" (1.2: 6o8). This scientific slant seems to immunize Bergson to a certain degree against the mystificatory retreat to poetry, nature, and myth that Benjamin criticizes in life philosophy. Yet it is Bergson who defines the "essence of experience in the dun~e in such a way that the reader must come to the conclusion that only the poet will be the adequate subject of such an experience" (1.2: 609). Benjamin, too, turns to a poet: to Proust. Just as he introduces Baudelaire as a calculating poet, he introduces Proust's work in terms of a scientific experiment: "One can look at Proust's work as an experiment to produce synthetically under today's social conditions the experience that Bergson had in mind" (1.2: 6og). Proust's work as a scientific experimental arrangement turns into an immanent critique of Bergson. Bergson's attempt to save "experience" in a willful turn to a contemplative vision of the flow of life is subverted by Proust's "involuntary memory" (memoire involontaire) that deprives the subject of any control over experience. Like any scientific experiment, Proust's experimental arrangement is the acknowledgment of the irreducible and uncontrollable function of contingency, chance, and accident. The volatile but productive function of contingency and chance in scientific experimentation is devastating for the ground of experience. In contrast to Erlebnis, experience as Erfahrung is not a matter of an individual subject, but is constituted by the symbolic order of a collective, a "matter of tradition" ("Sache der Tradition"; 1.2: 6o8). As a matter of tradition, it is both a cause (Sache) of tradition

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and caused by it. In the causality of tradition, experience enters into conflict with scientific causality to the degree that the principles of science emerge from a radical questioning of the authority of tradition. The unity of experience and experiment in the French experience is split. Proust's experimental staging of experience is the staging of this split. The abyss that opens up between experiment and experience becomes the scene for Benjamin's staging of Proust's and Baudelaire's work, with the stage directions of Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle."

IV In Freud's text, a curious combination of a transgression "beyond" all previous assumptions and apparent return to an earlier "pre-analytic" preoccupation with physiology, biology, and anatomy is presented in a vacillating mixture of scientific vocabulary and daring speculation that seems to restage Baudelaire's baroque extremes of "spleen and ideal." The baroque quality of many texts of modernism lies less in the juxtaposition of extremes-spleen and ideal, materiality and spirituality, puppet and angel, phenomenal and noumenal world-than in the gaping abyss that splits the phenomenal and perceptual world in such a way that it is both all and nothing, immanence without any recourse to a beyond of its split. Freud's "Beyond" is the inversion of the beyond in the irreducible immanence that Benjamin discovered in the Baroque. In this structure as much as in the thematization of memory, Freud's essay offers a commentary of Proust and Baudelaire for Benjamin. When Freud began to work on a series of metapsychological essays in 1915, his plans included not only the study on the unconscious but also one on consciousness. But while the text on the unconscious was written with apparent ease in the short period of three weeks, consciousness remained elusive, and the essay was never written. "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" is perhaps the closest approximation to a Freudian theory of consciousness. We may assume that this aspect, as much as the speculation on memory, accounts for Benjamin's insistent return to this particular essay of Freud. A strong tradition of the discourse on consciousness and per-

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Rainer Nagele ception 15 is intimately linked to the eye through a visual vocabulary that places the sphere of knowledge, perception, and the constitution of consciousness in the specular scenario of reflection. Benjamin's essay on Baudelaire reflects this tradition and at the same time radically revises it. The vocabulary of the eye and of seeing crystallizes in the scenario of the aura as a specular scene of the gaze: Inherent in the gaze is the expectation to receive a response from the one to whom it gives itself. Where this expectation (which can be attached, in the realm of thought, to an intentional gaze of attentiveness as well as to a gaze in the simple sense of the word) is answered, the experience of the aura is given in its plenitude.... The experience of the aura thus rests on the transfer of a form of reaction common in human society onto the relationship of the inanimate or of nature to the human being. The one who is looked at or thinks that he is looked at opens his gaze. To experience the aura of a phenomenon means to invest the phenomenon with the faculty to open its gaze. (1.2: 646-47) It is striking that Benjamin presents the exchange of the gaze in terms of two precapitalist economies: first, via a "primitive" economy of gift exchange in which the expectation rests on a gaze that gives itself as a gift (dem er sich schenkt), the gift produces the expectation of a corresponding gift, and where the exchange works, the plenitude of a gift is given (fiillt . .. in ihrer Fulle zu); then, via the word belehnen, which does not refer to capital investment, but means to invest someone with a fief, in which a feudal economy is evoked. The scene is further complicated by the fact that it rests on an initial transfer and displacement of a "literal" gaze to a metaphoric gaze. But is a gaze ever literal? Benjamin's phrasing is already a displacement of the German idiom die Augen aufschlagen ("to open one's eyes") to den Blick aufschlagen ("to open one's gaze"). In the slight metonymic shift from eye to gaze, a metaphoric abyss opens up that radically separates the gaze from any literal or empirical eye. Even the "gaze in the simple sense of the word" is different from the eye: no matter how intimately linked to the eye it seems, it is constituted by an irreducible distance from it.

Poetic Ground Laid Bare The difference between eye and gaze has the spatial structure of Benjamin's definition of the aura: "unique appearance of a distance, no matter how near it may be" (1.2: 440). The space of this difference is the space of experience as Erfahrung in Benjamin's description and also "a source of poetry" (1.2: 647). The disturbance of this space affects experience and poetry in a fundamental way. Benjamin's economic description of the aura indicates a certain discrepancy with the economy and production relations of modern capitalism. But while the descriptive terminology points at the economic relations, the analysis is primarily directed at the symptomatic phenomena of technology, perception, and their physiognomic effects. The aura is introduced in the Baudelaire essay at the moment when the eye of the camera threatens the glance. The eye of the camera is not a metaphor, it is the most literal eye: a pure optical apparatus for the registration of visual data. It is an eye without a glance and as such terrifying (as any organic eye is terrifying as soon as it is divested from the imaginary glance): "What must have been felt as inhuman, one might say even deadly, in the daguerreotype was this (by the way enduring) looking into the apparatus [Hereinblicken in den Apparat], while the apparatus receives the glance of the human being without giving back his glance to him" (1.2: 646). Benjamin's terminology registers an odd inversion of perspective: the looking into the apparatus is a Hereinblicken instead of a Hineinblicken. The looking is "seen" from the point of view of the apparatus. The eye of the analyst that looks at these photographs is located within the apparatus. The perception that perceives the reorganization of perception is an already reorganized perception. We can only hypothetically assume what perception was in earlier times: the looking into the apparatus "must have been felt as inhuman." There is something blinding in this reorganization of perception that cuts with a surgical knife between the eye and its glance. It is presented by Benjamin as a "blinding" experience: the "inhospitable, blinding experience of the epoch of the great industries" (1.2: 609). Yet any attempt to dose one's eyes against this blinding experience in the hope of saving one's vision does not preserve seeing but a phantasmatic "after image" (Nachbild).

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Rainer Nagele Bergson's Nachbild is contrasted with the "experience that steps undistorted ( unverstellt), in the figure of the reader, before Baudelaire's eyes" (1.2: 609 ). A blinding and blind figure leads to the innermost of the motifs in Baudelaire: a "chiffre" that "is found almost in all places of the Fleurs du mal where the glance from the human eye emerges .... It is the phenomenon that the expectation that thrusts itself toward the human glance is left unfulfilled. Baudelaire describes eyes of which one might say that they have lost the faculty of the glance" (1.2: 648). One might add that in this motif of Baudelaire the ground of his poetry is laid bare. 16 At the core of modernity, something happens to the eye. Benjamin describes it as a kind of evolutionary adaptation to new stimuli. The intervention of the camera not only exemplifies this training of the eye by technology, but concentrates it in a momentary shock that affects the moment as an Augenblick (literally, "glance of the eye"). The flash of the camera and its shock are triggered by the hand. In the essay "The Work of Art in the Age oflts Technical Reproducibility," Benjamin presents the appearance of photography as a fundamental shift from the hand to the eye: "With photography, for the first time the hand was relieved of the most important artistic tasks which now fell to the eye alone" (1.2: 436). But this apparent replacement of the hand by the eye is counteracted by the fact that it is a snap of the finger that takes the snapshot. In the Baudelaire essay, the snapping of the finger is inscribed in a paradigmatic series of abrupt motions of the hand: picking up the telephone receiver, striking a match, and above all, pushing the camera button. With the snap of the finger that makes the camera click, eye and hand are reorganized in a new, complex arrangement and interaction in which the eye is both devoured and objectifiedY The quick motion of the finger snaps away the glance from the eye and freezes the moment into a glacial photographic mirror that returns no gaze. 18 The technically equipped hand intervenes with a surgical cut between the eye and the gaze. Taking up a key term from Brecht, Benjamin characterizes the Handgriff as an Eingriff (intervention, often with the specific connotation of a surgical operation). Eingriff

Poetic Ground Laid Bare becomes the political counterterm to contemplation in Benjamin's later work. So forceful is the invasion of the term that it takes over even the simple adverbial emphasis of the French bien and tres. When Valery writes of a "temps bien distinct du notre," 19 Benjamin translates: "die sich eingreifend von der unsrigen unterschied" ("that was incisively different") (1.2: 475); when Valery writes of "des changements prochains et tres profonds," Benjamin translates them as "die eingreifendsten Veranderungen." The terminological intervention of the Eingriff sets up an entire scenario of operations and surgery. When Benjamin describes the Filmoperateur who "records the images in the studio by turning a crank" (1.2: 475), the operation of this Operateur still seems contained within a more general meaning of the word. Only a few pages later, however, the apparent contingency of associations evokes a full anatomical and surgical scenario. In a footnote, Benjamin illustrates and analyzes the rhetoric of the close human touch: To bring oneself into close human touch with the masses [Menschlich sich den Massen niiherbringen zu lassen] can mean: to erase one's social function from view. Nothing guarantees that a modern portrait painter captures more precisely the social function of a famous surgeon when he paints him with his family at the breakfast table than a painter of the sixteenth century who presents his physicians to the public in representative postures, as Rembrandt for example does in his Anatomy. (1.2: 479)

In this overdetermined passage of "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility," the seemingly casual appearance of Rembrandt's Anatomy and the cozy family portrait of the surgeon at breakfast set the scene for the final transformation of the Filmoperateur into a surgeon. In section n (of the third version), 20 the surgical scenario stages the cut that separates photography from painting and film from theater. The separation is staged as a construction based on "the concept of the Operateur as surgeon" (1.2: 495) that confronts the surgeon with the magician. Both operate with their hands: The surgeon presents one pole of an order that has the magician at the other end. The posture of the magician who cures a patient

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through laying on of hands is different from the surgeon who invades the patient through surgery [J:ier einen Eingriff in den Kranken vornimmt]. The magician preserves the natural distance between himself and the patient; more precisely: he decreases the distancedue to the laying on of the hand-only minimally, and increases it-due to his authority maximally. The surgeon proceeds inversely: he decreases the distance to the patient maximally-by penetrating into his interior-and he increases it minimally-through the carefulness with which his hand moves among the organs. (1.2: 495-96)

The somewhat macabre staging is the construction scene of a spatial inversion of distance and proximity. In the turn of the inversion, spatiality itself is marked by a categorical split. The invasion of the body by the surgical hand and instrument opens an interior that appears as utter exteriority from the point of view of the interiority that traditionally defines the space of the subject and (one might add) the space of the Classic-Romantic symbol. The anatomical and surgical scenario is overdetermined in this context. Dissection, fragmentation, and mutilation are part of the polemical rhetoric of the symbol against allegory. The surgical cut that separates the gaze from the eye brings into view the terrifying, naked eye and its organic destiny that leaves nothing but the empty eye cavities in the memento mori of the skull. The figure of this figuration appears in the apparent reduction of the body to its naked materiality as a surgically manipulated object. Laying bare the body's flesh, bones, and organs, the surgical hand points-in an eminently baroque gesture-at the creatureliness of the human subject that cannot be totalized by consciousness. It produces the specific remembrance of the dis/membered body that is the abyssal ground of Erfahrung. Proust's involuntary memory escapes the totalizing will of consciousness. Instead, it irrupts in the body in a literal remembrance of the members and limbs, as Benjamin remarks in a footnote: "Proust often treats these 'other systems' [of memory traces). Most often he represents them through the limbs, and he speaks untiringly of the memory images deposited in them, how they irrupt abruptly, without any beckoning from consciousness, into the limbs when a thigh, an arm, or a

Poetic Ground Laid Bare shoulder blade unwittingly comes into a position it occupied a long time ago. The memoire involontaire des membres is one of Proust's favorite subjects" (1.2: 613). At this point, the materiality of the body and its limbs is inseparably intertwined with the graphematic activity that Freud describes as the psychic apparatus. It is not a question of "body and soul," but of a graphematic shaping of somatic events that include the social and political bodies. 21 The graphematic body points at a physiognomic rather than psychological space of representation. Benjamin's Baudelaire essay (as well as his work on the Parisian arcades) is a reading of this physiognomic space shaped by a graphematic activity. Poe's poetic motif of the crowd gains its importance for Benjamin's Baudelaire as a graphematic choreography of movements and motions. "Even more amazing is the description of the crowd in the mode of its motions," Benjamin writes (1.2: 625), and he turns the attention to "the motif" that Poe "wrests from the moving crowd in the gaslight" (1.2: 629). Benjamin presents Baudelaire as a physiognomic figure, with his "eccentric play of facial features" (1.2: 616). This figure of the poet moves through a physiognomic space that is defined by the choreography of reflexes. Baudelaire is the choreographic counterfigure to Poe's man of the crowd: the latter's shoves and pushes through the crowd (1.2: 618) are received by Baudelaire as his exemplary Erfahrung (1.2: 652). In this arrangement of the scene, the poet's graphematic activity, his writing, appears in the figure of fencing. Benjamin singles out this figure of writing ("I go to practice my strange fencing") as the exemplary defense of the poet against the shock. Fencing presents the image (stellt das Bild) of this shock defense (1.2: 616). Fencing as a shock defense posits it in the function of consciousness. The figure of fencing as a paradigm for Baudelaire's writing reasserts Benjamin's earlier claim for the "high degree of consciousness" in Baudelaire's writing, implying Erlebnis rather than Erfahrung as the ground of poetry. Yet the configuration of consciousness and fencing also points at Kleist's essay on the marionette theater, where the fencing master invariably loses against the bear. But then it is the loser Baudelaire, going against the crowd

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Rainer Nagele "with impotent rage," who gives the weight of Erfahrung to the Erlebnis (1.2: 653).

v In its defeat, the shock defense of consciousness opens up to the abyss from which the specific beauty of so many beginnings of Baudelaire poems emerges. If the shoves and pushes of the crowd represent the figure of the social setting that conditions the poetic production, they are less a base and ground than an invisible foil of motility that directs the graphematic moves of the writing/fencing hand. Benjamin insists on the fundamental invisibility of the crowd in Baudelaire's poetry. In this graphematic space of reflexes rather than reflection, the jerking motions of the gambler at the gambling table can become the unlikely figure of the worker at the assembly line. Benjamin's historical materialism can be described as a shift from the representational models of mirror reflection ( Widerspiegelung) and the dialectics of specular self-reflection to a graphematic model of reflexive motility inscribing physiognomic traits and a concept of theory that opens up precisely at the moments of rupture between action and intention. This shift has fundamental consequences for aesthetics, and especially for the category of beauty. It is not certain that the modern beautiful ( "le beau moderne") is possible. It certainly has shifted its place in aesthetics: whereas the tradition of Classic-Romantic aesthetics is constituted by the philosophy of beauty, Benjamin returns to an earlier Kantian and pre-Kantian notion of aesthetics as a theory of perception. It is not at all certain that the beautiful is an object of perception. At least it is very paradoxical: essentially linked to appearance, to the phenomenal, and even to the sensual, it is constituted by something that is both an excess of perception and its lack. Its ideal codification in the visual and visionary is articulated through the invisible and the veiled. If this abyss between the visible and invisible is the ( un)ground of the beauty of an aesthetic epoch, the specific beauty of Baude-

Poetic Ground Laid Bare

laire's verses seems to emerge from a different abyss. It is paradoxically the closure of the aesthetic abyss (paradigmatically presented in the disappearance of the orchestra pit) that opens up the abyssal ground of Baudelaire's poetry. Its figure is the gesture oflaying bare: Baudelaire's heart mis a nu, laid bare in his name. Benjamin presents the gesture in a subtly signaled constellation with the final scene of the third act of Goethe's Faust 2. Euphorion, the incarnation of Romantic poetry, has plunged to his death; his body has vanished. Mephisto, in the figure of Phorkyas, picks up the remains: Euphorion's robe, coat, and lyre, and presents them to the audience: Hier bleibt genug, Poeten einzuweihen, Zu stiften Gild- und Handwerksneid; Und kann ich die Talente nicht verleihen, Verborg' ich wenigstens das Kleid. There is enough left over to initiate poets, to cause guild's and artisan's envy; and although I cannot lend the talents, at least I can lend the robe Mephisto/Phorkyas announces the end of the aesthetic age. There were enough nineteenth-century poets who were eager to borrow the poetic insignia and the robe in order to continue at least the illusion of an aesthetic age. Benjamin presents Baudelaire as the poet who refuses to borrow, in contrast not only to epigonal poets, but also to a philosophy founded on an illusionary experience of life: While Baudelaire, in the spleen and in the vie anterieure, holds the scattered fragments [auseinandergesprengten Bestandstiicke] of genuine historical experience in his hands, Bergson has alienated himself from history much more with his notion of the duree . ... It [the duree] is the quintessence of an Erlebnis that parades in the borrowed robe of Erfahrung. The spleen, in contrast, exhibits the Erlebnis in its bareness [stellt das Erlebnis in seiner Blofie aus]. (1.2: 643) The motif of this gesture is crystallized at the end of the essay in the emblematic figure of the poet who loses his aureole in the traffic of the boulevard and refuses to pick it up again. In a last gesture, Benjamin confronts Baudelaire with the poet-genius of Goethe's Wan-

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Rainer Nagele derer's Storm Song, who walks in exuberant spite against rain and wind. Baudelaire's gesture has no trace of exuberance: he moves against the crowd "with the impotent rage of one who walks against rain and wind" (1.2: 652). The coat of genius does not protect him; Erfahrung is laid bare as Erlebnis. Yet it is the gesture of laying bare the Erlebnis without any borrowed robe of Erfahrung that gives the Erlebnis the weight of Erfahrung. Benjamin describes this gesture, in a Brechtian term, as Einverstiindnis, "agreement," "consent" with the total shattering of the aura. Brecht's Learning Play of Agreement presents it in the motif of the Einverstiindnis with the storm. This Einverstiindnis with the utter negativity 0f the historical experience does not exclude a radical rage against it: they are identical, the abyss from which the specific beauty of some of Baudelaire's verses emerges.

Hans-]ost Frey

On Presentation in Benjamin

I

The problem of presentation (Darstellung) appears at the beginning of the preface to Benjamin's The Origin of the German Mourning Play, where the treatise is specified as the form of presentation of philosophy. This problem always recurs whenever what is to be presented is not given other than in presentation. Such is the case for truth. It is a basic thesis of the preface that truth is not an object of knowledge, but is inaccessible to knowledge. If it is the presentation of truth, philosophy cannot be the communication of cognitions except in such a way that the mode of communication leads beyond these cognitions. What is presented in presentation is not communicable. Presentation is not mediation. This means that what is presented is not what is said. Yet presenting is also always saying, since there is no language that does not communicate. Presenting, then, is a speaking or writing that never ceases to communicate, but 139

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that accomplishes beyond that something else from which communication is excluded. Since what is presented cannot be mediated, it cannot be situated outside language as something that would become accessible through language, but rather is given unmediated in language. Benjamin accounts for this by identifying the idea as a word. In order for it to appear, words must not be construed as signs, or instrumentally, but perceived differently. The idea is given "in a primordial perception in which words possess their denominating nobility, which has not been lost to cognitive meaning" (1.1: 216; Origin, 36). 1 The task of philosophy is "to restore in its primacy, through presentation," this original, noncommunicating character of the word (1.1: 217; Origin, 36). Presentation is thus the restitution of a language that is not the instrument of cognition and communication, to which it has been degraded in the course of its development, but rather is the language in which truth appears. This restitution can proceed only from communicating language, which is to be perceived differently. Discontinuity is the primary characteristic of the treatise. It appears as the "renunciation of the uninterrupted course of intention" (1.1: 208; Origin, 28). In place of a seamless continuity of argument or a chain of evidence, there is a movement of thought that again and again is interrupted and begins anew in order to approach the object over and over again from different angles. "This incessant pausing for breath is the mode most proper to contemplation" (1.1: 208; Origin, 28). The discontinuous treatise is presentation. It presents not by what it says, but by saying it intermittently. The pauses between the paragraphs are not the omission of something that could be said and that the reader must fill in, but rather the renunciation of linking them, that is, of grasping the relationship between them and of communicating it as something understood. Interruption opens up the treatise onto what is excluded from thinking, understanding, and saying. Presentation is not the communication of a sequence of thoughts, but the discontinuous arrangement of "fragments of thought" (1.1: 208; Origin, 29) whose coherence lies outside knowledge and flashes forth in the gaps and breaks. For Benjamin, presentation as detour is the methodological character of the treatise. As method, the discontinuous construction of the trea-

On Presentation tise is a deliberately employed and controlled procedure. On the other hand, the method is based on the insight that thinking, in whose realm such control remains possible, does not attain truth. Presentation must accomplish what is impossible for mere thinking. What is methodical in presentation can thus be understood only in this way: the inaccessibility of truth for knowledge forms the basis of the procedure. Presentation must take place in such a way that an opening ensues onto what lies outside the cognitively accessible. The method demands the inclusion within the thought process of what cannot be mastered. This occurs through the "renunciation of the uninterrupted course of intention." Such an attempt to establish discontinuity as method seems to amount to a surrender to unmasterable forces, which is contrary to the emphasis on the methodical. Method thus requires clarification. It can be developed as such only if the inclusion of the unmasterable permits the recognition of a certain systematic arrangement. One indication of this is the contemplation that Benjamin describes as incessant pausing for breath and that persistently circles the object. Other passages confirm how important it is for methodical advancement that one stick to the matter at hand. In the Berlin Chronicle, Benjamin compares remembering to an archaeologist's excavations in the ground of memory. Genuine memories must not be afraid to return again and again to the same subject matter, to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. "The subject matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, that yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all previous associations, that stand-like ruins or torsos in the collector's gallery-in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding" (6: 486; Reflections, 26). What is methodical in excavation is the return to the same subject matter. But even the "most meticulous examination" of the subject matter guarantees no discovery. That remains a matter of luck. The method of searching consists in making room for luck. The systematic organization of the search is necessary because one does not know where and what one will find. The discovery does not simply happen, at least not always, and this justifies the methodical search and the insistent questioning of the subject mat-

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ter. Even in the first version of the preface, Benjamin writes that "the truth content of the object can be grasped only by the most scrupulous immersion in the details of the subject matter" (1.3: 927; see also Origin, 29). On the basis of such passages, the idea of a methodical surrender to chance does not seem misleading in advance. What is methodical in the procedure of discontinuous presentation consists in abandoning the effort to insulate the characteristic linear progression of the argumentative discourse from the unexpected. By breaking off the discussion again and again and beginning it anew in the return to the matter at hand, luck is given room in which perhaps to clear the way for a discovery that the shortest path to the posited goal would have led past because it could not be foreseen. The treatise admits what stands at an angle to the planned course. The unavailable can only be admitted, not planned, but the searching readiness to let it enter is nonetheless a methodical measure, because it does not appear where no room is made for it. If the methodical character of the treatise consists in admitting the unforeseeable, and if this opening onto what is inaccessible to the "uninterrupted course of intention" is the discontinuous form of presentation of the treatise, then what is to be presented is not given in advance to presentation, but is only attained in it-one can hardly say through it. The treatise deals not with what is subordinated to the grasp of the concept, but with what shines through the interstices of the fragments of thought. This does not contradict Benjamin's remarks that philosophy is the presentation of ideas (1.1: 209; Origin, 29) and that ideas are preexistent (1.1: 210; Origin, 30 ), for as such they are not a possession that would be reproduced by presentation. Rather, they are something that precedes presentation, insofar as they are not brought forth by it, but they cannot appear other than in it, other than as what remains withdrawn. II

Presentation is a procedure for finding truth, which cannot be sought. This finding occurs in several of Benjamin's texts through listening to language as the unavailable preexistent. In a text from A Berlin Childhood, the word Kleptomanin ("female kleptomaniac"),

On Presentation

in which the name of its reader, "Benjamin," is also concealed, is heard in such a way that "a bared, evil intimation distorted the two syllables 'Ahnin' [ancestress], themselves already so ghostlike" (4.1: 277). The word does not remain limited to its acknowledged meaning, but rather brings forth relationships that lie outside its communicative function. Perceiving the word in this way is linked to a condition. A word bound up in a communication fulfills a specific task in the context of this communication. It conveys a meaning which acquires shadings depending on the context. But the word Kleptomanin will never be used in place of Ahnin. In order for the ancestress to be intuited in it, it must be extracted and isolated from the communicative context in which it stands. Only breaking through the textual structures of meaning divulges the relationships suppressed by the intended communication. When a word occurring in a text will break out in this way from communication and will be detached from its meaning depends in turn, however, on the context, although on a different context. If the kleptomaniac appears in a book illustration as "a woman in a white nightgown ... who wandered through a gallery with open eyes, yet as if asleep, lighting her way with a candelabra," then the link to the ancestress is produced (4.1: 277). Behind the order of communication, which is concerned with a sleepwalking kleptomaniac, another order is disclosed: the ghost of the ancestress. Apart from this example, the process may be conceived in the following way: a word that is torn out of the communicative context in which it has a specific meaning can be read other than with regard to this meaning. It can take up subterranean relations with other elements of the text and disclose a new context, one that is not conveyed, but that arises from the convergence of things having nothing to do with one another from the perspective of the text's structure of meaning. This convergence, for which Benjamin uses the image of the constellation, presupposes discontinuity. Just as the stars belonging to a constellation are unrelated for the astronomer, but for the astrologist constitute an order only as an image, so the words that are linked in a constellation must be read without regard for their position in the order of communication, to which at the same time they nevertheless belong. Communication continues to take place, but its articulation does

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not coincide with that of the constellation superimposed upon it. The transition from one to the other demands, however briefly, the suspension of the communicative function of language and an opening onto what is noncommunicative in it. This shines forth in the interruption of meaning achieved by the isolation of the word. In the constellation, the oblique links between words that break out of the linear path of communication are due to the room-giving discontinuity that Benjamin stresses as the sign of presentation. What is described negatively in terms of discontinuity appears positively in terms of verbal similarity. Discontinuity discloses something. The example of the kleptomaniac shows that the isolation of the word opens up new possibilities of relations. The eye for such possibilities has to do with what Benjamin calls the mimetic faculty, the ability to perceive and produce nonsensible similarities. This faculty, though not subordinate to the understanding, is nevertheless a faculty that is methodically applicable, or at least should be made so. As a faculty for recognizing similarities, it reveals something about the kind of relationships that discontinuity discloses. What was abruptly separated is reconnected by similarity, but differently, in a way that runs counter to an order that is valid on the surface. Discontinuity is thus important for the establishment of similarity, because the latter is concealed by the existing order. In a text, for example, the semantic context must be broken through in order for relationships of similarity to be produced. The concealed order of the constellation, which evades communication, will shine forth only when a word bursts out of its context. Discontinuity is thus a produced discontinuity, for it always refers to an existing order that blocks access to another. This existing order cannot be dispensed with, but it can be read in such a way that something emerges in it that it cannot deal with and that effectively disrupts it. This is the process that can be traced in A Berlin Childhood and Benjamin's short prose pieces, for which the "Doctrine of the Similar" supplies the following description: "Thus, the semantic context implicit in the sounds of the sentence is the basis from which something similar can become apparent instantaneously, in a flash" (2.1: 209; "Doctrine," 68). In both the example cited as well as Benjamin's reflections on

On Presentation

the mimetic faculty, one can easily recognize the affinity to the theory of presentation developed in the preface to the book on tragic drama. Nonetheless, a difficulty arises in the attempt to bring the two together. The task of presentation is to regain what is noncommunicative in language, which has been lost to "cognitive meaning" (1.1: 216; Origin, 36). How that occurs in specific texts of Benjamin's can be traced: 2 words are not only harnessed instrumentally into the communicative context, but also torn out of it and combined differently. This procedure of involving words in different orders simultaneously, which demands the fragmentation of one order for the benefit of another, is now applied to the treatise. Yet here it is no longer words that are isolated, but parts of texts, excerpts, chapters. The role that fell to the word Kleptomanin within one text is now that of a paragraph within the treatise. The theory of presentation can thus be seen as the transfer of the theory oflanguage from the word to the text. This is not to say that essays in linguistic theory deal only with the word, but that the analogical application of the relation between word and text to the relation between the parts of a text and its whole is new in the preface to the book on tragic drama. Its implications are considerable, for it is also the basis for the construction of Benjamin's late texts. However one wishes to interpret the montage, which Benjamin describes as the method of the Arcades project, its principle remains the discontinuity of what is assembled, and if in this context he writes "I have nothing to say. Only to show" (5.1: 574; N1a, 8), then it becomes clear that what is to be presented here is what lies outside the communicable. The concept of the treatise as presentation elaborated in the preface should thus also give access to the last of Benjamin's completed works-the Baudelaire essays. Yet it is not immediately clear how this can be the case. The difficulty begins with the attempt to derive a theory of the text from the theory oflanguage. It is relatively easy to show how a word breaks out of the communicative context to which it also belongs and shifts to another order overlaid on the first. This dual position of the word in the text does not seem transferable to the role of the paragraph or chapter in the treatise. Here there seems to be not superimposed orders, but rather only the one characterized by the interruption of intention and the pausing for

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Hans-]ost Frey breath, whereby the abruptness of the parts on the level of the argumentation makes them appropriate for the presentation of truth. What seems to be lacking in the treatise is an already existing order that must be ruptured in order to divulge another. But the demand for discontinuity, which necessarily refers to a continuity whose overcoming makes presentation possible in the first place, also means that such an order already exists for the treatise. On the other hand, the discontinuous structure of the treatise indicates that its parts already appear in it as fragments that have broken out of the order to be overcome. The treatise, as presentation through fragments of thought, can be seen as thoroughly analogous to those texts in which words appear in a context other than that of semantics. These words correspond to fragments of thought (paragraphs, chapters), and the order outside of communication in which they appear corresponds to the presentation of truth. Benjamin's thoughts on the citation give certain indications of how abruptly colliding texts can form constellations. The citation appears as a fragment in new surroundings, which can suddenly open up in it new dimensions that could not previously be anticipated. The process of citation montage, which plays an important role in the context of the Arcades project, opens up the possibility of such unforeseeable relationships, which arise from brusque confrontation and have nothing to do with the intentions of the participating texts. In his essay on Karl Kraus, Benjamin gives the example of the pomegranate tree ( Granatbaums) from Romeo and Juliet, which unexpectedly becomes the shot-up tree about which a soldier in the First World War writes home (2.1: 363; Reflections, 269). The relationship between the two texts is produced here by a word that, by darting over from one context to another, shines forth in the isolation of its unavailable quality as name. III

The two comparisons with which Benjamin illustrates presentation are applicable both to the treatise as discontinuous presentation as well as to the noncommunicative order in which words converge once they break away from communication. The better-

On Presentation known of these comparisons is to the mosaic, which is noteworthy through the superimposition of two orders. The contours of the image do not coincide with the boundaries between the individual shards. The image emerges out of disparate elements. It shines forth out of ruins. The two orders are those of the subject matter and the truth content. In order to get from one to the other, one must leave the order of the shards and focus the gaze on the order of the image. This corresponds to the other reading of the word, in which one no longer seeks its meaning, but finds another word. In his essay on Elective Affinities, Benjamin compares this superimposition of subject matter and truth content to the palimpsest. In the first version of the preface to the book on tragic drama, there is a further comparison, later effaced, but that is important with regard to the later Baudelaire essays. Benjamin mentions here "the increasing evaporation of the subject matter (offacts and words) in which an interpreting contemplation has to view the receptacle of truth content. The glassier the walls of this receptacle appear (to continue the image), the more visible the truth content enclosed in it" (1.3: 927). This comparison describes how the transition from one order to another takes place. There is no path to truth content other than by way of the subject matter. But since the latter, as the object of communication, conceals the truth content, it must evaporate so that the truth can be divulged. In this process of evaporation (increasing evaporation), the subject matter becomes transparent. Whatever becomes transparent does not become nothing at all, but remains something that conceals, though only in such a way that it is at the same time permeable to what it conceals. Likewise, language can become transparent to its original quality as name without ceasing to communicate as a result. This process by which words and texts become transparent is accomplished by the discontinuity that determines the construction of Benjamin's texts following the book on tragic drama and seems to indicate that they are to be read as presentation in the strict sense of the preface. An early reference to the affinity of the book on tragic drama to the mosaic appears in connection with its accumulation of citations in a letter to Gerschom Scholem of December 22, 1924: "Yet above all I am surprised that, if you will, what is written consists almost

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entirely of citations. The most fabulous mosaic technique that one can imagine, which might appear so strange for works of this sort that I will probably retouch the fair copy here and there" (1.3: 881). The letter suggests that the beginning of the preface is to be understood as the attempt to clarify the particular process of presentation, which evidently evolved more on its own in the course of writing the book than by plan. Only the comparison of the treatise to the mosaic remained in the final version of the preface. One may wonder how Benjamin approached presentation with the aid of comparisons. These do not communicate, but show. The glass receptacle and the mosaic make relationships visible instead of saying them. That links the comparison to presentation, to which it is supposed to lead. If presentation makes accessible what cannot be communicated, and if the comparison does not communicate, but makes visible, then the comparison is presentation. What it presents, however, is presentation itself, and what the case of the mosaic makes clear is that it is itself an image, and therefore presentation. The comparison, seen as presentation, is not illustration. It cannot be dismissed as a visualization of something that would otherwise already be said, but rather presents what cannot be communicated in any other way. Yet if comparison is presentation, it cannot be transposed into communicative language. Presentation itself is then something that cannot be said, only presented. The comparison is not only visualizing, but is also necessary and thus cannot be analyzed. Certainly, Benjamin strives in the case of both the mosaic and the glass receptacle to elaborate thoroughly their relationship to the treatise, yet this and many other Benjaminian comparisons owe their effect not to their translatability, but rather to the unanalyzable remainder that makes the relationship between the terms of comparison into presentation. In the case of the comparison of the treatise and the mosaic, this relationship is formulated in the preface as an affinity: "what makes their comparison possible is genuine affinity" (1.1: 209; Origin, 29). There is a note from 1919 concerning this concept entitled "Analogy and Affinity" (6: 43-45). 3 As a similarity based on the equality of relations, analogy can be rationally analyzed. Affinity, on the other hand, can "be immediately perceived solely in feeling (neither in intuition nor in ratio)" (6: 45). "The

On Presentation

essence of affinity is enigmatic" (6: 43). For Benjamin, this depends on analogy and affinity having nothing to do with another. Analogy does not establish affinity, nor is affinity expressed in analogy. But there is a similarity that is not, like analogy, a metaphorical one, and that may well anticipate what Benjamin in a later text calls the nonsensible similarity. Wherever what is similar "turns out to be superior to analogy-which in the end may turn out to be the case everywhere-it can be the herald of affinity" (6: 45). This holds true for the relation between treatise and mosaic. If genuine affinity makes their comparison possible, then similarity here proclaims affinity, and the comparison does not construct an analogy, but is an accomplishment of feeling and is not rationally analyzable. The comparison is thus no mere illustration of the treatise by means of the mosaic. It is irreducible because it only attains its terms of comparison through the affinity that it proclaims. Treatise and mosaic are not measured against one another as existing quantities, but are experienced as what they are-kindred-only in the comparison. Affinity cannot be proven argumentatively, but may well be presentable, in the sense of the preface in which the comparison appears. What is specific to the comparison between treatise and mosaic made possible by affinity is that it makes them comparable. As forms of presentation, they make accessible what lies outside the jurisdiction of the ratio. Their affinity is their presentational relationship to what is withdrawn. This cannot be rationally displayed, but is presented in the comparison. The comparison is not, as it may first appear, an illustration or elucidation of presentation, but rather is the presentation of presentation. In other words, the comparison of the treatise with the mosaic has itself the character of the treatise. The fact that both relationships cannot be rationally constructed, or at least cannot be restricted to such a construction, creates between them this discontinuity in which the affinity shines forth for feeling. Many of Benjamin's comparisons are presentation in the strict sense. They arise not out of metaphorical similarities, but out of the mystery of affinity. In them, what is compared comes together unforeseeably. The comparison between treatise and mosaic that turns out to be a presentation turns out, furthermore, to be the text

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Hans-fost Frey that, as presentation, postulates presentation as the method of the treatise. Benjamin's theory of presentation becomes accessible not through an argumentative deduction, but as a presented one. Presentation is not a process that can be mastered, and comparison is not an available instrument. Neither can be experienced anywhere except where it occurs. These reflections make it clear that when Benjamin makes a further attempt to approach the essence of the treatise, he once again brings it into a relationship of comparison. This occurs in the piece "Interior Decoration" from One- Way Street: The treatise is an Arabic form. Its exterior is uninterrupted and unobtrusive, like the facades of Arabian buildings, the articulation of which begins only in the courtyard. So, too, the articulated structure of the treatise is invisible from outside, revealing itself only from within. If it is formed by chapters, they have not verbal headings but numbers. The surface of its deliberations is not pictorially enlivened, but covered with unbroken, proliferating arabesques. In the ornamental density of this presentation the distinction between thematic and excursive expositions is abolished. (4.1: m; Reflections, 82) This text, which at first glance seems somewhat distant from the beginning of the preface to the book on tragic drama, nevertheless corresponds to it in a series of traits. The order of the treatise is not derived externally, because it cannot be traced back to a dominating authority external to it. It is set up from the inside, in the completion of the text, and thus also cannot be described from the outside, such as through chapter headings. Furthermore, this order is not linear but planar. Straight, purposeful movement thus cannot be distinguished from divergent, oblique, "digressive arguments." The planar, gridlike qualities of the treatise recall the oblique connections between words that are torn out of the context of their linear communication. Finally, the emphasis on the ornamental as opposed to the pictorial points to the noncommunicative aspect of language that always announces itself wherever the oblique interrupts linearity. Since the ornamental, as nonrepresentational, is always already constituted beyond communication, its articulation, an "unbroken proliferation," is not to be understood as the con-

On Presentation

tinuity of speaking. It is rather always already constellated presentation, which, because it is without content, does not have to assert itself against another order, nor does it have to rupture such an order. Instead, it can expand as an endless, rhythmical selfcompletion in space. Thus, in "Sevilla Alcazar" Benjamin writes of the Moorish rooms: "In them dance and silence become leitmotifs, because all human movement is absorbed by the quiet bustle of the ornament" (4.1: 123). The comparison of the treatise with Arabic form is as little analyzable as that with the mosaic. Rather, both lead, spatially and temporally, into an exotic strangeness outside of the familiar, which has the semblance of the available. IV The attempt to read Benjamin's essays on Baudelaire with regard to their character as presentation would have to question, as a result, whether one can detect in them the kind of superimposition of orders described in the theoretical writings. In On the Mimetic Faculty, the relation of these orders is described as follows: "Everything mimetic in language can, like a flame, manifest itself only through a kind of vehicle. This vehicle is the semiotic element" (2.1: 213; Reflections, 335). The vehicle that is consumed so that the flame can appear recalls the evaporating subject matter through which truth content becomes visible or the evaporation of the meaning of the word Kleptomanin that allows the ancestress to appear in it. In the treatise, it appears difficult to determine the order of the vehicle, because discontinuity is made into its principle of construction. Here it is not words, but pieces of text or fragments of thought that are torn out of a context. In the case of a word, it is torn out of its context in being read other than with regard to the meaning it usually has. What in the end is read or, as the preface puts it, perceived differently, is language. The discontinuity of the treatise is also established by reading differently. But since here it is not words that are torn out of their usual order, here it is not the language of words that is read differently. The treatise reads differently what it is concerned with. For Benjamin's late texts, that means it reads history differently. The dis-

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continuity of the treatise breaks open a valid representation of the order of reality and history and replaces it with a new, constellative order. That presupposes, in the first place, that reality can be conceived as a text: "To speak of the book of nature indicates that one can read the real as a text. This is how one should handle the reality of the nineteenth century. We are opening the book of what has happened" (5.1: sSo; N4, 2). In the second place, it is presupposed that this text is always already read, interpreted, and understood. Only because everything is explained, that is, brought into relationships and thereby bound into a continuity that leaves no room for what cannot be organized into comprehensible connections, the task is posed of disturbing this continuity and reading differently. This different reading occurs as presentation. "There is a tradition that is catastrophe." In opposition to it, phenomena are "saved by pointing out the leap in them" (5.1: 591; N9, 4). It is thus a question of locating what is disruptive in the text of reality, what ruptures the continuity of its context, "words" that, once isolated, come together in a constellation. What occurs in a text from A Berlin Childhood with the word Kleptomanin can occur in the text of reality with certain phenomena that, read differently, converge in a new order. This can be demonstrated in "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire." The subject of the first chapter is the boheme. At its outset, there is a quotation from Marx about professional conspirators. It is said of them that "their uncertain existence, which in specific cases depended more on chance than on their activities, their irregular life, whose only fixed stations were the taverns of the wine dealers" (1.2: 513; Baudelaire, 12), identify them as members of the boheme. The boheme is a group of people who, for whatever reason, lead a disordered life characterized by abruptness. It is the community of outsiders, the community of those who have had a falling out with society and who remain apart from its order. Besides the professional conspirator discussed at the beginning of the chapter, Benjamin takes into account the man of letters, whose position is discussed at the end of the chapter. The figures that come together in the boheme have little to do with one another in their orientations. They are linked not by a common interest, but by the fact that they

On Presentation have all somehow fallen out of society. They belong together as those who do not belong. The boheme thus has the structure of a constellation. But it differs from one, because the figures united in it do not form an order that could be superimposed on the existing order. For Benjamin, the constellation is an order of relationships that was concealed by an existing order and is divulged by the isolation of its elements. But here, what connects is only isolation within the existing order. Isolation itself is what establishes the connection. Discontinuity here is not the suspension of one order so that another can become visible; rather, what is discontinuous is similar to itself as such. Even the similarities discussed later between the conspirator and the man of letters, as when it is said of Baudelaire that he conspires with language itself (1.2: 601), are primarily consequences of the break with continuity that constitutes the boheme. Isolation as what establishes relationships is embodied in the ragpicker, whom Benjamin introduces between the conspirator and the man of letters. "The ragpicker cannot, of course, be part of the boheme. But from the man ofletters to the professional conspirator, everyone who belonged to the boheme could recognize a bit of himself in the ragpicker" (1.2: 522; Baudelaire, 20). In the ragpicker, the limit of misery is reached. He, too, is one who has fallen out of the social order, but to such an extent that he no longer belongs even to the community of those who do not belong. He is the isolated appearance of isolation and thus the figure for what constitutes the boheme as a constellation. As a result, those who belong to it can recognize something of themselves in him. This characteristic of the boheme must now be seen in the context of the problem of presentation. The boheme is the object of Benjamin's text. It is what makes apparent that the text has the structure of a treatise. Regardless of whether the text is presentation in the sense of Benjamin's theory, the boheme is an order based on discontinuity, and thus a figure of presentation. This sheds some light on Benjamin's choice of objects. He does not select arbitrary objects from the text of history in order to isolate them, but rather selects those that present in their structure what happens to them in presentation. This is also true in large measure of the arcade. In an early description, the disparate offerings of the shops and services

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Hans-lost Frey gathered in the arcade appear as a collection of things that do not belong together, in which discontinuous things confront one another abruptly, but in such a way that relationships ensue. "If a cobbler's shop neighbors a confectionery, then its shoelace hangings become licoricelike.... Combs, frog green and coral red, swim as in an aquarium" (5.2: 1042). The arcade described here is an allegory of presentation in the sense of the preface to the book on tragic drama. The relationship between object and presentation can be explicitly shown in the text on the boheme through the figure of the ragpicker. As the embodiment of isolation, the ragpicker is the emblematic figure of those excluded who come together in the boheme. But he is not only the most excluded of all, but also the one who is exclusively concerned with exclusion. He collects the refuse that has been excluded as unusable, so that it can be utilized anew. He thus stands not only for isolation as the ordering principle of the boheme, but also for presentation, which occurs as a montage of scraps. In one of the most important fragments on the method of the Arcades project, Benjamin identifies himself with the ragpicker: "Method of this work: literary montage. I have to say nothing. Only to show. I will pilfer nothing valuable and appropriate no witty formulations. But the rags, the refuse: I want not to inventory them, but rather to let them come into their own in the only way possible: by using them" (6.1: 574; N1a, 8). Among the figures of the boheme, the poet has a special position. He maintains a secret affinity not only with the conspirator, but also with the historian, whose text presents this affinity. The title, "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire," specifies Baudelaire as the one who not only lives in the city and experiences it as others do, but also presents it. How this happens is a central question in Benjamin's text. In order to answer it, it is important that Baudelaire himself in "Du vin et du haschisch" (Of wine and hashish) compares the poet to the ragpicker, of whom, after a detailed description, he writes: "He arrives shaking his head, stumbling on the pavement like young poets who spend all their days wandering and looking for rhymes." 4 The passage is similar to the later description of the poet as fencer in "Le soleil" (The sun). Benjamin has dealt with both in detail ("Baudelaire," 1.2: 582-83;

On Presentation Baudelaire, 618). Since both Benjamin and Baudelaire understand themselves as ragpickers, a parallel arises between Baudelaire's relationship to the big city and Benjamin's relationship to this relationship. This can best be specified by way of the interpretations of poems that are interspersed throughout Benjamin's text.

v In connection with the remark that the weakest point of Baudelaire's view of modernity is his theory of modern art, Benjamin says that what is not achieved by the theory is attained to a higher degree in the poetry. This indicates already that it is less a matter of communication than of presentation. "None of the aesthetic reflections [in Baudelaire's theory of art] presented modernity in its interpenetration with classical antiquity, as occurs in certain poems of the Fleurs du mal." Thus, the poems rank as presentation of this interpenetration: Among these, the poem "Le cygne" [The swan] is paramount. It is no accident that it is an allegory. This city, which is in constant flux, grows rigid. It becomes as brittle as glass, but also, like glass, transparent-that is, in regard to its meaning-("The form of a city I Changes faster, alas, than the heart of a mortal"). The stature of Paris is fragile; it is surrounded by symbols of fragility-living creatures (the Negress and the swan) and historical figures (Andromache, the "widow of Hector and wife of Helenus"). Their common feature is sadness about what was and hopelessness for what is to come. In the final analysis, this decrepitude [Hinfiilligkeit] constitutes the closest connection between modernity and antiquity. Wherever Paris occurs in the Fleurs du mal, it bears the signs of this decrepitude. "Le crepuscule du matin" is the sobbing of an awakening person reproduced in the material [Stoff] of a city. "Le solei!" shows the city threadbare, like an old fabric in the sunlight. The old man who resignedly reaches for his tools day after day because in his old age he has not been freed from worry is the allegory of the city; and old women-"Les petites vieilles" -are among its inhabitants the only spiritualized ones. That these poems have traveled through the decades unchallenged they owe to a reserve that shields them. It is the reserve against the big city. (1.2: 585-86; Baudelaire, 82-83)

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Hans-]ost Frey The return of the metaphor of glass from the first version of the preface links the passage with the question of presentation. The city of Paris becomes transparent with regard to its meaning. This process of becoming transparent has to do with the rapid architectural changes undergone by the modern big city. For Baudelaire, the process of renewal, generally seen as progress, is decay. In everything new, the ruins that sooner or later it will become are always already recognizable. This decrepitude that the new shares with the old links modernity with antiquity. As the city becomes transparent, decrepitude is also what becomes visible as its meaning. What is particular to it and disclosed only by taking Benjamin's metaphors strictly is that contrary to superficial appearance, the meaning does not lie beyond the glass and is not viewed through it. Rather, this becoming transparent is itself the signified decrepitude. "The stature of Paris is fragile." This fragility is that of the glass itself, through which it is perceived. The glass is not only transparent, but also brittle. Benjamin here metaphorically exploits this additional quality of glass. The glassy city is transparent to fragility as its meaning, but it is transparent as the glassy and therefore breakable city that it is. A similar metaphorical crossing, in which the medium through which the gaze passes is at the same time what is viewed beyond it, is found later in the text, where the sobbing of someone awakening appears "reproduced in the material [Stoff] of a city." Stoff here is the material out of which something is fabricated. But when in the next line the city is shown "threadbare, like an old fabric in the sunlight," then Stoff also becomes cloth as the translucent veil through which, as through the glass, the decrepitude of the city becomes visible as its meaning. The comparison of the cloth with the threadbare fabric confirms and amplifies the link observed in the glass between transparency and fragility. The fabric becomes transparent when it becomes thin. But what appears first of all in the wearing away of the cloth is not something on the other side of the cloth, but the thread grid originally cast on the weaving loom, which can quite properly be called the skeleton of the cloth. Even more clearly than the city of glass, the city compared to the threadbare fabric is recognizable as the allegory of its own decrepitude. This allegorization of the city has to do with the experience of

On Presentation

discontinuity, even if this text of Benjamin's does not explicitly speak of it. The transformation of the city is also always a demolition. In order for something to become transparent to its endangerment, it must be torn out of the structure supporting it and isolated. A series of figures in the second part of Baudelaire's poem "Le cygne" stand for this: the Negress, the orphan, the shipwrecked sailor, who have in common the loss of the context in which they belong and from which they are exiled. In Baudelaire's imagination, they form, by not belonging, a community that viewed structurally, as a collection of disparate exiles, is entirely comparable to the boheme.

This comparison makes readable an affinity between Baudelaire's treatment of the city and Benjamin's treatment of the boheme. They have in common the fact that the elements isolated out of an existing order do not constellate into a new order, but are linked only negatively, in one case by their isolation, in the other by their decrepitude. One can hardly speak here of superimposed orders, as in the mosaic or the texts of A Berlin Childhood, for here discontinuity brings forth no new order. Just as the professional conspirator has no coming order in mind, but is destructive only "out of indignation against the prevailing injustice" (5.1: 428; ]61a, 3), so discontinuity in Baudelaire is not the transition to something new, but is itself the experience presented. In "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Benjamin attempted to clarify this point with the support of Freud's theory of shock by investigating, more thoroughly than in the first version, the meaning of the crowd for Baudelaire. The experience of the big-city crowd is one of a discontinuity that cannot be overcome and that is unsettling, since one is at its mercy. In contrast to other poets who attempt to suppress or harmonize this experience, Baudelaire is the only one, according to Benjamin, who exposes himself to it. The way this occurs can be inferred from an interpretation of the poem "Le soleil" that is found only in the "Motifs" essay. Benjamin cites the passage from Baudelaire's letter to Arsene Houssaye calling for a prose that would correspond to the discontinuity of the experience of the big city and follows it with a consideration of the relationship between the crowd and language:

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Hans-fast Frey This passage suggests two insights. For one thing, it tells us about the close connection in Baudelaire between the figure of shock and contact with the big-city masses. For another, it tells us what is really meant by these masses. These are not classes or any sort of collective; they are nothing but the amorphous crowd of passersby, the public in the streets. This crowd, whose existence Baudelaire never forgets, did not serve as the model for any of his works, but is imprinted on his creativity as a hidden figure, just as it presents the figure concealed in the above-quoted fragment. We may decipher the image of the fencer from it; the blows he deals are meant to open a path through the crowd for him. To be sure, the faubourgs through which the poet of "Le soleil" makes his way are deserted. But the hidden constellation (which renders the beauty of that stanza transparent to its very depth) can probably be understood thus: it is the phantom crowd of words, fragments, and beginnings of lines with which the poet, in the deserted streets, fights the battle for the poetic booty. (1.2: 618; Baudelaire, 119-20) As in the interpretation of "A une passante" (To a passerby), Benjamin here invokes the crowd as what Baudelaire does not explicitly mention but what, unnamed, determines the events described in the poem. The crowd is "imprinted on [Baudelaire's] creativity as a hidden figure." Here it serves Benjamin's decipherment of the image of the fencer. This self-presentation of the poet, who in the streets of Paris battles with language, trips over words, and stumbles into rhymes, "is probably the only place in the Fleurs du mal where he is shown at his poetic labors" (1.2: 571; Baudelaire, 68), and as such it is taken especially seriously by Benjamin. The attempt to read it with regard to the crowd encounters the difficulty that the streets in "Le soleil" are deserted. But in Benjamin's interpretation, the crowd is replaced with "the phantom crowd of words." The relation to language is the figure for the relation to the crowd. This comparison makes the text into a condensed version of Benjamin's theory of presentation. In the first place, the relation to language is similar to the relation to the crowd because it is determined by it. The discontinuous form of the life of the city dweller and the blows he receives and delivers in the crush of the throng are, for Baudelaire, not simply an object for discussion, but rather

On Presentation

encroach on the language he uses to speak of them. The social relevance of Baudelaire's poetry does not consist primarily in taking up socially relevant motifs, but in experiencing language like the crowd and words like passersby. On the basis of this similarity arising from the infection of the linguistic by the social, the relation to language in "Le soleil" can be interpreted as an allegory for the relation to the crowd. It is important that this allegory can be established only by characterizing language not as an available means, but rather as something to which the writer is exposed and over which he battles constantly to prevail. The language with which one struggles is not instrumental, but resists control. The "poetic booty" -the poemis not acquired through it, but in it and out of it. It is won away from it. The language that frees itself from dependance on the writer and encounters the fencer as an adversary no longer stands in the service of communication. The noncommunicative emerges out of it. It is language, experienced as unavailable and incalculable, that is comparable to the crowd, to whose motions one is exposed and in which one attempts to assert oneself with sudden reactions. But the metaphors in the poem "Le soleil" in which the poet regards himself are not metaphors for whoever actually experiences language in the manner described. He does not speak metaphorically, but presents. He presents in the precise sense of not saying. The experience of the crowd is not communicated, but is transposed into an experience of language and a way of speaking. The poem is presentation, not as a statement, but by the abruptness of its linguistic gesture. Benjamin has repeatedly emphasized the brusqueness of Baudelaire's language. In connection with "Le soleil" he speaks (misreading Baudelaire's text somewhat) of "fragments" and "beginnings oflines." But the "feints of prosody" and the "uninterrupted series of small improvisations" (1.2: 573; Baudelaire, 70 ), as he conceives Baudelaire's work, also belong here. Likewise the "brusque coincidence" of everyday vocabulary and allegory in which, according to Benjamin, Baudelaire's linguistic spirit is to be captured (1.2: 603; Baudelaire, 100). Characterized by its discontinuous linguistic gestures rather than by its thematics, Baudelaire's poetry is for Benjamin the presentation of the experience of the big-city crowd, and the crowd is the hidden figure stamped on his creativity. As what is

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Hans-lost Frey presented, the crowd is unavailable and is withdrawn from the control of whoever is exposed to it. Here, too, discontinuity opens up no new order, and presentation does not go beyond the experience of its withdrawal. The metaphors of this interpretation of "Le solei!" maintain relationships throughout to Benjamin's theory of presentation. The relationship between the unstructured "amorphous crowd of passersby" and the "phantom crowd of words" engaged by the fencer appears as "the hidden constellation" that "renders the beauty of that stanza transparent to its depth." In the image of the fencer, the relation to language and the relation to the crowd are conjoined in a constellation. It is hidden, because it is accessible only when the relationship to language becomes transparent with regard to its meaning. In this becoming transparent, beauty (which, in the essay on the Elective Affinities, is determined to be what is covered in its cover) becomes transparent: the beauty of the image of the fencer appears when the constellation hidden in it-the presentation of the relation to the crowd through the relation to language-shines forth. Thus, Benjamin's interpretation of "Le solei!" with regard to the hidden figure of the crowd contains even in its metaphors the theory of presentation developed in the preface, except that Baudelaire's presentation of the crowd, like Benjamin's presentation of the boheme, seems to remain at discontinuity, without the emergence of any connection other than disconnectedness. The status of the interpretations of poetry in Benjamin's text may now be more clearly determined. A discontinuous grouping like the boheme, and to a greater extent the ragpicker, can be read as metaphors of presentation. Baudelaire's poems are distinguished from appearances of this sort by already being texts themselves, as objects of Benjamin's text. Benjamin reads them according to the similarity that exists in them between their relation to the object and their relation to language, through which discontinuity is established. The poem read in such a way is no longer a metaphor of presentation, but is, in Benjamin's text, the explicit presentation of the metaphorical relationship in which presentation stands to its object, and therefore is the presentation of metaphor. But both in Baudelaire's poetry and in Benjamin's text, the relationships of simi-

On Presentation

larity are based on discontinuity and are thus always determined only negatively. Yet presentation in the sense of the preface to the book on tragic drama does not leave things at this rupture, but discloses in it, lightninglike, what is presented but unsayable. This positivity of presentation seems to be lacking in Benjamin's text, to the degree that the constellating connections constituted in it, like the boheme or the Baudelairean poem, are produced in it solely by the abruptness common to everything torn out of context. If that is as far as things go, then the Baudelaire essays cannot count as presentation in the strict sense. Nor can one speak of the boheme as a metaphor for presentation, for such a correspondence would arise only if the constellation of the excluded were to reveal something besides the mere state of being excluded. VI

If discontinuity divulges nothing but the similarity of the discontinuous as such, then nothing shines forth in presentation except a world of ruins that can signify one another at will. One may wonder if Benjamin's text goes no farther than this. The manner in which it speaks of the boheme may lead one to think so. But perhaps this seemingly only negative characteristic discloses the possibility of a further step. "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" begins with a portrayal of the boheme based on Marx's description of the professional conspirator. Baudelaire is introduced in the second sentence: "To bring to mind the physiognomy of Baudelaire means to speak of the resemblance that he displays with this political type" (1.2: 513, Baudelaire, n). The isolation of those excluded doubtless belongs to this similarity, but it is not the only link. At the end of the chapter "Modernism," Benjamin returns to this relationship, abruptly making the report of Blanqui's secret review of his troops on the Champs-Elysees follow a characterization of Baudelaire's linguistic gesture. The relationship between Baudelaire and Blanqui that appears at the beginning and the end of the first Baudelaire text was perhaps the flash of insight that determined the original form of the Baudelaire project. There are indications that there is more in question here than

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Hans-fost Frey what those who do not belong have in common. Following the description of Blanqui's review, Benjamin writes: "Baudelaire's poetry has preserved in words the strength that made such a thing possible" (1.2: 604; Baudelaire, 101). And somewhat later: "Blanqui's action was the sister of Baudelaire's dream." The line refers to Baudelaire's "Le reniement de Saint Pierre" (St. Peter's denial), where it is claimed to be easy to leave a world "where action isn't the sister of dream." It is above all important that he no longer specifies the relationship between Blanqui and Baudelaire as similarity, but rather, by introducing the sister, as kinship. But kinship is what cannot be derived by argument, what can only appear as presentation. The question thus arises of what kind of kinship or affinity is illuminated in the comparison of Blanqui's ghostly review and Baudelaire's language, which on the surface have nothing to do with one another. Blanqui and Baudelaire are presenters in the sense that they are performers. Immediately before Baudelaire's relation to language is dealt with, the poet, who "patterned his image of the artist after the image of the hero," appears as the heroic performer spoken of in "Modernism": "Because he did not have any convictions, he assumed ever new forms himself. Flcmeur, apache, dandy, and ragpicker were so many roles to him. For the modern hero is no hero; he is a heroic performer. Heroic modernism turns out to be a tragic drama in which the hero's role is available" (1.2: 6oo; Baudelaire, 97 ). The reference to the tragic drama nearly compels one to link presentation in the theatrical sense of performance with the preface's theory of presentation, which refers to the treatise. In this way, it is shown that discontinuity is doubly in play. On the one hand, the roles taken on by the performer lack coherence, and on the other hand, their relation to him cannot be grasped, for no face is hiding behind the masks. Baudelaire becomes a performer precisely because he has no conviction of his own. Behind the roles, the performer remains inconceivable. Similarly, Blanqui, when first mentioned, is described in the "ambivalent position" that he held in the conspiratorial milieus of Paris: on the one hand as the professional conspirator who had to "improvise a revolution," and on the other hand as a figure who more resembled one of the doctrinaire habits

On Presentation noirs "who were the disliked competitors of those professional conspirators" (1.2: 518; Baudelaire, 16). As if not to clarify this indeterminate ambivalent position, the whiteness of the name "Blanqui" appears together with the blackness of the habits noirs, a link repeated in the description of the review: "It was after the murder of Victor Noir. Blanqui wanted to take an inventory of his troops" (1.2: 603; Baudelaire, 101). The review is a "play" that Blanqui not only stages, but in which he also assumes the role of the "secretive general," here that of the observer. Yet what links Baudelaire and Elanqui is not that they are performers, but that they remain inconceivable as the authority behind the performance. In both cases, the one on whom everything depends withdraws. This withdrawal makes possible the comparison between Blanqui and Baudelaire. Benjamin calls it "the incognito." The incognito distinguishes Blanqui's review from that of all official armies. It is also what distinguishes Baudelaire's poetry: "Behind the masks that he used up, the poet in Baudelaire preserved his incognito. He was as circumspect in his work as he was capable of seeming provocative in his personal associations. The incognito was the law of his poetry" (1.2: 601; Baudelaire, 98). The importance of the incognito for Benjamin's image of Baudelaire can be measured by the fact that, with less emphasis but unmistakably, it also marks the conclusion of the "Motifs" essay. In "Perte d'aureole," it is the loss of the aureole, and thus the destruction of the aura, that permits the poet to move about incognito. Benjamin is thus entirely consistent with his earlier determination of the incognito as the law of Baudelaire's poetry when he now writes: "He paid dearly for consenting to this destruction [of the aura]-but it is the law of his poetry" (1.2: 653; Baudelaire, 154). The incognito, as it appears in Benjamin's text, is not only something that, though remaining unrecognized, is known or even recognizable, but rather is the concealment of something unknown. Baudelaire wears masks not to hide himself, but because he is without conviction, that is, unable to have any shape at all. It is not only that he cannot be recognized, but that he does not know himself and is unrecognizable except in masked withdrawal. His identity is the incognito. Since it cannot be neutralized, it cannot be an object of communication, yet it is not

Hans-lost Frey

only a withdrawal, but also the place of a power that makes it possible for the performers Baudelaire and Blanqui to play their roles and perhaps even any role. The incognito in Benjamin's text is the preserved affinity of poet and conspirator. This affinity is now no longer only determined negatively. Certainly, the incognito is the withdrawal of recognizability, but it depends less on that than on the necessity of producing roles, which is announced by the lack of a graspable identity. The role is the self-presentation of what lacks a self. This self-presentation of the selfless leaps out of the brusque confrontation of Blanqui's review and Baudelaire's poetry as what is presented in Benjamin's text. How the boheme, which in the role-playing of the poet and the conspirator turns out to be a theatrical performance, then relates to the presentation of the boheme depends on how theater and treatise, how the theatrical performance and what is called presentation in the preface to the book on tragic drama, can be related to one another. They are similar to one another in that just as in the treatise what is presented in the constellation of fragments of thought shines forth as its noncommunicative possibility, the conspirator or poet bursts out of the constellation of his roles as incognito, and both affinities are presented in Benjamin's text as the community of what remains hidden. All presentation is thus theatrical, since it does not say, but performs. The relationship between poet and conspirator, as the aspect of the constellation named boheme most important for Benjamin, is presented in his text in such a way that it becomes the metaphor of its being presented. The constellation of poet and conspirator is based on the fact that they are both performers. Since they are both lacking, they replace themselves with the role. The role becomes the only possible self-presentation. But self-presentation in the role is the incognito. The self is constituted in the role as the incognito, just as what is presented in the treatise is constituted in the discontinuity of the fragments of thought as the power that makes them effective as a constellation. Translated by Michael Shae

Alexander Garcia Duttmann

The Violence of Destruction

For Werner Hamacher

Louis Althusser, in his "Defense of Amiens," contends that there is something "excessive" in the formulation of philosophical theses that belongs essentially to philosophy: thought should be possible only if one sets up limit theses and only when one lingers at the site of the impossible. 1 For Althusser, it is a matter of distancing himself from a "rationalist tradition" in order to designate politico-historical relations of power, domination, and force, not merely by a radical thesis, but by the radicalness of the thesis. If one disregards for a moment the context of this idea, then one can draw two opposing conclusions from the thesis about the philosophical thesis, which for some may perhaps already present itself as a limit thesis. On the one hand, philosophical thought does not proceed merely from individual positings or from individual positions and does not return to such (revised, further determined, or maintained) positions, for the formulation of limit theses as the task of philosophy necessarily implies that one loses control over what is formulated, at least to a

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Alexander Garcia Dilttmann certain extent. The formulated thesis proves to be a limit thesis only when it can no longer be overtaken by thought, only when it cannot maintain the stability of a thesis, only when its positing character is already thwarted and one cannot recognize it simply as a thesis. Only then can one speak in general (at least in one sense, which Althusser's idea further radicalizes) of philosophical thought. But on the other hand, it is the case that only a thought able to set up limit theses can assume a position, if one understands by position a positing that is not entirely dissolved in the process of the mediation of thought, in the experience of the concept, in conceptual determinability: as positing, position is always positing of a limit thesis; it is the surplus and excess that cannot be reduced to pure determinations of thought. On the one hand, the thesis must be recognizable as such before one can speak of a thesis at all; on the other hand, the thesis as such is the excess that thwarts any complete recognition and that never can appear as such. This opposition within the concept of the thesis itself can be formulated as follows: to the extent that it is a thesis, the thesis cannot be a thesis. Or even: to the extent that it is a thesis, the thesis must be a limit thesis. Does not this opposition circumscribe just that "site of the impossible," the site that Althusser locates as that of thought? Every positing is identified by a radical trait that indicates the limit of every possible self-identification, but the limit of selfidentification can no longer be simply identified. As a limit, every positing holds an excess within limits and likewise exposes itself without limit to an excess; because every positing is ex-posing, and above all exposing of itself, the limit of positing does not extend as a straight, uninterrupted line. Every positing conceals within itself a destructive violence that not only threatens another positing, but also already itself. Due to the ideality inherent in positing as such, however, a movement is unleashed by positing, a movement of return and appropriation, of separation and of remembering experience, from which thought cannot free itself. Through its exposing, positing exposes itself within itself, in its own interior, to another positing and thus to an excess that withdraws from conceptual determination; in order to sublate this relinquishing of conceptual unity and to put an end to the continuation of a bad infinity, posit-

The Violence of Destruction ing must completely merge with its ideality, and what is posited must finally be with itself in the other that is given only by positing. Recognition, by which otherness is determined and sublated, characterizes the speculative dialectical development of the concept. As Hegel writes in the Encyclopedia: The development of the concept -according to its determination, its goal, or if you prefer, its purpose-is to be grasped as a positing of what the concept is in itself. This development consists in the determinations of the concept's content coming into existence and being manifested, not however as independent, self-sufficient beings, but as posited moments of an ideal nature, which remain within its unity. This positedness can therefore be grasped as an expression, protrusion, exposition, or self-externalization insofar as the subjectivity of the concept loses itself in the juxtaposition of its determinations. It preserves itself within them as their unity and ideality, however; and seen from the opposite side, therefore, this outward movement of the center toward the periphery is just as much an internal resumption of what is outward; it is a reminder that it is the concept that exists in what is expressed. 2

The ideality of positing and the relation to unity consist consequently in remembrance, which determines the necessary relinquishing to be that of the concept: what comes to existence is grasped in its existing and is transformed into something returning, which is also why the "resumption" spoken of by Hegel transfers the coming of the concept to the "concept that has reached its manifestation." Positing as the positing of what the posited is in itself proves to be ideality, or has ideality, has therefore the truth of the finite as its determination, because it must be grasped as the movement of becoming for itself: "The concept wants to break through the rind of externality in order to become itself. Life is the concept that has reached its manifestation and stands displayed in its clarity; at the same time, however, it is the most difficult for the understanding to come to terms with, because the understanding finds it easiest to grasp whatever is simplest, abstract, and dead." If every positing is "ideal," then one can glimpse in the dialectical interpretation of positing the unrestricted, complete, determined unfolding of this ideality. In his lecture course on the Phenomenology of Spirit

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Alexander Garcia Diittmann held in the winter semester of 1930-31, Heidegger says that "all philosophy from first to last merely unfolds its presupposition" and that "everything depends on how philosophy entertains the presupposition"; if in the case of Hegel "the understanding of the end is plainly indispensable ... because the end is already plainly the beginning and because the way in which the end is the beginning (and vice versa) has already been decided," 3 then dialectical positing has as a presupposition that it always already presupposes itself and in its presupposing has suspended its exposure. Positing as the destruction of tautology, as a manifestation of what persists first of all tautologically and unmediated in itself, is in essence sublating, as Derrida has on occasion emphasized. 4 The question, therefore, of whether in the end positing does not disappear in its absolute presupposing and is forgotten in its absolute remembrance can be countered, from a speculative point of view, with the other question of whether the suspension of presupposing and the forgetting that goes along with it does not expose the ideality of positing to an "endless iteration of the alternation between different determinations, each of which calls up the other." 5 These two questions are about the difference between a "true" and a "bad" infinity, between the endless exceeding of a limit and the sublation of finitude. Hegel describes bad infinity in the Encyclopedia with the words: "We posit a limit: then we pass it: next we have a limit once more, and so on forever. All this is but superficial alternation, which never leaves the region of the finite behind." 6 In the section of the Science of Logic that deals with quantity, one reads that bad quantitative infinity is "the perpetual movement back and forth from one term of the lasting contradiction to the other." Quantitative and qualitative infinity are not distinguished as bad infinities: progress is presented not as a "going on and forth," but as "a repetition of one and the same thing, a positing, a sublating, and then again a positing and again a sublating, an impotence of the negative, for what it sublates is continuous with it, and in the very act of being sublated returns to it." 7 Thought can be more than the repetition of something already known, more than the confirmation of ideological content, only through its excess, through its irreducible irresponsibility. Therefore, it must be able to let itself be

The Violence of Destruction carried away by destructive violence, which one can read in simplification, in a barbaric, undialectical moment: it is as if positing wanted to utter everything all at once. The excess of positing lies in the fact that it must irrevocably abandon itself and the posited for its own sake, in order to be able to posit anything at all. "How much is lost, whenever one wants only to test it slowly": this line from a novel by Robert Walser, which has in mind untested, incessant, unmediated discourse, a discourse as pure positing and as pure exposing, seems to be engraved for positings. As a thought in limit theses, as a thought that touches the limits of its positings, philosophical thought stands before the question of the relationship between the presupposing and the exposing of positing: either it thinks positing essentially as a result and hypostatizes its ideality, or it exposes itself to what can be dismissed solely under the presupposition of a truth of the finite, as the endlessness of bad, untrue, impotently negative infinity. Walter Benjamin's essay "Toward a Critique of Violence" circles around the concept of positing. To be sure, positing is thematized in it only in the specific sense of a "law-positing violence"; Benjamin distinguishes, of course, between a "law-positing violence" and a "law-preserving violence": "All violence, as a means, is either lawpositing or law-preserving." 8 Positing as a positing oflaw is consequently not only a form of violence, but more precisely a form of violence as means. But not every means stands in the service of a law-positing or law-preserving violence: according to Benjamin, a "politics of pure means" can be imagined that brings about a nonviolent resolution of conflicts. Werner Hamacher has recently taken issue with the idea of such a politics, which ultimately is unimaginable and unpresentable, and has emphatically stressed that the "sketch of a politics of pure mediacy," of a politics that is not oriented toward external ends, is a sketch of a politics of the "deposing of the act of positing." 9 Next to violence as a pure and impure means, violence as impurely and purely mediated violence, Benjamin poses an unmediated violence, which in its turn experiences a division: while the "mythical manifestation of unmediated violence" is identical to the manifestation oflegal power and thus is far from "inaugurating a purer sphere" (a sphere in which positing and

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counterpositing no longer reciprocally condition one another), the divine manifestation of unmediated violence is the manifestation of a pure violence, which is defined by the "absence of every positing of law" and by the task of an "annihilation" of legal and therefore of state power. Only the deposing of positing (in Benjamin's words), which does not require another positing, inaugurates the pure and nonviolent sphere of mediated and unmediated violence. Benjamin characterizes this inauguration as annihilation. If positing is linked to violence, it is, however, not annihilating: it is not nonviolent in the sense of an annihilation, which occurs solely wherever the violence of pure immediacy dominates and a politics of pure mediacy prevails. The purity that is fundamentally lacking in positing is the purity of an annihilation without relapse into the annihilated, of an annihilation without remainder, without the annihilated that could always haunt it in that form: annihilation as bad infinity, as infinite affliction and endless restoration of the annihilated, is impure. Benjamin does not identify pure and limitless annihilation with the power of negativity; nevertheless, a clear relation exists between what Hegel determines as bad infinity and the impure sphere of (limit) positing. 10 The history of law, he writes, is a "dialectical up and down." This is not due to the particular form that positing assumes in the realm oflaw; rather, the circulation that stands "under the spell of the mythic forms of law" is brought forth by the character of positing, which is inherent in law, so that everything that Benjamin points out about the history and the structure of law can be generalized and transferred to positing in general: "A regard directed only at what is nearest can at most discern a dialectical up and down in the forms of violence as law-positing and lawpreserving. Its law of oscillation is based on the fact that every law-preserving violence in its duration indirectly weakens the lawpositing violence that is represented in it by the suppression of hostile counterviolences. This lasts until either new violences or the previously suppressed ones are victorious over the previous lawpositing violence and thereby establish a new law that itself will decline anew" ( "Kritik," 2.1: 202). It seems to be valid for positing in general that its own security, its preserving delimitation and opposition, causes it to fluctuate, but if it requires security, it is because

The Violence of Destruction

it is excessive and must maintain itself against other positings to which it remains exposed. Benjamin's formulation of the law of oscillation to which positing is subjected translates bad infinity into the language of a critique of violence. "Something becomes an other, but the other is itself a something, and therefore becomes itself an other, and so on into infinity": the process of bad infinity, the "negation of the finite, which nevertheless arises again," is here a violent suppression and a suppressing victory over what suppresses. In the grounding "that will decline anew," the excessive, the contradiction of the finite, is expressed: the finite is "both something and its other." One can raise three questions at this point: (1) If violence is always positing or deposing violence, how are nature and idea related to positing and deposing? (2) Why does Benjamin speak, on the one hand, of a pure and an impure mediacy, but then, on the other hand, of a pure and an impure immediacy? (3) What is a nonviolent, pure, remainderless annihilation, an annihilation without an annihilated, an annihilation that operates all the more annihilatingly because it does not annihilate (anything)? (This paradox is perhaps truth itself, wherever dialectical sublation expresses it, which, in accord with its double sense, sublates the finite and thus frees it from reflection, from bad or negative infinity, from the finitization of the infinite and the absolutization of the finite.) 1. The concept and the critique of violence are, as Benjamin makes clear, inseparable from "moral relations" ("Kritik," 2.1: 179); in order to be an "effective cause," violence must engage in such relations. Only as an engagement of law or of justice can it become an object of critique. If violence is thus not a "product of nature," if positing and deposing do not belong to the natural realm, then one can ask how mythic and divine, positing and deposing violence relate to that realm. On the one hand, the intervention of divine violence does not simply present a conceptually graspable transition to ideality (above all, because it cannot be recognized "with certainty"); on the other hand, mythic, positing violence is not entirely foreign to the natural realm. "The unleashing of legal power originates ... in the culpability of mere natural life, which hands over the living innocently and unhappily to atonement" ("Kritik,"

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Alexander Garcia Duttmann 2.1: 199-200). Positing, "ideal" to the extent that it is not a natural violence, remains, however, bound to what Benjamin names "mere natural life," and therefore to the web of guilt that constitutes fate. Does not the impurity of positing consist precisely in this mixture of the ideal and the natural, which keeps the living from its authentic determination and lets the ideal revert again and again to the natural? Must not a thought in limit theses, a positing and excessive thought that is embedded in an infinite-finite movement that it itself i~mortalizes, inevitably entangle itself in guilt? But the ideality of the positing of law asserts itself at the same time against "mere life," against the culpably natural. One can, that is, read in it that law, "in the 'decision' fixed in place and time, acknowledges a metaphysical category by which it makes a claim to critique" (2.1: 189). Benjamin underlines this metaphysical character of decision, which he only mentions in the "Critique of Violence," in his essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities, where he opposes choice and decision. It thus becomes apparent that decision annihilates choice: "for choice is natural and may even be inherent in the elements; decision is transcendent" ( Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften, 1.1: 189). Precisely because it consists of a mixture of the ideal and the natural, positing is never satisfied with itself; it not only succumbs again and again to fate, it not only perpetuates violently the bad infinity of the mythic cycle, but it also transcends the immanence of mere life through the decision that it makes possible. One must keep in mind here that this transcending or this relation to a transcendent is indebted in its turn to a destructive force, to the annihilation of the nature-bound principle of choice. Benjamin had already introduced the expression "annihilation" in his dissertation, where it is a matter of determining the exact meaning that this expression is given in German Romanticism. He designates as a "Romantic terminus technicus" the "mediacy of irony," that is, "the indirect refutation of the invalid through silence, through its ironic praise, or through the high praise of the good" (Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, 1.1: 79-80 ). If in his 1921 essay "Toward a Critique of Violence," divine violence reigns "over all life for the sake of the living," if immediate, pure violence thus annihilates without annihilating (perhaps one must understand sal-

The Violence of Destruction

vation as precisely this annihilation without an annihilated), then in his dissertation, published a year before, Benjamin says of annihilating irony: "It not only destroys the work that it attacks, but draws the work nearer to indestructibility. Through the destruction of the specific form of presentation of the work in irony, the relative unity of the individual work is drawn back more deeply into art as the universal work. ... The ironization of the form of presentation is, so to speak, the storm that raises the curtain on the transcendental order of art" ("Der Begriff der Kunstkritik," 1.1: 86). 2. Positing violence, as impurely mediate, is likewise an unmediated violence: The function of violence in the positing of law is twofold in the sense that the positing of law pursues as its end what is imposed as law, with violence as the means, but does not dismiss violence in the moment of the imposition of what is aimed at as law. Rather, it makes violence law-positing only immediately and in the strictest sense, by imposing an end that is not independent and free of violence, but necessarily and intimately bound to it as law under the name of power. The positing of law is the positing of power, and to that extent an act of the immediate manifestation of violence. ("Kritik," 2.1: 198-99)

Violence as means or mediate violence-that is, violence pure and simple, at least to the degree that violence has the function of a means and manifests itself mediately, in regard to an end-passes over into unmediated violence or is in its essence unmediated violence: it is not a means that can be set aside after use and forgotten. (Is the means that is ordinary and unremarkable not always something forgotten?) One should consider positing as the imposing of violence: with the characterization of the mediated violence of the positing of law as an unmediated violence, Benjamin draws attention to this imposing by which positing violence imposes itself. In other words, the proof that mediated violence is actually unmediated violence and that positing is actually the positing of power implies that positing as such may indeed be stamped with a relation to transcendence, but that it cannot accomplish the destruction, the sublation, or the overcoming of the excessive, which abandons it to the "dialectical up and down." If the impure mediacy of violence

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induces Benjamin to conceive of a politics of pure mediacy, then the self-imposing of violence in the act of positing seems to make necessary another violence, a pure unmediated violence that destroys violence, but that nevertheless remains a violence. Annihilation without an annihilated is an annihilation of violence.'' 3. The law of oscillation of violence, which Benjamin uncovers in its duration, concerns its "forms as law-positing and lawpreserving" violence. Consequently, the violence of destruction, which manifests itself under the names of deposing and annihilation, is a "deforming" violence, if one may use here an expression whose use Benjamin explains in an early fragment on fantasy. This short text was probably written during the same period as the essay on violence. Fantasy as "deformation" is unconstructive, dissolving, unconstrained, and free; it is "in the last day of the world and in the first" ("Phantasie," 6: 117). Does not the last day of the world in the "Critique of Violence" proclaim the "new historical era" introduced by the revolution and the victory of divine over mythic violence? Is this day not the one on which a "deformation" exhausts not just this or that formation, but formation itself? Does not divine violence appear as annihilating only in relation to the mythic? Whereas positing, because of its double character, is unable to free human existence from violence, and annihilation, as the violent transition to another positing, regularly reproduces what is annihilated, annihilating deposing opens the mythic circle. '.-Vhy? Probably because the double character of positing-its impurity-results from an excess, from a mixture of the ideal and the natural, while deposing, on the other hand, is purely annihilating and purely saving, but pure annihilation and pure salvation coincide. Whether one speaks of annihilation or salvation depends on the perspective from which one argues. (Strictly speaking, the concept of perspective is quite inappropriate here. It is used to distinguish two incompatible yet not entirely disparate perspectives, but in the end its use perpetuates destructive violence, since every perspective involves a further positing. Perspective is always the perspective of destructive violence. Benjamin's idea of deforming-or deposing-consequently does not go along with a mere perspectivism.) A series of notes on world and time, which Benjamin left unfinished, contain comments

The Violence of Destruction

that deal with this pure double character of divine violence and also recall the critique of theology in the so-called "Theologico-Political Fragment": "Genuine divine power can manifest itself other than as destroying only in the coming world (of fulfillment). On the other hand, wherever divine violence enters the earthly world, it breathes destruction. Therefore, there is nothing constant in this world and no formation can be grounded on it, least of all sovereignty as its highest principle" ("Welt und Zeit," 6: 99). True, positive infinity in speculative dialectics is the ideality or the truth of the finite, which raises thought above mere positing and repositing, above the constantly excessive economy of the negative that is never closed off as a whole, above the continual return of the sublated through its sublation. The excess of positing, by which it passes over into what is opposed to it, is no longer maintained as such, as the finitude of the posited moments of the concept, which are not unified in their mediation. But because it is only a bad infinity, because it alone retains the last word for a thought of understanding that hypostatizes the infinity of reflection, positing points beyond itself; this pointing beyond belongs to it to the degree that no veritable sublation of the finite occurs. "The finite ... ought to be sublated," Hegel writes of the bad infinity of criticism, and "the infinite ought not to be merely a negative, but also a positive. That 'ought to be' betrays the incapacity of actually making good a claim that is at the same time recognized to be right." 12 The law of oscillation of positing and opposing that is never recognized by a "glance directed only at what is nearest," by a glance that cannot truly discriminate and decide, designates in Benjamin's critique of violence this figure of the excessive or of bad infinity-certainly in a different context of thought than that of the movement of the concept, which is why one cannot speak here in the strictest sense of a bad infinity. However, deposing as a politics of pure mediacy and as a manifestation of a pure divine violence is engaged solely because the "sovereignty of myth is already broken here and there in the present," and the "new does not lie at such an unimaginable distance that a word against the law is resolved by itself" ("Kritik," 2.1: 202). In other words, it is engaged only because the immanence of positings cannot be sealed against deposing violence.

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The impurity of violence creates no pure immanence. Must one not even assume that the revolutionary violence of deposing in its radical heterogeneity already affects the conservative violence that preserves the "dialectical up and down," wherever this is effective as such? Does not the law of oscillation of positings mean that every positing must point beyond its finitude, in order to maintain itself at all as a positing against another positing? Would not absolute immanence or an absolute identity paralyze every positing in advance? The decisive, factually grounded, and not merely logical contradiction that one encounters in the course of such a critique of violence is based on the fact that the relation between positing and deposing is simultaneously incommensurable and differential. It must be incommensurable in order for the purely deposing violence to break through the bad infinity of positings, but it must also be differential if the positing, impure violence is to reproduce itself in bad infinity. Does this simultaneity of the incommensurable and the differential not lead inevitably to a submission of the incommensurable to the differential? Does the incommensurable at all permit a simultaneity, is it not what is incommensurable in the face of every simultaneity? Do positings not become, through simultaneity, expressions of the incommensurable? The question of the newness of the new promised by Benjamin is inseparable from this contradiction between the differential and the incommensurable, as is the question of whether "a new historical age" can be grounded, which is basically already raised with the formulation of the law of oscillation: with a formulation that can itself no longer be a positing. As the basis of all positing, as the basic law, the law of oscillation of positings cannot be subject to itself. But it also cannot actually serve as a basis: the knowledge of the essential instability of positing does not refer to a preceding, absolutely indubitable and certain positing of a basic principle or law. Such a first positing presupposes positing, as Heidegger demonstrates in the context of Cartesian doubt, which is itself in no way skeptical; it presupposes positing, regardless of whether position "in the sense of predicative thought" is only presupposed or not: "If something is given at all, then only ... positing, position, in the sense of predicative thought. Positing, the principle, has only itself as what can be posited." 13 Thus, as a cri-

The Violence of Destruction tique of the excess of all positings, the critique of violence leads in the end to the question of whether the new, already dawning historical age can be grounded. If Althusser vindicates the excess of positing for thought and thus seems to locate its paradoxical condition of possibility in a certain bad infinity, then perhaps what is called deconstruction sets out to demonstrate, as the necessity of thought itself, the necessity of an infinity that is no longer a bad infinity without thereby being a true infinity. One could describe deconstructive thought as a setting free of the excessive ( Ubermassige) that from the outset unhinges every positing, every regulated relation between individual positings and between individual oppositions. (The iiber in das Ubermassige is also supposed to indicate what is without measure, the heterogeneity of the excessive in regard to measure.) If it is anything at all, then deconstruction is a radicalized, general exposing, transposing, and deposing: as deconstruction of the privilege of synthesis and of gathering (the two are not the same), it does not even cease before that positing of Ge-setz that Heidegger contrasts with position "in the sense of predicative thought": Death should "gather into the whole of the already posited, into the positum of the entire relation," and as "this gathering of positing" should be "das Ge-setz." 14 "La differance," Derrida's more or less programmatic essay from 1968, ends with a discussion whose subject is Heidegger's treatise on the Anaximander fragment. Derrida cites a passage from this text in which the forgetting of Being is determined as the erasing of the difference between Being and beings, as the "forgetting of the difference." But it is not simply difference that is forgotten and erased; rather, its "early trace" is. Derrida proceeds from this specification, in order to investigate the structure of the trace in general and thus to call attention to an exposing of positing that is inscribed in this structure. If one can still make use of the predicative form here, one can say that the difference between Being and beings leaves behind a trace not only belatedly: to the extent that this difference does not assume the form of presence or absence, it is itself a trace. What Derrida calls differance describes nothing other than the movement of such a paradoxical, because original and therefore "early," trace:

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Alexander Garcia Duttmann Since the trace is not a presence but the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers itself, it properly has no site-erasure belongs to its structure. And not only the erasure which must always be able to overtake it (without which it would not be a trace but an indestructible and monumental substance), but also the erasure which constitutes it from the outset as a trace, which situates it as the change of site, and makes it disappear in its appearance, makes it go out of itself in its very positing. The erasure of the early trace (die fruhe Spur) of difference is therefore the "same" as its tracing in the text of metaphysics. 15 If one can think nothing that is present, no presence and no being such without the trace, then the exposing of positing (sortir de soi en sa position) that belongs essentially to the structure of the trace, to the assumption of a general, always open context of reference, leads to the assumption of a "textual generality." 16 Thus, as Derrida claims in the course of his radicalization of the thought of an "early trace," it is always worth reading the text of metaphysics, the trace and the trace of the erasing of the trace: as a trace, it is still readable, and at the same time endlessly defers its readability. The reading of the trace that marks this endless deferral is an exposure and a suspension of positing. Derrida himself confirms, in his lecture on Benjamin's "Critique of Violence," that one sees first in decontruction a manner of study, an attentive reading, an exact and patient analysis of texts and their metaphysical effects: "Deconstruction is generally practiced in two ways or two styles, although it most often grafts one on to the other. One takes on the demonstrative and apparently ahistorical allure of logico-formal paradoxes. The other, more historical or more anamnesic, seems to proceed through readings of texts, meticulous interpretations, and genealogies." 17 Deconstruction studies texts: here one may recall that Benjamin, in his portrayal of Kafka, describes law that is merely studied and no longer practiced with the image of a "gate of justice." In this image of a law that no longer stands under the law of oscillation that it has itself created, the general determination is already made that the "gate of justice" is study ("Franz Kafka," 2.2: 437). If deconstruction, as one can gather from Derrida's lecture on Benjamin, deconstructs the positing of law "in

The Violence of Destruction the name" of a justice that is never incorporated in such positings and is itself what cannot be deconstructed; if, therefore, deconstruction, at least in this sense, repeats a Benjaminian gesture, then it is thoroughly possible to characterize, with Benjamin, its style or its mode of proceeding as the interruption of myth or as the exposing of positing. Because it perhaps lives of the annihilating power of justice, it does not, as a continuing study, oppose itself to something annihilated and also does not continually reproduce the annihilated. The site of deconstruction is not justice, but rather its gate, if one will: this gate is not a threshold still external to justice, but rather the difference that justice conceals in itself. This difference separates-in Benjamin's terms-the coming world or the new historical era, in which justice will no longer have annihilating effects, from the world and time of positing, in which pure deposing prevails. It is the promise of deconstruction. There is thus a promise of deconstruction, because justice is its "own" gate and the gate does not lead to justice. Can one draw a lesson from the study of the "Critique of Violence"? Derrida seems to recognize a possible lesson in the necessity of a compromise between two heterogeneous and incommensurable orders or dimensions. It is doubtless the case that Benjamin exposes parliamentary democracy to the power of deposing, precisely because the democratic compromise denies law-positing violence, which is represented by parliaments. A purely external resolution of the conflict is distinguished, moreover, by its compulsory character. But Benjamin links justice to the language of names, to the idea of a language that eliminates violence and thus actually must be a language of pure mediacy or pure immediacy. This link between justice and pure language appears even more clearly in the essay on Karl Kraus, in which Benjamin speaks of the "image of divine justice as language" and of how destruction reveals language as the "matrix of justice" through the purifying and rescuing, saving, and punishing citation: "Justice [i.e. language], which destructively halts the constructive ambiguities of law [i.e. of positions], is also destroying" ("Karl Kraus," 2.1: 367). Derrida, then, refers to a passage in the Moscow Diary where Benjamin considers unavoidable a compromise between the two

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Alexander Garcia Duttmann poles of "all linguistic essence," between expression and communication. Expression does not destroy communication without a remainder. From such an expanded viewpoint, Derrida formulates the lesson that he draws from the "Critique of Violence." It seems as if with this renewed introduction of compromise (not between equal representatives of the parliamentary system, but rather between two entirely unequal orders, whose relation first opens the space of the political), he would implicitly raise the objection to Benjamin that Adorno expressed in a note to an unwritten essay. Adorno underlines the moment of arbitrariness and immediacy in Benjamin's positions and thought. (It should be added that Adorno, with this objection, does not endeavor to absolutize the process of the mediation of thought. Negative Dialectics, which deals with a survival of philosophy after its neglected realization, and which abandons philosophical thought to a bad infinity, since praxis at this stage should be "adjourned to an unforeseeable time," is directed against the transformation of infinity into something finite and turns the argument of bad infinity against the attempt to raise philosophy above it: philosophy, which purports to "possess its object as infinite," remains caught in a "finitude" that "blusters about infinity and does not heed it.") 18 What compromise does the critique of violence teach, if one reads it in the light of the entry in the Moscow Diary? It is perhaps one of the lessons that we could draw here: the fatal

nature of the compromise between heterogeneous orders, which is a compromise, moreover, in the name of the justice that would command one to obey at the same time the law of representations (Aufkliirung, reason, objectification, comparison, explication, the taking into account of multiplicity, and therefore the serialization of the unique) and the law that transcends representation and withholds the unique, all uniqueness, from its reinscription in an order of generality or of comparison. 19

The question arises whether deconstruction, which draws such a lesson, does not in spite of everything take on the form of an unhappy consciousness that can never advance to a result. Is it, in the end, the thought of a bad infinity that, split and torn by an uninterrupted movement of positing and deposing, can never rest? 20 Is it a

The Violence of Destruction

thought that pursues deposing all the more, the less that the latter succeeds in finally breaking through the circle of alternating exposing and imposing? Does deconstruction, which devotes itself to study and lingers at the gate of justice, posit the bad infinity of positings? But what value does such a first and likewise final positing have, which is due to a perpetuated deposing? A careful tracing of the emergence of deconstructive thought would have to proceed from Derrida's early analyses of the phenomenological concept of genesis; these analyses lead to the outline of a dialectic that seems in no way to sublate finitude and thus constitutes itself as endless dialectic: "The dialectic is endless," Derrida writes in his first large work on Husser}, "because the constituting subjectivity is synthetically one with time, and thus because existence is a finitude 'for itself' (une finitude 'pour soi')." 21 From a speculative perspective, is this unending dialectic of "the absolute consciousness of an essential finitude," which is supposed to point a way out of the alternative between the aporetic priority of a subjectivity that founds meaning and the no less aporetic priority of an already constitutive time for all foundings of meaning-is this the dialectic of a bad infinity? Derrida reproaches Husserl for a hypostasis of bad infinity in a note to the extensive and significant introduction to his translation of The Origin of Geometry. Certainly it is a matter here of a strategic argument that already proclaims the difference between the emerging deconstruction and a thought caught in bad infinity: This hidden history will take its sense from an infinite telos that Husserl will not hesitate to call God in his last unpublished writings. It is true that this infinite, which is always already at work in the origins, is not a positive and actual infinite. It is given as an Idea in the Kantian sense, as a regulative "indefinite" whose negativity does not affect the right of history. Not only the morality but also the historicity of truth itself is preserved by this "falsification" of the actual infinite into an indefinite or an ad infinitum, a falsification of which Hegel accused Kant and Fichte. 22

In a well-known section of the title essay in Speech and Phenomena, Derrida repeats this strategic argument in order to emphasize expressly its strategic value and to distinguish the movement of the

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Alexander Garcia Duttmann trace or of differance not only from the opposition of finite and infinite, but also from its dialectical sublation in a truth of the finite or in a positive infinityY The whole phenomenological discourse is ... caught up within the schema of a metaphysics of presence which relentlessly exhausts itself in trying to make difference derivative. Within this schema Hegelianism seems to be more radical, especially at the point where it makes clear that the positive infinite must be thought through (which is possible only if it thinks itself) in order that the indefiniteness of differance appears as such. Hegel's critique of Kant would no doubt also hold against Husser!. But this appearing of the Ideal as an infinite differance can only be produced within a relationship with death in general. Only a relation to my-death could make the infinite differing of presence appear. By the same token, compared to the ideality of the positive infinite, this relation to my-death becomes an accident of empirical finitude. The appearing of the infinite differance is itself finite. Consequently, differance, which does not occur outside this relation, becomes the finitude of life as an essential relation with oneself and one's death. The infinite differance is finite. It can therefore no longer be conceived within the opposition of finiteness and infinity, absence and presence, negation and affirmation. 24 The thought of differance thus appears as the attempt to think finitude beyond the opposition of bad and positive infinity, which is also why the unavoidable and yet impossible originary compromise, which produces no balance between the finitude of positing and the infinity of deposing, marks a politics of differance that constantly proves itself excessive in the face of its equation with a bad infinity and that justifies compromise, negotiation, and strategy ("the general strategy of deconstruction") solely on the basis of its irreducible dependence on an excess. 25 But this excess is not simply that of a finite positing that is opposed to an infinite deposing; rather, it is the excess that makes it impossible to oppose infinite deposing and finite positing, even if for the purpose of a sublation of this opposition. (Here is the decisive move by which the thought of differance turns against the radicality of speculative idealism.) Perhaps one could link the politics of differance to an ontologically or quasiontologically construed idea of a perpetual, permanent revolution

The Violence of Destruction

(the perpetuation would probably also consist in no longer being able to resist "messianic nationalism" and the complementary "bureaucratic-abstract internationalism" in the name of a true Marxist internationalism, as Trotsky did). If political reaction in the United States reproaches deconstruction for neglecting to deconstruct itself, 26 then this objection shows clearly that deconstruction is not understood as a thought, but rather as a mode of more or less effective and efficacious procedure. Is such an understanding, which is often based on willful ignorance, in the end not already implied in the announcement with which Derrida expressly identifies his lecture on Benjamin as an exercise in deconstructive thought? What happens to a thought if it becomes the object of a reflection that displays how one can interpret a text or a work of art in the sense of this thought? For example, does not the paradoxical limit of a theory of literature consist in the fact that it must always remain without an object, regardless of how it thinks its relation to the object and its own status as theory? That deconstruction cannot be deconstructed can be explained by neither a dogmatic, obscurantist ban on critique or thought nor by the ruses and cunning of those whose names one associates with this thought. Deconstruction does not exempt itself from deconstruction: it is, "as such," so to speak, the nondeconstructible "itself." The possibility of speaking of a deconstruction implies (before all possible critique), that everything can be deconstructed, even the situation in which the word "deconstruction" is being used-everything can be deconstructed, except deconstruction. Deconstruction occurs, it has always already occurred, because it is the nondeconstructible: if it could be deconstructed "in its turn," there would be no deconstruction. The nondeconstructible is the immemorial event of deconstruction or deconstruction is an immemorial event. In his lecture on Benjamin, Derrida names this event "justice": "Deconstruction is justice," but "justice ... is not deconstructible" ( "la justice .. n' est pas deconstructible") Y To the extent that positing does not oppose itself to deposing, but rather has its condition of possibility in the impossibility of thinking a pure deposing-just as presence is produced by the trace-one could perhaps say that deconstruction as the nondeconstructible is the ex-

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cess that produces the movement of differance, the movement that at the same time makes positing possible and thwarts it. Is there not a certain analogy between the thought of a nondeconstructible deconstruction and that of a deposing, of a destructive violence, whose dominance in a coming world or in a new historical era will no longer be annihilation? Derrida asserts at the end of his lecture (or more precisely, in a section added later) that he has been guided by the difference between deconstruction and the destructions of the thought of Being and the critique of violence. But this difference consists likewise in the fact that both Benjamin and Heidegger seem to pursue the violence of destruction even further: while the late Heidegger attempts to think a "retreat into the event" that signifies the end of the history of Being (but not a transition to positive infinity), and Benjamin in his critique of violence would like to think the pure deposing of finite positing (and consequently a certain end of history) in conjunction with the dawning of a new historical era (the concept of a "'philosophy' of history" and the quotation marks Benjamin uses ["Kritik" 2.1: 182, 202] deserve particular attention here), deconstruction is a thought that may provoke the suspicion of "bad infinity." Why? Because while it marks deconstruction "itself" as the nondeconstructible, the interruption of deconstruction 28 is still thought in the first instance as an enabling, even where the affirmative, positive character of deconstructive strategies is emphasized. Perhaps the task of a deconstructive thought is thus determined by the urgency of thinking its "own" interruption (an interruption implicated in the consistency of deconstruction) without thereby falling back into a philosophy of history. Translated by Michael Shae

Tom McCall

Momentary Violence

By way of introduction, consider the following preliminary accounts of three terms, interlinked in this essay: myth, law, critique. Myth. Myths are absolute and comprehensive representations that exhibit what may be called a "violence of mythic subsumption," the capability to generate fictive totalities from diverse thematic elements. This "mythical violence" pertains to the forceful articulations of mythical nar:ratives, which, in seeming to coincide with the real, may come to be taken for it. Mythical speech acts, such as the oracle, the voodoo spell, the charm, the curse, or the prayer, serve as instances of mythical violence, a verbal force, hard or impossible to resist, that sutures experience seamlessly. If you stand within the verbal spell, it will get you; if you pray within the verbal aegis, there will be an answer (and even no answer is still an answer). Indeed, the common mythological motifs of prayer, curse, and oracle are paradigms for the mythical force of words and exemplify any discourse that has the authority of myth to pro-

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duce meaning and name "the real." In this sense, mythical violence is a property of texts not usually associated with myth, such as newspapers. Law. The above notion of mythical violence can be extended to include the legal codes of sociohistorical formations as well. The court order and legal sentence emulate the verbal force of mythical sentences such as the curse or the spell. Legal systems covet the universality of the mythical instance and pursue it with all possible (yet legal) "violence" as the means to reproduce that integrity enjoyed by the word in the homogenized spheres or "logospheres" spelled out in mythical texts. Critique. In the historical and discursive world of partial mythologies and changing legalities, mythical violence appears to have fallen away from the ideal represencation of purely mythical speech, As a historico-philosophical speculation, one could say that the univocal force of once-absolute speech acts has turned inward and splintered to become a potent force of detour within language that constantly imparts new motion to texts and leads to inconclusive fixations of sense and reference within them. It is true that such violent spectacles as war, genocide, or capital punishment qualify as hyperbolic instances of mythical violence. Yet even as these spectacles lend themselves to critique directly, they remain the most in need of criticism, for the manifest violence we can measure proceeds from a violence we cannot. 1 The visible force of such spectacles may be generated in the first place by a certain failure to know and to measure on the part of those responsible for their creation: that is, power, a mobilization and gathering of violence-power that thinks itself knowable, gatherable, representable-has somehow missed its own connections and so resorts to a spectacular selfstaging whose continual failure to represent leads to that disruption called "violence." In the postmythical times of history, violent representation looks like the tentative effort to recreate the conditions of mythic closure, the means to guarantee the force of law through a forceful show of violence. It is instructive to take mythical violence as the textual form of

violence itself. Being so pervasive, so constitutive of the actual, vio-

Momentary Violence lence blends in with the givenness of the everyday and can easily appear to be "natural" and normative, at least for those standing, unaware, within its fields of force. Always too near to see, too constitutive of discursive analysis to analyze, too internalized to display, it lies concealed in those very formations to which it constantly gives rise. By this critical logic, the less noticed a particular nexus of insidious violence is, the more it cries out for critique-yet it will be all the more difficult to critique, given that, pervasive and invisible, it will elude the grasp of critical theory. 2 As trauma studies show, real, submerged, yet pervasive violence can surpass by far the phenomenal realm of affect. 3 Moreover, this claim that manifest violence demands a special critical wariness-that it takes place within an aesthetics of violence-in no way denies the real potential for destructiveness of such manifest violence, as this essay will argue with respect to capital punishment. The difficulty for a critique of violence comes from the circumstance that violence appears to come from heterogeneous sites, both representable and not, both "manifest-focused" and "invisiblepervasive." But the relation between the phenomenal and nonphenomenalizable modes of violence is not straightforward, and theory must work out the complex economies through which divergent modalities of force come to circulate. Mythical violence thus pertains as much to the violence of the representation-its ability to strike or shock us-as it does to the representation of violence. Indeed, the complex fracturing between the phenomenalizable and nonphenomenalizable aspects of violence lends violence a theatrical and political character that it has become the role of literary theory to apprehend. Walter Benjamin's 1921 essay "Toward a Critique of Violence" works with the hope of a less mythic, because more self-wary, criticism-a criticism that can somehow keep watch over its own representations of power in order to become a more authentic, more historical treatment of fundamental power. To what degree such a criticism is possible is an enormously complex issue, depending on how one reads "Toward a Critique of Violence" -and with what presuppositions. New critical readings of diverse textual representations of violence-whether Greek tragedy, media spectacles, or popular media representations

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of the Holocaust-may help to clarify the shifting grounds of that complexity. In Benjamin's essay, the notion of Gewalt ("violence," "force," "sovereignty") serves to articulate the close affiliations between ancient myth and modern law through the notion of a "mythico-legal violence." For the purposes of contrastive critique, Benjamin tries to isolate something called "pure violence," related to the divine, revolutionary, and messianic, and having to do with the absolute nonphenomenality of absolute power; yet his essay is never able to stabilize-"purify"-the definition of violence, at least on my reading. Despite an unbridgeable lacuna between the two, the mythic shades imperceptibly into the messianic; despite Benjamin's insistence to the contrary, it is hard to keep them rigorously separated. Still, the messianic perdures as the hope that justice might still be done even when critical perspicuity has reached its limits. Messianicity thus guards the possibility of the ethical reading and judgment, even when the latter are shown to fall short of unambiguously just decisions. In Benjamin's essay, temporal institutions and positions of power exist as so many mobilizations and consolidations of singular acts of violence. 4 Power is an agency with the capacity to repeat similar, singular acts over time-it is force as a repetition compulsion. The attempt, in criticism (critique), to strip various powers of their authority and normativity is to reveal violence as their constituent. Violence is the attempt to think power before and after its institutionalizations in the forms of culture: when power is (momentarily) lifted out of the power structure and caught unawares outside of its legitimating narratives, it may well appear as something singular and violent. The object of Benjamin's critique is a "pure and immediate" ("reine unmittelbare") violence-that is, a unique, singular instance of violence, one that is absolutely nonrepeatable, non transferrable, and so nonrepresentational, one that cannot serve as the instrument toward some end (unmittelbar: Mittel, "means") and that occurs so momentarily and in such specific spatia-temporal circumstances that it can never be recovered in analysis. Being by nature unrelated to anything, this unmediated violence has no as-

Momentary Violence signable origin or ground; from the perspective of discourse, at least, pure violence comes from nowhere, being irreducibly of the moment, incalculable, unpredictable. Yet this very immediacy is what makes violence so easily appropriated, so easily transferrable in power relations. Its very lack of context (the sense here of unmittelbar) and indeterminability makes it contextualizable and seemingly determinable without limit. Because it admits no ownership, anyone can claim it. This capability to give context to pure violence, a kind of blank check, is "power" (Macht), which Benjamin calls "the principle of all mythical positions of law." 5 Power signs the check and so embezzles violence for its own purposes, thus "contaminating" (or causing to "decay") something always sui generis and "of the moment"; in its appropriation of pure violence for mythico-political ends, power would domesticate something that has no master. Pure violence is thus adulterated or made into "something rotten" ("irgend etwas Morsches im Recht") (2.1: 188) by being transgressively inscribed into the contexts of myth and law in those modes of violence specific to them-that is, by "mythical" and "legal violence," two closely related modes to which Benjamin devotes most of his essay. Even though the kind of violence at work in legal formations-or rather in the violent systems engendered by mythico-legal violence-does provide materials for the conceptualization of justice in seminal treatments of philosophy and jurisprudence (as here in Benjamin's essay), this violence is not conducive to anything like absolute or "pure" justice and even does great violence to it. Unfortunately, Benjamin has rather less to say about the kind of violence that appears to do more justice to justice, such as the "pure" violence above, designated also as "revolutionary" or "divine" violence (2.1: 199). 6 Yet his remarks on the prevalent but "unjust" modes of mythical and legal violence do help us to account for the difficulty of justice achieving it, of recognizing it when it occurs, of repeating it, and of describing it in the discourses oflaw and philosophy. If we, following Benjamin, can discern something about mythico-legal violence, we should be in a better position to appreciate why the violence that leads to justice cannot be simply identical with the exercise of power in myth and law, but must arise from something or somewhere else, difficult as that other

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kind of just violence is to delineate, as evasive as it turns out to be. We, with Benjamin, are thus constrained to discern the traces of violence in the spheres of its contamination-here, in the spheres of myth and law. The notion of critique assumes the possibility of discursive convergence upon an ever more sharply delineated object, in our case a violence that may in principle be whittled down by incisive conceptual operations to its absolutely unique, singular, and undivided integrality. However, the more that the violence aimed at in Benjamin's analysis appears to emerge in its isolated and "purified" mode, the more unrecapturable to analysis it finally reveals itself to be. To do justice to violence thus always entails doing violence to it. As the essay's title specifies it: "Zur Kritik der Gewalt"-"Toward a Critique," where "toward" signals the hope of a convergence upon something like a simplex of violence, even in the midst of what, discursively and logically, can lead only to complications of violence. As the phantasm of Benjamin's critique, violence may thus well qualify as the paradigmatic object of all critical inquiry, whose movement appears to be that of a "hyperbologic," 7 an impossible quest succeeding to the degree that it fails. As mentioned above, violence is always an inaugural, radically singular outbreak that can erupt forcefully into contexts but that itself can be assigned no determinate context, one that universally applies to all instances. As the essay explains it: whatever is "capable of being universalized" ( "verallgemeinerungsfahig" ), will "contradict ... the standard of justice [Merkmal der Gerechtigkeit]" (2.1: 196). This is true because "what is just and universally acceptable in one situation will be so for no other" (2.1: 196). In other words, if we could approach violence in the singularity of its occurrence, detached from those concepts that subsume all particular cases under it, we could identify an occurrence of justice. Yet since the epistemology of criticism conforms to the generality of concepts, within the discourses of criticism, both justice and the pure violence informing it must always appear as a risk, a deviation into singular effect. This is to say that violence cannot be universalized, tied to any one, thing, person, or representation; if it is so tied (as it is here in the present attempt to determine it, just as it is in Ben-

Momentary Violence jamin's essay), it becomes "ambiguous," zweideutig (2.1: 198)divided between two (zwei) places, two fragments of itself, which, taken together, would by no means comprise violence "itself." In this case, it is, says Benjamin, "contaminated," not pure. In the double bind of critique, any distinctions made about violence fragment it, rendering it "ambiguous," dichotomous, as Benjamin's own binary articulations exemplify: legal/mythical violence; lawpositing/law-preserving violence; violence of natural/positive law. The critique of violence is thus doomed from the beginning as a project impossible to carry through. Because it can be only a singular and momentary occurrence, violence must exceed any attempt to frame it. Yet it should be clear that unless we subject violence to this splintering, we will never be aware of violence as a construct, an other that informs and always exceeds the violence of our own determinations of violence. The critique of violence thus correctly involves a vigilant watch over the violence of critique, so that the role the latter plays in the understanding of violence might be registered, even if this can be done only as a "contamination" of the pure violence that "severs the connections that were established between itself and all possible historical ends." 8 The problem for a critique of violence thus lies in the insignificance-or nonsignificance-of violence. Pure violence, the only form adequate to an incisive critique of violence, has no (tellable) significance, admitting no sign or manifestation of itself; and whatever violence is clearly manifested and so open to scrutiny, we can be sure, is not the real object of critique, but only a counterfeit of pure violence, and, as such, the visible sign of perverted justice in the spheres of myth and law. Mythical and legal violence pervert justice by inscribing the pure act of violence (the basis of justice) into contexts where it may then appear to be continuous. Indeed, mythico-legal institutions have the specific function to extend a momentary violence over a temporal span, thus giving it an aura of duration in their creation of an authorial, authorized power, "the principle of all mythical lawmaking" (2.1: 198): the fiction or legal myth of a violence no longer scattered in discrete unconnected acts, but now collected together in a semblance of duration, its random forces now accumulated and

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directed by one (fate or state) who could possess and dispense such a power at will. Whereas divine (pure) violence "is lethal without spilling blood," "mythical violence is bloody power" ("Die mythische Gewalt ist Blutgewalt"; 2.1: 200). Blood is the sign that a pure, momentary violence has been inscribed in a myth of power. Signs tell stories. Like the scar of Odysseus, which encapsulates the whole story of his first boyhood adventure, 9 blood or bloodshed, which Benjamin would have tell us the story of a certain mythical transformation: how a singular act of violence, making a singular bloody mark upon a (momentary, singular) body, magically transubstantiates its own evanescent act into an indelible mark, thereby memorializing that act with the psychological scars of trauma and the lasting inscriptions of bodily scars. In its turn, the legal state, too-aspiring as it does toward the absolute power of its mythical model, "fate" -mythologizes the momentariness of its own violence using the bloodshed of its subjects as the instrument of mythical inscription. As in the Kafka story on the penal colony, "In Der Strafkolonie," the state, using the body as text, attempts to inscribe its power in blood by means of an elaborate, ghastly mechanism. The story exposes the myth of the state, which attempts to overcome its lack of power by resorting to complex technologies; here, the elaborate prosthetic devices of the state-its "extenders" -are "scientifically'' designed to eternalize a momentary violence through the very precision with which it signs the subject's body mythically in bloody inscriptions. By covering up the myriad intervals between disparate acts of violence, blood well exemplifies the particular character of mythical violence to universalize the unique incident, inscribing the discrete case into the bloody continuum. Both as literal performance ro and as figure, the word "violence" always suggests a sudden, unbounded expansion of a local and vanishing act into something permanent, all-encompassing, and remarkable as myth and law. Indeed, this is the dangerous project and projection of violence and its figurations, which risk all on their own singular performances, whose hoped-for expansion into global effects can be neither calculated nor controlled. Like a pressurized gas suddenly released, violence expands away from its momentary ori-

Momentary Violence

gin to mushroom into a gaseous sphere or reigning Geist ("the allpervasive, ghostly presence," as Benjamin writes of the police (2.1: 188); in the "Critique ofViolence," "myth" and "law" are names for the spheres of this spooky influence. When violence breaks out, that is, the myth/law of violence asserts itself, linking the solitary outbreak of violence with a sovereign rule, two distinct senses encapsulated in the German word Gewalt. Mythic representation (which could stand for efficacious representation in general) wrenches what it represents (singular acts) violently from its "immediate" (non)context of (non)relation, and re-presents it as something that occurs in a context of abiding relations-that is, as something that remains the same (as regards its duration, direction, origin, force) throughout many contexts, which together are to comprise a continuum: a repeating context, "the state," a mythical cosmos. The mythical thus accompanies the act of violence as the mode of its appearance and as the means of its distinction; myth therefore becomes an inexpungible parasite of violence, a "mythical violence," namely, what ushers pure violence into and out of phenomenality. Myth asserts itself wherever violence manifests itself in experience or discourse; whatever effects and origins violence may have, such can appear to us only as mythic origins and mythic effects. Benjamin does attempt to describe a nonmythic ("immediate," "unmediated") violence, such as he finds occurring in the Old Testament story of Korah, yet this story must remain a mythical analogue of absolutely decisive, nonmythical violence. The (Hebraic) Korah story can really only allegorize a pure violence purged of (Greek) mythic manifestations while remaining itself a convenient and striking-yet no less mythical-means to phenomenalize and perform as a mythical text Benjamin's own philosopheme of the pure. Through its particular function to stage an outbreak of violence as a totalized meaning or totalitarian action, mythical violence is preeminently a theatrical gesture-in fact, a "show" of violence. We may explain this as follows: an interrupting or disrupting (pure) violence cuts (without prior relation-"immediately") into its contexts, in principle dividing them into two moments: a "before" (the interruption) and an "after." Other (immediate) acts of violence

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could continue these "inter-ruptions" or internal incursions indefinitely, so generating ever more (vanishing) incisions, more befores and afters, thus making it impossible to determine any final cut and final distinction. All traces of violence vanish in such contexts of indeterminability, even though such a context (which would qualify as the context of context) owes its existence to myriad but singular actions of unremarked violence (comprising a necessary textual background against which a singular act of violence may be staged at all). Myth then arrives on the scene as the function that represents a disruptive but momentary act of violence as something momentous. Myth, then, eternalizes the before and after, thereby founding a new (no longer infinitely interrupted, indefinitely postponed) temporal order, a new mythology, a new continuum. For this reason, Benjamin locates the origins of fate and state in acts of violence. By providing their contexts of a covering totality, the institutions of myth and law exist to hide the fundamental discontinuousness that inhabits violence and makes it what it is-namely, violence, a disruption, rupture, interruption of context. These mythic shows of force are intimately linked to colossal figures of authority and authorship. Divine superintendents, personified totalities, and quasi-personified spheres of authority, control, and surveillance (such as fate, the state) appear en scene, in this theater of violence, as the implicit or explicit concomitants of violent representations. In this case, violence does not seem to come from "nowhere," but from a controlling agent identified with it. To "show force" therefore enables the text to posit an agent who appears to own violence, generate, and dispense it. Violence is only itself-momentary-when it is not authored; yet once it shows itself on the stage of myth, it can appear to come from fate or from "the gods," becoming a "manifestation of," words Benjamin associates with mythical violence. Strictly speaking, we cannot speak of the text as accomplishing anything like a pure act of "positing" the gods through its "manifestations" of violence; this is merely a way to describe the function of mythical violence, which we must assume to have already constituted a prior general textual field within which something may be posited and manifested at all. From this point of view, myth is the master text, the general textual condition

Momentary Violence

of possibility for all texts, not just law. The point here is that once violence becomes a manifestation in the general field of myth, it loses its heterogeneity, now concealed behind a mythic veil on whose brilliant tapestry all acts of violence can appear to be the same, infinitely repeatable, like a story or mythos. Benjamin mentions the Greek myth of Niobe as "an outstanding example" of mythical violence, and his remarks proceed in some detail. What has been said above regarding mythical violence-the paradigm of all contaminating appropriations of violence-may be examined more concretely through a careful reading of the followmg passage: Mythical violence in its archetypal form is a mere manifestation of the gods. Not a means to an end, scarcely a manifestation of their will, but first of all a manifestation of their existence. The legend of Niobe contains an outstanding example of this .... If this immediate violence in mythical manifestations proves closely related, indeed, identical to law-positing violence, it reflects a problematic light on law-positing violence .... Law positing is force positing, and, to that extent, an immediate manifestation of violence. Justice is the principle of all divine end making, power the principle of all mythical positings oflaw. (2.1: 197)

The violence of Niobe's myth-and indeed of myth in general-is specifically confined to the mode of a manifestation, or rather, of"a mere manifestation" ( "eine blosse Manifestation"), of gods or of "fate." The violence of myth neither proves nor disproves the existence of divine superintendents, but has instead the lesser capacity to phenomenalize that existence by producing "mere" presentations (figures, displays, exhibitions) for such existence through the perceptible signs of immediate violence. For the moment, we leave aside the precise relation of myth, law, and justice-and that "problematic light" that mythical violence casts upon legal violence. What concerns us here is that all positings of power are originally mythic; myth is a Macht-setzung, a cultural and linguistic device for positing/staging power through its show of force (which is power figured more immediately, as a sudden, unforeseen event). As Benjamin's remarks on the interconnected nature of myth and law show,

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Tom McCall it is the performance of violence that results in the positing-in positions-of power. Mythico-legal manifestations of pure violence, however, are counterfeits, for these mythic shows of immediate violence are already mediations of violence-already incorporated into mythological, representational, and political systems-as opposed to that nonrepresentable and nonmediated immediacy of pure violence, which belongs to no system of mediations and so cannot be shown on any stage, and so also cannot be in any sense political (except for the political dimension lurking in the conceptual distinction itself, which belongs to the mythical-legal violence contaminating any critique). By mimicking the (unmediated) immediacy of pure violence in its own mythic show of that immediacy, mythical violence does great violence to pure violence, and so also to the potential justice that depends on the latter. Here, the immediacy of violence on the stage can be only a simulacrum of that other immediacy postulated to be the mode of pure, absolutely decisive and authentic violence. As we shall see below, myth infects law with its representational function, thus making justice even more difficult to achieve in the show of violence. The citation continues as follows: True, it might appear that the action of Apollo and Artemis is only a punishment. But their violence establishes a law far more than it punishes for the infringement of one already existing. Niobe's arrogance calls down fate upon itself, not because her arrogance offends against the law, but because it challenges fate-to a fight in which fate must triumph, and can bring to light a law only in its triumph .... Violence therefore bursts upon Niobe from the uncertain, ambiguous sphere of fate. It is not actually destructive. Although it brings a cruel death to Niobe's children, it stops short of the life of their mother, whom it leaves behind, more guilty than before through the death of the children, both as an eternally mute bearer of guilt and as a boundary stone on the frontier between men and gods .... At the same time, this connection promises further to illuminate fate, which in all cases underlies legal violence. (2.1: 197)

"Violence ... bursts upon Niobe from the uncertain, ambiguous sphere of fate." A myth can be a show of force-can stage violence, and the violence of the gods, of fate-only because it

Momentary Violence

is throughout informed by "ambiguity" (Zweideutigkeit), from whence it issues and whither its reading can only tend. As we remember, Niobe, fertile in childbearing, boasted that she had borne more children than the goddess Leto, mother of Apollo and Artemis. Apollo then slays Niobe's children (not her) with arrows. The violence of this myth arises from the ambiguous, overdetermined, and unbounded situation governing the response (Apollo's arrows) to Niobe's "arrogance" (Hochmut): there are myriad possible responses that an "uncertain, ambiguous fate" may choose to give to this rather mundane, if overweening speech act, the Niobean boast. As the citation articulates it, the boast "challenges ... fate" ( "herausfordert ... das Schicksal"). This "uncertain" fate, as if unsure whether and how to respond, is hard-pressed, "challenged"possibly even uncertain of its own existence-yet called upon by that "daemonic-ambiguous mode" that is myth to do something, anything, to overcome a challenging utterance and so to manifest its existence. Benjamin explicitly states that the killing of Niobe's children is no punishment corresponding to a crime committed; if it were, the choice of response would pose no difficulties whatever for fate, which would then not appear to be uncertain and ambiguous at all, but would be part of a legal economy where it could manifest its existence simply by reciting the punishment correspondent to the crime in the legal code. In this case, fate ("which in all cases underlies legal violence") would go unchallenged, would be stable, grounded, and self-certain, as it appears to be in law. But why should fate have chosen arrows? Certain associations drawn from mythological conventions do offer themselves: Apollo the archer (just as Artemis) is Leto's offspring. Yet such metonymical associations do not erase ambiguity, only create it. Precisely because an uncertain fate is uncertain (of itself, of the proper response to challenges) does it choose to manifest itself in a show of violence. Because there is no real necessity for the arrows, because these arrows are by no means the only possible "answers" to the boastor (lacking a legal code) necessarily the "correct" response-so do they slam so surely, with such deadly violence, into the bodies of Niobe's children. Apollo's murderous arrows hit their marks so violently because they could have, or might have, missed, and need not

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even have been used. In line with the present reading of Benjamin's suggestive remarks, the arrows are a show of force, their represented violence a compensation for their groundlessness; the real indifference of fate to Niobe and her moods declares itself in the means fate chooses to respond to the challenge-in the arrows, those unerring instruments of violence whose force shows itself always to be on target, univocal because it is possibly always so wide of the mark, ambiguous. Thus, violence is the thematic symptom of the ambiguity of power in mythico-legal agents. Their power is always in at least two places at once (zwei-deutig, "ambiguous"): both there (in the myth, in the law, in various sociopolitical systems) and not there-being somewhere else, or possibly nowhere. The violence of violence comes from this doubleness; and power, in this duplicity, is compelled to make a show of itself in figures of violence, as if, through this show, it could demonstrate its integrity. Yet the violence of the show only divides power more (power, which is a certain division of violence to begin with), so condemning all manifestations of existence to be "mere," and all decisions of justice to be indecisive. It might appear that the action of Apollo and Artemis is only a punishment. But their violence establishes a law far more than it punishes for the infringement of one already existing. Niobe's arrogance calls down fate upon itself not because her arrogance offends against the law, but because it challenges fate-to a fight in which fate must triumph, and can bring to light a law only in its triumph. (2.1: 197)

Before fate, as the harbinger of law, can enter into its triumphant inscriptions, it must be "challenged" by a prior mythic speech act (e.g., Niobe's boast, or Prometheus's gift of fire). In this challenge, fate is caught in the hesitation or caesura of a "fight," an interim in which an as yet "uncertain, ambiguous sphere of fate" is momentarily faced with its own nonresponsiveness and called upon to risk a responsive action whose inevitable "triumph" is to establish law in the wake of its inscription. If fate were to fail the challenge and lose the fight, there would be no mythic context and so no law to come in its wake; there would be only a few disconnected utterances. There would not even be a transgression or boast recogniz-

Momentary Violence able as such, until the arrows, triumphantly appearing as an uncertain fate's response to a challenge, retroactively cast the speech act of Niobe in its role as "boast." Precisely what fate is going to do or say when confronted with its challenge is not yet known, not yet written, and this is why we may say that it hesitates. Hence, the challenge, a kind of caesura, is the inarticulate space of a future coalescence of both myth and law, the (mythic) act of inscribing law, and the (legally) enacted inscription. Without the myth of the challenge, there would be no inscription of law, whose inscriptive permanence and force as inscription requires the "pre-text" of the challenge. At this point, however, the violence of myth must be sharply differentiated from that oflaw, even though the two modes are continuous or kindred. With law, all is foretold, all infringements are known in advance, with their corresponding punishments. A written protocol exists for the rules of evidence, courtroom procedures, and so on, guiding the decisions of the judiciary. The legal system, then, appears to be far less challenged and hesitant than myth when it is called upon to respond; whereas law has a preestablished code of legal precedents to draw upon, myth has more of a challenge and a fight on its hands, having to choose its responses from a much wider field of possibilities. Law is inscribed violence, myth the act of its inscription. Compared with myth, the operations of law appear more automatic, more logically deduced, more closely argued, more rationally determined. Legal violence springs from a system that so swiftly and automatically provides the response texts that it seems as if there is no challenge, no hesitation, and so no act of inscription; mythical violence, on the other hand, involves the challenge-the hesitation-of the unwritten, the asystemic, the indeterminate, the "not yet." Mythic fate, faced as it is with the unknown, hesitates before it produces the text; legal fate asserts itself by reiterating, 11 apparently without hesitation, what has already been inscribed, and so the violence of inscription is less conspicuous because all inscription is only a repetition or reiteration of something (law) that comes from a well-regulated and well-cultivated textual place, the familiar, deductible, and reasonable system oflaw. It should now be clear why Benjamin lays stress on the point that the arrows of Apollo and Artemis are not punishments and so

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are not law, at least not yet. If they were punishments-that is, already inscribed law-the specific mode of mythical violence would go unperceived: the challenge, the fight, and the triumph of a fatal inscription, the mode that legal violence conceals. If there were no sense of a challenge, together with the hesitation and fight accompanying it, there would be no conspicuous triumph of an inscription and of the fate attending it. If there were no challenge, mythical violence would not show itself so well in its show of force, its triumphant inscription, incipient law. The triumph of a mythic fate is therefore the beginning of law, which is structured as a violent performance of force in the same way that myth is. Indeed, law is myth, or rather a parasite of myth, just as myth is a (larger) parasite of pure violence; law can arise only where myth has been, as a certain utilization of the mythic context. What remains to be clarified is how law can follow myth only as an inscription of its violent ambiguity, an inscription that brings law into existence by concealing mythical ambiguity and consequently mythical violence. If the violent figures of myth are difficult to read and critique, those oflaw are all the more so, owing to the concealing operations oflegal violence. We proceed, then, from the analysis of myth to that of law. Niobe's boast "challenges fate-to a fight in which fate must triumph." Why "must" fate triumph (siegen mufi)? Can it ever "lose," in myth-fail to respond to the challenge, and so fail to manifest its (and the gods') existence? Fate does have the right to remain silent, but in the mythic context, such silence could be taken only as a response (as in Greek tragedy, when a silent response to hubristic acts can mean only that fate is biding its time, gathering its forces for a final lesson). As we recall from the analysis of violence and ambiguity, mythic fate is placed in a difficult, radically indeterminate situation, challenged by having to choose from an array of responses by means of which to show its force and manifest its existence. The fatal arrows of Apollo were a symptom of this indeterminacy (of the correct or best response, as of whether to respond at all), their directed violence being thematic compensations for the uncertainty (or ambiguity) of response to the challenge. It is true that, in the mythic context, responses are wholly overdetermined: in the daemonic nar-

Momentary Violence

rative of the Niobe myth, any response that follows the boast (or challenging action) could have served as a manifestation of fate. An act (any act) occurs in a first "slot" of the mythic syntagma: "Niobe boasted that ... "; or "Prometheus gave fire (artifice, technology) to man." In a subsequent slot, something (anything) occurs: "Apollo shot arrows," or "Prometheus is condemned to suffer" or "Hephaistos sneezed." The mythical violence in the narrative is the guarantee that whatever paradigm choice occurs in the first slot will be significant (or, as in our case, will count as a direct challenge to fate), just as this same mythical violence guarantees that the paradigms placed into subsequent slots will count as a climactic, fatal response to the first, and will in fact "be" fate's answer to it. One (but in myth there is no "one") can never be sure of choosing the right paradigms to fill in the narrative slots, but the violence of myth overcomes this indeterminacy of the paradigm with a compensating overdeterminacy of the syntagma that legitimates ("in a daemonicambiguous way") whatever is chosen as the mythically, religiously, and legally appropriate response. As we shall see, the legal system is enabled by the same linguistic structure as myth, where a certain possible randomness (indeterminacy) governing mythico-legal articulations is counterbalanced by a narrative mechanism (overdetermination) capable of staging a nonnecessary articulation as the final or correct one. On the one hand, the need to stage or thematize violence is the sure symptom of an unsettling uncertainty, an indeterminacy governing paradigm choice-here, an impossibility of deciding the best or correct articulation of laws, statues, crimes, and punishments; on the other hand, violence and force can be shown only because of a prevailing overdetermination that makes it possible to stage or show anything at all. The notion of showing force, which we (with Benjamin) have explained as the modus operandi of myth, is equally sovereign in legal formations, except that there the show is hidden in something else. Myth shades into law in the legal myth of the death penalty, where the hallmark of mythical violence, its show of force, is equally prominent in legal violence. This show happens to be more visible in the law of the death penalty than in other laws, where the show of violence gets hidden behind or is camouflaged within another

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Tom McCall show that upstages-or rather, steals the show from-myth: the show of the rational system of measured crimes and corresponding punishments. The judgment "death," a legal response no less random (in the sense of indeterminable yet overdetermined) than the mythic arrows of Apollo, is half myth and half law: like mythic fate, it stages and demonstrates a mandated power (one coming down from "on high"), yet as law, it conceals its own mythic manifestation of power within an automatic appeal to a preexisting text or codex (implicitly identified with cosmic order and universal justice) that supplies the response, "death." In this case, the state unjustly justifies its response by labeling it with the stigma of its own system: "death penalty" or "capital punishment." If violence, violence crowned by fate, is the origin of law, then it may be readily supposed that where the highest violence, that over life and death, occurs in the legal system, the origins oflaw jut manifestly and fearsomely into existence. In agreement with this is the fact that the death penalty in primitive legal systems is imposed even for such crimes as offenses against property, to which it seems quite out of "proportion." Its purpose is not to punish the infringement of law, but to establish new law. In the exercise of violence over life and death more than in any other legal act, law reaffirms itself. (2.1: 188) Why should it be that the death penalty reveals more to us about "the origins of law" -about lawmaking in general-than other laws? Because "the origin of law," as Benjamin postulates, is "violence, violence crowned by fate" ( "Gewalt, schicksalhaft gekroente Gewalt"). Where "the highest violence, that over life and death, occurs in the legal system," there "the origins of law jut manifestly and fearsomely into existence." As we saw in the Niobe myth, fate originates there, where the show of force is most conspicuous, murderous, spectacular, and bloody: in the show of death. The death penalty functions in the same way as the Niobe myth: in each case a show of reactive violence (fate-mandated arrows; state-mandated execution) conjures up a certain force field of associations held together by guilt, a name for the particular semiotic principle constitutive of a sphere called "fate" that links its phenomena together in singular ways. "Fate is the guilt relation

Momentary Violence [Schuldzusammenhang] of the living." 12 In those particular guilt relations enforced by the violence of myth and law in our context, deadly arrows count as a "mere manifestation" of gods and so qualify as the adequate response of a fate sitting in judgment over a prior act, and in the case of law, the execution can count as the response, the answerability of the state, its lawful and fated judgment. Death is chosen in each case as the means to demonstrate the absolute right and absolute watchfulness of a totalitarian sphere called fate or state whose coherence is guaranteed by guilt. The state idealizes and mythifies its power where it arrogates to itself the right to decide life and death, thus mimicking the tightly bound fate of the mythological universe. In the exercise of violence over life and death more than in any other legal act, law reaffirms itself. But in this violence, something rotten in law is revealed, above all to a finer sensibility, because the latter knows itself to be infinitely remote from conditions in which fate might imperiously have shown itself in such a sentence. (2.1: 188) Here, in a continuation of the passage at issue in the last section, the death penalty reveals to "a finer sensibility" that a certain "rot" or corruption is at work in this law, which encapsulates, but, more importantly, exhibits the violence of the entire legal system. The rot within law has to do with a persistent idealization or totalitarian representation in which one, singular, and solitary response oflegal fate (e.g., capital punishment) to an offense (e.g., homicide, or treason) gains an imperious authority as the only or best response to that offense. The "finer sensibility" recognizes that the means by which law aims to achieve legitimacy-namely, its self-legitimation through the representation of its violence-cannot serve as the basis for that universality it (as law) claims for itself. Thus the "fate" that underwrites law will be as uncertain and ambiguous as the fate in the mythic sphere; indeed, the essay reiterates in various ways that there is but one fate- "which underlies all legal violence." In other words, the fate that chooses "death" as the legal penalty for an illicit act is on no surer ground than the fate that chooses "arrows" as its answer to the boast of Niobe. In both cases, why should an uncertain fate/state have chosen death (of all

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things) as the means to show itself so "imperiously ... in such a sentence"? Indeed, death must be seen in each case as a random selection produced by the indeterminacy-the unrestricted fieldanimating the paradigmatic inscriptions of myth and law, whose randomness is betrayed through its violence as spectacle. The finer sensibility recognizes death as a specifically mythical production whereby the one-word sentence "Death" has to come from the nowhere of a blank inscription, a mythologie blanche, and so must be correspondent or equivalent to nothing-if it is to serve as a representation of the force of (a challenged, threatened, uncertain, ambiguous) state. The finer sensibility, in short, recognizes both the indeterminacy of the death sentence as a response to a crime as well as the overdetermined significance it enjoys owing to the mythical violence of its spectacle. Less fine sensibilities, caught within the ananke of mythic fate, would see the death sentence as determinate, inescapable, and even natural, legitimated by the fate of law-here, a fate sanctioned by the legal economy of crimes and punishments. In this case, it is the strictest economy: tautology-tautological jurisprudence of "an eye for an eye." "Law" is said to thrive, "gather its force, in its practice of exerting violence over life and death" ("in der Ausi.ibung der Gewalt iiber Leben und Tod bekraftigt ... das Recht sich selbst"). The dramatic performance of execution is the figure of total control, last right and rite. Yet if the state must resort to staging execution to show the force of its law, law has failed to have force. Legal violence differs from mythical violence in being the means to legal ends, rather than mere exhibitions of fate or gods. As means (Mittel), legal violence is already quite unlike pure violence, which can never be used as a means to the appointed ends of historical polities. But law is not content merely to let its means be what they are-the instruments of legal justice; rather, the instrumentality of legal violence grafts itself onto mythical exhibitions of violence-as if to keep itself assured that its means still exist and are still under its control. From this point of view, capital punishment and other draconian displays of state-imposed justice are the symptoms of political anxieties, the basis of which is always the fear of a failure to monopolize violence.

Momentary Violence Whereas the violence of the death penalty is manifest in its performance, such lethal violence-which Benjamin takes as the best demonstration of legal violence in general-is only latent in most other legal performances. If the mythical origins of law are readable in the case of the death penalty, elsewhere, mythical violence seems to "go underground," camouflaging itself in what might be identified as the less visible, but no less potent, metaphysical violence that holds together legal systems, based as these are on complex and abstract conceptions of equity, debts (to society), and payment of debt, "scales of justice," codes oflaw, written legal precedents, constitutions, and so on. One phrase in "Toward a Critique of Violence" notes that the "decision" handed down by the legal body is a "metaphysical category" that, as such, is open to critical evaluation. Thus the rottenness in the death penalty yields, in the case of law generally, to a more insidious rottenness in which violence is concealed: "When the consciousness of the latent presence of violence in a legal institution disappears, the institution falls into decay" ("Schwindet das Bewusstsein von der latenten Anwesenheit der Gewalt in einem Rechtsinstitut, so verfallt es") (2.1: 190). Human history, which is mostly a historiography of legal formations, is structured as a lapsing of consciousness, a forgetting of violent positions. The rational, rule-driven institutions oflaw forget myth and its violence, thinking they have superseded its capricious and excessive or "fantastic" plots; however, the same violence is at work, but concealed, within the rationality of law. There has only been a change of scene, where the shows of arbitrary force in myth turn into the shows of arbitration and argumentation informing the legal system. But the rational apparatus of jurisprudence still operates under the aegis of the general mythical fate that contains law. Reason here is like a Greek "fury in the mind," the puppet of a fate-imposed violence that has no choice but to follow the laws of that fate: here, the laws of evidentiary and judicial decidability, regulatability, reiterability, calculatability, adjudicability. Such laws and rules foster the forgetting of momentary violence. Benjamin brings up the idea of the legal contract to explain how law conceals its own violence. Far from being a "totally nonviolent resolution of conflicts," the essay explains, the legal con-

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tract incorporates real violence. It may look amicable or peaceable enough, but the slightest breach of contract and the skies can open up, raining down real, but legal, violence on the head of the one who fails to carry out the letter of the law. Ending as they do in possible violent legal actions, contracts must also have begun in such violence; the point here is that, coiled up in the contract, silently and waiting to strike, is the power that guarantees the contract in the first place. The legal contract is thus the tradition's land mine of forgotten, abysally internalized violence. Once this mine is tripped, it explodes with a violence no less remarkable than the mythical violence of Apollo's arrows or of that peculiar violence of the speech act at work in the mythic curse. Leaving Benjamin's text, we stay a moment longer with the curse of myth, the curse that exemplifies so well mythical violence, and would (after what has been said) have to be recognized as also the mode of state-imposed violence. Law, the means by which the state marks its language on bodies, is structured like a curse, akin to the curse that drives the accursed mad or the arrows that slay Niobe's children. Who is subject to the speech acts of contracts and laws is accursed. The curse offers a paradigm for the pure positional power oflaw, its nomothetic force, its power to mark the body politic. The violence of law, like that of myth, has to do with just this constitution and marking of bodies. Yet law remains an ideality that decays whenever it is applied.

Reference Matter

Notes

Preface 1.

The conference referred to took place at Johns Hopkins on October

18-21, 1966. It was organized by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato

and took as its title "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man." The proceedings of the Hopkins conference were subsequently published as The Structuralist Controversy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). 2. In this context, Paul de Man's remark about Benjamin in an essay on Bakhtin is worth noting, in particular, for its reflection on the relation of Benjamin (as well as Bakhtin) to literary theory: "Literary theory, and especially the theory of narrative, a rather barren area of endeavor constantly threatened by the tedium of its techniques as well as by the magnitude of the issues, offers poor soil for the heroes and the hero-worship that it rather desperately needs. So when a possible candidate for such status comes along, he is likely to be very well received, especially if he is safely and posthumously out of reach. Such belated 'receptions,' for being rare, are all the more intense in the field of literary theory. A fairly recent example is, 209

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Notes to Pages 1-2 of course the case of Walter Benjamin." "Dialogue and Dialogism," in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 106.

Ferris, "Aura, Resistance, and the Event of History" 1. The epigraph is from Maxime Du Camp, Paris (Paris: 1869-75) and it forms the first entry in Konvolut S of the Passagen-Werk, in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974-89), 5.2: 674; S1, 1. All subsequent references to the Gesammelte Schriften given parenthetically in the text will indicate volume, part, and page number. References to the Passagen- Werk will also be followed by section and paragraph numbers and will provide the alphabetical and numerical divisions established in that edition. The superscript 0 indicates notes; "Q 0 , " for example, indicates notes for what eventually became part of the Q Konvolut. Unless otherwise indicated all translations are my own. On Benjamin's use of ]anusgesicht to describe his work (in particular the Kafka essay as well as his writings on language), see Gerschom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 246. 2. One should also note that this work is described, in Benjamin's own words, as a "problemgeschichtliche Aufgabe" (a task defined by a historical-problematic). Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, in Gesammelte Schriften, 1.1: 11. 3. An opening of this question has taken place in the discussion of history and origin in Benjamin pursued in recent writings by Samuel Weber: "Genealogy of Modernity: History, Myth, and Allegory in Benjamin's Origin of the German Mourning Play," MLN 106 (December 1991): 465-500, as well as his contribution to this volume. The question is also discussed by Christopher Fynsk in "The Claim of History," Diacritics 22, no. 3-4 (fallwinter 1992): 115-27. For reflections on the political in relation to Benjamin's work, see Werner Hamacher, "Afformative Strike," Cardozo Law Review 10, no. 4 (December 1991): 1133-57, and Alex Garda Diittmann, "Traditional Destruction: Benjamin's Politics of Language," in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (New York: Routledge, 1994), 32-59. 4· In this sense, theory cannot be distinguished from the critical. As Paul de Man writes, theory is itself the resistance to theory. The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 19. No theory can evade the critical realm within which this resistance takes place and without which it has been unable to exist since at least Kant.

Notes to Pages 3-4

5. Adorno remarks that "hermetic works show more criticism of what exists than those that devote themselves to easily understood social criticism for the sake of a formal reconciliation and silently recognize the communication industry that is blossoming everywhere." Theodor W. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 215. 6. Benjamin writes: "Mir kommt hier etwas mehr linientreues Schrifttum vor Augen als in Paris und so gereit ich neulich an ein Heft der 'Internationalem Literatur' in dem ich, anlaBlich dines Teils meiner Wahlverwandscahftenarbeit als Gefolgsmann von Heidegger figuriere. Die Misere in diesem Schrifttum ist groK" Letter to Gretel Adorno, July 20, 1938, in Briefe, 2 vols., ed. Gerschom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 2: 771; this text will be referred to subsequently as Briefe. 7. Internationale Literatur was one of two anti-Fascist German language journals published by exiles in Moscow in the 193o's (the other was Das Wort). In her analysis of these journals during the years 1936-39, Angela HuB-Michel describes Internationale Literatur as the journal whose politics were more programmatic and adhered more closely to the politics of Stalin. See Die Moskauer Zeitschriften "Internationale Literatur" und "Das Wort" wiihrend der Exil- Volksfront (1936-1939), Europaische Hochschulschriften, vol. 974 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1987), 35-68. 8. As David Wellbery has remarked, "A ramified account of the Heidegger/Benjamin relationship is one of the central tasks facing contemporary theoretical discussion." Benjamin's Theory ofLyric," in Benjamin's Ground, ed. Rainer Nagele (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 41. What follows here is only one of the lines along which the relation of Benjamin to Heidegger could be pursued-a line that, to use a favored term of Benjamin's, involves a constellation of terms that relate history, Heidegger, and the work of art. A brief discussion ofHeidegger in the context of Benjamin's work may be found in Julian Roberts, Walter Benjamin (London: Macmillan, 1982), 85-92. A more sustained discussion is promised by Christopher Fynsk in his "The Claim of History," 116 n. On other aspects of the relation between Heidegger's and Benjamin's thought, see the essays by Samuel Weber and Peter Fenves in this volume. 9. On historicism, see sections 16 and 17 and appendix A of Benjamin's "Uber den Begriff der Geschichte," in Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2: 702-4. 10. Benjamin wrote this letter in French: "Pour ce livre aussi bien que pour le 'Trauerspiel' je ne pourrai me passer d'une introduction qui porte sur Ia theorie de Ia connaissance-et, cette fois surtout sur Ia theorie de Ia

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Notes to Pages 5-7 connaissance de l'histoire. C'est Ia que je trouverai sur mon chemin Heidegger et j'attends quelque scintillement de l'entre-choc de nos deux manieres, tres differentes, d'envisager l'histoire." Letter to Scholem, January 20, 1930, in Briefe, 2: 506. Susan Buck-Morss also refers to this letter at the beginning of The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), but does so in a translation that suggests a rapprochement ("connecting shock") between Heidegger and Benjamin (376 n. 4). As other references to Heidegger in the Passagen- Werk make clear, Benjamin does not seek, as Buck-Morss suggests, a materialist version of Heidegger's understanding of history (4). These references, as well as the letter in which Benjamin speaks of shattering Heidegger, will be discussed in the course of this introduction. 11. Benjamin, of course, could not have known the writings in which Heidegger draws upon this metaphor, since they were published after his death. 12. The naivete assumed by this conjunction (that, for example, Heidegger is a philosopher of Nazism) may be best put into perspective if one asks as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has done: "What is it in Heidegger's thought that made possible, what is it in Heidegger's thought that did not forbid the political engagement of 1933?" "La transcendance fini'/, dans Ia politique," in L'imitation des modernes, Typographies 2 (Paris: Galilee, 1986), 137. The terms of such a question do not immediately assume that the philosophical is simply political. It is rather a question of what necessitates (within the constitution of philosophy and not just in the case of Heidegger) the step from philosophy to politics. 13. Benjamin's use of entrechoc to describe his meeting with Heidegger should not be overlooked. Although the verb entrechoquer dates from the sixteenth century, the nominal form, entrechoc, is not common in French (Littre lists only entrechoquer as a verb and entrechoquement as a noun; no entry is given for entrechoc). However, the Grand Robert, 2nd ed. (1985) gives an entry for entrechoc and cites the following passage from Proust, which could well have been Benjamin's source for this word: "L'elan de ces souvenirs si tendres, venant se briser contre !'idee qu'Albertine etait morte, m'oppressait par l'entrechoc de flux si contraries que je ne pouvais rester immobile." A la recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Pleiade, 1954), 3: 482. 14. This material is contained in Konvolut N and carries the descriptive title "Erkenntnistheoretisches, Theorie des Fortschritts" ("Theoretical Knowledge, Theory of Progress"), in Gesammelte Schriften, 5.1: 570-611. 15. One other reference to Heidegger is worth noting here. In a letter

Notes to Pages 7-11

from 1930, Benjamin speaks of shattering Heidegger ("Heidegger zu zertriimmern"). Letter to Scholem, April25, 1930, in Briefe, 2: 514. A reference to Heidegger in Konvolut S of the Passagen- Werk will be cited subsequently. 16. Heidegger's own remarks on phenomenology and its method in Being and Time (1927) will be helpful in this context: "The expression 'phenomenology' signifies primarily a methodological conception. This expression does not characterize the what of the objects of philosophical research as subject matter, but rather the how of that research." A remark from the section on "Temporality and Historicality" is also appropriate here; Heidegger comments: "If historicality itself is to be clarified in terms of temporality and primordially in terms of an authentic temporality, then it is the essence of this task that it be accomplished only in the manner of a phenomenological construction." Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tilbingen: Niemeyer, 1986), 27, 375· Concerning Benjamin's two references to Heidegger in Konvolut N of the Passagen- Werk, the first occurs in a folio (N3) whose composition is dated no later than June 1935, the second (N8a) in a later group of folios that date from December 1937 to May 1940 (for these dates, see Gesammelte Schriften, 5.2: 1261-62). Given these dates and the emphasis of Benjamin's remarks, it is unlikely that Benjamin could be referring to any other work of Heidegger's than Being and Time. 17. On phenomenology and historicality (and their relation to temporality) in Heidegger, see Sein und Zeit, 27-38,372-97. In this context, mention must be made of Christopher Fynsk's study, Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986). 18. In the classical philosophical sense given by Aristotle in the Physics, such a present is a coincidence of past and future. As Aristotle rightly points out, such an understanding of the present demands that "what happened a thousand years ago would be simultaneous with what has happened today, and nothing would be before or after anything else." Physics, 4.10, 218a. Aristotle makes this remark after pointing out that it is hard to say whether "now" is related to past and future and is thus always the same or whether this "now" is always other, that is, always different from temporal continuity. Benjamin clearly leans in the latter direction, as his description of the "now of recognizability" as a temporal differential will show. However, there remains, even in this context, the consequences of Aristotle's observation that it is hard to say whether this "now" is one or the other. Indeed, is it what Benjamin rejects or espouses? 19. For a discussion of the relation of reading to Benjamin's dialectical image, see Anselm Haverkamp, "Notes on the 'Dialectical Image,'" Diacritcs 22, no. 3-4 (fall-winter 1992): 70-80.

213

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Notes to Pages 11-15

20. G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopiidie der Philosophischen Wissenschaften in Werke, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 8: 173, § 81. 21. That this image and the "now of recognizability" through which it arises is to be thought as a distinction is underlined by two later observations in Konvolut N, both of which compare this "now" to the moment at which one recognizes that one is no longer asleep: "The now of recognizability is the moment of awakening" (5.1: 6oS; N18, 4), and "Can it be that awakening is the synthesis whose thesis is dream consciousness and whose antithesis is consciousness? Then the moment (Moment) of awakening would be identical with the 'now of recognizability' in which things put on their true-surrealistic-face. Thus, in Proust, the importance of staking the whole life on its ultimate dialectical breaking point-the moment of awakening. Proust starts out with the presentation of the space of someone waking up" (5.1: 579; N3a, 3). At another point in Konvolut N, this moment of awakening becomes the recognition of "the historical object" (N10a, 3) as distinguished from historical process. What constitutes this object is, of course, never exactly clear in Benjamin; it is certainly not an artifact from the past, since the mere existence of such artifacts is not by itself historical. 22. While it is beyond the scope of this introduction to pursue fully Heidegger's understanding of history and historicality (for reasons that will become clear in the course of this discussion), a counterpoint that clarifies the relation of history and temporality in Heidegger is unavoidable here. For Heidegger, in Being and Time, there can be no thinking of history outside of temporality. It is on this point that there would be a considerable entrechoc between Heidegger and Benjamin, but not in the terms that Benjamin envisages. Benjamin's attempt to determine something that arrests temporality marks the point at which his thought differs from Heidegger's. This attempt also reveals that for Benjamin, the possibility of a politics, which arises from the temporal differential sought by Benjamin, is at the same time the possibility of a concept of criticism. 23. The persistence of such a critical position is analyzed by Rodolphe Gasche in an essay on Benjamin's "Kritik der Gewalt": "On Critique Hypercriticism, and Deconstruction: The Case of Benjamin," Cardozo Law Review 13, no. 4 (December 1991): ms-32. 24. This proximity in thought is given even greater expression in the notes Benjamin wrote for the theses presented in the text "On the Concept of History." One section of these notes concerned with Benjamin's concept of tradition is recorded as follows by the editors of the Gesammelte Schriften: "{Problem der Tradition I} Dialektik im Stillstand" (1.3: 1236). Other

Notes to Pages 17-21 sections of these notes are entitled "Das Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit," and "Das dialektisches Bild" (1.3: 1237-38). 25. As will be apparent from this citation (and is so often the case in his writing), there is little conceptual consistency to Benjamin's vocabulary. While Historismus indicates the understanding of history that Benjamin wishes to arrest, and Geschichte frequently refers to the historicality that occurs through the dialectical image, this example clearly refers to the latter while belonging to the word family of the former. Despite its attractiveness to significant themes within contemporary criticism, this conceptual inconsistency should not lead one to assume that Benjamin's work consciously resists the conceptualization of critical language-as Benjamin's presentation of the dialectical image and the "now of recognizability" indicates. 26. "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit," in Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2: 473. 27. Hegel, Enzyklopadie § 81, in Werke, 8: 175· 28. The suddenness of the flash of light is also present in the use of Umschlag to describe the dialectical turning around through which the relation of past and present is to be changed in Konvolut K (5.1: 491). Umschlag may also be used to refer to a sudden change of weather or opinion. 29. As a passage already cited from the introductory section of Benjamin's essay on the work of art states, the concepts introduced by this essay "are useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands [revolutionarer Forderungen] in the politics of art" (1.2: 473). 30. As Benjamin has already emphasized in the passage just cited from section 4 in the work of art essay: "In dem Augenblick aber, da der Mafltab der Echtheit an der Kunstproduktion versagt" (1.2: 482). 31. A passage omitted from the previous quotation states as much: "This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, in another word, its aura" ("Kunstwerk," 1.2: 480). 32. The 1936 French translation by Pierre Klossowski of the "Kunstwerk" essay, in which Benjamin had a limited participation (see, 1.3: 1267), is explicit in this respect: "Qu'est-ce en somme que !'aura? Une singuliere trame de temps et d'espace: apparition unique d'un lointain, si proche soit-il" (1.2: 712). 33. Walter Benjamin, "Uber einige Motive bei Baudelaire," in Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2: 647 n.

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Notes to Pages 22-25

34· Paul de Man, "Anthropomorphism and Trope in Lyric," in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 239-62. 35· For its relevance to the ongoing argument, the sentence from which this phrase is taken bears quoting in full: "The union of aesthetic with epistemological properties is carried out by the mediation of the metaphor of the self as consciousness of itself, which implies its negation." Ibid., 256. 36. Here, the passage from Konvolut S referred to earlier (see note 15 above) may be quoted: "Lebenswichtiges Interesse, eine bestimmte Stelle der Entwicklung als Scheideweg zu erkennen. An einem solchen steht zur Zeit das neue geschichtliche Denken, das durch hOhere Konkretheit, Rettung der Verfallszeiten, Revision der Periodisierung tiberhaupt und im Einzelnen charakterisiert ist und dessen Auswertung in reaktionarem oder revolutionare[m] Sinne sich jetzt entscheidet. In diesem Sinne bekundet in den Schriften der Surrealisten und dem neuen Buche von Heidegger sich ein und dieselbe Krise in ihren beiden Losungsmoglichkeiten" ("The interest of a life's work, to know a specific point of development as a crossroads. Currently, the new historical thought stands at such a point; this thought is characterized by greater concreteness, rescue of the decay of the times, revision of periodization in general and in details. Its interpretation in a reactionary or revolutionary sense now decides itself. In this sense, one and the same crisis reveals itself in the possibilities of both their accounts, in the writings of the surrealists and in the new book by Heidegger") (5.1: 676; S1, 6). This passage belongs to a group of folios written prior to June 1935. Is it at such a crossroads that Benjamin would face Heidegger-a crossroads that became the interest of Benjamin's life's work? 37. The pursuit of this question would entail not just an extended reading of Heidegger's analyses of phenomenology, but also Husserl's. 38. For the remarks that follow, it should be remembered that Benjamin wishes to rescue phenomenology, not investigate its foundation. 39· Difficulty in delimiting the aura is first indicated by Adorno in a letter written to Benjamin in March 1936. See Theodor W. Adorno, "Letters to Walter Benjamin," in Aesthetics and Politics (London: New Left Books, 1977), 121-22. 40. By making this rescue turn upon a moment, Benjamin also would preserve (whether knowingly or not does not matter) what Derrida applies considerable critical pressure to in his analysis ofHusserl's phenomenology in La voix et le phenomene (Paris: Presses Universitaives de France, 1967). Derrida's remarks are not without their significance for the terms of Benjamin's presentation of the dialectical image and its reliance upon the "now

Notes to Pages 28-33

of recognizability." Derrida writes: "As soon as one admits this continuity of the now and the not-now, perception and non-perception, in the zone of origination common to an originary impression and its retention, one welcomes the other into the self-identity of the Augenblick: nonpresence and uncertainty are admitted in the blink of an instant. There is a duration to the blink, it closes the eye. This otherness is in fact the condition of presence, of presentation, and thus of Vorstellung in general; it precedes all the dissociations that could be produced there." Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 65; translation modified. The Augenblick of the dialectical image is inevitable and unavoidable, it is the moment when Benjamin's theory of the knowledge of history closes its eye so that knowledge may be joined with politics and history. Whether or not one persists in translating Augenblick as the blinking of an eye (on this translation, see Samuel Weber's essay below), this moment in which the eye looks or closes still requires a duration and, as a result, Benjamin's dialectical image may be thought only as a temporal contradiction and not as a contradiction of time, a Zeitdifferential. Weber, "Mass Mediauras" 1. References to this text are to Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klosterman, 1963), 86. Subsequent references to this text will be in parentheses in the text. Translations are my own. The other translation cited is "The Age of the World View," trans. Marjorie Grene, Measure 2, (1951), 269-84. 2. In juxtaposing the approaches of Heidegger and Benjamin, another remark of Tiedemann's will find ample confirmation: "Benjamin always assigned an incomparably greater significance to pictoriality than is usual in philosophy; his own language speaks at length in, and even more out of, images." Rolf Tiedemann, Walter Benjamin, 1892-1940, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Christoph Godde, and Henri Lonitz, Marbacher Magazin 55 (1990):

260.

3· See Samuel Weber, "Upsetting the Set Up: Remarks on Heidegger's 'Questing after Technics,'" MLN 104, no. 5 (December 1989): 979-91. 4. Walter Benjamin, "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit," in Gesammelte Schriften (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1974-89), 1.2: 477-78. Here, as elsewhere, I have furnished my own translations of Benjamin's German. Subsequent references to this essay will be given parenthetically in the text and will provide two page numbers: the first is to the German edition just cited and the second is to the English

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Notes to Pages 34-41

translation published in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1985); here, 221. If only one page number appears, it is, unless explicitly indicated otherwise, a reference to the German text. 5. In one of his earliest notations on the subject of aura, from the hashish notes of 1930, Benjamin writes of the aura as "an ornamental surrounding [ Umzirkung] in which the thing of being lies embedded [eingesenkt] as in a case [Futteral]." Cited in Werner Fuld, Walter Benjamin: Zwischen den Stiihlen, (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1981), 268. 6. In § 18 of Being and Time, Heidegger describes the purposive, referential status of "equipment" (Zeug) as constituted by a similar movement ofleave-taking. Rather than simply serving some instrumental purpose, the equipmental entity is described as taking leave of itself. The "destiny" of such stuff is to be involved in something beyond its control. It thereby must be left alone to follow its bent, take its own turn, bewenden lassen. The noun that Heidegger uses to describe what results from this being left alone, Bewandtnis, seems not unrelated to the dimension of leave-taking that emerges as an irreducible, originary constituent of aura as Benjamin conceives it. The paradoxical relation of proximity and distance that marks Benjamin's notion of aura finds its correlative in the English translation of the Heideggerian Bewandtnis: "involvement." Involvement in leave-taking is perhaps the common source of the aura that emanates no less from the texts of Benjamin than from those of his great adversary, Heidegger. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Harper and Row: New York, 1962), esp. 115-120. 7. The ambivalence of this process, related to Heidegger's notion of Entfernung, an "un-faring" that does not exclude distance, is of particular pertinence to television, as I have tried to indicate elsewhere, "Television: Set and Screen" in Mass Mediauras, forthcoming. 8. See Martin Heidegger, Die Metaphysik des Satzes vom Grunde, §w, "Das Problem von Sein und Zeit," in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1990), 26: 173ff; and Jacques Derrida, "Difference sexuelle, difference ontologique," in Psyche: Inventions de /'autre (Paris: Galilee: 1987), esp. 405-14. 9. Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in Gesammelte Schriften,

1.1: 210.

10. The "aura" or halo around the moon is called in German its Hof 11. "Riviere has pointed out the subterranean shocks that rock Baudelaire's poetry. It is as though a word were to collapse into itself" (1.2: 617). 12. The poet here is in a position that closely resembles that of the Angelus Novus, whose stare is fixed upon the storm of history, piling up rub-

Notes to Pages 41-47

ble behind (or is it in front?) of the angel that it blows backward (or is it forward?) into the future (or is it the past?). We begin to see why the reader of Benjamin begins to wonder whether history is coming or going, or whether the difference between the two is really so decisive. 13. "Allegory appears as a successive mode capable of engendering duration as the illusion of a continuity." Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Blindness and Insight, 2nd ed., revised (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 227. 14. "The mass is for Baudelaire so inward that in his texts one will seek its depiction in vain. Similarly, one hardly ever encounters his most important objects in the form of descriptions." Walter Benjamin, "Dber einige Motive bei Baudelaire," in Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2: 621; "On some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Illuminations, 167. 15. Although Benjamin does not address this question explicitly, a close reading of Baudelaire's poem reveals that the encounter between poet and passerby remains ambiguous: the poet is "abruptly reborn" through "the glance" of this "fugitive beauty," but "reborn" is not the same as "seen." Whether or not the poet has been seen, however, remains rigorously unanswerable. The auratic quality of the passante depends upon this question remaining open: something has happened, an event has taken place, but what has been encountered is an alterity that resists all reciprocity, all exchange, all synthesis. The glance of the passante-the "eye" of the stormthus prefigures the "eye" of the camera, which records, inscribes, and produces images without itself seeing or looking at anything in particular. 16. Benjamin was undoubtedly deeply influenced in his conception of the masses by the work of his good friend Siegfried Kracauer, who also saw in the Fascist approach to the masses an effort to produce the "semblance" of their "reintegration": "The masses are compelled to look at themselves (mass rallies, mass parades, etc.). The mass is thus always present to itself and often in the aesthetically seductive form of an ornament or of an effective image." Siegfried Kracauer, Das Ornament der Massen, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962), cited in Peter Reichel, Der schone Schein des Dritten Reiches: Faszination und Gewalt des Faschismus (Munich: Hanser, 1991), 25. 17. I have sought to read certain traits of this "coverage" in the reporting of the Gulf War on American television in "The Media and the War," Alphabet City (summer 1991): 22-26. Reprinted in Emergencies 3-4 (fall 1992): 16-26. 18. Paul de Man, "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric," in The Rhetoric in Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984),

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Notes to Pages 48-50

which can be read as, among other things, a silent, implicit dialogue with Benjamin's reading of Baudelaire, a dialogue, however, that avoids, at least in part, what de Man describes in "Shelley Disfigured" as "the endless prosopopoeia by which the dead are made to have a face and a voice which ... allows us to apostrophize them in our turn" (122). In this dialogue Benjamin is not named. 19. In La machine de vision (Paris: Galilee, 1988), Paul Virilio explores the implications of "the sight without a look" ("vision sans regard") that he finds at work in contemporary efforts to produce automated forms of vision: "The electro-optical image is, for the computer, only a series of coded impulsions of which we cannot even imagine the configuration, since in this 'automation of perception,' the return image is no longer guaranteed" (153). For Virilio, the "logic" that governs this new form of vision is "paradoxical," privileging "accident, surprise at the expense of the durable substance of the message" (138). If many-although by no means all-of Virilio's arguments will be familiar to readers of Benjamin, the latter will not be surprised to find he concludes with a quotation from Baudelaire in which he appears to find a precocious interpretation of the contemporary transformation of vision through the digitalization of images: "L'ivresse est un nombre"- "Intoxication is a number." To this Virilio adds: "In fact, the numerical perspective [optique) is really a rational figure of indication, a statistical intoxication . . . . As though our society was plunging ever deeper into the night of a voluntary blindness, its numerical will to power succeeding in infecting the horizon of vision and of knowledge" (158). For an interpretation of "number" and of the numeric in Baudelaire that implicitly casts light both on Virilio's notion of "ivresse statistique" and on Benjamin's conjoining of"reproducibility" with "shock,'' see de Man, "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric," 250. 20. Walter Benjamin, Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften, in Gesammelte Schriften, 1.1: 200-201.

Gasche: "The Sober Absolute" 1. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, L'absolu litteraire: Theorie de Ia litterature du romantisme allemand (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 30. This passage is not in the English translation, The Literary Absolute, trans. P. Barnard and C. Lester (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988). In it, the authors describe Benjamin's thesis and note that "it did not fail to create a 'revolutionary' effect in traditional Romantic studies." Winfried Menninghaus, Unendliche Verdopplung: Die Friihromantische Grundlegung der Kunsttheo-

Notes to Pages 51-65

ne 1m Begriff absoluter Selbstreflexion (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987); my translation. 2. Menninghaus, Unendliche Verdopplung, 71, 41.

3· Ibid., 42. 4. Walter Benjamin, "Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik," in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974-89), 1.1: 9-122. All parenthetical page references in the text refer to volume 1, part 1 of this edition. The English translation of Benjamin's doctoral dissertation is by David R. Lachterman, revised by Piotr Parlej. All other translations of Benjamin's work are my own. s. In a letter dated November 8, 1918 to Ernst Schoen, Benjamin says that writing his dissertation is not lost time: "However, what I gain from it, namely an insight into the relation of a truth to history, will barely become articulated in it, but noticeable to intelligent readers I hope." In another letter to Schoen, dated April 7, 1919, he remarks: "A couple of days ago I finished the draft of my dissertation. It has become what it was supposed to become: an indication of the true nature of Romanticism totally unknown in the literature [on this subject]-yet only indirectly, because I could not deal with the center of Romanticism, namely messianism (I have treated only its conception of art), and with something else that is very much upon my mind, without jeopardizing the required complex and conventional scientific attitude that I distinguish from the authentic one. Yet I hope to have made it possible to become aware of this state of affairs from within this work." Walter Benjamin, Briefe, 2 vols. ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), 1: 202-3, 208).

6. Since Benjamin does not let up on his criticism of the Romantic concept of art criticism in the second part of the dissertation-quite the opposite is true-it would seem that the peculiar fruitfulness that some Romantic propositions have gained in the theory of art to which Benjamin alludes presupposes a critical dismantling of their specifically Romantic underpinnings. 7· Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1970), 424.

8. Indeed, it is highly doubtful whether the Romantic "idea" or Absolute is an idea in the Platonic sense. See my "Ideality in Fragmentation," in Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xxviii-xxx.

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Notes to Pages 77-78 Fenves, "The Genesis ofJudgment" 1. As Jacques Derrida points out, one of his first investigations was a phenomenological one into the ideality of the literary object. See "The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations," in Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan Montefiori (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 36-37; cf. the attempt by Rodolphe Gasche to develop the precise link between Derrida's readings of "literature" and the phenomenological epoche in The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), esp. 25570. Of course, Paul de Man's Blindness and Insight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971) is informed by phenomenology right down to its title. 2. Walter Benjamin, "Dber Sprache uberhaupt und tiber die Sprache des Menschen," in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974-89), 2.1: 140-57. All further citations of Benjamin are to this edition; translations are my own. 3. See Walter Benjamin, "Eidos und Begriff," in Gesammelte Schriften, 6: 29-31; cf. Paul F. Linke, "Das Recht der Phanomenologie," Kantstudien 21 (1916): 163-221. In his notes on Linke's article, Benjamin attempts to show that all "Abstraktionstheorien der Begriffe" ("abstraction theories of concepts") are unacceptable insofar as "die eidetischen Gegenstande unmittelbar gegeben sind" ("eidetic objects are immediately given"). The immediate communicability of "spiritual content" exactly parallels that of eidetic objects, or, to use Husserl's terms, noemata. (Paul Linke was a teacher of Gerschom Scholem at the University ofJena; he was a defender of transcendental philosophy who afterward departed significantly from Husser!. The main point of his article in Kantstudien is to demonstrate the specific terms of the "Copernician turn in phenomenology" and thereby to associate Husser! with Kant and to defend him against empiricist misunderstandings.) In "On Language as Such and on Human Language," Benjamin could be said to translate the language of phenomenology into that of linguistic philosophy, just as he "translates" the language of the Platonic theory of ideas into the philosophy of language in the "Erkenntniskritische Vorrede" to his Origin of the German Mourning Play ( Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels ). And in this latter work, Benjamin once again draws upon phenomenological analyses of the concepts of idea, essence, and essentiality. The most significant instance of Benjamin's borrowing from the pages of the principal organ of Husserlian thought, Jahrbuch for Philosophic und phanomenologische Forschung, can be found in the section of the preface called "The Word as Idea," where Benjamin quotes at length the

Note to Page 79

exploratory remarks of a Husser! disciple, Jean Hering; see Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in Gesammelte Schriften, 1.1: 218. Hering takes a stand against all attempts to arrive at "essentiality" ( Wesenheit) through dialectical mediation; see his "Bemerkungen iiber das Wesen, die Wesenheit, und die Idee," Jahrbuch fur Philosophic und phenomenologische Forschung 4 (1921): 495-543. Much of the preface can be read as an attempt to displace and reinscribe the methodological implications of discrete phenomenological research into "ideas " or "essences": in the place of a Wesenschau ("intuition of essence"), Benjamin proposes something like Wesensurvernehmen ("primordial listening to essence") in which each essence escapes its otherwise ineluctable phenomenalization (see 1: 216). The often cited remark "Truth is the death of intention" (1.1: 216) does not differ so radically from Husserl's conception of truth as the fulfillment of intention once Benjamin's sentence is understood not only in the context of its citation of Hering, but also in relation to the Mourning Play book itself, for death appears in the "play of mourning" as fulfillment-not, to be sure, because the dead one reaches fulfillment (such is tragedy), but insofar as the representation of death alone satisfies the melancholic. It is no accident that Benjamin then opens the section on melancholia with a "phenomenology" of moods (see 1: 318) and that he closes the work by absorbing the problem of abstraction into that of allegory (see 1: 407). A full exploration of Benjamin's relation to the phenomenological movement would have to begin with his "translation" of the phenomenological concept of noema ("the conceived") into the poetological concept of das Gedichtete ("the poeticized") in his 1914 analysis of Holder lin. In an essay written much later and devoted to a completely different topic-"the crisis of Darwinism"-Benjamin describes the phenomenological "breakthrough" in a way that cannot help but remind one of the methodological procedure he outlines in the book on the mourning play: "Husser! posits in the place of the idealistic system discontinuous phenomenology" (4: 536). Finally, in one of Benjamin's most detailed Lebensliiufe, he emphasizes that Husserl's work, like that of the Marburg School, is important for his philosophical program (see 6: 218). As is clear from my presentation, I cannot agree with Rodolphe Gasche's statement that "it is ultimately impossible to tie Benjamin to any of the philosophical currents that characterized his time" -unless this tie is seen as a knot. "Saturnine Vision and the Question of Difference," in Benjamin's Ground, ed. Rainer Nagele (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 84. 4· See Walter Benjamin, Briefe, ed. Gerschom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), 1: 77, 162. See also

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Benjamin's notes on "Wahrnehmung," in Gesammelte Schriften, 4: 32-37. Benjamin's "illustration" of the reduction (4: 36) through the image of an artist's picture (Bild) recalls numerous attempts on the part of Husser! to illustrate the nature of the epoche, and in the "Program for the Coming Philosophy," he names the research of phenomenology as a place where one might hope that transcendental consciousness, which knows nothing of either subject or object and therefore has only a tenuous claim to the title "consciousness," can be elucidated. See Gesammelte Schriften, 2.1: 163. 5. Martin Heidegger, Die Lehre vom Urteil in Psychologismus, sec. 2, § 2, in Fruhe Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978), 172; my translation. 6. On "scholastic analogies," Benjamin, see Briefe, 1: 252. Cf. Heidegger's treatment of the analogy of being in his Habilitationsschrift on Duns Scotus, in Fruhe Schriften, 255-65; on the creation of reality per sui communicabilitaten, see 258-60. "Die Naturwirklichkeit, die sinnlich reale, existiert nur als geschaffene; sie ist nicht Existenz wie das Absolute, sondern hat Existenz durch die 'communicabilitas'" (260 ). Although complaining bitterly about the insufficiency ofHeidegger's commentary (it amounted to nothing more than a good translation!), Benjamin reluctantly admits that Heidegger had grasped the "essential," and so he abandoned his project of developing scholastic theories of analogy. See also the notes Benjamin developed for his work on "scholastic analogies," Gesammelte Schriften, 4: 22-23; at no other point, so far as I know, does Benjamin come so close to adopting the vocabulary of Husserlian phenomenology. The correlation of Bedeutende and Bedeutete in the "medium" of language, which defines the locus of investigation, is a restatement of Husserl's noetico-noematic correlation in the "medium" of the logos. This "medium" is the problem to which the first volume of Ideas is largely devoted. 7. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, in Werkausgabe, ed. W. Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), A 24; B 38.lt should be noted that the "parallel" argument for the transcendental ideality of time is not in fact parallel: "man [kann] wohl die Erscheinungen aus der Zeit wegnehmen." A 31; B 46. 8. This last sentence has been given a Wittgensteinian interpretation. After citing it, Liselotte Wiesenthal writes: "Kurzer und pragnanter formuliert Wittgenstein: 'Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, dartiber muB man schweigen."' Zur Wissenschaftstheorie Walter Benjamins (Frankfurt am Main: Athenaum, 1973), 88. Under no condition is Wittgenstein's all too famous sentence a shorter version of Benjamin's remark; on the contrary, they are almost diametrically opposed. Benjamin's postulates a "propor-

Notes to Pages 82-83 tionality" between spiritual being and linguistic being in order to make room for a concept of revelation, whereas Wittgenstein's Schopenhauerian "revelation" is altogether nonlinguistic, a matter indeed of the ineffable will (ethics and aesthetics). Language is, for Wittgenstein, the index of finitude; it is indeed the Fall (as casus or "case") from which the entire treatise departs and from which it derives its task: to show the limits, hence the unspeakable finitude oflanguage. And language is, for Wittgenstein, utterly rooted in the unity of judgment: in the Satz ("sentence"). Far from distancing himself from the metaphysical tradition to which he pays so little attention, Wittgenstein's orientation toward the Satz and his insistence on the priority of its meaning mark the culmination of Aristotle's orientation toward logos apophantikos. Wiesenthal's interpretation of Benjamin's "cognitive utopia" amounts to the retranslation of Benjamin's break with the traditional orientation on the unity of judgment into the terms in which this unity is reaffirmed: those of Wittgenstein. That Wittgenstein himself had something else in mind-and that it does indeed have something to do with Benjamin's program-can be seen when Wittgenstein's das Mystiche is brought to bear on Benjamin's das Ausdrucklose, as the latter is pursued in the essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities (in Gesammelte Schriften, 1.1: 181). But before any confrontation between Wittgenstein and Benjamin can take place, Wittgenstein's Schopenhauerian doctrine of the ineffable will must be exposed for what it is. Wiesenthal's understanding of Husserlian phenomenology is no better; she accuses Husserl of making the "thoroughly traditional" distinction between '"impure' phenomena and essential components" (18). No conception of phenomenology could be more in error. A cursory glance at "Philosophy as Rigorous Science" would forestall such comments. 9. See, for instance, G. W. Leibniz, "Discourse on Metaphysics," in Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. L. Loemker (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969), 319; §24. 10. The problem of analogy is as complex as the problem of metaphysics, for "analogy," in its immense variety of modalities, is indissociable from the solution to the question of metaphysical knowledge. Any adequate presentation of analogy would have to begin with its dual commencement in the ontology of Parmenides and the mathematics of Theatetus. Useful accounts of the history of the concept can be found in Hupert Lyttkens, The Analogy Between God and the World (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wilksells, 1952); Bernard Mantages, La doctrine de l'analogie de l'etre (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1963); Jules Vuillemin, De Ia logique a Ia theologie (Paris: Flammarion, 1967); Paul Ricouer, La metaphore vive (Paris: Seuil, 1975); and

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Note to Page 84 Bruno Puntel, Analogie und Geschichtlichkeit (Freiburg: Herder, 1969). A troubling question: what is the meaning of ana in analogia? Ana means "upward," perhaps even the upward movement associated with transcendence, and so there should be, in turn, a katalogia, a movement downward. Perhaps Benjamin's forays into historical knowledge, including the Passagen-werk, should be understood as "catalogues" in this sense: a movement downward, on analogy with the analogy of being. But kata can also mean "according to," and so can ana under certain circumstances. Ana can, in turn, mean something like "in mutual accord," "reciprocally," or "mutually" (mutual proportions = analogia). Then again, ana also has the same sense as the Latin re or retro (cf. "analogy" and "anagelo" = renunciare; analogy, then, is retro-ratio ). All this is very obscure; it leads back to the reciprocal inception of philosophy and mathematics in the "mysteries" of the Pythagoreans if not further back than this. The Latin word proportion was early on designed as the translation for analogia, and it corresponds to a Platonic conceptualization of analogy, since proportion could just as well translate methexis or metoche ("having with"). From methexis it is not far to Benjamin's Mit-teilung, but the latter may very well be subject to the same accusation Aristotle leveled against the Platonic concept of "participation," namely, that it is used "metaphorically." See, for example, Metaphysics, 987b. n. Much of Hermann Cohen's rewriting of Kant involves a rethinking of the relation between the "forms of intuition" (space and time) and the "forms of understanding" (the categories) such that the former are integrated into the latter. Cohen could proceed in this manner because he took his point of departure from "the fact of science," and in the modern, "mathematical" sciences, space and time are always already conceptualized and, to this extent, are as much functions of thought as the original Kantian categories. Out of the pure concept of multiplicity (Vielheit), the category of time develops, and out of the pure concept of totality (Allheit) arises the category of space; see Hermann Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (Berlin: Cassirer, 1902), 127-30 (on the category of time), 161-70 (on the category of space). At the opening of this "logic of pure knowledge," Cohen insists that Kant's initial concern with a transcendental aesthetic can be justified only in historical terms and that, in contrast to Kant, "we begin with thought" (n). In a manner that bears comparison with Heidegger's "destruction" of the Critique of Pure Reason, Benjamin notes the insufficiency of Kant's own effort to distinguish these two "forms" of form and accepts the validity of Cohen's attempt to rethink the relation between sensibility and categoriality: "A principle problem of neo-Kantianism has been to do

Notes to Pages 84-85 away with the difference between intuition and understanding, a metaphysical rudiment like the entire doctrine of the faculties." Gesammelte Schriften, 2.1: 164. But Benjamin, like Heidegger, then rejects Cohen's attempt to reduce intuition to understanding and thus to make space and time into categories. See Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1973), 48, 63. Both Benjamin and Heidegger move in the other direction, making the forms of intuition, as media of communicability, primary, whereas the categories (functions of judgment, modes of assertion) are secondary and derivative. It is unfortunate that so little has been done to explicate the relation of Benjamin's early work to Hermann Cohen's "first philosophy," even though Benjamin again and again uses Cohen's work at the very least as a counterposition against which to measure his own theses; nowhere is this more important than in the section of the "cognitive-critical preface" to The Origin of the German Mourning Play where he distinguishes his concept of an historical "origin" from Cohen's "logic of origin." See Gesammelte Schriften, 1.1: 226. Cohen's Logik der reinen Erkenntnis aims at a systematic presentation of this "logic of origin." According to Cohen, metaphysics from its inception in Plato has centered on the thought of origin. Just as Benjamin's elucidation of a genuinely historical concept of"origin" in the preface to the mourning play book presupposes Cohen's Logik, his concern with the intricate logicomathematical problems of continuity, infinitesimals, and thus "density" presupposes a familiarity with Cohen's Princip der Infinitesimal-methode und seine Geschichte (Berlin: Diimmler, 1883). Benjamin's thought thus intersects at almost every point with the two main foci of Cohen's theoretical philosophy-the concept of origin and the problem of infinitesimals. Perhaps every one of Benjamin's major texts can be understood as the exposition of certain "original" infinitesimals as loci of unparalleled "intensity." 12. On the concept of magic in Benjamin's essay, see Winfried Menninghaus, Walter Benjamins Theorie der Sprachmagie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980). Menninghaus's initial procedure is essentially historical, yet he leaves out of his account the central figure through which Benjamin and the Romantic writers are able to articulate a (linguistic or reflective) medium of immediacy, namely, Kant. Anschauung in Kant is "magical" to the extent that it is immediate, and the "Program for the Coming Philosophy" could be understood as the transformation of this (lower) immediacy into the (higher) immediacy oflanguage. 13. Benjamin's reading of Holderlin proceeds to demonstrate the thoroughgoing permeation of the Kantian forms of intuition (space-time) with one another, and, once bound together, with das Geistige, the end result of

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which is an intuitional-intellectual network so tightly bound up with itself that, as a unity, it realizes das Gedichtete. See Gesammelte Schriften, 2.1: 1222J. Holderlin's poetic process thus arrives at a Gedicht ("Blodigkeit") that fulfills das Gedichtete. This poem is, to use the language of Husserlian phenomenology, the fulfillment of its noema: it is, in other words, true. 14. See, for instance, Ideas I, trans. W. R. B. Gibson (London: CollierMacmillan, 1969), § 127. An important exploration of the problems Husser! encountered when in Ideas I he proposed to find a "pure logical medium" as a medium of the logos itself can be found in Jacques Derrida, "La forme et le vouloir-dire," in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972). 15. Analogy has a spatial character outside of subjectivistic philosophy. The Analogies of Experience in the Critique of Pure Reason are "philosophical" -in contrast to "mathematical" -analogies and are, of course, entirely temporal: they give the rules for the construction of experience in time (see A 179-80; B 222-23). 16. On this word in Kierkegaard, see Peter Fenves "Chatter": Language and History in Kierkegaard (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993). The texts from which Benjamin most likely drew the word Geschwatz (in Danish, snak) are The Concept of Anxiety and A Literary Review (the last section of which was translated by Theodor Haecker and published in Der Brenner under the significant title, Kritik der Gegenwart in 1914). It is in The Concept of Anxiety that Benjamin could find a presentation of the "nothing" that gives rise to the Fall: a "nothing" that consists in an uninterpretable "word."

Jacobs, "Benjamin: Topographically Speaking" 1. Letter from Gerschom, August 1, 1931, about a year before the writing of the Berlin Chronicle, in Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn, (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981), 169-74. 2. All references to the works of Walter Benjamin in the text, unless noted otherwise, begin with a reference to the volume and page numbers in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedermann and Hermann Schweppenhauser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974-1989). This particular reference is to the editorial notes on the Berlin Chronicle. The translations are, for the most part, my own, although I have occasionally borrowed phrases from the translation of Edmund Jephcott in Walter Benjamin, Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). Page numbers followed by an E refer to this edition.

Notes to Pages 95-97

3· Letter to Gerschom Scholem, February 28, 1933, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem: 1932-1940, ed. Gersh om Scholem (New York: Schocken, 1989), 27. 4· The discussion of the lost page and other editorial difficulties is in the afterword to the 1970 publication of Berlin Chronicle. Walter Benjamin, Berliner Chronik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 128-29. 5· The name means "gem cutter," "lapidary," "stone engraver." To be sure, Benjamin could not have known her name as one of his future editors, nor was she married to Steinschneider at the time. But, as irony would have it, the letter of February 28, 1933 in which he announces the completion of the Berlin Childhood also mentions her name, as do many subsequent letters of his correspondence. 6. See Samuel Weber's fine reading of the term Darstellung, "Criticism Underway: Walter Benjamin's Romantic Concept of Criticism," in Romantic Revolutions, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990 ), 317. 7· Translations are usually radically modified versions of the English translation, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, (London: NLB, 1977) and are marked as OGTD, followed by the page number. 8. Burckhardt Lindner uses the metaphor of the snapshot in "The Passagen-Werk, the Berliner Kindheit, and the Archaeology of the 'Recent Past,'" in New German Critique 39 (fall1986): 26. 9. "Among the picture postcards in my album there were a few of which the written side has lasted better in my memory than their picture side." (6: 503-4; 44E). The passage that follows here has much affinity with the play on Steglitz that we will trace. 10. The Berlin Chronicle version reads: "der Irrgarten urn Friedrich Wilhelm III und die Konigin Luise die auf ihren bebilderten Empiresockeln mitten aus Blumenbeeten wie von den magischen Zugen versteinert strebten" (6: 465). In this "Irrgarten,'' where the king and queen "strebten,'' how can one fail to read a rebus-those puzzles of which Benjamin was so fond and of which he wrote a few himself. It is a rebus of a line from Goethe, about whom Benjamin wrote and planned to write so much: "Es irrt der Mensch, solang er strebt." Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Goethes Faust (Hamburg: Christian Wegner, 1963), 18. This, the solution to the puzzle, sets up another enigma, since the center of the labyrinth, the locus of the striving or struggle, is once again the place in which one goes astray. u. See Rainer Nagele's commentary on the Medusa in his exceptional

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Notes to Pages 97-107 book, Theater, Theory, Speculation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 122-25. In another context, from another perspective, Werner Hamacher speaks of writing in Benjamin as "a Medusa who petrifies the reader." Werner Hamacher, "The Word Wolke- If It Is One," in Benjamin's Ground, ed. Rainer Nagele (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 157· 12. Henry Vizetelly, Berlin under the New Empire (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1870), 209. 13. Elsewhere, Benjamin uses the image of the blotting page as what unwrites the written: "My thinking relates to theology like the blotting page to the ink. It has entirely sucked itself full with it [Es ist ganz von ihr vollgesogen ]. If the blotting paper had its way, nothing that is written would remain." Gesammelte Schriften, 1.3: 1235. 14. If in the succeeding lines this written space of his life turns out to be a map of Berlin, the coincidence would seem to go without saying. (See Gesammelte Schriften, 6: 466-67; 4-5E). 15. "Outskirts" are a recurrent image in Benjamin's work. See, for example, his rebus on the term "Weichbild," in Gesammelte Schriften, 7.1: 302. 16. We might remember that much of Chronicles 1 in the Old Testament also involves a question of genealogical trees-a text that does not fail to mention Benjamin (and Gershom) among many others. 17. The entire question of the tombstone in Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften (part 2, chapter 1) is relevant here. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Hamburg: Christian Wegner, 1951). 18. See especially the closing lines of the fourth of the Duino Elegies. (Rainer Maria Rilke, Gesammelte Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1963), 455-56. 19. The reference is probably to Epicurus's Letter to Herodotus. See A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, vo!. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 72-73- My thanks to John Peradotto for his help in locating the passage. 20. There is an important connection to be made here to Benjamin's insistence in his early language essay on the noninstrumentality of language-on its operation as "medium." "On Language as Such and on Human Language," in Gesammelte Schriften, 2.1: 142; 315-16E. 21. The biographical notice to Illuminationen tells us that Benjamin's father was an antiquarian and art dealer, and that there were archaeologists in the family. Walter Benjamin, Illuminationen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1961), 439· 22. We might remember in this regard the connections Benjamin makes

Notes to Pages

108-19

between criticism and Darstellung in The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism, in Gesammelte Schriften, 1.1: 109. 23. See "Was ist das Epische Theater,"in Gesammelte Schriften, 2.2: 53435, 537, for example. 24. "Paris as it disclosed itself to me in the character of a hermetic tradition that I can follow back at least to Rilke ... was more than a foliage labyrinth [Irrgarten] a tunnel labyrinth [Irrstollen]. Impossible to think away ... the underworld of the metro and the North-South that opened itself up in the whole city with hundreds of shafts" (6: 469, 9E). 25. An excellent, as yet unpublished translation of Berlin Childhood ca. 1900 by Shierry Weber Nicholson is the source for some of the citations here (often vastly modified to fit the precise terms of the argument). The page number of the English manuscript is given in the text. 26. "Lehmann ... 'der kein eignes Erbe hat, sondern eines zu Lehen tragt, vasallus,'" Albert Heintze, Die deutschen Familiennamen, ed. Paul Cascorbi (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1967), 323. "Lehmann ist der lehenman, der ein Grundstiick von einem Grundherrn zu Lehen hat." Wolfgang Fleischer, Die deutschen Personennamen (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1964). 27. Handworterbuch des Deutschen Aberglaubens, ed. E. HoffmannKrayer and Hanns Bachtold-Staubli (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1936), 8: 481, among other sources. 28. Hamacher, "The Word Wolke,'' 152-54. 29. With the wisdom of hindsight, this would call on us to reread the scene in the Tiergarten and the involuted relationships among the water script, the statues of the sovereigns, the carvings on the pedestal, the child who contemplates these, and Benjamin as he writes Berliner Chronik. Nagele, "Poetic Ground Laid Bare"

1. "Die besondere Schonheit sovieler baudelairescher Gedichtanfange ist: das Auftauchen aus dem Abgrund." All Benjamin quotations are from Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974-1989). Translations, if not otherwise indicated, are my own. 2. While the arrangement of the text on the individual pages is definitely by Benjamin, the arrangement and sequence of the pages is less clear. The pencil numbering of the pages is not in Benjamin's hand, but might reflect his arrangement. See the editorial notes of the Gesammelte Schriften, 1.3: 1218-19. Adorno interpreted Benjamin's title as an indication of the "central significance" (1.3: 1216) that Benjamin attributed to these notes, and furthermore as an allusion to his emigration plans for New

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York, where friends were looking for living accommodations near Central Park. 3· Rainer Nagele, "Traumlektlire: Benjamin's politische Baudelaire-Lektlire," forthcoming. 4· Among the most remarkable readings of this figure is Werner Hamacher's "The Second of Inversions: Movement of a Figure Through Celan's Poetry," Yale French Studies 69 (I985): 276-3u. 5. Josef Korner, "Erlebnis-Motiv-Stoff," in Vom Geiste neuerer Literaturforschung: Festschrift fur Oskar Walzel (Leipzig: Reclam, I924). 6. "In der Determinierung ahnen mir groBe allgemeine Rahmenmotive, mochte ich sie nennen, und andere, Flillmotive, die nach den Erlebnissen des Einzelnen wechseln." Sigmund Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fliefl, 18871904 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, I986), 295. The English translation and edition of the letters to Fliess by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, I985), 274, makes a decision for "motives," although the German Rahmenmotive and Fullmotive strongly point in the direction of "motif." 7. For a brief and concise summary of the understanding of the motif in German literary criticism, see Wolfgang Kayser, Das sprachliche Kunstwerk (Bern: Francke Verlag, I965), 60-64. 8. Ibid., 6o. 9· Ibid., 63. 10. "Und endlich ist nicht von der Hand zu weisen, daB unter seinen Motiven einige, von denen die vorliegende Untersuchung gehandelt hat, die Moglichkeit lyrischer Poesie problematisch machen." II. Benjamin wrote one of his most enigmatic essays on the category of the similar: "Lehre vom Ahnlichen," revised as "Ober das mimetische Vermogen," in Gesammelte Schriften, 2.I: 204-13. 12. The first explicit opposition of the terms, and strong rejection of Erlebnis in favor of Erfahrung, seems to occur in a letter to Ludwig StrauB in 1912, articulating Benjamin's relationship to Judaism. The letter is partially quoted in Gesammelte Schriften, 2.3: 838. I3. Benjamin's first encounter with Dilthey's work was more positive. In a letter to Herbert Belmore dated August I2, I9I2, he praises Dilthey's essay on Holder lin as one of the important reading experiences of that summer. Walter Benjamin, Briefe, 2 vols. ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, I978), I: 43· 14. The qualification is important. In the meantime, Dasein, like Erlebnis, had become useful for the rhetoric of Fascism. It is one of the terms

Notes to Pages 130-32

through which Heidegger announces his fundamental consensus with the Nazi movement in a letter of March 30, 1933 to Elisabeth Blochmann: "The present events-precisely because much remains dark and unmasteredhave an unusually concentrating force for me. They intensify the will and the sureness to act in the service of a great mission and to participate in the building of a world grounded in the folk. For a long time, the paleness and shadowiness of mere 'culture' and the unreality of so-called 'values' have been reduced to nothingness for me and made me search for the new ground [or: soil; "blood and soil" (Blut und Boden) was one of the Nazi passwords] in Dasein." Martin Heidegger and Elisabeth Blochmann, Briefwechsel, 1918-1969, ed. Joachim W. Storcke, (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1989 ), 6o. 15. If we treat for the moment perception and consciousness as a unity (as Freud occasionally does, when he treats them as one system, W-Bw [PC]), we must nevertheless not collapse them in an undifferentiated identity. Indeed, Freud's texts indicate that the abyss of the unconscious opens in the small gap between perception and consciousness. 16. It is a ground and motif that subtends much of modern poetry. Lacan quotes a striking example from Louis Aragon's Fou d'Elsa ("Vainement ton image arrive a rna rencontre") and weaves it as a central motif of his reflections on the eye and the gaze into the seminar Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 21, 75. 17. Derrida suggests another version of a reorganization of eye and hand in Heidegger: "C'est [Ia pensee] en tout cas un travail manuel [Es ist jedenfalls ein Hand-Werk], une oeuvre de Ia main .... Que veut done dire Heidegger, et pourquoi choisit-il ici Ia main alors qu'ailleurs il accorde plus volontiers Ia pensee ala lumiere ou a Ia Lichtung, on dirait a l'oeil." "La main de Heidegger," in Psyche (Paris: Galilee, 1987), 426. 18. Thus in Aragon's poem "Contre-Chant," quoted by Jacques Lacan in Seminaire 11: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973), 21: Vainement ton image arrive a rna rencontre Et ne m'entre ou je suis qui seulement Ia montre Toi te tournant vers moi tu ne saurais trouver Au mur de mon regard que ton ombre revee Je suis ce malheureux comparable aux miroirs Qui peuvent reflechir mais ne peuvent pas voir Comme eux mon oeil est vide et comme eux habite De !'absence de toi qui fait cecite

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In vain your image comes to meet me And does not enter into me where I am, who only shows it. You in turning toward me, you could find only On the wall of my glance your dressed shadow. I am unhappy like the mirrors That can reflect but cannot see Like them, my eye is empty, and like them used To your absence that makes blindness. 19. Paul Valery, Oeuvres, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 2: 1284. 20. According to the new arrangement, based on a recently found manuscript. See the editorial notes in Gesammelte Schriften, 7.2: 661-65. 21. In a letter of June 5, 1917 to Georg Groddeck, Freud comments on a

mysterious remark in his essay "The Unconscious": "In my essay on the Ucs ... you will find an inconspicuous note: 'We save the mentioning of another significant privilige of the unconscious for another context.' I will disclose to you what was kept back there: the assertion that the unconscious act has an intensive formative effect [eine intensive plastische Einwirkung] on somatic events." Sigmund Freud, Briefe, 1873-1939 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1980 ), 332. Frey, "On Presentation" 1. Parenthetical references will first refer to the German edition of Benjamin's writings, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974-1989); where appropriate, a second reference indicates an English translation of Benjamin's work. Translations of Benjamin are modified from the following sources: Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1973); "Doctrine of the Similar" (1933), trans. Knut Tranowski, New German Critique 17 (spring 1979): 65-69; The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977); Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt, 1978); "The Task of the Translator," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 69-82. 2. See Werner Hamacher, "The Word Wolke- If It Is One," in Benjamin's Ground, ed. Rainer Nagele (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 147-75; and Thomas Schestag, "Asphalt," MLN 106, no. 3 (1991), 589-621. 3· "The Task of the Translator" was written in 1923, between the 1919 note

Notes to Pages 154-70 and the preface to the book on tragic drama. The idea of the affinity of languages is very important for Benjamin's theory of translation. Benjamin intimately links the problem of translation with that of presentation by determining translation to be "purposeful for the innermost relation of languages to one another" ( Gesammelte Schriften, 4.1: 12; "Task," 72) and by characterizing this relation as the affinity of languages. Translation presents the affinity oflanguages. The latter is its signification, to which it refers, not communicatively, but rather by saying "by the effort, the seed of its production" (ibid.). 4. Baudelaire, Oeuvres completes, 2 vols., Bibliotheque de la Plt':iade (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 1: 381. Translated by Michael Shae.

Garcia Duttmann, "The Violence of Destruction" This text originated as a lecture, which I first gave at the North Rhine- Westphalian Culture Institute in Essen (July 1991). 1. Louis Althusser, "Soutenance d'Amiens," in Positions (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1976), 146ff. All translations are by Michael Shae unless otherwise designated. 2. G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopiidie der philosophischen Wissenschaften 2 in Werke, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 9: 36-37, §251. 3. Martin Heidegger, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 36-37. 4· See Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galilee, 1974), 167. 5. Hegel, Enzyklopiidie 1, in Werke, 8: 199, § 94· 6. Ibid., supplement. 7. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, in Werke, s: 264. 8. Walter Benjamin, "Zur Kritik der Gewalt," in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974-1989), 2.1: 190. All subsequent references to Benjamin's writings will be to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text; parenthetical references to this edition will give volume, part, and page numbers. Further references to "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" given in the text will use the short title "Kritik." 9· Werner Hamacher, "Afformative, Strike," Cardozo Law Review 13, no. 4 (December 1991): 1139-40. 10. An investigation of the-discrete?-use of the concept of infinity in Benjamin would have to consider the important fragment "The Infinite Task" and the critique of the "ambiguity" of this neo-Kantian formula. The meaning of "infinite task" in Benjamin can perhaps be understood in this way: a task is more than the (infinite) search for infinitely many (finite) NOTE:

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Notes to Pages 174-80 solutions only if it is not given and cannot be given. Consequently, only the task that is related to "solubility in general" is infinite in the paradoxical sense of such a "more" -of such a suspension of the task. As infinite task, science in its unity and before any material determination does not correspond to this or that solution-or positing. Benjamin notes: "Science is neither solution nor does it consist of tasks: thus "infinite task." ("Fragmente," 6: 52.) Since the "infinite task" does not inaugurate the bad infinity of its uninterrupted renewal "through solutions" -but rather means "solubility in general," one can no longer designate its infinity as "bad." It is striking that Benjamin is not interested in solutions, but in solubility, not in communications, but in communicability, not in reproductions, but in reproducibility. It is as if he wishes to counter bad infinity with the thought of an actualization of possibility as such, and thus attempts to get beyond the opposition of possibility and act without which there is no bad infinity. See also Alex Garcia Diittmann, "Tradition and Destruction: Benjamin's Politics ofLanguage," trans. Debra Keates, in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 32-59. u. This genitive expresses the extreme ambiguity of a critique of violence that seems to proceed in the simultaneity of the incommensurable and the differential. (See also the following arguments.) 12. Hegel, Enzyklopadie 1, in Werke, 8: 200. 13. Martin Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding (Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer, 1975),80. 14. Martin Heidegger, "Wozu Dichter?" in Holzwege (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980), 300. 15. Jacques Derrida, "La differance," in Marges de Ia philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 25. The translation is from Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 24. 16. Jacques Derrida, "Hors livre," in La dissemination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 27. 17. Jacques Derrida, "Force de loi," Cardozo Law Review 12.2 (July-August 1990): 958. 18. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 25. Already in his first Habilitationsschrift, "Der Begriff des

UnbewuBten in der Transzendentalen Seelenlehre," whose critical points of departure were the doctrine of paralogism and psychoanalysis and which sought to give a formulation of the unconscious in terms of the philosophy of consciousness, Adorno repeatedly criticized the positivization of the infinite, which hypostatized a limit concept at the cost of becoming entangled

Notes to Page 180 in the antinomies of reason. The following passages may be cited: "But to make any statement (about experience as such)-and the statement of its transcendence is already a positive statement, and the theses derived from that statement are highly determined material claims-is impossible. Even the claim of an infinite progression of our experience is, strictly speaking, not allowed; we know only that experience can be continued beyond every positively specifiable limit .... Its infinity as transcendence and finitude as immanence can be asserted only under the presupposition of a complete givenness of the positively infinite conditions of the possibility of experience .... But to speak positively of a general psychic determinism ... means making that presupposition of a fully given infinity and thus already succumbs to the Kantian critique of the antinomies." Theodor Adorno, Philosophische Friihschriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 143, 153, 299. Peter von Haselberg has recently drawn attention to Adorno's early seminar on Kracauer's Detektivroman (1925); it is also well known that Adorno made his first intensive study of the Critique of Pure Reason together with his older friend, who dedicated his "philosophical treatise" to him. If one reads a passage from that treatise in conjunction with theradically-critical argument about infinity that one encounters in Adorno's first Habilitationsschrift, one finds the philosophy of the antisystem in nuce. The critical argument seems to be suggested already in Kracauer: "Like the legal, the system asserts itself outside of relation, and its constructions, which intend to capture totality, proceed as legal arbitrary actions do, from initial positings, or even experiences, without dealing with reality any further. If it happened, the whole would result only from the tension toward it, and the series of insights would be, as a cognitive process, discontinuous, since it would possess continuity solely as the coherence of the totality of human experiences." Siegfried Kracauer, Schriften, 8 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971- ), 1: 155. 19. Derrida, postscript to "Force de loi," 1044. 20. Rodolphe Gasche has investigated in detail the relationship of deconstruction to "bad infinity." He leaves no doubt that this is a decisive (philosophical) question: "The verdict of philosophy upon spurious infinity is firm and definite: the concept of spurious infinity remains indebted to ordinary thought-it does not raise itself one inch above the empirical. It does not live up to the most fundamental requirements of thought as completion, unity, totality. The question, then, seems obvious: Does Derrida's philosophy, with its continuous emphasis on the infinite, the endless substitutability of play, the text's infinite reference, the infinite task of interpretation, not fall prey to Hegel's, and eo ipso, philosophy-in-general's

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Notes to Pages 181-82 condemnation of spurious infinity?" Rodolphe Gasche, "Nontotalization Without Spuriousness: Hegel and Derrida on the Infinite," journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 17, no. 3 (October 1986): 295. Gasche also refers to an essay by Manfred Baum on the prehistory of Hegel's concept of infinity; in a section of this essay dealing with Hegel's early theological writings, it becomes clear how the question of the difference between a bad and another (true) infinity can be connected to the question of freedom: "In this context, Hegel makes the distinction between 'true infinity' and that infinity 'proper' to reason, which deceives reason when it reaches it.... Thus, for the determination of the content of true infinity, only this remains: that it is the (nonreflected) 'completion' of the limited, which is not limited again like the 'proper' infinity of reason itself whose possibility requires in its turn something limiting (a negatio for its determinatio ). It is this superrational 'completion' that contains all limitation in itself, even that of the finite by the infinite that is a mere deception of a reason constantly advancing to new limitations. It thus does not itself require another limitation in order to be the unique determination that it is. Its determination is a consequence of self-determination, of freedom." Manfred Baum, "Zur Vorgeschichte des Hegelschen Unendlichkeitsbegriff," in HegelStudien (Bonn 1976), u: 107-8. 21. Jacques Derrida, Le probleme de Ia genese dans Ia philosophie de Husser/ (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), 172. 22. Derrida, "Introduction," L'origine de Ia geometrie de Husser/ (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974), 29. 23. Derrida, moreover, confirms this argumentation in a lecture on the relation of deconstruction to negative theology: he alludes again to this section and characterizes the structure of the trace in general as the possibility of an experience of finitude. 24. Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phenomene (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), 114. The translation is from Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husser/'s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 101-2. In a work on Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy speaks of the infinity that is inherent in finitude: "Perhaps one must say that per definitionem there is nothing beyond being, nothing beyond its folding, and in this consists an absolute limit. But an absolute limit is a limit without an outside, without a foreign, neighboring land, an edge without an outer side. It is thus no longer a limit, or rather: it is a limit to/of nothing [limite de rien ]. Such a limit is an unlimited extension, an extension from nothing to nothing, if then being itself is nothing. It constitutes the infinite proper to finitude." Jean-Luc Nancy, "Sens elliptique,"

Notes to Pages 182-83 in Une pensee finie (Paris: Galilee, 1991), 283. On the question of radically finite thought, see Alex Garda Diittmann, "Transcendences, Immanences," in Paragraph, June 1993 (Edinburgh University Press). 25. Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 56. Here, perhaps, between discourse theory's grounding of morality and the deconstructive approach to justice and law, certain parallels appear that are connected to a Kantian tendency of deconstruction and discourse ethics (even if Derrida would not like to have justice understood as a-regulative-idea, and even if Habermas attempts to abandon the "metaphysics of the doctrine of the two realms"). Is the mediation of "idealizing de-limitation" and concrete situations not the horizon in which the impossible "compromise" between law and justice takes shape, if justice is understood as radically unlimited, not in the sense that Habermas himself lends to the concept when he distinguishes it from solidarity? See Jiirgen Habermas, Erliiuterungen zur Diskursethik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 156. Certainly: precisely because he thinks within the horizon of a regulative idea, Habermas endeavors throughout to restrict as far as possible a "decisionism" that he surmises in Derrida, specifically, wherever the latter demonstrates the urgency of a decision about which knowledge would have to be confused (never mind whether or not one can speak here of "decisionism" at all; is there a decisionism without a subject of the decision?). But it is not just that the moment of confusion and madness is found in the finitude by which, as Habermas himself concedes, every action is distinguished. One must also wonder whether idea and horizon (the "idealizing de-limitation") are not affected by the condition that one sometimes-and not only "for the time being" -cannot validate any better argument: "It could turn out that descriptions of the problem ... are always indissolubly interwoven with individual self-descriptions of persons and groups, thus with their identities and life projects, viz., life forms" (ibid., 166). If contextuality cannot be stripped away, then discourse ethics can no longer take a position in general on the problem of how the "desecularization of norms that is the unavoidable step for achieving a grounding can be undone" (ibid., 25). In other words: the "impotence of the ought"-bad infinity-reproduces itself again here: the more one ought, the less one can. The problem of discourse ethics thus consists of fundamentally demonstrating the possibility of a better argument. Either there is always a better argument, but then communication is nothing other than the setting aside of its own semblance, or there isn't always such an argument, but then the scheme of achieving a grounding is endangered in its essence. 26. "In fact deconstructionists treat some works with uncharacteristic re-

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Notes to Pages 183-87

spect, and their authority is left unchallenged. Marx, for instance, never seems to be deconstructed .... Derrida ... appear[s] to enjoy immunity," writes D'Souza, for example. Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education (New York: Free Press, 1991), 182. 27. Derrida, "Force de loi," 944· Just as little, perhaps, as the khara: "Here the limit would pass less between the Babelian project and its deconstruction than between the Babelian place (event, Ereignis, history, revelation, eschato-teleology, messianism, address, destination, response and responsibility, construction and deconstruction) and 'some thing' without thing, like a nondeconstructible khora: the place that gives rise to Babel would be nondeconstructible, not as a construction of which the foundations would be secure, sheltered from all internal or external deconstruction, but as the very spacing-out of de-construction." Jacques Derrida, Sauf le nom (Paris: Galilee, 1993), 104. On the problematic of the khora in the Timaeus, see also Derrida, Kh6ra (Paris: Galilee, 1993). That deconstruction is nothing but justice (and justice thus the nondeconstructible), cannot be interpreted as meaning that one deconstructs with reference to or in the name of justice, or that therefore justice is an instance to which one can recur whenever one seeks to legitimate the deconstructive undertaking. Perhaps one could say that justice is the khora of deconstruction ("the very spacing-out"), but under the aspect of questions such as those raised by Benjamin's "Critique of Violence." In a traditional context, one would probably designate these as questions of the legal institutionalization of moral-political action. 28. On this point, as well as on the connection between deconstruction and Ereignis, see the following works by Alexander Garcia Diittmann: "Rien a voir: Radicalite d'une deconstruction," in Art et phenomenologie, La part de l'oeil, vol. 7, Brussels, 1991; Uneins mit AIDS: Wie iiber einen Virus nachgedacht und geredet wird (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1993), 132 (forthcoming in English, Stanford University Press); and "La deconstruction se demarque," in Le passage des frontieres (Paris: Galilee, 1994). McCall, "Momentary Violence" 1. "An ideology is really 'holding us' when we do not feel any opposition between it and reality-that is, when the ideology succeeds in determining the mode of our everyday experience of reality itself." Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989 ), 49. 2. Patricia J. Williams's analysis of the Eleanor Bumpurs, Howard Beach, and Tawana Brawley media events in 198o's New York City offers suggestive materials for the way in which trauma studies and the work of the Critical

Notes to Pages 187-89

Legal Studies movement may be combined. See The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). 3. In a reading of Kleist's Uber das Marionettentheater, Paul de Man marks a turn of argument as follows: "We have moved on to the question of reading as the necessity to decide between signified and referent, between violence on the stage and violence in the streets. The problem is ... the ability to distinguish between actual meaning and the process of signification." Especially with critique and critical reading, everything comes down to this question regarding the "ability to distinguish." See The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 280-81. 4· Foucault's account of the relations between knowledge and power ( "les relations de pouvoir-savoir") is quite close in some respects to the Benjaminian articulation. In each, force is a singularity existing outside of institutions, which integrate always singular, radically local forces into structures of power; to study this power is not to apprehend force in its singularity, since institutions (including "knowledge," its concepts and arguments) are only particular mobilizations and concatenations of a general, unstructured field of forces that will always exceed any of its particular instantiations. For both Foucault and Benjamin, forces exist at the level of the micro, below and before any of their actualized hypostatizations; therefore, the theory of force will be differential. Yet there are also significant differences between the two. Some of these depend on the way in which Gewalt and other terms get translated. Gewalt can mean both violence and force; yet violence, in the text of Foucault, is only a concomitant of the use of force and cannot play the constitutive role that force does. But for Benjamin, violence, being also force, is constitutive. Violence for Foucault is mostly limited to specific material entities, such as bodies, upon which perpetrated violence can produce visible changes; violence in Benjamin's text is pervasive, and can exist without its phenomenal marks, as with the instance of the pure justice (violence) of God in the Korah story. God strikes and leaves no mark. Concerning Foucault, see, for example, La Volante de Savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). 5· Walter Benjamin, "Zur Kritik der Gewalt," in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974-1989), 2.1: 198. Translations are the author's unless otherwise noted. Subsequent references to this edition of Benjamin's essay will be given parenthetically in the text by volume, part, and page number. 6. The passage appears in Jephcott's translation as follows: "If mythical violence is law-making, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence

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Notes to Pages 190-92 brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood." Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt, 1978), 297. See Werner Hamacher's essay, "Afformative Strike," Cardozo Law Review 10, no. 4 (December 1991): 1133-57, for some suggestive directions in which the notion of "pure violence" may be taken. 7· See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, "La cesure du speculatif," in L'imitation des Modernes, Typographies 2 (Paris: Galilee, 1986). In describing a certain topos of speculative thought in the idealist appropriation of Greek tragedy, namely, "The contradictory structure implied by mimetic relation," "hyperlogic" is "the logic of indefinite exchange involving a presence that exceeds and a loss that exceeds," where "the maximal possession is the maximal dispossession, and inversely" (63-64). 8. See Rodolphe Gasche, "On Critique, Hypercriticism, and Deconstruction: The Case of Benjamin," Cardozo Law Review 13, no. 4 (1991): 1125, n. 3· 9· Homer, The Odyssey, book 19. 10. The "performative" of speech-act theory offers a means to characterize the discrete event of violence, as several critical essays on Benjamin's text have pointed out. A performative utterance performs the act to which it refers (e.g., "I hereby pronounce you man and wife"), and has an (illocutionary) force coinciding with the completion of its performance. Like the act of pure violence, it is by definition a singular, nontransferable and nonrepeatable event; both its occurrence and its force are a hapax legomenon, taking place once and once only, strictly bound to an inalienable spatio-temporality and to culturally specific circumstances, as in the marriage utterance above. Strictly speaking, one cannot "repeat" a performative: whatever looks like a repetition can be only another performance, one that happens to have the same grammatical structure, with similar effects made upon observers. The performative, like the act of violence, is momentary and noncontinuous. Either action may be associated with lasting effects, but the unique performance of each is invariably transient. It happens only to pass away, its force being derived from its perfective aspect of selfcompletion. The performative, however, is only an analogue of the construct "pure violence." The action of a (felicitous) performative may be remarked retroactively, through its produced effects, but the act of pure violence is (so long as it remains "pure") not installed in preexisting (grammatical, institutional) structures and procedures, which, by grafting conventional effects onto always singular acts, would make it possible to re'llark the occurrence of the act through such effects. The performative

Note to Page 199 may indeed have something like a pure violence at its core, but this violence will be (by definition) impossible to remark through the contingent manifestations that the original act may have occasioned. This is merely to state, again, that pure violence always only passes away, and its temporal passage cannot be remarked, unlike the "perlocutionary" effects of performatives. The violence is "pure" only by having no relations to whatever appearances its forceful occurrence may have produced. Pure violence must remain impossible to locate, for, strictly speaking, there can be no traces of it, only the traces of its adulteration. 11. Within the sphere of law, Benjamin sets up the important distinction between law-positing [rechtsetzende] and law-preserving [rechtserhaltende] violence, the two modalities of legal, and, indeed, of institutional violence. The distinction between the two modes is mostly temporal: each is a thetic act, differing in the way that a first position differs from its subsequent repetitions. Regarding the law-positing moment of violence: first, political and mythical bodies have to be composed from always dispersed and disorganized elements; but such bodies, once constituted, are always going to be momentary, and so must somehow be held together, maintained and preserved in dose-packed reiterations, or at least given the illusion of permanence and duration, thus involving the second moment of violence, the "law-preserving one." Here we note that these two modes-the instituting and the preserving aspects of violence-are collapsed or indistinguishable in the mythic, where the composition of bodies is always enduring. That's just what "the mythical" means: something, a violence, that posits, and then lasts forever (or seems to), an enduring position, a lasting performance. Indeed, the distinguishability between "initial act of institution" and "subsequent, reiterative-preservative acts" (equally momentary and just as much inaugurations) is what differentiates myth and law as well as their respective violence. Myth appears to be ahistorical, outside of time, in a way that law is not, because in myth, the first nomothetic act is always already preservative, durational. Once the story line and its characters are laid down, they appear to be permanent, or outside of temporal process. Mythical violence is therefore said, with good reason, to encompass legal violence: myth, which looks timeless, provides state-imposed violence with its master plan. Law violently fragments mythic textuality into two moments (the law-positing versus the law-preserving)-thus opening it up to history. Myth is the idealized, monolithic form of legal violence, which itself is the idealized form of state-imposed violence. Structures of reiteration such as the legal "law-positing" versus "law-preserving" violence remain conceptually impossible to discern in myth because the a priori textual

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Note to Page 203 condition of the mythical is itself pure reiteration, eternal return-as also it is with literary modes close to myth, such as the lyric of folklore, love song, or nursery rhyme. But law and the legal formation are readable, "critique-able" in a way that myth is not. Legal violence is the disappearance of position; mythical violence its endurance. This explains why law, not myth, exhibits history as "decay" (Verderblichkeit). Law is just this evanescence or temporalizing of the mythical position. Law is the frenetic, cinematic repetition of a position that fails to be mythical, whose very failure makes readable the two positions of law. 12. Walter Benjamin, "Schicksal ist der Schuldzusammenhang des Lebendigen," in Gesarnrnelte Schriften, 2.1: 175.

Index of Names

In this index an "f" after a number indicates a separate reference on the next page, and an "ff" indicates separate references on the next two pages. A continuous discussion over two or more pages is indicated by a span of page numbers, e.g., "5759." Passim is used for a cluster of references in close but not consecutive sequence. Adorno, Theodor W., 3, 39, 119, 180, 211n5, 216n39, 236m8 Althusser, Louis, 165-66, 177 Aragon, Louis, 233nm6,18 Aristotle, 213 m8 Baudelaire, Charles, 40-41, 46-49, 118-20, 124-38 passim, 145, 151, 152-64, 219nlll4,15 Benjamin, Walter: Berlin Chronicle, 94-117, 141f, 144, 152, 157; "Central Park," 42, 119; The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism, 1, 50-74 passim, 172, 230n22; "Doctrine of the Similar," 105, 112, 144; "Eidos und Begriff," 222n3; "Franz

Kafka," 178-79; Goethe's Elective Affinities, 3, 48, 121, 147, 160, 172; "Hiilderlin," 222 n3; "Karl Kraus," 179; Moscow Diary, 179-80; "On Language as Such and on Human Language," 77-93 passim, 106, 113, 230 mo; "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," 21-23, 40-49 passim, 122-38 passim, 157-61; "On the Concept of History," 1, 6, 15-17; "On the Mimetic Faculty," 151; One- Way Street, 150f; The Origin of the German Mourning Play, 40, 96, 114, 121, 13947 passim, 161, 222 n3, 226 n11; "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire," 122, 152-57, 161; Passagen-

245

Index of Names Werk, 7-17 passim, 23-25, 152, 154; "Phantasie," 174; "Sache der Tradition," 128; "Theologico-Political Fragment," 175; "Toward a Critique of Violence," 169-77 passim, 187206; "Welt und Zeit," 175; "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility," 17-22, 3249 passim, 132-35 Bergson, Henri, 128, 132 Brecht, Bertolt, 132, 138 Buck-Morss, Susan, 212illO Cohen, Hermann, 226illl de Man, Paul, 22, 41, 47, 2o6n2, 210n4, 219llill3,18, 222ill, 240ll3 Derrida, Jacques, 39, 168, 177-84, 216ll40, 222ill, 233ill7, 237ll20, 238llll2},24, 239ll25, 240ll27 Dilthey, Friedrich, 127-28, 232ill3 D'Souza, Dinesh, 239n26 Diittmann, Alexander Garcia, 210 n3 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 56, 57-58 Foucault, Michel, 241 n4 Freud, Sigmund, 120-29 passim, 135, 157, 233 illS, 234n21 Fynsk, Christopher, 210n3, 211n8, 213ill7 Gasche, Rodolphe, 214n23, 222ill, 237ll20 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 137, 229 illO, 230 ill7 Habermas, Jiirgen, 239 Hamacher, Werner, 112, 169, 210n3, 229illl Haselberg, Peter von, 236 ill8 Haverkamp, Anselm, 213 ill9 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1114, 19, 120, 167-68, J70, 175> 237ll20 Heidegger, Martin, 3-10, 23-35 passim, 39, 168, 176f, 184, 211 n8, 212llilll,l2,15, 213lll6, 214ll22, 216n36, 218nn6,7, 224n6, 226n11, 232ill4, 233n17, 238nn23,24, 239n25, 240ll27

Hering, Jean, 222n3 Holderlin, Friedrich, 84-85, 120, 227 ll22, 228 ll23 Husser!, Edmund, 75-80 passim, 86, 181, 216ll37> 222ll3, 223ll4, 224ll6, 228ill4 Kant, Immanuel, 54-55,76-90 passim, 224n7, 227n12, 228n15 Kleist, Heinrich von, 135 Kracauer, Siegfried, 219ill6, 236ill8 Lacan, Jacques, 233 nill6,I8 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, so, 2.12ill2, 220 ill, 242 ll7 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 82 Linke, Paul, 78, 223n3 Marinetti, Emilio, 47 Marx, Karl, 119 Menninghaus, Win fried, sof, 220 ill, 227ill2 Nagele, Rainer, 229illl Nancy, Jean-Luc, so, 220ill, 238n24 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 121 Navalis, 59 Proust, Marcel, 16, 128f, 134, 212 ill}, 214ll21 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 233 illS Roberts, Julian, 211 n8 Schlegel, Friedrich, 59-72 passim Scholem, Gershom, 210 ill Tiedemann, Rolf, 28, 217n2 Trotsky, Leon, 183 Valery, Paul, 133 Virilio, Paul, 220ill9 Walzel, Oskar, 123 Weber, Samuel, 210n3 Wellbery, David, 211n8 Williams, Patricia J., 240 n2 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 224 n8 Zizek, Slavoj, 240 ill

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walter Benjamin : theoretical questions I edited by David S. Ferris. p. em. Essays based on papers presented at a conference on Walter Benjamin on October 18-19, 1991 at the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8047-2569-1 ( cJ.) ISBN 0-8047-2570-5 (pbk.) 1. Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940-Aesthetics-Congresses. 2. Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940-Knowledge-Literature-Congresses. 3. Literature-History and criticism-Theory, etc.-Congresses. I. Ferris, David S. PT2603.E455Z92913 1996 838' .91209-dC20 95-30006 CIP

@l This book is printed on acid-free, paper. Original printing 1996 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96