Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait 9780674063020

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WA LT E R B E N J A M I N A Philosophical Portrait

W A L T E R

BENJAMIN A Philosophical Portrait

Eli Friedlander

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2012

Copyright © 2012 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Friedlander, Eli. Walter Benjamin : a philosophical portrait / Eli Friedlander. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-06169-9 (alk. paper) 1. Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940. 2. Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940. Passagen-Werk. I. Title. B3209.B584F75 2011 193—dc22 2011013394

For my parents, Hagith and Saul

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations

xi

Introduction

1

1 Language

9

2 Image

37

3 Time

60

4 Body

74

5 Dream

90

6 Myth

112

7 Baudelaire

139

8 Rescue

157

9 Remembrance

190

Notes

223

Index

279

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

This book has been long in the making and many significant conversations have contributed to its final shape. I am grateful to Carolyn Abbate, Stanley Cavell, Howard Eiland, Ilit Ferber, Angus Fletcher, Saul Friedlander, Michal Grover-Friedlander, Ido Geiger, Werner Hamacher, Arata Hamawaki, Michael Jennings, Hagi Kenaan, Irad Kimhi, Josi Mali, Ashraf Noor, Ofra Rechter, Ori Rotlevy, Yaron Senderowicz, Lindsay Waters and David Wellbery. Anonymous referees for boundary 2 and Harvard University Press gave illuminating and helpful comments on earlier versions of the material. Lindsay Waters, himself involved in assimilating Walter Benjamin into his own writing, provided much support and encouragement throughout the different phases of the project. Discussions with students in the seminars on Benjamin I have taught at Tel Aviv University over the years have greatly helped to clarify the central points of my reading and to elaborate its various nuances. A fellowship at the School of Historical Studies of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study has provided an ideal setting for the development and maturation of the ideas presented in the book. I have benefited from a generous grant from the Israel Science Foundation funding my research on Benjamin. The devoted assistance of Ori Rotlevy and Noa Merkin has been invaluable in the final stages of writing and in the preparation of the manuscript for publication. My thanks also go to Michael Haggett for overseeing the production process. This book is dedicated with love to my parents Hagith and Saul.

ix

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

Throughout this work I refer to Benjamin’s writings immediately following the quotes by way of the following abbreviations: A

The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.

C

The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994.

CAB Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. CBS

The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932–1940. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.

O

The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne. London: NLB, 1977.

SW

(followed by the volume number) Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin, 4 vols., ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003.

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WA LT E R B E N J A M I N A Philosophical Portrait

INTRODUCTION

The present work is an all-too-partial unfolding of the conviction that Walter Benjamin’s corpus of writing constitutes a unique configuration of philosophy. Philosophy has appeared in many guises, some eccentric, others more easily assimilable to its tradition. However, the recognition of the unique spiritual character that Walter Benjamin’s writings present faces numerous obstacles. In considering his body of writings, we find, especially early on, some essays that draw on the language of academic philosophy (such as his “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy” or his doctoral dissertation on the concept of criticism in German Romanticism). But for the most part Benjamin’s published works would be identified and classified as essays in literary or cultural criticism. These are surrounded by a multitude of pieces, partly completed, for the most part fragmentary and unpublished on the most diverse topics. In addition, there is the monumental, incomplete Arcades Project.1 Can one draw together this multiplicity and view it as the different traits contributing to a single physiognomy of thought? The reluctance to engage the rigor of Benjamin’s thought is evident in the often-encountered tendency to adopt his writings piecemeal. Various insights, images, and even phrases drawn from his writings lend themselves to the most varied interpretations and appropriations. Moreover, even his best readers sometime treat his corpus of writing as a vast array of brilliant and idiosyncratic insights with hardly more to unify them than the sense that they all bear the stamp of Benjamin’s unique and unclassifiable genius. Arendt figured Benjamin as a “pearl fisher,” and Adorno, even as he insists on the exoteric nature of Benjamin’s insights, testifies that what Benjamin has said and written often sound “as if it has been conjured up out of a secret depth.” This amazement at Benjamin’s marvelous 1

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Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait

richness of aperçus has probably contributed to his posthumous fame; it is catastrophic for the portrayal of the character of his thinking. An interpretation of Benjamin’s work must strive to explicitly lay out the philosophical armature that both holds his writings together and provides a measure by which to judge the significance of particular moments within them. It is true that nowhere has Benjamin himself explicitly laid out a system and no prior models of systematicity, of rigor, or of consistency are readily usable to characterize the unity of his writings. Moreover, speaking from experience, attempts to summarize lines of thought feel very soon all too forced and painfully artificial. This state of things led me to adopt a peculiar method to address the problem—a method, I might add, commensurate with the difficulties the task presents. I chose The Arcades Project as a focal point to bring out Benjamin’s thinking as a totality. By this I do not mean to suggest that my book is a commentary on that work. Not enough of the details of the convolutes are discussed in what follows. Rather, the task set by The Arcades Project serves me as a schema for gathering into a unity of thinking the disparate moments of Benjamin’s writing. That is to say, I construe The Arcades Project as the most extreme attempt to realize the task Benjamin set himself in philosophy. Many readers would agree that there are philosophical reflections in The Arcades Project concentrated for the most part in “Convolute N” titled “Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress,” but at the same time they would also hesitate to call the work itself a philosophical investigation.2 As they are usually understood, the philosophical remarks are supposed to provide the theoretical grounding of the historical account. However, I take it that Benjamin’s engagement with philosophy goes further than providing a philosophical theory of his historiographical practice. Rather, he conceives of the presentation of the material as itself a philosophical project—a philosophical investigation of historical experience. The lack of explicit engagement with philosophical positions and the effacement of any philosophical theory or even of philosophical language throughout must be understood as a function of the conviction that the truth that philosophy has traditionally aimed at must now be recognized in the holding together, the presentation of (Benjamin also calls it “construction with”) the historical material. Benjamin shows the possibility of the highest order of thinking taking the form of writing with the concrete, time-bound, particular contents of human experience.3 For Benjamin the

Introduction

stakes of philosophy are not in a theoretical introduction to the practice of writing history but rather in the possibility of a concrete presentation of that reality as a philosophical constellation of contents. Benjamin is engaged not only in clarifying the nature of the philosophy of history but also in writing a philosophical history (competing, say, with Hegel’s engagement with human history as a history of spirit). The difficulties in even conceiving of the possibility of such an enterprise, not to speak of realizing it, are enormous. Among Benjamin’s close acquaintances, Adorno was probably the one who took most seriously the philosophical import of The Arcades Project, and his ambivalent response to what he read of it is all the more interesting to examine. In a letter following the reading of Benjamin’s 1935 exposé of the project he writes: “I openly confess to regarding the ‘Arcades’ not as a historicalsociological investigation but rather as prima philosophia in your own particular sense . . . I regard your work on the ‘Arcades’ as the centre not merely of your own philosophy, but as the decisive philosophical word which must find utterance today; as a chef d’oeuvre like no other” (CAB, 83). Even so, some worry creeps into Adorno’s praise, precisely as to the difficulty of recognizing the philosophical character of a work that limits its means of revealing the highest truth to the ordering of the contingent historical material: “We certainly have no need to quarrel with one another concerning the decisive significance of the material character of the work, and there is no one who understands better than I do precisely how the interpretation of the piece must be sought in this material character alone. But there is also no one less tempted than I am to try and forgo its interpretation and total articulation in the medium of the concept; and I think I possess a sufficient idea of the project to realize quite clearly that this is also part of your intention” (CAB, 83). Adorno warns that the lack of explicit theorizing might have disastrous consequences: “any weakening of the innermost claims of this work, and any consequent repudiation of its own peculiar categories, would strike me as catastrophic and quite irreparably damaging” (CAB, 84). This line of criticism only intensified in his reaction, three years later, to “Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” part of a book on Baudelaire that was supposed to become a model for The Arcades Project as a whole and which was submitted to the judgment of the Institute for Social Research, of which Adorno was a prominent member. Adorno warns Benjamin of the danger that his work would either collapse into mere facticity or provoke in its readers an amazement lacking any critical distance. He calls that juncture at which Benjamin’s work stands the

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Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait

crossroad of positivism and magic. In his letter, Adorno objects to what he perceives as Benjamin’s wish to let things speak for themselves “without theoretical interpretation” and complains that Benjamin is “omitting all the crucial theoretical answers, and even . . . making the questions invisible to all but initiates” (SW IV, 100–101). Such “selfeffacing” writing would be both intellectually and politically powerless. Moreover, the fear is that it would fall prey to the spell of what it engages with. A forceful theorizing is required to overcome the temptation: “Only theory could break the spell: your own relentless theory, speculative in the best sense” (SW IV, 102). The theoretical vantage point would make criticism possible by revealing the true nature of the material and exposing its illusory character. Adorno brings to the fore many of the tensions implicit in Benjamin’s philosophical practice only to revert from the revolutionary aspirations of the work to safer intellectual ground. His worries, needless to say, are not unfamiliar to Benjamin himself. Indeed, Benjamin would be the first to admit the spellbinding potential of the Arcades’ material manifest incomparably in Aragon’s Paysan de Paris, a book he admired but from which, at the same time, he felt the need to distance himself.4 However, critical force, as Benjamin understands it, does not require occupying an external theoretical standpoint from which to direct one’s critique. His insistence not to take apart form and content, method and subject matter, concrete singularity and ideal presentation, as well as description and criticism, has itself deep philosophical grounds. It is thus an assumption of my work that Benjamin’s writing is everywhere informed by a philosophical task. Yet, he is committed to working with and out of the historically concrete material, thus doing away with the organizing power of a systematic theory. In the face of such a lack of explicit philosophical elaboration, it is in the mode in which historical material is ordered and presented that one must recognize the face of necessity of history. I assume it possible for us to lead through Benjamin’s writings to the understanding of the necessity of resorting to such a method of presenting the truth philosophy is after.5 It is the framework for that approach to philosophical history that I aim to recover here by returning from the Arcades to Benjamin’s body of writings.

The Arcades Project is Benjamin’s ultimate work. It is his most ambitious project, and, judging by the many years of composition and the in-

Introduction

complete state in which the work was left, it is also his most difficult and dangerous undertaking. Nonetheless, would that be justification enough to take it as the gathering point of Benjamin’s thinking as a whole, and did he mean it to be so? The fame of Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project, the reputation of that work, can easily lend an aura of mystery to the phenomenon it strives to articulate. A good guidebook to Paris would recount that the arcades were covered streets that served as mercantile galleries and that were built and flourished mainly in the first half of the nineteenth century. As the occasion for the early use of iron and glass as materials for their roofs, they became places of “promenade” for Parisians. How can that be what a life of philosophy ultimately revolves upon? The title Benjamin adopted for the exposés of the project “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” is instructive in that respect. It has a structure that resembles Berlin Childhood around 1900, as well as “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire.” By conjoining a place and an epoch, Benjamin did not only mean to assert that Paris was a central place in the nineteenth century. Rather, the idea is that tendencies spread out in time are gathered by way of a place. By further taking the arcades as the preeminent phenomenon investigated in his project, Benjamin implies that they bring together and concentrate within themselves such broader expanses of meaning. One could think of it as a structure of miniaturization: the nineteenth century, concentrated in Paris, concentrated in the arcades. Benjamin indeed opens “Convolute A” of the manuscript by quoting how an Illustrated Guide to Paris referred to the arcades as “a city, a world in miniature.” However, the true microcosm presented by the project is a result of Benjamin’s monadological practice, of his singular construction of history out of the meaning material of the arcades. At the same time as Benjamin conceives of the work on the arcades as gathering history, he also describes this work to Scholem as the theater of all of his struggles. About the projected Baudelaire book (which itself was supposed to gather the broader expanse of the Arcades) he writes: “The subject matter necessarily puts in motion the entire mass of thoughts and studies I have launched myself into over the last years” (CBS, 230). The Arcades Project became for Benjamin a field of forces upon which his struggles, past and present, were brought to bear. It was not just as if Benjamin had at last found “his” subject matter. Rather, making the engagement with the subject matter into such an opportunity to draw his past thought and studies together is for him a postulate of method

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Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait

grounded in his conception of truth: “how everything one is thinking at a specific moment in time must at all costs be incorporated into the project then at hand. Assume that the intensity of the project is thereby attested, or that one’s thoughts, from the very beginning, bear this project within them as their telos” (A, 45). For Benjamin, everything leads to the engagement with the arcades. For us, the project must, conversely, lead back to everything he was ever engaged with. The gathering power of The Arcades Project, its capacity to hold broad expanses of meaning together (one might call this the sovereignty of thought manifest in it) is what also allows it to function as the centerpiece of my attempt to bring out the character of Benjamin’s thinking. Making manifest the significance of the work should take the form of telescoping through it the variety of Benjamin’s concerns, thereby drawing explicitly their inner relationships. In other words it is necessary to put into practice something analogous to the kind of concentration of meaning Benjamin attributes to the work of the historical materialist, who constructs history monadically, so as “to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history, . . . a specific life out of the era, a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method, the lifework is both preserved and sublated in the work, the era in the lifework, and the entire course of history in the era” (SW IV, 396). The following chapters thus undertake to schematize the internal relation among some of the central notions of Benjamin’s Arcades by bringing to bear the weight or mass of his earlier writings. They also aim to place Benjamin in a tradition of philosophy and point to the ways in which he transforms the sources that he inherits so as to make for an authentic originating moment of philosophy. Benjamin’s explicit remarks about philosophy and philosophers are, as I have pointed out, scarce. This is why I often also comment on and elaborate those few astoundingly precise remarks, thus forming a derivation of sorts. Three of the philosophers to which Benjamin’s thought is traceable—Plato, Leibniz, and Kant—can be called defenders of a sober and rigorous ideal of reason.6 The decision to place Benjamin’s thinking in that lineage of philosophy is not, at least judging by the reception of his work, the first choice to suggest itself.

Wanting to take The Arcades Project as the gathering point for a large corpus of Benjamin’s writings, thus showing how those writings also

Introduction

relate to one another or can come together, runs into an obvious problem, namely the incomplete state of the work. How far from completion it was is a matter of some controversy. As late as 1936 Benjamin wrote to Scholem: “not a syllable of the actual text exists, even though the end of the preparatory studies is now within sight. And for the moment the emphasis is not on the text so much as on the planning of the whole, which needs to be thought through very carefully and will certainly give rise to this or that experiment for some time to come” (C, 527). One could rely on the form of Benjamin’s earlier works to think through the possible completion of the Arcades. Indeed, to some extent I do that here, in particular by turning to what might be his only other comparable book, The Origin of German Trauerspiel. But Benjamin also warns against such analogies: “. . . I periodically succumb to the temptations of visualizing analogies with the baroque book in the book’s inner construction, although its external construction decidedly diverges from that of the former.” He adds: “whereas the baroque book mobilized its own theory of knowledge, this will be the case for the Arcades at least to the same extent, though I can foresee neither whether it will find a form of presentation of its own, nor to what extent I may succeed in such a presentation” (C, 482; translation modified).7 Benjamin did attempt to summarize The Arcades Project in the two exposés written in 1935 and 1939, each drafted for the Institute of Social Research. The exposés no doubt were intended to interest others in the work, in part for very practical reasons. But are they also blueprints for the final presentation of his work? Are they (so to speak) schemata for the project or modes of organization of the material? Benjamin seems to feel differently, at least about the 1935 exposé (and the 1939 version is hardly different). In a letter to Scholem dated August 9, 1935, he writes: “a précis for the Institute—I want to say for superficial, even the most superficial, use—which has been circulating for quite some time, has made me realize the precise point at which constructive work (which simultaneously entails deciding on the literary form and its potential success) will one day have to begin. That day has yet to arrive.” (C, 505)8 Some of the material of The Arcades Project was developed and elaborated for what was to become a book on Baudelaire. It provides an example of how a particular convolute (namely, “Convolute J,” titled “Baudelaire”) would be turned into a more continuous prose form and was to serve Benjamin as a model for the work as a whole. In 1938 Benjamin wrote to Scholem: “I can say that a very precise model of the

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Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait

‘Arcades’ project would be finished if the ‘Baudelaire’ were to succeed. Another question is what guarantee there might be for this success.” (CBS, 231) The book on Baudelaire, needless to say, was never completed.9 Is this deep and pervasive incompleteness a reason to avoid the experiment I attempt with the Arcades? It might help to reiterate that here I am neither engaging in a commentary on The Arcades Project itself nor aiming to complete what was left unfinished. The schematic scaffolding of The Arcades Project enables me to open up the panoramic unity or landscape of Benjamin’s writings as a whole. Conversely, as they come together, those writings serve to make comprehensible the task Benjamin set himself in this project. That is, I aim by way of these writings to lead to the threshold of the project, to make understandable how it became a project at all and how it was thought to actualize Benjamin’s highest aspirations.

To conclude this introduction, let me add a word about the form the present book takes. In the process of writing, I was faced with two opposite demands. On the one hand, the necessity for abbreviation and condensation was obvious to me if only because of the need to bring together so many texts so that their relatedness, thus the force of Benjamin’s thinking as a whole, could be made manifest. On the other hand, each text I engaged demanded in itself endless efforts of elaboration and clarification; each issue broached revealed a further need to unfold Benjamin’s concentrated thinking; each point developed only made more evident what had to be put aside. To satisfy these two conflicting demands I chose to remain concise in the presentation in the body of the text and add long clarificatory remarks to some of the chapters, in which I follow the unfolding of the themes. I introduce another gradation by means of endnotes, in which I discuss further points, as well as different interpretations of Benjamin’s achievement.

1 LANGUAGE

The greatest obstacle to conceiving of Benjamin’s enterprise as philosophical is probably the sense one gets of the utter contingency of the materials gathered in the convolutes. How could iron construction, dolls, and fashion, to take but a few examples, exhibit the necessity and universality characteristic of philosophy’s concern with truth? It might help therefore to stress that Benjamin is not concerned with truth to the facts but with truth in the medium of meaning, with the possibility of recognizing the meaning of the contingent material. However, one might argue, any genuine concern with historical facts betokens an interest in their meaning. In what way is the philosophical character of Benjamin’s work manifest in its distinctive relation to meaning? A first step in addressing this question would be to clarify the place of language in Benjamin’s inquiry.

§1. Quotation An insight into the centrality of language, of its being not merely a means of representation but also the very medium of the investigation or of the revelation of truth is afforded by reflecting on the prevalent place given to quotations in the Arcades, the methodical importance of which is easy to overlook given the work’s incomplete condition. One could easily tell oneself that Benjamin gathered material for his investigation in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, yet never succeeded in incorporating it into a narrative or an argumentative structure. Nonetheless, while there is no doubt that, if completed, the work would have assumed a more continuous appearance, citations were not meant to serve as illustration or as evidence in longer stretches of argument. Moreover, in using quotation 9

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Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait

material, Benjamin does not merely manifest an interest in public opinion, social consciousness, or the reactions of particular people or classes to certain historical transformations, investigating their reception, as it  were. Benjamin attributes to quotation an essential role in the constitution of the truth of history: “To write history . . . means to cite history.”1 Benjamin’s methodical use of quotation can be traced back to his Origin of German Trauerspiel. At the time of that work’s composition he wrote to Scholem: “. . . what surprises me most of all at this time is that what I have written consists, as it were, almost entirely of quotations. It is the craziest mosaic technique that you can imagine” (C, 256). The innumerable quotations that book contains, woven into a seemingly continuous prose form, testify, no doubt, to Benjamin’s sheer scholarly mastery. However, their presence is also explicitly related to the understanding of method laid out in the “epistemo-critical preface”2 to that work. The preface establishes the form of the book as akin to that of the medieval treatise in whose canonic form, Benjamin writes: “the only intentional element . . . is the authoritative quotation” (O, 28; translation modified). To put it simply, the work mostly consists of what other people have said of a certain matter. What we would have expected, namely stretches of text in the author’s own voice expressing his view about the object of inquiry are hardly to be found. Benjamin’s text is essentially constructed by a juxtaposing of quotations, thus expressing the truth of the matter without relying on the assertive authority of his own point of view, without having a position to identify with. Needless to say, this is not because of the author’s deference to authority but rather is itself a mode of establishing the highest authority or sovereignty of thinking. For the work is keyed to presenting in and by way of the material something over and above it. (One of the figures Benjamin uses to suggest the relation of quotations to the emerging truth is that of the colored stones to the image pattern of the mosaic.) Consider that, in a quotation, an utterance is taken out of context, and its motivation or purpose is thereby problematized. Thus, in the quotation we have someone’s use of language to make a certain point but, on the other hand, a disappearance of the context motivating that assertion. Benjamin foregoes the explanatory support provided by the relation of the utterance to its original context (be it in the person or the events of the time). “Quoting a text implies interrupting its context” (SW IV, 305), he writes. In something of a reversal of Frege’s dictum about meaning,

Language

Benjamin thinks of quotation, the dissociation of a text from its context and its juxtaposition with other such quotations, as the key to bringing out a higher unity of meaning. One might also say that we are turned not only to the information conveyed in the quotation but also to how it is conveyed (how the object is meant). The original value of the utterance can be bracketed, and the way of meaning, which, when the utterance is used in its setting, is all but hidden, surfaces with all its peculiar and striking traits. In quoting we are raised from a relation to reality by means of language to the plane of language itself. That is, whatever the truth that can be recognized in that material, it would emerge not from the correspondence of its content to an independently given reality (from the correctness of the assertions) but from the relationships established between the ways of meaning. Sometimes quoting is a way to take sides, align, or identify oneself with a certain prevalent view, stated in the contents quoted. However, for Benjamin the problematization of the relation of quotation to its context precisely foregoes such an identification. This is, I take it, related to what Benjamin means in “One–Way Street” when he writes: “Quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions.” Think of the idler as the user of language who takes words to signify, while being oblivious in principle to what supports this possibility, to the ways of meaning. Thus, unaware of the conditions of meaning, he conceives of words if not quite as a possession, then in terms of contents having greater or lesser value that he can communicate as pleases him. (This possessive relation to language, in which it is treated as a means to further the speaker’s interests, is what, in another context, Benjamin calls the “bourgeois” conception of language.) Robbing is not in the service of appropriating the possessions of others: “To snatch hastily, as if stealing the property of others, is the style of the routinier, and is no better than the heartiness of the philistine” (O, 45). By taking himself to be developing “to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks,” Benjamin does not confess then to plagiarism. Among the wealth of citation, one rarely finds valuable material, such as brilliant ideas or deep insights. “I shall purloin no valuable, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse . . .” (A, 460). Quotation that dissociates a claim from its original life context has a peculiarly equalizing effect. Everything, even “the rags and the refuse,” can be used, and nothing would in itself constitute a valuable piece of intellectual property.

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Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait

The distinction between major and minor is lost, as the material is put to use so as to reveal a higher design. The constructive work with quotations lets meaning appear as partaking in the self-presentation of truth. The quotations would be put to use to reveal something that itself cannot be conceived as the object of a linguistic intention. That is, insofar as the presentation of truth is concerned, there is no element of intention, nothing that allows us to aim at that consistency of meaning. The form of presentation by way of the construction from quotations foregoes the continuity of a line of argument, the advance of a narrative, or the purposive exchange of dialogue. Relying on quotation creates constant interruption and produces writing that essentially involves detour or digression. In relation to the modeling of the Trauerspiel book on the medieval treatise Benjamin writes: “[The] method [of the treatise] is essentially presentation. Method is digression [Umweg]. Presentation as digression—such is the methodological nature of the treatise. The absence of an uninterrupted purposeful structure is its primary characteristic. Tirelessly the process of thinking makes new beginnings, returning in a roundabout way to its original object” (O, 28; translation modified). Given the associations that such notions as detour and digression might elicit, it is important to stress that methodical digression reflects, for Benjamin, the understanding that truth is unapproachable, not that it is ever receding and reaching an end infinitely deferred.3 This latter mode of taking truth to be a regulative idea is, as we will see, criticized by Benjamin. Truth is unapproachable insofar as there is no aiming at it, which means that it is not the object of any intention. To say that we cannot aim at or approach the truth also implies that the nature of such truth is to reveal itself. For Benjamin, knowledge is the correctness of our way of looking at the world, but truth is a unity of being recognized in reality itself. The former is a way of taking possession of the object in thought; the latter must take the form of a discovery in an act of recognition that we can only prepare for but not bring about wholly voluntarily. Foregoing the simple criterion of correspondence to characterize the nature of truth, a necessary condition on the authenticity of the order discovered would be its distinctness from the systematic divisions imposed on the world by our ways of thinking. Such truth must reveal itself from the matter at hand so as not to be a mere reflection of our ways of representing or systematizing the world to ourselves. If our modes of representation of the world are exhibited in the varying forms of inten-

Language

tional consciousness, it follows that “truth” is no object of consciousness, or, as Benjamin puts it, in a claim which will require further interpretation, it “is an intentionless state of being . . .” (O, 36.) This is not to say that it is ineffable or to be grasped in a mysterious intuition. It emerges in the use of the quotations to reveal significant relationships on another plane altogether. In other words, the distinction between what we say by means of or through language and what can be revealed in language is at the same time a distinction between what we say and what communicates itself in language.

§2. Language and Nature At this point certain questions might arise concerning the kind of truth that Benjamin is after in his work on the Paris arcades. One might have taken the insistence on the use of quotation material to be a sign that he is concerned with the realm of the social or the cultural. This is not so much false as requiring clarification, in particular of his view of the relation of culture to nature. For there are indications that Benjamin thinks of truth in history naturalistically as the self-manifestation of nature in human affairs. Consider, for instance, the following claims: “The expression ‘the book of nature’ suggests that one can read the real like a text. And that is how the reality of the nineteenth century will be treated here. We open the book of what happened” (A, 464). Or again: “The historical method is a philological method based on the book of life. ‘Read what was never written,’ runs a line in Hofmannsthal. The reader one should think of here is the true historian” (SW IV, 405). Such notions as the “book of nature” or the “book of life,” indeed the very idea of reading the real, have a religious basis that must be distinguished from the scientific idea of investigating reality for the sake of knowledge. Whereas, as I have argued, the material Benjamin uses is linguistic, he is not reading a self-enclosed text but rather reading the real in the framework of a theology: “Bear in mind that commentary on a reality . . . calls for a method completely different from that required by commentary on a text. In one case, the scientific mainstay is theology; in the other case, philology” (A, 460). The theological register implicit in the idea of the book of nature is usually understood as the search for the teleological order of nature manifesting God’s design, which shows nature to be created. Yet what is striking in Benjamin’s adoption of that expression to characterize his enterprise is that it is now directed not

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toward the beauty or glory of nature but toward human constructs in the often not-so-flattering products of metropolitan existence. The fact that Benjamin nevertheless turns to such a theological register would imply that the reality he aims to wrest out of that material is attesting to a higher life in the refuse of history. How are we to hold both to the understanding that the material for Benjamin’s construction is human language (i.e., quotation material) and that the task at hand is that of reading the real? Would the latter not demand looking at reality directly? Moreover, would a construction of quotations not be distinct from a process of investigating nature as such in a way that must not interfere with it? The idea of reading the real leads to a form of realism or even naturalism, whereas the construction out of quotations seem to imply a social or linguistic idealism. In a formulation that brings to the fore all the tensions implicit in our previous considerations he speaks of allowing the materials “in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them” (A, 460). The apparent contradiction between using and letting be is evident also when Benjamin describes his work as engaged in “the construction of history as such,” while adding, “in the structure of commentary” (A, 461). Even if he undertakes, as he puts it, a “construction out of facts . . . construction with the complete elimination of theory,” how can what is constructed be a commentary upon what exists as such? How can the two practices be reconciled? The question of the relation between the meaning revealed in the natural order and human language is fundamental to Benjamin’s philosophy of language. It is of concern to him in his early essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” That essay is famous for its interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis by way of a reflection on the nature of language. Its importance for us is not so much in its contribution to biblical hermeneutics but rather as a way to translate the theological register into the language of philosophy. If the essay suggests at first a metaphysical account elaborated on the basis of a religious myth, a more nuanced reading reveals a complex and powerful picture of man and world in language. The essay opens with the peculiar claim that “there is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of each one to communicate its mental contents” (SW I, 62). Assuming that Benjamin does not take an interest in the modes of communication of creatures (such as the sig-

Language

nals of bees or the songs of whales), we should understand the essay to be concerned with the ways in which essential nature (or what he calls “spiritual being” [geistige Wesen] is revealed. What initially distinguishes Benjamin’s approach from philosophical accounts that conceive of essence as hidden by appearance is his understanding of the revelation of essential being in terms reminiscent of a teleology of meaning whose end is full significance.4 In the framework of such an account we can say that essence strives or has a tendency to communicate itself.5 The characterization of an order of the world in terms of the tendency of expression of essential being constitutes a philosophical translation of the theological dogma of creation. To speak of the striving of essences to communicate themselves is tantamount to conceiving of nature as created. For creation by the divine word is what, on the theological picture, would make for the expressive potential of essences. It would be the ground of the dynamic conception of essences striving to a full realization in meaning. Adam, in the story of Genesis, continues by naming nature, the act of creation by the divine verb.6 For naming, conceived as the expression of essential being to be possible, man must be attentive to nature’s inner tendency. Is it revealed to him by the direct observation of nature, revealed in perception or intuition, as secretly at work in nature? How is the language of nature to be heard? Here lies the crucial point that would distinguish Benjamin’s account from a simple theological or teleological story. Man is not attentive to the language of nature by avoiding his own language altogether and relying on some direct and immediate intuition of things. Rather, the possibility of naming depends on recognizing how essences can be realized in the medium of human language. It would require establishing on philosophical grounds a distinction between what is ours to say through language and what speaks in it and is not our own doing. In other words, it requires an investigation of the forms internal to our use of language that condition our discourse about the world. The inner tendency to expression, initially attributed in realistic terms to nature itself, can become manifest and be realized only in human language. Human language has a dual relation to nature. In the first place, it is used to speak about nature and refers to objects in nature, but, second, by virtue of this very capacity, human language becomes the medium for the fulfillment of the tendency of essence to express itself. Intelligibility is not achieved by the inner tendency of essences on their own. Bringing together both the language of essences and the language of

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man positions us as those who can recognize and thus realize in our language that tendency of expression in nature. Benjamin’s understanding that man has the task of expressing the language of nature avoids both metaphysical realism and linguistic idealism, that is, both the idea that essences are fully formed and our language somehow corresponds to them, as well as the idea that we divide the world by imposing on it our own mental categories or concepts. Benjamin identifies that latter condition as the reduction of man’s relation to nature. Indeed, he reads the story of the Fall as allegorizing that problematic relation to nature in language. Falling short of the Adamic task of naming creation, human language turns to the judgment. Judgment, as Benjamin understands it, is the source of abstraction. Objects are subsumed under a concept in a judgment that thereby represents them through a specific aspect determined by the interest motivating the judgment. The concept signifies through common marks and is not immediately and singularly referring like a name. The concept establishes an essentially mediate relation to things. With the turn to judgment, language comes to appear as a means of communication, a medium in which a speaker can represent states of affairs to another speaker of the language. On such picture what is lost is precisely the immediacy of language, in which it is not a means to express something else but a medium of the self-expression of true nature. “The word must communicate something (other than itself). In this fact lies the true Fall of the spirit of language” (SW I, 71). The distinction Benjamin draws between name and judgment has important implications for our understanding of the relation between language and value. At this point I will only hint at that relation by noting that, given Benjamin’s picture of the realization of essence in meaning, there is a normative aspect to naming itself. Indeed, the good is the very bringing of a thing into the full expression of its essence. Goodness is fulfilled expression.7 The expression of essence thus knows no negation but only intensification and decrease. Moreover, in Benjamin’s scheme, man has no essence of his own but rather has the task of bringing essences to expression by means of his language. Man is, so to speak, the center of the world not by using nature for his purposes but rather by giving it expression. Man is manifest to himself by expressing, or by “naming,” the world.8 In other words, one must conceive of the goodness of man or of  the highest value in relation to the capacity to give expression to creaturely life.

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If there is an internal connection between naming and the idea of the good, then one might say that evil has no name (so also “the good” is no name, no separate essence or idea, but goodness is inherent in naming things). It is judgment that introduces negativity by way of its antithetical nature (for a judgement is either true or false).9 Foregoing the task of the expression of essences as what is valuable in itself, value comes to be viewed in terms of contentful principles legislating good and evil. Man’s relation to value would then be based on knowledge rather than expression. Value becomes a matter of knowing the content of determinate moral laws or principles separating good from evil, applying them to certain situations and acting accordingly. Original sin, on Benjamin’s reading, is inherited in thus entering language: “Knowledge of good and evil abandons name; it is a knowledge from outside, the uncreated imitation of the creative word” (SW I, 71). This is not to say that the expression of essences cannot be recovered from the fallen language of judgment. However, it would be necessary to reveal in language as we know it a dimension of meaning independent from the determinations of the concept: to recover by other means the power of naming, the distinction between what is said through language and what manifests itself in language. Language must be recovered as the medium of the self-presentation of essential being—not a means by which we produce sensical assertions but as a medium of the manifestation of significance, of things appearing valuable by being fully meaningful.

§3. Criticism and Translation How is one to conceive of the work of expression, whose schema Benjamin provides in his reading of the first chapters of Genesis, in relation to history? In particular, how are we to think of the task of reading the real, which Benjamin undertakes in the Arcades project? And what form of interpretation, if it is correct to call such a practice of reading interpretation at all, would be adequate to the task at hand? These are questions best approached gradually by considering first a limited, albeit crucial, context in which the question of reading is more naturally raised, namely Benjamin’s engagement with literary works. I therefore take a somewhat long detour and explore some of the different textual practices that Benjamin considers, as well as, through them, the specificity of the context of art and its relation to the task of giving expression to truth in history.

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As one considers the various modes of the realization of meaning with which Benjamin was concerned in the context of literary works, both criticism and translation would appear to delineate ways of addressing the problem of judgment in language. Benjamin identifies a problem with the conditions of judgment. Yet being in judgment is the unavoidable form of having language (Kant would say of our intellect’s being a discursive one). It is necessary, therefore, to recover the naming relation to the world indirectly—within the sphere of judgment. A corrective to the abstraction and determination of the concept would require another mode of judgment, a possibility of expression within the sphere of judgment. One way of thinking of those two modes, after Kant, is in terms of the distinction between the determinant and the reflective forms of judgment. Kant introduces the latter in the Critique of Judgment so as to account for our aesthetic appreciation and our teleological judgments. The elaboration of the idea of reflection in relation to art (and by way of it in relation to teleology more generally) is Benjamin’s concern in his doctoral dissertation, The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism. In that work Benjamin describes the framework through which the Romantics appropriate Kant’s notion of reflection (via the intermediary of Fichte) and understand it as the form of criticism of art. Criticism would bring out the value of a work of art by intensifying its meaning in reflection. It would thereby understandably be a model for a form of judgment that does not presuppose given concepts to assess the object, a model for the use of language in which value has to do with the intensification of expression.10 Since Benjamin relates the predicament of judgment to the multiplicity of languages (the Fall to Babel), translation would be another route to address the task of expressing essences in language.11 Indeed, as early as the essay “On Language as Such,” Benjamin conceives of translation not just in relation to literary works. He also characterizes it ontologically as the paradigm for understanding how essences of a higher order express those of a lower order, as well as for characterizing the mode in which the mute language of nature finds expression in the language of man.12 As will gradually become clear, translation is for Benjamin a deeper, more significant, form than criticism with respect to the possibility of the revelation of truth in language.13 For Benjamin, translation is not understood primarily in terms of the task of reproducing the sense of an original poetic work in another language. The great achievement of a translation is the possibility it offers

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to recognize by its engagement with the literary work something pertaining to language as such: “. . . translation transplants the original into a more definitive linguistic realm” (SW I, 258). In and through the translation of great poetic works what can manifest itself is what Benjamin calls the pure language. This difficult idea of a pure language must be elucidated against the background of the essay “On Language as Such,” namely as the manifestation in human language of the divine creative verb. We thus ask what role translation can play in recognizing how created life is manifest in human language. Instead of asking directly what the pure language is, it would be advisable to elaborate first how we are to conceive of the perfected state of language, in which it most clearly works on the model of naming. This would be a language expressing in itself, in its signs, the essential being of that which it signifies. In language as we use it, the sign does not exhibit in its structure what it is that it signifies. In the perfected language, what a sign signifies, that is, the category of being to which what it signifies belongs, would be perspicuously evident from the sign itself.14 Such language would not only be seen, therefore, as a means for communicating something external to it but would also express the world by showing itself. The key to this possibility of achieving perspicuity of symbolic expression lies in the nature of signification: A sign has a way of meaning its object. That way of meaning is not an arbitrary connection between sign and thing. In order for a sign to mean objects of a certain kind, the way of meaning must itself reflect what the object is. In other words, the relation between signifier and signified is such that something of the nature of the signified must be present in the medium of its signification in order for the signifier to mean it at all. Conversely, the knowledge of the way of meaning can provide an intimation of the true being of the signified.15 This is why translation, as Benjamin understands it, is not concerned with the sense or contents represented but with the way of meaning of the words of the original. The way of meaning is incorporated in the translation and made explicit in its language: “. . . translation, instead of imitating the sense of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s way of meaning” (SW I, 260). How is the way of meaning of the original incorporated? Indeed, how is the way of meaning even recognized in the language of the original? To be sure, the production of sense in language does not assume the knowledge of the way

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of meaning of signs. That is, the way of meaning of words used is not immediately available even to speakers of the original language. For, the way of meaning is not something that the users of language themselves determine or must have in mind for communication. It is something presupposed and shared with other speakers by virtue of their partaking in the same configuration of life. Must the translator, then, identify with the form of life in which the original work was written? Is it necessary to have a special empathy or identification with the Greek world in order to translate Greek tragedy?16 If we recognize that even the speakers of the original language do not have immediate access to the way of meaning of their words, then in no sense can the work of translation depend on the possibility of identification with that life world or on experiencing the world through their eyes (or through their language). Translation is not a reconstruction of the original intention but a construction that first makes explicit or even determinate the way of meaning in the original. We should, moreover, not think of the translator’s objective as that of finding in language words with a way of meaning similar to those of the original (as though first we identify the way of meaning in the original and then copy it somehow in an analogous context in the translated language). Benjamin assumes that even though it is possible to refer to one and the same thing in different languages, the respective ways of meaning that thing are in conflict or tend to exclude one another. No intentional context in the language of the translation would be similar or analogous to that found in the original’s way of meaning. Incorporating the way of meaning of the original would thus always involve what Benjamin calls a supplementation in the language of the translation. The translators would have to appeal to resources in their language that go far beyond any localized intentional context. Neither will translation retain the unity of intention existing in the original, nor will the translators’ relation to their language be analogous to that of the poets to theirs. Translation is, as Benjamin puts it, uninspired: “The task of the translator,” he writes, “consists in finding the particular intention toward the target language which produces in that language the echo of the original. This is a feature of translation that basically differentiates it from the poet’s work, because the intention of the latter is never directed toward the language as such, at its totality, but is aimed solely and immediately at specific linguistic contextual aspects . . . The intention of the poet is spontaneous, primary, manifest; that of the

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translator is derivative, ultimate, ideational” (SW I, 258). The translation of the poetical intention may involve drawing from diverse regions of the translator’s language. (I take it that this is the point of the figure of the echo that Benjamin uses, for echoes are so to speak refractions of the original unity of the voice over broad expanses of meaning.) What in the original is a specific linguistic context may involve for its supplementation in the translation the resources of the whole range of the translator’s language. However, Benjamin argues also for a much stronger claim, namely, that what pertains to language as a totality can be recognized by the work of the translator on the specific linguistic context of the original. To clarify this last point we need to further inquire about the nature of the poetic work and its transformation by translation and criticism. I have argued that for the most part the ways of meaning of words are not present to language users. Language users rely on them by partaking in the immensely complex common form of life. It is nevertheless the case that in the poetic work, that common form of life is drawn together and gathered by way of the particular poetic context. The poetic work is distinct from the ordinary communication of sense in that it can bring into play (though not make wholly explicit and determinate) the life that underlies our use of words. The beauty of a great literary work is correlative with its capacity to draw together the underlying life of language. It is for that reason that the work gives the impression of itself being alive. Such aliveness is primarily evident in the wealth of meaning that the work brings into play in one’s reflection on it. Kant, for instance pointed to this relation of the beautiful work of art to life, characterizing the unfolding of its meaning through the notion of purposiveness without purpose. It is meaning itself in our reflection upon the work that evolves with an inner consistency that cannot be attributed to our prior conceptual determinations. The work appears alive to us in the lively movement of our faculties involved with it. However, the wealth of meaning that can be associated with the beautiful work of art comes at a price. For it is made possible insofar as our reflection on the work is marked throughout by ambiguity. Determinacy of meaning, at least when it is sought in determinant judgments, would issue only in the assertion of factual matters and in applying concepts to the work. Ambiguity is the condition of the aliveness of meaning in the work of art. The ambiguity of meaning characteristic of beauty makes the beautiful work essentially semblance: “Beautiful life, the essentially

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beautiful, and semblance like beauty—these are identical” (SW I, 350 ). Such semblance, as understood by Benjamin, is not to be taken just as a deceptive illusion or as the mere play of the imagination. Nor is ambiguity mere vagueness or lack of precision. To put it again in Kantian terms, the ambiguity in beauty reflects the relation of its meaning to the idea. It is insofar as the singular beauty is the locus of a movement of meaning that is oriented by the idea and insofar as its own meaning unfolds in relation to a completed totality of meaning that it must be inherently ambiguous. To view beauty as giving voice to a totality of life is possible only upon the lack of determinacy or the formlessness of its meaning. To put it in Goethe’s words, quoted by Benjamin, “Beauty can never become lucid about itself” (SW I, 353). Kant, who serves me here as a frame of reference, expresses this same insight by his understanding that genius, viewed as the capacity for aesthetic ideas, lacks clarity about the mode in which it produces a work of art. Calling genius a natural talent means ultimately that it is the expression of nature itself. It is nature that gives the rule to art. Or, what comes to the same, art harbors a hidden, yet to be determined, form of natural life. That such rule given by nature is conceived as correlative with an idea means that it is presupposed, yet not manifest in the context of the emergence of the work. It is revealed by the possibilities the work offers to advance or elaborate its meaning in judgment and criticism. Criticism would be the infinite clarification of that nature presupposed in the work. Romantic criticism explored this possibility and made it central to its method. (See further my discussion in Chapter 2.) Should we then say that criticism makes manifest in the beautiful work of art the life of created nature? The inherent indeterminacy of the beautiful distinguishes its liveliness from the life of the created. Despite our common use of the term “creation” to refer to the origination of the work of art, Benjamin would argue that “. . . the work of art has not been ‘created’ ”17 (SW I, 220). This is not so much evident from the context of its emergence as in the possibility it offers to realize the meaning inherent in it. Created life would be recognized in the possibility to give it full expression in human language. The beautiful life, on the other hand, cannot fulfill its meaning and retain its beauty: “The work of art will not escape from chaos as does the created world” (SW I, 340). Thus, one would have to recognize two distinct teleologies: The one concerns the destiny of the work of art insofar as its inner life or afterlife depends

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on the intensification of its meaning (say, in criticism). The other—whose main dimensions we have sketched in the account of the early essay on language—would be the underlying tendency of created life, whose end lies in the actualization of its meaning in human language. There is nevertheless a possibility of relating the life of beauty to that of creation. Created life may ultimately be recognized in the work of art, but this realization of the work might demand the destructive criticism of beauty. The life of creation would thereby be shown to be hidden in the life of beauty. It would be the truth of beauty. It is regarding this possibility of recognizing the truth of beauty that a fundamental distinction must be drawn between criticism and translation. Both criticism and translation contribute to the afterlife of a work of art, to its continued life as it is dissociated from its original life world. However, criticism, as it was conceived by the Romantics, is essentially an enlivening or an intensification of the possibilities of meaning inherent in the work. It thrives on the ambiguity essential to the life of the work of art. It is translation, which by destroying the false aliveness of beauty, reveals creaturely life in works. In its indirect planned and ideational ways translation arrests the movement of beautiful semblance but thereby reveals a higher life, that of the created hidden in the work of art. Translation contains a critical moment, wholly distinct from the movement of criticism as the latter is understood by the Romantic practice.18 It is to this non-Romantic understanding of critique that Benjamin refers in a letter to Florence Christian Rang: “My definition is: criticism is the mortification of the works. Not the intensification of consciousness in them (that is Romantic!), but their colonization by knowledge. The task of philosophy is to name the idea, as Adam named nature, in order to overcome the works . . . The task of interpreting works of art is to concentrate creaturely life in ideas. To establish the presence of that life” (SW I, 389).

§4. Translation and Creaturely Life We are now in a better position to clarify how translation can make manifest a life of created nature. Benjamin’s claim that the language of man can bring to expression created nature can be understood first extensively: Insofar as the language of man is extensionally complete and covers all natural beings, that is, insofar as man can speak in his language of all beings, the language of each being can be incorporated, and its form revealed in the language of man. However, there is a further

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sense in which Benjamin conceives of the language of man as making manifest an even deeper stratum of created nature as a whole: insofar as the languages of all natural beings come to be incorporated in the language of man, they are brought into contact with one another and ordered within it. The higher and more complex a being, the more its language (now expressed in the language of man) refracts from within itself the languages of all lower orders of being. Thus, in human language one could recognize, for instance, that the language of living beings, of animals, has its way of opening up and expressing from within itself the language of the vegetal world or that the language of the plant world can express from within itself the language of matter. Human language, the most evolved language, would thus give expression to the world of the animals but thereby also to lower orders of beings expressed by animal life itself. Ultimately then, in human language, a totality of nature can be manifest intensively (rather than merely extensively). In the last lines of the essay, Benjamin powerfully draws on this distinction between the expression of the different languages of natural beings in man’s language and the intensive manifestation of the created as a whole, of the divine word figured as a message that is passed through the different orders of beings: “The language of nature is comparable to a secret password that each sentry passes to the next in his own language, but the meaning of the password is the sentry’s language itself. All higher language is a translation of lower ones, until in the ultimate clarity the word of God unfolds, which is the unity of this movement made up of language” (SW I, 74). It is this intensive unity of the movement made of language that is brought out in the translation of a poetic work from one human language to another. Translation involves the totality of language in making manifest the power that runs through created nature as a whole. This liberation of a force or power in language as such is at issue in the last pages of Benjamin’s essay, devoted to the nature of fidelity and freedom in translation. Indeed, from the preceding considerations, it is possible to argue that insofar as translation affects the language of the translator as a whole, it does not lead to the discovery of specific unities of meaning that reflect in their symbolic structure the essences of those beings referred to in the original poetic work. Rather, a destructive opening of the language of the translation is effected by incorporating in it the ways of meaning of the original. Benjamin approvingly quotes Rudolf Pannwitz, who realized precisely that unsettling effect that translation has:

Language Pannwitz writes: “Our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a mistaken premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English. Our translators have a far greater reverence for the usage of their own language than for the spirit of foreign works . . . The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue . . . He must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language. It is not generally realized to what extent this is possible, to what extent any language can be transformed . . .” (SW I, 262)

What emerges then in the meticulous and uninspired work of translation is a force in the medium of language as such. This is the manifestation of the pure language in human language: “It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is exiled among alien tongues, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work. For the sake of the pure language, he breaks through decayed barriers of his own language” (SW I, 261). The freedom inherent in translation is not creative freedom but rather the liberation in being attuned to the manifestation of a forceful transformative current that runs through language. It is only by the meticulous fidelity in reproducing the ways of meaning of the original that the barriers of meaning in the language of the translation are exploded and that such hidden force is manifest. The creative Word is not given any specific form or expression but is revealed as a force when all unity of expression in the original is carefully and knowledgably taken apart by incorporating the way of meaning in the language of the translation. This is why Benjamin describes the manifestation of the pure language as expressionless. It is neither a communication of sense nor an expression of meaning. Indeed the original work expresses its contents, but the translation, by incorporating the way of meaning of the original, makes all that is essential to the expressed content present at the level of the language of the translation itself. This is also why Benjamin describes that tensionless language as a silent depository of the ultimate truth not only as the language of truth, but also as itself the true language: “In this pure language—which no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that which is meant in all languages— all information, all sense, and all intention finally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished.” (SW I, 261)19

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Benjamin does not believe that every poetic work can, in being translated, make manifest with the same intensity this ultimate stratum of language.20 However, in great translations of great works, where fidelity to the original means lovingly incorporating into the translator’s language its ways of meaning, one finds in the language of the translator precisely the liberation from laws or forms that weigh on meaning and the manifestation of a force flowing through language. As such translations destroy any unity of meaning to hold to, they risk incommunicability: “the gates of languages thus expanded and modified may slam shut and enclose the translator in silence” (SW I, 262). But incommunicability is not ineffability. It is precisely in the utmost articulation of meaning that the force of the Pure Word is manifest in human language expressionlessly.21

This is not our last word on Benjamin’s account of translation. However, I would like, in concluding this chapter, to draw some connections to our initial discussion of the use of quotation material in The Arcades Project. For I take The Arcades Project to be still involved, although more indirectly, with the same issues as concerned Benjamin early on. Viewed from the perspective of the early essays, quotations are not used for the information they contain. The truth that can be presented in a construction out of that material should be conceived as the revelation of a natural order in human history. What is thereby revealed should be conceived as the manifestation of creaturely life in the human world rather than merely as a testimony to the social and cultural practices of the past. The juxtaposition of a theology of language and Benjamin’s practice needs much clarification. In particular it will be necessary to establish the significance of the natural life that can emerge from the construction of history. In what sense would the construction of history provide a picture of this world as a scene of creation, as the fulfillment of creative life? Or, to pose the question in different terms, what is the force or dynamism that is all but invisible as one follows the unfolding of history “as it happens” but is revealed in Benjamin’s constructive practice? And how is that force the ground for a political transformation around the axis of the most basic and fundamental human needs? Or should we speak here of the uses of destruction, of something emerging from the destruction of a unity of life in the past? After all, the very use of quotations in Benjamin’s practice of translating the past into the language of the present at some level already

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assumes the destruction of the unity of life of that world, out of which the meaning material was drawn. A more immediate question, one that will help us to approach these larger issues, concerns the character of the presentation of truth by way of the construction of quotations. Translation, as I have argued, does not re-create the original poetic intention. It indeed demands the destruction of the original unity of the beautiful work. It nevertheless presents in its language a fragment of totality, a fragment of the pure language. Similarly, Benjamin’s construction of history is in no way a reconstruction of the original form of life of the past. Rather, the construction makes recognizable a fragment of the totality of history in the singular phenomenon presented. Benjamin will speak of the recognition of that totality in terms of the emergence of an arresting image: the dialectical image. It is to the clarification of this peculiar mode of presentation that I now wish to turn.

REMARK Transforming Kant’s Metaphysics of Experience a. The Epistemological Framework Thinking of Benjamin’s philosophy as growing out of a philosophical tradition is first and foremost thinking of it in relation to Kant’s legacy. As Benjamin himself acknowledges, it is the driving force of his early engagement with philosophy: “The central task of the coming philosophy will be to take the deepest intimations it draws from our times and our expectations of a great future and turn them into knowledge by relating them to the Kantian system. The historical continuity that is ensured by following the Kantian system is also the only such continuity of decisive and systematic consequence” (SW I, 101). So as to make this allegiance more than a passing episode to be explained by the prevalence of neo-Kantianism in German universities at the time, we must inquire what transformations Benjamin brings to the Kantian system and how on their basis can Kant be seen to play a decisive role in the development of

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Benjamin’s own thought.22 Specifically, one must ask about the problem Benjamin faces in inheriting Kant’s attempt to develop a metaphysics of experience. Kant’s critical philosophy reveals the illusions of traditional dogmatic metaphysics and destroys its aspirations by showing knowledge to be limited to the experience of nature. At the same time the critical project is to create the possibility of an instauration of metaphysics for this realm of experience. Such metaphysics would contain the a priori part of any lawful determination of the domain of experience over and above the one provided by the categories and their corresponding principles. The attempt to go beyond the principles of the knowledge of objects of experience as such would involve not only pure but also empirical concepts. Therefore, Kant argues that, in order to safeguard the necessity and universality of the metaphysical principles for that domain, one would need to retain a hold on the constitutive involvement of the forms of intuition in experience. Put differently, a metaphysics of experience is possible only for contents manifesting fully the structuring power of the pure forms of intuition, space and time. Therefore, only domains of experience that are mathematizable can have a part in such metaphysics of nature. The experience whose a priori form is deduced in metaphysics is that given by the mathematical sciences. This would preclude precisely the possibility of a metaphysical account for the time-bound, historical, or cultural domains of experience. It is thus a metaphysics for a poor (one might say humanly) insignificant experience: “. . . Kant wanted to take the principles of experience from the sciences—in particular, mathematical physics . . . he undertook his work on the basis of an experience virtually reduced to a nadir, to a minimum of significance. Indeed, one can say that the very greatness of his work, his unique radicalism, presupposed an experience which had almost no intrinsic value and which could have attained its (we may say) sad significance only through its certainty” (SW I, 101). It is Benjamin’s project of broadening the scope of metaphysically accountable experience that explains the central transformations he aims to bring to the Kantian philosophy. The kinds of experiences or the domains of experience accounted for extend to every aspect of existence. There would be experience in domains of science such as biology, linguistics, and psychology, as well as historical experience, experience in art, and religious experience. Benjamin aims thus to enlarge the scope of meta-

Language

physical doctrine not only to nonmathematizable domains of scientific knowledge but also to domains of experience that are not domains of knowledge. Benjamin believes that Kant is barred from recognizing the possibility of a richer metaphysics of experience by the involvement of unwarranted assumptions about the nature of the knowing subject in the critical elaboration of his epistemological framework: “Kant’s epistemology does not open up the realm of metaphysics because it contains within itself primitive elements of an unproductive metaphysics which excludes all others. In epistemology every metaphysical element is the germ of a disease that expresses itself in the separation of knowledge from the realm of experience in its full freedom and depth. The development of philosophy is to be expected because each annihilation of these metaphysical elements in an epistemology simultaneously refers it to a deeper, more metaphysically fulfilled experience” (SW I, 102). One of the central stumbling blocks in developing a speculative metaphysics is Kant’s account of the particularity of experience, on the basis of the material of intuition given in sensibility. The diversity of contents of experience, beyond what belongs to the formal framework, with its duality of categories and forms of intuition, is explained by postulating the material of sensation: “This ‘material of sensation’ was artificially distanced from the animating center of the categories by the forms of intuition by which it was only imperfectly absorbed. In this way Kant achieved the separation of metaphysics and experience, or, to use his own terms, between pure knowledge and experience” (SW I, 94). Making the variety of empirical content so dependent on the sensuous given creates a first obstacle in accounting for any necessity it might have. Postulating the material of sensation implies further that the intelligibility of experience is to be accounted for by the structuring or unifying power of the concept. In taking the latter as the spontaneous product of a faculty of the subject called the understanding, it is hard to avoid thinking of it as reflecting our ways of organizing the world. Here, too, there would be no justification for the necessity of things appearing as they do. These difficulties point, according to Benjamin, to the need to strip the perspective of transcendental knowledge from everything pertaining to the structure of empirical consciousness of the individual subject and in particular from the division of subjectivity into the faculties of sensibility and understanding. These human faculties cannot be the starting point of an epistemological account; they are, rather, themselves a matter for

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psychological investigation: “Experience, as it is conceived in reference to the individual living human and his consciousness, instead of as a systematic specification of knowledge, is again in all of its types the mere object of this real knowledge, specifically of its psychological branch.”23 Where would transcendental knowledge of experience in its variety be sought? Its place, as Benjamin emphasizes, is language. The notion of conditions of possibility of experience, so crucial to the Kantian justification of knowledge, can hardly be transferred to more particular areas of experience without the mediation of language. It is in language that we can uncover the grammar of phenomena. Importantly, it is in language that we recognize the form or conditions of intelligibility of domains of experience that are not, strictly speaking, matters of scientific knowledge. For the order of language need not be conceived on the model of a mathematical order (Benjamin was at the time well aware of attempts to mathematize or logicize language): The great transformation and correction which must be performed upon the concept of experience, oriented so one-sidedly along mathematicalmechanical lines, can be attained only by relating knowledge to language . . . For Kant, the consciousness that philosophical knowledge was absolutely certain and a priori, the consciousness of that aspect of philosophy in which it is fully the peer of mathematics, ensured that he devoted almost no attention to the fact that all philosophical knowledge has its unique expression in language and not in formulae or numbers. This fact, however, might ultimately prove to be the decisive one, and it is ultimately because of this fact that the systematic supremacy of philosophy over all science as well as mathematics is to be asserted. A concept of knowledge gained from reflection on the linguistic nature of knowledge will create a corresponding concept of experience which will also encompass realms that Kant failed truly to systematize. (SW I, 108)

It is in its turn to language that Benjamin’s transformation of the Kantian philosophy is seen to be continuous with the preoccupations of the essay “On Language as Such.” In particular, given that in that essay language is considered not only by way of the perspective of the concept (i.e., of the determinations of judgment) but also as a medium in which essential being can be recognized, one can appreciate how it can be for him the field of metaphysical knowledge. This connection between the two essays further raises in turn the question of how Benjamin understands the religious dimension in his reconception of Kant.

Language

b. The Teachings of Religion and the Teachings of Philosophy In Benjamin’s transformation of the Kantian philosophy, the religious seems initially to hold a dual position. First, insofar as it is a form of experience, it can be investigated, along with other domains of human experience. Second, the religious is identified in relation to the unity or integrity of human experience as a whole. The development of a speculative metaphysics as an integral whole of metaphysical knowledge, is for Benjamin the way to bring together the religious and the philosophical. Indeed, Benjamin attributes to Kant the understanding that “[Metaphysics’] distinctiveness lies . . . in its universal power to tie all of experience immediately to the concept of God, through ideas” (SW I, 105). The problem that defines “the task of the coming philosophy” is “the discovery or creation of that concept of knowledge which, by relating experience exclusively to the transcendental consciousness, makes not only mechanical but also religious experience logically possible . . . This should definitely be taken to mean not that knowledge makes God possible but that it definitely does make the experience and doctrine of him possible in the first place” (SW I, 105). For Kant religion enters philosophy as a requirement of the unity of reason by way of reason’s need to bring together its different employment (in particular pure and empirical practical reason). The existence of God, thus conceived, is a postulate of the regulative employment of reason in the idea of the Highest Good, not a form or condition of possibility of experience. The question whether a speculative metaphysics that makes “the experience and doctrine of God possible” could be developed within a Kantian framework leads Benjamin to inquire how the highest unity of ideas can be presented in experience even if these ideas are not conditions of its possibility. Put differently, if the idea is the ordering of transcendental knowledge of experience, how can that integral unity of knowledge be manifest in experience itself? The task of ordering a whole of metaphysical knowledge of experience is formulated for Benjamin by way of his understanding of the nature of philosophy as doctrine or teachings. Benjamin concludes the essay “On Perception” with the following claim: “Philosophy as a whole, including the philosophical sciences, is teachings” (SW I, 96). The German word for “teachings” is Lehre, which the editors of the English edition elucidate as a notion that “signifies something between ‘religious doctrine’ and ‘teachings.’ ” Scholem explains Benjamin’s use of the notion in

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similar terms: “In those years—between 1915 and 1927—the religious sphere assumed a central importance for Benjamin that was utterly removed from fundamental doubt. At its center was the concept of Lehre [teachings], which for him included the philosophical realm but definitely transcended it. In his early writings he reverted repeatedly to this concept, which he interpreted in the sense of the original meaning of the Hebrew torah as instruction”24 Taking the concept of teaching to transcend the philosophical realm might suggest a misleading emphasis on Benjamin’s understanding of the function of the term, for it is by conceiving of philosophy as doctrine that its relation to the teachings of religion can be brought out. It is indeed necessary to add a further use of the term Lehre, specifically in the context of Kant’s philosophy. It comes to denote the domain of the metaphysical investigation, following the project of critique. That is, Benjamin equates conceiving of philosophy as teachings with his attempt to broaden Kant’s concept of a metaphysics of experience. For Kant, doctrine is that part of philosophy that can be transmitted and forms the basis of a tradition that can be passed from one generation to the next. If Kant justifies his critical project in terms of the sense that metaphysical systems confront each other as on a battleground, the instauration of metaphysics as doctrine gives it the form of science. Benjamin’s problem, from this perspective, would be to free the Kantian notion of doctrine from its scientific mold and make it into the highest determination of his idea of philosophy. As he puts it in a letter to Scholem dated October 1917: “what is essential in Kant’s thought must be preserved. I still do not know at this point what this ‘essential’ something consists of and how his system must be grounded anew for it to emerge clearly. But this is my conviction: anyone who does not sense in Kant the struggle to conceive doctrine itself . . . knows nothing of philosophy” (C, 97–98). The centrality of doctrine for the very idea of philosophy is also the theme that opens the epistemo-critical preface to the book on the Trauerspiel: “In its finished form philosophy will, it is true, assume the quality of doctrine [Lehre], but it does not lie within the power of mere thought to confer such a form. Philosophical doctrine is based on a historical codification” (O, 27). This means that the mathematical or geometrical model of ordering philosophical doctrine, evident, for instance, in Spinoza, will be too abstract or too restrictive. The problem of philosophy as doctrine must be conceived in relation to concrete historical experience, as the possibility

Language

of a codification of experience in its historical specificity. In other words, the problem is how to give the historical material the fixity and uncriticizability of doctrine.25 The immutability of doctrine is certainly one that is most clearly recognizable in the realm of religion. The authority of religious doctrine is traced to revelation. But philosophy cannot appeal to the concept of revelation. Can the articulation that philosophy in its finished form gives to experience match the codification it acquires in religious teachings? Is the form of doctrine something that could adequately reflect the ideal of philosophy? In the addendum to his “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy,” Benjamin conceives of the relation between the philosophical and the religious as a “virtual identity”: “The philosophical concept of existence must answer to the religious concept of teachings, but the latter must answer to the epistemological original concept” (SW I, 110). How are the initial separation and the ultimate identity of the philosophical and the religious understood? The original concept of knowledge, after Kant, is one in which knowledge is always conditioned, possible under human conditions. Transcendental knowledge gives us the conditions of possibility that constitute a domain of experience of objects. Thus, knowledge, and that includes philosophical knowledge, transcendental knowledge of experience, is always partial. That partiality is set against a totality that Benjamin calls “existence” and that cannot itself be an object of knowledge: “Philosophy always inquires about knowledge . . . Indeed, it must be said that philosophy in its questionings can never hit upon the unity of existence, but only upon new unities of various conformities to laws, whose integral is ‘existence’ ” (SW I, 109). Existence is not understood, as in Kant, in relation to the actuality of that which is posited in intuition but as the integral totality of the different forms of knowledge of experience. The totality is the idea articulated in the integration of knowledge of experience. It is speculative metaphysics in its finished from. The investigation of various forms of consciousness or of diverse modes of intentionality may reveal the inner structure, that is, the conditions of possibility, of specific modes of experiencing. It provides transcendental knowledge of domains of experience. However, Benjamin is interested not only in developing a phenomenology of the different domains of consciousness but also in accounting for the unity or integrity of knowledge of experience in its totality in a speculative metaphysics. The crucial question in considering the dimension of existence is whether such

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totality can be recognized if not in experience itself, then as an integral ordering of experience. To understand that last possibility, what must be explicated is the initial separation and ultimate identity of three distinguishable levels: the immediate “natural” concept of experience, transcendental knowledge of experience as it is articulated in the philosophical investigation of the diverse domains of experience, and the totality of experience that arises from ordering and integrating knowledge of experience in its different forms. The inner relatedness of these three levels is expressed in a highly complex formulation in the fragment “On Perception,” which both criticizes previous accounts (including Kant’s) and suggests the way to overcome their problems: The distinction that must be made is between the immediate and natural concept of experience and the concept of experience in the context of knowledge. In other words, the confusion arose from conflating the concepts of “experience” and “knowledge of experience.” For the concept of knowledge, experience is not anything new and extraneous to it, but only itself in a different form; experience as the object of knowledge is the unified and continuous manifold of knowledge. Paradoxical though it sounds, experience does not occur as such in the knowledge of experience, simply because this is knowledge of experience and hence a context of knowledge. Experience, however, is the symbol of this context of knowledge and therefore belongs in a completely different order of things from knowledge itself. . . . This can perhaps be elucidated best by an image: if a painter sits in front of a landscape and “copies” it (as we say), the landscape itself does not occur in the picture itself, and that too is perfectly justifiable. (SW I, 95)

Three questions can be raised about this passage: First, in what sense does knowledge of experience inhere in experience? Second, how can the different forms of knowledge of experience constitute an integral continuity of experience? Third, in what sense is higher experience to be conceived as the symbol of the integral unity of knowledge of experience? The understanding that knowledge of experience inheres in experience and is not categorically distinct from it can be seen as part of Kant’s philosophical legacy. It is precisely the idea of transcendental knowledge as constitutive of the objects of experience. If the object is constituted by its conditions of possibility, they inhere in it and can be recognized and experienced in the appropriate presentation of the ob-

Language

ject. (This internal relation between knowledge and presentation is one that is more fully developed in the next chapter.) Thus, Benjamin can assert the virtual identity between ordinary experience and knowledge of experience: “. . . everything depends on the way in which the concept of ‘experience’ in the term ‘knowledge of experience’ is related to ‘experience’ in ordinary use. The first point to be made is that his linguistic usage is not an error. That is to say, the ‘experience’ we experience in reality is identical with what we know in our knowledge of experience” (SW I, 96). Once we accept the conclusion that knowledge of experience can be presented in experience, we can also start conceiving how an ordering of such material of experience can make manifest the integral totality of knowledge of experience. As opposed to Hegel’s identification of the totality by way of the system, Benjamin wishes to conceive of the concrete unity of the embodiment of the absolute by constructing a continuity in the manifold of knowledge of experience. (The model for understanding such constructed continuity is Goethe’s theory of science. See Remark to chapter 2.) The idea would be manifest in that constructed higher integral continuity of knowledge of experience (which is in no way one of the synthetic unities in experience).26 “Experience as the object of knowledge is the unified and continuous manifold of knowledge.”27 Yet, recognizing the concretization of ideas in such an integral of experience does not imply that the idea is fully realized in the phenomenal world. Benjamin will want to retain Kant’s fundamental separation of the ideal and the phenomenal. This separation will be reflected in a discontinuity or fragmentation that lies at the heart of the presentation of the integral of transcendental knowledge. Against the preceding account, consider finally Benjamin’s use of the term “symbol” to argue that “experience does not occur as such in the knowledge of experience . . . [It,] however, is the symbol of this context of knowledge and therefore belongs in a completely different order of things from knowledge itself.” One should understand “symbol” here, as Benjamin explicates that notion in his book on the Trauerspiel: A symbol is the unity of the transcendent and the material, the way in which the material is taken to embody and express momentarily the transcendent. If understood in this way, we can indeed say that through the construction of an integral continuity out of the multiplicity of forms of knowledge of experience, we recognize the integrity of experience, higher experience, as the symbol of our knowledge of experience. This is not

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experience of the transcendent but our natural experience itself articulated absolutely (or realizing the ideal of immutable doctrine). It is philosophy’s way of the identity of its own utmost articulation of experiencewith the teachings of religion: “philosophy is absolute experience deduced in a systematic, symbolic framework as language” (SW I, 96).28

2 IMAGE

One of the key concepts of The Arcades Project is the “dialectical image.” The endpoint of the work is often characterized in terms of the task of presenting such an image. This imagistic dimension of Benjamin’s thinking is the source of what I take to be pervasive misunderstandings of his philosophical sensibility. I start, therefore, by considering certain peculiarities in Benjamin’s use of the notion of an image, which any account given of it must aim to interpret. First, we think of an image as an object of vision, yet Benjamin never uses the word “ ‘see” or even “ ‘imagine” to characterize our relation to the dialectical image. It is “manifest” or “recognized” but not perceived. Moreover, he characterizes the image as legible, as an “image that is read” (A, 463). Rather than setting an opposition between language and image, he writes that “the place where one encounters [the dialectical image] is language” (A, 462). That doesn’t just mean that such an image is described in words (rather than, strictly speaking, perceived). Nor does it imply that the imagistic is to be identified with a poetic, figurative, or metaphorical register of language (as in certain uses of the term “image”). As the reference to the “mosaic” of quotations in the preceding chapter might indicate, the dialectical image must emerge from the work of construction with countless quotations. I argue, then, that language is the medium in which the dialectical image can be recognized at all. Furthermore, its presentation is for Benjamin a strictly philosophical task. The second peculiarity of Benjamin’s use of “image” is that it is invariably in the singular rather than in the plural.1 He does not aim to evoke nostalgic images and snapshots of city life or to conjure the fantasy images, dreams, and illusions of the time. Rather, the investigation of a certain subject matter would end in the presentation of the single dialectical 37

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image. More precisely, “image” is a characteristic of the mode of presentation of the material as a whole. It is, as he puts it, “an occurrence of ball lightning that runs across the whole horizon of the past” (SW IV, 403). By the use of the term “image” Benjamin suggests that the unity of the material is neither inferential nor narrative but rather it has the unity of a perspicuous totality that admits of recognition. Third, we usually think of an image as a kind of representation distinct from, say, linguistic signs in that it resembles the reality it represents. Still, the dialectical image is not the image of anything already given otherwise. On the contrary, the work Benjamin engages in prepares for the recognition of reality as a totality. The image is the configuration revealed in the nature of things. It is indeed common to find Benjamin using a turn of phrase suggesting that the image is a dimension of reality made recognizable rather than a representation in the mind, whether past or present. (In that respect it would have been better to translate the German Bild as “picture,” as when we say that things can suddenly present a different picture.)

§1. Image and Totality The possibility of conceiving of the presentation of an image in language depends on holding to the distinction drawn in the last chapter—between what can be said and what must be shown in language. That distinction is present in one guise or another throughout the different stages of Benjamin’s writing. In the Arcades, for instance, he writes: “Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show” (460). Earlier on, he opens the “epistemo—critical preface” of his book on the German Trauerspiel with a similar emphasis: “It is characteristic of philosophical writing that it must continually confront the question of presentation (Darstellung)” (I have modified the English translation, which has “representation” for Darstellung throughout, making Benjamin’s point harder to get). “If presentation is to stake its claim as the real methodology of the philosophical treatise,” Benjamin writes, “then it must be the presentation of ideas” (O, 29). I take it that that in his use of the term “idea” Benjamin invokes not only Plato but also Kant, for whom “idea,” the product of reason, indicates the encompassing of a totality. For Benjamin, ideas are not intuited, nor are they the abstract products of the intellect. Rather, they are eminently the subject of presentation—that whose recognition essentially

Image

involves their being presented. We commonly emphasize presentation when something given has to be made available to others, primarily when our problem is pedagogical: how an already objectively determined meaning is elucidated or taught to someone who does not know it yet. This didactic aspect of presentation is mostly relegated to psychology or pragmatics. When Benjamin, on the other hand, speaks of the method of philosophy to which presentation is essential, the latter is interpreted ontologically. For, since nothing in experience would count as the embodiment of the idea, it can become manifest only by using the phenomenal material not for what it is in fact but so as to recognize something over and above it. The use of “image” to characterize the form of truth Benjamin aims to reveal would then involve two moments. In the first we would insist on the utter concreteness of the material in which that truth would be recognized. However, the second, crucial moment, which justifies thinking of truth in terms of the presentation of an image, would be to claim that it is a matter of recognizing that material as the manifestation of what itself does not appear, of what is essentially not part of the phenomenal— the idea. It is this sense of manifestation that underlies Benjamin’s thinking and must be essentially distinguished from the vision of an image. Though he adopts Kant’s understanding that the idea cannot find an embodiment in experience, Benjamin refuses to think of it merely regulatively, as what orients a movement of thinking. Instead, by relying on quotations in which language is severed from its experiential context and using them in a construction that reveals another nexus of meaning, he wants to find a way around the Kantian stricture and present, as he puts it, “a state beyond all phenomenality” (O, 34).2 This crucial aspect of the image can thus be linked to our discussion of language and quotation, in which I argued that truth is not the object of an intentional stance. If indeed the dialectical image is that manifestation of truth, then it cannot be an object of contentful vision. This is why Benjamin uses the term “recognition” to characterize our relation to the dialectical image rather than seeing, perceiving, or intuiting: “Ideas are not among the given elements of the world of phenomena . . . The being of ideas simply cannot be conceived of as the object of intuition [Anschauung], even intellectual intuition . . . intuition does not enter into the form of existence which is peculiar to truth, which is devoid of all intention” (O, 35; translation modified). Since perception or seeing involves an intentional stance, not only what is shown cannot be said but also what is

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presented (shown) cannot be seen. Referring in the Arcades to an earlier formulation of the nature of truth in the Trauerspiel book, he characterizes the point of emergence of the dialectical image as “the death of the intentio.” The contrast between recognition and seeing that has an intentional object is powerfully expressed in Benjamin’s figure of the constellation. “Where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions—there the dialectical image appears” (A, 475) The figure of the constellation is taken from the “epistemo-critical preface” to the Origin of German Trauerspiel, where Benjamin writes: “Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars” (O, 34). Tying our discussion of the dialectical image back into this initial context supports the claim that the dialectical image is the presentation of an idea. For, though the term “idea” does not have a systematic place in the Arcades (maybe because that might have mistakenly suggested an understanding of his project as idealistic rather than materialistic), many of the terms surrounding it, in particular the figure of the constellation and the characterization of the task of philosophy as one of presentation, are taken from the Trauerspiel book. To engage in the construction in which the dialectical image flashes up is Benjamin’s later formulation to what he called earlier the task of the presentation of an idea. In trying to interpret the figure of the constellation, the first thing we need to say is that the stars are not brought together by a higher law or unifying principle.3 However, we have something more than the mere unity of the dispersed provided by position in space. The unity of the constellation is in its making recognizable an image. Only in relation to that recognition of relatedness in an image can one assess the role and place of the isolated elements in the constellation.4 The nature of that imagistic configuration would have to be distinguished from the structure of the factual, whose unity is given in the forms of judgment. In that latter case elements fall under a concept, a relation, or a logical form. The configuration of elements in a constellation, as Benjamin emphasizes, does not take that form: “phenomena are not incorporated in ideas. They are not contained in them” (O, 34). The issue is not merely that facts are contingent, whereas what one is looking for is a universal or lawful unity. For even if general laws might hold of phenomena, ideas “do not become functions of the law of phenomena” (O, 34). The idea is neither simply identified in that which is “apprehended,” nor does it comprehend the phenomenal material “in the way in which the concept genus includes the species”

Image

(O, 34). Whereas objects fall under concepts, ideas are recognized as an order of the phenomenal elements. The mode of presentation of ideas should also be distinguished from the reflection of the condition of possibility of objects of experience (i.e., from the presentation of the forms of experience). Rather than a presentation of form, one could speak here of an ordering of contents. When he takes the highest task of philosophy to be the presentation of ideas, Benjamin extends the idea of transcendental philosophy by seeking a totality of existence in the confluence of the concrete contents of experience. Ideas, rather than concepts, rules, laws, or transcendental forms of possibility, are the highest or most significant order that can be recovered in language (O, 34). This is not to say that concepts have no role in the presentation of the idea. One should not confuse the claim that the unity of the presentation is not a conceptual or formal unity with the claim that concepts are absent from such a presentation. Indeed, without the work of the concept, discarding knowledge altogether, one would be at risk of relying on some sense or intuition and of falling upon an unhealthy mysticism, rejected outright by Benjamin. Benjamin criticizes not just the conflation of a methodology of science with the presentation of ideas but also the conflation of the latter strenuous task with various forms of intuitive or mystical grasp. Indeed, if one wants to hold to the sense that ideas are presented in language, then retaining conceptual articulation is crucial. The issue is to position the concept properly in relation to the task of the presentation of the idea. The role of concepts is one of discrimination rather than unification. That is, there is no attempt to bring the phenomena that are necessary to present the idea under a common concept or law; on the contrary, the intention is to make these as articulated as possible. There is a shift from the idea that conceptual work is related to the making of generalizations to the idea that it allows the dissecting of phenomena in such a way as to bring their extreme singularity in detail. Note that in a constellation every star is an extreme. The constellation is drafted between extreme points.5 Concepts, one could then say, allow us to subdivide and articulate phenomena to the extreme, so that between such extremes the constellation can be spanned (see O, 34–35). By raising the question of what it is to “see” a constellation, Benjamin points to a way of avoiding the contradiction inherent in the visualization of the idea. He distinguishes between the vision of a unity of experience and the recognition of the idea in the discontinuous configuration

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of the phenomenal material. Viewed in terms of the temporal, spatial, or causal relations constitutive of the unity of experience, a constellation is not an object. In a similar way the philosophical constellation will bring out material unrelated through objective connections of inference, succession, proximity or causality. We would recognize that diverse material to belong together yet without having in advance an object of experience of which these are aspects, features, or properties. The discontinuity and inherent multiplicity of the constellation (there are, after all, no one-star constellations) should not be confused with the multiplicity of quotations that provide the material for the construction. The constellation is an organization of a limited number of clearly separable elements. It is not a mass of fragments. I take it, then, that Benjamin’s work of construction demands in its first stage the condensation of the quotation material into several “luminous” contents. This might indeed be what he attempted in the Arcades Project by way of the grouping of the convolutes. At the risk of pressing the figure too far, I note that stars appear at night and are invisible in broad daylight. Thus, it might be the case that the gathering that will allow the recognition of a constellation might initially require a synthesis of meaning that has a quality of semblance (this is what the luminosity would express). We have already seen how Benjamin thinks of the beautiful work of art as such a gathering point of meaning, and he indeed refers to works of art by way of an analogy with stars: “The ideas are stars, in contrast to the sun of revelation. They do not appear in the daylight of history; they are at work in history only invisibly. They shine only into the night of nature. Works of art, then, may be defined as the models of a nature that awaits no day, and thus no Judgment Day . . . The redeemed night” (SW I, 389). Works of art, one might say, prefigure the fulfillment of created nature in history (and therefore have in them a dimension of semblance). Though works of art do not play as central a role in the argument of the Arcades as they did in the Trauerspiel book, we will see, in chapter 5 on dream, that a dimension of semblance is essential to the prefiguration that allows the emergence of the dialectical image. The multiplicity of quotation material is certainly characteristic of the starting point of any investigation as concrete as Benjamin’s work on the Paris arcades. However, the point I wish to make here is that there is also a limited multiplicity and discontinuity of the end point. Far from being attributed merely to the unfinished state of the project or to a stylistic predilection for fragmentary writing, that latter final discontinuity

Image

is implied by the task of presenting an idea. It is characteristic of the dialectical image, the utterly stable end point of the investigation. The discontinuous multiplicity involved in the presentation would first constitute an acknowledgment of the finitude of knowledge, of the incapacity of cognition itself to encompass the material as a unified totality. It would avoid the illusory transference of the mode of unity of objects of experience onto the realization of the idea. However, rather than arguing that because we are finite we cannot recognize such totality, the claim is that the striking recognition of that discontinuous multiplicity is the recognition of totality adequate to human finitude. In other words, thinking does not merely fail at producing a complete embodiment of the idea, for a mere failure does not coalesce into an image. Thought must be arrested in the image as though recognizing something striking: “To thinking belongs the movement as well as the arrest of thoughts. Where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions—there the dialectical image appears” (A, 475). The figure of saturation suggests that just as a saturated solution can precipitate and crystallize at the slightest shock, so the dialectical image is a striking recognition of a fragment of the true world, emerging as a constellation saturated with tensions. It is the arrest of the movement of thought that gives rise to the recognition of the higher unity of truth content. Benjamin, one might say, inherits dialectics yet problematizes its movement. His is dialectics at a standstill. Though I leave most of the discussion of the relation between Benjamin and Hegel to the next chapter, I note here that the sublation (Aufhebung), which is central to Hegel’s understanding of dialectical movement, is in Benjamin’s translation replaced by the emergence of the image. The logical negation or antithetical presentation of the space of possibilities that comes with the perspective of the judgment about an object, as well as the movement governed by the determinate dialectical negation, gives place to an image recognized as a multiplicity of extremes in a field of tensions. Think of this as the critical polarization of reality.

§2. Image and Archetype In The Arcades Project Benjamin relates his use of the dialectical image to Goethe’s understanding of truth as the recognition of an Urphenomenon: “The dialectical image is that form of the historical object which satisfies Goethe’s requirement for the object of analysis: to exhibit a genuine synthesis. It is the primal phenomenon of history” (A, 474).

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The primal phenomenon is an archetype, a primal image. Here the use of the term “image” does not refer to a representation of a state of affairs; rather, the image is a schema for the coming together of a whole range of disparate forms. It is the standard for assessing the significance of the range of the phenomena investigated. Understanding the peculiar logic of the image schema requires us to consider once more the paradigmatic case of the work of art and in particular the contrast that Benjamin draws between Goethe and the Romantics in the unpublished epilogue of his study on Romantic criticism. As I have noted, criticism is the key term for the early Romantics’ philosophy of art. The movement of reflection in criticism intensifies the meaning internal to the work. If, in a later Kantian understanding of modernist practice, criticism establishes the limits of the aesthetic medium and its autonomy from other media, in the Romantic appropriation of the idea of criticism, it results in dissolving boundaries and working against the separation of artistic media.6 For the process of reflection is not limited to a specific form but brings to bear on the work diverse artistic forms, thereby problematizing its own identity of form at the same time as its meaning unfolds (this is the core of Romantic irony). That dissolution of boundaries, internal to the intensification of meaning, does not relate the work to its formal conditions of possibilities but rather places it under the idea of Art. Art, so capitalized, is an idea (as opposed to the forms and the conditions of possibility that are characteristic of specific artistic media). The contingent individuality of the work thus dissolves in the process of incorporating it and finding a place for it in the medium of Art. Any notion of concrete, ultimate determination of content would thus be foreign to the Romantic sensibility. However, this is precisely why Benjamin thinks that the Romantic framework cannot serve to recognize substantial truth contents (or truth as a unity of content). Its essence is in the methodical iteration of reflection, which in itself lacks any criteria for determining a contentful end point. In the epilogue to the dissertation Benjamin sets the essential criticizability of art advocated by the Romantics against Goethe’s understanding of the uncriticizability of art. For the latter the task of art is the imitation of a model, the realization in a perceivable form of the ideal of art. The ideal is the singular and contentful embodiment of an idea. It is not manifest in a movement of criticism but rather in the production of works that stand as though complete. Every such presentation of the ideal is final. It stands isolated from other such attempts and cannot be related

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to them by further reflection. The different works do not belong to a common medium, as was the assumption of Romantic criticism. The presentation of the ideal is, to use a term that concerns us in the next chapter, monadic. Discrete separation is also internal to the structure of the presentation itself. A limited number of contents play a role in presenting the ideal but do not form between themselves the unity of an object of experience. This feature of the presentation is captured in Benjamin’s figure of the constellation.7 Reflection is the Romantic term that describes the movement of thought that creates the continuity of the medium of Art, that is, the relationship of a work to other works and, by way of that relatedness, to the idea of Art. However, Benjamin describes the relation of even the most accomplished work to the ideal as a “refraction”: “Just as, in contrast to the idea, the inner structure of the ideal is discontinuous, so, too, the connection of this ideal with art is not given in a medium but is designated by a refraction”(SW I, 179). Refraction suggests a break, an essential discontinuity of the work of art from the archetype it imitates. This discontinuity or presentation at a distance is what I earlier called the “unapproachability” of the truth recognized (in contrast to the infinite approach to the idea characteristic of the regulative conception of criticism of Romanticism).8 The relation of works to the ideal is not constituted by any methodical approach. It is best described as an imitation. “Works cannot attain to those invisible—yet intuitable—archetypes . . . they can resemble them only in a more or less high degree” (SW I, 180; translation modified). To realize how peculiar this use of imitation is, consider that the ideal, by definition, cannot be realized in a perceptible unity of experience. The Urbild, the archetype, is not a conceptual, abstract unity but a concrete and singular contentful totality. Indeed, it has the highest degree of reality, but it is not an element of the phenomenal world. It is invisible but not because it is abstract. Rather, it is invisible because it is singular and concrete to the extreme. Our perception is directed or has an intentional structure. It provides us with meaningful experience because of its horizon of form, its possibilities of advance opened to it. The ideal is a limit in which all has been actualized in which there is no more possibility of advance. For that reason it is invisible (Kant would think of it as the correlate of an intuitive intellect). Thus, resemblance of work and archetype cannot be based on a simple similarity (for instance, an identity of parts or an analogy), for one side is perceptible and the other invisible. Therefore,

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it is only by way of the highest articulation of the perceivable contents, an articulation that leaves no room for ambiguity (as though the movement of meaning is arrested), that the immutable finality or necessity of the invisible ideal can be felt in the perceivable.9 Though completely concrete and singular, the ideal can be presented only by an ordering of the perceivable. That order, furthermore, does not occur naturally but requires construction (for that which develops of itself naturally is part of phenomenal nature, not the manifestation of the idea). The invisibility of the archetype implies that it can be presented only by its constructed imitations (Benjamin calls them prototypes) and recognized by way of them but not identified with them. The construction is nevertheless not artificial, if by that we would mean that there is something arbitrary about it. The prototypes are human constructions (for instance, works of art), but what they make manifest inheres in nature. In that sense Goethe advocates a form of constructive naturalism. The invisible archetype in nature can be recognized only by way of its constructed “imitation.” Specifically, a work of art is understood as a construction necessary to make manifest the truth of nature. Truth becomes intuitable in art but not because art represents it: “the true, intuitable, ur-phenomenal nature would become visible after the fashion of a likeness, not in the nature of the world but only in art, whereas in the nature of the world it would indeed be present but hidden (that is, overshadowed by what appears) (SW I, 181).”10 The archetype is the standard or measure of the realization of the idea in contingent contents. Prototypes make it recognizable. Phenomena are not measured by being compared, placed against the standard. Rather, they come to acquire value by partaking in its presentation. While not itself constructed (but rather being the highest reality), the archetype is recognized in the constructions out of the phenomenal material.

§3. A Commentary on the Real If we relate this brief presentation of Goethe’s doctrine of truth to our concern with Benjamin’s Arcades Project, we can better appreciate the reason he thinks of his own work as having the structure of a commentary. At first this characterization appears surprising, for the philological work on a text that produces a commentary characteristically involves the attention to detail, even a devotion, to the particularities of the subject matter. Even more, the commentary begins with a presupposition

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concerning the value of the work and with an assumption that its meaning is complete, set. It is written about what is to serve as an uncriticizable model. A commentary would be appropriate to scriptures or to classical works: “A Commentary, as we know, is different from an assessment. An assessment evaluates its subject, sorting out light from obscurity. The commentary takes for granted the classical status of the work under discussion and, thus, in a sense, begins with prejudgment. It also differs from the assessment in that it concerns itself only with the beauty and positive content of the text” (SW IV, 215). Benjamin thus adopts “a form that is both archaic and authoritarian,” a form of writing on authoritative classical works to structure his writing on the not-so-distant past, in which modern reality takes shape.11 That in itself might suffice to concur with Adorno’s assessment that Benjamin’s descriptive and seemingly affirmative stance toward the material of the Arcades risks losing any chance of realizing the aspiration to social criticism. Moreover, Benjamin himself at times contrasts criticism and commentary in such a way as to form a clear hierarchy between the two. At the beginning of his essay titled “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” he writes: “Critique seeks the truth content of a work of art; commentary, its material content” (SW I, 297). Yet, as the rejection of the Romantic model suggests, everything hinges on the proper understanding of what criticism comes to. While Benjamin describes his engagement with Goethe’s novel as critique, he emphasizes that it cannot be easily separated from commentary, for “the more significant the work, the more inconspicuously and intimately its truth content is bound up with its material content.” With time the material content comes to the fore, whereas the truth content remains hidden; “therefore the interpretation of what is striking and curious—that is, the material content—becomes a prerequisite for any later critic” (SW I, 298). It is even possible to argue more strongly that not only is commentary’s involvement with the details of the material content a prerequisite of critique. If properly understood, it also comes to acquire the function of criticism: “Commentary represents the dialectical overcoming of the antinomies in criticism. Only at this stage is the work fully criticisable—and uncriticisable at the same time . . . only at this stage do quotation and gloss become part of the formal characteristic of criticism” (SW II, 410). For what is implied by considering The Arcades Project as a commentary? Benjamin is not commenting on historical reality as it appears to us. Rather, by attending to all that is striking, all that comes to the fore

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precisely as the quotation material is dissociated from its original world, Benjamin constructs a commentary on the archetype or standard underlying historical phenomena. The construction out of quotations taken out of their world makes recognizable the standard that underlies any judgment on historical experience. The construct is not to be identified with what is artificial. The necessity of construction is to present whatever in nature is not visible independently. It can be contrasted with naturalism or realism that assumes the idea of a correspondence with a preexisting reality. Vulgar historical naturalism assumes a simplistic idea of copying, the similarity between parts of representations and parts of reality. In contrast, Benjamin’s task is “. . . to assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event. And, therefore to break with vulgar historical naturalism” (A, 461). Here lies the naturalistic side of Benjamin’s project, which justifies his use of commentary. However, precisely because the commentary is not a description of a given model or standard and because it is a construction that makes the standard recognizable at all, it is necessary to also acknowledge the critical edge of commentary: by way of the construction the standard is recognized at the same time as the phenomena are criticized. There is no activity of criticism but, as Benjamin puts it a “critical moment”: “. . . the image that is read . . . bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded” (A, 463). The archetype recognized casts a destructive verdict on reality as it appears to us. Its very recognition demands the destruction of the homogeneity of that world of experience, out of which the material for the construction is drawn.12 At the same time, phenomena, by partaking in the construction of the standard and making it recognizable, are “saved” or even, Benjamin says, “redeemed.” They receive their place in the affirmation of a different order. The constructive and the destructive come together in the presentation of the standard. “ ‘Construction’ presupposes ‘destruction’ ” (A, 470).13 If at first I emphasized the replacement of the Romantic model of criticism by Goethe’s understanding of truth as archetype, we realize that naturalism is not incompatible with criticism. Benjamin recovers a form of criticism at the heart of Goethe’s vision of the descriptive task of imitation of the uncriticizable ideal. What might have been hidden in Goethe’s focus on the presentation of the Ur-phenomenon of nature by way of

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natural phenomena becomes evident in Benjamin’s translation of this presentation into history: conceiving of the presentation of truth descriptively by way of the register of the image does not forego critical violence. It makes it all the more decisive. One can thus see Benjamin as attempting to overcome dialectically the opposition between Goethe and the Romantics, between the naturalistic classicism of the former and the critical fervor of the latter.

§4. Image and Allegory The translation of Goethe’s position from nature to history raises numerous questions, especially as one contrasts Goethe’s classical sensibility not with Romanticism but with the Baroque. In Benjamin’s book on the German Trauerspiel, Goethe’s view is aligned with what Benjamin calls the aesthetics of the symbol. The plastic symbol is the experienced presence of the idea in phenomenal reality. It is the momentary revelation of the transcendent in the concrete materiality of this world. The symbolic presentation would indeed seem to fit well Goethe’s attempt to conceive of the recognition of the archetype in phenomenal reality. However, in that study, Benjamin precisely contrasts the symbolic and the allegorical. He strives to correct the perception of the allegorical as a mere illustration of concepts, a distortion brought about by the traditional identification of beauty with the symbolic. Indeed, even if the symbol might be an adequate presentation of the archetype of nature, it is undoubtedly allegory in which something essential to the baroque vision of history is expressed. Should we not expect, then, Benjamin’s own account of historical reality to take a form that reflects the conditions of allegory rather than those of the symbol? Or is there a way to conceive of the antithesis of symbol and allegory as itself something to be overcome? With the reevaluation of allegory Benjamin attempts to transform the very categories of aesthetics, as well as the idea of art and its relation to truth. The distinction between symbol and allegory marks the meeting point of concerns of aesthetics history, theology, and language. The symbol is the embodiment of the transcendent. It is an essentially paradoxical moment of unity of transcendent truth and material embodiment. This manifestation is to be distinguished from the way in which essence is said to have an appearance. That is, what is at issue is not that essence has a certain manifestation in appearance but that the presentation of appearances can allow us to recognize the fullness of truth. The recognition

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of the symbol involves a moment of intuition of the transcendent. It is the phenomenal made to be absolutely expressive. Its paradigm is the human body insofar as it is made to express the inner moral disposition.14 For those who grant primacy to symbolic expression, allegory is liable to appear as a mere illustration of concepts, “a conventional relationship between an illustrative image and its abstract meaning” (O, 162). Allegory appears to be mere image writing: the concept made concrete by being correlated with a schematic image. From this perspective, allegory is conceived as rigid and, if at all, crudely expressive. “Never has poetry been less winged” (O, 200). Yet, Benjamin’s account is aimed at showing that “Allegory . . . is not a playful illustrative technique, but a form of expression, just as speech is expression, and, indeed, just as writing is” (O, 162). That is, for Benjamin the foremost question is how to understand the unique capacity of expression of allegorical material: “. . . allegory . . . is not convention of expression, but expression of convention” (O, 175). In particular the problem is how, despite the arbitrariness and conventionality inherent in allegory, it can partake in a dialectic of the revelation of truth. A more complete understanding of the dialectic of allegory must await a discussion of its basis in a vision of history and its relation to nature. However, at this stage, we can suggest that the allegorical knowledge is not strictly opposed to the Goethean understanding of truth, to the revelation of ur-phenomenal nature. It is possible to conceive of the place of allegory in the presentation of truth first, as it were, negatively, that is, insofar as it serves to destroy the semblance of unity in symbolic expression. It shows the supposed experience of the living totality to be fraught with ambiguity. By submitting the object to an allegorical treatment, that problematic appearance of the beautiful is extinguished. To clarify, consider how Benjamin contrasts the allegorical perspective with the work of criticism characteristic of Romanticism. If one thinks of Romantic criticism as guaranteeing the afterlife of the work of art by way of the intensification or enlivening of its meaning, allegorical criticism—in that aspect like commentary—turns its attention to all that appears peculiar in the work as it is dissociated from its living element. Rather than enlivening, erosion and preservation of the work as a ruin, then, are the aims of the allegorist. Knowledge of the significance of the failed and incomplete emerge in the place of beauty: “What has survived is the extraordinary detail of the allegorical references: an object of knowledge which has settled in the consciously constructed ruins. Criticism means

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the mortification of the works” (O, 182). The contrast to the practice of Romantic criticism is very clear: “Mortification of the works: not then—as the romantics have it—awakening of consciousness in living works, but the settlement of knowledge in dead ones. Beauty, which endures, is an object of knowledge”(O, 182). Beauty appears from the point of view of allegory as semblance, as a false totality. Its enlivening by criticism sustains such semblance. Draining it from such liveliness, that is, making it the locus of allegorical knowledge, is thus essential to the revelation of what truth there is to it. The allegorical moment must be understood in terms of the fundamental scheme of the transition from beauty to Truth: “The object of philosophical criticism is to show that the function of artistic form is as follows: to make historical content into truth content makes the decrease in effectiveness, whereby the attraction of earlier charms diminishes decade by decade, into the basis for a rebirth, in which all ephemeral beauty is completely stripped off, and the work stands as a ruin” (O, 182). My account of the destructive force that is involved in the form of the commentary would be the first step in showing how allegory would function as a dimension of the recognition of a dialectical image. Indeed, allegorical contemplation precisely brings out the material content in all its peculiarity. It extinguishes the false aliveness of beauty and prepares it to take part in the presentation of truth contents. Conversely, the allegorical does not constitute in itself the end of the matter. Its destructive force is compatible with the presentation of a more original life. It will be necessary to think through the self-overcoming of the allegorical vision itself. The data of allegorical contemplation as they stand “are not capable of being incorporated in philosophical constellations” (O, 231). It is indeed allegory itself that contains the resources for such overcoming. The dialectical movement of this form of expression opens up the possibility of a redeeming moment at the heart of the allegorical vision of the destruction in history.

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REMARK Continuity and Discontinuities a. The Primal Phenomenon in Goethe Benjamin’s avoidance of abstract theorizing can be seen to follow Goethe’s dictum: “[Not to] seek anything behind phenomena, for they themselves are the theory.” For Benjamin, as for Goethe, the issue is how to present phenomena so that their inner articulation is manifest in and as experience. The insistence on this matter is crucial so as to properly understand the role played by the numerous experiments in Goethe’s scientific theories. For they are not such as to corroborate hypotheses concerning a nonphenomenal structure of matter, chemical composition, physiology, and so on. Rather than understanding these often simple experiments as a form of popular, or primitive, science, one should think of them as experimental interpolations. They provide intermediate cases and thus constitute an order out of what is found dispersed in experience. The meaningful articulation of phenomena is recognized by presenting them in a continuum with the mediation of a series of simple cases. This ordering provides insight into the continuity of the experienced. It is knowledge of experience that can itself be experienced. Goethe calls such experience of a higher order a “pure phenomenon.” “The pure phenomenon,” Goethe writes, “. . . can never be isolated but appears in a continuous sequence of events.”15 In the Contributions to Optics he thinks of the continuity created by his contiguous experiments as the formation of a “single piece of empirical evidence explored in its most manifold variation.” He further takes as a figure for the relation of the multiple to its unity “the general formula . . . that overarches an array of individual arithmetic sums.”16 However, this figure of succession in a series does not reflect clearly enough the multiplicity of domains that must be brought together to achieve the perspicuous presentation of one and the same phenomenon.17 The life of nature is identified not only in teleological unities such as animals and plants. Indeed, investigating colors as living nature makes this evident as they occur in different orders or domains of experience. By gathering color phenomena, the unity or life of nature as an idea can be presented as though nature is refracted in the irreducibly different manifestations of color and thereby shown as a totality. Thus, in the pref-

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ace to the Theory of Colors Goethe writes: “Through [colors] nature in its entirety seeks to manifest itself, in this case to the sense of sight, to the eye.”18 Such phenomena that can, through their perspicuous presentation, give us a sense of nature as a whole are the primal phenomena. In other words, the multiplicity in the presentation of color phenomena is not merely a contingent matter but is characteristic of the logic of the archetype. Following the Kantian turn in philosophy, what is at issue in a primal phenomenon is the possibility of presenting an idea with the material of experience. The idea cannot be manifest as an experienced synthetic whole. It is for that reason that one has to think of its presentation by way of the failure to produce an intuition corresponding to it, though not by way of an absolute, sublime failure. Rather, the idea is presented by a recognition of limits or discontinuities in the internal unity of phenomena themselves. “If I find comfort in the primary phenomenon,” Goethe writes, “then that is only out of resignation. It makes, however, a big difference, whether I am resigned at the limits of humanity or within the restrictions of my narrow-minded individuality.”19 Limits are neither seen nor shown but recognized or acknowledged.20 Goethe does use the notion of “intuitive judgment” (anschauliche Urteilskraft). Nonetheless, the fact that he refers his understanding of intuition to section 77 of the Critique of Judgment, in which Kant discusses the intellectus archetypus, means that such intuition does not have the intentional structure of perception. The intuited archetype is an “image,” but not one to be identified with the perception of any particular. It is concrete reality recognized as a totality.21 b. Continuous Reflection in the Medium of Art So as to introduce the transformation of the idea of judgment in Romantic criticism, consider first Kant’s distinction between the determinant and the reflective judgment: “Judgment in general is the faculty of thinking the particular as contained in the universal. If the universal (the rule, principle, or law,) is given, then the judgment which subsumes the particular under it is determinant. . . . If, however, only the particular is given and the universal has to be found for it, then the judgment is simply reflective” (Ak. 5, 179). In other words, judgment leads not just from concept to object but also from object to concept. The difference between the determinant judgment, in which the object is subsumed under the given concept, and the reflective judgment

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is suggested by the description of the latter case as one of finding a concept for the object. “Finding” is not a matter of merely providing any concept we might come up with that in fact applies to the object. The very adequacy of the reflective judgment would depend on finding what feels like appropriate terms for that given thing rather than imposing a concept on it based on our general knowledge of that kind of thing (thus ultimately relying on a prior determinant judgment). In the determinant judgment there is no question of the affinity of our judgment to the object. In a reflective judgment, to put it somewhat loosely, what one says must be true of the object so as to be true to it. This is why the idea of the reflective can be used to characterize a mode of being responsive to what expresses itself in the object.22 With Romanticism, the reflective judgment is identified more closely with the criticism of the work of art. Critical judgment or reflection is the movement in which the work comes into its own. The work of art is in no way judged from the outside on independent principles but is rather realized by critical attentiveness. In a formulation reminiscent of the positioning of the language of man in relation to the expression of essences and the critique of the representational conception of language Benjamin writes: “The subject of reflection is, at bottom, the artistic entity itself, and the experiment consists not in any reflecting on an entity, which could not essentially alter it as Romantic criticism intends, but in the unfolding of reflection—that is, for the Romantics, the unfolding of spirit in an entity” (SW I, 151). Reflection is never assertion about an entity but rather is the unfolding of its tendency to express its spiritual content. Similarly, criticism is in no way developed primarily so as to explain the work of art to others or to educate them. It is not communicative in the problematic “bourgeois” sense Benjamin attributes to that notion. It is what brings a work into its own disregarding any communication from (an author) to (a public) by means (of a critic): “. . . the task of criticism is the consummation of the work. Schlegel utterly rejects an informational or pedagogic function” (SW I, 177). Criticism of art, moreover, is never a judgement to the effect that a work is simply good or bad. The judgment does not eventuate in a verdict. One might also say that the very possibility of making sense or criticizing is good; it is the form of the aesthetic judgment. The aesthetic judgement has no negative. Its positivity or its value is in the very bring-

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ing into meaning of experience. This is why it can approach the condition of naming, which, as Benjamin emphasizes, has no negative: “In any case, this self-judgement in reflection is only improperly called a judgment. For in it a necessary moment of all judgment, the negative, is completely curtailed . . . [It is] the complete positivity of this criticism, in which the Romantic concept of criticism is radically distinguished from the modern concept, which sees criticism as a negative court of judgment” (SW I, 152). A work’s criticizability amounts to the affirmation of its value. Criticism presents the work in the medium of its knowability. At stake in the idea of the self-expression of essence now linked to criticism is precisely the ability to think of the manifestation of essence as a linguistic medium in which language expresses itself infinitely: “[The] intensification of consciousness in criticism is in principle infinite; criticism is therefore the medium in which the restriction of the individual work refers methodically to the infinitude of art and finally is transformed into that infinitude. For it is self-evident that art, as medium of reflection, is infinite” (SW I, 152). The proper understanding of this infinity has to do with the understanding of the movement inherent in criticism. The infinity of reflection is not the vertical infinity of thinking about thinking, which becomes more and more abstract, but rather a horizontal infinity of connectedness. The infinitization of the work is, one might say, making the work part of an infinitely related totality. This connectedness places the work in the horizon of the idea of Art. Thus, reflection does not lead back from work to form (as it does in Kant’s understanding), nor does it lead to genre, medium, or style. Instead, by the intensification of relationship it dissolves all that is particular to that work and has it partake in Art as such. This is the place to note that Benjamin does not dwell at any length on the form of the fragment, so typical of the Romantics’ literary output. Indeed, the discontinuity inherent in writing fragments is only a moment that opens up the possibility of a movement of reflection that forms relationships between fragments. Fragments are at the service of the intensification of relatedness, thus ultimately viewed in terms of the continuous medium of reflection. The fragmentary has an entirely different standing in Benjamin’s overcoming of the antithesis between Goethe and the Romantics in the notion of the expressionless.

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c. The Dialectical Image and the Expressionless Benjamin characterizes a moment of arrest internal to the appearance of meaning in the dialectical image. The dialectical image is “dialectics at a standstill.” The understanding of this aspect of the image (which is in part what justifies calling it an image at all rather than a discursive unity) can be clarified by considering Benjamin’s elaboration of what he calls the “expressionless” (das Ausdruckslose) in the essay titled “Goethe’s Elective Affinities.” The expressionless is the moment of the emergence of truth content from the semblance inherent in the beautiful. I start by quoting this complex passage in full: What arrests this semblance, spellbinds the movement, and interrupts the harmony is the expressionless. This life grounds the mystery; this petrification grounds the content in the work. Just as interruption by the commanding words is able to bring out the truth from the evasions of a woman precisely at the point where it interrupts, the expressionless compels the trembling harmony to stop and through its objection [Einspruch] immortalizes its quivering. In this immortalization the beautiful must vindicate itself, but now it appears to be interrupted precisely in the process of its vindications, and thus it has the eternity of its content precisely by the grace of that objection. The expressionless is the critical violence which, while unable to separate semblance from essence in art, prevents them from mingling. It possesses this violence as a moral dictum. In the expressionless, the sublime violence of the true appears as that which determines the language of the real world according to the laws of the moral world. For it shatters whatever still survives of the legacy of chaos in all beautiful semblance: the false, errant totality—the absolute totality. Only the expressionless completes the work by shattering it into a thing of shards, into a fragment of the true world, into the torso of a symbol. (SW I, 340)

As I have argued earlier, the element of life in beauty is also what makes for its inherent ambiguity. It is that ambiguity that allows the rich movement of meaning characteristic of the liveliness of the beautiful. This can be compared to and to some extent contrasted with Kant’s characterization of the experience of beauty in terms of a free play or harmony of the faculties. For play is both what opens the possibilities of meaning and the richness of imagining, thus the sense of the presence of the idea at work in the beautiful; however, it is at the same time what stands in the way of the decisive presentation of truth or the truthful presentation.

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The presence of the idea in the beautiful is understood in terms of the sense or potential of the endlessness of the movement of meaning. This is why Benjamin thinks of such life as grounding the mystery of the work. Yet, precisely because of this harmonious movement, it is difficult to recognize in it a stable and utterly definite content, a truth content. The question Benjamin raises, as he conceives of the problem of truth as a problem of content, is, then, how content that is utterly determinate can ever emerge from the deferral and ambiguity essential to the form of the work of art.23 (Note Benjamin’s use of terms such as “trembling” or “quivering” in relation to the life of the beautiful. These are figures for that instability inherent in the meaning that arises out of beauty.)24 This makes clear, then, what Benjamin finds problematic in Romantic criticism. The movement of meaning that the intensification of reflection produces has no capacity of itself to come to an end. The end can therefore be characterized only by an arrest of that movement. That arrest is also what transports from the beautiful to the true.25 The moment of arrest “completes” without reaching an end. Arrest produces a discontinuous presentation of truth. That mode of completion presents us with a fragment, but it is a fragment of the true world, a mode of presentation of truth itself. If the ideal of the human figure is sometimes taken to be the utmost expression of the good in the beautiful (the symbol that expresses moral nature in material nature), then the moment of arrest, which Benjamin calls “the expressionless,” turns the work into “the torso of a symbol.” Significantly, in the Arcades, as he formulates the arrest of thought, which constitutes a constellation, he uses the term “caesura”: “Where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions— there the dialectical image appears. It is the caesura in the movement of thought” (A, 475). Thinking presents an image when the movement of thought is arrested. It is a break in the movement that allows the presentation of truth. The relation between presentation and arrest or caesura is something that Benjamin derives from Hölderlin’s discussion of tragedy, from which he quotes in the essay titled “Goethe’s Elective Affinities”: As a category of language and art . . . the expressionless can be no more rigorously defined than through a passage in Hölderlin’s Anmerkungen zum Ödipus [Annotations to Oedipus], whose fundamental significance for the theory of art in general, beyond serving as the basis for a theory of tragedy, seems not yet to have been recognized. The passage reads: “For

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Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait the tragic transport is actually empty, and the least restrained.—Thereby, in the rhythmic sequence of the representations wherein the transport presents itself, there becomes necessary what in poetic meter is called caesura, the pure word, the counter-rhythmic rupture—namely, in order to meet the onrushing of representations at its highest point, in such a manner that not the change of representation but the representation itself very soon appears.” The Occidental Junoian sobriety . . . is only another name for that caesura, in which, along with harmony, every expression simultaneously comes to a standstill in order to give free reign to an expressionless power inside all artistic media. (SW I, 341)

This condensed passage will be more fully understandable against the background of our discussion of tragedy in chapter 5, but an initial clarification of it can be given here: Tragedy arises from the entanglement of the individual in the ambiguity characteristic of the field of life. Such ambiguity is manifest in the tragic dialogue as an intensification of irony in the language of the tragic hero. The arrest of the ambiguity of meaning is the recognition of paradox in the existence of the hero. It is not the emergence of a specific content but the coming to a standstill of the ambiguity that plagued the hero’s representation of the situation. It is at the same time a recognition that something played itself out in the representation. Thus, the tragic transport opens up the recognition of a higher necessity in the plane of representation itself.26 Note how Hölderlin writes that it is “not the change of representation but the representation itself [that] very soon appears” Similarly one would say that arrest in which the dialectical image emerges is an ascent or transport to a recognition of truth in the order of language itself.27 This transport from a linguistic context to the plane of language as such, is also of decisive importance, as we have seen, in Benjamin’s account of translation. Translation’s ultimate concern is with the pure language, rather than with the reproduction of specific linguistic unities. By its knowledge of the ways of meaning translation arrests the movement of meaning characteristic of the life of the original and effects the transport to the plane of language as such. By way of its precise knowledge, translation fragments any original living unities of meaning and gives free reign to the expressionless “power inside all artistic media.” This expressionless power is the Pure Word, the manifestation of created life. What needs to be stressed in conclusion is that the arrest that makes manifest the pure power in language as such is achieved in and through

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the most meticulous work, be it translation, construction out of quotations, allegorical knowledge, or commentary. The pure power is itself contentless or expressionless, but its manifestation is identical to the utmost articulation of meaning. Failure to rigorously hold to this inner connection of revelation and articulation in language would risk mystification.

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§1. Origin The archetype whose preeminently spatial figure is the constellation has a temporal counterpart in the notion of “origin.” “Philosophical history” is “the science of origin” (O, 47). That notion of origin is explicitly traced back in the Arcades to Goethe’s understanding of truth as the recognition of an Ur-phenomenon: “. . . my concept of origin in the Trauerspiel book is a rigorous and decisive transposition of [the] basic Goethean concept [of truth] from the domain of nature to that of history. Origin—it is, in effect, the concept of Ur-phenomenon extracted from the pagan context of nature and brought into the Jewish contexts of history. Now in my work on the arcades I am equally concerned with fathoming an origin” (A, 462). Interpreting Benjamin’s notion of origin by considering its central figure will be a first step to understanding how time is brought into the picture: “Origin [Ursprung], although an entirely historical category, has, nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis [Entstehung]. The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being but rather describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and passing away [Vergehen]. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis” (O, 45). Benjamin takes up the characteristic metaphors for time, that of the river or of the flow of time, and transforms them to express his understanding of the temporality of truth.1 Origin should not be confused with genesis. It is not the source or moment at which a being came into existence. Nor is it identified by considering a stretch of time in which the phenomenon in question develops to its fullest or most mature form. It does not consist in recounting the process of becoming and passing 60

Time

away by relying on the given temporal succession. An origin will emerge as a new ordering in which the multiplicity of materials come to stand in decisive contrast with the direction one attributes to the flow of time. The whirlpool is a disturbance in the flow, a circular order that goes against the linear appearance of time. The revelation of origin, then, is not a reconstruction of the life span of the phenomenon. It is, moreover, a stable configuration that occurs downstream at a distance not only from the source but also from the various transformations of the phenomenon. The possibility of revealing another order in the material assumes the disintegration of the life context it belonged to. It assumes that the process of growth and decline in time has already been completed. Origin, Benjamin writes, is “an entirely historical category.” The significance of that statement will become apparent as we work toward the understanding that historical time itself is recognized in the construction of an origin. However, we can start by pointing out that in order for origin to be a historical category it must be distinguished from transcendental or logical categories. Benjamin is trying to steer a course between idealism, with its overly powerful idea of the system, and the threat of the collapse of his investigation of the concrete into a mere collection of facts.2 An origin is gathered from the time-bound contingent material, but its ordering cannot be identified by means of empirical principles. To distinguish origin from overly systematic idealism, the investigation must involve a moment of discovery. To distinguish it from the merely empirical, discovery is further characterized as recognition. For recognition may occur when that which has already happened, that which is already fact, suddenly appears in the construction as a singularly striking or uniquely significant unity. Origin, in other words, is to be conceived as the recognition of the idea in a singular and passing ordering of the contingent. The passing nature of origin is to be understood in terms of the logic of presentation of an idea. That is, the idea cannot be recognized as a self-subsisting being. (A self-standing being enduring in time is an element of experience, not the embodiment of an idea.) Although the idea is presented as something preexisting and timeless, it must be realized again and again in the construction from the time-bound phenomenal material. “[S]ingularity and repetition [are] conditioned by one another in all essentials” (O, 46). The ordering that presents the idea is thus itself something passing. If it is not too paradoxical to say, it is a passing moment of eternity: “In the dialectical image,” Benjamin writes, “what has been within a particular epoch is

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always simultaneously ‘what has been from time immemorial.’ As such, however, it is manifest, on each occasion, only to a specific epoch” (A, 464). I assume that this duality of becoming and passing away, which is characteristic of the presentation of the idea (not to be confused with the growth and decline of the phenomenon in question), is what Benjamin is expressing by the figure of the whirlpool, which pulls everything down into its center. The forceful movement that swallows the material is also that in which it becomes an order. The order that constitutes an origin emerges precisely as the material is on the verge of disappearing. This feature of origin contrasts with accounts of history as a cumulative and continuous development (including Hegel’s ascending spiral). However, even more significantly, the recognition of the passing order is correlative with the manifestation of a directed force. In the circular “arrangement” given to the material, each point has what one could call its polar opposite, and the two are held together by the rotation as a field of force in which the elements are balanced by a centrifugal movement. One could think therefore of the whirlpool as a gathering of the force inherent in the flow in such a way as to make it visible. It is as though when one goes with the flow such force cannot become manifest in a stable form. Thus, a power that is present, though invisible as one relates to events successively, becomes manifest in the phenomenal world by way of the constitution of another order out of phenomenal material. Far from being merely a matter of contemplation, the recognition of the image is at the same time the manifestation of a force in history (or of history as a force): “[Truth] is the power which determines the essence of . . . empirical reality” (O, 36). That force is effective in the present, that is, for the moment in which the image is recognized. Recognition makes the discovery of the dialectical image essentially a matter of how the present is involved with its past. In other words, an essential relation is formed between the image of the past recognized and the forceful overturning of the present.

§2. Realization In attempting to characterize the relation formed between past and present, which comes to light in recognition, it is somewhat pointless to state that it is in the present that one achieves knowledge about the past. Not much more illuminating would be the claim that the understanding of the past is achieved by means of present discoveries of facts previously

Time

unknown. Moreover, it would not be strong enough to claim that only in the present do we have a proper perspective on the past. The issue is not one of acquiring better knowledge or of having the proper “distance” but ultimately one of the temporality internal to the manifestation of truth: “truth . . . is bound to a nucleus of time lying hidden within the knower and the known alike” (A, 463). The key to such temporality is the idea of the realization of meaning. I single out the sphere of meaning so as to distinguish this time internal to it both from the objective, physically measurable, time and from the subjective structure of the experience of time. This temporality of realization must be clearly distinguished from ways of making the image of the past depend on the point of view of the present, in particular such that would imply relativism or perspectivism. Clarifying this structure of realization would also allow us to further distinguish the realism of The Arcades Project from the problematic realism that aims to provide knowledge of the past, of things “as they really were.” The relation of present and past constituted in the historical investigation must be formulated ontologically, so that knowledge is at the same time a realization of its object. One might say that Benjamin brings together the two senses of “realizing”—realizing as making something real or actual on the one hand and recognizing or seeing something clearly on the other. This is strikingly put by emphasizing how knowledge of a historical object is not “knowledge about” it but actually part of the being of the object itself: “Historical ‘understanding’ is to be grasped, in principle, as an afterlife of that which is understood” (A, 406). Benjamin’s formulations of the essence of historical truth constantly maintain a balance between the pole of the past and that of the present: “It is said that the dialectical method consists in doing justice each time to the concrete historical situation of its object. But that is not enough. For it is just as much a matter of doing justice to the concrete historical situation of the interest taken in the object. And this situation is always so constituted that the interest is preformed in that object and, above all, feels this object concretized in itself and upraised from its former being into the higher concretion of now-being” (A, 391). What Benjamin calls “now-being” is the present insofar as it realizes its past. Thus, it is a present singled out by a temporality that binds its meaning to the afterlife of the past, which it can recognize as its own. The past is not to be viewed as an object, already complete in its determinations and unchangeable. What belongs to the past is not set and closed but can become fully real, actualized in the present: “In regard to

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such a perception, one could speak of the increasing concentration (integration) of reality such that everything past (in its time) can acquire a higher grade of actuality than it has in the moment of its existing” (A, 392). The idea of how “things really were” is as problematic as the Kantian idea of the thing in itself (and not for unrelated reasons). The Kantian echo is most obvious when Benjamin appropriates the famous figure of the Copernican revolution from the introduction of the Critique of Pure Reason: “The Copernican revolution in historical perception is as follows. Formerly it was thought that a fixed point had been found in ‘what has been,’ and one saw the present engaged in tentatively concentrating the forces of knowledge on this ground. Now this relation is to be overturned . . . The facts become something that just now first happened to us, first struck us; to establish them is the affair of memory” (A, 389). Facts are facts, one would be inclined to say, and all changes in what has long occurred are only changes in our attitude to that past. However, it is precisely this seemingly obvious division of objective and subjective that Benjamin’s analysis precludes. In his temporal transposition of Kant’s Copernican reversal ( just as in the original), it is the constitution of the historical object, that is, its reality, that is at stake. Kant does not claim that independently existing objects are affected by our faculties as they become part of experience. He argues that an object of experience is first constituted through that involvement of the human subject. Similarly for Benjamin, history is not merely colored by the perspective of the present; rather, history achieves full reality and the historical object is actualized by way of the involvement of the present. For Kant the Copernican revolution, the involvement of our faculties in the constitution of the object, is to show how the conditions of possibility of experience are those of knowledge of objects of experience. Benjamin transforms the understanding of that Kantian formula insofar as he aims to address the possibility of the presentation of an idea with concrete phenomenal material of experience. In the Kantian system, every such attempt would be dialectical. The idea of reason can be regulative only in relation to our knowledge of experience. It orients our advance but is itself unattainable in experience. However, this is precisely why it is important to remember that realization is not knowledge but recognition. The dialectical image does not present the conditions of possibility of an empirical object of knowledge: “. . . the determining force of historical time cannot be fully grasped by, or wholly concentrated in, any empirical process. Rather, a process that is perfect in historical terms is

Time

quite indeterminate empirically; it is in fact an idea” (SW I, 55). Benjamin would agree with Kant that temporal succession that is the schema of causality characteristic of objects of experience, cannot constitute the temporality of the idea: “. . . no state of affairs having causal significance is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years” (SW IV, 397). A different temporality must be characteristic of the revelation of the idea, a noncausal, nonchronological, nonsuccessive, and nonhomogeneous gathering of time by the present. Moreover, as will become clear, this realization of meaning in the afterlife of a phenomenon should be distinguished from a simple teleological development. The realization of meaning is in no way a gradual process involving a progressive time line from past to present, as though we have a simple maturing of meaning or unfolding of a potential. It is not the work of hidden forces or a dynamism working by itself in history. Such systems of continuous development assume the time in which they occur. Time would be the medium in which historical forces unfold. However, in Benjamin’s rendering of dialectics, in the dialectical image, time is itself revealed in the construction as its precious nucleus. This would indeed be the reflection of the understanding that the presentation of the idea is independent of the form of time. The idea is presented by phenomenal material that is not ordered in time or by time. It is rather the presentation or construction out of the material that gathers time in itself. We will approach that difficult matter gradually.

§3. Monadological Construction In the last chapter I follow the analogy Benjamin draws between Goethe’s account of the archetype in nature and his own notion of the dialectical image. Benjamin’s attempt to recover the Ur-phenomenon for history is evident in the following reference to Goethe’s primal plant: “I pursue the origin of the forms and mutations of the Paris arcades from their beginning to their decline, and I locate this origin in the economic facts. Seen from the standpoint of causality, however (and that means considered as causes), these facts would not be primal phenomena; they become such only insofar as in their own development—“unfolding” might be a better term—they give rise to the whole series of the arcade’s concrete historical forms, just as the leaf unfolds from itself all the riches of the empirical world of plants” (A, 462). For Goethe the recognition of an archetype of

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natural life in experience depends essentially on ordering perspicuously the changes or transformations that give expression to the full range of the primal phenomenon. The transformations that reveal the archetype are not determined by the natural growth of the individual organism but rather fall under the broader concept of metamorphosis. Similarly, Benjamin will distinguish the apparent growth and decline of the phenomenon of the arcades from what he calls the unfolding of its range of possibilities, through which is revealed their significance for the present. Rather than appealing to the morphological notion of metamorphosis, Benjamin will consider the transformations that the historical phenomenon undergoes insofar as it is considered in view of its realization in the present. The space of these transformations is the afterlife of the historical phenomenon in question: “Historical understanding is to be grasped in principle, as an afterlife of that which is understood” (A, 460). The recognition of the truth of a historical phenomenon depends, then, not just on the consideration of the time of its happening but also on a complex transformation internal to the realization of its meaning, which delimits its inner life. Benjamin’s account of translation, in which his understanding of the afterlife of works is first elaborated, should stand at the background of the clarification of his conception of time. In particular I recall the following feature of translation: In the afterlife provided for the literary work by translation, what was an intentional unity of meaning in the original makes recognizable in the translation fragments of the pure language. Drawing the analogy to the account of history, we should argue, then, that the image of the past for the present will not involve the reconstruction of a unified context of life for the particular phenomenon investigated (say, the Paris arcades) but rather, by way of its presentation, that it will provide the present with an abbreviated image of history as a totality. To explore this possibility, consider Benjamin’s understanding that the complete presentation of a historical phenomenon involves what he calls its fore- and after-history. Fore-history and after-history (notions initially developed in the preface to his Trauerspiel book) do not refer merely to what led to and what followed a certain circumscribed historical occurrence. They are not the broader context necessary for a proper description of a historical phenomenon. Phenomena count as fore- and afterhistory primarily because they take part in the polarization of the object under consideration. We have encountered the idea of polarization in the

Time

figure of the constellation constituted as a field of tensions between extremes. Benjamin’s use of the term points to yet another way in which he inherits Goethe’s account of truth and translates it from nature to history. The notion of polarity is indeed central to Goethe’s presentation of a primal phenomenon in nature. Polarization precludes conceiving of the primal phenomenon as in itself an object or unity of experience. Rather phenomena take part in the expression of an origin by being polarized. The more polarized the presentation, the greater the intensity of expression of the primal phenomenon.3 Polarization is the creation of a tension when phenomena are held together as extremes. Facts as such are inert, but they can be polarized and span a field of meaningful tensions. It is important to distinguish polarization from simple antithetical comparison. Comparison depends on a common concept and often involves setting up a hierarchy between the sides contrasted in which the one appears, through the comparison, as more valuable than the other. Polarization assumes that the presentation of what is valuable or significant depends on equally holding to all sides. Value is not identified in one of the sides over and above the other but rather is recognized by turning all sides into equally valuable extremes. The following is a suggestive illustration that Benjamin gives of the creation of such a field of tension: “To encompass both Breton and Le Corbusier—that would mean drawing the spirit of contemporary France like a bow, with which knowledge shoots the moment in the heart” (A, 459). Merely comparing and contrasting the two figures would be pointless, given their extensive differences, but polarizing them would make them both partake in the presentation of a unity of spirit otherwise unrecognizable. It would allow the recognition of a force that traverses or pierces the present in its most significant determinations. By the construction of the past as a field of extremes, a force is manifest or becomes effective for the present.4 The polarization of the past, which Benjamin also calls the sectioning of time, is key to the opening up of possibilities for the present: “And thus the historical evidence polarizes into fore- and after-history always anew, never in the same way. And it does so at a distance from its own existence, in the present instant itself—like a line which, divided according to the Apollonian section, experiences its partition from outside itself” (A, 470). The figure of the Apollonian section, which has generated no little interpretative disagreement, becomes clear as one realizes that it is an ideal division also called the “golden cut.” Thus, in terms of the

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preceding analysis, this division of time is the basis of the recognition of the ideal, the measure, or the archetype in history. However, since the partition of the linear succession that we call the past is the key to the recognition of a transformative force in the present, such partition can be said to be experienced outside itself.5 Whereas the contextualization of a historical phenomenon strives for the establishment of continuity, the polarization by way of the fore- and after-history makes recognizable the possibility of a discontinuity in history. Such a presentation of history involves a breaking point. That break is not something discovered about the past (as when one refers to the division into BC and AD) but rather is a possibility for the present upon the presentation of its past. By the incorporation of its fore- and after-history, the presentation of a historical phenomenon can afford the recognition of the present as an opportunity for breaking away from the progression of history as we know it. As we have seen in our discussion of the emergence of the dialectical image, the reconception of the dialectical method involves an arrest. The emergence of the dialectical image is that breaking point for the present as it suddenly appears to itself as an opportunity for revolution in owning to its past. In order for the present to be a breaking point, its past must be constructed in the dialectical image as a field of tensions whose “resolution,” its Aufhebung, is the recognition of the force that traverses it. The polarization, far from being resolved in the unification of one temporal continuum, precipitates the recognition of the revolutionary possibility for the present. The polarization by way of fore- and after-history is thus intimately linked to the nature of the dialectical method: “every dialectically presented historical circumstance polarizes itself and becomes a force field in which the confrontation between its fore-history and afterhistory is played out. It becomes such a field insofar as the present instant interpenetrates it” (A, 470). The traditional understanding of dialectics presents the synthesis as emerging in time from the negation of the initial opposition of thesis and antithesis. However, on Benjamin’s understanding, the dialectical image might not be evident at all as one retains the assumption that dialectical movement unfolds successively in time. Whereas in time, forces get played out invisibly over a vast terrain, the concentration of fore- and after-history in the very constitution of the historical phenomenon makes it into that field of dialectical tensions with critical consequences. In order to charge the historical phenomenon itself with the explosive potential Benjamin attributes to it, the field of tension must be created in

Time

it, as it acquires its singular identity: “The fore- and after-history of a historical phenomenon show up in the phenomenon itself on the strength of its dialectical presentation” (A, 470). Or, better, one must conceive of the (primal) phenomenon itself as constructed by way of relationships in the field of phenomena. We do not first have a well-defined historical phenomenon that we then seek to relate to other phenomena in its past and future. Rather, we must think of the identity of the phenomenon in question as emerging in the recognition of relationships. The dialectical picture would thus be constructed as a field of differences. This is the point of Benjamin’s use of the notion of the time differential (Zeitdifferential). In one of the first sketches of the Arcades Benjamin notes: “On the dialectical image. In it lies time. Already with Hegel, time enters into dialectic. But the Hegelian dialectic knows time solely as the properly historical, if not psychological, time of thinking. The time differential in which alone the dialectical image is real is still unknown to him . . . Real time enters the dialectical image not in natural magnitude— let alone psychologically—but in the smallest gestalt” (A, 867). The contrast Benjamin forms between his understanding of dialectic and Hegel’s paradigm is suggestive. In the first place it is a contrast between Hegel’s turn to history, whose dialectical unfolding is revealed by the ordering of its “great” moments, and Benjamin’s attention to the “smallest gestalt” as the key to the construction of nonprogressive, authentic time. The presentation of the standard underlying historical reality does not proceed by linking the identifiable great moments of history. It is to the consideration of the immature, the discarded, and the excessive that Benjamin turns. He assumes that, even within that field of the insignificant, differences have significance. Furthermore, it is only from those differences—differences that seem unimportant from the perspective of “the great”—that one can construct the image of history. “What matter are never the ‘great’ but only the dialectical contrasts, which often seem indistinguishable from nuances. It is nonetheless from them that life is always born anew” (A, 459). Establishing differences in the field of the discarded would appear, from the perspective of the investigation of “the great,” mere deviations from the main line of inquiry. However, it is precisely through these deviations that Benjamin seeks orientation: “Comparison of other people’s attempts to the undertaking of a sea voyage in which the ships are drawn off course by the magnetic North Pole. Discover this North Pole. What for others are deviations are, for me, the data which determine my course.—On the differentials of time (which, for others, disturb the main

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lines of inquiry), I base my reckoning” (A, 456). In this figure of the sea voyage, what is initially problematized is the directionality of inquiry that follows the succession of events. The point is never to work with material that has a time line already ascribed to it. Never work with what is in time. By way of the construction from differentials, an order will become manifest in which all that has failed and been discarded is redeemed by taking part in the manifestation of another time, call it the “time of realization.” If initially one is tempted to formulate dialectics as the enfolding of meaning in time, what would be more correct to say is that, in dialectics at a standstill, real time is made manifest in the construction. What matters is not what happens in expanses of homogeneous time but a nucleus of time—“a precious and tasteless seed” found in the construction (SW IV, 396). A nucleus of time is contained in the image. The image does not emerge in time; rather, authentic time is found in the constructed image. Benjamin’s constructivism or method of montage is much more than a modernist artistic device. If his claim that “historical materialism must renounce the epic element in history” (A, 474) was obviously related to his emphasis on the presentation of an image, what needs to be further stressed here is that such imagistic presentation does not cancel time altogether but rather reveals essential time (time whose order cannot be discerned from any successive scheme). It is not a construction in time but a construction of time. “History is the subject of a construction whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled full by now-time” (SW IV, 395). The term “differential” suggests a reference to the infinitesimal calculus. The differential is an interval that tends to zero. That is, it is not a measurable interval of time. Whereas a differentiable function is continuous, Benjamin’s use of the differential of time makes manifest the present as a point of discontinuity. As the time internal to the meaning is revealed in the painstaking construction out of the time differentials, the system of time as a homogeneous and continuous medium in which the events of history find a place is exploded, and the present is revealed as a breaking point.6 The fact that Leibniz is considered a founder of the infinitesimal calculus should alert us to the connection Benjamin forms between the time differential and the monadic construction: The idea is a monad. The being that enters into it, with its past and subsequent history, brings—concealed in its own form—an indistinct abbreviation of the rest of the world of ideas, just as, according to Leibniz’s Dis-

Time course on Metaphysics (1686), every single monad contains, in an indistinct way, all the others. The idea is a monad—the pre-stabilized representation of phenomena resides within it, as in their objective interpretation. The higher the order of the ideas, the more perfect the representation contained within them. And so the real world could well constitute a task, in the sense that it would be a question of penetrating so deeply into everything real as to reveal thereby an objective interpretation of the world. In the light of such a task of penetration it is not surprising that the philosopher of the Monadology was also the founder of the infinitesimal calculus. The idea is a monad— that means briefly: every idea contains the image of the world. The purpose of the representation of the idea is nothing less than an abbreviated outline of this image of the world.7 (O, 47–48)

The presentation that would refashion the unity of past and present is in effect Leibnizian in assuming a relational understanding of time. There is no homogeneous time serving as an absolute framework in which events take place; rather, time appears essentially from the relatedness of contents as internal to the manifestation of essential being: “Its history is inward in character and is not to be understood as something boundless but as something related to essential being, and it can therefore be described as the past and subsequent history of this being” (O, 47). For Leibniz the monadic construction reveals time to be internal to the constitution of essence. Time is contained in the monad insofar as all of the changes of an individual substance are, in the monadic presentation, contained in its individual concept. The more that concept is clearly expressed, the more such changes are recognized to be internal to it. Benjamin inherits the Leibnizian intuition about the inner life of essences, which is revealed only in and through the monadic presentation and translates this insight into history: “For in the science of philosophy the concept of being is not satisfied by the phenomenon until it has absorbed all its history. In such investigations the historical perspective can be extended, into the past or future, without being subject to any limits of principle. This gives the idea its total scope. And its structure is a monadological one, imposed by the totality in contrast to its own inalienable isolation” (O, 47). The centrality of expression in Benjamin’s philosophical project must be rearticulated in accord with the Leibnizian perspective precisely to the extent that no external relations can be established between monads. The isolation of the monad is tantamount to its capacity to express all the world from within itself. Leibniz calls this sometimes the “mirroring capacity” of monads and thinks of the monad as having no windows on

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the world. However, mirroring is not the reproduction of an image on a reduced scale. A monadic presentation precisely requires an extreme condensation or abbreviation, an outline of the world as whole to be presented in a singular subject matter. Such totality would be translated into and expressed by subtle distinctions in the subject matter (the time differentials). The forces and interests that get played out invisibly over large expanses of time would be manifest in abbreviated form, condensed in the smallest details of the construction. The necessity of presenting history as a whole in one singular phenomenon makes it the case that one has to take the smallest nuances of meaning to have extreme significance. The monadic presentation, by being an abbreviation, makes every nuance matter and every detail have immense expressive power. As Benjamin writes: “It would be a question of penetrating so deeply into everything real as to reveal thereby an objective interpretation of the world” (O, 48). The penetration into reality does not discover new features (as on the model of the discoveries afforded by a microscope). The deeper the penetration into details, the more it is possible to express a totality by means of the singular phenomenon investigated. The monadology not only is a metaphysical theory of being but also defines a task.8 For the monadological structure to become manifest it is necessary to deepen the engagement with the singular traits of the phenomenon investigated and make them moments in the abbreviated outline of the world of ideas. The historical phenomenon Benjamin considers, when presented monadically, does not stand in external relations to other essential moments of history. It must be capable of expressing from within itself the whole abbreviated outline of history. Through abbreviation, thus through the nuances of subject matter, one can present the whole world of ideas through internal features of the historical event.9 It is from within the phenomenon itself that history is presented as though refracted or abbreviated in it: “[The monadological] structure first comes to light in the extracted object itself. And it does so in the form of the historical confrontation that makes up its interior (and, as it were, the bowels) of the historical object and into which all the forces and interests of history enter on a reduced scale. It is owing to this monadological structure that the historical object finds represented in its interior its own fore-history and after-history” (A, 475). For Hegel the movement of dialectics is such that each stage retains all past stages as moments internal to its present configuration of mean-

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ing. Thus, the end might be said to contain all of the essential moments of history within itself. In contrast, Benjamin conceives of the revelation of authentic time by way of the construction of a singular historical event out of time differentials. In that construction of the unique, history as a whole comes to be abbreviated in the smallest details. Rather than a Hegelian cumulative model, we find in the monadic construction the key to a total incorporation of history, which is always singular and unique. Uniqueness or singularity are correlates of monadic presentation. It is ultimately by way of the monadic construction that one can properly understand what it is to construct the historical phenomenon as an origin. That the original does not depend on anything external to it is understood in terms of the inalienable isolation of the monadic construction. In the concrete monadic presentation, dialectic is detached from its systematic idealistic underpinning and at the same time distinguished from its objectivizing materialistic interpretations. The latter versions of the dialectic often appeal to an independent economic dynamics in history furthering the cause of the revolution. However, in Benjamin’s account it is only the monadic construction that makes evident the revolutionary potential in the present. The monadic construction reveals the inner life of history. It makes recognizable forces that can now effectively transform the present. In the monadic abbreviation there occurs a contraction of time (see ‘On the Conception of History’ thesis XIII). History is coming together for a particular moment. It is as though, by drawing history together, the present gathers its forces or pulls itself together.

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4 B O DY

References to the collective as a body with limbs and organs abound in The Arcades Project, as well as in many of Benjamin’s other writings: “. . . just like the sleeper—in this respect like the madman—sets out on the macrocosmic journey through his own body, and the noises and feeling of his insides, such as blood pressure, intestinal churn, heartbeat and muscle sensation (which for the waking and salubrious individual converge in a steady surge of health) generate, in the extravagantly heightened inner awareness of the sleeper, illusion or dream imagery which translates and accounts for them, so likewise for the dreaming collective, which through the arcades, communes with its own insides” (A, 389). It would appear at first as though the body, insofar as it is viewed as what every individual human being has, is the relatively clear notion on the basis of which we then are to conceive of a metaphorical extension to the characterization of the collective as a body. Yet, to acquire the significance it has in Benjamin’s thought, the notion of a collective body cannot be a simple figure. I devote the present chapter to a broad and schematic clarification of the notions of body and embodiment guided primarily by a close reading of an important early fragment titled “Outline of the Psycho-Physical Problem.” The sections of the chapter roughly correspond to the different parts of that outline.

§1. Mind and Body (Geist und Leib) Benjamin starts his investigation of the question of the relation of mind and body with a discussion of embodiment in general rather than a consideration of the individual body. Body and mind are characterized as aspects of one and the same reality rather than as distinct substances. 74

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There are nevertheless different degrees of realization of embodied spirit. Therefore, the identity of mind and body is not something given at the outset. It is rather something to be realized. One could nevertheless delineate, even in the unrealized state, what Benjamin calls a “zone of identity” or a zone of all that would partake in the realization of that identity. That zone is also referred to by the term “Gestalt.”1 The bodily Gestalt spans the phenomena that need to be brought together for mind to be fully realized or embodied. It is in that sense that one can speak of the Gestalt of embodied spirit at a certain time, as it is manifest in the various material products of the age, its institution, customs, and so on. We can think, for instance, of all of the material drawn together in The Arcades Project as a configuration of the embodied mind, a Gestalt of the realizable identity of mind and body. This does not mean that mind is fully expressed in these materials as they stand, but it is in and from them that it can be realized. Insofar as this configuration is judged in relation to the fulfillment of that identity of mind and body, to realization in the Now of recognizability, it can be considered as the form of the historical: “In general we may say that everything real is a ‘configuration’ insofar as it is regarded historically as meaningfully related to the historical totality in its ‘now,’ its innermost temporal presence.” Within this realizable identity of mind and body we can identify two poles: the one in which the identity with mind is only potential, which we call “body,” and the other, where the form or configuration of embodied mind is made explicit, which can be called “genius.” The highest manifestation of the embodied mind, considered in formal terms is what Benjamin calls “genius” (SW I, 393). Genius should be understood primarily as a historical configuration of embodied spirit. It is thus characteristic of an age, though it can be, to different degrees, reflected or concentrated (but not instantiated) in an individual. Thus, what Benjamin refers to as the birth of genius in tragedy is, as we will see, for him a model for the concentration of the embodied configuration of spirit in an individual through which spirit is made explicit and further articulated. The configuration of embodied mind has a delimited form. To think of embodied mind as a configuration means that it is understood in relational terms. Benjamin also calls this way of thinking of the body “functional,” meaning to contrast it with the “substantial.”2 To take an example, we can consider the form of desire in which individuals partake. Viewed in relational terms, it includes its possible objects, as well as the various

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conditions that make such relation to its objects possible. That embodied form can manifest to different degrees the full articulation of desire. For the idea of fulfillment of the form of desire is not to be identified with the satisfaction of desire by its object. Such satisfaction is not the fulfillment of the condition of having desire, the solution to the problem of desire. We can further conceive of the historical transformation of desire and even of a process in which the problem of the relation of desire to its object resolves itself. In Hegel, for instance, we might speak of the dialectical transformation of the relation of “natural” desire to its object into the possibility of mutual recognition in a community of a certain form. This process in which the form of desire is fulfilled in history would count as a (partial) realization of the identity of mind and body with respect to that function. (As we will see, no such notion of a supraindividual being, a community in which fulfillment would determine a specific form of life, will be part of Benjamin’s notion of the full realization of the identity of mind and body.)

§2. Mind and Corporeal Substance (Geist and Körper) Though Benjamin starts his account with the clarification of the form or configuration of embodied mind, there is another more intuitive notion of body that he wishes to account for. This is body insofar as it “belongs” to individual beings (in the sense in which I speak, for instance, of my body). What is the relation between the individuality of the body in the latter sense and the formal understanding of embodied mind? How does the realization of the embodied mind relate to the embodiment of spirit in the individual? In order to address such issues Benjamin introduces a further notion—Körper—translated as “corporeal substance.” If body (Leib) is characterized essentially in relational terms, as a configuration, the corporeal is to be understood nonrelationally, that is, as a substance. The introduction of the notion of corporeal substance allows us to ask about the way the formal dimensions of embodied mind relate to the dimension of existence and to the existing individual beings.3 In particular, one must ask to what extent the embodied mind can be realized in an individual that is a reality within the historical process. An individual substance is not the form of the historical; rather, it is “one of the realities that stand within the historical process itself” (SW I, 394). Existing individuals no doubt take part in the configuration of embodied mind, but they are also more than terms in functional configurations.

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Existence, for Benjamin, is nonrelational. It marks a realm of higher objectivity or reality than can be captured by formal characterizations. However, the existent is not thereby individualized by way of a substrate of unformed matter. Existence is judged by the degree of intelligibility, or of meaningful articulation of the embodied mind. In his essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” Benjamin writes: “the deeper (that is, the more existent and real) the mind, the more it is expressible and expressed” (SW I, 67).4 The more the mind is concretely articulated and the higher the reality of its embodiment, the more it can appear concentrated in existing individuals. Thus, a higher or more complete embodiment of mind must characterize the transition from the consideration of the body in terms of form to its understanding as corporeal substance and as the unity embodied in individual existence. (This is not to say, as will become clear, that the full embodiment of mind, the ultimate substrate of our existence, can be understood as contained in the unity of an individual corporeal substance.) The contrast between the formal or functional view of embodiment and the articulation of mind in corporeal substance can be further clarified in terms of limitation. In contrast to the limited nature of the embodied mind, Benjamin conceives of corporeal substance as limitless. This might be counterintuitive insofar as we identify corporeal substance with an individual being, whereas the embodied mind is a much broader configuration that includes the meaningful surroundings of such individuals. However, consider that the limitation of embodied mind is consequent upon its characterization in terms of form. Limitations are conditions of possibility of having a realm of objects for a certain function (objects of desire, objects of memory, objects of thought). Form is limitation that is inherent in modes of intentional directedness. The limitlessness that characterizes corporeal substance, conversely, is not a matter of infinite extension. There is no external limit on corporeal substance insofar as it is understood as the convergence of various functions. The unity of corporeal substance is understood in terms of how the various functions are held together in the individual so that their total configuration is concentrated monadically by the life of the individual. This means that individual existence is first of all understood in terms that are intensive, that is, in relation to the degree in which spirit in its multiple functional characterizations is explicitly articulated and bound together in a single being. Individual identity assumes the possibility of the measured concentration of forms. The individual identity of corporeal substance, understood in

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intensive terms, is felt in the interpenetration or gathering of forms.5 Thus, the two characteristics of individual existence and limitlessness are not, despite what might appear to be the case, opposed but rather come to the same. The individual substance is manifest as an internally limitless totality insofar as it can concentrate and express its configuration of spirit from within itself. Assuming that the human being is one of the highest and most complex individual concentrations of the embodied mind, we can further ask what aspect of human experience can provide access to the individual as a limitless corporeal substance. What is the mode in which we are aware of our corporeal substance in experience? What is our mode of access to ourselves as that nonrelational embodiment of spirit that is the corporeal substance? So as to find nonrelational dimensions of experience Benjamin turns to aspects of experience that are not characterized by intentional directedness. These he finds primarily in pleasure and pain. We can certainly speak of the source of pain or pleasure, to localize pain in the body, but pain and pleasure are not forms of experience: “[Corporeal substance] manifests itself . . . in a twofold polar form as pain and pleasure. In these two, no form of any sort, and hence no limitation, is perceived. If therefore, we know about our corporeal substance only—or chiefly—through pleasure or pain, we know of no limitation on it.” (SWI 394) Pleasure and pain are not understood merely physiologically or just as sensations having certain qualities but are rather seen as having metaphysical significance. They are intimately related to degrees of the embodiment of spirit and are transformed by the extent to which it is articulated in the individual. Pleasure and pain are the primary modes of access to the corporeal substance, but they are not the sole ones. Indeed, even though perception generally involves intentional directedness (thus, conditions of possibility of its objects or formal limitation), there will be ways of encountering in perception as well the limitlessness of corporeal substance: “It is now advisable for us to look around among the modes of consciousness for those to which limitation is just as alien as the states of pain and pleasure. . . . Admittedly, we must distinguish here between different degrees. The sense least bound by limitation is perhaps that of sight . . . Sight shows our corporeal substance to be, if not without limits, then at least with fluctuating, formless delimitations . . . Thus, we may say in general that what we know of perception we know of our corporeal substance, which in contrast to our body is extended but has no sharply

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delimited form” (SW I, 394). Knowledge of corporeal substance would require recognizing modes of perceiving that are not object directed. The case of colors, which greatly preoccupied Benjamin, might be an indication of how to understand formless delimitation. Benjamin devotes several essays to the mode of access to the world by way of color. He finds it to be particularly manifest in the child’s view of color. The perception of the world by way of color shows that field in its formless delimitation.6 It would thus constitute an awareness of our corporeal substance. More generally we can argue that since pleasure and pain are the most immediate modes of acceding to corporeal substance, the more experience has an affective dimension, the more will it provide ways of access to our corporeal substance. Thus, the consideration of beauty, or more generally the erotic in its various manifestations, is of vital importance to the understanding of our corporeal substance. Since both beauty and the erotic are, on the face of it, understood relationally, we will have to ask how the inherent involvement of feeling in them nevertheless points the way to recognize through them the substantive unity of corporeality (see in this context Remark A in Chapter 9). The preceding characterization raises the question how we are to understand the limitation that we associate with an existing person, the unique limited reality of an individual living being viewed as a corporeal substance. “The person is . . . limited but is not formed.” (SWI 394)Since the person is a substantial unity of existence, the delimitation that we recognize as belonging to the individual is not formal limitation. However, neither can the limitation of the individual be identified in terms of the formlessness of the modes of experiencing corporeal substance described earlier. The first kind of limitation that Benjamin recognizes is in the belonging of corporeal substance to nature. In other words, the limitation of the person is understood in relation to the way we think of corporeal substance as “natural,” as part of nature. Benjamin avoids thinking of the natural as something that belongs to each individual, as though each living being merely instantiates independently identifiable, common natural properties such as sentience: “Nature is not something that belongs especially to every individual body” (SW I, 395). Nature is not something that is instantiated in every living individual, nor is it like genius, a formal configuration capable of being concentrated in an individual corporeal substance. Nature is the same in all individuals but not in the sense of something equally present in each and every one. Rather, Benjamin strikingly describes individuals as partaking in the broader and

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encompassing currents of nature: “[Nature] relates to the singularity of the body as the different currents that flow into the sea relate to each drop of water. Countless such drops are carried along by the same current. In like fashion nature is the same, not indeed in all human beings but in a great many of them. Moreover, this nature is not just alike; it is in the full sense identical, one and the same” (SW I, 395). In the next section we will consider further this notion of nature in relation to which the limitation of the individual is manifest. The limitation of the person can be further characterized in extensive terms. As is evidently the case, there are many persons. That very multiplicity of persons cannot be characterized in terms of form (for formal configuration is what all persons partake in at a certain historical time). If we now seek to characterize a limit to this extensional determination, a maximum extension of the embodied mind, one such limit can be identified in the people. The very fact that Benjamin characterizes the people as a maximum extension of corporeal substance, rather than in intensive terms, as itself an individual substance, would problematize its relation to realization and to a fulfillment of the form of the historical. The people constitutes a maximum extension of persons but is not, even potentially, itself a substantial identity of embodied mind. This does not mean that there is no notion of realization for the collective but rather that such realization cannot be conceived as the destiny of an individual being that we would call a nation or a people (say, the German people). Realization in the collective is always realization with respect to its ultimate limitless extension, the body of humankind. This further means that the realization of mankind does not take the form of a substantive unity such as would be constituted in a form of human life under specific laws (what we imagine as, say, utopia or a kingdom of God). Rather, the fulfillment common to humanity will manifest the absence of limitation, the release from law, which Benjamin calls in another context bare life. In other words, one must distinguish between the consideration of history in terms of the ends of man, which aim at bringing about specific forms of life, and the idea of humanity’s fulfillment in relation to nature, in which it partakes.

§3. Body and Corporeal Substance Corporeal substance stands higher than body insofar as it is understood in terms of existence as an individual substance rather than only relationally

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in terms of form. That is, it is a higher reality than body. However, the preceding considerations suggest that it is nevertheless not the ultimate substratum of existence. Indeed, this follows from the understanding that the realization of the collective body does not constitute an individual being, say in the unity of a formed society: “corporeal substance is not, indeed, the ultimate substratum of our existence, but it is at least a substance in contrast to our body, which is only a function. Our corporeal substance is objective in a higher sense and therefore must be more concerned with the clarification of the spiritual ‘nature’ of living beings bound to and subservient to our corporeal substance than with the elucidation of the genius that is identical with the body” (SW I, 394). Given the point of view of the realization of meaning as the fundamental scheme of Benjamin’s ontology, the higher standing of corporeal substance means that one thinks of it as partaking in the ultimate end (understood, as in the early essay on language, in terms of fulfilling creation).7 In contrast, the body is that which partakes in the historical viewed solely in terms of the ends of man: “Man’s body and his corporeal substance place him in universal contexts. But a different context for each: with his body, man belongs to mankind; with his corporeal substance, to God” (SW I, 395). In relation to body (Leib), we can characterize the highest purpose of humanity as happiness. That is, the configuration of embodied mind, the form of life of humanity, at a particular time can be judged by the way it is conducive to the end of happiness. The organization of the human world in terms of the end of happiness also draws in the natural world, subserving it to that end of humanity: “In addition to the totality of all its living members, humanity is able partly to draw nature, the nonliving, plant, and animal into this life of the body of mankind, and thereby into this annihilation and fulfillment. It can do this by virtue of the technology in which the unity of its life is formed. Ultimately, everything that subserves humanity’s happiness may be counted part of its life, its limbs” (SW I, 395). An organized form of life of the collective, a collective body, is viewed as a living body that draws on all that subserves that end of happiness, including the natural world. The relation between corporeal substance and nature is fundamentally different. Nature, one should remember, is not the antithesis of spirit but rather is to be understood as created nature, which is to be given full expression in the articulation of spirit. One could also say that the fuller the embodiment of spirit, the more nature will be manifest as created. As

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we have seen in considering Benjamin’s account of human language and its relation to created nature, he distinguishes the expression given in human language to the specific natural essences from the manifestation of nature figured as a message that is passed through the different orders of beings (See chapter 1, p. 24) It is this picture of the current of vitality of created nature over and above the unity of individual forms of life, that is central to the understanding of the natural-historical dimension of corporeal substance. Created nature is manifest not in each individual but as a current that runs through countless individuals.8 One can see clearly the relation of this characterization of nature to Benjamin’s figure of origin as a whirlpool in the flow. Indeed, what is at stake in the actualization of spirit (i.e., its complete embodiment) is making effective the power in created nature by the concentration that makes an origin manifest. The course of the world viewed in terms of the concentration of an origin is therefore what Benjamin calls its “natural history.” Origin is uniquely or singularly manifest, but it is never manifest in or as an individual being, as a substantial unity. The force it reveals is always to be conceived in relation to all life, a power for the sake of all living beings. Both body and corporeal substance have a relation to nature and to the course of the world viewed as “natural history”: “Bodily nature advances toward its dissolution; . . . corporeal substance however advances toward its resurrection. . . . Hence natural history contains the two great processes of dissolution and resurrection” (SW I, 395). The contrast between body and corporeal substance is then the basis for understanding the perishable, as well as eternal life, in natural history. When Benjamin views bodily nature to be advancing toward its dissolution, he does not merely make the point that certain forms of the historical organizations of human life for the promotion of the end of happiness will disappear and that others emerge in their place. This is, of course, true, and modernity would be for Benjamin a new historical configuration of the body [Leib]. However, he makes a further, more difficult, claim that we will be able to assess only at a later stage, namely, that the striving for happiness itself brings about the dissolution of the historical configuration of the body. Similarly, the way in which corporeal substance advances toward resurrection must not be conceived in terms of a doctrine of the immortality of the individual soul but rather by the manner in which humanity ultimately can be seen to belong to created nature, that is, in terms of its return to nature. Insofar as corporeal substance in its maximum exten-

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sion as humankind can appear as the passing manifestation of that force or “flow” that traverses created nature, humanity would partake in eternal life. There is thus less a contrast than a coming together of the dissolution of body and the resurrection of corporeal substance, for both are understood as the return of history to (created) nature. The indestructibility of the highest life is manifest neither in the form of life of the historical body nor in the individual soul but is rather the indestructibility of created nature, of creaturely life.

§4. Spirit and Sexuality Nature’s sameness is figured as a flow carrying individual natural beings. Understanding the different currents in the flow, the dynamics or the dimension of force in nature, requires us to further clarify how corporeal substances relate to that nature made manifest through them. Benjamin thinks of nature in human beings as expressing itself in the polarity of spirit and sexuality: “Spirit and sexuality are the two basic polar forces of human ‘nature’ ” (SW I, 395). This division occurs within nature. That is, spirit is not opposed to nature but belongs to it just as much as its polar opposite, sexuality. Just as there is no absolute division of mind and body but rather degrees of embodiment of spirit, so sexuality and spirituality are two polarly opposed manifestations of nature in the corporeal substance. Sexuality, or, more generally, eros, is the binding element, whereas spirit is most manifest in the capacity for differentiation or articulation of nature in meaning. The currents of nature or vitality are, in and through the corporeal substance of man, bound and differentiated, that is, comprehended in spiritual terms. The corporeal substance can then be conceived of as an instrument that measures natural vitality (i.e., that provides articulated expression for vitality): “Only the body can be viewed as an instrument with which to differentiate between the vital reactions and at the same time can be comprehended in terms of its psychic animation” (SW I, 396).9 The results of the “measurements” of vital nature by the instrument that is corporeal substance are the two fundamental modes of access to corporeal substance we have already mentioned, pleasure and pain. The nature of pleasure and pain can thus further be considered in terms of their role in judging or measuring natural vitality in corporeal substance. Pain and pleasure are not merely two opposite sides of a scale but have very different characteristics: Pleasure is uniform and passing.

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Pain is diverse and chronic and can be localized (say, in an organ). The source of pleasure is important to what we make of it, whereas the significance of pain does not lie in its source. Its importance is not in what brought it about but rather in what the suffering signifies. Benjamin thus further points to the richer relation of pain to language, that is, to the variety of expressions of pain: “feelings of pain are incomparably more capable of expressing genuine diversity than the feelings of pleasure, which differ mainly in degree” (SW I, 397). Pain has, one might say, a much more complex grammar than pleasure. We can distinguish in language between kinds of pains and articulate specifically their distinct character and significance. The variety of pains, their more intimate relation to linguistic expression, as well as the temporal dimension of pain (the ways it endures and can be endured), all suggest a more immediate connection of pain to spiritual nature. (Its endurance, for instance, is intuitively considered to be a function of character.) Pleasure, on the other hand, is manifest more clearly in relation to the pole of sexuality. However, both are seen as having metaphysical significance and play a role in assessing the embodiment of spirit: “Pain is the ruling, pleasure the evaluative . . . principle of human physicality” (SW I, 395). Calling pleasure the evaluative principle does not mean that value is reduced to a hedonistic basis. Rather, pleasure plays a role in evaluation ( judgment). This alignment of judgment and pleasure belongs to the legacy of Kant’s account of judgment, in which the field of the aesthetic is conceived as the paradigmatic manifestation of the capacity to judge. However, so as to distinguish Benjamin’s understanding of the relation of pleasure to judgment from Kant’s, it is important to stress that Benjamin does not conceive of the highest principle of pleasure in terms of purposiveness (as it is in the Critique of Judgment). Rather, the more spiritual a pleasure, the more it is for Benjamin the sensing of a relationship. Pleasure is an indication of relatedness, a sensing of substantial unity by recognizing things as belonging together. Put in terms of our earlier discussion, pleasure signals the transition from the relational to the substantial. It is thus understood as a mode of access to corporeal substance. It is also in these terms that one is to understand the higher manifestations of the relation of pleasure to eros, which is for Benjamin, as for Plato, “the binding element in nature” (SW I, 400). (The fragment on the psychophysical problem contains a long quote from Plato’s Symposium) Why is pain called the ruling principle of human physicality? And how is this ruling distinct from the binding that is associated with eros? Ruling

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(which is not for Benjamin an exclusively political notion) would allow holding together of that which does not belong to a living unity. The fuller the articulation of embodied spirit and the more ruling comes to replace the binding of eros, the more the manifestation of natural vitality involves the sustained presence of pain. Since nature is figured by Benjamin as a flow, one can understand why he speaks of navigating pain to its destination: “Only the feeling of pain, both on the physical and the metaphysical planes, is capable of such an uninterrupted flow—what might be termed a ‘thematic treatment.’ Man is the most consummate instrument of pain: only in human suffering does pain find its adequate expression, only in human life does it flow to its destination” (SW I, 397). Vital nature will ultimately find its manifestation in and through the expression of human pain. Pain has an intimate relation to meaningful articulation and differentiation. However, in its most spiritual form it is not the pain of individuation. In other words, the fulfillment of meaning will not be apparent in the living unity of a person. Rather, realization must be cued to all that is suffering, all that is unfulfilled in human strivings. Benjamin will develop in his account of the expressive power of allegory precisely how the consideration of the failed, of the stations of the passion of the world, can serve expression. Significantly, the allegorical perspective will open up the possibility of conceiving of a return of history to nature (see Chapter 6).

§5. Nearness and Distance The final section of this chapter contains initial explorations of many issues that are more fully elaborated in later chapters. It is nevertheless important to broach these issues, even if cursorily, in the context of the problematic of embodiment, which is of concern to us here. Benjamin’s understanding of body and embodiment seems to demand a reformulation of the nature of the body’s spatiality. In the next chapter we consider the transformation of the distinction of inner and outer. However, the spatiality of the body is primarily elaborated for Benjamin by way of the factors of nearness and distance: “These are two factors that may be as important for the structure and life of the body as other spatial categories (up and down, right and left, etc.)” (SW I, 397).10 Nearness and distance are not to be understood in terms of an objective metric of space. To the extent that our access to corporeal substance is in terms of pleasure and pain, we assess nearness and distance in terms of the different forms binding and separation can take. That is, the factors

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of nearness and distance bear primarily on the understanding of the erotic life and the various inflections it gives to the polarity of sexuality and spirit. The importance of nearness and distance for the field of human life can be appreciated by considering the way Benjamin relates those notions to his understanding of fate. (A fuller discussion of the relation of fate and vitality is the subject of Chapter 6.) Benjamin understands fate not as something attributable to the individual living being, but rather in terms of the individual’s existence in the field of nature’s total vitality: “Nature itself is a totality, and the movement into the inscrutable depths of total vitality is fate” (SW I, 396). The relevance of considerations of nearness and distance to fate is captured in the following formulation: “The less a man is imprisoned by the bonds of fate, the less he is determined by what lies nearest at hand. Whether it be people or circumstances” (SW I, 398). Thus, for such a person fate manifests itself only in what is distant: “The things that determine his life with the force of fate come to him from a distance. He acts not with ‘regard’ to what is coming, as if it might catch up with him, but with ‘prudence’ toward what is distant, to which he submits” (SW I, 398). One might say that being determined by the near is a condition of constant reactivity. A space of freedom, on the other hand, is opened up in orienting one’s life by the distant. This does not mean that one is free from the power of nature but rather that freedom exists in having the space to let oneself follow the guidance of that nature and to organize one’s life in accord with it. Freedom is thus understood less through principles of action (as in Kant) than in terms of the character or of the conduct of life: “. . . the impact of nature falls not on people’s actions but on their lives, which alone are subject to fate. It is here, not in the realm of action, that freedom has its home. For it is the power of freedom that releases the living human being from the influence of individual natural events and lets him follow the guidance of nature as a whole in the conduct of his affairs” (SW I, 398). Orienting life by the determinations of the distant is a sign of spirituality, of character: “[To be] determined wholly by distance; it is the fate of the highest among mature men” (SW I, 400). Conversely, constantly attending to the near is often associated with stupidity (“stupidity stems ultimately from too close a scrutiny of ideas” [SW I, 397]).11 The near and the far, insofar as they determine life, are manifest by two states that Benjamin identifies as “spell” and “yearning.” Spell is the magic of nearness: being immediately attracted or bound to the near. It

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is a mode of being determined that is not incompatible with pleasure but that leads to a dead end in terms of fulfillment. Far from being in control of the near, such enchantment is tantamount to having one’s life ruled by endless ambiguity. Being spellbound is being bound by the near. The spell quality of the near suggests that it has the consistency of that which is conjured, that is, what cannot be held to, of what is essentially ambiguous. Insofar as eros is the primordial binding element, the incapacity to bind the near is often sensed as anxiety at the uncontrollable power of sexuality. “The erotic life is ignited by distance. On the other hand, there is an affinity between nearness and sexuality” (SW I, 397). Yearning is a state of being determined by the distant. The more the distant determines the tendency of life, the more yearning can find ways of fulfillment. Thus, Benjamin considers the structure of wishing, which has an intimate connection to distance: “‘What one wishes for in one’s youth, one has in abundance in old age,’ said Goethe. The earlier in life one makes a wish, the greater one’s chances that it will be fulfilled. The further a wish reaches out in time, the greater the hopes for its fulfillment. . . . In folk symbolism, distance in space can take the place of distance in time; that is why the shooting star, which plunges into infinite space, has become the symbol of fulfilled wish” (SW IV, 331). (See in this context Remark A in Chapter 9.)12 Several examples from Benjamin’s writings can serve to elucidate these sketchy considerations: So as to suggest initially the relevance of the categories of nearness and distance to better-known themes in Benjamin’s thinking, one could bring to mind his characterization of the aura as the “unique apparition of distance, however near it may be” (SW IV, 255). The auratic is the intimacy with the distant; it is the closeness to the distant that can be achieved in certain forms of beauty (and in love). Both longing that determines the type of movement in the field of the erotic and the auratic are transformed in modern experience. A clear case of that problematic position with regard to the near, bound to react to the immediate, is developed in Benjamin’s essay on Baudelaire: modern life turns into a field of fate precisely through the incessant need to respond to the near. Lived experience (Erlebnis) is the fatal rule of the vitality of the near. Being delivered to vitality is the constant need to react defensively to stimulus. The aura, the intimate experience of distance, should be seen as mitigating the spell of the near. The decline of the aura would then signal the incapacity to live under the sign of the distant even in one’s relation to the beauty of art.

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As a reorganization of the balance of near and far, the transformations of the erotic in the new historical configuration of the body are evident in Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire’s poem “A une passante.” The entranced infatuation it suggests is no longer articulated in terms of yearning for the distant but wholly in relation to the spell of the near. The poem transforms the Platonic structure of erotic ascent insofar as the love depicted in it is not conceived as leading on but as a momentary fulfillment that is at the same time the disappearance of the loved object. It is, as Benjamin puts it, love at last sight: “The delight of the urban poet is love—not at first sight, but at last sight. It is an eternal farewell, which coincides in the poem with the moment of enchantment” (SW IV, 324). The disappearance of the passing makes for a form of love that has no dimension of wish, yearning, or hope: “This is the gaze . . . of the object of a love which only a city dweller experiences, which Baudelaire captured for poetry, and which one might infrequently characterize as being spared, rather than denied fulfillment” (SW IV, 324). (See in this context Remark B in Chapter 9.) It is also in the context of the discussion of embodiment, with its categories of nearness and distance, that one has to read Benjamin’s claim that Proust’s writing is to be understood in terms of a physiology of style. The body is not just involved in tasting a madeleine, but rather a whole problematic of body, corporeal substance, and vitality is involved in Proust’s writing. Benjamin describes the bottommost stratum of Proust’s work as “a stratum in which the materials of memory no longer appear singly, as images, but tell us about a whole, amorphously and formlessly, indefinitely and weightily, in the same way the weight of the fishing net tells a fisherman about his catch. Smell—this sense of weight experienced by someone who casts his nets into the sea of the temps perdu. And his sentences are the entire muscular activity of the intelligible body; they contain the whole enormous effort to raise this catch” (SW II, 247). This is not only a way of describing how the limitless individual corporeal substance is encompassed in Proust’s work but also to point at this work’s power to make manifest the dimension of total vitality of nature. Indeed, one can see Proust’s existence and writing as ruled by the far, by homesickness, or by a form of yearning. The turning of day into night makes for an existence detached from the near, from the immediately present. It becomes a way of binding the space of memory by the yearning. The space of the past as a space tied by relationship, distorted by similarities, is the field of manifestation of the power of the erotic that responds to

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distance. That yearning is not fulfilled by recovering the substantial unity of the individual Proust in memory; rather, Benjamin describes its realization as an emptying of the self, a discharge that is rejuvenating, a manifestation of vitality. Take as a final example Benjamin’s reference to the body in his essay on surrealism: “The collective is a body too. And the physis that is being organized for it in technology can, through all its political and factual reality, be produced only in that image space to which profane illumination initiates it. Only when in technology body and image space so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto” (SW II, 217–218). Benjamin speaks here of the body (Leib) as the form of the historical. By way of the image (and ultimately, though not in the surrealist artistic practice, in the dialectical image), the forms of the embodied mind are brought together, held together, not so as to produce a collective corporeal substance but rather to make manifest a force: Image space allows for collective innervation to result in revolutionary discharge, in the manifestation of a force that transforms reality. In image space, the vitality of nature in the bodily configuration of the modern world is recognized.

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5 DREAM

§1. Dream and Experience We have considered two dimensions of Benjamin’s conception of truth: the one was a quasi-spatial schema at work in the presentation of a dialectical image; the other a temporal schema in the realization of the past in the present. But there is a further dimension to the dialectical image, namely, the transition from dream to truth. Though Benjamin does not treat fantasies in the subjective, individual, sense but rather turns to elements of the collective life in the city landscape centered in the arcades, these materials initially come together in The Arcades Project as what he calls a “dream configuration.”1 Benjamin’s realism or naturalism is not incompatible with the understanding that initially the material strikes us as a dream configuration. That is, Benjamin is not being realistic by just trying to show this dream space as what it “really is,” namely, an illusion, thereby aiming to achieve a sobering effect that would free us from its hold. What Benjamin is after is the kernel of truth in the dream. Awakened consciousness does not merely shake off the dream; rather, awakening proceeds from within by the transformation of the meaning of the dream.2 Moreover, the dream consciousness is not just one aspect among others of the historical phenomenon investigated (as though it should further be balanced by, say, the description of the brutal conditions of poverty of the collective) but the condition out of which that period reveals its utmost truth: “. . . these forms characterize this collective much more decisively than any other” (A, 391). The three dimensions of the dialectical image—space, time, and dream—intersect in Benjamin’s calling the nineteenth century not only “a space-time [Zeit-Raum]” but also a “dream-space-time [Zeit-Traum]” 90

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(A, 389). Each of the terms inflects our understanding of the others. The dream configuration would show the temporal scheme of the realization of truth to be a structure of awakening; it will make manifest how the space of the dialectical image involves a transition from the interior to the open. Properly understood, these transitions will further afford insight into what can be called the dynamics of awakening, namely, the mobilization of the energies of dream intoxication and their translation into (revolutionary) action. Benjamin takes the dream configuration to emerge in relation to a reality common to all, namely, the arcades. One can no doubt attribute an illusory quality to elements of reality insofar as they serve the satisfaction of various desires and hide from us our true needs. They are then said to be objects of a false consciousness through which alienation occurs. However, Benjamin does not strike this all-too-familiar register of criticism. He is not primarily concerned with illusions that first manifested themselves in the collective in the nineteenth century (say, certain forms of alienation in bourgeois existence) and that persist even today. Rather, the dream configuration becomes visible in time, in the transformation and gathering of the material of the past by the present. A dream configuration is not only a subjective state of consciousness but also a form that is characteristic of embodied mind, of meaningful material brought together by the focal point of the arcades. It is the unity of that material that is the correlate of a type of dream consciousness that is continuous with ordinary consciousness even while leading to its radical reversal in awakening.3 Conceiving of the dream as a particular configuration (Gestalt) of meaning allows us to extend its scope beyond the subjective experiences associated in the individual with dreaming.4 Dream, as Benjamin uses the term in The Arcades Project, is not primarily a private experience that individuals have mostly at night but is understood as the characteristic of a field of meaning that can emerge in our memory of the past. It follows that the experience of the arcades as a dream configuration is not only (or even primarily) that of the nineteenth-century “dweller” of the arcades. It is not a state of mind of the inhabitants of that place and time that Benjamin describes. Undoubtedly there were certain types of “illuminati” (foremost among them was the flâneur) for whom those spaces presented occasions for intoxication. Later on there would be individuals, such as Aragon, who experienced the arcades as a dream landscape. However, Aragon’s case is particularly instructive insofar as the expression he

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gave to the passage de l’opéra as a dreamscape in his Le paysan de Paris is essentially dependent on the arcades being outdated. The surrealist face of the arcades emerges as they become a matter of the past. Similarly, for Benjamin, I argue that the recognition of the space of the arcades as the expression of the dream of the collective, just as the awakening from it, must be understood as occurring in and through the articulation of the memory of that past. Benjamin places at the head of the convolute on iron construction an epigraph from Michelet: “Each epoch dreams the one to follow.” However, it is not as if he simply adopts the ancient identification of dreams and the prophetic. Nor does he conceive of the imaginary of a certain time as, of itself, prescient. Rather, it is only insofar as the memory of the past coalesces as a dream configuration that it can afford the possibility of its realization by the present. The dreamlike character of the past in memory is a condition of the recognition of one’s own present as the opportunity to awaken from that dream. Benjamin thus elaborates on the epigraph from Michelet: “Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow, but in dreaming, precipitates its awakening” (A, 13). “The new, dialectical method of doing history presents itself as the art of experiencing the present as a waking world, a world to which that dream we name the past refers in truth. To pass through and carry out what has been in remembering the dream” (A, 389). Note first the generality of that formulation. It is the very relation between past and present that is explicated in terms of the schema of dream and awakening. The past can take for us, in memory, the form of a dream, and historical consciousness provides the occasion for the awakening from that dream. The experience of a period as a dream configuration is not the experience that such a period has of itself. It is only in retrospect (that is, for the present) that the past appears as such a dream. To say that the present must remember the dream would mean that it demands work to tap into such dimensions of the past and to find in the ordinary material gathered “the bridge to the dream.” (SW II, 239) It is part of the work of the Arcades to express that dream aspect, out of which the present awakens to itself.5 As opposed to the individual who can be awakened from sleep by light, noises, and other external disturbances, for the collective, awakening occurs out of the dream. If it is in dreaming that awakening is precipitated, one could also say that it occurs by way of an intensification that, at the same time as it forms dream consciousness, also allows its overturning. The higher articulations of dream consciousness will also more clearly

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present opportunities to awaken. Dream is not only, by definition, what one awakens from but also what allows that awakening, what precipitates it. In other words, a dream configuration would be the extreme phenomenal manifestation of the material out of which the recognition of the intentionless dialectical image emerges. By working through the dream, reality reveals its “true-surrealist-face.” (A, 464).

§2. Waiting for Awakening The individual can experience the space of memory as a dream configuration particularly insofar as images of childhood are concerned. One’s relation to one’s childhood, which Freud takes to underlie the possibility of the transformation of adulthood, is also key to Benjamin’s elaboration of the dreams of the collective: “A generation’s experience of youth has much in common with the experience of dreams. Its historical configuration is a dream configuration. Every epoch has such a side turned toward dreams, the child’s side. For the previous century, this appears very clearly in the arcades” (A, 388). The child does not experience the world as though it is a dream. Rather, looking back, the experience of childhood can appear as a dream space. “What the child (and, through faint reminiscence, the man) discovers in the pleats of the old material to which it clings while trailing at its mother’s skirts—that’s what these pages should contain” (A, 391). Note in this figure the emphasis on the close contact with, almost the immersion in, the formless material. The symbolization of such experience is not there in the “darkness of the lived moment” (A, 393). Its dream structure, just as much as the realization of its meaning, is a matter of the remembering of adulthood.6 It is in that sense that Benjamin argues that “[t]he fact that we were children during this time belongs together with its objective image. It had to be this way in order to produce this generation” (A, 390). The dream experience of the past belongs to our present. It can be seen as our collective childhood. For a child, growing up is not only a matter of nature but also of education. Education, in its highest sense, to be distinguished from mere schooling or instruction in various branches of knowledge, is possible when tradition is effective and provides the individual entering it with resources for the interpretation of his existence. In particular, tradition would provide us ways of relating ourselves to our past. It would allow us to explain the past’s peculiar distortions, its dream quality. A crisis in

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tradition, as is characteristic of modernity, makes the appropriation of that dream, which is the past, highly problematic: “whereas the education of earlier generations explained these dreams for them in terms of tradition, religious doctrine, present-day education simply amounts to the distraction of children” (A, 388). As a result, adults are left out of tradition, left in a state of uneducated children, or left to their own devices to enter the world of significance. They realize the meaning of their past only individually and in roundabout ways, depending on their peculiar genius (or pathology) and to a large extent depending on chance. There is, for Benjamin, a paradigmatic case of this individual form of appropriating the past: “Proust could emerge as an unprecedented phenomenon only in a generation that had lost all bodily and natural aids to remembrance and that, poorer than before, was left to itself to take possession of the worlds of childhood in merely an isolated, scattered, and pathological way” (A, 388). Benjamin’s Arcades Project is written out of the conviction that fulfilled experience cannot be the prerogative of the isolated genius but must be a possibility of common existence. It must be teachable, like a technique, and commonly available, like an experiment. To reestablish a medium of tradition that can provide the possibility both of interpreting the dream which is the past, and, thus, of experiencing the present as an awakened world is the aim of Benjamin’s “experiments in the technique of awakening.” The model of the individual’s relation to childhood in memory enters into the characterization of the movement in dream toward awakening: “. . . we seek a teleological moment in the context of dreams. Which is the moment of waiting. The dream waits secretly for the awakening . . . children provide the happy occasion for [the dreaming collective’s] own awakening” (A, 390). We should not understand waiting in terms of an objective, external determination of time (as though a certain number of years must pass until those who were children back then grew up) but rather in relation to the process of transformation internal to the dream’s space of meaning, through which awakening can occur. However, this does not mean that all there is to waiting is patience, as though killing time until that transformation occurs. Waiting must be understood as holding to two distinct and opposed moments. On the one hand, waiting is the gathering of forces or of potential; on the other, waiting is the seeking of an opportunity to realize that potential. In other words, awakening cannot be accounted for merely by reference to an inner transformation of the material, which would happen gradually of itself. Nor can awak-

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ening be left to chance or external contingencies. Present opportunities are there for one who has gathered enough power to recognize them. Conversely, patience is nothing unless one has the presence of mind to put its power to work. Waiting is the dialectical overcoming of the opposition between gathering energy and actively seeking “experiences” that stimulate or awaken.7 But how should we conceive of the gathering of potential in memory to be actualized in the present? We have some notion of what constitutes an accumulation of experience in an individual, whom we would then call “experienced.” Experienced persons would be those who have incorporated and bound together moments of their past experience so as to translate them into a certain practical wisdom in relation to the affairs of the present. However, I take it that the idea of waiting, which brings together the past as a dream configuration and the present opportunity for awakening from it, points to an altogether different structure. The binding of the past and the relationships established in the medium of memory do not follow the reality principle, which is constitutive of unities of experience. These relationships are not constituted by the consciously directed possibilities of voluntary memory to bring up and associate objects, faces, and stories but rather are established in their shadow, in what from the point of view of present consciousness can thus be said to be forgotten. The forgotten is present as distortions of the past in memory. This is why Benjamin speaks of the past as acquiring the quality of a dream in memory, as its potential becomes recognizable. It is in relation to that distorted form of the experience of the past that opportunities must be recognized in the present to discharge the energies bound in the dream in a healthy surge of action. “Presence of mind” depends on “the force of what is forgotten” (A, 393). However, precisely because the dream is a distortion rather than a conscious accumulation of past experience, it is far from clear what constitutes an opportunity to release its force for the use of the present. One model for tapping into the reservoir of the forgotten is elaborated in Benjamin’s account of the role of involuntary memory in the fulfillment of experience in Proust. Yet, the Proustian model shows that opportunity precisely cannot be sought and that the opening of the past and the release of its energies is essentially left to chance. Its dialectical contrast is the meaningful experience of modernity that emerges from Baudelaire’s highly planned poetry. That limit case of lyric poetry involves the heightened consciousness (or presence of mind), seeking and responding to the

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constant stimulation of a striking environment. Such “parrying of shock,” the constant involvement with stimulations, leaves little place to open up the resources of involuntary memory, to discover relationships or correspondences in the medium of memory. Benjamin’s problem is one of finding the dialectical overcoming of the polar opposition represented by the figures of Proust and Baudelaire. The dialectical image as the constructed, yet “involuntary memory of humanity” would present the tense holding together of the two extremes. Present occurrences must be brought together with the distortion of the past to release the force of the forgotten. However, it is not possible to relate directly present and past, to purposely seek opportunities to awaken from the dream. There is nevertheless the possibility of indirectly, deviantly, working toward that which cannot be reached by any purposive effort. Working in such a way as to bring about what cannot be achieved head on can also be described as the use of cunning: “The sleeper surrenders himself to death only provisionally, waits for the second when he will cunningly wrest himself from its clutches” (A, 390). Given that Odysseus is the antique figure of cunning, one understands Benjamin’s image that “the imminent awakening is poised, like the wooden horse of the Greeks, in the Troy of dreams” (A, 392). Benjamin specifically traces his understanding of the indirectness required for awakening back to Hegel’s famous idea of the cunning of history. “Every epoch . . . bears its end within itself and unfolds it—as Hegel already noticed—by cunning” (A, 13). For Hegel, cunning marks the way in which Spirit will use the strivings characteristic of humanity at a certain stage of its development in order to advance higher ends. Waiting as the expression of cunning would then require going with the dream (so to speak, surrendering to it or, as Benjamin puts it, surrendering provisionally to death). Just as Freud takes every dream to be the disguised fulfillment of a wish, Benjamin, too, often speaks of dream images as wish images. The dynamics of the dream are governed by something we call its inner purpose or the wish it seeks to fulfill. However, insofar as awakening is the fundamental experience of dialectical reversal, it is not continuous with the internal unfolding of the dream configuration. Waiting for awakening is not waiting for the fulfillment of the wish. It would primarily be understood as finding detours to avoid its fulfillment. “Only with cunning, not without it, can we work free of the realm of dream” (A, 173). For Benjamin, cunning would consist in finding that fulfillment that takes the form of the disappearance of the wish. It is necessary to find a

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way to be spared fulfillment (or at least the kind of fulfillment that the wish images seem to demand). In other words, to dream is to be subjected to the wish. It is necessary to release the energies of the dream from their bond with the fulfillment of the wish images of the dream. However, the overcoming of that subjection does not involve the frustration of the wish. Awakening must occur by way of dissolving the wish (showing it a way to come to nothing). If the dream constitutes an attempt at a fantasized fulfillment of a wish, Benjamin points to a possibility of cunningly following the elaboration of the dream material so as to fulfill it in the dissolution of the fantasy. It nevertheless requires taking elaborate detours through the complexities of the dream space to dissolve it (to accept or be able to recognize its fulfillment in its dissolution and awaken in truth). A Hassidic parable Benjamin tells in his essay on Kafka exemplifies the movement that through elaborate detours dissolves the wish rather than fulfills it: In a Hasidic village, so the story goes, Jews were sitting together in a shabby inn one Sabbath evening. They were all local people, with the exception of one person no one knew, a very poor, ragged man who was squatting in a dark corner at the back of the room. All sorts of things were discussed, and then it was suggested that everyone should tell what wish he would make if one were granted him. One man wanted money; another wished for a son-in-law; a third dreamed of a new carpenter’s bench; and so each spoke in turn. After they had finished, only the beggar in his dark corner was left. Reluctantly and hesitantly he answered the question: “I wish I were a powerful king reigning over a big country. Then some night while I was asleep in my palace, an enemy would invade my country, and by dawn his horsemen would penetrate to my castle and meet with no resistance. Roused from my sleep, I wouldn’t have time even to dress and I would have to flee in my shirt. Rushing over hill and dale and through forests day and night, I would finally arrive safely right here at the bench in this corner. This is my wish.” The others exchanged uncomprehending glances. “And what good would this wish have done you?” someone asked. “I’d have a shirt,” was the answer. (SW II, 812)

How can one wish for the everyday? How would having an ordinary shirt acquire such extraordinary significance? How would the dissolution of the wish be more than a mere return to a disenchanted everyday? Benjamin chooses Hegel’s words as an epigraph to his fourth thesis on

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the concept of history: “Seek for food and clothing first; then shall the kingdom of God be granted to you” (Hegel 1807). Taken with the parable of the beggar, this epigraph brings out a further moment central to Benjamin’s elaboration of awakening. Indeed, Benjamin speaks of “experiencing the present as waking world, a world to which the dream we name the past refers in truth” (A, 389). In other words, the interpretation of dreams does not provide us with an image of the future that the present must strive to achieve. Nor is awakening transformative in that it disenchants one with the present and thus allows one to will something beyond it. Rather, the present in its ordinariness is that to which one awakens. It can itself appear transformed in its significance, appear as a realization of the dream, which is the past. It is a transformation of the everyday rather than the expectation of an extraordinary change that is at issue for Benjamin in awakening. To further clarify this “most inconspicuous transformation,” one must conceive of the position of waiting as overcoming another antithesis between the boring and the striking. We tend to formulate the condition of waiting as something that involves boredom. There is boredom, it seems, when something lies ahead that we can do nothing but wait for. In particular, if one waits for the fulfillment of a wish, then fulfillment cannot but be conceived as the outstanding occurrence, as what puts an end to a life of waiting. It would not allow us to understand how a wish can be fulfilled in being dissolved. This is why Benjamin formulates the relation of waiting to boredom quite differently: “We are bored when we don’t know what we are waiting for. That we do know, or think we know, is nearly always the expression of our superficiality or inattention. Boredom is the threshold to great deeds” (A, 105). Boredom at its deepest is not an intentional state. We are not bored with something (say, a book) or because we have to wait for something (say, a train). Boredom relates us to that stratum of experience whose transformation is at issue in Benjamin’s work, to the everyday. The everyday can be recognized as the scene of the deepest transformation of fundamental human needs. History is not concerned with world dramas but rather, as Benjamin puts it, with “what is closest, tritest, most obvious” (A, 389). The arcades, one must remember, are in more than one sense a pedestrian phenomenon. In considering the material of memory at its deepest level, where events and characters disappear, all one seems to find is the commonplace, the boring stuff of life. Nonetheless, the everyday in its uneventfulness can appear striking in the dream. “. . . In dream . . . the rhythm of

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perception and experience is altered in such a way that everything— even the seemingly most neutral—comes to strike us; everything concerns us” (A, 206). This should not be understood as though the dream can even turn what is plainest and most boring—the everyday—into something interesting. Rather, what is expressed is an internal connection between the elaboration of meaning of the everyday and the emergence of a dream configuration. Once more Proust would be a model for this realization of the striking nature of the everyday. In Proust’s work the strict following of the principles or laws of remembrance has as its result that all that stands out in experience comes to be dissolved in a unity of memory, becomes part of one weave of meaning. “The intermittences of author and plot” appear only “as the reverse of the continuum of memory, the figure on the back side of the carpet” (SW II, 238). All that is outstanding is revealed as the unfolding of the everyday: “Can we say that all lives, works, and deeds that matter were never anything but the undisturbed unfolding of the most banal, most fleeting, most sentimental, weakest hour in the life of the one to whom they pertain?” (SW II, 238). In the transformation brought upon experience by memory Proust sacrifices “plot, unity of characters, the flow of narration, the play of the imagination” (SW II, 239). Meaning unfolds in the deep boredom in which the ordinary and the dream become one. Benjamin approvingly quotes Max Unold on the matter: “Proust managed to make the idle story interesting. He says: ‘Imagine, dear reader: yesterday I was dunking a bit of cake in my tea when it occurred to me that as a child I had spent some time in the country.’ For this he takes eighty pages, and it is so fascinating that you think you are no longer the listener but the daydreamer himself” (SW II, 239).8 Waiting would express the understanding that the striking and the boring are two sides of the same texture of life. In an important formulation Benjamin presents waiting as overcoming their antithesis by way of a spatial figure: “Waiting is, in a sense, the lined interior of boredom” (A, 118). “Boredom is a warm gray fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colorful of silks. In this fabric we wrap ourselves when we dream. We are at home in the arabesques of its lining. But the sleeper looks bored and gray within his sheath. And when he later wakes and wants to tell of what he dreamed, he communicated by and large only this boredom. For who would be able at one stroke to turn the lining of time to the outside?” (A, 106). To the temporal dimension of awakening thus corresponds a spatial figure of the transition from the interior to the open.

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§3. From the Interior to the Open The distinction between inner and outer often serves to set the space of individual consciousness in opposition to the intersubjectively or commonly available external world. Fantasy or dream would then be paradigmatic states in which there is no correspondence between inner and outer. This model, so dependent on the identification both of the inner with the supposedly private space of the individual mind and the outer with what is revealed in perception, does not allow the understanding of the emergence of truth from the dream space. Nor does it allow conceiving of dream as a characteristic of the experience of the collective. It is therefore essential to free the notion of the inner from its psychologistic underpinning. Consider that the term “inner” or “interiority” is used not only to refer to the individual mind but can also be used in relation to an interior, to a home, a dwelling place. Benjamin’s Arcades contains a convolute titled “Interior, Trace,” in which he considers the constitution of the bourgeois interior as a reaction to the emerging conditions of the metropolis. Such an interior is constituted as a counterpart to the individual’s experience of the masses, as a defense in the face of the impossibility of leaving any traces of one’s existence in the collective space of city life. Many of Benjamin’s descriptions of the bourgeois interior contain an emphasis on how it is conducive to dream: “. . . the nineteenth-century interior is itself a stimulus to intoxication and dream. This mood involves, furthermore, an aversion to the open air” (A, 216).9 This notion of the interior can be further extended and transformed in describing the phenomenon of the arcades. It is no longer understood in terms of the house or the domestic dwelling but rather as an internalization of the street: “Streets are the dwelling place of the collective” (A, 423). Flânerie already provides a way to think of the city as an interior: “. . . flânerie can transform Paris into one great interior” (A, 422). But it is the arcades that are for the collective the prototypes of all such interiors: “More than anywhere else, the street reveals itself in the arcade as the furnished and familiar interior of the masses” (A, 423). Arcades are the “inner boulevards.” This spatial determination has a correlate in terms of the structure of dream: “Arcades are houses or passages having no outside—like the dream” (A, 406). To explain this relation between the interior and the dream, one must go beyond the mere fact that arcades were “covered” streets (i.e., streets turned into an “interior” space), as well as beyond any psychological and sociological expli-

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cation of what it is to feel at home in them. It is the possibility of internalization of the surroundings that can lead to an insight into the relation between the interior and the dream. The interior, at the most fundamental level, must be understood as a mode of inhabitation and incorporation of meaningful surroundings of existence. Put differently, it should be elaborated, just like nearness and distance, as the spatiality proper to the corporeal substance. It is ultimately to be viewed as a dimension of the internal relation of corporeal substance to a configuration of embodied mind. Benjamin calls the capacity for an incorporation of the surroundings of life the “mimetic faculty.” Yet one should not think of this capacity psychologistically as if first we have an individual mind that is separated from a specifiable objective world, which is then mimetically identified with and thus internalized. Rather, the more one is manifest to oneself as corporeal substance and the higher the degree of concentration and interpenetration of the forms of embodiment, the more one can be said to mimetically incorporate one’s configuration of existence.10 Benjamin brings out the primal, mythical form of dwelling in the following: “The original form of all dwelling is existence not in the house but in the shell. The shell bears the impression of its occupant. In the most extreme instance, the dwelling becomes a shell” (A, 220). In that figure the occupant and its encircling world are not just “adapted.” One does not merely respond more or less successfully to encounters with objects in one’s surroundings. There is a stronger sense of the possibility of the inhabitant to take the form of, be an imprint of, the surroundings: The figure of the mollusk in its shell further indicates a certain formlessness inherent in this incorporation. I take this figure to indicate that distortion is the condition of the space of meaning in which the incorporation of one’s surroundings is manifest. An environment is essentially different from an object given to consciousness. It cannot be simply identified, broken into parts, isolated, and studied. The manifestation of the incorporation of an environment in consciousness would make certain images stand for or gather the amorphous surroundings. These are the dream images. Formlessness is typical of dream consciousness, of “the amorphous dream configuration” precisely to the extent that such consciousness gathers in images an environment of life. The dream image can be the locus of a wealth of meaning that does not belong to a single specifiable object of consciousness. The deformation of dream images is the manifestation of the internalization of the surroundings. The collective gives body to this internalization in

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the arcades. The arcades provide a gathering point in wish images of the yet-to-be-articulated environment of life. Deformation and distortion, which are characteristic of dream images, reflect the mode of appearance of surroundings in memory. For such surroundings precisely are the deepest stratum of memory, beyond all specific determinants of individual memory. This is yet another way in which Benjamin accounts for the relation of the everyday—the surroundings of our activities—and the dream. What becomes further clear is the necessity to go through the dream to arrive at truth. With this understanding of the formlessness of the dream images that emerge from the internalization of the surroundings, we rejoin the temporal dimension of realization. For dream images are the condensation of a broader reality to be given expression. It is with respect to them that one can speak of a potential or tendency to realize their truth. Thus, as we think of the material Benjamin gathers in The Arcades Project, the dream images formed in this concentration of vast expanses of meaning should not be identified with the dialectical image whose figure is the constellation. The latter is the correlate of awakening. However, dream images can be thought of as the stars in the constellation, that is, as the condensation of the phenomenal material into a limited number of contents. Through that condensation or gathering, the material acquires its illumination, that is, the phenomena come to appear to contain more meaning than what they would have in fact or as facts. Indeed, this seems to be what Benjamin expresses in a letter: “The dialectical image does not draw a copy of the dream—it was never my intention to assert this. But it does seem to me to contain the instances, the moment consciousness dawns as one awakens, and indeed to produce its likeness only from these passages just as an astral image emerges from luminous points” (C, 508). One should in effect not confuse the dreamy luminosity of the stars with truth emerging as those stars are constellated. Nevertheless, it is only out of the luminous, one might say auratic, condensation of the material that a constellation can be spanned. Put differently, the interiorization that is characteristic of dream consciousness is the condition of the monadic construction. It is that which brings into a specific phenomenon the wealth of meaning that allows it to refract in an abbreviated form the world of ideas. The semblance, ambiguity, or formlessness of the dream is necessary to the revelation of the monadic structure of truth. Monads that do not refract the world distinctly and clearly are, as Leibniz himself would put it, slumbering. However, it is

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only the mimetic internalization of the environment in a dream configuration that opens the possibility of a monadic construction of truth. It is only insofar as the expanse is gathered in dream images that the truth of such concentration can emerge. The monadic construction is the overcoming of the opposition of internal and external. Indeed, for a monad, there is no outside. The monad, as Leibniz puts it, has no windows. However, this is because what we call external has been internalized and expressed from its individual being. Benjamin indeed calls the arcades “a windowless home” (A, 532), relating it thus both to the dream, which has no exterior, and to the monad, which has no windows onto the world: “The true has no windows. Nowhere does the true look out to the universe. . . . What is found within the windowless house is the true” (A, 840).11

REMARK Dream and Awakening in the Berlin Childhood Berlin Childhood around 1900 was composed between 1932 and 1934, as Benjamin left the continent and its cities for the rural setting of the island of Ibiza, off the coast of Spain. By 1938, it had been reworked, and a short but important introduction had been added to the series of passages bearing titles such as “Loggias,” “Imperial Panorama,” “The Butterfly Hunt,” “Winter Morning,” and “Winter Evening.” The work did not appear in Benjamin’s life, though some of its parts have been printed separately in various publications. The opening lines of the text provide a motivation and a goal for the writing: “In 1932, when I was abroad, it became clear to me that I would soon have to bid a long, perhaps lasting farewell to the city of my birth” (SW III, 344). With the impending loss comes the danger of melancholy, and, to face it, Benjamin engages in a process of inoculation, deliberately calling to mind “those images which, in exile, are most apt to waken homesickness: images of childhood.” His autobiographical writing initially presents itself as a subjective strategy of defense, something of a cathartic practice, with the help of which “the feeling of longing would

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no more gain mastery over [his] spirit than a vaccine does over a healthy body” (SW III, 344). Immediately however, the emphasis shifts from an attempt to control the outpour of sentiment to the possibility of reaching insight or understanding through those images. Specifically, Benjamin puts forth the puzzling claim that it is not the recollection of the images in itself but the insight achieved through them into what he calls the irretrievability of the past that would limit the melancholic potential of memory. I say “puzzling” since why would not recalling images of childhood precisely be a mode of retrieval of the past? Is it that by recalling the childhood memories, one would be able to embed them in a historical context and thus achieve objective understanding to replace the subjective early impressions? While on the right track, this solution would in effect establish too stark a contrast between a mature knowledge of reality and an illusory perspective of childhood. This reality check might explain why the early relation to the world becomes irretrievable, but it would hardly be of help for homesickness, in which the devotion to one’s memories knows no bound. A further, more nuanced possibility of balancing the attachment to the past, with the retrospective recognition of its meaning, is suggested as Benjamin writes, “The images of my metropolitan childhood perhaps are capable at their core, of preforming later historical experience” (SW III, 344). The term “preforming” suggests that the transition between the innocence of childhood and adult experience is to be achieved within the space of memory. The idea of opening up from out of the depths of memory the mature vistas of the present itself seems to raise almost insuperable difficulties. It would demand finding in memory a path from the contingent personal, if not private, recollections to a communicable image of a shared, collective past. A number of established oppositions are thus drawn into this reconception of memory and must be themselves recast: between inside and outside, subjective and objective, private and collective, image and concept, as well as feeling and meaning. The title of Benjamin’s work Berlin Childhood around 1900 can provide a way into those difficulties. It brings together time, space, and a particular experiential world: childhood, in the city, around that time. Such a title structure would suggest the telescoping of the times in the environment and the environment in the individual’s space of experience. It would point to the possibility of finding a level or a dimension of memory in which those surroundings common to all are refracted. The

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memories at issue would then be those of a particular person but not such that have to do with the particular course of that person’s life. Even more important, the depths of experience probed in memory would not recover what we would call the city landscape—the streets, parks, and monuments of Berlin—but rather the experience of an environment of life, the images in which “the experience of the big city is precipitated in a child of the middle class” (SW III, 344). Since surroundings are not your usual kinds of things, one might wonder whether a child would pay attention to them at all. Indeed, what would it be for us to do so? For thought or perception needs an object, and surroundings would just be too diffuse to get a hold of. Moreover, the deeper the level of experience probed and the more independent of faces, names, events, and stories, the less it would seem up to us to deliberately bring them to mind. Benjamin is well aware of the problem, for he raises it in discussing Proust’s famous recollection of his childhood surroundings, the town of Combray, which entirely depends on chance and cannot be elicited by a voluntary effort of memory. Note, then, that Benjamin is not saying that he is reminded of various images perceived in childhood, as though recalling the things he has seen. He is rather saying that the experience of the city can come together in images. In other words, an image, as the term is used here, is not the correlate of a past perceptual experience but rather something emerging in memory, standing for and gathering a multiplicity of perceptions that may not have been intentional objects of consciousness. Images of an environment of living would be such that they are formed in memory yet not for that reason fantastic. Memory is not merely an instrument for information retrieval but a medium in which the past undergoes processes and in which it can be reworked. The result is not thereby a falsification of experience, as though the initial perception must, ipso facto, have the highest grade of truthfulness. The formation of the image would occur on a plane wholly different from the one the deliberate act of memory can be directed to. The term Benjamin uses to characterize the emergence of the images, “precipitation,” suggests that when memory is saturated, that mass can undergo of itself a change of state. An image in the text can serve to support this characterization. Precipitation brings to mind the weather and in particular those rainy days whose importance in the Berlin Childhood has in part to do with the overall quality that rain brings to the city. It makes it a uniform gray, a whole with no shading, and brings it out as an environment in a mood

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that is also manifest in a transformed sense of time. (In rainy weather, as Benjamin puts it, “from morning until evening one can do the same thing.”) However, the image in which that whole environment is precipitated bears no obvious similarity to it. It is the otter in the zoo. For the child, the otter is the “sacred animal of the rainwater”: “. . . when I gazed into the water,” Benjamin writes, “it always seemed as though the rain poured down into all the street drains of the city only to end up in this one basin and nourish its inhabitant . . . whether it was formed in this runoff of the rains, or only fed from arriving streams and rivulets, is something I could not have decided” (SW III, 366). The child would endlessly wait to catch a glimpse of the “glistening inmate of the cistern,” which, after briefly darting up to the surface, would immediately “hurry back to urgent affairs below” (SW III, 366). Something similar might be said of the images of memory. They are fleeting, difficult to hold on to, precisely insofar as their force is not in grasping them in isolation but as a gathering point for a whole environment of meaning. Such is the case with another image, this one of summer, the image of the butterfly hunt: “Between us, now,” Benjamin writes, “the old law of the hunt took hold: the more I strove to conform, in all the fibers of my being, to the animal—the more the butterfly itself, in everything it did, took on the color of human volition; and in the end, it was as if its capture was the price I had to pay to regain my human existence” (SW III, 351). Not only does the metamorphic creature par excellence become the object of the mimetic transformation of the child, but that identification itself is also the support for a deeper, more formless, absorbing of the surroundings. The flight of the butterflies is governed by “the conspiring elements— winds and scents, foliage and sun” (SW III, 350). By his use of the word “conspiracy” Benjamin suggests that the elements come together through some secret plan, of which the butterfly becomes the image. The ephemeral creature can become a gathering point for those diverse intangible dimensions and, through its flight, allow them to enter the child. It is certainly possible to reduce surroundings to a summing up of things or facts in space and time and then describe the movement of the butterfly in terms of the various factors causally affecting it. However, to capture the experiential specificity of a world would be to see it in terms of a confluence of what might be neither physically nor psychologically related. In mimetic immersion the imagination does not just cast a net over a single colorful object but instead gathers through that object a large and disparate variety of phenomena. These then allow it to gradually bring out hid-

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den relationships (or what Benjamin calls nonsensuous similarities) among them by way of the image at their center. The image would then don what Benjamin calls in a different context an aura and would return to us a meaningful gaze, rewarding us with meaning for the attention we pay it, just like the butterfly would seem to “take the color of human volition” when the child tracks it. As the butterfly joins others of its kind in the collection, pinned down in a specimen box, the passage raises the question of turning this ephemeral meeting point (ephemeral, precisely in being a meeting point) into something amenable to recognition, if not to a secure possession by way of theoretization or classifications. Benjamin tells how “the spirit of the doomed creature entered into the hunter. From the foreign language in which the butterfly and the flowers had come to an understanding before his eyes, he now derived some precepts” (SW III, 351). The adult translation of these childhood precepts would not occur by one’s becoming a lepidopterist but rather through the remembrance that realizes their meaning. As the images of the otter and the butterfly might already have suggested, the formlessness of the environment is matched by the way in which the images in which it is precipitated are not synthesized by a knowing consciousness. To insist on their being images also means that the perceptions they gather are not brought together according to a narrative pattern, through succession and causality. Rather, they come together in memory as an imaginary, akin to a dream configuration. This is not to say that childhood in the city is experienced, in general, by the child as a dream. Rather, in memory, that environment can initially manifest itself by the coming together of elements to form images that have much in common with dreams. Provisionally summing up, it is possible, I believe, to recognize two distinct stages in the process of condensation in memory. In the first stage the formlessness of the surroundings is precipitated in dream images, the composite images that the Berlin Childhood tries to hold on to. However, Benjamin further writes, “I believe it possible that a fate expressly theirs is held in reserve for such images” (SW III, 344), suggesting that the dream images are yet to undergo another change of state or crystallize into truth. The realization of the surroundings in meaning from what is initially a dream configuration is, to put it somewhat provocatively, a case of “dream come true.” This might explain why Benjamin opens the passage of the Berlin Childhood titled “Winter Morning” with an

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invocation of the realm of the fairy tale: “The fairy in whose presence we are granted a wish is there for each of us.” The wish Benjamin tells of, which every child having to go to school knows only too well, is “to be able to sleep my fill.” “I must have made that wish a thousand times,” Benjamin writes, “and later it actually came true. But it was a long time before I recognized its fulfillment in the fact that all my cherished hopes for a position and proper livelihood had been in vain” (15). The bittersweet tone of the concluding line, in which the moment of recognition occurs, suggests to me that the ironic fulfillment of the wish can be more than simple disillusionment, the dashing of hopes. To justify this intuition would demand attending to the peculiar temporal structure described, first in the very formation of the wish, then in the description of fulfillment, and finally in the relation established between wish and fulfillment. The wish, Benjamin writes, “took shape in me with the approach of the lamp, which, early on a winter morning, at half past six, would cast the shadow of my nursemaid on the covers of my bed” (SW III, 357). The nursemaid opens the door of the oven and places in it an apple, and it is the projection of the “grating of the burner door . . . outlined in a red flickering on the floor,” as well as “the fine bubbly fragrance,” (SW III, 357) that draws the child out of bed without quite waking him up. The smell sustains the child on the way to school, and it is only as he arrives at the class bench that the wish escapes him and is uttered. The initial formation of the wish and its ultimate formulation and uttering are distinct, then, separated by unformed experiences that provide a substrate for meaning to accumulate, for the wish to don its aura. The shadow, the smell, and the flickering image of light provide the wish with an afterlife that the mere thought—“I really do not want to go to school”—however intense and recurrent it may be, would not have. A similar separation of moments exists in relation to fulfillment as Benjamin writes: “later [the wish] actually came true, but it was a long time before I recognized its fulfillment” (SW III, 358). This suggests that the actual fulfillment of the wish to sleep is no longer at issue (no doubt since it is no longer part of one’s image of happiness); rather, the focus of recognition becomes the temporally and logically distinct possibility of forming a meaningful link between past and present. The deviousness of the overall temporality of realization is emphasized as Benjamin writes that “few of us know how to remember the wish we have made; and so, few of us recognize its fulfillment later in our lives”

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(SW III, 357). There is an essential discontinuity between wish and fulfillment, a lack of temporal contiguity, causal, or even teleological connection between them. If anything, there is rather what Benjamin describes in another context as a Copernican revolution around the axis of the present. This means that a present circumstance is recognized as the hinge upon which the meaning of the past turns and through which the unformed memories can come together in a single, meaningful unity. Making this more than an allegory would risk romanticizing or aestheticizing the course of Benjamin’s life. Still, the point of the allegory is not just to establish the distinction between awakened realization and the achievements of knowledge but also, through it, the possibility of an affirmative stance in the face of failure and adult disappointments. One would not want to dismiss the hopes, the wishes of the past as mere illusions; nor would one want to embrace them wholeheartedly and affirm only that course of life in which they can be fulfilled as they are. So Benjamin structures his little image on the pattern of a predicament that is familiar from fairy tales, where fulfillment can make us regret ever having uttered a wish. We so to speak did not realize how a world in which that wish came true would look like. This just underscores the fact that while the fulfillment of the uttered wish is in having all the time in the world to sleep, it is the emerging meaning context—the possibility of retelling life against the grain—that would constitute the awakened realization of that past. In this rescue of the past the virtues in demand are not the usual kind of heroism. As Benjamin puts it, the traditional courage of the hero (Mut in German) is polarized in the fairy tale into cunning (Untermut) and high spirits (Übermut). Think of it as the cunning required to see the devious paths that can be formed between present and past, as well as the good spirits necessary to affirm the sobering formulation the past achieves in the present. The model of truthful memory correlative with this form of affirmation of the past is not that of reliving the past or empathically identifying with one’s former self. Benjamin’s autobiography is not a regressive or sentimental attempt to recapture the taste of childhood. Rather, insight requires the translation of the past by way of the space of present experience. It might also result in taking leave of the past.

To characterize the spatial scheme of the transition from the captivating dream images to their meaningful realization in remembrance, consider

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a last passage titled “The Sock.” In it the child climbs into a closet and works his way through the contents to the back: There I would come upon my socks, which lay piled in traditional fashion— that is to say, rolled up and turned inside out. Every pair had the appearance of a little pocket. For me, nothing surpassed the pleasure of thrusting my hand as deeply as possible into its interior. I did not do this for the sake of the pocket’s warmth. It was “the little present” rolled up inside that I always held in my hand and that drew me into the depths. When I had closed my fist around it and, so far as I was able, made certain that I possessed the stretchable woolen mass, there began the second phase of the game, which brought with it the unveiling. For now I proceeded to unwrap “the present,” to tease it out of its woolen pocket. I drew it ever nearer to me, until something rather disconcerting would happen: I had brought out “the present,” but “the pocket” in which it had lain was no longer there. I could not repeat the experiment on this phenomenon often enough. (SW III, 374)

In the description of this childhood experiment is a pronounced element of desire, almost an erotic component. However, what most grabs the child’s attention and provokes astonishment is not getting hold of the attractive object but rather its disappearance, neither by having the desire fulfilled nor by having it frustrated. It is dissolved by the disappearance of what allows for that structure of desire at all: the distance, veiling, or the secrecy that made for the attraction. Desire that seeks to possess the attractive “present” is itself worked through and extinguished on the way to its realization. In terms of our earlier discussion, think of the pocket as the meaning of the surroundings, in which the images of the past, which provoke longing, are sheltered.12 The images appear to us significant far beyond any factual basis they would have and provoke longing precisely because they are veiled by that aura of meaning. The reality of the past is not the result of simple exposure of what is beneath an imaginary appearance but must do justice to the quest of one’s longing and show those dreams to be truthful rather than self-alienating fantasies. Placing the images in an objective, independently arrived at context is no solution. For what is not given to us as a set of facts is that unity of the surrounding world. It is precisely the images that allow the surroundings to come together. The image is not put in context; rather, the context can be made explicit by way of the gathering power of the image. The work of interpretation or analysis would result, if we follow the unfolding of the socks, in the formation of a single plane of

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meaning, where no distinction can be drawn between the attractive object and the unformed veil. In tightening the many fine threads that linked the image to its life, in giving a form to the surroundings that emerge from it, the image would be dissolved in them and become unremarkable, part of a uniform weave of meaning. The past would thereby be rescued, redeemed by giving it a stable form, a higher degree of actuality in the present. Yet, it would also become, just like the present in its pocket, irretrievable. Realizing the irretrievability of the past would in effect occur in the very movement of rescue, which makes its desirable appearance disappear.

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6 MYTH

“In this work,” writes Benjamin, “I mean to wrest from primal history [Urgeschichte] a portion of the nineteenth century” (A, 393). Combating the resurgence of myth is an explicit task of the writing of history: “To cultivate fields where, until now, only madness has reigned. Forge ahead with the whetted axe of reason, looking neither right nor left so as not to succumb to the horror that beckons from deep in the primeval forest. Every ground must at some point have been made arable by reason, must have been cleared of the undergrowth of delusion and myth. This is to be accomplished here for the terrain of the nineteenth century” (A, 456). Awakening, the realization of dream images, occurs by means of a struggle against the burden of myth that reemerged in modernity. The dialectical image is recognized in the struggle with the primal.1 In myth are manifest the violence and the suffering of humanity’s slumberous existence. However, the outlines of myth are not easily recognizable in the modern landscape. The hold of notions such as fate, guilt, and eternal recurrence must be revealed in the structure of the modern world.2 That is, they must be recognized in relation to phenomena such as money, the market, commodity, fashion, and technology: “Isn’t there a certain structure of money,” Benjamin asks, “that can be recognized only in fate, and a certain structure of fate that can be recognized only in money?” (A, 496). Different types inhabiting the space of the arcades (gambler, flâneur, dandy, prostitute) will appear as the peculiarly modern versions of archaic figures, caught up in the field of mythical forces, or evading it by uncommon means. In the next chapter, through the elaboration of the place of Baudelaire in The Arcades Project, I am more specific about the concrete character112

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istics of the nineteenth century as a mythical formation, but here I remain with the broader characterization of the complex configuration of nature, myth, and history. A simple schema of their relations would be successive: Nature would be a source or ground upon which human capacities come to be exercised so as to give form to what is properly human life. Mythic consciousness would then be understood as prehistory, as primitive mentality, or as the first mode of organization of nature.3 History would be the gradual cultivation of humankind, the progress away from primitive elements and the gradual imposition of humanity’s dominion over nature. Benjamin does not adopt any such progressive ordering. Just as in history writing the time-bound material itself can present a timeless archetype, so the mythical and the natural, themselves seemingly external to historical succession, are seen to emerge anew. What Benjamin calls “ur-history” would bring those elements together in their new and specific grouping in the consideration of a unique historical object. The nineteenth century must be seen as a reconfiguration of the interplay of nature, myth, and history: “Only where the nineteenth century would be presented as originary form of primal history—in a form, that is to say, in which the whole of primal history groups itself anew in images appropriate to that century—only there does the concept of a primal history of the nineteenth century have meaning” (A, 463). Nature is not to be viewed as gradually mastered by the progress of humankind. Rather, at every point nature is opened up and reveals itself in new ways, in the “living arrangements” of human beings (A, 393). With the new configuration of living and the dissolution of old orders, myth also emerges: “Just as technology is always revealing nature from a new perspective, so also, as it impinges on human beings, it constantly makes for variations in their most primordial passions, fears, and images of longing” (A, 393). Thus, precisely in those phenomena that most rapidly transform modes of living, such as technology or capitalism, myth will reemerge. “Capitalism was a natural phenomenon with which a new dream-filled sleep came over Europe and through it, a reactivation of mythic forces” (A, 391). Benjamin, after Marx, is concerned with the discrepancy, at certain historical junctures, between the possibilities opened by the new means of production and the old social order. However, instead of stressing, as Marx would, the dimension of ideology in which the old strives to retain

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control over the new, he shows how their interpenetration produces a reconfiguration of the primal past: Corresponding to the form of the new means of production, which in the beginning is still ruled by the form of the old (Marx), are images in the collective consciousness in which the old and the new interpenetrate. These images are wish images; in them the collective seeks both to overcome and to transfigure the immaturity of the social product and the inadequacies of the social organization of production. At the same time, what emerges in these wish images is the resolute effort to distance oneself from all that is antiquated—which includes however the recent past. These tendencies deflect the imagination (which is given impetus by the new) back upon the primal past. (A, 4)

The overcoming of the dominion of myth in the collective is a task of the realization of history. The dialectical image viewed as an archetype introduces measure against myth. However, the standard or measure provided by the dialectical image is not just a means by which to achieve some distance from primal chaos. The construction of history reveals a more original life, as though a new sphere of innocence. A life that one might want to call more natural comes to be recognized in the very construction of the historical object.4 The dialectical image would be true to nature not by imitating an already given nature but by revealing creaturely life in history, “the indestructibility of the highest life in things” (A, 459).

§1. Life and Meaning The following considerations concerning the relation of life and the fulfillment of meaning have been addressed in various forms in the preceding chapters, but because of their special difficulties it is worth deriving them, yet again, from a slightly different perspective. In his essay on translation, Benjamin defends his use of the concept of life to express the temporality of meaning of literary works and argues that the attribution of life and afterlife to works of art is in no way metaphorical. Indeed, he aims to reconceive the notion of life apart from the strictly biological determinations of the organic, the animal, the sensuous, or ideas of the soul: “The concept of life is given its due only if everything that has a history of its own, and is not merely the setting for

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history, is credited with life. In the final analysis, the range of life must be determined by the standpoint of history rather than that of nature, least of all by such tenuous factors as sensation and soul” (SW I, 255). Life has been understood traditionally in terms of purposiveness, in terms of the capacity for self-formation in accordance with inner purposes. The causality of life, involving final causes or purposiveness, is  contrasted with the effective causality of the inanimate explainable merely in terms of mechanistic principles. In human beings such life would be regulated by the exercise of the will, the faculty of desire. It will then be regarded as ruled to a lesser or greater degree by laws or principles imposed by our rational capacities. Benjamin relies on the traditional link of life and purposiveness but transforms it: “The relationship between life and purposiveness, seemingly obvious yet almost beyond the grasp of the intellect, reveals itself only if the ultimate purpose toward which all the individual purposiveness of life tends is sought not in its own sphere but in a higher one. All purposeful manifestations of life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis have their end not in life but in the expression of its nature, in the presentation (Darstellung) of its significance” (SW I, 255; translation modified). With the traditional understanding of the relation between life and purposiveness, that which is alive, the living being or organism is the end of its own organization. In Benjamin’s formulation we should be attentive to distinction that emerges in relation to what counts as internal and what external to the purposive manifestations of life. Benjamin draws a distinction between purpose and ultimate end or terminus. For it would seem that purpose is that state of the living being toward which it strives, that which organizes its living structure so as to be able to achieve that striving. It is thus internal to the living being. However, the ultimate end that Benjamin identifies—significance—is not something that the living being can strive for or achieve by way of its own organization. It is not to be conceived in purposive terms. The very striving of the living being, the purposiveness of its life, is itself referred to a ground beyond that striving. With regard to human life, one could call its purpose, that which human life strives for, happiness. However, its final end, that which constitutes the fulfillment of the tendency of life, is the realization of meaning inherent in that striving, not the achievement of the goal of that striving itself. By distinguishing purpose and end Benjamin further implies that the realization of meaning takes place not in life but in the afterlife of

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that being insofar as the question of happiness partakes in the broader, more encompassing life revealed in history. Moreover, the revelation of that higher life might be manifest not in the successes of humanity to achieve its ends but rather in viewing all the failures in human history, in viewing history catastrophically.(See on this matter chapter 9.) Viewed in this way, fulfillment as the expression of significance is both internal and external to the purposiveness of living beings. It is for that reason that Benjamin claims that even natural life is to be understood, philosophically, from the standpoint of history rather than nature: “The philosopher’s task consists in comprehending all of natural life through the more encompassing life of history” (SW I, 255). Insofar as the task of expressing nature falls to humankind in history, then nature as well must be understood from the standpoint of history. This does not constitute a reduction of life to history, as though what we call life is in fact always already mediated or constructed for human interests. Rather, the emphasis is on the possibility of revealing, even in the artificial forms of human life, by way of construction, the “more encompassing life of history” (my emphasis). There is, then, on Benjamin’s understanding an implicit possibility of discovering in human forms of life a higher life in which not the individual but rather humanity partakes. Whereas a form of life is ultimately understood through its possibilities of realization in history, it can also remain in an unrealized state, in a cycle of the ever same: “life within the magic circle of return makes for an existence that never emerges from the auratic” (A, 119). The individual or the collective would remain absorbed, spellbound by such condition. Life has to be wrested out of that state through its meaningful articulation, by its realization in meaning. In its formless state life belongs to the sphere of myth, and it is bound to the mythical notion of fate. Recall that in Benjamin’s essay on language, the Fall was conceived in terms of the problem of the realization of meaning posed by the emergence of judgment in language. In naming, value (goodness) is manifest in giving expression. With judgment, value becomes a matter of articulating contentful laws that distinguish good from evil states of affairs. The understanding of original sin as the condition in which naming is replaced by judgment is reflected in Benjamin’s understanding of the tree of knowledge: “The tree of knowledge stood in the garden of God not in order to dispense information on good and evil, but as an emblem of judgment over the questioner. This immense irony marks the mythic con-

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ception of law” (SW I, 72). Original guilt is then not a matter of breaking the law but rather of forming that relation to value that conceives of it in terms of laws. Guilt is inherent in the position of questioning that seeks knowledge (in the form of laws). Human beings are already guilty insofar as the good given to them to partake in, by the realization of creation, is transformed into an approach to that law that supposedly would allow them to distinguish good and evil, innocence from guilt. Original sin lies in the very constitution of value as knowledge of that distinction. In that essay Benjamin argues that natural life itself comes to be affected by the rule of the concept. The fall of man from the task of naming nature is manifest as a mood of nature, its sadness. Sadness is that mood in which echoes the muteness of nature left unexpressed by humanity. Moreover, the Fall into judgment is the appearance of an inherent ambiguity in meaning, which Benjamin introduces by way of the notion of “overnaming.” Overnaming would characterize not only the fact that the perspective of judgment makes possible many ways to refer to a thing (as opposed to the singular immediacy of the name). The ambiguity inherent in meaning is also manifest in the emergence of life as a field of fate. It would mark humanity’s entanglement in life. For Benjamin, fate is never something assigned to individuals as a destiny of their own. Actions of individuals are not dictated by fate, nor does their personality or character determine their fate. Rather, fate is for Benjamin the field of life insofar as it produces systematic ambiguity of meaning. Subjection to fate would be identified with the failure to articulate life in language, thereby suffering its inherent ambiguity: “Fate is the guilt context of the living. It corresponds to the natural condition of the living . . . It is not therefore really man who has fate; rather the subject of fate is indeterminate . . . It is never man but only the life in him that [judgment] strikes—the part involved in natural guilt and misfortune by virtue of semblance” (SW I, 204). Insofar as fate is identified with the dominion of the formlessness of life over individuals, then its overcoming would demand articulating life in meaning. Conversely, where meaningful forms of life disintegrate, the entanglement in life, namely the ambiguity of myth, takes over. So, for instance, Benjamin takes Goethe’s Elective Affinities to be a study of the problem of the emergence of the mythical forces that arise in the dissolution of the bond of marriage. A different context, maybe closer to the concerns of the Arcades, is the analysis of the constitution of the

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laws governing common existence in the essay “On the Critique of Violence.”

§2. Life and Law How is life conceived from the point of view of history? What are the forms of life of the collective, and how is its highest life distinct from the  forms of life in society determined by law, norms, and habits? Indeed, how is the relation of law and life to be formulated? What are the different forms of introducing order, law, or measure to life? We speak of laws as ordering life or as giving form to life. But this does not make law a realization of life in meaning. Established law does provide a way to turn the indeterminacy and ambiguity characteristic of the field of fate into a specifiable assignment of guilt to a person. However, it is, for Benjamin, a problematic form of setting the individual apart from the context of life, attributing guilt to the person for a determinate deed, and ignoring the share of guilt to be traced back to the field of life itself. “The laws of fate—misfortune and guilt—are elevated by law to measures of the person” (SW I, 203). The infraction of the law is that which makes the person guilty and on account of which that person then incurs punishment. This would disregard the nonpersonal guilt pertaining to the condition of life itself and which preexists the infraction, indeed, preexists law itself. Fate is that condition of life that is essentially guilty. It is the guilt of life as such that precipitates the visible misstep. The establishment of law would allow associating this indeterminable guilt with a specific misdeed, an action chosen by an individual, in relation to which one could then speak of the necessity of punishment. This priority of guilt over infraction is also at the basis of Benjamin’s rejection of the view that associates the suffering of fate as a punishment imposed by the gods for a religious offense. This latter view is just as much a distortion of the notion of fate as is the narrowing of guilt to the infraction of the law. For the issue is not the nature of the offense or against whom it was committed. The precedence of guilt over law characteristic of the field of fate is expressed, according to Benjamin, in the prevalence of unwritten laws in mythic existence: “Laws and circumscribed frontiers remain, at least in primeval times, unwritten laws. A man can unwittingly infringe upon them and thus incur retribution. For each intervention of law that is provoked by an offense against the unwritten and unknown law is called

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“retribution” (in contradistinction to “punishment”). But however unluckily it may befall its unsuspected victim, its occurrence is, in the understanding of the law, not chance, but fate showing itself once again in its deliberate ambiguity” (SW I, 249). I take it that by speaking of unwritten law Benjamin points to the mythological figuration of a field in which, as far as the human form of life is concerned, there is no preexisting law. Unwritten law, then, does not mean natural law. Indeed, the point of Benjamin’s analysis is to argue that there is no initial lawful determinacy to natural life. Until it is fulfilled by history, it remains essentially ambiguous. Is there liberation from fate, and how is it related to the articulation or ordering of the unformed context of life? Moreover, how would transformations in the organization of the collective under laws (say, the emergence of a new order of law) relate to the task of the realization of meaning? Some of the central philosophers of the nineteenth century, such as Hegel or Nietzsche, addressed the issue by referring to the model provided by ancient tragedy. Benjamin, following them, takes this context as fundamental; yet, the contrast he draws between tragedy and Trauerspiel should itself alert us that he seeks a different solution. In tragedy the original condition of guilt, associated with the unformed context of life, is made visible. Life can become manifest in its controlling violence in the destiny of the one suffering the consequences of its essential ambiguity. In tragedy the ambiguous movement of life would be arrested. This arrest would become visible as a dead end or paradox in the life of the tragic hero. Given that ambiguity is the mark of the demonic, we can understand Benjamin’s claim that “The tragic is to the demonic what the paradox is to ambiguity” (O, 109). In paradox evasiveness in ambiguity is arrested even if for the hero who embodies the paradox there is no satisfying solution. The hero falls silent, but this bringing of the paradox to light is enough to have the silence of the hero be one of defiance. Such silence would not signal a lack but rather fulfillment, a state to which nothing can be added. Silence is correlative with the absorptive individuation of the tragic hero who has made fate his “inner, self-discovered possession.” The tragic hero is said to “die of immortality.” Insofar as the suffering the hero undergoes works toward the overcoming of the unformed life, toward the formation of law for the community, it should be called “sacrifice” rather than mere punishment. Indeed, as Benjamin notes, the nobility of tragic heroes is in no way inconsistent with their guilt, for such guilt is not moral guilt. In

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tragedy law emerges in relation to a previously undefined expanse of life by way of the concentration of that life in the person of the tragic hero. His existence has something of the prophetic to it. He makes a new law manifest for the coming community at the price of the collapse of his own existence, and his death is not punishment for a misdeed but rather sacrifice, which constitutes not only retribution but also expiation and atonement. While tragedy constitutes a response to the fatal nature of unformed life, it is one that, according to Benjamin, does not ultimately escape the violence of the mythical world: “Far from inaugurating a purer sphere, the mythic manifestation of immediate violence shows itself fundamentally identical with all legal violence” (SW I, 249). For that reason, it is necessary to further contrast the dissolution of myth into history attempted in Benjamin’s work with the solution of tragedy. One of the central differences between the overcoming provided in Benjamin’s conception of history and the tragic scheme is that, whereas the latter establishes a new order of law, the dialectical image redeems life by revealing what might be called its innocence. To elaborate this difficult notion of innocent life, consider first the way Benjamin understands it in individual existence. The innocence of life is not, for him, thematized by way of the figure of the one who has not yet entered into the order of law or the forms of society (say, through the figures of the noble savage or the child). Similarly, innocence is not identified through the figure of virginity. For even if one of the most significant manifestations of the ambiguity of life, of what Benjamin calls the “demonic,” is the sphere of sexuality, virginity merely avoids rather than overcomes the guilt associated with such life. Virginity, moreover, as Benjamin points out, is still part of the world of myth, as is, for example, evident in the demand that an object of sacrifice be pure: “. . . the natural innocence of life . . . is not tied to sexuality—not even in the mode of denial—but rather solely to its antipode, the spirit (which is equally natural)” (SW I, 335). Benjamin conceives of the innocence of the individual as bringing to life determinacy, which altogether avoids the guilt inherent in the ambiguity of fate. Yet it is not a determinacy that results from deciding to act according to the law but rather a determinacy of character: “Just as the sexual life of man can become the expression of natural guilt, his spiritual life, based on the variously constituted unity of his individuality, can become the expression of natural innocence. This unity of individual

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spiritual life is ‘character.’ Unequivocalness, as its essential constitutive moment, distinguishes it from the daemonism of all purely sexual phenomena” (SW I, 335).5 Just as life is not to be understood biologically, so character does not refer to an inner psychological constitution of individuals. It is recognized as a unity of the life of those persons and judged by the extent that their mode of existence illuminates the world in a particularly consistent way. That is, character would be reflected in the unity of world that persons of character inhabit, in how they open their surroundings of life in a specifically coherent way. Persons of character have a transformative effect on their surroundings by making things happen at their own pace. They are not governed deterministically by their character but rather by their presence open a space of freedom from fate. Character is the simplification and disambiguation of life: “Complication becomes simplicity, fate freedom” (SW I, 205). Character has a ruling trait but is not for that reason abstract. Its manifestation is an individual type. Just as tragedy is for Benjamin the expression of the mythical origins of law, so comedy provides an occasion to experience the liberating innocence of character. Benjamin refers to Molière’s comedies and characters such as “the miser” or “the misanthrope” to exemplify his understanding of character.6 (One could think also of a modern comic character whom he admired, namely Charlie Chaplin.)7 Can the idea of the spiritual innocence of life in the simplicity of character also be formulated collectively in relation to history? How are these considerations relevant now that one returns to the question of giving measure to history? Is there a notion of character in history that would parallel the simple determinacy of individual character and reveal its innocence?8 The understanding of the possibility of revealing innocent life in history must lead through Benjamin’s elaboration of the contrast between tragedy and Trauerspiel, as well as the way he sets his position against Nietzsche’s philosophy of the tragic.

§3. Benjamin contra Nietzsche In The Arcades Project, explicit consideration of Nietzsche’s philosophy is mostly found in convolute D, titled “Boredom, Eternal Return.” However, the underlying confrontation with him can be traced back to the Origin of German Trauerspiel. In particular the opposition between Benjamin’s thinking and the tragic scheme is evident if one thinks of the

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Origin of German Trauerspiel against Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy.9 The notion of ‘origin’ appearing in the title of Benjamin’s book is contrasted with that of birth prevalent in Nietzsche’s work. The Nietzschean figure of birth (Geburt) is a figure of ecstatic renewal. Tragedy is born out of the spirit of music. Music is for Nietzsche a “womb” of phenomena and is intimately related to the primordial form of meaning, namely the mythical order: “Music can give birth to myth (the most significant example) and particularly to tragic myth: the myth which which expresses Dionysian knowledge in symbols” (BT, 103). Benjamin’s notion of origin (Ursprung), on the other hand, is emphatically a “historical category” set in opposition to mythic genesis (Entstehung). Against Nietzsche’s affirmation of the healing power of art in the balance it establishes between Dionysian intoxication and Apollonian dream, Benjamin adopts a more sober, “Socratic” understanding of the relation of beauty and truth. The process of criticism to which the work of art is subjected destroys the semblance inherent in it. However, at the same time, insofar as it is only by working internally through the work of art that the hidden truth that sustained it in existence can be revealed, criticism also vindicates beauty or does justice to it. Benjamin’s understanding of the relation of beauty and truth is implicitly a critique of Nietzsche’s aestheticization of existence: Nietzsche takes art “to be the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life”(BT, 31–32). Indeed, even Nietzsche’s conception of tragedy is distorted by the primacy he gives to art: “. . . the nihilism lodged in the depths of the artistic philosophy of Bayreuth nullified . . . the hard, historical actuality of Greek tragedy”10 (O, 103). One of the clearest points of contrast between Benjamin and Nietzsche concerns the way they position Socrates in relation to the tragic worldview. In thinking of his project in terms of the Trauerspiel and in contrast to Nietzsche’s tragic spirit, Benjamin aligns himself with the philosophical practice of Socrates and Plato. Whereas Nietzsche thinks of the figure of Socrates as causing the death of tragedy, Benjamin thinks of the proper understanding of the death of Socrates as opening the way to the sensibility that will inform the Trauerspiel.11 For Nietzsche, Socrates is the spectator par excellence, the one who remains external to the essentially participatory structure of tragedy. However, this detachment is essentially the position of contemplation appropriate to the Trauerspiel. That is, Benjamin takes precisely what seems to Nietzsche as counterartistic and makes it the basis of a new sensibility

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that is contrary to the ecstatic identification demanded by tragedy: “The spectator of tragedy is summoned, and is justified, by the tragedy itself; the Trauerspiel, in contrast, has to be understood from the point of view of the onlooker” (O, 119).12 Consider further the contrast Benjamin draws between the trial of Socrates and the structure of trial, upon which tragedy is modeled: “The important and characteristic feature of Athenian law is the Dionysian outburst, the fact that the intoxicated, ecstatic word was able to transcend the regular perimeter of the agon, that a higher justice was vouchsafed by the persuasive power of living speech . . . This is the ultimate affinity between trial and tragedy in Athens” (O, 116). Importantly this Dionysian outburst is absent from Socrates’ trial. He does not protest: “the agonal has disappeared from the drama of Socrates—even in his philosophical struggles it is only a question of going through the motions” (O, 113). The ideal of the living speech that bursts out in the ordeal or trial is missing. Indeed, for Benjamin, not only the trial but also the very structure of the Socratic dialogue is understood apart from any notion of, truth-engendering conflict. The latter is in fact essentially tragic. “Tragedy,” Benjamin thus writes, “is not just confined exclusively to the realm of dramatic human speech; it is the only form proper to human dialogue” (SW I, 59). Insofar as Socrates emerges in opposition to the spirit of tragedy, his relation to his interlocutor is not quite dialogue. Rather than adopting the picture of Socrates as giving birth to truth in a lively exchange, Benjamin takes Socrates to be a figure who has absolute mastery over means for instruction and cunningly uses them for that purpose: “The Socratic inquiry is not the holy question which awaits an answer and whose echo resounds in the response: it does not, as does the purely erotic or scientific question, already contain the methodos of the answer. Rather, a mere means to compel conversation, it forcibly, even impudently, dissimulates, ironizes—for it already knows the answer all too precisely. The Socratic question hounds the answer, it corners it as dogs would a noble stag” (SW I, 53). The death of Socrates should also be distinguished from the representative sacrifice of the tragic hero for the community. I have already touched upon the necessity revealed in the death of the tragic hero. His transgression makes him speechless because he internalizes and embodies through what befalls him the invisible limits that constitute life as a field of fate. It is up to the future community to take up this paradoxical manifestation and make it into common law. This prophetic or oracular

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quality of tragedy (part of its Apollonian form-giving moment) is evident in Nietzsche’s description of the fate of Oedipus: Sophocles understood the most sorrowful figure of the Greek stage, the unfortunate Oedipus, as the noble human being who, in spite of his wisdom, is destined to error and misery but who eventually, through his tremendous suffering, spreads a magical power of blessing that remains effective even beyond his decease. The noble human being does not sin, the profound poet wants to tell us: though every law, every natural order, even the moral world may perish through his actions, his actions also produce a higher magical circle of effects which found a new world on the ruins of the old one that has been overthrown. (BT, 67)

However, as Benjamin emphasizes, none of this is part of Socrates’ death: “Superficially, of course the death of the philosopher resembles tragic death. It is an act of atonement according to the letter of an ancient law, a sacrificial death in the spirit of a new justice which contributes to the establishment of a new community” (O, 113). However, in reading the Phaedo more closely, for instance, it becomes evident how different that death is from the struggles of the tragic hero that lead to his falling silent in inalienable solitude. Indeed, even in his life Socrates is surrounded by disciples: “In his own lifetime the hero not only discovers the word, but he acquires a band of disciples, his youthful spokesmen” (O, 117). Instead of the silence of the hero of tragedy we find in Socrates’ last hours a “brilliant display of speech and consciousness”: “Socrates looks death in the face as a mortal—the best and most virtuous of mortals, one may insist—but he recognizes it as something alien, beyond which, in immortality, he expects to return to himself. Not so the tragic hero; he shrinks before death as before a power that is familiar, personal, and inherent in him. His life, indeed, unfolds from death, which is not its end but its form” (O, 114). For the tragic hero, death is internal to life. He has internalized the limits that determined his life and given them expression. He has so to speak lived the completion of his life. (Benjamin writes that the tragic hero “dies of immortality.”) It is precisely Socrates’ sense that death is external to his utmost being, his engaging in a discussion on the immortality of the soul, that makes his death so alien to the tragic world. He is silenced by death rather than by the concentration of fate in life. Because Socrates “dies voluntarily . . . with inexpressible superiority and without defiance” (O, 114), he can be compared to the martyr rather than the tragic hero.

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Finally, it is necessary to consider the contrast Benjamin draws between tragic irony and Socratic irony: “. . . tragic irony always arises whenever the hero—with profound but unsuspected justification— begins to speak of the circumstances of his death as if they were the circumstances of his life” (O, 114). Tragic irony depends primarily on the gap between the speech of the hero and the unfolding of fate concentrated in his person. It essentially presupposes the unconsciousness of the hero to the tightening knot that ensnares him and will bring about his death. It is in contrast to these features of tragic irony that we must understand Benjamin’s characterization of Socratic irony: “His silence, not his speech, will now be informed with the utmost irony. Socratic irony, which is the opposite of tragic irony. What is tragic is the indiscretion by which unconsciously, the truth of heroic life is touched upon . . . The ironic silence of the philosopher, the coy, histrionic silence, is conscious. In place of the sacrificial death of the hero Socrates sets the example of the pedagogue” (O, 118).

§4. Tragedy and Trauerspiel The contrast between tragedy and Trauerspiel serves Benjamin to oppose two diverging schemata for redeeming the contingency of empirical events. Tragedy, then, is not only an artistic form but also a mode of conceiving of the fulfillment of meaning in history as what makes it possible to bring an order to the contingencies of historical time: “At specific and crucial points in its trajectory, historical time passes over into tragic time; such points occur in the actions of great individuals” (SW I, 55). Whereas the Trauerspiel is essentially historical, tragedy imposes a mythical form upon the struggles of history and its fulfillment: “Historical life . . . is [the Trauerspiel’s] content, its true object. In this it is different from tragedy. For the object of the latter is not history, but myth, and the tragic stature of the dramatis personae does not derive from rank—the absolute monarchy—but from the pre-historic epoch of their existence—the past age of heroes” (O, 62). Tragedy, in Benjamin’s understanding, provides a possibility for individual fulfillment of the contingencies of history: “This guilt, which according to the ancient statutes falls upon men from without through misfortune, is taken over by a hero in the course of the tragic action and absorbed into himself. By reflecting it in his consciousness of himself, he escapes its demonic jurisdiction . . . In tragic poetry the ancient curse which has been passed down from generation to generation, becomes

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the inner, self-discovered possession of the tragic character. And it is thus extinguished” (O, 131). The Trauerspiel remains immersed in historical time and renounces the model of redemption for the community by way of the sacrifice of the heroic individual. In this it is closer to the biblical idea of fulfilled time, which Benjamin contrasts with the essentially Greek, tragic idea of the fulfillment of history by way of the great individual: “. . . the idea of a fulfilled historical time is never identical with the idea of an individual time. This feature naturally changes the meaning of fulfillment completely, and it is this that distinguishes tragic time from messianic time” (SW I, 56). When Benjamin thinks of the Trauerspiel as a drama of fate, it is in clear contrast to the internalization of fate typical of the tragic hero. In the Trauerspiel what is delineated is the self-enclosed world in which fate exerts its power: “Fate is the entelechy of events within the field of guilt . . . here everything intentional or accidental is so intensified that the complexities . . . betray, by their paradoxical vehemence, that the action of this play has been inspired by fate” (O, 130). The Trauerspiel traces the exhaustive unfolding of fate in the whole expanse of the play, in all its characters, and even in the involvement of stage properties. Everything, be it intentional or accidental, can serve as an instrument of fate. “Destiny is not only divided among the characters, it is equally present among the objects” (O, 132). In the Trauerspiel guilt, so to speak, runs its course: “In the drama of fate [the ancient curse] is worked out” (O, 132). This means in the first place that fate brings together the different characters and is divided among them as it unfolds. There is no concentration of fate in an individual as in tragedy. Rather, fate is a presence in the whole enclosed world of the play. In the Trauerspiel there is no preeminent voice. “The subject of fate cannot be determined.” There is a fundamental sharing of fate, its plurivocality exemplified by the multiplicity of characters in the princely court. “The Trauerspiel therefore has no individual hero, only constellations of heroes” (O, 132). While remaining in unfulfilled historical time, a drama of fate is not a conflict motivated or explained solely by empirical factors such as the psychological constitution of the characters. Rather, if anything, it is their psychological makeup that facilitates their participation in the working out of fate. Indeed, Benjamin argues that to think in terms of fate would precisely involve taking psychological makeup to be no more than an object or instrument of fate. In a drama of fate even the psychological

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motivations become instruments of the characters’ incorporation in this field and operate on a par with other factors. The contrast that emerges between tragedy’s relation to fate and the Trauerspiel treatment of that notion bears on the understanding of fulfillment or completion: “. . . tragedy ends with a decision—however uncertain this may be” (O, 137). The Trauerspiel “has no proper end” (O, 135); it neither leads to the establishment of a new order nor marks the end of an epoch. Benjamin sets apart the closure inherent in tragedy (in both a historical and an individual sense) from the unresolved time of the Trauerspiel: In contrast to the decision inherent in the unified structure of the tragic, it is repetition that is characteristic of the temporality of the inherently nonunified drama that is the Trauerspiel. Given that resolution in a dialectical structure is essentially tripartite, Benjamin sees in the even number of acts of the Trauerspiel a tendency toward repetition rather than overcoming and fulfillment. This presence of repetition is a sign that the source of guilt is an underlying, ever-present condition: the fallen state of the creature: “The creature is the mirror within whose frame alone the moral world was revealed to the baroque . . . The sequence of dramatic actions unfolds as in the days of the creation” (O, 91). The creaturely condition is neither wholly nature nor wholly history. Rather, it is a schema for considering history as nature (or revealing the presence of natural life in history): “For fate is not a purely natural occurrence—any more than it is purely historical. Fate, whatever guise it may wear in pagan or mythological context, is meaningful only as a category of natural history . . . it is the elemental force of nature in historical events, which are not themselves entirely nature, because the light of grace is still reflected from the state of creation. But it is mirrored in the swamp of Adam’s guilt” (O, 129). This turn to creaturely life is the pendant of the renunciation of all forms of completing or transcending history: “The German Trauerspiel is taken up entirely with the hopelessness of the earthly condition . . . consequent upon the total disappearance of eschatology, is an attempt to find in a reversion to the bare state of creation, consolation for the renunciation of a state of grace” (O, 81). History, both in its struggles and the possibilities of redemption it may offer, is seen in terms of the creaturely condition. If tragedy embodies the extraordinary catastrophe befalling the hero, the vision of the Trauerspiel is one of the ordinariness of catastrophe in history: “. . . it is not moral transgression but the very estate of man as creature which provides the reason for the catastrophe” (O, 89).

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The contrast between tragedy and Trauerspiel should be further elaborated in terms of their implicit pictures of the position of man in language. Tragedy is a manifestation of the power of the word, of what Benjamin calls “the eternal inflexibility of the spoken word” (SW I, 61). In it is realized the possibility of the closure of meaning, beyond all intention, or conscious use of language by its speakers. Tragic irony is the manifestation of this incessant logic of the word: “[Tragedy] is a content, which exists only in language” (O, 118). “Tragedy,” Benjamin writes, “is not just confined exclusively to the realm of dramatic human speech; it is the only form proper to human dialogue” (SW I, 59). In contrast, the essential experience of the Trauerspiel is the failure of language to attain closure or fulfillment in meaning: “Whenever we see an ‘untragic’ drama, the autonomous laws of human speech fail to manifest themselves; instead, we see no more than a feeling or a relationship in a linguistic context, a linguistic phase . . . It is not the indissoluble law of inescapable orders that prevails in tragedy. It is merely a feeling. What is the metaphysical relation of this feeling to language, to the spoken word? That is the riddle of the mourning play” (SW I, 59). The preeminent feeling to emerge from the lack of fulfillment and abandonment characteristic of the Trauerspiel is sorrow (Trauer). The relation of sorrow to language is itself formulated in relation to the creaturely state in terms of man falling from the task of giving expression to nature in language: “. . . midway through its journey nature finds itself betrayed by language, and that powerful blocking of feeling turns to sorrow. Thus, with the ambiguity of the word, its signifying character, nature falters, and whereas the created world wished only to pour forth in all purity, it was man who bore its crown” (SW I, 60). The dramatis personae of the Trauerspiel reflect aspects of this problematic condition of meaning (See further the Remark to the present chapter). The sovereign in the Trauerspiel is primarily understood as having the dictatorial power to address the ever-present possibility of a catastrophe, of a state of emergency in which law would be abrogated. This position of sovereignty stands for the power as well as the necessity to decree meaning, precisely in a condition in which significance does not reveal itself, and cannot be brought to fulfilment “naturally.” That very power invested in the figure of the absolute sovereign is also the reason that the ruler will further embody the disappointment in the arbitrariness of meaning. Other figures such as the intriguer and the martyr are brought into play to characterize the fate of meaning, or meaning in a field of fate. The

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intriguer stands for the possibility of diverting or manipulating meaning. The possibility of the intrigue reflects the condition in which meaning always has a life, or can express, beyond the intention of its utterance. Once the voice is sounded, it can be subverted to serve the conspiratorial design of the intriguer. The martyr is then the polar opposite of the intriguer; that is, the martyr would stand for the failure of the innocent voice to fully express itself. However, the martyr’s suffering would further come to signify the purgatory-like nature of the exhaustion (rather than the fulfillment) of meaning. If one takes the human body to be the paradigmatic field of expressiveness, then it will not be presented in  these plays as capable of expressing to the utmost the soul that animates it. It will be the tortured body, even the corpse, that serves as a figure for the possibility of drawing meaning internal to these plays.13 The extreme appearance of such a linguistic situation, figured by the characters of the plays, is what Benjamin methodically develops in his account of allegory.14

§5. Allegory and History The thematic confrontation between tragedy and Trauerspiel as two opposed ideas of realization of meaning is developed in the first part of Benjamin’s book on the German Baroque. It has a counterpart in his discussion (in the second part of the book) of the contrast between symbol and allegory. We have touched upon some elements of this contrast, but it is necessary to further clarify how it relates to the problem of the realization of meaning in history. Indeed, the fundamental condition of meaning to which allegory gives expression can be formulated in terms of its underlying vision of the relation between nature and history. “It is by virtue of a strange combination of nature and history that the allegorical mode of expression is born” (O, 167). Central to the relation between nature and history established by allegory is the sense of the failure of fulfillment of human endeavor in history, through which the return of the historical itself to a more natural setting can be expressed. Allegory makes it possible to conceive of the catastrophic vision of history as expressive of the creaturely condition. In viewing history as the accumulation of failings, one conceives of it in terms of how the incompleteness caused by death, rather than the purposiveness of life, provides it with meaning: “The greater the significance, the greater the subjection to death because death digs most deeply the jagged line of demarcation between nature and significance” (O, 166).

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History itself is seen in terms of the decline of life, as inevitably marked by death: “This is the heart of the allegorical way of seeing, of the baroque, secular explanation of history as the Passion of the world; its importance resides solely in the stations of its decline” (O, 166). This can itself be expressed allegorically, as history is portrayed as having a certain character or paradigmatic expression, a physiognomy: “Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—or rather in a death’s head” (O, 166). This scheme of historical meaning should be contrasted, say, with the idea of history as an organic or living whole “. . . history does not assume the form of the process of eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay” (O, 178). In other words, it is not the revelation of an inner purposiveness in history but rather the failure of the achievement of human strivings that is fundamental to opening up the possibility of allegorical meaning: “From the point of view of the baroque, nature serves the purpose of expressing its meaning, it is the emblematic representation of its sense, and as an allegorical representation it remains irremediably different from its historical realization” (O, 170). This distance between historical realization and the catastrophic state of world history is what allegory attempts to fill with its enigmatic knowledge. Yet, one can further characterize the failure that stands at the basis of allegorical interpretation as allowing to envision not only the catastrophic dimension of history but through that very destruction recognize a manifestation of created nature as well. That is, history is considered as leading back, through the disintegration of human edifices, to nature. It is in this return to the setting that one gleans a higher meaning of nature itself, of the creaturely state. In painting human history as transfixed by its failure, it can be viewed as having returned to a more original condition. In the Trauerspiel human history becomes a “stage property” of the timeless schema of creation.15 It follows that the mortification brought about by allegory is not the last word in the journey of meaning. Allegory, one might say, contains the possibility of its own reversal. It does not provide in itself the image of reality that philosophy allows us to recognize. It prepares the historical content for the presentation of truth content in a dialectical image. It is indeed to be doubted that allegorical interpretation is the ultimate form of philosophical criticism, given the fundamental mastery and sense of possession that is typical of the allegorist. The power of the allegorist depends on the death of the object in which significance is sought.

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It assumes, to speak in terms of a famous characterization of the aura, the incapacity of the things considered to return a gaze to the attention given to them: If the object becomes allegorical under the gaze of melancholy, if melancholy causes life to flow out of it and it remains behind dead, but eternally secure, then it is exposed to the allegorist, it is unconditionally in his power. That is to say it is now quite incapable of emanating any meaning or significance of its own; such significance as it has, it acquires from the allegorist. He places it within it, and stands behind it; not in a psychological but in an ontological sense. In his hand the object becomes something different. Through it, he speaks of something different, and for him it becomes a key to the realm of hidden knowledge. (O, 183–184)

We should read that description bearing in mind Benjamin’s sense that whereas knowledge is “possession of its object,” Truth is an “intentionless state of being.” The possessive form of the allegorist’s relation to the object makes it incapable, of itself, of serving for a recognition of truth. The dissociation between philosophical knowledge and the knowledge of the allegorist is further hinted at in the later parts of the book: “The intention which underlies allegory is so opposed to that which is concerned with the discovery of truth that it reveals more clearly than anything else the identity of the pure curiosity which is aimed at mere knowledge with the proud isolation of man” (O, 229). The “Midas touch” of allegory that finds significance in any object it turns its attention to is associated with “godless” spirituality. It is satanic knowledge, its power identified with the excesses of subjectivity. Allegory is thereby opposed to the philosophical presentation of truth: “In the form of knowledge instinct leads down into the empty abyss of evil in order to make sure of infinity. But this is also the bottomless pit of contemplation. Its data are not capable of being incorporated in philosophical constellations” (O, 231). This is what makes it necessary to introduce a further moment, a reversal such that in “the allegorical image of the world . . . the subjective perspective is entirely absorbed in the economy of the whole” (O, 234). Allegory itself would be redeemed in history’s return to a timeless state of creation.

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§6. Innocence and Bare Life How is one to conceive of the revelation of the innocence of life in terms of the Trauerspiel? What is the redemptive schema of these plays? It cannot be conceived in terms of the destiny of one of the characters in the play, say, the innocent voice of the martyr, for it is precisely that voice that does not reach fulfillment because of its betrayal by meaning. Rather, it must be the self-enclosed world in its catastrophic development that can be rediscovered, as a whole, as making manifest a higher life. Characterizing this possibility involves considering more broadly Benjamin’s understanding of rescue and redemption in history. However, some beginnings can be made in relation to the distinctions elaborated in this chapter The notion that Benjamin sometimes opposes to the mythical entanglement of life (for which tragedy provides only an apparent solution) is “mere life” (blosse Leben, which is also translated as “bare life”). This notion appears toward the end of the essay “Critique of Violence,” in which three different modes of the relation of law, force, and life are considered: the problematic form of the preserving force of established law; the mythical force of law, that is, the overcoming of fate by the sacrifice that allows a new order of law (on the model provided by tragedy); and the divine manifestation of sovereign power, which dissolves law for the sake of life itself. Contrasting the last two Benjamin writes: “The dissolution of legal violence stems . . . from the guilt of more natural life, which consigns the living, innocent, and unhappy to a retribution that ‘expiates’ the guilt of mere life—and doubtless also purifies the guilty, not of guilt, but of law. For with mere life, the rule of law over the living ceases. Mythic violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake; divine violence is pure power over all life for the sake of the living. The first demands sacrifice; the second accepts it” (SW I, 250). To start interpreting this notoriously difficult passage, consider first the contrast that Benjamin establishes between bloody mythic violence, which demands sacrifice, and the bloodless divine power, which accepts it. Since blood is the fundamental element of life in the individual living being, we can interpret the bloodless nature of the manifestation of divine force by way of understanding that the highest life is never revealed in the sacrifice of an individual being (as would be the case in tragedy). One can further say that the bloodless stand for an annihilation which leaves no traces of those involved in the specific form that human cata-

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strophic conflict has taken in history. The bloodless divine force is then manifest in the recognition of a higher life common to the created as a whole correlative with the disappearance and passing away of the catastrophic past. The further distinction between the demand of sacrifice by the mythic violence and the acceptance of sacrifice by divine violence should be understood as implying that the revelation of innocent life in the present goes hand in hand with the recognition that sacrifice has already occurred. In other words, it is the past itself that is recognized as the catastrophe that divine force accepts (which, of course, does not mean that divine force is the cause of that catastrophe). The revelation of the present as a moment of renewal, as partaking in the manifestation of eternal life, goes together with the recognition of the destruction of history. How is one to think further of the release from the rule of law, that is, of an innocence that is not dependent on abiding by the law but rather on being absolved or purified of the condition of life under law? Can a determinately meaningful life be conceived apart from the order brought about by law? Moreover, should it be thought of as possible only in the sphere of the individual’s private concerns, or does it have any bearing on common existence?16 Readers of Benjamin have taken bare life to point to a minimal (bare) existence. Bare life would be that life revealed in the exclusion from all forms of society and law retaining hardly anything of the meaningfulness of human life. Such “minimal” interpretation is tempting given the relation that Benjamin forms between the destructiveness of divine force and bare life in the essay “Critique of Violence.”17 However, while the realization of the destructive dimension of history is a necessary moment, the life that it exposes is not one devoid of any order or spiritual unity. Indeed, bare life is not to be understood merely in terms of that which was left out of all of the forms of life in common.18 It is rather what appears in the ordering and articulation of meaning. It is the construction of the dialectical image that can give rise to the recognition of this life, which unites present and past. The dialectical image brings out, one might say, the character of history or makes it possible to conceive of an emergence of humanity out of the field of guilt, of its spiritual innocence. One can appreciate here the importance of emphasizing that the dialectical image is an order, yet it is not a law of phenomena. Divine power revealed by the construction is characterized as a power over all life, over the life common to created nature. It is a manifestation of that

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life that binds together the present and its past. It is that force that was recognized in the meticulous articulation of meaning in translation, as well as in and through the monadic construction of origin: “In the monad the textual detail which was frozen in a mythical rigidity comes alive.”19 Creaturely life is manifest in the extreme articulation of meaning, which makes recognizable the idea in concrete reality. Indeed, Benjamin conceives of the task of philosophy in terms of the original Adamic model of naming creation even when this comes to presenting ideas: “. . . in philosophical contemplation, the idea is released from the heart of reality as the word, reclaiming its name-giving rights. Ultimately, however, this is not the attitude of Plato, but the attitude of Adam, the father of the human race and the father of philosophy” (O, 37).20 Original or created life is not what is merely excluded from the various forms of embodied spirit. Nor is it something recognized as the minimal remainder of a human being in surroundings of extreme destruction. Rather, it can be revealed only in the construction of history by the realization of meaning. It is the highest realization of the identity of life and spirit.

REMARK Characters of the Trauerspiel A contrast was established between the single hero of tragedy, and the plurality of positions of the Trauerspiel represented by the figures of sovereign, martyr, and conspirator. There is nevertheless a way in which each of these roles can be transformed into the other. They are the polarization of a single dialectical situation. In what follows I briefly elaborate on the different roles of the Trauerspiel to show their internal connection. The sovereign in the Trauerspiel is “the representative of history.” The intimate relation of the sovereign to history as such is the result of the power invested in him to address the catastrophe that might emerge. This is primarily something evident in the conception of the state of emergency: “The ruler is designated from the outset as the holder of dictatorial power if war, revolt, or other catastrophes should lead to a state of emergency” (O, 65).

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This understanding can be clarified by contrasting it to the modern conception, according to which sovereignty is the executive power of the law. That latter conception starts from the understanding of the domain of the political in terms of the law that orders normal conditions of social existence. But law has exceptions that we place under the title of emergency. The sense of the prevalence of the catastrophic in common existence is one of the factors leading the baroque to reflect on sovereignty and its relation to law primarily from the standpoint of the exception. The starting point of such political thinking then is not the capacity for self-legislation (as in certain eighteenth century social contract theories). Rather the power to deal with the exceptional is the fundamental attribute of sovereignty. In other words the sovereign is given absolute power beyond the bound of the law in order to protect from the complete abrogation of law in a state of emergency. Sovereignty is understood in terms of the ever-present possibility of the exception. This view of sovereignty goes hand in hand with a vision of history as ‘ordinarily’ catastrophic. The sovereign is the one to decide on the exception and has dictatorial powers insofar as addressing the exception is required. What is, in the Trauerspiel, the “trajectory” of the sovereign as representative of history and holder of dictatorial power? The deployment of power inherent to the sovereign’s position first lead to the degeneration of that absolute power into tyranny. That same inherent tendency also brings about the demise of the tyrant and his falling into the mere human estate of the creature. In order to understand the inner logic of this double movement it is necessary to further clarify the demands made of sovereignty in the light of the baroque’s theological conception. In the development of the understanding of the sovereign in the play of the Baroque, Benjamin acknowledges his debt to Carl Schmitt’s account of sovereignty, presented in the context of his four essays on Political Theology. In particular the parallel between the position of sovereignty and divine power is understood in terms of the comparison between the state of exception and the miraculous. The power of the sovereign in his direct intervention in the legal order is compared to the miracle of the direct intervention of God in the natural order. The rejection of the miraculous by the enlightenment parallels the rejection of the idea of sovereignty as grounded in its relation to the state of exception. This is briefly raised by Benjamin in linking Kant’s conception of a religion of reason to his understanding that emergency law is

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no law at all. Kant’s theological rationalism involves a regulative conception of religious reason, where the highest good serves as a focal point of the advance of humanity. One might say that with his regulative conception Kant opens up the horizon of hope (or answers one of the essential questions of philosophy, “What may I hope for?”). God becomes a postulate that underlies the possibility of the regulative ideal of the highest good. This also means that there is no direct intervention of the order of the divine in the here and now. The deferral of judgment allowed by that horizon of hope was unavailable to the baroque. The attribution of absolute power to the sovereign is thus to be understood not only as forming a parallel between divine power and sovereign authority, but also in terms of the emptying out of the realm of the hereafter from anything that bears a recognizable relation to the dynamics of history. Matters supposedly belonging beyond the limits of human existence, were introduced and demanded to be resolved in immanent existence. In this process of secularization, immanent existence is filled to the point of bursting with the contradictions of involving the absolute in the finite. The attribution of absolute power to the sovereign, creates a violent illumination of these contradictions that have a catastrophic logic to them:21 “The hereafter is emptied of everything which contains the slightest breath of this world, and from it the baroque extracts a profusion of things which customarily escaped the grasp of artistic formulation and, at its high point, bring them violently into the light of day, in order to clear an ultimate heaven, enabling it, as a vacuum, one day to destroy the world with catastrophic violence” (O, 66).22 The disproportion between the authority of the sovereign and his capacity is manifest in the way in which the sovereign is driven to become a tyrant. But the complete dialectical position of the sovereign is only grasped as one can see him as the other side of the martyr, as he becomes martyr. The understanding that emerges from the combination of political and theological considerations makes vividly clear the ultimate demise of the sovereign. The way he comes to embody divine or absolute power is the very reason for the contradictions that plague his existence and his falling to the state of the mere creature.23 The fall of the tyrant, in itself, thus cannot be a satisfying resolution of the contradictions of the Trauerspiel. Since he is the representative of history, his demise casts a verdict on history, on that very life in which

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the spectator of these plays is involved: “For if the tyrant falls, not simply in his own name, as an individual, but as a ruler and in the name of mankind and history, then his fall has the quality of judgment, in which the subject too is implicated” (O, 72). From the preceding considerations it follows that it would be misleading to present the martyr only as the victim of the tyrant’s abuse of power. This characterization does not bring out enough the possibility of the martyr and the tyrant being two sides of the same person. Indeed, the position that requires the excess in the use of power, that turns the sovereign into the tyrant, is also that which, in these plays, makes of him a victim: “At the moment when the ruler indulges in the most violent display of power . . . he falls victim to the disproportion between the unlimited hierarchical dignity, with which he is divinely invested and the humble estate of his humanity” (O, 70). Conversely, Benjamin views in the martyr a certain manifestation of absolute sovereignty. Indeed, just as the sovereign decision and his will power is supposed to address the ever-present possibility of a state of emergency, the martyr’s stoic bearing is the discovery of the absolute defense against that state from within. The stoic constitution of the martyr is the counterpart to the absolute power of the sovereign: “[T]he stoic technique also aims to establish a corresponding fortification against a state of emergency in the soul, the rule of the emotions. It too seeks to set up a new, anti-historical creation—in woman, the assertion of chastity—which is no less far removed from the innocent state of primal creation than the dictatorial constitution of the tyrant” (O, 74). The figure of the conspirator brings together features of both the sovereign and the martyr. His power is utterly spiritual. It is not manifest in decision but rather in the conspirator’s total existence in the spheres of means. His mastery is in his knowledge of human nature, manifest in the capacity to use it to his designs. The human psyche is for him a machine whose functioning he knows and can expertly take advantage of. His relation to the soul is purely instrumental. He is therefore also a victim or martyr of that knowledge of his. His position is one of deep melancholy. The possibility of holding together the utmost cunning, the conspiratorial, the mastery or sovereignty over meaning, as well as the saintliness of the martyr together in one figure is a rare achievement of the Trauerspiel. Speaking of the courtier in the Spanish mourning plays Benjamin writes that his spiritual sovereignty “brought to the course of

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the world an icy disillusion which is matched in intensity only by the fierce aspiration of the will to power. Such a conception of perfect conduct on the part of the man of the world awakens a mood of mourning (Trauer) in the creature stripped of all naïve impulses. And this, his mood permits the paradoxical demand for saintliness to be made of the courtier”(O, 98).

7 BAUDELAIRE

The preceding discussions of embodiment, heroism, and character raise for us the question of the place of individuals in Benjamin’s writings. Many of Benjamin’s literary essays are portraits of individual figures. The image of Proust, as well as the essays on Kafka and Kraus, are attempts to think through the relation between individuals and their times. Yet, specific persons are seldom directly the subject matter in The Arcades Project. Benjamin, it seems, approaches human existence mostly through its material traces in the world. The primary material of the Arcades is the expanse of the city, its places, and its living arrangements. We do find convolutes devoted to the physiognomy of types rather than individuals, such as “the flâneur,” “the collector,” “the idler,” “sales clerks,” “prostitutes,” and “gamblers.” Nevertheless, in the two exposés of the project a more intimate connection is formed between places and individuals, as the title of each section couples a feature of the urban space with the proper name of a person: “Fourier, or the Arcades,” “Daguerre, or the Panoramas” (only in the first exposé), “Grandville, or the World Exhibitions,” “Louis-Philipe, or the Interior,” “Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris,” and “Hausmann, or the Barricades.” In The Arcades Project itself one name is conspicuously present. In terms of the sheer quantity of the material, the convolute titled “Baudelaire” is by far the largest. It is also the basis for a book projected to have three parts. The second completed part was sent to Horkheimer with an indication of its relation to the Arcades: “This book is meant to set down the decisive philosophical elements of the Arcades project in what I hope will be definitive form. If, besides the original plan, there was a subject that offered optimal opportunities for the basic conception of the Arcades, it was Baudelaire” (C, 573). 139

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The very presence of Baudelaire in a work such as the Arcades, as a figure that can set down the decisive philosophical elements of that project, raises several important issues: How does a proper name function in presenting the expanse of meaning of history? In modernity can we speak of representative individuals, and what is their relation to the collective and the times? Are such questions in some way continuous with Benjamin’s early concern with the nature of the proper name and its relation to naming things in language? The projected title of the book on Baudelaire, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, makes it clear that to express the truth of the times the account of the proper name must be mediated by the poetic production. Thus, we must raise the further question of the relation between the truthful contents revealed in Baudelaire’s poetry and his historical position. Should we keep apart the internal space of meaning of the literary work, in which, as we would say, its beauty is manifest, and the external space, the historical surroundings in which it is written and received? How is the historical context related to the aesthetic appreciation? Benjamin wishes to challenge the accepted ways of relating internal “appreciation” and external “historical content”: “. . . one must admit without reservation that only in isolated instances has it been possible to grasp the historical content of a work of art in such a way that it becomes more transparent to us as a work of art” (SW III, 263). No doubt, establishing a dialectical relation between internal and external would result in attributing to Baudelaire less than a complete grasp of that which his work allows one to present as truthful: “If Baudelaire is summoned before the tribunal of history, he will have to put up with a great many interruptions; an interest that is in many respects foreign to him, and in many respects incomprehensible to him, conditions the line of questioning” (A, 363). Finally, we need to ask whether Benjamin in some way identifies his position, his predicament in relation to the nineteenth century conceived as a ground upon which the image of modernity would emerge, with Baudelaire’s task? To what extent is the dialectical image of the Arcades as a whole constructed by way of the image of Baudelaire? How is the problematic relation of Baudelaire to the judgment of history overcome in Benjamin’s own portrait? At the end of the essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” Benjamin speaks of Baudelaire’s poetry as “a star without atmosphere” that appears in the sky of the Second Empire, as though Baudelaire’s poetry has absorbed the atmosphere, his life surroundings.

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How is this luminous star part of the constellation that Benjamin draws together in his own work?

§1. Baudelaire and the Figure of the Hero In what sense is Baudelaire the hero of the Arcades? Maybe it is better to ask first how Baudelaire provides us with a new image of the hero, a hero for modernity? Benjamin opens the third section of his “Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” with the following claim: “Baudelaire patterned his image of the artist after an image of the hero” (SW IV, 39). Presenting the poet as a hero means understanding his work in relation to a task: “In the period in which he lived, nothing came closer to the ‘task’ of the ancient hero—to the ‘labors’ of a Hercules—than the task imposed upon him as his very own: to give shape to modernity” (SW IV, 49). The transformation of the mythic figure of the poet-hero and of his task has been a concern of Benjamin throughout his writing. This is evident from his early essay on Hölderlin, in which a consideration of the difference between two versions of a poem whose theme is the poet’s courage is the occasion for elaborating a transformation of the understanding of poetic destiny. It is also present in the way in which the essay titled “Elective Affinities” directs its criticism at Gundolf’s mystifying interpretation of Goethe’s genius. The idea of the poetic task and with it the image of the poet-hero is to be conceived in terms of the relation of the poet to the community. In the nineteenth century the possibility of a representative position was affected by the emergence of the masses on the stage of history. With the appearance of the masses, the model that takes the individual to speak for the community as a representative citizen (such as Benjamin still recognized in Hugo) is problematized. In Baudelaire’s poetry the masses are not celebrated; rather, “Baudelaire divorced himself from the crowd as a hero” (SW IV, 39). Yet, this is not a simple assertion of authenticity or individuality in the face of the inauthentic mode of the crowd’s existence. Baudelaire cannot simply dissociate himself from the masses to assert his poetic genius. His heroism is to distinguish himself in and through the immersion in the existence of the masses: “The signature of heroism in Baudelaire: to live in the heart of unreality (semblance)” (SW IV, 175). What is it to be both divorced from and immersed in the existence of the crowd? This would mean at the least that one is essentially compromised by one’s position.

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If heroism is sometimes associated with the manifestation of a core of strong individuality, this cannot be the ground upon which to conceive of the duality of Baudelaire’s position: “Because he did not have any convictions, he assumed ever new forms himself. Flâneur, apache, dandy and ragpicker were so many roles to him. For the modern hero is not a hero; he is a portrayer of heroes. Heroic modernity turns out to be a Trauerspiel in which the hero’s part is available” (SW IV, 60). The reference to the Trauerspiel provides a clue to understanding this new configuration of heroism. Indeed, precisely what is stressed in that work is the fundamental difference between the one tragic hero, the tragic scheme in which fate can be concentrated in one person who articulates, through his sacrifice, life for the community, and the many figures of a Trauerspiel. The comparison that Benjamin draws between the multiplicity inherent in the structure of the Trauerspiel and Baudelaire’s position might suggest that the scene of modernity requires for its depiction the presentation of a plurality of disparate types or characters such as is to be found in Balzac’s Comédie Humaine. Yet, as will become clear from Benjamin’s discussion of the literature of types (in his account of the figure of the flâneur), this is only the beginning of an answer. Indeed, one must ask why Baudelaire takes roles upon himself: Modernity finally became a role which perhaps only Baudelaire himself could fill. A tragic role, in which the dilettante—who, for want of other parts, had to perform it—often cut a comical figure, like the heroes Daumier caricatured with Baudelaire’s approbation. . . . Assuredly, therefore, he was not a savior, a martyr, or even a hero. But he had about him something of the mime who apes the “poet” before an audience and a society which no longer needs a real poet, and which grants him only the latitude of mimicry. (SW IV, 166)

Beyond the self-deprecation inherent in Baudelaire’s compromised position, evident in his caricatural excesses, the description Benjamin gives implies a further, more troubling transformation of the image of the hero: the theatricalization of heroism. The distance taken from the model of the tragic hero can be conceived in terms of the essential theatricality of the poet’s existence. His masks are not the expression of mere frivolity or willful deception but rather that which best fits the understanding of the task.

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From the very beginning of the essay Benjamin raises the problem of Baudelaire’s relation to his readers: “Baudelaire envisaged readers to whom the reading of lyric poetry would present difficulties” (SW IV, 313). Thus, to borrow the terms of Michael Fried’s analysis of the modern, there arises the question of the relation of art to its public, the problem of theatricality. Baudelaire appears to embrace the theatricalization of his relation to the public. The public exists as the marketplace. “Baudelaire was perhaps the first to conceive of a market-oriented originality . . . In Baudelaire, the poet for the first time stakes a claim to exhibition value” (SW IV, 168). It would be wrong to conceive of the matter just in terms of the necessity of the poet to sell himself, that is, to be actively engaged in attracting a public. The theatricalization of experience is not captured by the idea, traceable to Rousseau, of the way people display themselves as other than what they are. Baudelaire’s theatrical posture is not so much a reflection of his own nature, but rather constitutes a response to a sense of the theatricalization of life. “[The] city is . . . no longer native ground. It represents . . . a theatrical display, an arena” (A, 347). It is the theatricality of the world that Benjamin diagnoses in the Baroque that could better explain Baudelaire’s predicament. The sense of the world as a self-enclosed scene of play is to be understood in relation to a sense of its being emptied of ultimate significance. It is consequent on the deadening of the capacity for involvement in life (“the world sinking into rigor mortis”).

§2. The Crowd Baudelaire’s position was initially described in terms of the transformation of the image of the poet-hero speaking for a community, into that of a compromised individual divorced from the crowd in his very immersion in it. In his essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” Benjamin provides something of a genealogy of the crowd’s presence in modern life. “The crowd: no subject was more worthy of attention from nineteenthcentury writers” (SW IV, 321). The crowd is not a certain type of people or social class: “They do not stand for classes or any sort of collective; rather, they are nothing but the amorphous crowd of passers-by, the people in the street” (SW IV, 320–321). The masses are the body whose significance is sought, that is, the body whose presence is essential to the configuration of modern experience. But this is what makes it all the more elusive. The appearance of the masses as such in Baudelaire’s

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poetry is scarce because they pervade and give form to all of his experience: “The masses had become so much a part of Baudelaire that it is rare to find a description of them in his works” (SW IV, 322). Typical in this respect is “A une passante”: “In the sonnet . . . the crowd is nowhere named in either word or phrase. Yet all the action hinges on it, just as the progress of a sailboat depends on the wind.” “Sail” in French is “voile,” which also means “veil.” In a particularly striking formulation of this omnipresence without a focus Benjamin writes: “The masses were an agitated veil, and Baudelaire views Paris through this veil” (SW IV, 323). The reference to the veil in relation to the masses forms a link to Benjamin’s account of beauty and its essential relation to the agitation of life. To speak of the veil in relation to the masses would then be a way of characterizing an experience of being spellbound, entranced by this appearance of life, which at the same time hides the (mythical) violence inherent in the existence of the masses. One might also say that viewed through that veil the crowd appears as a body animated by its own life. The experience of that life, what it expresses, is ambivalent. It can have a progressive, as well as a regressive, determination. Early on, the experience of the masses in the city was “tamed” by the flâneur: “For the flâneur, the ‘crowd’ is a veil hiding the ‘masses’ ” (A, 334). The flâneur’s relation to the masses is evident in his study of types. His is an “illustrative seeing” (A, 419). The flâneur’s mode of revealing significance out of the crowd is more generally made available through the literature of types.1 The types are the “individualities” that emerge from the crowd. Through them beauty is found in the experience of the crowd. In other words, the liveliness of the crowd, the richness of the “human comedy,” is combined with the pleasure of divining character. Think of it as a sense of the accessibility of the mind of others. Benjamin points to the striking aspect of that mode of experience, to which the flâneur is oblivious, by reference to Baudelaire’s essay on the “painter of modern life,” Constantin Guys. Guys, just as absorbed in the crowd as the flâneur is, was reported by Baudelaire to hold that “Anyone who is capable of being bored in a crowd is a blockhead. I repeat; a blockhead and a contemptible one” (SW IV, 19). Yet, Guys is distinct from the flâneur by his awareness of the shock of the encounter with the masses. His work itself takes the form of combat. In Baudelaire’s words, which Benjamin quotes: “How he stands there, bent over his table, scrutinizing the sheet of paper just as intently as he does the objects around him by day; how he stabs away with his pencil, his pen, his brush; how he spurts water from his glass to the ceiling and tries his pen on his shirt;

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how he pursues his work swiftly and intensely, as though he were afraid his images might escape him. Thus, he is combative even when alone, parrying his own blows” (SW IV, 319). One might see this as a description of the entranced, inspired artist, but it is even more one that brings out presence of mind, an increased degree of consciousness essential to the combative posture. Types do not emerge from idle, intoxicated contemplation but rather from the struggles of an alert consciousness to fend off the onslaught of impressions. Benjamin similarly finds this figure of combat adequate to characterize the emergence of images in Baudelaire’s own poetry. He takes the opening stanza of “Le Soleil” to portray the poetic task as such a “fantastic combat.” This figure of combat makes evident that Baudelaire cannot be identified with the flâneur, for the flâneur “demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forgo the life of a gentleman of leisure” (SW IV 30). Baudelaire’s literary physiology, on the other hand, the physiology of his style, incorporates the fundamental experience of being “jostled by the crowd”: “The man who wrote these pieces was no flâneur . . . Of all the experiences which made his life what it was, Baudelaire singled out being jostled by the crowd as the decisive, unmistakable experience” (SW IV, 342–343). “The semblance of a crowd with a soul and movement all its own, the luster that had dazzled the flâneur, had faded for him” (SW IV, 343).2 The transformation of the relation to the masses by the experience of shock is a manifestation of the violence associated with the existence of the masses.3 This is further developed in Benjamin’s essay through the transformation of the figure of the flâneur into that of the detective. Instead of the innocuous physiologies, the bonhomie of the types, the crowd becomes an environment identified with crime and guilt: “The soothing little remedies that the physiologists offered for sale were soon outmoded. On the other hand, the literature concerned with the disquieting and threatening aspects of urban life was destined for a great future” (SW IV, 21). The connection between Baudelaire and the genre of the detective story is mediated by Poe, whose stories he has translated. The detective is the dialectical transformation of the flâneur. The flâneur is, one might say, a descendant of Rousseau’s “promeneur,” and his daydreaming and idleness seem to be the antipode of the detective’s procedures, at least insofar as “the [interest of ] the detective story lies in its logical structure (which the crime story as such need not have)” (SW IV, 23). The relation of the detective to the masses is distinct from the flâneur’s study of physiologies and types: “The detective follows traces in an environment in which the possibility of leaving traces of individual

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existence disappears.”4 The story that Benjamin finds particularly important in that respect is Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” which he conceives as an abstract representation, something of an X-ray of the structure of the detective story in its relation to the masses. The man of the crowd is a fatal transformation of the flâneur: “In him composure has given way to manic behavior. He exemplifies rather what had to become of the flâneur after the latter was deprived of the milieu to which it belonged” (SW IV, 326). Deprived of his surroundings, the flâneur turns from a figure that, comfortable in his detachment, contemplates with pleasure the social landscape and becomes “someone who does not feel comfortable in his own company. This is why he seeks out the crowd . . . Poe purposely blurs the difference between the asocial person and the flâneur. The harder a man is to find, the more suspicious he becomes” (SW IV, 27). The man of the crowd is, in the words of the narrator in Poe’s story, “the embodiment and the spirit of crime” (SW IV, 27). The crowd as a body is no more the lively element that the flâneur enjoys but rather becomes identified with guilt, with that element in which the guilty hide. An environment in which one exists by being guilty is a mythic environment. The crowd’s life is not patterned on the liveliness of a natural landscape as the flâneur imagined it but is rather that agitation and semblance in which fate and guilt rule. This sense of being caught in a field ruled by repetition would suggest why, for Benjamin, the collective body’s fundamental feature is its automatisms. Benjamin remarks that “Poe’s . . . pedestrians act as if they had adapted themselves to machines and could express themselves only automatically. Their behavior is a reaction to shocks. ‘If jostled, they bowed profusely to the jostlers’ ” (329). The crowd reflects on a large scale the kind of automatism that is visible also in more specific contexts, in the worker and the gambler, who seized “body and soul” by “the mechanism to which [they] entrust themselves. . . . behave like the pedestrians in Poe’s story. They live their lives as automatons” (SW IV, 330). In contrast to the divining of character the flâneur prides himself on, the modern world can, through the prism of the crowd, reveal itself as the realization of the deepest skepticism. Seated at his window, Descartes could imagine, as an epistemic possibility, the passers-by as automata cloaked in coats and hats. For Baudelaire it is the immersion in and combat with the crowd that make that skepticism all the more real. The recognition of automatism in the existence of the crowd bears on Benjamin’s critique of a vitalism that he perceives as reactionary. In the

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problematic cases (of Jung and Klages) it is a reaction that makes common cause with fascism. In the case of Bergson, vitalism is diagnosed as a deflection of the difficulties of reality, as a defense: “[Bergson] thus manages to stay clear of that experience from which his own philosophy evolved, or rather, in reaction to which it arose. It was the alienating, blinding experience of the age of large-scale industrialism. In shutting out this experience, the eye perceived a complementary experience in the form of its spontaneous afterimage, as it were. Bergson’s philosophy represents an attempt to specify this afterimage and fix it as a permanent record” (SW IV, 314). The question then arises as to the ways in which Baudelaire’s parrying of shock is not such a defensive reaction or in what ways his poetry does give expression to this new condition of humanity in a transformed structure of significant experience.

§3. The Transformation of Experience If one characterizes more generally what is brought out by Benjamin’s account of the body image of the crowd, then one might say that Baudelaire’s poetic task and his peculiar heroism have to do with facing the transformation of the structure of experience in modernity, with the possibility of making that transformation affirmable. Such transformation has an effect on the conditions in which lyric poetry can be written and received. The lyric poet has the task of giving voice to experience for his community. He is viewed as the “bard of the people.” Baudelaire struggles to retain a place for lyric poetry, that is, to give through it significant expression to the altered conditions or to the transformation of experience in modernity. The transformation of experience in modernity to which Baudelaire responds is characterized more generally by Benjamin as the loss of aura.5 “[Baudelaire] named the price for which the sensation of modernity could be had: the disintegration of the aura in immediate shock experience” (SW IV, 343). I take Benjamin’s notion of aura to be a way of characterizing an experience of significance. The character of significance, whether it be that of a work of art or of experience more broadly, is the sense that there is more meaning to the object than meets the eye. The figure of an aura of light emanating from an object and surrounding it, making it slightly more than it is, suggests that there is a space of meaning that comes with the object and allows us to relate to it significantly. This is possible insofar as the object is embedded in tradition.

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In reading the essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” there is a tendency to reduce the notion of the aura to one of the terms explicating it, namely, to authenticity. This emphasis can be misleading in particular if authenticity is simply contrasted with reproducibility. Authenticity ( just like Benjamin’s notion of origin) is not judged in relation to the point in time in which the work comes into existence. Nor is Benjamin concerned with establishing criteria that distinguish the authentic from the fake. Moreover, when Benjamin speaks of authenticity from the point of view of the experience rather than the production of the work and in terms of its “here and now” quality, he does not advocate embracing the immediacy of present impressions. Authenticity is explicated by Benjamin precisely in terms of the dependence of experience on tradition: “The uniqueness of the work of art is identical to its embeddedness in the context of tradition” (SW IV, 256).6 It is tradition that gives the work of art this extra weight of meaning or that provides the space in which it can be reappropriated in the present as significant experience. The reference to the “here and now” of the experience of the auratic is not to be understood in terms of the material or perceptual present but rather as the momentariness inherent in the symbolic presentation of what is beyond the perceivable. In particular, if one takes a paradigmatic context of the figure of the auratic, namely, the halo around the head of saints or angels, one can argue that such a significance is the manifestation of that which is essentially distant in the perceptible. The aura is the experience of distance or, more precisely, of the nearness of the distant (without thereby canceling the distance). The highest form of the auratic, that which gives it its religious association, is the embodiment of the transcendent in the phenomenal. The auratic is what Benjamin calls in his Trauerspiel book a symbol. Given this understanding of the auratic in terms of the involvement of tradition in experience, one should then add that if tradition is a matter of memory, what is involved in the auratic is essentially a type of involuntary memory. By this I mean a form of memory that the individual cannot recover at will. The fact that tradition is collective determines the mode in which the individual can relate to it. The access to that kind of memory would not be voluntary in the sense that it would depend, in the religious context, for example, on the days of communion, of remembrance, which demand the participation of the collective. In other words, in the experience of the aura, meaning appears that is not explicable in terms of the engagement of individual consciousness with the object. It

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is a peculiar accumulation of experience that constitutes the existence of the object in a medium of tradition, an accumulation that comes with the object when it is experienced as significant. The auratic experience is thus an experience of meaningfulness that elevates the object above itself. A further aspect of this involuntary recognition of meaning emerges therefore as a sense that the auratic object has a life of its own. Its meaning does not depend solely on the way we look at it, but it can be figured as having the capacity to return our attention: “Experience of the aura thus arises from the fact that a response characteristic of human relationships is transposed to the relationship between humans and inanimate or natural objects. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us. This ability corresponds to the data of the mémoire involontaire” (SW IV, 338). To attribute an aura to inanimate or natural objects is to experience their personification. The returned attention that one encounters in relation to the auratic is experienced as the enlivening or animation of that object. Or, to put it differently, our approach to the auratic work of art receives surprising reinforcement in the work, so that the process of judgment and criticism becomes one of enlivening in reflection. On these terms, Romantic criticism is a form that assumes the auratic nature of the experience of art. “Significant” experience requires the possibility of appropriation. Tradition is the medium that allows authentic (which is not possessive) appropriation for the collective. The disappearance of tradition implies a transformation in the structure of experience, which Benjamin initially characterizes by means of the distinction he makes between Erfahrung and Erlebnis. The prevalence of the immediacy of lived experience, as Benjamin diagnoses it, is not only due to the actual transformation of the surroundings of life, for example, the chaos of the streets of the modern city. It is also, in part at least, related to the disappearance of the medium of tradition. It is this break with the past that precipitates the isolation of experiences, their becoming “sensational.” The transformation of experience in the prevalence of immediate experience is not to be construed as the valuation of immediate experience as such. It does not imply that authenticity is to be found now in the bare immediacy of impression. This aestheticization of immediacy is foreign to Benjamin insofar as for him what is always at stake is significant experience, experience that can be articulated as language. The issue would

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always be how to find new modes of appropriating essentially isolated impressions. As he put it in relation to Baudelaire’s achievement: “This is the nature of the immediate experience [Erlebnis] to which Baudelaire has given the weight of long experience [Erfahrung]” (SW IV, 343). Similarly, to speak of a dimension of shock in modern experience would not mean embracing the production of shock effect and foregoing meaning (as certain Dadaist and surrealist practices would perhaps imply). As Benjamin’s discussion of Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” makes evident, the reaction to shock is precisely an increase of consciousness in modern experience. Thus, the problem becomes one of how lyric poetry is possible, given the excessive involvement of consciousness. It must forego the reliance on what would be called inspiration (always a matter of involuntary memory) and turn to planning or calculation: “One wonders how lyric poetry can be grounded in experience [einer Erfahrung] for which exposure to shock [Chockerlebnis] has become the norm. One would expect such poetry to have a large measure of consciousness; it would suggest that a plan was at work in its composition. This is indeed true of Baudelaire’s poetry” (SW IV, 318).7 The place of the planned and the voluntary in Baudelaire’s poetry can be exemplified in relation to the auratic experience of correspondences that seems, at first, to have a place in his poetry. The idea of significant experience in its dependence on involuntary memory assumes that experiences acquire in memory a unity that consciousness cannot provide them with. The recognition of correspondences is a way to bring out the unity in the constitution of the space of experience that is beyond our modes of unification. Correspondences provide a sense of unity to experience that is also its seal of authenticity. Correspondences are an auratic experience. They are connected to the sphere of the ritual experience, which disappears in modernity. Correspondences provide a sense of the emergence of meaning connections that cannot be explained by way of the recognizable structures of experience (causality, similarity, contiguity). In Baudelaire’s poem titled “Correspondances,” auratic experience is identified with the recognition of such kinship: “Scents, colors, and sounds respond to one another.” What is thus related does not belong to the same sensory space. Furthermore, precisely for that reason the recognition of relationships is referred to something deeper in nature that manifests itself beyond our directed modes of perceiving. It is as though nature as a whole speaks to us and returns our attention in such experiences. Correspondences are thus related to the other characterization of the aura, that of the returned gaze.

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As Benjamin emphasizes, correspondences are not a matter for empirical psychology but are revealed in the medium of memory. Correspondences are a form of the involuntary in memory. They are the clearest point of contact between the otherwise antipodal figures of Baudelaire and Proust. Yet the emphasis is, with Baudelaire, if not on the voluntary memory, then at least on the conscious seeking to arouse such memories. Proust himself was well aware of this difference between Baudelaire’s search for memories and his own “madeleine” experience: “. . . in Baudelaire, these reminiscences are still more frequent and obviously less incidental and therefore in my opinion decisive. Here it is the poet himself who, with more variety and more indolence, purposely seeks in the odor of a woman’s hair or her breast, for example, inspiring resemblances which shall evoke for him ‘the canopy of overarching sky’ and ‘a harbor filled with masts and sails’ ” (A, 404). Baudelaire seeks correspondences. One could also say that his fundamental experience of correspondences is that of their loss. If scent is, of all senses, the one most likely to involuntarily evoke memory, it is significant that Baudelaire writes: “Spring, the beloved, has lost its scent.” The problematization of “natural correspondences” is paralleled by the peculiar nature of the memories Baudelaire relates to each other. For Proust (as well as for Benjamin himself) the occasion for the concentration of meaning in memory is childhood. In contrast: “. . . in [Baudelaire’s] work memory gives way to the souvenir. In his work, there is a striking lack of ‘childhood memories’ ” (SW IV, 190). The souvenir is an isolated memory. As such it is detached from the living medium of memory. The experience of living nature in correspondences is replaced by the melancholic relationship between collected souvenirs. “The Correspondances are, objectively, the endlessly varied resonances between one souvenir and the others. “J’ai plus de souvenir que si j’avais mille ans’ ” (SW IV, 190). Correspondences formed between souvenirs will have a character that is different from that of the “natural” correspondences in Proust. Relations become allegorical. Acute consciousness rather than involuntary memory plays a fundamental part in the constitution of allegorical relationships. The souvenir does not have the structure of memory, which feeds into present experience to make it into a full experience: “The souvenir is the complement to ‘isolated experience.’ In it is precipitated the increasing self-estrangement of human beings, whose past is inventoried as dead effects . . . The relic comes from the cadaver; the souvenir comes from the defunct experience [Erfahrung] which thinks of itself, euphemistically, as living [Erlebnis]” (SW IV, 183).

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The relation constituted in the souvenir between defunct Erfahrung and Erlebnis presents the latter’s liveliness, the immediacy and force of the sensational (the effective, the shocking, even the sentimental) as the complement hiding the deadening of the world. The life of immediate experience is essentially demonic semblance. Baudelaire recognizes the deadness of the world attendant on the lively effects of immediate experience. His peculiar brand of melancholy is nevertheless not characterized by indolence but rather by rage. Rage is one form of reaction to the loss of significant experience. It is the expression of the incapacity to judge or discriminate: “For someone who is past experiencing, there is no consolation. Yet it is this very inability to experience that explains the true nature of rage. An angry man ‘won’t listen.’ His prototype, Timon, rages against people indiscriminately; he is no longer capable of telling his proven friend from his mortal enemy” (SW IV, 335). The incapacity to have (significant) experience is precisely what is implied in the primacy of Erlebnis. Rage is figured as a struggle against a storm, as time divides into isolated moments out of which no history can emerge: “The rage explodes in time to the ticking of the seconds that enslaves the melancholy man . . . In spleen, time is reified: the minutes cover a man like snowflakes. This time is historyless, like that of the mémoire involontaire. But in spleen the perception of time is supernaturally keen. Every second finds consciousness ready to intercept its shock” (SW IV, 335). This image of raging against a storm, betrayed by one’s allies, reappears at the end of the essay: “Baudelaire battled the crowd—with the impotent rage of someone fighting the rain or the wind. This is the nature of the immediate experience to which Baudelaire has given the weight of long experience”8(SW IV, 343).

§4. Commodity as Allegory Benjamin develops the possibility of lyric poetry in modernity in relation to the centrality of allegory for that mode of experience. Allegory is not merely a characteristic of Baudelaire’s poetic style. If anything, one should say that his style is consequent upon the contents of the world he is involved with. Allegory emerges with the baroque as the complement of a catastrophic vision of history that declines all promises of transcendent fulfillment. It opposes the projected completeness that appears in symbolic expression. Just as the baroque views history itself as allegorical, so for Baudelaire it is human experience in modernity that demands the form of allegorical expression: “The figure of the ‘modern’ and that

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of ‘allegory’ must be brought into relation with each other” (A, 239). The allegorical structure of the modern world is evident primarily in the place of the commodity in it. The understanding of commodity as having an allegorical structure is the key to opening up the significance of Baudelaire’s work for the image of modernity. (The incomplete parts of the planned book project on Baudelaire were titled “Baudelaire as Allegorist” and “The Commodity as Poetic Object.”) Exhibiting the allegorical structure of the commodity further provides a way of relating Benjamin’s involvement with Baudelaire with regard to the concerns of the Trauerspiel book and to the historico-political themes of The Arcades Project. The references to the Trauerspiel book throughout the convolute on Baudelaire thus provide a bridge between Benjamin’s analysis of the baroque’s allegorical materialism and his Marxism or historical materialism. The rule of the commodity is not merely reflected in the structure of the economic sphere narrowly construed. Rather, the allegorical nature of the commodity is manifest as a schema of experience. “The allegories stand for that which the commodity makes of the experiences people have in this century” (A, 328). The devaluation of the worth of objects in allegory is matched by the loss of significant experience in the world ruled by the commodity: “The devaluation of the world of things in allegory is surpassed within the world of things itself by the commodity” (SW IV, 164). Benjamin’s wish to think of economic processes as structuring the form of significant experience lead him to formulate Marx’s insights into the relation of superstructure and base in expressive terms: “Marx lays bare the causal connection between economy and culture. For us, what matters is the thread of expression. It is not the economic origins of culture that will be presented but the expression of the economy in the culture. At issue, in other words, is the attempt to grasp an economic process as perceptible Ur-Phenomenon, for out of which proceed all manifestations of life in the arcades (and accordingly in the nineteenth century).” The understanding of the economic process as structuring experience will essentially involve the analysis of the commodity, and its expressive form will be allegorical. To suggest how the decline of the aura in the structure of experience is related to the emergence of the allegorical structure of commodities, consider first that aura exists also in the sphere of practice: “If we think of the associations which, at home in the mémoire involontaire, seek to cluster around an object of perception, and if

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we call those associations the aura of that object, then the aura attaching to the object of a perception corresponds precisely to the experience which, in the case of an object of use, inscribes itself in long practice” (SW IV, 337). The initially contemplative characterization of the aura can be broadened to an understanding of the significance or value that attaches to an object of use. This significance is understood in relation to the continuity in the process of production and its embedding in tradition, which allows the workers to experience their product as valuable. It is this possibility of experiencing values in things that is disrupted by the growing division of labor in society. Marx’s famous description of commodity fetishism should then be assessed against the background of this understanding of the disappearance of the auratic object of practice: A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties . . . The existence of the things qua commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom . . . In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So is the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.9

In the preceding passage it might appear as though Marx adopts the structure of an auratic object to characterize the expressive power of the commodity in such conditions. He attributes an aura to the commodity, which can express as its own value the sum total of the social relations involved in its production. In that way the commodity appears as having certain unnatural and inexplicable powers that come to govern life as a fetish would. Indeed, it appears endowed with life. The commodity is so to speak transfigured. However, the auratic appearance of the commodity, its life, is bound to semblance. It lives off the impoverishment of the human world. The liveliness of the commodity is possible insofar as the world in which it is produced acquires characteristics of demonic repetition. The spell of the commodity is hiding the deadening of the

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world. It is for this reason that one has to think of the truth of the commodity’s space of meaning as emerging in the destruction of the remnants of semblance. Allegory’s mortifying power works toward the dissolution of the semblance of the commodity. “More and more relentlessly, the objective environment of human beings is coming to wear the expression of the commodity . . . What resists the mendacious transfiguration of the commodity world is its distortion into allegory” (SW IV, 173). Allegory, one might say, most adequately expresses, or actualizes in experience, the catastrophe that the modern world has become: “. . . allegory has to do, precisely in its destructive furor, with dispelling the illusion that proceeds from all ‘given order,’ whether of art or of life: the illusion of totality or of organic wholeness which transfigures that order and makes it seem endurable. And this is the progressive tendency of allegory” (A, 331). In a further passage relating the allegorical perspective of the baroque to the structure of commodities Benjamin interprets Marx’s understanding of the discontinuity conferred on the production process by the capitalist mode of production in terms of the fragmentation typical of the allegorical perspective: “Here may be found the key to the Baroque procedure whereby meanings are conferred on the set of fragments, on the pieces into which not so much the whole as the process of its production has disintegrated. Baroque emblems may be conceived as half-finished products, which, from the phases of a production process, have been converted into monuments to the process of destruction” (A, 366). Capitalist production aims to cover up the fragmentation in the production process by the appearance of the valuable completed product. Working against this tendency to fetishize the commodity, allegorical expression rediscovers the disruption beneath the surface of this auratic semblance of life. Marx further diagnoses how the capitalist economy produces the commodification of labor power itself. This economic description can be formulated in expressive terms as the equal objectification of all that allegory treats of, lacking as it does any distinction between persons and things. Allegory’s secret knowledge depends on its rule over a world of objects. “But the real triumph of the Baroque emblematic, the chief exhibit of which becomes the death’s head, is the integration of man himself into the operation” (A, 366). Finally, one can also trace how commodity takes the form of allegory by reference not to its process of production but rather to the process in which it becomes outdated. This seems to be why Benjamin quotes Adorno

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on that matter “. . . With the vitiation of their use value, the alienated things are hollowed out and, as ciphers, they draw in meanings. Subjectivity takes possession of them insofar as it invests them with intentions of desire and fear. And insofar as defunct things stand in as images of subjective intentions, these latter present themselves as immemorial and eternal” (A, 466). To this Benjamin adds the following: “. . . it should be kept in mind that, in the nineteenth century, the number of ‘hollowed out’ things increases at a rate and on a scale that was previously unknown, for technical progress is continually withdrawing newly introduced objects from circulation” (A, 466). Allegory destroys the semblance of life in the commodity. “Majesty of allegorical intention: to destroy the organic and the living—to eradicate semblance” (SW IV, 172). It reveals the life of the world of the commodity to be governed by the mythical form of eternal return: “The dialectic of commodity production in advanced capitalism: the novelty of products—as a stimulus to demand—is accorded an unprecedented importance. At the same time, ‘the eternal return of the same’ is manifest in mass production” (A, 331). It is essential (as with discussions of reproduction in art) not to think of repetition and return as mere by-products of the quantity of produced commodities. These are features of the relation to (each) object as such, features of experience. The attraction of the isolated impression, the sensational, and repetition are related by the understanding that it is precisely the new that ever repeats itself.

8 RESCUE

Certain forms of historical consciousness or appropriation of the past are for Benjamin complements of mythical consciousness. It is in contrast to such seemingly objective accounts that one can recognize more precisely the features of Benjamin’s own materialist historical practice. In particular, as opposed to the “narcotic” effects of historicism, it is characteristic of the “awakened” consciousness of the historical materialist to understand the appropriation of the past as its rescue. In a striking formulation of the components of the “elementary doctrine of historical materialism,” we find that “An object of history is that through which knowledge is constituted as the object’s rescue” (A, 476). Rescue presumes danger, a catastrophe to avert by taking urgent measures. That danger can be specified in terms of the threat of forgetting the past granted that one bears in mind that for Benjamin it has more to do with the way that the past is taken up by the present than with its simply falling into oblivion. It is the present’s mode of memory with its constant overpowering “conformism” (SW IV, 391) that is blocking a truthful realization of the past: “What are phenomena rescued from? Not only, and not in the main, from discredit and neglect into which they have fallen, but from the catastrophe represented very often by a certain strain in their dissemination, their ‘enshrinement as heritage’ ” (A, 473). However, how does the task of appropriating the past acquire the urgency associated with rescue? How is one to make the emergence of revolutionary power in the present correlative with the appropriation of the past? How is one to turn an issue of memory into a decisive struggle that is thoroughly political? 157

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§1. Against Historicism Images of danger and rescue abound in a famous passage in “On the Concept of History,” which figures history not quite as a battlefield but rather in its apparent form as the triumphal procession of the victors. Historicism is the ideology that eventuates in such a vision of history and justifies it: With whom does historicism actually empathize? The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of prior conquerors. Hence, empathizing with the victor invariably benefits the current rulers. The historical materialist knows what this means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which current rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried in the procession. They are called “cultural treasures,” and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. (SW IV, 392, translation modified)

Historicism takes the central form of explanation in history to be the return of the historical phenomenon investigated to the utterly specific context of its times. Whereas natural science sees in the subsumption under general laws the mode of justification and explanation of phenomena, historicism replaces the positivistic demand for laws of historical development with the ideal of the incorporation of the phenomenon to be explained into the individual context, which would provide the rationale for things occurring as they did: “The essence of historicism is the substitution of a process of individualizing observation for a generalizing view of human forces in history.”1 However, as Benjamin points out, an explanation of that sort would at the same time serve as a justification of that which has happened in history. It would make the actuality of what has in fact happened into a standard by which to judge meaning in history. Historicism thereby takes the form of apologia, a defense of what has occurred by placing it and understanding it in its context. It is a form of acceptance of the past that depends on the assumption that whatever has in fact occurred can be seen as reasonable insofar as it is viewed in its proper context. Such rationalization of the actual is to be distinguished from true actualization or realization, which is revealed by historical materialism to be the task of the present in relation to the past it recognizes as its own. For it denies that the past is yet unformed in its highest meaning determinations or that it can be actual-

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ized in the present. That is, the identification with what emerged victorious from the struggles of history would deny the possibility of revolutionizing the present by a further realization of that past: “The enshrinement or apologia is meant to cover up the revolutionary moments in the occurrence of history. At the heart, it seeks the establishment of continuity” (A, 474). Historicism’s mode of accounting for historical occurrences by reference to their specific context sanctifies the actual order as the rational outcome of history. History then presents a picture of evolution that might be called Darwinistic. Thus, it is not only that historicism identifies the individual aspect of every object it investigated. It also justifies the order or hierarchy of forces within a particular period. It makes those who have actually ruled into those who, from the point of view of history, have been vindicated. Historicism invariably justifies the ruling order of the past (as, so to speak, best adapted to the context) and eventuates in the view of history in which “all rulers are the heirs of prior conquerors” (SW IV, 392), leading all the way to the present rulers. Undoubtedly the historian can assume on moral grounds the injustice of a given order, but Benjamin’s point is that historical investigation as such is powerless to effect any critique. Historicism draws no critical force from the investigated past. For historicists this might appear as a perquisite of the objectivity of their accounts, namely, as the avoidance of involving present value judgment in the investigation of history. However, Benjamin’s point is that such supposed objectivity and rationalization mask a fundamental passivity. From that point of view history itself has no resources to reveal forces that are yet to be actualized. The relation historicism forms between present and past clarifies Benjamin’s thoughts on the appropriation of the cultural values of the past as the spoils of the present. Indeed, this possession of the past as “cultural treasures” is precisely possible insofar as no transformation of the past is conceived as possible in the medium of culture. The past so reified becomes a matter for accumulation. Whoever benefits from such passive or neutral relation to the past is always those who rule in the present. Historicism, though apparently stressing the uniqueness of every historical context, at the same time assumes that the present may enter into every past. The present of the historian, on such view, can bring the past back to life without in any way transforming itself. Culture is a living medium only insofar as it allows for transformation. The attempt to acquire culture without changing oneself is a manifestation

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of barbarism. This would be true of the individual, as well as the collective: For in every case these treasures have a lineage which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great geniuses who created them, but also to the anonymous toil of others who lived in the same period. There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. Barbarism lurks in the very concept of culture—as the concept of a fund of values which is considered independent not, indeed, of the production process in which these values originated, but of the one in which they survive. And just as such a document is never free of barbarism, so barbarism taints the manner in which it was transmitted from one hand to another. The historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from this process of transmission as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain. (A, 467)

The relation Benjamin suggests between the production of cultural values and the anonymous toil of the masses is, one might agree, evident in the case of the monuments of the civilizations of antiquity. With regard to them the masses are “directly involved” in the production of culture in such a way that contributes to their oppression. As Jochmann puts it at the beginning of the essay “The Regression of Poetry” (which Benjamin regards highly and for which he wrote an introduction): “Apart from a few unworldly scholars, few people would be tempted to admire the gigantic works of hoary antiquity—monstrous testaments to an equally monstrous degradation of day-laboring millions—for anything other than their massiveness; and few would be tempted to regard the impossibility of emulating their builders as a misfortune, or to yearn for the days of the grimacing priestly masks of Egypt because the pyramids were erected then” (SW IV, 370). However, there is a further sense in which the perpetuation and survival of culture are a testimony of barbarism. Culture is ideology when it is not conducive to transformation. There is a way in which attempting to hold to various forms of traditional value in art, that is, transmitting this fund of values and treating it as the treasures of the present day, closes off for the majority of people forms of experience that would do what such art originally did for its creators. Thus, Benjamin raises after Jochmann the question of how to react to what is widely perceived as the regression of poetry. Should one, out of a sense of deep loss, try to revive the world in which that poetry emerged? Or, rather, should one realize that a mode of transmission of and hold-

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ing to moribund forms comes at the expense of the deployment of human capacities in new forms in the present? With respect to the high days of, say, a poetic form in the life of a people, we might ask, as Jochmann does, “why mental faculties which (as experience teaches us) are capable of infinitely varied development are able at certain times to strive toward only a single goal, and with such notable success” (SW IV, 371).2 However, with regard to the present state, what needs to be understood is “that the glory and influence of poetry are vanishing wherever the mind is destined by nature to operate through other means and in different forms, and to regard this as anything but a misfortune” (SW IV, 372). The attempt to retain cultural possessions and enjoy them by enlivening the world of the past for its own sake, as historicism would, is in the present conditions the surest sign of barbarism: . . . there is another situation in which imagination enjoys a similar preeminence . . . a situation in which other forces are certainly awake, but in chains; in which the real world with all its treasures and truths is no longer unknown to us, but locked away. And if, in such a state of things . . . a nation is forced to continue along the wrong paths it has taken because no better ones are open to it, then a sick imagination comes to hold the scepter of one formerly so rich, and the rambling of a feverish mind replace the inspiration of the poet. Under such conditions, the finest products of socalled higher culture are crutches for a crippled society rather than free expressions of abundant intellectual vitality . . . (SW IV, 373)

Historicism cannot acknowledge the necessity of conceiving of the regression of certain cultural forms, in which true progress of the human spirit resides. Its mode of relation to the culture of the past as an inheritance of treasures is not the true form of tradition, for it fails to make the past a living force in the present.3

§2. Empathy and Melancholy The view of history that allows the present to take possession of the values of the past can be further characterized as a reification of history. It is a view of the past as already there, fully formed just as an object is. The past is not realized in the present; rather, its continued subsistence, with which the present can identify, precisely depends on freezing it “as it was.” Thus, Benjamin writes of historicism that it corresponds to “a viewpoint according to which the course of the world is an endless series

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of facts congealed in the form of things. The characteristic residue of this conception is what has been called the ‘History of Civilization,’ which makes an inventory, point by point, of humanity’s life forms and creations” (A, 14). Certainly the reification of historical events does not turn them into objects to be investigated by the natural sciences. So as to distinguish itself from the model of natural sciences, historicism takes what is characteristic of historical knowledge to be the historian’s capacity for identification with the specific context or world of the past by way of empathy or a special “feeling for the individual.”4 The historian, by re-creating the world of the past would reenliven it. That methodology is supposedly the antidote to positivistic history, which assigns to itself “the project of discovering ‘laws’ for the course of historical events” (SW IV, 401). However, Benjamin argues that, in effect, “the notion that the historian’s task is to make the past ‘present’ is guilty of the same fraudulence and is far less transparent” (SW IV, 401). “Forming the basis of the confrontation with conventional historiography and ‘enshrinement’ is the polemic against empathy” (A, 475). The first principle of such empathic understanding demands that the historian who identifies with the specificity of a certain time block all knowledge of what followed the period he is investigating. Benjamin takes the following claim by Fustel de Coulanges to epitomize its spirit: “If you want to relive an epoch, forget that you know what has come after it” (A, 472). Historicism thus presents fidelity to history to require entering the mode of experience of an epoch and understanding it from within. Quite apart from the question of the possibility of that identification with what, doubtfully, was itself available even to those living at that time, we should ask what motivates the very wish to so enter the world of the past.5 A critique of the reliance on empathy in our own relation to others might point to the dangers of sentimentality. In particular, empathy would then function as a substitute for action, for real involvement with those with whom one empathizes. In the broader context of history, the wish to identify with how things were without “disturbing” their order would similarly mask a fundamental passivity and make the study of the past a matter of idle curiosity.6 In his Trauerspiel book Benjamin criticizes empathy as a mode of judgment serving the deluded self-image of the present: Just as a man lying sick with fever transforms all the words which he hears into the extravagant images of delirium, so it is that the spirit of the pres-

Rescue ent age seizes on the manifestations of the past or distant spiritual worlds, in order to take possession of them and unfeelingly incorporate them into its own self-absorbed fantasizing. This is characteristic of our age: there is no new style, no unknown popular heritage to be discovered which would not straight away appeal with the utmost clarity to the feelings of contemporaries. This fatal, pathological suggestibility, by means of which the historian seeks through “substitution” to insinuate himself into the place of the creator—as if the creator were, just because he created it, also the best interpreter of his work—this has been called “empathy” in an attempt to provide a disguise under which idle curiosity masquerades as method. (O, 54)

If properly understood, the possibility of later interpretation, which is in principle unavailable to the creator, is the life of the work of art; thus, the reliance on empathy (as identification with the context of birth) denies such life to the work. It does not truly reveal origin. Benjamin’s characterization of historicism’s relation to the past as a form of enshrinement of that past would further suggest that empathy is a manifestation of melancholy. Enshrinement not only suggests that the unchangeability of the past is the condition for its being inherited, a condition of possessing and passing it on. There is also a sense of holding on to something long dead as though the past is not only treasures but also relics to be conserved. As Benjamin puts it: “The reception of great, much admired work of art is an ad plures ire (‘to go to the many,’ ‘to die’)” (A, 471). The figure of the procession of victors further suggests a connection between historicism and the melancholic temperament. Indeed, that very figure is invoked in the Trauerspiel book so as to characterize melancholic pensiveness: “Pensiveness is characteristic above all of the mournful. On the road to the object—no: within the object itself—this intention progresses as slowly and solemnly as the processions of the rulers advance” (O, 140). The rhythm of the representation of the past in the figure of the procession is characteristic of the allegorical mode of thought. For the melancholic the past is already lost. The melancholic takes possession of it but can secure it only insofar as that past is dead and enshrined: “. . . melancholy causes life to flow out of [the object,] and it remains behind dead, but eternally secure . . . it is not quite incapable of emanating any meaning or significance” (O, 183). As opposed to the melancholic pensiveness of the baroque allegorist, historicism covers melancholy by a belief in the capacity to reenliven the past through identification. Yet, its way of enlivening the object is to hide the underlying deadness of historical experience on which that view depends. Thus, Benjamin writes: “The false aliveness

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of the past-made-present, the elimination of every echo of a ‘lament’ from history, marks history’s final subjection to the modern concept of science” (SW IV, 401). Behind the wish to make the past present (to reenliven it by identification) stands the melancholic temperament that has given up on life. For precisely the identification that wishes to recapture the life of the past depends on freezing the historical object. It thus denies the possibility that there is life in the historical object itself, which is to emerge now and would carry in it the power to revolutionize the present. The inner connection between empathy and melancholy is indeed strongly suggested, as Benjamin quotes Flaubert: “Few will suspect how depressed [sad] one had to be, to undertake the resuscitation of Carthage” (A, 481). To that Benjamin adds the remaining link between melancholic pensiveness and play, or a lack of true involvement with the past. “It is pure curiosité that arises from and deepens sorrow” (A, 481). The alliance between reenlivening and melancholy inherent in historicism provides a way to recognize the mythical elements hidden in that view of history. Though the historicist’s scheme of succession of victors and accumulation of cultural treasure might suggest progress in history, it is possible only by deadening the past, by making every moment of it similarly powerless to affect the present. Its seeming wish for uniqueness in history eventuates in homogenizing historical time: “The concept of mankind’s historical progress cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must underlie any criticism of the concept of progress itself” (SW IV, 395). The wish for the enlivening of the unique historical context, far from providing an adequate account of uniqueness in history, relies on the homogeneous view of time and ultimately provokes a sense of eternal recurrence in history: “In the idea of eternal recurrence, the historicism of the nineteenth century capsizes” (A, 117). To clarify, consider the apparent opposite of the historicist’s emphasis on uniqueness, namely, the sense that in every configuration of human life in history the same conflicts are being replayed without the hope of any fundamental transformation. In the opening of the 1939 exposé, as well as in Convolute S, Benjamin quotes a claim to that effect, which he attributes to Schopenhauer: “ ‘If one takes from history only the most general facts, those which lend themselves to parallels and theories, then it suffices, as Schopenhauer said, to read only the morning paper and Herodotus. All the rest intervening—the evident and fatal repetition of

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the most distant and the most recent facts—becomes tedious and useless’ ”(A 545). Supposedly the point of this passage is that in comparing Herodotus and the morning paper, one would realize that nothing has changed and that history repeats the same configurations, always a play of the fundamental human passions. This view would, then, form an apparent opposition to historicism’s wish to consider each period on its unique “individual” terms. The apparent antithesis to historicism can be formulated as follows: “Man, it was maintained, with his reason and his passions, his virtues and his vices, had remained basically the same in all periods of which we have knowledge.”7 This conception essentially depends on looking at history on a grand scale, on being impressed by what repeats itself in the emergence and the decline of civilizations. Insofar as history is viewed through this prism, we can safely ignore all the small details that become tedious and useless. Of what use is it to engage all such intricacies if they come to the same thing? Put differently, this vision of history would be tantamount to a certain detachment from the possibility of learning from history, from its coming to bear on one’s present experience. It would go with a heroic bearing of a stoic attitude that treats the orders of the world as inescapable as fate. In commenting on that passage, Benjamin notes that in fact repetition is most present not in the great configurations but rather in the smallest details. This makes all the difference in our way of addressing it, for what in principle is impossible to hold to is the heroic attitude toward the minutest repetition that crops up in every aspect of life. Indeed, retaining such a posture now appears as a rationalization of the utter helplessness revealed in the face of eternal recurrence. It thus shares the shallow rationalism that is at work in embracing visions of progress of humanity. Stoicism, as Nietzsche has clearly recognized in Schopenhauer, is a lifedenying will. This is where it is shown to rejoin the melancholic temperament implicit in historicism. Both the attitude Benjamin attributes to Schopenhauer and to historicism feed on the same problematic relation to the past as something essentially finished and immutable. Both are rationalizing, both melancholic. They are the two horns of an antinomy to be overcome dialectically. Historicism’s belief in progress is the complement of the sense of recurrence in history: “The belief in progress—in an infinite perfectibility understood as an infinite ethical task—and the representation of eternal return are complementary. They are the indissoluble

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antinomies in the face of which the dialectical conception of historical time must be developed. In this conception, the idea of eternal return appears precisely as that ‘shallow rationalism’ which the belief in progress is accused of being, while faith in progress seems no less to belong to the mythic mode of thought than does the idea of eternal recurrence” (A, 119).

§3. “A Unique Experience with the Past” Benjamin identifies his own position as a form of historical materialism, at every point opposed to the historicist view: “It is the inherent tendency of dialectical experience to dissipate the semblance of eternal sameness, and even of repetition in history. Authentic political experience is absolutely free of this semblance” (A, 473). The uniqueness of the dialectical experience, not to be confused with the conception of uniqueness of historicism, has to be understood in terms of the unique opportunity for the present to recognize the past belonging to it: “Historicism offers the ‘eternal’ image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience [Erfahrung] with the past”(SW IV, 396). Having a unique experience with the past does not mean identifying with the world of experience of the past, with how uniquely, so to speak, things were experienced in such and such a time and place. It is distinct from having an experience of the unique past, which is how the historicist would think of the individuality of historical experience. By using “with” rather than “of,” Benjamin seems to point to a way in which the past is alive in the present by transforming the present’s mode of experience. One might then also say that the past is unique in being “our” past, in being recognized as belonging to the present. Historicism might aim through empathy to transport us into the space of experience of the past. However, the uniqueness associated with historical materialism can be initially understood to be the consequence of the monadic construction serving the highest interests of the present. For the monadic presentation does not place the historical phenomenon in a context. Nor does it draw analogies to similar phenomena. It is rather, as I have argued, a condensation of history at a single point, as though identifying the scope of a unique phenomenon with history as a whole. This “telescoping” of the past into the space of the present is achieved by construction. It does not depend on replacing events in a broader context but on construction from material taken out of its context: “The

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true method of making things present is to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their space). . . . Thus represented, the things allow no mediating construction from out of ‘large contexts’ . . . We don’t displace our being into theirs; they step into our life” (A, 206). Construction is the very opposite of identification. For the historicist, the individual unity of the world of the past is a given, and the historian is to find a way of being sensitive to that specificity. The historical materialist, on the contrary, constructs the historical event out of historical material, which provides no occasion for identification. Furthermore, the reliance of historicism on empathy is to be set against the forceful appropriation characteristic of the relation to the past formed in the dialectical image. Benjamin speaks of “appropriating a memory.” The use of the notion of appropriation is the opposite of the empathic identification. It suggests a forceful seizure, an arrogation, or a taking over. Identification, in contrast, wishes not to disturb and leaves the past “as it was.” It “respects” its object. Empathy assumes a distance from its object and the necessity to preserve the space of the object without interfering with it. It enshrines the past and makes it an object of cult. “To the process of rescue,” as Benjamin puts it, “belongs the firm, seemingly brutal grasp” (A, 473). That destructive moment shows construction to be distinct from reconstruction: “It is important for the materialist historian, in the most rigorous way possible, to differentiate the construction of a historical state of affairs from what one customarily calls its ‘reconstruction.’ The ‘reconstruction’ in empathy is one-dimensional. ‘Construction’ presupposes destruction” (A, 470). The uniqueness or singularity of the construction is not merely to be formulated in terms of our knowledge of the past. For uniqueness is most manifest in the recognition of the possibility of transformation. Recognition, such as is appropriate to the dialectical image, determines a form of action; it implies something of a unique opportunity for transforming the present. The unique experience brought out by the construction contrasts with the potentially endless progression. It brings out the stakes in one’s present moment. This sense of uniqueness and opportunity characteristic of the true internal relation of a specific past with the present is the grounds for thinking of history in terms of rescue. Against the slowness of the procession and the sense of repetition historicism ultimately brings to history, Benjamin sets the urgency inherent in materialistic history, arising from a sense of danger, and an opportunity in the present to avoid it. Recognizing one’s position as an opportunity is,

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subjectively speaking, a form of presence of mind. However, this is not to be seen merely as a trait of the historian’s character. It is a matter of method: “Still to be established is the connection between presence of mind and the ‘method’ of dialectical materialism” (A 469). Presence of mind has an objective correlate in the opening up of possibilities produced by the dialectical image. This presence of mind characterizes the difference between the consciousness of the present as a mere temporal determination and what Benjamin calls now-time, the awareness of the present as the possibility of fundamental transformation. In contrast to the melancholic relation to the past, which is reflected in the historicist position, Benjamin emphasizes the urgency or decisiveness of our relation to the past. The present is brought into a state of crisis that demands action, by its transformed relation to the past. It is made a moment of decision or a unique opportunity for transformation. I have argued that the polarization of the historical event is to be understood in terms of the involvement of the present. That polarization is to be understood as a revelation of the stakes in history. When an event is polarized to the utmost, the tensions inherent in it constitute the present as a moment of decision. Recognizing the stakes of history would be bringing the present into a critical state. “The materialist presentation of history leads the past to bring the present into a critical state” (A, 471). Bringing the present into a critical state is realizing its opportunity to be a turning point, an opportunity for another meaning of history to emerge. It is, thus, where the danger of the prevalence of the status quo is the  greatest. Ignoring that opportunity is the catastrophic condition of the  present. “Definitions of basic historical concepts: Catastrophe—to have missed the opportunity. Critical moment –the status quo threatens to be preserved. Progress—the first revolutionary measure taken” (A, 474). This explains why Benjamin slightly changes his figure of the constellation as described in the Trauerspiel book when he adopts it to the framework of The Arcades Project. The constellation, which might wrongly suggest by itself the timelessness or eternity of what is external to human affairs, becomes “a constellation of dangers”: “the dialectician cannot look on history as anything other than a constellation of dangers which he is always, as he follows its development in his thought, on the point of averting” (A, 469). This last formulation strikes a further register of associations. Indeed, it cannot but remind one of Carl Schmitt’s definitions of the sovereign whose task is to avert the state of emergency in which law is abrogated.

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This no doubt intended similarity of formulation is, I take it, the basis of an ironic transformation of Schmitt’s definition (who by that time was clearly identifying with the rulers, with the history of the victors). The emergency, as it comes to characterize the relation of the present to its past, is understood as follows: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that accords with this insight. Then we will clearly see that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency” (SW IV, 392). Consider first that, on Benjamin’s understanding, the danger to avert is not something that occurs suddenly and unexpectedly. It is the status quo of the present—that which always characterizes the form of the ruling powers’ appropriation of the past. If that is the case, then what is necessary is precisely to bring about the perception of the present as a constant danger, as that state of emergency to avert. It is the weight of the past as a catastrophe that brings the present to a critical state and that accounts for the danger threatening it. In other words the “real state of emergency” is something the recognition of which the materialist historian is supposed to bring about. Moreover, if it is the transformation of one’s relation to the past that is the task of the sovereign power that can be manifest in the present, then the emergency is ever present. This is what it would mean to speak of a permanent state of emergency. Every present can be seen as a “now,” as a turning point in relation to that past which it recognizes as its own. Benjamin reconceives Schmitt’s association of sovereignty as the capacity for decision in a state of emergency. Decision is not choice grounded in dictatorial authority. Sovereignty is the capacity to make one’s position a decisive one that allows or demands urgent action in the present. That emergence of decisive power depends first and foremost on the construction of the past in the dialectical image.8 A true sovereignty of reason is revealed in holding the material of the past in a constellation saturated with tensions.9 Such force made manifest in history can in no way be identified with the power of the state, but it is nevertheless essential to politics (to history as politics), for it grounds the decisive position of the present.10 We need to consider a last complication in the account of rescue of the past, one that concerns the relation between the appropriation of the past and what Benjamin understands as the irretrievability of the image of that past. “The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized

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only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability and is never seen again. ‘The truth will not run away from us’: this statement by Gottfried Keller indicates exactly that point in historicism’s image of history where the image is pierced by historical materialism. For it is an irretrievable image of the past which threatens to disappear in any present that does not recognize itself as intended in that image” (SW IV, 390). This claim at one level reflects the distinction between the historicist understanding of the past as fixed and ever available in principle and the sense of urgency and opportunity that emerges in the historical materialist relation to the past. In contrast, then, to the reification of history, where the past is passed along as treasures or relics from one generation to the next, in the materialist outlook, what is evident is the passing or ephemeral moment inherent in the construction of history. To acknowledge the inner dependence of past and present, that the dialectical image allows the recognition of the past for a present, is tantamount to acknowledging the passing of that image and its irretrievable nature. “Articulating the past historically . . . means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to hold fast that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to the historical subject in a moment of danger” (SW IV, 391). However, one could further ask whether ephemerality is constitutive of the dialectical image. Is it ephemeral until one holds to it? Furthermore, how is holding fast to it distinct from turning the past into an enshrined heritage? How is the appropriation of memory distinct from turning the past into a store of possessions? There is an important ambiguity in Benjamin’s claim that it is “an irretrievable image of the past that threatens to disappear.” He does not hold the more intuitive claim that the image of the past threatens to disappear irretrievably if it is not held to. Rescue and irretrievability are not opposed; rather, paradoxical as it may sound at first, it is the condition of the rescue that makes the image of the past irretrievable. The issue has already arisen for us in characterizing the relation of dream and awakening. For fulfillment might very well mean losing the relation to the image of the past that has been the object of longing. It is forgetting just as much as remembering the past. In becoming irretrievable, the force of the past would not be lost. Indeed, it is not possible to hold fast to an image of the past without translating it or finding a foothold for it in the meaning of the present.11 It would be thus incorporated in the present space of life. That process would be the truly materialistic understanding of rescue, which

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is opposed to the idealist sense that such past could survive as an image in our minds or a description in books. The image of the past is irretrievable insofar as it has moved into higher forms or has been brought into our present arrangements of life and revolutionized them.12 In particular, this fulfillment of the past by its transformation into present experience and action is crucial to the possibility of conceiving redemption in history.

§4. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Realizability Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” may afford the clearest view of how he conceives of revolutionizing the present by transforming its relation to its past.13 The essay concerns the transformation of a limited field, namely art, but bears more broadly on the understanding of social transformation Since art is one of the fields in which the possibility of significant experience is most evident, an account of the transformation of art would also provide an opportunity for investigating the possibilities for a different mode of (significant) experience in the conditions of modernity. In particular what must be explored through the consideration of this essay is the possibility of transformation of (our perception of) the ordinary.14 The essay opens with the question of the relation between the revolutionary transformation of society and the transformation of its ideological superstructure. Just as Marx argued that the present conditions of capitalist economy contain the inherent possibility of their self-overcoming, Benjamin argues that the conditions for a transformation of the idea of artistic value already exist and can be revealed by considering the tendencies of the development of art in the superstructure. The recognition of these tendencies would, by itself, be a force in the political struggle: “They neutralize a number of traditional concepts—such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery—which, used in an uncontrolled way . . . allow factual material to be manipulated in the interest of fascism” (SW IV, 252). More fundamentally, Benjamin claims that what constitutes value in art shifts from its anchoring in ritual to its emergence in relation to the space of politics. Indeed, an adequate reading of the essay should lead to an understanding of its famous conclusion, which contrasts the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism, with the politicizing of art in Communism (see SW IV, 270).

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However, it is just as important to stress that the essay is not concerned with prophesying the form of art in a classless society. Indeed, what is revealed in a new light is what already exists in the present and is commonly and generally available, as in film, for instance. It is to a large extent the holding on to the forms of the past—not only its funds of values but also its modes of evaluation and even the very idea of art it has bequeathed—that hides from us the significance of the new medium of film. The problem is therefore how to recognize the value of the present in the transformation of the very idea of art by technological reproducibility. This question must be addressed by tracing the transformation of the central concepts spanning the domain of the aesthetic: judgment, the relation of appreciation and pleasure, audience, work, creativity, expertise, community of taste, and other matters. The traditional idea of art, which brings together all of these concepts, is encapsulated in what Benjamin calls the auratic. Different aspects of the auratic may be seen to correspond to different moments of the aesthetic judgment, elaborated most systematically in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. In what follows I briefly consider Benjamin’s essay against the background provided by Kant’s articulation of the aesthetic and focus on the transformation of some of the key terms in the domain of the aesthetic realized by the advent of film.

The transformation of the traditional structure of judgment is perhaps most clearly evident in the idea of a critical yet distracted appreciation that for Benjamin is a possibility of our response to film: “. . . at the movies, the evaluating attitude requires no attention. The audience is an examiner, but a distracted one” (SW IV, 269). The capacity to distract is usually attributed to what turns one’s mind away from serious and burdensome matters. Distractions make one forget what there is to care about. It is therefore a condition whose absentmindedness is contrasted with the concentration deemed necessary to assess high art: “. . . the ancient lament that the masses seek distraction, whereas art demands concentration from the spectator . . . is a commonplace. The question remains whether it provides a basis for the analysis of film” (SW IV, 268). In other words, how can distraction be a productive concept with respect to art? The notion of distracted examination can be illuminated by contrasting it to the disinterest essential to an aesthetic judgment of beauty according

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to Kant.15 Disinterest, too, foregoes the seriousness in which things might be considered in reality. It is conducive to the state of play that for Kant is characteristic of the movement of our faculties in the aesthetic judgment. Insofar as disinterestedness is key to the endless movement of meaning in the aesthetic judgment, it does not eventuate in a “verdict” or decision but rather allows one to dwell upon beauty, to remain endlessly or purposelessly with it. Reflection is conceived in contrast to determination. Indeed, as long as determination is understood as the application of a concept, this suspension of the end characterizes the aesthetic as a state of indecision pregnant with meaning. The idea of distracted examination also assumes detachment from the object. But the distracted person is not daydreaming. Distraction allows one, as Benjamin sees it, to introduce decisiveness into judgment, for a lack of concentrated attention does not allow dwelling at length on matters. Examination must promptly eventuate in judgment. In other words, whereas in the disinterested condition we find judgment identified with the movement of free play of the faculties, which constantly defers taking a stand, the distracted examiner has the capacity to exercise prompt judgments. The issue, then, is how to make this into a virtue—a sign of healthy innocence, of the vigor of youth unafraid to pass judgment— rather than a symptom of impatience, of the difficulty to give enough time to reflection.16 In the opening of his essay on the epic theater Benjamin argues that Brecht envisions for it a “relaxed audience.” However, he does not contrast relaxation to arriving at a decisive judgment based on expertise. The possibility of a “summary” judgment depends essentially on the way in which such judgment is not based merely on matters of culture, for which one requires elaborate education in tradition. For the first time with film one can also conceive of the structure of judgment without the hierarchy attending to competence in the cultural tradition. The notion of the aura, one should remember, could be understood as a reflection of the way in which the work of art belongs to a medium of tradition. It is by virtue of tradition that the work has its inner life in criticism and other forms of transmission that gradually realize its meaning. As a result of such transmission and of the existence in the medium of tradition, the work gathers into itself a space of meaning and opens a space of play for appreciating it. It is therefore the unavailability of this space of play that transforms the idea of judgment. This lack of the “cultural space” required for evaluation might be called “barbarism,” but, as Benjamin writes elsewhere: “Barbarism? Yes,

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indeed. We say this in order to introduce a new, positive concept of barbarism” (SW II, 732).

Benjamin characterizes the response to film in terms of “an immediate, intimate fusion of pleasure—pleasure in sensing and experiencing—with an attitude of expert appraisal” (SW II, 732). The inner relation of pleasure and judgment is essential to the very idea of an aesthetic judgment. In Kant, for example, pleasure is in the judging itself, in the deployment of one’s capacity to judge. However, the concept of expert appraisal brings in an altogether different register. For the notion of expertise has traditionally been associated with the realm of work rather than play. It comes to characterize a certain specialization or precision mainly identified with the idea of artisanship. One would contrast, for instance, the abundance associated with the creative genius of the artist with the technical expertise of the artisan. Yet, when Benjamin speaks of expertise in relation to film, it is not a matter of knowledge of the technical side of filmmaking but rather primarily an expertise manifest in evaluation or judgment: “It is inherent in the technology of film, as of sports, that everyone who witnesses these performances does so as a quasi-expert” (SW IV, 262). The involvement of expertise in judgment can be assessed in terms of the transformation in the relation of judge to participant or actor. To put it simply, the expertise of the actor in film depends on nothing other than the ordinary, in which the judge also partakes. It is therefore a matter about which the judge can personally manifest expertise. Ordinary expertise is tantamount to the possibility of everyone’s taking part in film. Playing in film does not demand the kind of talent (or genius) required of the theater actor. This means not only that some films have used nonprofessional actors. Rather, acting in film has essentially a dimension of people playing themselves. The possibility of playing oneself in front of the camera is not a form of retaining one’s familiar identity but depends on creating a distance for play by way of the camera itself: “Experiments have proved that a man does not recognize his own gait on film or his own voice on the phonograph” (SW IV, 814).17 The technology of film changes the relation between actor and character in a fundamental way and allows for a transformed notion of expertise in acting and judging. Acting is no longer something understood solely in terms of the capacity to enter into and project a charac-

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ter. It involves the corporeal presence of the actor in the character. While stage actors need the skills and tradition of acting so that the audience can identify with them in the right way, the camera, as it tests or investigates them, constructs their character in ways that are not open to their intentional control. Film actors play by allowing themselves to be tested by the camera. Benjamin writes that “the performance of the actor is subject to a series of optical tests:”18 This is the first consequence of the fact that the actor’s performance is presented by means of a camera. The second consequence is that the film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance to the audience in person. This permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor. The audience’s empathy with the actor is really an empathy with the camera. Consequently, the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing. (SW IV, 259–260)

In other words, a pervasive problem of identification and empathy in traditional forms of art can be resolved for film by the very technology. It is not that identification is now directed by the movement of the camera rather than elicited by the actor. Rather, occupying the position of the camera foregoes any reliance on empathy. There is thus in film an inherent possibility of detachment, call it relaxation, in relation to the projected. It is in that context that one must understand Benjamin’s remark that “at the movies, the evaluating attitude requires no attention” (SW IV, 269). One can also say that, whereas in theater one would find the audience absorbed in the play, in film the projected is absorbed by the audience. This allows a reformulation of the contrast between distraction and concentration: “Distraction and concentration [Zerstreuung und Sammlung] form an antithesis, which may be formulated as follows. A person who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it; he enters into the work, just as, according to legend, a Chinese painter entered his completed painting while beholding it. By contrast the distracted masses absorb the work of art into themselves” (SW IV, 268). Concentration is a form of attention that characterizes the absorption of the beholder in the work of art. That absorption can be understood as demanded by the work’s selfabsorbed or self-enclosed nature. The work closes itself off; it is essentially

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constituted as a space of internal relations. This is not to say that the beholder cannot attend to it, only that it is the disinterested approach that allows the work to appear as, at once, distant and ungraspable, as well as a world in itself, in which one enters, as the Chinese painter enters the completed painting. That is, one cannot engage a work on the model of communication but rather by being absorbed in it in a way that matches its own self-absorbed or antitheatrical nature.19 Creating this semblance of the self-absorbed has been essential, as Michael Fried has shown, to the response of painting to the emergence of the bourgeoisie as an audience for art. It is part of a complex dialectic that makes the conviction in the work essentially depend on its avoidance of a theatrical relation to its audience, of its appearing to be for an audience. However, Benjamin’s contrast between being absorbed in a work and absorbing the work into oneself provides for film a mode of escape from the dialectic of absorption and theatricality.

“The technological reproducibility of the artwork changes the relation of the masses to art. The extremely backward attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into a highly progressive reaction to a Chaplin film” (SW IV, 264; italics in original). Throughout his writings Benjamin has distinguished forms of art that isolate and speak to the solitary individual from those whose audience is essentially communal. Thus, to take an example, the novel isolates its reader, whereas storytelling is experienced in common. However, what is at stake in the relation of the masses to film is not captured just by reference to the fact that it is viewed with others. There occurs with film a fundamental transformation of the relation of the individual to the community of judgment. Aesthetic judgment, as Kant thinks of it, is first and foremost singular and individual. That is, it is always deployed in relation to a unique instance of beauty and is a form of self-reliance that must be attuned to the pleasure the individual experiences in reflection. Universality is understood by way of the possibility of representativeness.20 That is, speaking with a universal voice is speaking for others and exemplifying an idea of agreement. The fact that our relation to an idea of agreement can, according to Kant, be understood only regulatively must be mirrored in the form our appreciation takes: Judgment must be construed as exemplifying the possibility of endless advance in reflection. It is that exemplification of the idea that makes the work inherently a manifestation of distance. It is

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part and parcel of Benjamin’s understanding of the structure of the auratic.21 With film, Benjamin conceives of an altogether different structure: not of an exemplary individual judgment but rather the possibility of turning a mass of reactions into a judgment: “. . . nowhere more than in the cinema are the reactions of individuals, which together make up the massive reaction of the audience, determined by the imminent concentration of reactions into a mass. No sooner are these reactions manifest than they regulate one another” (SW IV, 264). So as to avoid reading Benjamin’s remark as a sociological observation on the averaging of reactions to film into a consensus, it is necessary to clarify the nature of the concentration of reactions into a mass (which can be just as much the response of one individual). How can estimation arise out of the sensing of a mass of reactions? Whereas the traditional structure of judgment hinges on the contrast between the reflective and the effective (the production of reactions), film has found a way to reconceive the relation of judgment and effect. The striking character that Benjamin attributes to film means that its absorption produces a multitude of isolated impressions in consciousness. Estimation is constituted by bringing together a multitude of isolated reactions, none of which is in itself decisive. A certain weight or critical mass they come to have together precipitates judgment. Thus Benjamin suggests the possibility of conceiving with film of a mode of estimation through which the sheer weight or mass of responses becomes decisive. It is possible to distinguish the critical decisiveness of such judgment from the problematic determination of the object by means of a concept in a determinant judgment. To put it in Kant’s terms, the operative contrast is no longer that of the determinant to the reflective but rather to the massive judgment. The latter assumes the capacity to gather reactions into a mass that precipitates judgment here and now. There is no more deferral, inherent in exemplifying agreement regulatively. Rather, the balancing of reactions leads to a critical moment of passing judgment. The previous considerations suggests that there will be a fundamental difference as to how a space of play is opened by the judgment upon the auratic work and how it is conceived in relation to film. Play is essentially in the traditional structure of aesthetic judgment in terms of the free and continuous movement of the imagination. Thus, in the essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Benjamin speaks of the reduction of the imagination’s space of play by the technology of reproduction: “The

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perpetual readiness of voluntary, discursive memory, encouraged by the technology of reproduction, reduces the imagination’s scope for play [Spielraum]” (SW IV, 337). However, at the same time another space of play is opened up by film that is closely related to our habitual responses: On the one hand, film furthers insight into the necessities governing our lives by its use of close-ups, by its accentuation of hidden details in familiar objects, and by its exploration of commonplace milieus through the ingenious guidance of the camera; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of a vast and unsuspected field of play [Spielraum; translation modified]. Our bars and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories seemed to close relentlessly around us. Then came film and exploded this prison-world with the dynamite of the split second, so that now we can set off calmly on journeys of adventure among its far-flung debris. (SW IV, 265)

The unsuspected field of play, of journeys of adventure, of which we become conscious in detachment, is precisely the ordinary, that which is also the object of the deepest boredom. The critical effectiveness of film depends on its capacity to make the ordinary a matter for distraction. Together with the transformation in the scope and structure of judging, we find the possibility of discovering value to be intimately related to the opening of the ordinary surroundings to meaning. To put it simply, with film the ordinary can become the ultimate subject matter of art. It is thus important to counter the tendency of certain readings of the essay to think of photography and film in relation to the extraordinary. This has been the emphasis of readings that relate Benjamin’s essay to aspects of Dadaist and surrealist practice. In particular, if we misunderstand the emphasis on the dimension of shock in Benjamin’s account, we might be tempted to set up a fundamental opposition between the ordinary and the “shocking” cinematic experience. Benjamin devotes a section of the essay to contrasting film’s relation to shock to the way Dadaism was intent on shocking so as to destroy the possibility of reflective immersion in the work of art: “The Dadaists attached much less importance to the commercial usefulness of their artworks than to the uselessness of those works as objects of contemplative immersion . . . Contemplative immersion—which, as the bourgeoisie degenerated, became a breeding ground for asocial behavior—is here

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opposed by distraction as a variant of social behavior. Dadaist manifestations actually guaranteed a quite vehement distraction by making artworks the center of scandal. One requirement was paramount: to outrage the public” (SW IV, 266). The production of the shock essential to Dadaism might destroy the immersion of bourgeois contemplation in art but does not allow the transformation of the experience of the masses to art.22 What is so significant in the emergence of film is the way in which it takes care, by means of its automatic mode of production, of that which Dadaism must understand by way of its destructive, antimoralistic animus. “By means of its technological structure, film has freed the physical shock effect— which Dadaism had kept wrapped, as it were, inside the moral shock effect—from its wrapping” (SW IV, 267; italics added). Film naturally destroys the possibility of absorbed reflection and makes the involvement of consciousness in an environment of shock something productive and pleasurable.

It is possible to sum up many of the issues raised in our discussion of Benjamin’s essay in terms of the place of the ordinary in film. The ordinary is the weight of experience without tradition, which allows reactions to count, to reach the critical point of decisiveness in one’s judgment. One might say that, with film and photography, the ordinary is realized as the field of expertise and play for judgment. This means both that the ordinary is a subject matter for this new art and is that which underlies its modes of appreciation. Culture becomes the movement out of the ordinary and back to it. The centrality of the revelation of the ordinary to the transformed modes of perception and evaluation requires a transformation of our understanding of the ordinary itself. In particular there is a need to consider the relation formed between the ordinary and the habitual or, in general, the place of habits in relation to the experience of film. On the traditional model of aesthetic experience, there would be an inverse correlation between the habitual and the significant. Benjamin’s short discussion of architecture at the end of the essay is extremely important in that respect. He points out that there has always been a form of art that was absorbed by the collective rather than contemplated in concentration by the individual, namely, architecture. Dwelling is a fundamental form of being in the ordinary for which significant perception is

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intimately related to habit: “For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at historical turning points cannot be performed solely by optical means—that is by way of contemplation. They are mastered gradually—taking their cue from tactile perception—through habit” (SW IV, 268; italics added). It is by taking itself to be primarily concerned with ordinary experience that film makes habits become touchstones for appreciation. Furthermore, it is only insofar as the habitual is itself opened up in the experience of film that it becomes a source of value and pleasure.23 When Benjamin writes that “it is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye,” one need not think of the camera as bringing out like a microscope utterly unknown features of reality. Rather, Benjamin draws on the distinction between the intentional nature of consciousness and the possibility of the nonintentional (one could call it unconscious) opening of the same expanse of living by the camera:24 “Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the split second when a person actually takes a step. We are familiar with the movement of picking up a cigarette lighter or a spoon, but know almost nothing of what really goes on between hand and metal, and still less how this varies with different moods” (SW IV, 266). In his essay on Proust, Benjamin reflects on the centrality of the nonintentional in fulfilled experience, on that which is not available to consciousness but can be opened only by chance for the solitary poet in involuntary memory. However, habits are similarly unavailable to consciousness, and their transformation is opened for all, collectively, in film. Film is intimately related, one might say, to the experience of the prosaic or to the prosaic as experience.25

REMARK Experience Articulated in Stories Storytelling, is for Benjamin one of the forms in which significant experience is shaped in the medium of tradition.26 It is nevertheless a form of

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transmission of experience which is on the verge of disappearing in modernity. I will develop in what follows some of the central features of storytelling and in Remark B to chapter 9, further refer to one of the central cases of the transformation of storytelling found in Kafka’s parables. Benjamin opens his essay “Experience and Poverty” with a fable: “Our childhood anthologies” he writes “used to contain the fable of the old man who, on his deathbed, fooled his sons into believing that there was a treasure buried in the vineyard. They would only have to dig. They dug, but found no treasure. When autumn came, however, the vineyard bore fruit like no other in the whole land. They then perceived that their father had passed on a valuable piece of experience: the blessing lies in hard work and not in gold. Such lessons in experience were passed on to us, either as threats or as kindly pieces of advice, all the while we were growing up . . . It was handed down in short form to sons and grandsons, with the authority of age, in proverbs . . . Where has it all gone? Who still meets people who really know how to tell a story . . .”(SW II, 731). Benjamin’s opening tale is not only an example of storytelling but can also serve as an allegory of the structure of the transmission of experience in storytelling. Indeed it is a story about storytelling: The old man tells his sons a tale about a treasure buried in his vineyard. I note, first that the story is appropriate to an environment of work (in this case the rural environment of a vineyard). The experience it aims to communicate is practical experience. “An orientation toward practical matters is characteristic of many born storytellers.” (SW III, 145) It is further a story told by the old man on his death bed, a circumstance which gives it a seal of authority. Yet, there is also a sense that the old man uses the seriousness of the moment, to make his tale believable. Thus the story exhibits also a certain freedom or playfulness in the face of death. Related to that is the fact that the story achieves its aim indirectly. That is, the point of the story is not recognized solely in terms of an understanding of its contents. Taking the story at face value leads the sons to dig the vineyard in search for a treasure, but this itself produces the magical effect on the vineyard. There is an element of cunning to storytelling. Cunning would appeal to human self - interest, in this case the greed of the sons, and use that very force to produce a transformation, or the recognition of a more natural relation to the world. Put differently, telling provokes doing, which itself allows undergoing “experience” in a concentrated form. The story not only transmits practical advice, but actually produces

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experience articulated in a practice. Finally there is also a sense in which there is a simple moral, easily stated, to the story, something that can take the form of a proverb (‘In hard work lies blessing’). As though the story is something of an illustration of the maxim that is expressed in the proverb. Or maybe more precisely, the story is internally related to a certain form of teaching. Benjamin traces the character of the storyteller to two archetypal figures: the seafarer and the laborer of the soil. The one brings stories from far away lands, the other stays in the same place, but can reach far back and tell tales about the past of that place. These are figures that allegorize the reach of storytelling over space and time, over the globe and into history. They are brought together, Benjamin argues in the structure of trade and craft of the middle ages. That is, the sphere of cooperative practice broadly conceived is fundamental to the structure of experience articulated in stories. The co-operative nature of the sphere of craft is reflected in the communal character of storytelling. Storytelling fashions experience from the start so as for it to be told to others. In particular, storytelling has a didactic function. Experience is understood primarily in terms of the possibility of its accumulation and its articulation in such a form that can be transmitted as teaching. Teaching, in the context of stories, does not mean providing explanations of various matters. One of the salient features of the story, according to Benjamin, is its lack of explanations of that which it recounts. This is not just due to its being a short form, which has no space to elaborate, but only to schematically describe. One could attribute the lack of explanation to a wish to invite the one who listens to the story to think for himself. This indeed might be one way of understanding the didactic aspirations of the story. A more interesting suggestion would be that stories touch upon a dimension of experience in which understanding is best impressed by simply presenting, or presenting simply. Put slightly differently, the point the story makes is expressed in it more forcefully than any explanation given or any hypothesis provided as to why things occur the way they do. The story, as its relation to the proverb makes clear, has the unity that is specific to the simple. It makes a simple point. It equates wisdom and counsel primarily with a way of simplifying the sphere of the spiritual struggles (or it is a simplification of what appears to be complexities and ambiguities of existence that are utterly paralyzing). From that perspective, explanation appears as un-

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necessary complication. In other words the teaching of the story is not the basis for reflection. Or its power is not in its capacity to produce a rich movement of thought or interpretation. It is rather a pointed, localized intervention in the everyday fabric of experience. This can be clarified by considering specifically the explanation of motivation, or the lack of a psychological dimension to the story. To the extent that motivation is mentioned it is on a par with the rest of the world of the story. Every occurrence is at the same level, and the inner life has no explanatory privilege. Stories are peopled by types rather than by individuals with a complex inner life. A type is not an abstract psychological constitution, but rather is best exhibited by the avoidance of psychology altogether. For it brings out a simplicity inherent in character, the way in which a character has a ruling trait. This is how one might view the role of animals in fables: not so much as an anthropomorphizing of the animal realm, but rather as a simplification of the human, that attributes to its spiritual life a recognizable unity figured by animal existence. The simplicity of character is revealed not by the consideration of the inner life, but by the way character illuminates the world around it in a particular way. Thus we might say that characters are brought out by the proper characterization of their surroundings, of the sphere of their interaction with the world. What prompts a story? When is it called for and what is it to recall one in the appropriate circumstances? To be pertinent a story must arise from experience, be prompted by experience. Stories are so to speak woven into the texture of experience. It is in that sense that Benjamin writes that “counsel woven into the fabric of lived experience [gelebten Lebens] is wisdom.” (SW III, 146) It is therefore essential to characterize first of all how a story is absorbed, so as to be handy, to be brought to mind to provide advice at the opportune moment. Here, as in other places in which Benjamin considers memory, conscious appropriation goes counter to truthful remembering. This is why a fundamental condition for hearing stories is boredom: “If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.” (SW III, 149) This forms yet another important connection between storytelling and the surroundings of work or craft, with its habitual structure that is conducive to this kind of productive boredom. It is because stories are absorbed in conditions of mental relaxation that they can be retold at the appropriate moment. One might of course be able to remember the

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words of a story, by learning it by heart, but the consciousness intent on remembering would not provide the proper attunement to opportunities for retelling. If the telling of the story is to produce the possibility of retelling it, not only its content must remembered but it must also be absorbed into experience in and through habit. It is absorbed in the habitual and emerges out of it as the occasion demands (Stories, especially as we think of anecdotes, constitute part of the meaningful consistency of the habitual or of the ordinary). Stories thus should not only be seen as providing distraction in an environment of work. Rather, the distracted frame of mind of habitual work or practice is the condition of their absorption. Reception in distraction, not reception that distracts, is the peculiar mode of attentiveness that is conducive to the pertinent use of the story. Stories are absorbed into the weave of our life. Benjamin further relates storytelling and the conditions of craft by conceiving of the artifacts themselves as occasions for the telling of stories. Or more precisely, objects seem to contain by virtue of their subsistence a certain possibility of becoming gathering point for stories in which they are involved. (“See this pipe here . . .” might be a prologue to the telling of a story. Consider in this context Benjamin’s story “The Handkerchief”). Stories belong to the aura of objects of use. The decline of the aura indeed affects not only the reception of high art, but also the sphere of practice and the conditions of storytelling. And Benjamin lists the fact that things don’t last the way they used to, as a central reason for the decline of storytelling. (The speeding up of the replacement of objects in the return of the new that is typical of the rhythm of the commodity, is correlative with the impoverishment in telling experiences). The capacity to tell stories in relation to objects of the past remains as part of the spiritual physiognomy of the collector. For him objects are significant, not the least as occasions for telling a story concerning, say, their provenance. Stories are short, but they are also related to other stories, in such a way as to form “guarlands”. This successive structure is not only a consequence of the transformation of the telling into a written format that is collected in volumes. It is rather something internal to the logic of storytelling. That is, we need to ask not only about the prompting of a story by experience, but of the way that one story prompts another. Understood properly, these can come to the same: “After all,” Benjamin writes “counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is in the process of unfolding. To

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seek, this counsel, one would first have to be able to tell the story.” (SW III, 146). Thus, recounting one’s loss of way in experience takes the form of a story, that itself prompts the counsel articulated in another story. Stories provide a way to conceive of the succession and continuity of experience. One of the important models Benjamin refers to, for understanding the logic of prompting one story by another is that of the “Thousand and One Night”. The frame of the collection of stories tells of Scheherazade who addresses the threat of death on the night of her marriage to the king, by telling one tale and only starting another to be continued on the next night. The king is forced to keep her alive in order to hear the conclusion, only to be again held in suspense by another beginning of a tale the next night. On this model, we have something of the polar opposite of the mental relaxation and boredom necessary for the absorption of stories. In the face of the threat of death prompt thinking is required. Storytelling thus is for Benjamin the occasion for a dialectical overcoming of boredom associated with the habitual and the interest in the extraordinary lifethreatening event. Finding a way from one story to another, becomes the model for presence of mind, an urgency manifest in finding ways to postpone. This cunning rather than heroic way of addressing a threat, should be taken to allegorize a vision of life articulated in and by stories. It is such a broad notion of the completeness of life in meaning that has its model in the figure of the storyteller as a kind of sage: “Seen in this way, the storyteller joins the ranks of the teachers and sages. He has counsel – not for a few situations, as the proverb does, but for many, like the sage. For he is granted the ability to reach back through a whole lifetime (a life, incidentally, that comprises not only his own experience but much of the experience of others; . . . His gift is the ability to relate his life; his distinction, to be able to relate his entire life”( SW III, 162). What does an entire life articulated through stories, through the anecdotal, look like? In order to develop and clarify this idea one should go into the contrast that Benjamin sets in the essay between the form of the novel and that of stories, both traceable to the original unity of the epos. There are for sure many ways to bring out the difference between the two forms, but I would like to focus on the contrast Benjamin draws between “the perpetuating remembrance of the novelist” and the “short lived reminiscence” of the

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storyteller: “The first” he writes, “is dedicated to one hero, one odyssey, or one battle, the second to many diffuse occurrences” (SW III, 154). This contrast between the unique and the multiple must be understood as diverging modes of the meaningful articulation of life as a whole, or as diverging modes of addressing limits in the field of life. Benjamin quotes a peculiar saying of Moritz Heimann to the effect that: “A man who dies at the age of thirty-five is at every point in his life a man who dies at the age of thirty-five.” “Nothing is more dubious than this sentence” Benjamin comments, “but for the sole reason that the tense is wrong. A man—so says the truth that was meant here—who died at thirty-five will appear to rememberance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of thirty five. In other words, the statement that makes no sense for real life becomes indisputable for remembered life. The nature of characters in a novel cannot be presented any better than it is in this statement, which says that the “meaning” of their life is revealed only in their death” (SW III, 156). From within life death appears wholly external. The limit it sets is contingent, a mere cessation of the purposive striving of life. But in remembrance such as is presented in the novel, even that sense of contingency in premature death can be made into a necessary limit, one that is constitutive of the meaning of every stage of life. The reader of the novel is a witness to what he can never experience in relation to his own life: To view a life from outside it, in such a way as to be able to return and reflect on it, tighten it into such a meaningful totality, that even death becomes part of its necessary unity. The novel is the experience of life seen sub specie aeterni, as a limited whole. (I note that this clearly depends on the essentially written character of the novel. Writing allows the reflection and tightening up of meaning relationships so as to give the inner consistency to the life portrayed.) In contrast, the constitution of the meaning of life as a plurality of stories provides a way to conceive experience so that essential limits disappear or are dissolved. A fundamental teaching of stories is the possibility of dissolving every sense of ‘must’ in experience. There is, always another way, even if it appears only as postponement. Or more precisely, since we are speaking here of remembrance, there is no necessity to understand things in an already determined way, according to an unavoidable progression, or caught in a nexus of causality or explanatory justification. There is not unique odyssey, no ultimate battle. Experience, can be seen to be significant without having to coalesce into, a determining

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moment, the ultimate conflict. Indeed, it would seem that the succession of stories can become a model for a mode of experience in which the very sense of limit and limitation is transformed. Memory can become the medium in which is dissolved any sense of a necessary progression of things. (This is why, it seems, Benjamin considers Proust, from one perspective so clearly a novelist, to be also a modern transformation of the storyteller.) “The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story” (SW III, 162). This last characterization of the relaxed posture of storytelling should be contrasted with the way Benjamin describes the burning interest of the reader who devours the material of the novel. His tense participation is permeated by the suspense which acts like “the draft of air which fans the flame in the fireplace and enlivens its play”(SW III, 156). The reader of the novel jealously seizes upon the material in solitude. His experience is the realization by proxy of the fantasy of the solitary individual wanting to conceive of his own life as having something of an inner necessity. Adopting that perspective on oneself would demand, so to speak, experiencing one’s life, from beyond its own limits, as though contemplating it after one is dead to the world. This solipsistic fantasy is fulfilled, by reading of the completeness of meaning of another’s life. This sense of life as a meaningful totality, as a limited whole is what the reader seeks. In contrast to the solitude of the hero and the reader of the novel, we find in the storyteller a voice that does not draw its strength from the pathos of uniqueness and individuality. Not just because a story is told in common and addressed to others didactically. And not only because the storyteller allows himself to borrow from the life of others, material from hearsay that he incorporates into the telling of his own experience. Most importantly, it is because, the story makes that which appears a life-determining necessity into something which can be simplified as a specific difficulty to be avoided. The way it relates to the entirety of a life is by the multiplicity of stories that can always open the field of life in a further direction. For the storyteller, experience looses the unity and necessity reflective of the self’s mode of being toward death. It becomes anonymous as it is the most significant. Benjamin suggests how the decline of storytelling coincides with the withdrawal of the presence of the dying from the space of experience. Death becomes a limit experience, or life is conceived as essentially mine

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in “being towards death”. The pathos of human existence as being towards death, opens an abyss between it and the mode of being of the rest of nature. The vision of the relation to death, to the limits of life, as an essential mystery through which individuation occurs and meaning is given to one’s existence should be contrasted to the way storytelling, provides something of a natural perspective on experience. Storytelling is a form of naïve articulation of experience. In his essay Benjamin relates his account to Schiller’s concept of the naïve. The naïve, as Schiller defines it, is a feeling of admiration or respect to nature simply because it is nature.27 Indeed, some of the features that we have developed can be reconsidered from the perspective of Schiller’s famous account. In particular the descriptive terseness of the story, its lack of psychological explanation as well as of any sentimental or reflective stance. Benjamin thinks of storytelling in relation to natural history, or to what he calls the creaturely world. The truthfulness in storytelling has to do with relating occurrences to an idea of the course of the natural world, seeing them as models of the course of the world. The account of natural history and the creaturely word is a rich and complex issue in Benjamin’s writings. It touches upon such central questions as humanity’s mode of facing the recurring burden of myth. The liberating magic of the tale is primarily in its capacity to counter the binding spell of myth. The simplification the story brings to existence is a way of facing the essential ambiguity of the field of life as it appears when ruled by fate: “And they lived happily ever after,” says the fairy tale. The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was created by myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest. In the figure of the fool it shows us how mankind “acts dumb” toward the myth; in the figure of the youngest brother it shows us how one’s chances increase as the mythical primitive times are left behind; in the figure of the man who sets out to learn what fear is it shows us that the things we are afraid of can be seen through; in the figure of the wiseacre it shows us that the questions posed by myth are simple-minded, like the riddle of the Sphinx; in the shape of the animals which come to the aid of the child in the fairy tale it shows that nature not only is subservient to myth, but

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much prefers to be aligned with man. The wisest thing—so the fairy tale taught mankind in olden times, and teaches children to this day—is to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and high spirits. (This is how the fairy tale polarizes Mut [courage], dividing it dialectically into Untermut—that is, cunning—and Übermut [high spirits]” (SW III, 157).28

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A Platonic legacy in Benjamin’s thinking is evident not only in his understanding of the task of philosophy as the presentation of ideas, in the inner relation of beautiful semblance to truth, or in the struggle of philosophy against myth. It is also manifest in the understanding that the realization of meaning is achieved in recollection. Recollection is first reconceived in Benjamin’s book on the German Trauerspiel as a form of saving phenomena in ideas: “As the salvation of phenomena by means of ideas takes place, so too does the presentation of ideas through the medium of empirical reality” (O, 34). In the construction of the dialectical image the material of the past is incorporated and finds a place in the presentation of the idea. By partaking in a higher order of meaning it is redeemed. Recollection, just as in the Platonic scheme, reveals a dimension of immortality in human existence. In the later writings, especially in “On The Concept of History,” the emphasis shifts from the Platonic model to the thematization of rescue in recollection as a messianic moment. Benjamin calls that redemptive memory “remembrance” [Eingedenken]: “History is not simply a science but also and not least a form of remembrance” (A, 471). In remembrance, rescue is understood as salvation and acquires an essentially theological dimension: “. . . in remembrance we have an experience that forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally a-theological, little as it may be granted to us to try to write it immediately with theological concepts” (A, 471). While theology informs Benjamin’s writing, reliance on explicitly religious language for the project is out of the question: “My thinking is related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to go by the blotter, however, nothing of what is written would 190

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remain” (A, 471). Just as Benjamin himself wishes to avoid the direct use of theological concepts, one should, in reading him, translate such notions as messianic redemption, so that they can be presented as characteristics of his practice of writing history in terms of the task of actualizing the past. Religious language cannot stand on its own. Its use must always be indirect, pervasive though it may be, and its presence must be mediated by secular concepts. “Philosophy may not presume to speak in the tones of revelation” (O, 36). Does the messianic assume revelation, and, if so, how can it be even indirectly a dimension of philosophy? Several issues need to be clarified so as to pose that question properly: First, revelation is not, for Benjamin, beyond language. Mysticism is never for him a mode of access to what is ineffable. This is evident even in the early essay on language, which is often deemed by readers to belong to Benjamin’s “mystical” period: Within all linguistic formation a conflict is waged between what is expressed and expressible and what is inexpressible and unexpressed. . . . the deeper (that is, the more existent and real) the mind, the more it is expressible and expressed . . . in a word, the most expressed is at the same time the purely mental. This, however, is precisely what is meant by the concept of revelation, if it takes the inviolability of the words as the only and sufficient condition and characteristic of the divinity of the mental being that is expressed in it. The highest mental region of religion is (in the concept of revelation) the only one that does not know the inexpressible. (SW I, 67)

Second, there is a tension between the dimension of recollection and that of revelation. Indeed, recollection would assume that we have in store, in memory, all that is needed to access the highest truth. Revelation, on the other hand, articulates truth as a manifestation of the essentially Other.1 Even if the tension between revelation and remembrance can be reassessed by appealing to the intentionless, self-presenting character of truth and the emergence of the dialectical image as a form of involuntary memory, there would still be a specific problem posed by the conditions of modernity. The relation between revelation and memory, depends on the presence of a living medium of tradition, in the understanding of revealed law being transmitted as doctrine. Thinking that modernity is a crisis in the very possibility of establishing the continuity of tradition is one of Benjamin’s fundamental themes. That is, the problem of constituting philosophical truth as doctrine must be reconceived in the conditions

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where access to the law is all but lost. It would seem that the very appeal to a concept of revelation, in whatever indirect form it may be couched, is unavailable. Finally, for Benjamin the translation of the theological messianic conception into secular terms not only depends on further characterizing the realization of meaning, which would constitute an arrest and an end of history. It also hinges upon the proper characterization of revolutionary action as a form of realization of the past, for Benjamin often speaks in the same breath of the messianic dimension of history and of the proletarian revolution: “In [the monadic] structure [the historical materialist] recognizes the sign of a messianic arrest of happening, or (to put it differently) a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed” (SW IV, 396).2 But it is far from clear how the two are to be identified.3

§1. Messianic Temporality To conceive of a messianic dimension of history is to make redemption and justice internal to its realization. As must already be clear from our account of time and the dialectical image, the end or, as Benjamin also calls it, the arrest of history is not to be viewed as something brought about solely by an internal dynamics of the secular world (as though the ultimate telos of humanity’s striving): “Only the Messiah himself completes all history, in the sense that he alone redeems, completes, creates its relation to the messianic. For this reason, nothing that is historical can relate itself, from its own ground, to anything messianic. Therefore, the kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic. It cannot be established as a goal. From the standpoint of history, it is not the goal but the terminus [Ende]” (SW III, 305). For Benjamin it follows that a regulative model conceiving of the end as lying in the infinitely distant future, toward which humanity advances continually, even if defined in moral terms, is a flawed vision of messianic temporality. Indeed, it would serve only to defuse any revolutionary intensity: “. . . once the classless society had been defined as an infinite task, the empty and homogeneous time was transformed into an anteroom, so to speak, in which one could wait for the emergence of the revolutionary situation with more or less equanimity” (SW I, 402). Thinking of the ideal regulatively would not allow one to introduce any urgency in the mode of existence of the present. There is all the time in the world, infinite time, for humanity to gradually approach its ideal state. More

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important, the messianic passion is not nourished by the idea of a future state but primarily by the demand of justice for the past. “The spirit of sacrifice . . . [is] nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than by the ideal of liberated grandchildren” (SW IV, 394). However, it would be wrong to consider the turn toward the suffering of the past only in motivational terms. Messianic temporality as a scheme of actualization does not involve the projection of a utopian end in a more or less distant future but rather the urgent revolution of the present by way of the recognition of its bond with the suffering of the past. The present transformed, what Benjamin calls the Now, rather than any dreams of the future, is the focal point of the messianic passion.4 This is why Benjamin opposes messianism as he understands it to all utopian or prophetic thinking: “We know that the Jews were prohibited from inquiring into the future: the Torah and the prayers instructed them in remembrance. This disenchanted the future, which holds sway over all those who turn to soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future became homogeneous, empty time. For every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter” (SW IV, 397). Insofar as remembrance determines one’s horizon one might also say that it is the present transformed that is prophesized: “The saying that the historian is a prophet facing backward can be understood . . . to mean [that] . . . the historian turns his back on his own time, and his seer’s gaze is kindled by the peaks of earlier generations as they sink further and further into the past. Indeed, the historian’s own time is far more distinctly present to this visionary gaze than it is to the contemporaries who ‘keep step with it’ ” (SW IV, 405). The opening of a horizon of future possibilities in which one is freed from a present burden is usually associated with the concept of hope. Hope is not directly related to what is willed or desired. However, neither is hope mere wishing. It bears a relation to what one deserves or what would do justice to one’s condition. What is hoped for cannot be brought about by one’s own striving. It assumes a response to those strivings, call it grace or providence. Thus, we find that, for Kant, the answer to the question “What may I hope for?” is elaborated in terms of the ideal of the highest good, namely, that object whose realization involves the apportioning of happiness to virtue and which demands the postulate of God’s existence and that of the immortality of the soul. This dependence of hope on the response from an Other, as well as the relation constituted in the

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object of hope between justice and happiness, are reflected in Benjamin’s understanding of that concept. However, they are translated into the relation between present and past. Strange as it may sound, for Benjamin, the redemptive or messianic hope is not a matter of what the present conceives as occurring in the future.5 One must not ask what may I hope for but rather whose hope I keep alive in the present. If the idea of immortality is internal to the constitution of the object of hope, then we can again recognize how for Benjamin hope is for the past: “. . . the hope of redemption that we nourish for all the dead . . . is the sole justification for the faith in immortality, which must never be kindled from one’s own existence . . . Only for the sake of the hopeless have we been given hope” (SW I, 355–356). Hope is for the past, hope for those who are essentially hopeless, for those who themselves cannot hope any more. It is hope to be fulfilled by the transformation of the present. “The last hope is never such to him who cherishes it, but is the last only to those for whom it is cherished” (SW I, 355). The fact that earlier generations are long dead diminishes neither the hope for them nor the danger they can still suffer: “The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious” (SW IV, 391). Implicit in the messianic idea is an apocalyptic dimension. Such a destructive moment would further distinguish it from a vision of a selfdeveloping humanity, distinguish the messianic intensity from the optimistic view of a progressive dynamism of humanity left to itself. Religiously speaking, it would be as though the Armageddon is still before us, standing between the present and the establishment of a different order in the messianic age. This destructive apocalyptic dimension, when translated into secular terms, is often understood as the necessity of revolutionary violence for the transformation of society. However, just as for Benjamin the messianic order is not projected onto an indistinct future, so it is also a mistake to conceive of apocalypse in terms of the destruction that must still be wrought to transform human society. It is imperative to keep in mind how for Benjamin the catastrophe has already occurred; it is the past as the present forces it to appear. Catastrophe is the constant condition of the present until revolutionary measures are taken. Every present can be a turning point with respect to the realization of its past.6 This is why Benjamin endows it with “weak messianic power.” Giving up on the model of an infinite task means conceiving of fulfillment as a possibility

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for each present in relation to its past: “In reality, there is not a moment that would not carry with it its revolutionary chance . . .” Fulfillment need not wait for the kingdom of ends, for realization of morality in nature: “My definition of politics: the fulfillment of an unimproved humanity” (SW 1, 226).

§2. Happiness and Redemption Is not messianic redemption of the past only a figure? How is the realization of the past in the present an answer to the suffering of the past? Is not what is past done with, so that we can look only to the future to be changed by our present actions? We might change our idea of the past but not the reality of the suffering it involved. It might even appear to be a sign of sober realism or true materialism to accept the incomplete closure of the past. That is, it would appear that the very idea of redeeming or completing, making whole, betokens an essentially idealist perspective. For completeness would be achievable only in the idea. The irreparable state of the past must be taken as the final word about it. This is the spirit of Horkeimer’s remark as quoted in the Arcades: “The determination of incompleteness is idealistic if completeness is not comprised within it. Past injustice has occurred and is completed. The slain are really slain. . . . If one takes the lack of closure entirely seriously, one must believe in the Last Judgment . . . Perhaps with regard to incompleteness, there is a difference between the positive and the negative, so that only the injustice, the horror, the sufferings of the past are irreparable” (A, 471). To that melancholic materialism Benjamin responds, “The corrective to this line of thinking may be found in the consideration that history is not simply a science but also and not least a form of remembrance. What science has ‘determined,’ remembrance can modify. Such mindfulness can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete” (A, 471). The bond between past and future cannot be put in terms of a simple advance toward a better state even if one finds a way to see the suffering of the past as essential to that progress. It is not possible to address the suffering of the past by way of a calculation of overall utility or benefit for the future. Future progress is no solution to the suffering of past generations. On that matter Benjamin quotes Lotze, whom he considers “a critic of the concept of progress”: “To hold that the claims of particular times and individual men may be scorned and all their misfortunes

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disregarded if only mankind would improve overall is, though suggested by noble feelings, merely enthusiastic thoughtlessness . . . Nothing is progress which does not mean an increase of happiness and perfection for those very souls which had suffered in a previous imperfect state” (A, 478). However, neither is the bond with the past understood merely as the constant bearing in mind of the suffering of the past, an imperative not to allow oneself to forget. Remembrance must allow the recognition of an internal relation of past suffering to present existence. That community of past and present exists not just because the present has the past in mind. In recollection a dimension of immortality is revealed insofar as the present and the past are seen to share a common life, the highest kind of life. In history another life is revealed that will allow one to speak of the immortality of that which is essential in the past by becoming part of the living flame of the present. (“The eternal lamp is an image of genuine historical existence. It cites what has been—the flame that once was kindled—in perpetuum, giving it ever new sustenance” [SW I, 355– 356].) It is only in such condition that one would be able to conceive of present transformation as the continuation and fulfillment of the past. It is nevertheless difficult to formulate that intuition properly. So as to articulate the living bond between past and present, it is necessary to consider the relation between the orders of happiness and redemption. Considering life from the perspective of history, we have seen how, though happiness can be conceived as the goal of human life, its end or terminus must be thought of in terms of the fulfillment of meaning. This connection and disjunction of happiness and redemption is broached in “On the Concept of History” “It is one of the most noteworthy peculiarities of the human heart,” writes Lotze, “that so much selfishness in individuals coexists with the general lack of envy which every present day feels towards its future.” This observation indicates that the image of happiness we cherish is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. There is happiness—such as could arouse envy in us—only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, the idea of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the idea of redemption. The same applies to the idea of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption. Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? In the voices we hear, isn’t there an echo of now silent ones? Don’t the women we court have sisters

Remembrance they no longer recognize? If so, then there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Then our coming was expected on earth. Then, like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim. Such a claim cannot be settled cheaply.7 (SW IV, 389)

In this passage there are two surprising shifts of perspective. The first is from the lack of envy each generation has toward its future to the implications Benjamin finds this fact to have for our understanding of the present’s relation to its past. Together with this temporal reversal the passage effects a second shift from the plane of happiness to that of redemption, or from the dream of secular existence to the religious fulfillment of its meaning. An image of happiness, one should begin by noting, is not a conception of happiness, an abstract idea or a matter of various plans of life, calculations of utility or methods for maximizing pleasure and minimizing suffering. Our image of happiness is not even a clear imagination that can direct our striving. It is much more elusive, dependent as it is on what is “in the air,” in our life surroundings. Like the air we breathe, it is not a matter of choice. It has an irreducible facticity to it, arising as it does from the concreteness of life.8 The deep entrenchment of the image of happiness in one’s life surroundings explains the lack of envy that every generation displays toward its future: Not because we can never have the happiness that lies in the future, beyond the span of our life, and therefore do not envy it. (Envy does not require a realistic possibility of having that which one is envious of.) Rather, we do not feel envy because we would not desire the form happiness takes for the future; it would not feel like happiness to us. The happiness of future generations, even if granted to us, would not fulfill our wish for happiness. However, the further question is then why would Benjamin precisely consider that to be the ground for the indissoluble bond of happiness and redemption. One could initially argue that because the image of happiness is so entrenched in the concreteness of one’s life, future generations lie outside the space of wishes, expectations, and envy.9 It is because the future is free from intricacies characteristic of present relations in the human world that a different bond between it and its past can be forged. This other bond can be explored insofar as we reverse the perspective and consider not the expectations of the present toward its future but the relation of the present to its past in remembrance.

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What is initially puzzling in Benjamin’s characterization of this reversal is that whereas happiness is almost unrecognizable in the future, in turning to the past, what is stressed is precisely a similarity in what made for the happiness of the past and our present surroundings: “Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? In the voices we hear, isn’t there an echo of now silent ones? Don’t the women we court have sisters they no longer recognize?” (SW IV, 389). Is our present then, after all, part of the space opened by the past’s image of happiness? Note that the relation of past and present is formulated by way of kinship: there is in the present a whiff of air of the past, an echo of voices, a sister. Kinship is not similarity or analogy. The projections of the imagination, the wish for happiness in the future would all be guided by similarity to what we experience. However, the deformation of the past in memory can be the basis of a deeper kinship. To speak of kinship rather than identity or analogy would mean that the images of happiness of the past can find a way to be translated into the space of the present. Nonetheless, as is the case with translation, what is brought out is not a relation between the image of happiness of the past and that of the present but rather a higher unity that relates the two worlds. A unity of meaning in the original finds itself echoed and recovered in the language of the translation as a whole. The gathering of echoes of the past in the present would not become part of the present’s image of happiness. Rather, it would be the realization of the dreams of the past in a different form, as a force that mobilizes the present. This is the sense in which the claim of the past upon the present cannot be settled cheaply. For what constitutes the recognition of these claims is not merely a matter of contemplative understanding, of identification, or of passive memory. It is first and foremost a translation into a form of urgent transformation of the present.

§3. Images of Happiness The relation of happiness to redemption can be further clarified by reference to Benjamin’s essay on Proust. In drawing the image of Proust we find Benjamin emphasizing the “blind, senseless, obsessive quest for happiness . . . [a] heart-stopping, explosive will to happiness which pervades Proust’s writings” (SW II, 239). Since Proust is portrayed as one who has replaced day with night, replaced the striving

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of life for the weaving of the past in memory, one might wonder how the quest for happiness can play such a central role in his existence. Is it not an existence that is essentially nostalgic or melancholic? That is, how can the return to the past be a fulfillment of the quest for happiness? “There is a dual will to happiness,” Benjamin writes, “a dialectics of happiness: a hymnic form as well as an elegiac form. The one is the unheard-of, the unprecedented, the height of bliss; the other, the eternal repetition, the eternal restoration of the original, first happiness. It is this elegiac ideal of happiness—it could also be called Eleatic— which for Proust transforms existence into a preserve of memory” (SW II, 239). In other words, one can conceive of happiness both in terms of revelation (the unheard of, unprecedented) and in terms of the return to an original past requiring the work of memory (a restoration or return). The dialectical form of such quest for happiness as a return to an original state becomes evident insofar as we ask whether such image of the past can in any way be held to. It seems that such attempt to hold what is past would invariably stumble upon its irretrievability, thus only exacerbate the homesickness that drives the return in memory. The irretrievability of the past must then be recognized as that which fulfills the striving for happiness. It must be happiness in the passing away or ephemerality that attends the return in memory. The movement of memory is not a return that leaves the past intact and allows one to reinhabit what is longed for. As we have already seen, memory has a destructive dimension. In memory’s articulation of the past, it makes it irretrievable. Happiness is realized in the complete and total passing away of the images that provoked homesickness: “Proust could never get his fill of emptying the dummy, his self, at one stroke, in order to keep garnering that third thing, the image which satisfied his curiosity—indeed, assuaged his homesickness” (SW II, 240). This emptying out is also called rejuvenation: “Proust has brought off the monstrous feat of letting the whole world age a lifetime in an instant. But this very concentration, in which things that normally fade and slumber are consumed in a flash, is called rejuvenation” (SW II, 244). It is the discovery of a force of life in the disappearance of the past. Something inherent in the drive to happiness brings out its own dissolution and fulfillment in another dimension.10 The drive to happiness insofar as it is conceived in relation to the return in memory can be said to seek its own downfall:

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Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait For in happiness all that is earthly seeks its downfall, and only in happiness is its downfall destined to find it.—Whereas admittedly the immediate messianic intensity of the heart, of the inner man in isolation, passes through misfortune, as suffering. The spiritual restitutio in integrum, which introduces immortality, corresponds to a worldly restitution that leads to an eternity of downfall, and the rhythm of this eternally transient worldly existence, transient in its totality, in its spatial but also in its temporal totality, the rhythm of messianic nature, is happiness. For nature is messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away. (SW III, 306)

The completeness of history that is to be conceived of in Benjamin’s understanding of the messianic is then a complete passing away and disappearance of the past in the realization of its dreams of happiness. This clarifies Benjamin’s sense of the passing nature of the dialectical image. The fact that such an image is passing is related to the redemptive moment. The dialectical image is one for a particular present, which means also that there is no way to conceive of it as enduring in time (that is, passed on by tradition). What eventually is a matter of recognition cannot be enduring in that form. There is a direct connection between the sense that the dialectical image appears for a certain present (the Now) and its irretrievability. Thus, its redemptive aspect must also partake of this sense of transience: “To grasp the eternity of historical events is really to appreciate the eternity of their transience” (SW IV, 407). It is the eternity of transience that is the rhythm of messianic time.

§4. The Last Judgment Even if we grasp how the dreams of happiness of the past can be fulfilled by memory in the present, there remains a fundamental difficulty in our relation to the suffering or evil of the past: How is the last word given to justice? While Benjamin’s conception of history does not require the imagination of a redeemed humanity (a classless society), it does involve a reconception of the notion of the Last Judgment. Some aspects of our discussion of the dialectical image can here be recalled to motivate the introduction of a dimension of judgment and justice into our relation to the past. Recall how Benjamin conceives of the dialectical image as a measure, a standard. It puts the past on balance and does it justice in the present: “All historical knowledge can be represented in the image of balanced scales, one tray of which is weighted with what has been and

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the other with knowledge of what is present. Whereas on the first the facts assembled can never be too humble or numerous, on the second there can be only a few heavy, massive weights” (A, 468). The image of the scale is an allegorical presentation of justice. It reformulates the two dimensions essential to the presentation of the past: first, the multiplicity and discontinuity of the material of the past itself; second, the massive weights on the other side of the scale represent the unity of action that the present acquires by revealing a bond with that past. The transformation of the multiplicity of material of the past into the decisive order of action of the present is expressed in the following terms: “. . . only a redeemed mankind is granted the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation à l’ordre du jour. And that day is Judgment Day” (SW IV, 390). Note that it is its past that is granted to such humanity, not the past in general. To be able to cite the fullness of its past would mean that the past belongs to the present. It becomes the present’s order of the day, its blueprint for action. The possibility of having the past so concentrated in the order of the day of the present is related to the abbreviated, monadic nature of the dialectical image: “Our life, it can be said, is a muscle strong enough to contract the whole of historical time” (A, 479). For Benjamin the monadic structure is a sign of the messianic arrest of happening: “The historical materialist approaches a historical object only where it confronts him as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a messianic arrest of happening” (SW IV, 396). The abbreviation is also a mode of summation, making the present into a point in which such a summary judgment is possible, in which decisiveness is possible. “The saying from an apocryphal gospel—‘Where I meet someone, there will I judge him’— casts a peculiar light on the idea of Last Judgment. It recalls Kafka’s note: ‘The Last Judgment is a kind of summary justice.’ But it adds to this something else: the Day of Judgment, according to this saying, would not be distinguished from other days. At any rate, this gospel saying furnishes the canon for the concept of the present which the historian makes his own. Every moment is a moment of judgment concerning certain moments that preceded it” (SW IV, 407). The possibility of abbreviating the past in the present, of summing it up, is that which makes the possibility of summary justice at any moment with respect to certain past moments. In other words, we lack nothing but to recognizes the past as

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our own in order to take a decisive stance in the present. There is no waiting for something that is yet to come in the future. The Last Judgment is not the end of times, conceived of as the ever-deferred order that it is an infinite task to pursue. It is rather the possibility of completeness with respect to the judgment of the past at any moment. This fulfillment is a form of arrest of time. It is where the philosophical concept of dialectics at a standstill acquires its redemptive dimension. The dialectical image arrests history; it introduces a break into the seeming vision of continuity and progress. This can also be formulated as an understanding of revolutionary practice: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency break” (SW IV, 402).

§5. Storms, Catastrophe, and Forgiveness However, how does the Last Judgment address the evil that occurred in the past? How in that respect can we speak of doing justice not only to the sufferings of the past but also to those who have perpetrated such sufferings? One would not think of the Last Judgment as meting out punishment for those who have inflicted suffering, for they, like their victims, are long dead. However, neither is the Last Judgment to be understood through the category of retribution as though against the rulers who are the heirs of those who inflicted the suffering (even though retribution, as opposed to punishment, knows no temporal bounds: “Retribution is fundamentally indifferent to the passage of time, since it remains in force for centuries without dilution” (SW I, 286). Just as law’s dominion over life does not account for the order that reveals the highest form of life in history, so in redeeming the past, one has to go beyond punishment and retribution and introduce the dimension of forgiveness. This is expressed in an extremely difficult and highly figurative passage: The Last Judgment is regarded [in the heathen conception] as the date when all postponements are ended and all retribution is allowed free rein. This idea, however, which mocks all delay as vain procrastination, fails to understand the immeasurable significance of the Last Judgment, of that constantly postponed day which flees so determinedly into the future after the commission of every misdeed. This significance is revealed not in the world of law, where retribution rules, but only in the moral universe, where

Remembrance forgiveness comes out to meet it. In order to struggle against retribution, forgiveness finds its powerful ally in time. For time, in which Ate pursues the evildoer, is not the lonely calm of fear but the tempestuous storm of forgiveness which precedes the onrush of the Last Judgment and against which she cannot advance. This storm is not only the voice in which the evildoer’s cry of terror is drowned; it is also the hand that obliterates the traces of his misdeeds, even if it must lay waste to the world in the process. As the purifying hurricane speeds ahead of the thunder and lightning, God’s fury roars through history in the storm of forgiveness, in order to sweep away everything that would be consumed forever in the lightning bolts of divine wrath. (SW I, 286–287)

Why is forgiveness figured as a storm? Is not our image of forgiveness one involving love or kindness? Forgiveness is not reconciliation (between victors and victims). It rather involves obliteration, the erasure of all traces of misdeeds. “. . . time not only extinguishes the traces of all misdeeds but also—by virtue of its duration, beyond all remembering and forgetting—helps, in ways that are wholly mysterious, to complete the process of forgiveness, though never of reconciliation” (SW I, 286– 287).11 However, how can erasing the trace of a misdeed serve justice beyond retribution and punishment? Why is this answer not just as offensive and thoughtless as is the claim that progress can justify past suffering? Various catastrophic natural occurrences have been the occasion for appealing to the involvement of providence and divine punishment (think, for instance, of the debate over optimism that surrounded the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Benjamin wrote a radio piece on it; see SW II 536). With Benjamin, it would seem that it is world history itself that becomes the catastrophe that needs to be conceived in relation to divine force. This is not to say that humankind is punished by the destruction in history, or that divine force brings about the destruction, for this would involve divine punishment directed indiscriminately at perpetrators and victims. Divine violence that obliterates traces is figuratively contrasted with the bloody nature of mythical violence. “Mythic violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake; divine violence is pure power over all life for the sake of the living. The first demands sacrifice; the second accepts it” (SW I, 250). The acceptance of sacrifice associated with divine force suggest that the catastrophe has already occurred. The catastrophe in permanence, which is the past, can be accepted only by recognizing in it and through it a life common to humanity.

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The subject of forgiveness (and of guilt) is humanity. Furthermore, destruction viewed as divine force that obliterates the traces of misdeeds can be seen as redeeming life for humanity as a whole even in the face of human violence in history. It is the recognition of life in and through all that has failed and is catastrophic in human existence. What appears initially problematic in the preceding quote is the sense that it is the mere passage of time that erases traces of the misdeed and would be the source of forgetting. This would not make forgetting into forgiveness, nor would it be anything more than the past falling into oblivion in time. However, remember that authentic time is what is recognized in the dialectical image. Thus, Benjamin points to ways in which the gathering of the catastrophe that is the past in the dialectical image allows one to take leave of that past for the sake of the manifestation of a higher life that is common to humanity in the present. Only this dialectical turn away from the past reveals time as the ground of forgiveness.

These considerations bear on how to interpret Benjamin’s famous image of the angel of history. Indeed, the tempestuous storm of forgiveness that precedes the Last Judgment cannot but remind one of the storm blowing from paradise in the image of the angel of history: A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (SW IV, 392)

At first the angel of history might appear to be a figure of complete impotence in relation to the suffering of the past. The angel cannot awaken the dead and mend what is destroyed. Yet, the angel of history is not an angel of melancholy (figured in Dürer’s engraving, which Benjamin discussed in his book on the Trauerspiel). A melancholic reading of the

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passage on the angel of history must be rejected. Given our earlier discussion, we must view the catastrophic vision of the past as part and parcel of messianic time. Indeed, such a view of the past as a catastrophe is an achievement of historical consciousness. It is for the most part hidden by the illusions of progress, by the sense of a course of history. “The course of history, seen in terms of the concept of catastrophe, can actually claim no more attention from thinkers than a child’s kaleidoscope, which with every turn of the hand dissolves the established order into a new array. There is a profound truth in this image. The concepts of the ruling class have always been the mirrors that enabled an image of ‘order’ to prevail—The kaleidoscope must be smashed” (SW IV, 164). Consider further that what prevents the angel from achieving his task of rescue is the storm. Here it is important to read the last sentence of this passage correctly: “This storm is what we call progress” (my emphasis). In other words, it is not that progress is a storm.12 Rather, the storm is always something related to the divine or the absolute (it is the storm blowing from paradise). However, in our thoughtlessness we are able to confuse its effects with progress. We, as opposed to the angel of history, have our back to the past and thus feel pushed ahead by the storm. Insofar as Benjamin criticizes the vision of history by way of a scheme of progress he opens the way to navigate the winds of history: “Being a dialectician means having the wind of history in one’s sails” (A, 473). Or again: “On the concept of ‘rescue’: the wind of the absolute in the sails of the concept” (A, 473). Indeed, the absolute is precisely that whose force cannot be felt unless the historical material is brought together as a dialectical image. The dialectical image is the presentation of the historical as a manifestation of the absolute, that is, as the revelation of a messianic force in history. This setting the sail would not allow one to hold to the past, for the image of the past is in the next moment irretrievably lost. However, this loss is fulfillment insofar as it is achieved by gathering all the true life of the past as force for the present.

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REMARK A Hope and Reconciliation in “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” The end of Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities is a sustained meditation on the themes of hope, rescue, and reconciliation. The deployment of such notions hinges on Benjamin’s sense of the centrality of the figure of Ottilie in Goethe’s novel. Ottilie’s naïve being lacks spiritual innocence (that is, character). She is essentially life, beauty, but therefore her existence, her life and death alike, is also characterized throughout by semblance.13 “With the semblance-like character that determines Ottilie’s beauty, insubstantiality also threatens the salvation that the friends gain from their struggles. For if beauty is semblance-like, so, too is the reconciliation that it promises mythically, in life and death. Its sacrifice, like its blossoming, would be in vain, its reconciling a semblance of reconciliation” (SW I, 342). Can Goethe have conceived of redeeming her existence? What form does rescue take if it is conceivable neither in her life nor in her death? Moreover, what is it to conceive of rescue in relation to a character in a novel? Would that require, so to speak, stepping beyond the limits of the work itself? For Benjamin, the possibility of Ottilie’s rescue is initially related to the question of the nature of her relationship with Edward, namely, the extent to which it can be justified by appealing to their love. This is also crucial for the possibility of a (re)conciliation with the other figures of the novel, primarily Charlotte. Benjamin repeatedly insists that the only place in which love and reconciliation are authentically manifest in Elective Affinities is in the novella told within the novel, depicting the relation between a pair of young lovers. All relations established between the principal characters of the novel are to different degrees submerged in semblance. All relations emerging from the dissolution of the marriage, whether formed on the basis of passion, affection, or emotion, are to be distinguished from the bond that comes to characterize love. To establish this contrast is, in effect, for Benjamin, the function of the novella within the scope of the novel. However, the fact that love is not manifest in that circle of friends is not a proof that such lives are doomed. The possibility of redemption is elaborated in a gradual transformation of the sphere of the eros and can thus be seen as a reflection on the Platonic theme of saving beauty in truth. The different stages of the problem can be distinguished

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by the treatment of differences between passion, affection, emotion, and love. Passion is, presumably, what draws Ottilie and Edward together. However, there is no attempt in the novel to think of passion in itself as justifying the torment and death that come in its wake. In other words, the problem of rescue arises precisely as passion is recognized to be insufficient and another mode of relatedness must be sought as the basis for reconciliation. In particular, reconciliation needs to encompass not only Edward and Ottilie but also Charlotte, who has suffered from their amorous relation. The novel, it seems, progresses away from the register of passion into the struggles of the friends to set right the consequences of that passion and to achieve reconciliation. Passion is transformed into affection (“In affection the human being is detached from passion”) and in such guise brings about conciliation between the friends. Passion is overcome or transformed by affection; however, does affection turn passion into love? “Sounder than passion yet not more helpful, affection likewise only brings about the ruin of those who renounce passion” (SW I, 148). It is not that there is in affection a lack of feeling or that it lacks the intensity of passion. What is critical in distinguishing passion from love is not the intensity of feeling but rather its incapacity to break away from semblance. Love is a bond from which the spell of semblance has withdrawn. Conversely, all relations based on passion, affection, or emotion, retain veiling in one form or another. Passion, for instance, essentially depends on perceiving the beloved not only as beautiful but also as the most beautiful: “for passion the most beautiful is the most precious” (SW I, 344). The fixation on the utmost beauty inevitably involves the semblance of completeness. Semblance, through its essential ambiguity, binds the one attracted to it in such a way as to preclude any decisiveness. It is thus helpless to effect any change: “Passion and affection are the elements of all semblance like love, which reveals itself as distinct from true love not in the failure of feeling but rather uniquely in its helplessness” (SW I, 344). Love has, on the contrary, an active dimension to it. It is not manifest in the contemplation of the beloved (or the contemplation of one’s life with the beloved) but rather is essentially related to decisiveness (Benjamin also calls it fidelity, which involves that active dimension). In other words, the truthfulness of the relation must be judged by its manifestation as decisive willing. Such willing is not adequately characterized by the notion of choice (Wahl). The title “Elective Affinities” comes then to characterize a problem in the sphere of

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relationship that unfolds in the novel. That is, even though “affinity is already, in and of itself, conceivably the purest word to characterize the closest human connection, as much on the basis of value as on that of motives,” in the novel it is not manifested authentically as love insofar as it is grounded in choice, in the elective. “[Affinity] cannot be strengthened through choice; nor in particular would the spiritual dimension of such affinity be founded on choice.” As Benjamin understands the matter, choice should be distinguished from decision (the latter includes the resoluteness that one would identify in fidelity but not in the extremity of passion or the “comfort” of affection): “only the decision, not the choice is inscribed in the book of life. (For choice is natural and can even belong to the elements; decision is transcendent” (SW I, 346). Benjamin’s characterization of decision as transcendent suggests that love involves the establishment of the deepest relationship not only between human beings but also between human beings and the divine. It is here that one can recognize the dependence of active decisiveness on an ultimate passivity that constitutes the core of true reconciliation. It is in the solitude of exposure and abandonment of the person before God that decisiveness in the relation to the one loved arises. Reconciliation cannot be achieved if one remains only in the sphere of human relationships. This is why affection can lead to conciliation but not to the reconciliation on the basis of which decisiveness in human relations arises: “Whereas in true reconciliation the individual reconciles himself with God and only in this way conciliates other human beings, it is peculiar to semblancelike reconciliation that the individual wants others to make their peace with one another and only in that way become reconciled with God” (SW I, 342). Benjamin characterizes the solitude of reconciliation internal to decisiveness in terms of the passivity of complete exposure, that is, the exposure to the divine gaze. Exposure is giving up on veiling. Since beauty is essentially veiled, in love, beauty must surrender itself. It is necessary to go beyond its attractive unity of veiling and veiled to the register of exposure, to the meaning of human nakedness. In nakedness the human body does not appear as an object of desire. Rather, as the novella thematizes it, it is what must be rescued. That is, in exposure the semblance of completeness and perfection, essential to the beautiful as the object of passion, disappears. This is not to say that the human body is appraised more realistically in its imperfections rather than idealized. It is precisely by being recognized as created, that is, as taking part in the

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ideal, that it appears fragmentary, as something to be redeemed: “. . . in veilless nakedness the essentially beautiful has withdrawn, and in the naked body of the human being are attained a being beyond all beauty— the sublime—and a work beyond all creations—that of the creator” (SW I, 351). This “being beyond all beauty,” understood as exposure through love, would mean that love is capable of incorporating and rescuing the imperfections of human nature: “love becomes perfect, only where, elevated above its nature, it is saved through God’s intervention . . . It is not a naked foundering but rather the true ransoming of the deepest imperfection which belongs to the nature of man himself” (SW I, 344). Passion is thus caught up in the false image of perfection. For it, “every waning of beauty, even the slightest decline, makes it despair” (SW I, 344). But, because of its helplessness, affection cannot rescue imperfection. The passivity of affection prevents it from engaging in the decisive rescuing of the imperfections of human nature. Remaining with affection is “the admission that man cannot love” (SW I, 345). Affection, Benjamin writes, “leads to death” (SW I, 349). By this he does not mean only that affection dooms the ones relying only on it but also that it can “tenaciously escort the lovers in their descent: they reach the end conciliated” (SW I, 348). It is this connection of affection and death, the understanding of affection as Eros Thanatos, that points to a way of redeeming human existence apart from the decisiveness achieved in love, namely, through the exposure that death produces. Love assumes complete exposure, but death, too, is exposure—in such a way that for God the nakedness of death can make life appear as love (i.e., redeemed). This raises the question of whether a certain way of caring for the dead can be the basis of achieving this divine way of contemplating the exposure of the human condition and can match the way in which life lost may become the object of (divine) love. In particular, can the disappearance of the beautiful semblance in the death of Ottilie be the ground of reconciliation in the novel? This would not mean that Ottilie manifests decisiveness in dying. For decisiveness can exist only in language. Ottilie’s muteness, the way she does not bring into language a choice to die but rather lets herself dwindle away, is for Benjamin the best sign that in her death, too, she is not reconciled. However, can the intense responses of others to her death testify that her life can appear as the object of divine love? Can her existence be considered, as Eduard views it, as that of a saint?

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This moment of the transformations of eros will be characterized not by affection but rather by violent emotion. “[It] is not the little emotion, which delights in itself, but only the great emotion of shattering in which the semblance of reconciliation overcomes the beautiful semblance and with it, finally, itself. The lament full of tears: that is emotion. And to it as well as to the tearless cry of woe, the space of Dionysian shock lends resonance” (SW I, 349). Emotion is the moment in which the semblance in affection disappears: “. . . affection, like the veiling of the image through tears in music, thus summons forth in conciliation the ruin of the semblance through emotion. For emotion is precisely that transition in which the semblance—the semblance of beauty as the semblance of reconciliation— once again dawns sweetest before its vanishing” (SW I, 348). The dead end of affection is powerfully evident in emotion, yet the overcoming of semblance is not wholly achieved. Emotion is figured as a “double veiling”: the tears that veil the veiled appearance of beauty. However, this extinction of the semblance of beauty is also its highest point, veiling disappearing in its highest intensification. The veil of tears of emotion is both the highest point of the semblance of beauty and the disappearance of the vision of beauty: “For the tears of emotion, in which the gaze grows veiled, are at the same time the most authentic veil of beauty itself. But emotion is only the semblance of reconciliation” (SW I, 348). Put differently, beauty that is about to disappear is the most authentic manifestation of beauty. It is internal to the semblance of beauty that it exhibits this passing under and disappearance. More generally, Benjamin distinguishes two manifestations of semblance that he calls the triumphant semblance and the self-extinguishing semblance. He further thinks of beauty in art as a play between the triumphant semblance and the semblance that extinguishes itself. “The figure of Ottilie,” he adds, “is governed throughout by only the one semblance which is extinguished” (SW I, 349). In that sense her fading away is also the most extreme manifestation of her beauty, of her type of semblance. In itself emotion does not truly expose. It, too, is only the semblance of reconciliation. However, emotion is an essential moment insofar as it is understood not as an endpoint but as a transition. Emotion is not an end in itself (in particular not an end of the poetic). Nor does its presence prove that authentic abandonment and exposure, thus reconciliation, have been achieved: “The more deeply emotion understands itself, the more it is transition; for the true poet it never signifies an end. This is the precise implication when shock emerges as the best part of emotion . . . Emo-

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tion, however, will be a transition from the confused intuition ‘on the path of a truly moral . . . development’ only to the uniquely objective correlative of shock, to the sublime. It is precisely this transition, this going over, that is accomplished in the going under of the semblance” (SW I, 349). These various stages lead finally to the question of what hope there is for Ottilie, given that love was not part of her life and that her death did not reveal her life authentically to others. How is one to account for Benjamin’s conclusion of the essay in terms of the possibility of hope and reconciliation? Everything about the relationship between Ottilie, Edward and Charlotte is touched by semblance, including reconciliation. Still, as Benjamin understands it, hope emerges precisely out of the semblance of reconciliation: “Thus, at the end, hope justifies the semblance of reconciliation, and Plato’s tenet that it is absurd to desire the semblance of the good suffers its one exception. For one is permitted to desire the semblance of reconciliation—indeed it must be desired: it alone is the house of the most extreme hope” (SW I, 355). Hope is not something the characters of the novel have for themselves or for one another: “Only for the sake of the hopeless have we been given hope” (SW I, 356), writes Benjamin at the end of his essay. Hope is not part of the world of the novel’s characters. Indeed, they are wholly unaware of the event that most symbolizes hope: the falling star that appears over their heads. Nonetheless, there can be hope for them, as it were, from outside their world. There is a way to see their lives as love even if love is not part of their lives. But who is to hope for characters in a novel? Here Benjamin appeals in a fundamental way to the distinction between the figures of the novel and the “narrator’s stance”: “With this comes to light the innermost basis for the ‘narrative stance.’ It is he alone who, in the feeling of hope, can fulfill the meaning of the event . . .” (SW I, 355).14 Is the narrator’s stance identified with Goethe’s position? Benjamin attributes much importance to the testimony that Goethe loved Ottilie. That is, one would be tempted to form an analogy here between the way in which life can appear as love for God in death and the way in which, for the writer of the novel, the character the writer created can be redeemed beyond the limits of the novel itself. Yet, one must take into account the fact that, for Benjamin, there is an essential difference between “creation” (as it is understood in relation to the work of art) and divine creation. Moreover, Benjamin emphasizes earlier on that the character

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of Ottilie has the consistency of something conjured, not even formed, which when exposed comes to nothing. Ultimately, the work of rescue is attributed to the critic-commentator of the work, who, in extinguishing the remnants of semblance like life in the work, reveals a higher life in the truth contents of the work. At the end of the essay one finds the justification for the pregnant opening image of the funeral pyre: “If . . . one views the growing work as a burning funeral pyre, then the commentator stands before it like a chemist, the critic like an alchemist. Whereas for the former, wood and ash remain the sole objects of his analysis, for the latter only the flame itself preserves an enigma: that of what is alive. Thus, the critic inquires into the truth, whose living flame continues to burn over the heavy logs of what is past and the light ashes of what has been experienced” (SW I, 298).15

REMARK B Hope without Revelation Benjamin’s essay on Franz Kafka is essential to shedding light on the theological dimensions of his thinking and particularly on the relation of revelation, doctrine, tradition, and hope. Doctrine constitutes the order of religious law, whose authority is traced to revelation. In being passed along, interpreted, and recovered from generation to generation it constitutes, in part at least, the medium of tradition. Kafka’s writing is marked by the disappearance of the authority of doctrine or law. This is amply evident in Benjamin’s identification of Kafka’s world as even more primitive than that of myth, a world where no measure is to be found: “It takes us back, far beyond the time of the giving of the Law on twelve tablets, to a prehistoric world, written law being one of the first victories scored over this world” (SW II, 797). One of the difficult issues in the Kafka essay concerns the possibility of retaining something of the force that teachings (and study) would have in a theological framework, yet in the absence of any access to doctrine or law. Can something pertaining to the order of revelation be retained in a world where no sense is to be made of any determinate content of the law?

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In his letters to Benjamin, following the reading of the essay, Scholem questions the possibility of a theology lacking all revelation: Kafka’s world is the world of revelation, but of revelation seen of course from that perspective in which it is returned to its own nothingness . . . The nonfulfillability of what has been revealed is the point where a correctly understood theology . . . coincides most perfectly with that which offers the key to Kafka’s work. Its problem is not . . . its absence in a preanimistic world, but the fact that it cannot be fulfilled . . . Those pupils of whom you speak at the end are not so much those who have lost the Scripture . . . but rather those students who cannot decipher it. (CBS, 126)

Upon Benjamin’s request to clarify what Scholem means by “the nothingness of revelation” the latter replies: I understand by it a state in which revelation appears to be without meaning, in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity but no significance. A state in which the wealth of meaning is lost and what is in the process of appearing (for revelation is such a process) still does not disappear, even though it is reduced to the zero point of its own content, so to speak. This is obviously a borderline case in the religious sense, and whether it can really come to pass is a very dubious point. I certainly cannot share your opinion that it doesn’t matter whether the disciples have lost the “Scripture” or whether they can’t decipher them . . . When I speak of the nothingness of revelation, I do so precisely to characterize the difference between these two positions. (CBS, 142)

Scholem wishes to distinguish between, on the one hand, a sign of existence of the divine—a manifestation that has the structure of the appearance of what is on the verge of disappearing—and on the other, the content of such revelation. This leaves room for messianic hope as it relates merely to the duality of revelation and concealment but allows fulfillment of revelation to be endlessly postponed as its content remains completely open. The disciples have the “Scripture,” treat it as a sign of revelation, yet cannot decipher it unambiguously. Understandably, given Benjamin’s increasing emphasis on truth content and his critique of any formal account of realization (such as the regulative or Romantic model), he would object to the distinction Scholem wishes to establish. Indeed, as I have argued earlier on, for Benjamin revelation is the fullest articulation of content, the actualization of meaning. A sign of existence without

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content cannot be revelation. Benjamin would thus argue that the condition in which scripture is lost and the one in which it cannot be deciphered come to the same thing. Scripture, as well as the law derived from it, introduces determinacy into life. The absence of any written law is the characteristic sign of a world in which the ambiguity of life takes over, a world ruled by guilt: “In Kafka the written law is contained in lawbooks, but these are secret; by basing itself on them, the prehistoric world exerts its rule all the more ruthlessly” (SW II, 797). That world would “call for Law, justice or determination,” yet it is extremely difficult to characterize the form in which judgment could ever appear: “Only this much is certain: . . . In the mirror which the prehistoric world held up for him in the form of guilt, he merely saw the future emerging in the form of judgment. Kafka, however, did not say what it was like. Wasn’t it the Last Judgment? Doesn’t it turn the judge into the defendant? Isn’t the trial the punishment? Or wasn’t he, rather, concerned to postpone it? . . . In Der Prozess, postponement is the hope of the accused man only if the proceedings do not gradually turn into the judgment” (SW II, 807). Can one nevertheless conceive of the articulation of life without the authority of law? Is there a hope of escaping the sway of fate in such a world? What form would study that has no teachings take, study that operates in the absence of revelation? “The gate to justice is study. Yet Kafka doesn’t dare attach to this study the promises which tradition has attached to the study of the Torah. His assistants are sextons who have lost their house of prayer; his students are pupils who have lost the Holy Writ [Schrift]” (SW II, 815). The difficulty of conceiving of study, hope, and justice in Kafka’s world is vividly depicted in Benjamin’s essay: “The air . . . is permeated with all the abortive and overripe elements that form such a putrid mixture. This is the air that Kafka had to breathe throughout his life. He was neither mantic nor the founder of a religion. How was he able to survive in this air?” (SW II, 806). The Jewish tradition takes the form of the interpretation of law (the Halachah), but it can also take the form of stories or parables (the Aggadah). This bears on the conditions of study where law, doctrine, or scripture is lacking. Indeed, it brings out the importance of Kafka’s transformation of the parable, his creation of what Benjamin calls fairy tales for dialecticians: [Kafka’s prose pieces] have . . . a relation to religious teachings similar to the one Aggadah has to Halachah. They are not parables, yet they do not

Remembrance want to be taken at their face value; they lend themselves to quotation and can be recounted for purposes of clarification. But do we have the teachings that Kafka’s parables accompany and which K.’s postures and the gestures of his animals clarify? It does not exist; all we can say is that here and there we have an allusion to it. Kafka might just as well regard them as precursors preparing the teachings. In every case, it is a question how life and work are organized in human society. (SW II, 803)

Kafka gives us parables in the absence of doctrine, an Aggadah without the Halachah. The parable does not come after the doctrine to clarify it or to present the teaching. Yet, its reading and study must provide a model for the articulation of life in the absence of law. Instead of the proverbial teaching that the ordinary parable aims to impart, we find the cloudy core of the Kafkaesque parable to be a gesture. It is a gesture that provides the support for the unfolding of study. It brings out the connection between postponement and realization, which is the possibility of articulating existence when nothing can be achieved.

Parables, fables and fairy tales, were means to transmit experience in a living medium of tradition. Parables supposedly provide a moral, a teaching. They are usually seen as transmitting experience necessary for the conduct of life by imparting a form of practical wisdom. Kafka’s writing in the condition of the crisis in tradition goes hand in hand with his writing parables in the condition of the disappearance of storytelling (i.e., having to rethink the form of the story or parable). The transformation of storytelling is all the more important to assess as one recognizes that tales are one of the oldest means of overcoming the indeterminacy of the world of myth: “Fairy tales are the traditional stories about victory over these forces [of myth], and fairy tales for dialecticians are what Kafka wrote when he went to work on legends” (SW II, 799). There is in the essay “The Storyteller” a particularly interesting, way of thinking of the relation of storytelling and hope in the face of what appears inevitable—one particularly relevant for Kafka’s method—namely, by making the telling itself constitute a structure of postponement. The tale, which is essentially short (i.e., does not have the form of completeness that a novel would have), bears in itself the possibility of being followed by another tale. The way this concatenation functions as a mode of tricking or postponing death is evident in “The Thousand and One Nights”. Postponment is related in Benjamin’s understanding of Kafka’s

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parables, to two other temporal modalities: urgency and reversal. Benjamin identifies different figures in Kafka’s stories and parables whose existence has this rhythm and for whom there is hope to escape the rule of the swamp world. They include students, assistants, fools, and actors. The students are awake and go about the most insignificant business with breathtaking speed. They manifest a form of readiness for their tasks. However, in a world in which nothing can be achieved, urgent readiness for their tasks is not opposed but, strangely enough, related to the figure of postponement. To bring this out consider the following parable by Kafka, which turns a patriarch into an assistant: “I could conceive of another Abraham (to be sure he would never get to be a patriarch or even an old-clothes dealer), an Abraham who would be prepared to satisfy the demand for a sacrifice immediately, with the promptness of a waiter, but would be unable to bring it off because he cannot get away, being indispensable; the household needs him, there is always something or other to take care of, the house is never ready. But without having his house ready, without having something to fall back on, he cannot leave— this the Bible also realized, for it says: ‘He set his house in order’ ” (SW II, 808). The figure of Abraham, who appears “with the promptness of a waiter,” shows how readiness for any task can in itself be the postponement of the demand for sacrifice. This figure combines, one might say, the naïve readiness of the fool, who wants always to be of assistance, with the cunning that serves to avoid or postpone the demand for sacrifice made by the world of myth as a condition for the determinateness of law. How are urgent readiness and postponement brought together systematically to constitute an articulation of life that avoids sacrifice? This can be understood by considering existence in terms of reversal: “Reversal is the direction of study which transforms existence into script” (SW IV, 815). Reversal is first understood in terms of a consideration of life not by way of a purpose or future achievement but solely by turning back. However, reversal is not mere reflection upon one’s life or remembering in any way that would provide one with an essential understanding of that past itself in terms of an inner meaning hidden in it. It precisely opens that perspective on life through which one senses that it is urgent to take care of endless preconditions so as to achieve even the smallest thing. This is the point of the following parable, titled “The Next Village”: “Life is astonishingly short. As I look back over it, life seems so foreshortened to me

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that I can hardly understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that, quite apart from accidents, even the span of a normal life that passes happily may be totally insufficient for such a ride” (SW II, 812). Any attempt to achieve something (a result, purpose) is shown in Kafka’s world as utterly impossible: “Kafka thinks in terms of cosmic epochs. The man who whitewashes has epochs to move, even in his most insignificant gesture” (SW II, 795).16 In the condition in which nothing can be achieved, fulfillment can only be in realizing what has already occurred. If the idea of a wish encapsulates how one is directed to the future, then the urgency in recapturing one’s present position is associated with endless detours required for ridding oneself of the wish, thus making a small, almost imperceptible, yet utterly important, transformation of one’s present existence. I have already quoted Benjamin’s Hassidic parable of the beggar (see Chapter 5). I further note that this parable incorporates the element of urgency, characterized through the figure of flight from enemies, the element of postponement, as the detours in the unfolding of the wish, and the element of reversal, through which one is brought back to the present by being spared the yearning for the fulfillment of the wish. The structure of being spared fulfillment by way of the detours that elaborate or unfold is also evident in Kafka’s “Wish to Be a Red Indian”: “If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a galloping horse, leaning into the wind, kept on quivering briefly over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there were no spurs, threw away the reins, for there were no reins, and barely saw the land before one as a smoothly mown plain, with the horse’s neck and head already gone” (SW II, 800). The articulation of the wish through which the parable unfolds is itself its disappearance. To the extent that the wish is given content, it at the same time disappears, and one is spared fulfillment.

Reversal, then, not only brings about the sense of the enormity of the smallest task and thus the urgency demanded to take steps to achieve it. It also links this urgency with the detours, thus with postponements that allow one not to realize but rather to get rid of the task. The possibility of such detours to find oneself where one is also introduces a theatrical dimension into existence: Realization requires one to move away from oneself as one is and yet to do so without opening a space of yearning

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for something to be achieved. This can be formulated in Kafka’s world as the demand to play one’s own role, that is, to recapture oneself in the distorted figure in which one can appear to oneself in the reversal: “Thus, the beggar on the corner bench rides toward his past in order to catch hold of himself in the figure of the fleeing king” (SW II, 814). It is for that reason that another place of hope in the world of Kafka, to which Karl Rossman is directed by a student, is a world theater or nature theater: “Kafka’s world is a world theater. For him, man is on stage from the very beginning. The proof is the fact that everyone is hired by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. What the standards of admission are cannot be determined. Dramatic talent, the most obvious criterion, seems to be of no importance. But this can be expressed in another way: all that is expected of the applicants is the ability to play themselves. It is no longer within the realm of possibility that they could, if necessary, be what they claim to be” (SW II, 804). The connection between the theme of redemption and playacting is clearly brought out if one remembers how study should not be conceived in terms of an achievement because it cannot eventuate in the understanding of teachings or the practice of law; it amounts to nothing. Similarly in acting, it is possible to do everything one does in life, yet this amounts to doing nothing (for it is acting). Studying and acting are brought together in a central passage of the essay: Perhaps these studies had amounted to nothing. But they are very close to that nothing which alone makes it possible for a something to be useful—that is, they are very close to the Tao. This is what Kafka was after with his desire “to hammer a table together with painstaking craftsmanship and, at the same time, to do nothing—not in such a way that someone could say “Hammering is nothing to him” but “To him, hammering is real hammering and at the same time nothing” . . . It may be easier to understand this if one thinks of the actors in the Nature Theater. Actors have to catch their cues in a flash, and they resemble those assiduous students in other ways as well. Truly, for them “hammering is real hammering and at the same time nothing”— provided that this is part of their role. They study this role, and only a bad actor would forget a word or a gesture from it. For the members of the Oklahoma troupe, however, the role is their earlier life; hence the “nature” in this Nature Theater. Its actors have been redeemed. (SW II, 814)

Actors are, one might say, assiduous students of their own role. Actors, like assistants and students, manifest the utmost urgency and wakeful-

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ness: “Actors have to catch their cues in a flash.” Furthermore, the idea of the nothing, which makes all the difference, must be understood in terms of the long detours that return one to the present state. This is not the nothingness of revelation, as Scholem thinks of it. For, in Scholem’s formulation, one was keyed to the utter lack of content (the unsayability of what is nevertheless revelation and therefore to the infinite postponement of its fulfillment, so to speak). With Benjamin what comes to the fore are precisely the detours and postponement required to articulate one’s present position. That is, to repeat in a way that fulfills what presently is. Playing oneself is a form of repetition. Yet, in order to play oneself it is not possible to merely remain in the familiar. Or, rather, repeating the familiar would be the form of mythic eternal recurrence. The familiar can be fatal: not only the administration of society but also the family circle entraps the individual or constitutes life as a field of guilt and fate: “In Kafka’s works, the conditions in offices and in families have multifarious points of contact” (SW II, 796). For Kafka, the father-son relationship characterizes original sin and its presence in every generation. Belonging to a family circle is a form of entrapment: “He does not live for the sake of his own life; he does not think for the sake of his own thought. He feels as though he were living and thinking under the constraint of a family . . . Because of this unknown family . . . he cannot be released” (SW II,808; quoted by Benjamin from Kafka’s “Er”). Liberating repetition from the familiar would mean capturing oneself in the figure of oneself emerging in the reversal. How is the strangeness of oneself, thus the possibility of the self-distance in playing oneself, opened up? Is there a need for imagination to find a role for oneself? Rather than anything formative or creative, one would need here to speak of deformation. Such deformation and self-estrangement can be produced in different ways. It is, for instance, involved in technological reproduction: “The invention of motion pictures and the phonograph came in an age of maximum alienation of men from one another, of unpredictably intervening relationships which have become their only ones. Experiments have proved that a man does not recognize his own gait on film or his own voice on the phonograph. The situation of the subject in such experiments is Kafka’s situation; this is what leads him to study, where he may encounter fragments of his own existence—fragments that are still within the context of the role” (SW II, 814). These deformations are further evident in attending to the strangeness of gestures. The gesture opens up the strangeness of the familiar: “What

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Kafka could fathom least of all was the gestus. Each gesture is an event—one might even say a drama—in itself” (SW II, 802). Deformation or distortion is evident in the reversal, through which the smallest action appears unachievable. Indeed, the gesture can be related to the action by the understanding that “the more frequently we interrupt someone engaged in acting, the more gestures result” (SW III, 305). To conceive of one’s role by encountering fragments of one’s existence, the opening of the past through the impossibility of achievement, or as a series of failures is to open it by way of gestures.17 Gestures are not invented but rather are the result of interruptions in the flow of action. A world in which the aim of an action can never be achieved is precisely a world constituted by gestures. “Kafka could understand things only in the form of a gestus, and this gestus which he did not understand constitutes the cloudy part of the parables.” “Kafka does not grow tired of making the gestus present in this fashion, but he invariably does so with astonishment” (SW II, 814).18 Importantly, when human actions lose their purpose and become gesture, they reawaken the strangeness of our body (Körper). The experience of the strangeness of the body is the experience of its belonging to a family that includes the animal. It is the recognition of the animal gesture in the arrest of human action: “This animal gesture combines the utmost mysteriousness with the utmost simplicity. You can read Kafka’s animal stories for quite a while without realizing that they are not about human beings at all. When you finally come upon the name of the creature— monkey, dog, mole—you look up in fright and realize that you are already far away from the continent of man. But it is always Kafka; he divests human gesture of its traditional supports, and then has a subject for reflection without end” (802).

Recapturing one’s role in the reversal that produces the distortion of gesture is figured in terms of the endless detours that lead back to one’s present position. Instead of detours, which are essentially spatial figures, one can also speak here of setting right the temporal distortions of existence. The messianic task is understood in terms of setting right the distortions of time: “No one says that the distortions which it will be the Messiah’s mission to set right someday affect only our space; surely they are distortions of our time as well” (SW II, 812). This setting right of the distortion of time is not incompatible with the idea of a return to the present.

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Referring to the hunchback as a paradigmatic figure of the distorted, Benjamin writes: “This little man is at home in distorted life; he will disappear with the coming of the Messiah, who (a great Rabbi once said) will not wish to change the world by force but will merely make a slight adjustment in it” (SW II, 811). Similarly: “The Hassidim have a saying about the world to come. Everything there will be arranged just as it is with us. The room we have now will be just the same in the world to come; where our child lies sleeping, it will sleep in the world to come. The clothes we are wearing we shall also wear in the next world. Everything will be the same as here—only a little bit different” (SW II, 664).

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NOTES

Introduction 1. Scholem’s dedication of his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism to Benjamin draws together some of the dimensions to be reconciled if one is to grasp the unity of Benjamin’s thought: “the friend of a lifetime whose genius united the insight of the Metaphysician, the interpretative power of the Critic and the erudition of the Scholar.” This dedication is itself patterned on Benjamin’s opening characterization of Proust in the essay “On the Image of Proust”: “The thirteen volumes of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu are the result of an unconstruable synthesis in which the absorption of a mystic, the art of a prose writer, the verve of a satirist, the erudition of a scholar, and the self-consciousness of a monomaniac have combined in an autobiographical work” (SW II, 237). Benjamin, I note, does not hesitate to introduce problematic traits (“monomaniac”) into his portrait. 2. Benjamin explicitly draws the contrast between a historical, sociological, or cultural investigation and his own philosophical practice: “These images are to be thought of entirely apart from the categories of the ‘human sciences,’ from so-called habitus, from style, and the like”(A, 462). Benjamin writes that “. . . the historian today has only to erect a slender but sturdy scaffolding—a philosophic structure—in order to draw the most vital aspects of the past into his net” (A, 459). 3. One could also call the ordering of such material a “metaphysics of experience” (even if only to suggest the connection with Benjamin’s rewriting of the Kantian project of a metaphysics of experience in his early essay “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy”). By emphasizing the rigor of Benjamin’s thinking, taking him to inherit Kant, I thus place myself in opposition to such an approach to Benjamin expressed, for instance, in Steiner’s introduction to The Origin of German Trauerspiel: “Benjamin was not, in any technical sense, a philosopher. Like other lyrical thinkers, he chose from philosophy those metaphors, dramas 223

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Notes to Pages 4–6 of argument and intimations of systematic totality . . . which best served, or rather which most suggestively dignified and complicated his own purpose” (introduction to O, 23). 4. One of the incentives for the writing of The Arcades Project was Benjamin’s reading of Aragon’s Paysan de Paris, a book whose central part is titled “Passage de l’Opéra.” He himself tells how profound an effect that book had on him as he started to work on his project: “It began with Aragon’s Paysan de Paris—I could never read more than two or three pages of this on going to bed, because my heart began beating so fast that I had to put it aside. What a warning! What a hint of the years and years I would have to put between myself and such reading” (SW III, 51). The impact of reading Aragon at the beginning is crucial, but so is the way Benjamin conceives of his reaction as a warning—as a sign of the kind of work that would be required to revert from that amazement to the revelation of the truth of that place. In “Convolute N” Benjamin writes: “Delimitation of the tendency of this project with respect to Aragon: whereas Aragon persists within the realm of dream, here the concern is to find the constellation of awakening. While in Aragon there remains an impressionistic element, namely ‘mythology’ . . . here it is a question of the dissolution of mythology into the space of history” (A, 458). 5. The necessity to provide a solid scaffolding for the Arcades Project, as well as the high philosophical stakes that are involved in that work, is apparent early on from the following passage in a letter to Scholem dated January 20, 1930: “Up till now, I have been held back, on the one hand, by the problem of documentation, and, on the other hand, by that of metaphysics. I now see that I will at least need to study some aspects of Hegel and some parts of Marx’s Capital to get anywhere and to provide a solid scaffolding for my work. It now seems a certainty that, for this book as well as for the Trauerspiel book, an introduction that discusses epistemology is necessary—especially for this book, a discussion of the theory of historical knowledge. This is where I will find Heidegger, and I expect sparks will fly from the shock of the confrontation between our two very different ways of looking at history” (C, 359). 6. There is in Benjamin a clear sense that those thinkers can be brought together: “. . . even those philosophical systems whose cognitional element has long since lost any claim to scientific truth still possess contemporary relevance. In the great philosophies the world is seen in terms of the order of ideas. But the conceptual frameworks within which this took place have, for the most part, long since become fragile. Nevertheless, these systems, such as Plato’s theory of ideas, Leibniz’s Monadology, or Hegel’s dialectic, still remain valid as attempts at a description of the world. It is peculiar to all these attempts that they still preserve their meaning, indeed they often reveal it more fully, even when they are applied to the world of ideas instead of empirical reality” (O, 32).

Notes to Pages 7–10 7. It would be good to keep in mind that, for Benjamin, method arises together with the content: “Scientific method is distinguished by the fact that, in leading to new objects, it develops new methods. Just as form in art is distinguished by the fact that, opening up new contents, it develops new forms. It is only from without that a work of art has one and only one form, that a treatise has one and only one method” (A, 473). There is no overarching or preexisting system into which the material is then ordered. Benjamin himself is acutely aware that there is no simple division to be made between the plan and the filling in of the details. That very distinction, call it the distinction of form and content, is problematized by what Benjamin calls the “constructive work,” that is, the minute construction of the whole out of detailed concrete and singular contents alone. 8. Compare this statement with Tiedemann’s presentation of the material in his “Dialectics at a Standstill”: “The fragments of the Passagen-Werk can be compared to the materials used in building a house, the outline of which has just been marked in the ground or whose foundations are just being dug. In the two exposés . . . Benjamin sketches broad outlines of the plan as he envisaged it in 1935 and in 1939. The five or six sections of each exposé should have corresponded to the same number of chapters in the book, or, to continue the analogy, to the five or six floors of the projected house. Next to the foundations we find neatly piled excerpts, which would have been used to construct the walls; Benjamin’s own thoughts would have provided the mortar to hold the building together. The reader now possess many of these theoretical and interpretive reflections, yet in the end they almost seem to vanish beneath the very weight of the excerpts” (“Dialectics at a Standstill,” in A, 931). 9. Michael Jennings has argued that in fact the material on Baudelaire is sufficient to provide the model Benjamin was aiming for: “. . . the Baudelaire book provides an astonishing optic through which to study The Arcades, an optic that offers a perspective different from those offered by the Exposés Benjamin wrote in 1935 and 1939. The Baudelaire book, even in its fragmentary form, is in fact the definitive statement of Benjamin’s maturity” (Jennings, “On the Banks of a New Lethe: Commodification and Experience in Benjamin’s Baudelaire Book,” boundary 2 30[1] [2003]: 91–92). I partly agree with Jennings’s assessment of the extreme importance of Baudelaire for Benjamin. I have therefore devoted a chapter to Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire, in which I also conceive of the parallels and differences between Baudelaire’s relation to his times and Benjamin’s construction of the nineteenth century through the Arcades.

1. Language 1. One should, at the same time, avoid falling into the opposite position to the down-to-earth necessity to accept the incomplete state of the project. Such

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Note to Page 10 would be the affirmation that the work must in principle be nothing more than a collection of fragments, as though there is an essentially unfinished quality to Benjamin’s writing. The wealth of quotations is not in the service of a rhetoric of fragmentation and incompleteness. Benjamin’s use of quotations should neither be identified with Romantic uses of the fragmentary form nor associated with the Baroque predilection for ruins, remains, or strewn materials, available to the allegorical gaze of melancholy. The prevalence of quotation in the Arcades is neither merely a by-product of the unfinished state the project was left in nor the reflection of a pseudo-Romantic or pseudo-Baroque refusal of closure. Benjamin’s strenuous work over years and years does not amount merely to intellectual meandering, taking one detour after another among fragments of thought. Granted that a quotation is a kind of fragment, there is a tenacity in Benjamin’s use of the fragment that is totally opposed to the reflective instability characteristic of the Romantic style or the allegorical multiplicity of meanings that can be adjoined to the Baroque remains. For Benjamin, if quotations are indeed fragments, they are meticulously chosen. They are the “smallest and most precisely cut components” of a “large-scale construction” (A, 461). One of the postulates of the concept of philosophical style in The Origin of German Trauerspiel is “the tenacity of the essay in contrast to the single gesture of the fragment” (O, 32). Benjamin warns, moreover, in that work against confusing the fragmentation of allegory with philosophical contemplation. The infinity associated with the allegorical mode “is also the bottomless pit of contemplation. Its data are not capable of being incorporated in philosophical constellations” (O, 231). It would be therefore problematic to associate, as Howard Caygill does, the dialectical image with the multiplicity of possible meanings arising out of an allegorical image. He writes: “. . . time freezes into space forming what Benjamin variously described as an allegorical or dialectical image” (Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience [New York: Routledge, 1998, 141]). Insofar as the affirmation of incompletion as such does not constitute a method, I would agree with T.  J. Clark’s “refusal to let the accidental present state of Benjamin’s remains be fetishized as his ‘method’—the book-made-out-ofnothing-but-citations, the de-totalized totality, montage, Trauerspiel, the dialectical image” (in T. J. Clark, “Should Benjamin Have Read Marx?” in Boundary 2 30[1] [2003]: 42). However, of course, it is not necessary to oppose the fetishization of incompletion by adopting the security provided by theoretical detachment. 2. The English translation of Benjamin’s book has “prologue” rather than “preface.” I assume that John Osborne, the translator, wished to suggest by the use of the term “prologue” a connection to a theatrical representation. While various relationships can be formed between the content of the book, the German plays of the baroque, and Benjamin’s method, I do not think the use of

Notes to Pages 12–15 “prologue” is justified. I have therefore reverted to a more standard translation of “Erkenntniskritische Vorrede” as “epistemo-critical preface” throughout. 3. It is important to understand the role that quotation plays in relation to the constrast developed in the opening of the preface of the Trauerspiel book between the two forms that were, according to Benjamin, neglected by the nineteenth century’s concern with the system: the treatise and the esoteric essay. Put simply, the treatise is the teaching of a wholly available body of doctrine. In the esoteric essay it is the essential difficulty of teaching that is made into a principle of writing. Benjamin presents his own writing as holding together those two apparently opposed form. The key to the overcoming of the opposition is in the insistence that “the only element of intention [in the treatise] . . . is the authoritative quotation” (O, 28). For quotation is on the one hand wholly external teaching, always in the third person. It is so to speak mere material to be learned, not the thing itself. But, on the other hand, since the quotation material never communicates the truth content, but the latter is to be presented by means of it, we get the esoteric nature of the writing, that aspect of it which can only be associated with the striking recognition to which there is no approachable path. 4. There are significant differences between Benjamin’s understanding and a strict teleological conception. This will become evident as we develop his account of the realization of meaning. 5. Part of the difficulty in reading the essay ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’ is in properly understanding Benjamin’s use of terms such as mediacy and immediacy, magic, universality, infinity, the extensive and the intensive. I will attempt to clarify these terms by way of a simple example that will be gradually elaborated. Suppose we ask ourselves what the language of painting is. Such language, insofar as it is identified with the essential being of painting, is what allows paintings to come into being. It is the condition of possibility of making paintings. Thus we can identify provisionally such language as what we might also call the medium of painting. How is that medium, then, expressed in paintings? It is not expressed through paintings as their communicated content. Indeed, one might even hold that the more painting distances itself from the communication of content, the more it will express its own nature in its language (abstract art would, from that perspective, best be viewed as concerned with the expression of the language of painting itself). A painting that wishes to be a communication of something external to it, assumes a mediate relation to its subject matter. That subject matter is represented by means of the language of painting. But in paintings the medium presents itself, to various degrees, immediately. That which is produced without means, immediately, might be called magical. In that sense the magic in the language of painting is that character of paintings which makes present immediately the medium itself.

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Note to Page 15 The notion of medium allows further to clarify the nature of the infinity Benjamin associates with the language of essence: That which is infinite is limited only by itself. A medium is self-enclosed and in that sense unlimited. Thus, painting, to follow our example, is not limited by music or sculpture. But in another sense the infinity of that language would depend on the way in which a painting can find its place in the medium of the idea of Art as such (therefore in relation to other media or languages). The problem of fulfilling this dual requirement of the infinity of the pure medium is central, as will become clear, to Benjamin’s discussion of Romantic Criticism. Assuming that our somewhat simplistic model is, at least, part of what Benjamin points to in elaborating the immediacy of the mediate, one could further translate the sense that the language of painting has a tendency to manifest itself into the understanding that the medium of painting has a history. That history of painting is the gradual revelation of its own conditions of possibility, that is the realization of the tendency of the language of painting to manifest itself. Take now a natural phenomenon and consider the way in which we can conceive of the presentation of its essence on the model of language that tends to express itself. We can speak, for instance, of color phenomena and ask in what ways colors can be viewed as constituting a language in nature. To think of these manifestations as a language would require first of all to characterize the medium for the ‘production’ of color phenomena. Some might argue that the production of color phenomena must be sought in the structure of light. But, at least on the model of Newtonian optics, the relation of light and color can hardly be conceived of as one of expression. It would be more appropriate to speak of a causal relation. Similarly, if we take colors to be ‘produced’ by certain physiological characteristics of the eye and the neural system, we would not have the justification for conceiving of these conditions as a language. In order to speak of a language of color, the starting point must be that no “reduction” of color to another order of being is assumed. That is one must recognize the condition of possibility of color in the color phenomena themselves. Goethe’s theory of color might serve as a prototype for such an approach to presenting the language of color. Consider further that within this space or language of color phenomena, we can isolate those phenomena in which the production of color brings out aspects of matter. We would not attempt to reduce color to laws of chemical interaction, but rather, refract the nature of matter in the space of color. We would have, a translation, albeit a fragmentary one, of the language of matter in the language of color. More generally we can speak here of the relation of one order of nature to another in terms of the translation of the former language into the latter. The presence of the language of matter in the language of color is now to be judged in intensive terms. The issue is not how to cover extensively all the features of

Notes to Pages 15–17 matter, but rather the degree to which one language can be recognized within the form of another. 6. One realizes the difference between man and all other created beings by the fact that man is created by the divine breath and not the divine verb. This does not make him lower than other beings; rather it provides man with freedom in language and with the task of giving expression to essences. “God did not create man from the word, and he did not name him. He did not wish to subject him to language, but in man God set language, which had served him as a medium of creation, free. God rested when he had left his creative power to itself in man. Man is the knower in the same language in which God is the creator.” Man is given the material aspect of language, breath, the capacity to sound meaning. Benjamin interprets the capacity of human language to express essence as a continuation or fulfillment of creation. Thus, Benjamin provides an interpretation of the claim that man is made in God’s own image. This is a nonsensible sense of image, identifying man as having no nature and as characterized merely by the task to bring to expression the essence of all other beings. 7. To put the point differently, in the creative intellect there is no separation between knowledge and goodness. This is the returning verse of the opening chapter of Genesis: “And God saw that it was good.” The seeing (i.e., the cognizing of the thing in creation) is indistinguishable from the recognition of goodness. Given the centrality of Kant to Benjamin’s early thinking, one might refer here to the idea of an intuitive intellect, for which the distinction between theoretical and practical does not exist. Sections 76 and 77 of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, provide the central elaboration of such an idea. They have had enormous influence on the development of German idealism, as well as on Goethe’s thinking (see in this context the remark on Goethe in Chapter 2). 8. It is in strictly distinguishing the logic of the proper name of man from the naming of essences that one gets an insight into Benjamin’s understanding of the nature of the human subject. That distinction is expressed in the following: “Name, however, is not only the last utterance of language, but also the true call of it. Thus in name appears the essential law of language, according to which to express oneself and to address everything else amounts to the same thing.” This claim introduces a certain solipsistic dimension into individual existence. This is of course far from surprising, in the story of Eden, insofar as we speak here, mythically, of the language of Adam. But it points to the understanding that the substantive unity and individuality of a person is realized in the articulation of experience. Individuality is only achieved in naming the world (through the ways in which experience is structured and expressive). This points further to an extremely important issue, namely the difficulty in characterizing the embodiment of the human mind in an individual. I will develop this question in chapter 4. 9. The tree whose fruits Adam and Eve eat is an emblem of judgment first in the sense that it polarizes reality. This might be rendered graphically by thinking

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Notes to Page 18 of the Hebrew word for tree: sQ The word itself has in each of its letters a presentation of that bipolarity, of the branching characteristic of a tree into alternatives that exclude each other. 10. Throughout the process of writing the dissertation Benjamin asserted the need to find an alternative to the Romantics’ method. This is why even that work, although devoted to criticism, problematizes it at the end. The dissertation concludes, significantly, with an “esoteric” epilogue, itself unsubmitted, “for those with whom” (as Benjamin wrote in a letter at the time) “I would have to share it as my work” (C, 141). 11. In the essay “On Language as Such” Benjamin seems to tie the fate of Babel directly to the appearance of judgment and the Fall: After the Fall, which, in making language mediate, laid the foundation for its multiplicity, linguistic confusion could be only a step away. Once men had injured the purity of name, the turning away from that contemplation of things in which their language passes into man needed only to be completed in order to deprive men of the common foundation of an already shaken spirit of language. Signs must become confused where things are entangled. The enslavement of language in prattle is joined by the enslavement of things in folly almost as its inevitable consequence. In this turning away from things, which was enslavement, the plan for the Tower of Babel came into being, and linguistic confusion with it. (SW I, 72)

12. “It is necessary to found the concept of translation at the deepest level of linguistic theory, for it is much too far-reaching and powerful to be treated in any way as an afterthought, as has happened occasionally” (SW I, 70). Given Benjamin’s extension of the idea of language to the expression of essential being as such, translation will be seen to characterize the transition from the language of nature to naming it in human language: “The translation of the language of things into the language of man is not only a translation of the mute into the sonic; it is also the translation of the nameless into name. It is therefore the translation of an imperfect language into a more perfect one, and cannot but add something to it, namely knowledge” (SW I, 70). Translation further accounts for the relation between the languages of the different orders of beings. The basic principle here is that “all higher language is a translation of lower ones” (SW I, 74). In other words, a higher language incorporates within itself, in a translated form, the lower languages. In human language “[t]ranslation attains its full meaning in the realization that every evolved language (with the exception of the word of God) can be considered a translation of all the others.” (SW I, 70). 13. “[The Romantics,] more than any others, were gifted with an insight into the life of literary works—an insight for which translation provides the highest testimony. To be sure, they hardly recognized translation in this sense, but devoted their entire attention to criticism—another, if lesser, factor in the continued life of literary works” (SW I, 258).

Notes to Pages 19–26 14. The idea of a perfect language is found at the origin of the analytic tradition of philosophy, in Frege’s Begriffsschrift. In that latter case we might say that certain fundamental categories are revealed in the use of language (e.g., what it is to be a concept or an object) and are then reflected in the distinction between the signs of that language in the conceptual notation. 15. The last point is clearly developed in Benjamin’s remark on Duns Scotus: “To the extent that the linguistic can be separated out and gleaned from signifieds, the latter should be regarded as the modus essendi of that knowledge and therewith as the foundation of the signifier. The realm of language extends as a critical medium between the realm of the signifier and the signified. We may say, therefore, that the signifier points to the signified and simultaneously is based on it, insofar as its material determination is concerned—not in an unlimited manner, however, but only with regard to the modus essendi that is determined by language” (SW I, 228). 16. Just as Benjamin is critical of any reliance on empathy with regard to the world of the past when writing about history, so his model of translation in no way depends on that possibility of identification. This relates the issue of translation to Benjamin’s critique of historicism. 17. “It has ‘sprung’ from something; those without understanding may wish to call it something that has ‘arisen’ or ‘become’; but it is not a ‘created’ thing under any circumstances. For a created object is defined by the fact that its life— which is higher than that of what has ‘sprung’ from something—has a share in the intention of redemption. An utterly unrestricted share” (SW I, 220). 18. In her subtle and complex essay “Benjamin and the Ambiguities of Romanticism” Rebecca Comay finds certain strands or tensions in Benjamin’s account of Romanticism to still inform his late writings. In particular she claims that in the consideration of Benjamin’s messianism, his “earliest and latest writings draw together unexpectedly” (The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David Ferris, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 149). 19. For a further elaboration of the notion of the expressionless, see the remark at the conclusion of Chapter 2. 20. “The extent to which a translation manages to keep with the nature of this form is determined objectively by the translatability of the original. The lower the quality and distinction of its language, the greater the extent to which it is information, the less fertile a field it is for translation, until the utter preponderance of content, far from being the lever for a well-formed translation, renders it impossible. The higher the level of a work, the more it remains translatable even if its meaning is touched upon only fleetingly” (SW I, 262). 21. This is incomparably evident for Benjamin in Hölderlin’s translations from Sophocles: “in them meaning plunges from abyss to abyss until it threatens to become lost in the bottomless depths of language. There is however a stop. It is

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Notes to Pages 28–33 vouchsafed in Holy Writ alone, in which meaning has ceased to be the watershed for the flow of language and the flow of revelation” (SW I, 262). 22. Some readers of Benjamin have attributed great and, to my mind justified, importance to his essay “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy.” In particular, Howard Caygill’s Walter Benjamin: The Color of Experience (London: Routledge, 1998) considers the question of the relation between a Kantian account of experience and the elaboration of freedom in relation to experience to be the central tension that Benjamin’s reconception of Kant addresses, a tension whose resolution will be developed only in the later stages of Benjamin’s thinking. In his Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) Peter Fenves sees the central transformation that Benjamin brings to the Kantian philosophy in terms of his development of the transcendental aesthetic, or of a new form of intuition. Significantly, both Caygill and Fenves suggest a connection between Benjamin’s writings on color and his transformation of Kant. 23. Benjamin hesitates to speak of consciousness at all with respect to the recognition of the integrity of the different domains of experience, for a mode of consciousness always involves a specific synthetic intentional unity of experience Corresponding to the types of empirical consciousness are just as many types of experiences, which in regard to their relation to the empirical consciousness, so far as truth is concerned, have the value only of fantasy or hallucination. For an objective relation between the empirical consciousness and the objective concept of experience is impossible. All genuine experience rests upon the pure “epistemological (transcendental) consciousness” if this term is still usable under the condition that it is stripped of everything subjective. The pure transcendental consciousness is different in kind from any empirical consciousness, and the question therefore arises of whether the application of the term “consciousness” is allowable here. How the psychological concept of consciousness is related to the concept of the sphere of knowledge remains a major problem of philosophy, one which perhaps can be set aside only through recourse to the age of Scholasticism. Here is the logical place for many problems that phenomenology has recently raised anew. (SW I, 104)

24. Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1988, pp. 55–56. 25. Benjamin does not even engage such subject matters that have a preestablished canon: the German Trauerspiel, and even more so the Paris arcades, have no established tradition of interpretation, so it is difficult to conceive what it would be to give the writing on them the form of doctrine. This problematization of the idea of doctrine also bears on the place of quotations in the writing, for quotations, especially in religious forms of writing, are often used to refer oneself to past authorities. However, when Benjamin writes on matters in which there is no such traditional authority, what would be the purpose and the force of the use of quotation? See in this context my discussion of commentary in Chapter 2.

Notes to Pages 35–37 26. The idea of an integral summation of experience in its continuity can suggest the mathematical terminology of the infinitesimal calculus. This is further developed in Chapter 3 with Benjamin’s notion of a time-differential and is related to Leibniz’s monadological outlook. 27. If one wants to speak here of a mode of categorizing, then one would have to appeal to a peculiar form of nonsynthesis that appears in the field of concepts: “But besides the concept of synthesis, another concept, that of a certain nonsynthesis of two concepts in another, will become very important systematically since another relation between thesis and antithesis is possible besides synthesis.” (SW I, 106). One can recognize in this idea of a relation by nonsynthesis the first formulation of what Benjamin will later understand as dialectics at a standstill, or the unity that has to do with the arrest of dialectical movement rather than the overcoming of its oppositions. Nonsynthesis can also be understood in terms of polarization that brings together extremes without synthesizing them into a unity. I thank Yotam Feldman for pointing out to me the importance of this passage. 28. Benjamin’s understanding of the symbolic in the context of a transformation of the Kantian philosophy should be compared and contrasted to Cassirer’s neo-Kantian philosophy of symbolic form. Whereas Cassirer’s idea of symbolic forms can account for the broadening of the Kantian idea of constitutive conditions of possibility to a variety of domains of experience, he has no clear notion of the integrity of experience, that is, of the coming together of the different symbolic forms. Cassirer’s account is functional or relational rather than substantive. (See further on that issue Chapter 4). I thank Amichai Amit for his insightful comments on that issue.

2. Image 1. Benjamin writes: “Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic)” (A, 462). However, the plural form here does not mean that many dialectical images will be formed in relation to the material of the Arcades. It is rather a way of speaking of dialectical images in general (it is equivalent to saying “only a dialectical image is a genuine image”). In many interpretations the reference to a plurality of dialectical images seems to be the result of identifying the concept too closely with that of the dream image. This leads, for instance, to the sense that the commodity can be presented as a dialectical image. Consider, for instance, M. Pensky’s understanding that “the dialectical image ‘pictures’ the commodity no differently, in one sense, than a predominant culture does. It merely shifts the context . . . the dialectics of the dialectical image is precisely the fact that the image represents the commodity as it truly is” (“Method and Time: Benjamin’s Dialectical Images,” in David S. Ferris (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 188).

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Note to Page 39 Buck-Morss views similarly the commodity as the paradigmatic object, which can be turned from dream image into dialectical image: “. . . the substance of dialectical images was to be found in everyday objects” (Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectic of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, Cambridge: MIT press, 1991 249). On both views, it seems, the dialectical image can still be identified with a different perception of the object, thus as essentially localized. Yet, it is unclear in what sense the truth of that picture would involve more than the revelation of its illusory, or phantasmagoric, nature. Take further the following claim found in ‘Central Park’ in which Benjamin refers to dialectical images (in the plural): “If it can be said that for Baudelaire modern life is the reservoir of dialectical images, this implies that he stood in the same relation to modern life as the seventeenth century did to antiquity” (SW IV, 161). Note that it can be read in two ways. First, as claiming that the reservoir is one that contains (many) dialectical images. However, second, and, to my mind, more correctly, the claim would be that modernity is the reservoir (of material) out of which dialectical images are constructed. (Thus that there is more than one way to construct a dialectical image out of the material, just as there can be several prototypes of the same archetype. Yet, each is, in itself, singular and expresses the whole.) In the exposé of 1935, there seems to be an exception to the reference to the dialectical image in the singular, one that disappears in the 1939 rewriting of it: “Ambiguity is the manifest imaging of dialectic, the law of dialectics at a standstill. This standstill is utopia and the dialectical image, therefore, dream image. Such an image is afforded by the commodity per se: as fetish. Such an image is presented by the arcades, which are house no less than street. Such an image is the prostitute— seller and sold in one” (A, 10). Here one could argue that commodity, arcades, or prostitute are all instances of dialectical images. Yet, I assume that in this passage one should emphasize the fact that ambiguity is the manifest imaging of dialectic. That is, in that quote Benjamin is considering the elements that will go into the construction of the dialectical image. Those dream images, which are essentially plural, will be transformed into the totality of truth, which constitutes the dialectical image. It is thus necessary to distinguish this manifest stage from the standstill of the final presentation of the dialectical image, which lacks all ambiguity. These lines, moreover, refer to the imagination of modernity in Baudelaire. But a dialectical image is not an object of the imagination. Moreover, speaking of “utopia” is tantamount to claiming that the truth content has not yet been revealed in the dialectical image. I take it that, just as the dialectical image is never plural, so, one might argue, the notion of “origin,” as deployed in the epistemocritical preface, should be used only in the singular. 2. To clarify, consider once more the contrast between presentation and representation. A certain subject matter can be talked about or represented. Representation has an intentional object. The nature of that intentional object, the spe-

Note to Page 40 cific unity of experience, is a function of how we are directed to experience by means of the concepts at hand. A correct representation would allow a unified grasp by way of generalization, thus subordinating the material to a set of concepts that take hold of the subject matter in question. They would grasp it in a determinate fashion as such and such a thing. Taking possession of the object by means of a specific perspective or direction characterizes the structure of knowledge: “Knowledge is possession. Its very object is determined by the fact that it must be taken possession of—even in a transcendental sense—in the consciousness. The quality of possession remains” (O, 29). In the context of knowledge, the unity of the object is correlative with the choice of concepts to grasp it, thus with a unity of consciousness. To speak of the presentation of an image would require a different mode of unity. At stake is unity that is recognized in the material itself. It is a matter of truth rather than of knowledge. Truth is a unity of being (Sein), not of our way of looking at the world. “For the thing possessed, presentation is secondary; it does not have prior existence as something presenting itself. But the opposite holds good of truth. For knowledge, method is a way of acquiring its object— even by creating it in consciousness; for truth it is self-presentation and is therefore immanent in it as form. Unlike the methodology of knowledge, this form does not derive from a coherence established in consciousness, but from being (Sein)” (O, 29 translation modified). 3. Consider that the starry night evokes sentiments of sublimity. In a famous moment at the end of the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant speaks of two things that fills us with awe and a sense of sublimity—the starry sky above and the moral law within. Far from wishing to attribute to Benjamin a certain mysticism of the ineffable in using the sublime figure of the constellation, I want to use the structure of the sublime in order to think of what might be called an articulated or contentful sublime. An important feature of the description of the sublime in Kant is the disappearance of the mediation of the concept. The experience takes place or is opened up in the relation of imagination and reason without the mediation of the understanding. Similarly it would appear that the figure of the constellation problematizes the place of the concept. Indeed, the figure, though not bypassing the concept altogether, forms a relation between ideas and phenomena that does not depend on the unifying power of the concept. In the structure of the sublime we find that the object is lost or sacrificed to a certain movement of the mind. The experience of beauty in contrast, involves a movement constantly returning to the object, bringing out the potential of the representational capacity and the meaning in the object correlatively. A contentful presentation of the sublime would involve an overcoming of the duality of beauty and sublimity. Benjamin conceives of it by way of an arrest of the movement of the mind involved in the experience of the beautiful that “freezes” its contents. It is that “freezing” in what Benjamin calls the “expressionless” that

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Notes to Pages 40–41 that is an essential aspect of the constellation. (See further my Remark on the expressionless at the conclusion of the present chapter). Striking the register of the sublime, we get a further reason for Benjamin’s denial of any kind of reliance on vision to characterize the revelation of the dialectical image. With such an attempt to combine the sublime with a presentation there is always the danger of what Kant calls “fanaticism” in the “Third Critique” (Ak. 5, 275) (All references to Kant’s Critique of Judgment are from the translation of James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952). The page references will be given following the quote, according to the pagination of the Akademie edition.) The parallel moment in Benjamin should be formulated in terms of his insistence on distinguishing the mythological use of archetypes (as in Jung and Klages) from his understanding of the dialectical image as archetype. 4. Characterizing the dialectical image in terms of the recognition of relationships can explain the sense in which it “flashes up”: “The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability and is never seen again.”(SW IV, 390) One aspect of that flashing has to do with the nature of similarity. In the essay “On the Mimetic Faculty,” Benjamin describes the recognition of nonsensuous similarities as the flashing up of an aspect: “Thus the nexus of meaning of words or sentences is the bearer through which, like a flash, similarity appears. For its production by man—like its perception by him—is in many cases, and particularly the most important, tied to its flashing. It flits past” (SW II, 722). One could say that the flashing up of similarities is something of a grammatical insight about what such similarity is: it is always a passing moment of recognition. One cannot speak of a gradual, or of a lasting sense of similarity. In nonsensuous similarities there is no common perceivable element to hold to. Such cases of similarity do not appeal to a common core of identity or analogy. (See on that issue “Analogy and Relationship,” SW I, 207) Analogy can be established between well-defined entities. The principle of relationship brings out a unity or a sense of totality in and through the recognition of relationships. 5. In the epistemo-critical preface of the Trauerspiel book the multiplicity of extremes receives a particular inflection in relation to the inquiry of an artistic genre. It characterizes the kind of works that will enter into the presentation of the idea of the Trauerspiel, “the most singular and eccentric of phenomena . . . both the weakest and clumsiest experiments and . . . the overripe fruits of a period of decadence” (O, 46). It is worth emphasizing what might appear too obvious to mention, namely, that in the Trauerspiel book Benjamin does not consider a work of art and relate to it as a critic (as he did, for example, in his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities). He rather turns to the multiplicity that is loosely considered a genre. This is important precisely insofar that in bringing out the truth of such a genre we do not merely consider its “great works” but rather

Notes to Pages 44–46 extreme, even bizarre, cases. Thus, something about the emphasis on the individual value of each work is lost or sacrificed to the revelation of the total idea. The very idea of the great work is problematized and replaced by a multiplicity of extremes, none of which contains in itself all of what is needed for the presentation. 6. I mean to refer here to Clement Greenberg’s Kantianism, evident in, for instance, his essay “Modernist Painting” in C. Greenberg The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 85–93 7. It is also for that reason that he calls the presentation of the ideal a “harmonic dis-continuum of pure contents” (SW I, 179). 8. In his introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, David Ferris suggests a further way that Benjamin is reticent to adopt the Romantic model of criticism. It leads to a point at which “every artwork exposes the absolute as finite, as something prosaic, secular and therefore not transcendent” (“Introduction: Reading Benjamin” in Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, 10). He takes Benjamin’s aim “to preserve the difference between a necessarily limited and finite activity such as criticism and something infinite such as the absolute. In this respect, Benjamin, unlike the Romantics, demands that whatever is absolute should not participate or be discovered in whatever is finite or limited” (ibid.). That separation leads him to see Benjamin as insisting on the absolute as “what is inexpressible, what is speechless, unutterable” (ibid., 11). This analysis is supplemented by Ferris’s account of Goethe’s position in “Benjamin’s Affinity: Goethe, the Romantics, and the Pure Problem of Criticism.” (in Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, New York: Continuum, 2002, pp. 180–196). 9. “For those images are invisible, and “resemblance” signifies precisely the relation of what is perceptible in the highest degree to what in principle is only intuitable. In this, the object of intuition is the necessity that the content, which announces itself in the feelings as pure, become completely perceptible. The sensing of this necessity is intuition. The ideal of art as object of intuition is therefore necessary perceptibility—which never appears purely in the artwork itself, which remains the object of perception” (SW I, 180). I note that in this formulation of Goethe’s account of truth, Benjamin characterizes primal images as invisible, yet intuitable. Nonetheless, intuition, as he uses the term here, is not identified with perception, but rather points to Goethe’s appropriation of Kant’s notion of the intuitive intellect (intellectus archetypus). See “Remark: Continuity and Discontinuities” in this chapter. 10. Compare also the following: “Here everything turns on the more exact definition of the concept of ‘true nature,’ since this ‘true’ visible nature, which is supposed to constitute the contents of the artwork, not only must not be immediately identified with the appearing, visible nature of the world, but rather must first be rigorously distinguished from that nature on a conceptual level, whereas

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Notes to Pages 47–50 afterward, to be sure, the problem of a deeper, essential unity of the ‘true’ visible nature in the artwork and of the nature present in phenomena of visible nature (present though perhaps invisible, only intuitable, ur- phenomenal) would be posed” (SW I, 181). 11. The problem of writing on modern reality as though it is a classic is posed explicitly in Benjamin’s commentary on Brecht’s poetry: “So the situation becomes highly dialectical when the commentary, a form that is both archaic and authoritarian, is applied to a body of poetry that not only has nothing archaic about it but defies what is recognized as authority today” (SW IV, 215). 12. Michael Jennings importantly emphasizes this coexistence of the constructive and the destructive in the constitution of the dialectical image (M. Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987, 38–39]). Though Jennings titles his book Dialectical Images, his specific discussions of the notion of the dialectical image agrees, I think, with my use of the term in the singular. My discussion here shows that one can give a philosophically rigorous account of that notion that is free from what he calls “the unmistakable stamp of Benjamin’s mysticism” (ibid., 36). 13. This coexistence of the destructive and the constructive can be traced back to Benjamin’s understanding of Karl Kraus’s use of quotation: “To quote a word is to call it by its name . . . In the quotation that both saves and punishes, language proves the matrix of justice. It summons the word by its name, wrenches it destructively from its context, but precisely thereby calls it back to its origin. It appears, now with rhyme and reason, sonorously, congruously, in the structure of a new text. As rhyme, it gathers the similar into its aura; as name, it stands alone and expressionless. In citation the two realms—of origin and destruction—justify themselves before language” (SW II, 454). In her interpretation of the role of quotations in Benjamin’s writing, Hannah Arendt refers to this essay on Kraus, in which the dialectic of the destructive and the constructive is developed: “In this form of ‘thought fragments,’ quotations have the double task of interrupting the flow of presentation with ‘transcendent force’ . . . and at the same time of concentrating within themselves that which is presented” (Hannah Arendt (ed.), introduction to Illuminations / Walter Benjamin, New York: Shocken, 1969, 39). However, what remains unclear in her description is how, precisely, the destructive transcendent force is identical to the constructive presentation. 14. “The measure of time for the experience of the symbol is the mystical instant in which the symbol assumes the meaning into its hidden and, if one might say so, wooded interior” (O, 165). This figure of the wooded interior is striking. It must be read against Benjamin’s understanding of translation. There the translator is said to stand outside the woods and try to find the proper echo for an expression: “Unlike a work of literature, translation finds itself not in the center of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls

Notes to Pages 52–53 without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one” (SW I, 258). This is then a first hint at the proximity that we will develop between allegory and translation. Translation, as well as allegory, destroys the semblance of symbolic completeness. 15. Goethe, “Empirical Observation and Science” (1798), in J. W. Goethe The Collected Works, vol. 12 Scientific Studies, edited and translated by Douglas Miller, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, 25. 16. Goethe, “The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject” (1792), in Scientific Studies, 17. 17. This is what is also expressed in the notion of metamorphosis. The unity at stake is not simply that of an organic whole. Nor is the inner connection of the multiple cases revealed genetically by describing the continuous development of a living being from one stage of growth into another. Rather, metamorphosis provides a principle of relatedness of disparate phenomena through which a higher natural life is revealed. As Goethe puts it in his theory of morphology: “What is alike in idea may manifest itself in empirical reality as alike, or similar, or even totally unalike and dissimilar: this gives rise to the ever-changing life of nature. It is this life of nature which we propose to outline in these pages” (Goethe ‘On Morphology’ in Scientific Studies, 65). 18. Goethe, “Theory of Colors” in Scientific Studies, p. 158. Benjamin comments on this passage in the essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities: “The genesis of the Theory of Color is also chronologically close to that of the novel. Goethe’s studies in magnetism everywhere intrude quite distinctly into the work itself. This insight into nature, with which the author believed he could always accomplish the verification of his works, completed his indifference toward criticism. There was no need of it. The nature of the ur-phenomena was the standard; the relation of every work to it was something one could read off it. But on the basis of the double meaning in the concept of nature, the ur-phenomena as archetype [Urbild] too often turned into nature as model [Vorbild]. This view would never have grown powerful if, in the resolution of the posited equivocation, Goethe has grasped that only in the domain of art do the ur-phenomena – as ideals – present themselves adequately to perception, whereas in science they are replaced by the idea, which is capable of illuminating the subject of perception but never of transforming it in intuition. The ur-phenomena do not exist before art; they subsist within it” (SW I, 315). 19. Quoted in Schopenhauer’s On Vision and Color trans. Georg Stahk, Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010, p. 45. 20. I mention here that Goethe’s understanding of the essential polarity in the presentation of experience is something Benjamin inherits as well in his understanding of the presentation of the dialectical image as constituted by a constellation of extremes. See further my discussion of polarization in Chapter 3.

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Notes to Pages 53–54 21. This explains why Benjamin describes the presence of intuitive content in Goethe’s theory in terms of the intensification of significant perception. The highest meaningful articulation of the perceptual is what Benjamin calls “necessary perceptibility.” The sense of necessity in the perceptible is experienced as a demand for its articulation. (Intellectual) intuition can thereby manifest itself in feeling, as that demand of the idea to be expressed in the perceivable: “the object of intuition is the necessity that the content, which announces itself in the feelings as pure, becomes completely perceptible”(SW I, 180). 22. See in this context my “Meaning and Aesthetic Judgment in Kant” in Analytic Kantianism (ed.) James Conant, issue of Philosophical Topics vol. 34, nos. 1 & 2, Spring and Fall 2006, 21–34. In Benjamin’s -abilities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010) Samuel Weber traces the issues Benjamin raises back to Kant’s Critique of Judgment. I find this reference to the “Third Critique” important but I disagree with Weber’s interpretation of the issues of singularity and communicability in the second moment of the analytic of the beautiful, as well as with his understanding of their relation to Benjamin’s account. Weber presents what I would think of as a minimalist view of the aesthetic reflective judgment related to his emphasis on potentiality. He interprets communicability as empty of content, in terms of a capacity, or in terms of the revelation of a pure medium that would leave no room for actual expression of meaning. However, if we consider Benjamin’s engagement with Romantic criticism, which follows up on Kant’s Critique of Judgment, we see that he would not adopt the sharp separation of medium and meaning that Weber proposes. In his “Concept of Criticism,” reflection is taken (through Fichte) to account for the possibility of creating a movement of criticism internal to the work, in which its meaning is intensified. Even if the potentially unbounded nature of such a movement of meaning would require appealing to abilities, it would be such that would be made manifest by expression. More important, the formal nature of such Romantic criticism that implies an infinite task (thus, the exercise of a critical ability) is precisely for that reason inadequate in Benjamin’s eyes. He proposes instead, in the epilogue of the dissertation, a model in which meaning is actualized to the extreme, namely by reference to the Goethean understanding of the ideal. This ideal is fully contentful and uncriticizable. In it meaning is actualized to the extreme. Weber interprets the problem Kant faces in the “Third Critique” as a failure of the power of judgment to contain the wealth of phenomena, or the infinite heterogeneity of nature.The presentation of the predicament as a failure to subsume the infinity of nature through our concepts is important to Weber in setting up the situation of reflection as a response to a traumatic inability. This seems to me a problematic reading of the “Third Critique,” which is then brought to bear on Benjamin.

Notes to Page 57 23. In his “Virtual Paris: Benjamin’s Arcades Project” Kevin McLaughlin draws attention to the transformation that Benjamin brings to the notion of content in relation to the work of art. The background against which McLaughlin considers that transformation is the Hegelian understanding that identifies a kernel of truth in the work of art. McLaughlin draws attention to Benjamin’s introduction of virtuality or potentiality into this idea of content. He refers, as Samuel Weber does in Benjamin’s -abilities, to the terms in Benjamin’s vocabulary that stress potential (such as “translatability,” “recognizability,” “criticizability,” and “legibility”). “This vocabulary emerges,” McLaughlin writes, “from Benjamin’s approach to aesthetic content as a matter of divisibility” (in Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Gerhard Richter [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002], 209). McLaughlin’s emphasis that truth content cannot be identified in a substantial unity of meaning seems to me important. Indeed, the articulation of the way of meaning by translation, which appeals to the resources of the whole language of the translator, precisely entails this point. Moreover, the language of power is important insofar as the articulations of translation make manifest a power in language as such. Nonetheless, it does not follow, it seems to me, that there is anything potential in the work of philosophy: “What comes to light here and what is furthered and conserved is identified with nothing substantial; conserved in fact is the possibility that what philosophy seeks—vainly in its questioning—can still potentially appear” (ibid., 212). When Benjamin uses the notion of the virtual, it is precisely so as to emphasize that all possibilities have been explored and made part of the presentation of the idea: “The presentation of an idea can under no circumstances be considered successful unless the whole range of possible extremes it contains has been virtually explored. Virtually, because that which is comprehended in the idea of origin still has history, in the sense of content, but not in the sense of a set of occurrences which have befallen it” (O, 47). 24. Conceiving of the beautiful as involving an essential ambiguity of meaning is tantamount to characterizing its essentially veiled nature. The beautiful is truth veiled: “. . . the beautiful is neither the veil nor the veiled object but rather the object in its veil” (SW I, 351, see further note 25 to the present chapter). The revelation of truth out of beauty cannot be understood as a simple unveiling, the separation of veil from that which is veiled. Dispelling the semblance in reaching truth content is to be viewed as achieving the arrest of the quivering of beauty. Achieving the arrest of beauty is the true function of criticism. Criticism is not the continual enlivening of the work practiced by the Romantics but takes the form of precise knowledge (one example of which is translation): “The task of art criticism is not to lift the veil but rather through the most precise knowledge of it as a veil, to raise itself for the first time to the true view of the beautiful” (SW I, 351). Still, note that knowledge is not knowledge of the truth, for there is an essential distinction between the dimension of

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Note to Page 57 knowledge and that of truth. Rather, Benjamin speaks here of a precise knowledge of the veil that would precipitate the recognition of truth. Knowledge has nevertheless a critical function in arresting the ambiguity of the beautiful semblance. 25. The central theme of Benjamin’s reading of the Symposium in the epistemocritical preface of the Trauerspiel book concerns the relation established between beauty and truth: “[The Symposium] contains two pronouncements of decisive importance in the present context. It presents truth—the realm of ideas as the essential content of beauty. It declares truth to be beautiful” (O, 30). The claim that truth is the essential content of beauty is not to be reduced to the relation between phenomenal appearance and essence. Benjamin does not mean simply to argue that beauty, like other phenomena, have to be understood ultimately in terms of the truth content of the realm of ideas. This is evident in the second pronouncement to the effect that truth is beautiful. Yet, how is the attribution of beauty to truth compatible with the understanding, often expressed by Benjamin, that beauty is semblance? How can beauty both be attributed to truth and characterized as semblance? This tension can also be formulated in terms of the way beauty, according to the account of the Symposium, draws to truth. Wouldn’t conceiving of beauty as semblance, make the attraction it exerts mere temptation, something to do away with, a mere means to the end of truth? Why isn’t Eros duped in ultimately recognizing truth to be what beauty was drawing to. How can truth, in Benjamin’s words, “do justice to beauty” (O, 31)? So as to resolve the apparent contradictions in the account of the relation of Truth, Beauty and Eros, it is necessary to take into account the following matters: • Truth (the realm of ideas) is the essential content of beauty, however the beautiful always involves a dimension of form. • Truth is beautiful only for the lover of wisdom, but not in itself. In other words, it is necessary to address the question of the relation between form and content in beauty, as well as the essentially relational nature of the beautiful. These characteristics can be exemplified in terms of the Kantian account of beauty (which has served us as a background in many of the previous considerations). On the Kantin picture, beauty is not an attribute of the object, nor is it a matter of the subjective effect of the object. It is inherent in the medium of relation of the subject to the object. The medium of that relatedness is the medium of judgment. Moreover, beauty is essentially a matter of the form of our reflection on the object (it is not in itself a stable and determinate content, insofar as its experience is so dependent on the movement of the faculties in our reflection on the object).

Notes to Pages 58–61 If form characterizes the movement of meaning in relation to beauty, recognizing the essential content of beauty requires an arrest of reflection. This is the moment that Benjamin introduces through the notion of the expressionless. The arrest is the moment of the transport from the formal movement of meaning to the striking recognition of the truth content of the beautiful. It is also what makes for the essentially unapproachable nature of that content. Such truth content is not the object of a relation. Truth, as Benjamin puts it, is an intentionless state of being. 26. The caesura can be compared to a moment in Kant’s analysis of the sublime. For in the arrest of the sublime we are raised from a relation to the world to a presentation of the very plane of representation. Kant thinks of the sublime as the recognition of our faculty of reason, that is, the shift from the concern with estimating the world to the arrest that reveals the power of representation itself in its highest manifestation. Hölderlin thus provides Benjamin with a model by which to conceive of the sublime not merely as the indirect manifestation of reason in feeling but also as the presentation of truth contents articulated according to the standard of reason, a fragment of the world articulated by the highest idea. 27. For a rich and multilayered analysis of the question of the image in Benjamin’s analysis of this moment from Hölderlin, see Rainer Nägele, “Thinking Images,” in Benjamin’s Ghosts, pp. 23–40. In that essay Nägele further thinks of the presentation of the conditions of representation in relation to Benjamin’s reinterpretation of Kant in his “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy”: “The shift from Hölderlin’s “historical” to Benjamin’s Image-forming remains fully within the logic of Benjamin’s philosophy of history and memory. For, as Hölderlin already perceives the post-Kantian task as an integration of experience in thought in a sphere that encompasses memory and thought, Benjamin’s work on the same task (explicitly formulated in the early essay “On the Coming Philosophy”) culminates in a philosophy of history and memory that finds its sphere in the construction of the dialectical image” (Benjamin’s Ghosts, p.36).

3. Time 1. I further elaborate this idea of a flow in my discussion of nature in chapter 4. 2. Benjamin’s suspicion of overly powerful systematization is evident in a passage that appears in the preface: “Inasmuch as it is determined by [the nineteenth-century] concept of a system, philosophy is in danger of accommodating itself to a syncretism which weaves a spider’s web between separate kinds of knowledge in an attempt to ensnare the truth as if it were something which came flying in from outside” (O, 28).

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Notes to Pages 67–70 3. “The missing capstone is the perception of the two great driving forces in all nature: the concepts of polarity and intensification, the former a property of matter insofar as we think of it as material, the latter insofar as we think of it as spiritual. Polarity is a state of constant attraction and repulsion, while intensification is a state of ever-striving ascent. Since, however, matter can never exist and act without spirit, nor spirit without matter, matter is also capable of undergoing intensification, and spirit cannot be denied its attraction and repulsion” (Goethe, ‘A Commentary on the Aphoristic Essay “Nature” (1828) in Scientific Studies, 6). 4. It is particularly interesting in this context to consider Benjamin’s response to a letter by Greta Karplus dated May 1934, which warned him of the danger of his relationship with Brecht: “What you say about his influence on me reminds me of a significant and continually repeated constellation in my life . . . In my existential economy, a few specific relationships do play a part, which enable me to maintain one which is the polar opposite of my fundamental being . . . my life, as well as my thought, is moving towards extreme positions. The distance that it asserts in this way, the freedom to juxtapose things and ideas that are considered irreconcilable, achieves its character only through danger” (quoted in Erdmut Wizsla, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009], 10). 5. The editors of The Arcades Project add the following note: “Benjamin’s reference to the “appoll< i.>nischen Schnitt” remains obscure. The French translator of the Passagen-Werk renders this as ‘section d’or’ (‘golden section’), while the Italian translators offer the emendation ‘taglio di Appelle’ (‘Apelles’ section’), with reference to the fourth-century b.c. greek painter who, in a contest, divided a narrow line by one yet narrower and of a different color” (A, 989n21). In his essay “Miracles Happen,” Eric Santner further interprets Agamben’s emendation of the passage: “Agamben argues that the effect of the Appelles section or cut is to produce . . . a unique kind of remainder or remnant . . . Agamben adds that this ‘remainder’ is ‘not something that resembles a numerical portion or a substantial positive residue.’ It represents instead a cut into the bipolar partition . . . that allows for the passage to an entirely new sort of logic of being-with, one that no longer operates on the basis of membership in bounded sets or totalities set off against exceptions” (Santner, “Miracles Happen,” in Žižek, Santner, and Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Tehology, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006, 128). 6. There is, in Benjamin’s use of the notion of a time differential, a similar understanding of limit. That limit is the complete positivity in which everything can be incorporated as of equal value into the affirmable image of the past in the present: Modest methodological proposal for the cultural-historical dialectic. It is very easy to establish oppositions, according to determinate points of view, within the various

Notes to Pages 71–72

“fields” of any epoch, such that on one side lies the “productive,” “forward-looking,” “lively,” “positive” part of an epoch, and on the other side the abortive, retrograde, and obsolescent. The very contours of the positive element will appear distinctly only insofar as this element is set off against the negative. On the other hand, every negation has its value solely as background for the delineation of the lively, the positive. It is therefore of decisive importance that a new partition be applied to this initially excluded, negative component so that, by a displacement of the angle of vision (but not of the criteria!), a positive element emerges anew in it too—something different from that previously signified. And so on, ad infinitum, until the entire past is brought into the present in a historical apocatastasis. (A, 459)

An example Benjamin provides for this procedure is instructive: “Consider though: Isn’t it an affront to Goethe to make a film of Faust, and isn’t there a world of difference between the poem Faust and the film Faust? Yes, certainly. But, again, isn’t there a whole world of difference between a bad film of Faust and a good one?” (A, 459). To put it in other terms, thinking in terms of the time differential disturbs every attempt to describe a period in terms of progress or of decline. For the evaluation of the positive and the negative is never absolute, but by taking this process to the limit everything becomes equally positive, and the retrograde can always be shown to have a positive element by means of a further contrast: “The foregoing, put differently: the indestructibility of the highest life in all things. Against the prognosticators of decline” (A, 459). This must be seen in the context of the overcoming of the antithetical structure of judgment, that is, as a possibility of a return to the naming language, in which goodness and expression are one. 7. The missing term in the unfolding of the mathematical figure is the Integral. I have treated of Benjamin’s understanding of the integral continuity of experience in the remark to chapter I. 8. I take it that the abbreviated monadic presentation is related to what in “The Task of the Translator” Benjamin calls an embryonic presentation of the pure language by the translation: “It cannot possibly reveal or establish this hidden relationship itself, but it can represent it by realizing it in embryonic or intensive form. This representing of something signified through an attempt at establishing it in embryo is of so singular a nature that it is rarely met with in the sphere of nonlinguistic life” (SW I, 255). 9. The monadic presentation could be seen as yet another mode of addressing the difficulty Benjamin found with the antithetical structure of judgment. For the monadic presentation, as Leibniz understands it, replaces the idea of judgment as predication with that of the expression of identity. In the next chapter we will further develop the contrast between a relational characterization of meaning and a substantial understanding in the context of Benjamin’s treatment of embodiment. As will become clear, the highest realization of meaning is nevertheless not the monadic concentration of meaning in an individual substance.

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Notes to Pages 75–78 The monadic presentation in history leads away from the unity of individual life. The highest life is a life that cannot be contained in an individual.

4. Body 1. The term “Gestalt” is translated into English as “form.” This seems to me to be misleading, for Benjamin uses the latter term specifically in other, distinct, contexts (see, for instance, the use of “form” in the essay on Romanticism). On the distinction between forms and their interpenetration see further note 5 below). 2. The distinction between substance and function is something that might have been familiar to Benjamin from Ernst Cassirer’s early work of the same name. 3. See Gerhard Richter’s Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000) for a different elaboration of the relation between thought and body in Benjamin’s autobiographical writings. 4. See in this context the discussion of existence in Benjamin’s “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy” and my remark on this essay at the end of Chapter 1. 5. In his early essay “On Two Poems of Hölderlin” Benjamin thinks through the spiritual unity of the poet and of his task in terms of the overcoming of the mythological (its transformation into what, at this early stage, he still calls the mythical). The early version of Hölderlin’s poem is mythological insofar as it identifies the poet’s being by relying on an analogy to the localization and figuration of the divine as a sun-god. It is the “isolation of the god, whose mythological destiny furnishes merely analogical significance for the poet” (SW I, 23). Myth emerges from mythology only insofar as the individual, the poet, fulfills his task by giving the world the spiritual unity of relationships. The poet makes manifest his own substantial being, by expressing the coherence of world drawn together in relationships rather than by analogy. He finds himself as the “center of a structured world”. (SW I, 23) His substantial unity is that which is held in repose by the surrounding world being brought in balance in meaning. Conversely, it is in that convergence of the world in the poetic task that the divine emerges from the mythological, so that the manifestation of the god and the poetic destiny are one. “The mythological emerges as myth only through the extent of its coherence. The myth is recognizable from the inner unity of god and destiny.” (SW I, 22) The discussion of the law of identity in this essay serves to further establish the understanding that substantial identity is to be sought in what Benjamin calls the intensive interpenetration of forms: “This Law of Identity states that all elements in the poem already appear in intensive interpenetration; that the ele-

Note to Page 79 ments are never purely graspable; that, rather, one can grasp only the structure of relations, whereby the identity of each individual being is a function of an infinite chain of series wherein the poetized unfolds. This is the Law of Identity— the law according to which all essences in the poetized are revealed as the unity of what are in principle infinite functions. No element can ever be singled out, void of relation, from the intensity of the world order which is fundamentally felt” (SW I, 25). The preceding considerations suggest that the spiritual unity of the individual, namely character, is manifest to the extent that it expresses or illuminates the world, that it is a locus of the articulation of a totality of experience. One would not have a localized subject facing objects (as in problematic pictures of the transcendental subject modelled on the empirical subject). Rather, as Benjamin puts it in the essay “Fate and Character”: “the external world that the active man encounters can also in principle be reduced, to any desired degree, to his inner world, and his inner world similarly to his outer world, indeed regarded in principle as one and the same thing” (SWI, 202). If anything should be counted as the spiritual unity of an individual, it will only arise through the utmost articulation of the world in language, in giving form to that individual’s experience. The identification of the mind by way of its localization in an already given unity of individual life (by way of the identity provided by the individual body or the reification of psychological constitution as one’s individual character) always risks producing a mythology of unity. 6. “The concern with color,” Benjamin writes in an early fragment titled “A Child’s View of Color,” “cancels out intellectual cross-references of the soul and creates a pure mood” (SW I, 51). I take moods to be distinguished from feelings or other emotional states in part by being affective manifestations of one’s surroundings and one’s being in them. To create a mood, color must then bring out the texture of experience as an interrelated totality and should not appear as a property of isolated objects. This sense of color is something Benjamin identifies in the child’s attraction to coloring, in particular the watercolor illustrations where the coloring seems as though it hovers above the lines of the printed design and is so to speak detached from the object. Just like watercolors, soap bubbles, pieces of jewelry, decals, and the magic lantern all provide an opportunity for what Benjamin calls “pure imaginative contemplation” (note the expression). “Their magic lies . . . in the colored glow, the color brilliance, the ray of colored light” (SW I, 443). Among such phenomena he singles out the rainbow as a “pure childlike image.” It is an image of boundaries solely defined by color: “In it color is wholly contour” (SW I, 50). The distinct colors of the rainbow and its geometrical shape might tempt us to think of the order of color on the model of harmony. Yet, the possibility of arranging colors, say on a wheel, need not imply that they form a quasi-mathematical order. “Color,” Benjamin writes, “does not relate to optics the way line relates to

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Notes to Pages 81–85 geometry” (SW I, 49). Color can retain the quality of a pure appearance, thereby forming “an order consisting of an infinite range of nuances” (SW I, 50). Harmony demands separation, but color allows countless continuous transitions. Nevertheless, its nuances, even when minimal, can be immediately and utterly clear. This is why color can be experienced as a fluid medium of delicate change occurring of itself. It is not so much the mixing of saturated colors but rather the contemplation of transparent colors that often provides an occasion to experience differences of intensity, shimmering light, subtle and shifting nuances, and continuous merging. “In their illumination and their obscurity,” Goethe writes, “the transparent colors are without limits, just as fire and water can be regarded as their zenith and nadir” (quoted in Benjamin, SW II, 443). One might speak here of an effortless dissolution of boundaries, of a dimension of experience in which change is felt to be eminently possible. But it is change without destruction. “Painless”deformation, Benjamin would call it, very different from the anxious, sublime, or ecstatic emotional states in which we imagine ourselves experiencing the world in its boundless totality. With color the experience of merging is one of endless dissolution with no temptation to transcendence. The mood of color is created, Benjamin writes, “without thereby sacrificing the world” (SW I, 51). 7. Considering the issues from this perspective can also clarify why Benjamin starts from the identity of mind and body. Indeed, created nature is precisely that unity to be realized by the task of giving expression to nature or actualizing mind in it. 8. In the Arcades we find several examples of this way of speaking of currents: “Every current of fashion or of worldview derives its force from what is forgotten. This downstream flow is ordinarily so strong that only the group can give itself up to it; the individual—the precursor—is liable to collapse in the face of such violence, as happened with Proust” (A, 393). Here the distinction between the manifestation of the current in the individual and in the collective is particularly clear. It is in this context that one can see the importance of stressing that Proust’s achievement is not conceived in terms of the retrieval of the forgotten past and its incorporation into the structure of individuality but rather as a forceful emptying out of the self. 9. Thus, one should not separate life as the natural, organic, or biological from the manifestations of spirit but rather ask what forms of life can be recognized in various manifestations of the embodied mind (thus, the idea of life and afterlife of works of art). See further my discussion of life in Chapter 6. 10. In an early fragment Benjamin thinks of the horizontal and the vertical as metaphysical categories that bear on the distinction between pictures and signs: “A picture may be held vertically before the observer. A mosaic lies horizontally at his feet . . . We see here a profound problem of art and its mythic roots. We might say that there are two sections through the substance of the world: the

Notes to Pages 86–90 longitudinal section of painting and the cross-section of certain pieces of graphic art” (SW I, 82). 11. Nearness is also identified with a certain kind of beauty: “this all-too-close (mindless) examination of ideas is the source of an enduring (nonintermittent) beauty. Thus transpires the relation of beauty and stupidity” (SW I, 397–398). 12. Flight is the figure of a movement determined by the distant. Benjamin quotes on several occasions a line in Goethe’s poem “Selige Sehnsucht” [Blessed Yearnings], in which is expressed the balance between flight and fascination, which is the balance between near and far in love: “No distance weighs you down; / you come flying and spellbound.” The common dream of low flight combines, according to Benjamin, the sense of nearness (of the ground) and the yearning for the distant. Distance and nearness are especially effective in the experiential configuration of dream. Benjamin suggests that dreams are a manifestation of the distant; that is, they provide us with the capacity for approaching in a field of significance (i.e., the sense that meaning is forthcoming). They are also associated with nearness, with the sense that in the dream everything is experienced as concerning me, as striking. Those who arrange their lives by distance are guided by nature, “but like a sleeper. The perfect man lives only in such dreams, from which he never awakes” (SW I, 398).

5. Dream 1. See in this context: “Sundering the truth from falsehood is the goal of the materialist method, not its point of departure. In other words, its point of departure is the object riddled with error, with doxa. . . . If the materialist method claimed to approach the matter [die Sache] in truth, it would do nothing but greatly reduce its chances of success. These chances, however, are considerably augmented if the materialist method increasingly abandons such a claim, thus preparing for the insight that ‘the matter itself’ is not ‘in truth’ ” (SW IV, 63). 2. Beatrice Hanssen emphasizes the problematic aspect of the imagistic register, to which flâneurs and surrealistic artists were attracted. She also identifies Benjamin’s attractions to these profane illuminations: “This ‘living in images’ . . . is of course something that Benjamin tries out frequently . . . children’s books above all had a special place in his collection, as did the image-world of the child, as evidenced in his Berlin Childhood around 1900, a memory book replete with nostalgic photographs” (“Introduction: Physiognomy of a Flâneur: Walter Benjamin’s Peregrinations through Paris in the Search of a New Imaginary,” in Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project, ed. Beatrice Hanssen [New York: Continuum 2006], 7). At the same time Hanssen admits that “Benjamin himself was acutely aware of the dangers that beset his theory of the image. Thus, as flâneur and critic . . . Benjamin was prone to the torpor of the melancholic” (ibid., 2). Hanssen

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Notes to Pages 91–92 describes a change in Benjamin’s relation to the image and the acknowledgment of the necessity of awakening: “. . . Benjamin would now complement his early reflections on surrealist dreamwork, by calling for a dialectical moment of awakening, a rude shock-like awakening that snatched the sleeper out of his enveloping visions” (ibid., 11). However, just as the assertion of Benjamin’s early immersion in the space of images seem to me problematic, this description of awakening is not dialectical enough. It does not take into account that awakening takes place as the realization of the truth of the dream. 3. Insofar as dream is a configuration of experience, a form of experiential consciousness, it stands at the same level as what we think of as veridical perception. Reality (in space and time), which is the object of knowledge, has no privileged role in the analysis of configurations of experience. This would mean that within the realm of the phenomenal, taken broadly as encompassing the unities of meaning in experience such as are found in perception and judgment, the distinction between correct and incorrect states of consciousness is not operative with respect to the recognition of truth. As Benjamin puts it: “Perceptions, however, cannot be true or false, and disagreements can arise only about the status of their meanings. The system of such possible meanings in general is human nature . . . [For] consciousness in general, only the relation to life—not the relation to truth—is relevant. And neither of the two modes of consciousness is ‘truer’ to life; they merely have different meanings for it’ ” (SW I, 399). 4. Consciousness encompasses a variety of states ranging from what we would call simple perception to that experience of meaning that is brought together in a dream configuration. “One of the tacit suppositions of psychoanalysis” Benjamin adopts is the understanding that “. . . the clear-cut antithesis of sleeping and waking has no value for determining the empirical form of consciousness of the human being but instead yields before an unending variety of concrete states of consciousness conditioned by every conceivable level of wakefulness within all possible centers” (A, 389). In the Arcades, though Benjamin does not have a systematic use for the notion of the unconscious, he does make a parallel distinction between the intentional nature of contents of consciousness and the intentionless character of truth. This fundamental opposition allows him to reformulate what is at issue for psychoanalysis in relation to the emergence of the dialectical image of the past. Moreover, emphasizing, as Benjamin does, that truth is an intentionless state of being would imply that “the world of truth may well not be the world of any consciousness” (SW I, 399). 5. Note how Benjamin describes the thickening of experience as a form of superimposition or overlap (for instance, through the figure of the flâneur) (A, 418). This dimension of intoxication and dream has been analyzed in depth in Howard Eiland, “Superimposition in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project.” Telos 138 (Spring 2007) pp.121–138.

Notes to Pages 93–101 6. Childhood introduces the new into the symbolic space (of dreams) and thus prepares for future possibilities of awakening: . . . initially the technologically new seems nothing more than that. But in the very next childhood memory, its traits are already altered. Every childhood achieves something great and irreplaceable for humanity. By the interest it takes in technological phenomena, by the curiosity it displays before any sort of invention or machinery, every childhood binds the accomplishments of technology to the old worlds of symbol. There is nothing in the realm of nature that from the outset would be exempt from such a bond. Only, it takes form not in the aura of novelty but in the aura of the habitual. In memory, childhood and dream. (A, 461)

7. Benjamin puts the point in terms of the contrast between different types whose dialectical synthesis is the type who waits: “Rather than pass time, one must invite it in. To pass time (to kill time, expel it): the gambler. Time spills from his every pore—To store time as a battery stores energy: the flâneur. Finally the third type: he who waits. He takes in the time and renders it up in altered form—that of expectation.” In other words, for gamblers, everything is opportunity. They cannot wait: “Games of chance possess the great charm of freeing people from having to wait” (A, 119). For the flâneur, on the other hand, waiting is everything: “The boulevardier (feuilletonist) has to wait, whereupon he really waits. Hugo’s ‘waiting is life’ applies first of all to him” (ibid.). 8. An important connection between the everyday and the dream is developed in Benajmin’s essay on surrealism: “. . . we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday . . . the reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flâneur are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic” (SW II, 216). The everyday experience we must then consider as opening the space of illumination is memory. 9. “. . . To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider’s web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry. From this cavern, one does not like to stir” (A, 216). Such a description suggests the importance of the satirical as a mode of fighting for some fresh air, as well as its limitations. The satirical is, one might say, too psychological an understanding of the relation of destruction to the possibility of freedom. It is not enough for Benjamin’s idea of the destruction, which is necessary for the construction of the open. See also in that context the essay “The Destructive Character” (SW II, 541–542). 10. One might also say, in the spirit of the essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” that one can be truthfully present to oneself by the way one articulates one’s experience of the world. Thus, the early essay on language and the essay of the mimetic faculty present the same idea from two different

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Notes to Pages 103–110 standpoints. Note that in “On the Mimetic Faculty” Benjamin considers language as the place in which those similarities form themselves: “True, our existence no longer includes what once made it possible to speak of this kind of similarity: above all the ability to produce it. Nevertheless we, too, possess a canon according to which the meaning of nonsensuous similarity can be at least partly clarified. And this canon is language” (SW II, 721). He concludes the essay with this claim: “. . . language may be seen as the highest level of mimetic behavior and the most complete archive of nonsensuous similarity: a medium into which the earlier powers of mimetic production and comprehension have passed without residue, to the point where they have liquidated those of magic” (SW II, 722). Given my sense of the essential identity of the understanding of language in the two essays, I find problematic Beatrice Hanssen’s analysis of their relation in her “Language and Mimesis in Walter Benjamin’s Work” as she argues that “where Benjamin’s earliest thought championed a ‘spiritual’ language— magic—his later work posited a magical, mimetic, and corporeal phase antedating the acquisition of (verbal) language” (in David S. Ferris [ed.], The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 56). 11. Understanding the constitution of a dream space in terms of the idea of internalization might finally suggest why Benjamin would associate awakening with the “fresh air doctrine of revolutions” (A, 422). “Fresh air” is the opening of the expanse of the dialectical image, from the interiority of the dream images. In the dialectical image everything comes to be presented on the same plane in balance, so to speak, as a panorama: “How this work was written: rung by rung, according as chance would offer a narrow foothold, and always like someone who scales dangerous heights and never allows himself a moment to look around, for fear of becoming dizzy (but also because he would save for the end the full force of the panorama opening out to him)” (A, 460). Awakening does not merely provide a breathing space, freeing one from the paralyzing hold of the wish images of the past. The panorama opened by the dialectical image allows an energetic conversion that takes a specific form in awakening. For Benjamin the open is associated with the revolutionary force of the dialectical image: “The . . . leap in the open air of history is the dialectical leap Marx understood as revolution” (SW IV, 395). 12. Benjamin draws from this memory image a certain “moral,” in effect making his childhood experiment into a prefiguration of his literary-critical practice: “It taught me that form and content, veil and what is veiled, are the same. It led me to draw truth from works of literature as warily as the child’s hand retrieved the sock from ‘the pocket’ ” (SW III, 374). In the essay ‘On the Image of Proust’, the same childhood experiment figures Proust’s literary practice (SW II, 240).

Notes to Pages 112–113

6. Myth 1. Engaging primal history is not to be confused with an affirmation of the primal or the mythical. It is on the contrary that manner of viewing history that takes it upon itself to oppose myth and its resurgence. It should eventuate in becoming free from the semblance of the eternally self-same. The concern to set himself against a mythical notion of archetype emerges particularly in Benjamin’s criticism of Jung: “The archaic form of primal history, which has been summoned up in every epoch and now once more by Jung, is that form which makes semblance in history still more delusive by mandating nature as its homeland” (A, 476). 2. Benjamin’s vision of Kafka’s world is precisely of one ruled by such a duality of the primeval and the modern. “Kafka did not consider the age in which he lived as an advance over the beginnings of time. His novels are set in a swamp world. In his works, the creature appears at the stage which Bachofen has termed the hetaeric stage. The fact that this stage is now forgotten does not mean that it does not extend into the present. On the contrary: it is present by virtue of this very oblivion” (SW II, 808–809). 3. In his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965) Ernst Cassirer articulates a Neo-Kantian account of myth. His governing idea is that the world of myth is a context of experience that has its own categories, forms of intuition, and idea of the self. Myth is not to be understood allegorically but rather as constituting a mode of experience, a world. Cassirer thus takes the fundamental idea of the Kantian philosophy, namely, the constitution of the domain of objects by the principles of synthesis of experience and broadens it to include the structure of experience given to mythical consciousness: It is one of the first essential insights of critical philosophy that objects are not “given” to consciousness in a rigid, finished state, in their naked “as suchness” but that the relation of representation to object presupposes an independent spontaneous act of consciousness. The object does not exist prior to and outside of synthetic unity but is constituted only by this synthetic unity . . . The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms takes up this basic critical idea, this fundamental principle of Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” and strives to broaden it. It seeks the categories of the consciousness of objects in the theoretical, intellectual sphere, and starts from the assumption that such categories must be at work wherever a cosmos, a characteristic and typical world view, takes form out of the chaos of impressions. (Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, p. 29)

At about the same time as Cassirer develops his Neo-Kantian account of the world of myth, Benjamin writes his program for a coming philosophy in the spirit of Kant. I have already discussed how Benjamin challenges the primacy of the mathematical-mechanical worldview in the Kantian system and seeks to develop a concept of metaphysical truth that must account for the form of all

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Note to Page 113 areas of experience. However, even more striking is the claim that such a system must account for the forms of magical thought. Thus, Scholem writes as follows in his biography of Benjamin: Right from the start we spoke a great deal about his “Programm der kommenden Philosophie.” Benjamin discussed the scope of the concept of experience that was meant here; according to him, it encompassed man’s intellectual and psychological connection with the world, which takes place in the realms not yet penetrated by cognition. When I mentioned that consequently it was legitimate to include the mantic disciplines in this conception of experience, Benjamin responded with an extreme formulation: “a philosophy that does not include the possibility of soothsaying from coffee grounds and cannot explicate it cannot be a true philosophy.” (Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, 59)

Scholem would, it seems, argue that Benjamin takes myth to be another domain of experience on a par, say, with aesthetic experience, linguistic experience, and so on. However, for Benjamin mythology also comes to denote a problem in relation to the articulation of experience. The Kantian epistemological framework with its distinctions between the conceptual and the sensuous, as well as the subject and the object, is itself likened to a mythological conception that stands in the way of an account of fulfilled experience: “Kant’s epistemology does not open up the realm of metaphysics because it contains within itself primitive elements of an unproductive metaphysics which includes all others. In epistemology every metaphysical element is the germ of a disease that expresses itself in the separation of knowledge from the realm of experience in its full freedom and depth” (SW I, 102). In other words, Kantian metaphysics is limited because of the introduction of metaphysical assumptions into the critical part. These assumptions, in particular the Kantian conception of the transcendental subject, are mythology: It simply cannot be doubted that the notion, sublimated though it may be, of an individual living ego which receives sensations by means of its senses and forms its ideas on the basis of them plays a role of the greatest importance in the Kantian concept of knowledge. This notion is, however, mythology, and so far as its truth content is concerned, it is the same as every other epistemological mythology . . . The commonly shared notion of sensuous (and intellectual) knowledge in our epoch, as well as in the Kantian and pre-Kantian epochs is very much a mythology . . . and indeed only a modern and religiously very infertile one.” (SW I, 103)

The reference to a mythology is not a mere figure of speech. Kant’s view of the knowing subject is compared with the beliefs of primitive peoples “of the so-called pre-animistic stage who identify themselves with sacred animals and plants and name themselves after them”(SW I, 103), as well as the beliefs of the insane, of sick people, or of clairvoyants. But what is it exactly that makes Kant’s assumption of the subject a mythology in that specific sense? I want to suggest

Notes to Pages 114–121 that the mythological dimension of Kant’s view has to do with the mode of localization of the transcendental subject provided by the analogy with the empirical subject, namely the specific way that analogy allows the individual embodiment and ‘placing’ of spirit in the world. The model of the empirical subject projects a problematic conception of the localization of the mind. (See further on the issue of embodiment and mythology note 5 to chapter 4.) 4. Consider in this context how Benjamin thinks of the technology of film as providing a new mode of unmediated, or natural access to reality: “. . . the presentation of reality in film is incomparably the more significant for people of today since it provides the equipment-free aspect of reality they are entitled to demand from a work of art and does so precisely on the basis of the most intensive interpenetration of reality with equipment” (SW IV, 264; italics in original). See further my discussion of film in Chapter 8. A similar remark about the relation of human work and nature can be found in Benjamin’s consideration of Fourier’s vision in “On the Concept of History”: “[Fourier’s fantasies illustrate] a kind of labor which, far from exploiting nature, would help her give birth to the creations that now lie dormant in her womb” (SW IV, 393). 5. See in this context Benjamin’s essay “Fate and Character.” The peculiarly objective dimension of character, its manifestation by way of the world it opens, is what leads him to speak of its anonymity. “The sublimity of character comedy rests on this anonymity of man and his morality, alongside the utmost development of individuality through its exclusive character trait” (SW I, 205). The human proper name, one might say, by being manifest in naming the world, by being a dedication to naming the world, can also be ultimately characterized, as paradoxical as this sounds, as anonymous. 6. It is important to note that just as tragedy does not involve moral guilt, so the notion of character in comedy is not judged by a moral standard: Comedy shows the true sphere to which these pseudo-moral character descriptions are to be consigned. At its center, as the main protagonist in a comedy of character, stands often enough an individual whom, if we were confronted by his actions in life instead of by his person on stage, we would call a scoundrel. On the comic stage, however, his actions take on only the interest shed with the light of character, and the latter is, in classical examples, the subject not of moral condemnation but of high amusement. It is never in themselves, never morally, that the actions of the comic hero affect his public: his deeds are interesting only insofar as they reflect the light of character. (SW I, 205)

7. Especially interesting in that respect is a short essay titled “The Destructive Character.” The unity and simplicity of character are evident in Benjamin’s opening description: “The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred” (SW II, 541).

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Notes to Pages 121–122 8. “To write history means giving dates their physiognomy” (A, 476). Initially, it would be possible to associate the notion of physiognomy to the dialectical image by noting that a physiognomy is a matter of recognition. That recognition of a unity of expression proceeds from separate and heterogeneous traits. It is a paradigm for a meaningful totality whose order is not characterized by falling under a common concept or law. This understanding should be compared to and contrasted with another appropriation of Goethe’s morphological theories, which one finds in the work of Oswald Spengler: “All modes of comprehending the world may, in the last analysis, be described as Morphology. The Morphology of the mechanical and the extended, a science which discovers and orders nature-laws and causal relations, is called Systematic. The Morphology of the organic, of history and life and all that bears the sign of direction and destiny, is called Physiognomic” (The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922vol. 1, 100). Spengler further characterizes the possibility of presenting a physiognomy from disparate historical materials: “It is possible, given the physiognomic rhythm, to recover from scattered details of ornament, building, script, or from odd political, economic and religious data, the organic characters of whole centuries of history, and from known elements on the scale of art-expression, to find corresponding elements on the scale of political forms, or from that of mathematical forms to read that of economic. This is a truly Goethean method—rooted in fact in Goethe’s conception of the prime phenomenon—which is already to a limited extent current in comparative zoology, but can be extended, to a degree hitherto undreamed of, over the whole field of history” (ibid., 113). 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Vintage Books, 1967 (hereafter, BT) 10. Benjamin criticizes Nietzsche’s ‘aesthetic’ interpretation of the tragic phenomenon. Yet, he is equally reluctant to think of tragedy in terms of strictly moral categories. Indeed he rejects the very possibility of thinking of fictional characters in a work of art in ethical terms: “Although, in general, one hardly dare treat it so unquestioningly as a faithful imitation of nature, the work of art, is unhesitatingly accepted as the exemplary copy of moral phenomena without any consideration of how susceptible such phenomena are to representation” (O, 104). 11. The idea of a Socratic theater, that is, a theater that has didactic aims and in which the spectator remains detached from the scene, is what Benjamin further identifies with Brecht’s epic theater: “According to familiar notions of ‘the dramatic,’ a nonparticipating, third party—a dispassionate observer or ‘thinker’— should not be associated with the action onstage. Yet Brecht often had something like this in mind. One can still go further and say that Brecht undertook to make the thinker, or even the wise man the hero of the drama . . . Plato long ago recognized the undramatic quality of that most excellent man, the sage. In his

Notes to Pages 123–130 dialogues, he took this figure to the threshold of the drama; in his Phaedo, to the threshold of the Passion play” (SW IV, 304). 12. The figure of Hamlet can also serve to present this confrontation between Benjamin and Nietzsche, for he appears prominently in Benjamin and also makes an appearance at a crucial juncture in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy: “. . . the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet” (The Birth of Tragedy, 59–60). Hamlet, according to Nietzsche, is stopped halfway through the journey of the tragic hero. Alternatively, Hamlet does not give a complete expression to the elements of the tragic. For The Birth of Tragedy characterizes tragedy through the idea of rebirth or renewal out of the affirmation of the veiling nature of art. This view would then be consistent with the nineteenth-century treatment of the Trauerspiel as an unsuccessful tragedy, which Benjamin counters in his book. For Benjamin, “Hamlet alone is a spectator by the grace of God,” and he adds, “Only in a princely life such as this is melancholy redeemed, by being confronted with itself” (O, 158). 13. I am grateful to Ilit Ferber for insightful conversations on that matter. See her Melancholy and Philosophy: Walter Benjamin’s Early Writings (forthcoming). 14. In other words, one can draw certain parallels between features of Benjamin’s understanding of the presentation of truth in his book on the Trauerspiel and the different figures in the plays. In doing so, it is crucial to take into account the interplay of the different roles, rather than focus solely on one of them (as is often the case with the figure of the flaneur in Benjamin’s analysis of modernity): Sovereignty is a characteristic of the forceful holding of the material in the constellation (a constellation that is saturated with tensions and emerges as a striking recognition in relation to a sense of emergency). The conspiratorial is related to the idea of the detour that is essential to the work with quotations. It is work with what is always only means, without end. The torture of martyrdom, should be considered in relation to the mortifying power of allegory, essential to destroy the fascinating semblance of totality. 15. The idea of secularization underlies Benjamin’s understanding of the mourning plays. Secularization is not the elimination of the religious. It is rather the way in which the religious dimension is recognized not in relation to the hereafter, but is rather manifest in the contradictions of worldly existence in the court. Thus, the sovereign, the representative of history, comes to have attributes of the divine such as absolute power. It is also in that sense that Benjamin speaks of a state of creation that is revealed in and through the dynamics of history presented in the plays. This condition that mythically speaking, stands before

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Note to Page 130 history is something that emerges in those plays, by seeing history returning to a non-historical setting. It is the state of creation emerging through the destructive forces inherent in secular history. Thus, when Benjamin wants to characterize a dimension of the natural in the mourning plays, he speaks primarily of the creaturely: “The nature of creation which absorbs history back into itself, is quite different from the nature of Rousseau’s” (O, 91). The contrast set by Benjamin between historical existence and the absorption of history back into nature, the reversal of history to a state of creation is related to the prevalence of the catastrophic so present in the sensibility of that period: “. . . consequent upon the total disappearance of eschatology, is the attempt to find, in a reversion to a bare state of creation, consolation for the renunciation of a state of grace” (O, 81). Therefore what is at stake is not a yearning for innocent nature, discovered as a space wholly set apart from the vicissitudes of history: “For the decisive factor in the escapism of the baroque is not the antithesis of history and nature but the comprehensive secularization of the historical in the state of creation. It is not eternity that is opposed to the disconsolate chronicles of history, but the restoration of the timelessness of paradise. History merges into the setting” (O, 92). The secularization of the historical is manifest in the emptying of the temporal horizon, or more precisely as a translation of the various determinations of time characterizing the relation to the eternal into a spatial simultaneity. Instead of the expanse of time being seen in terms of a final end, we have a reversion to a timeless state, the translation of the temporal into the spatial: “Here as in other spheres of baroque life, what is vital is the transposition of the originally temporal data into a figurative spatial simultaneity” (O, 81). The place in which the temporal is laid out and concentrated spatially is the court: “The image of the setting or, more precisely, of the court, becomes the key to historical understanding. For the court is the setting par excellence” (O, 92). Whereas the Trauerspiel as such is fundamentally historical, it is concerned with a return of history to nature, to the a-historical creaturely state. The court is the place in which this reversion is manifest: “The sequence of dramatic actions unfolds as in the day of the creation, when it was not history which was taking place”(O, 91). The court is the representative concentration of the tensions of existence. In it what enfolds on a large scale in history, over great expanses of time, is concentrated and spatialized. Benjamin compares this turn to the spatial locus of the court and its way of concentrating historical existence to the emerging metaphysics of modern science: “If history is secularized in the setting, this is an expression of the same metaphysical tendency which simultaneously led, in the exact sciences, to the infinitesimal method. In both cases chronological movement is grasped and analyzed in a spatial image”(O, 92). One may add here that the extreme foreshortening of the horizon of time, translated into a simultaneity of the image is characteristic of the monadic presentation, as well as

Notes to Pages 133–134 Benjamin’s own understanding of its function in the construction of a dialectical image. I am indebted to Ori Rotlevy for emphasizing to me the importance of the theme of the spatialization of history and for insightful conversations on the subject. 16. In a penetrating essay Werner Hamacher derives the idea of a politics of pure means from Benjamin’s treatment of the general strike and from his consideration of the nature of force in its various manifestations. This would be a form of politics that is always aimed at the singular occurrence (i.e., it identifies justice with addressing the singularity of the situation). It is further a politics that essentially does not bring about anything but only suspends the order of law: Benjamin’s sketch of a politics of pure means is a theory not of positing, producing, and presenting, not of forming and transforming action, but a theory of the abstention from action; it is, if you will, a theory of the transcendental strike which exposes the conditions of historical action, suspends its previous forms, and inaugurates another history no longer dominated by forms of positing and work, by forms of presentation and production, and no longer by forms. A strike, then, that even disrupts the form of the transcendental, the form of pure paradigmatic forms themselves, and thus the possibility of its cognition. (“Afformative, Strike: Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence,’ ” (Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 126)

17. I mean to invoke here a family of interpretations derived from the work of Giorgio Agamben. Addressing in any detail his own forceful appropriation of Benjamin’s thought would be a task that would take me too far from the kind of presentation of Benjamin I aim for in this book and must be left for another occasion. 18. Indeed, it would seem that for Benjamin one of the clearest manifestations of this sovereignty without law in a nonreligious context is education: “This divine power is not only attested by religious tradition but is also found in present-day life in at least one sanctioned manifestation. The educative power, which in its perfected form stands outside the law, is one of its manifestations” (SW IV, 250). 19. The life revealed in the monadic construction of history is to be contrasted with a scientistic view of organic life in time: “ ‘In relation to the history of all organic life on earth,’ writes a modern biologist, ‘the paltry fifty millennia of history of homo sapiens equates to something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-four-hour day. On this scale the history of civilized mankind would take up one-fifth of the last second of the last hour.’ Now-time, which, as a model of messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in a tremendous abbreviation, coincides exactly with the figure which the history of mankind describes in the universe” (SW IV, 396). Whereas in the scientistic view of life human meaningful history is only a tiny fraction of the time of the universe,

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Notes to Pages 134–144 in authentic historical time there is a complete identity of the moment and the preceding unfolding in time insofar as that moment is understood as an abbreviation, a monadic contraction of time. It is as though in the specific moment of history all of history is recapitulated. To use a figure from Benjamin’s essay on translation, the monad is an embryonic presentation of time. It incorporates immense stretches of time on a reduced scale and only thereby gives birth to life anew. Indeed, the arcades must be so presented: “. . . the arcades—structures in which we relive, as in a dream, the life of our parents and grandparents, as the embryo in the womb relives the lives of animals” (A, 106). 20. It is worth noting that a crucial part of the essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” is incorporated at the end of the Trauerspiel book, as Benjamin characterizes the reversal of the allegorical perspective. 21. The preceding idea is further elaborated by Benjamin by reference to the tendency, evident in baroque paintings, for the contraction of distances. The very strong foreshortening does not permit the gradual perspective into the infinite. Benjamin’s reference to foreshortening can be brought together with features of his own philosophical presentation, in this case with the idea of the monadic presentation. One might say that the monadic presentation involves a tremendous foreshortening, in which history is abbreviated in a single subject matter. 22. The figure of the vortex into which the world disappears (as “driven along to a cataract” (O, 66)) must be related to that of origin. The difficult question will be how to conceive of this catastrophic vision as characteristic of the redemptive. I will return to this question in chapter 9. 23. Benjamin suggests that in the Spanish mourning plays of Calderon we find the possibility of conceiving of a redemptive structure within the secular space of courtly existence. This is achieved in establishing within the limited space of the court a reflective playful infinity through miniaturization (as a play within play often involving a marionette theater). Such miniaturization is a way to spatially concentrate a dimension of infinity and produce a sense of its realization. The idea of play and of reflection then becomes central to the conception of such secular realization. But it must be distinguished from the role of such notions in Kantian or Romantic aesthetics. It is possible to capture this distinction by pointing to the two meanings of Spiel (play and game). When we speak of life being but a game, we have a certain way of distancing ourselves from it, but a state of playfulness is one in which we are involved in a lively way (see O, 82).

7. Baudelaire 1. Benjamin’s sense of the experience of the flâneur as involving semblance and intoxication is evident in the way that he is characterized as the modern version of Socrates’ interlocutor: “In the flâneur, one might say, is reborn the sort of idler that Socrates picked out from the Athenian marketplace to be his inter-

Notes to Pages 145–146 locutor. Only there is no longer a Socrates, so there is no one to address the idler” (SW IV, 186.) Given Benjamin’s attempt to relate Baudelaire’s task of shaping modernity to the form of the Trauerspiel, one should remember the centrality of the figure of Socrates in Benjamin’s discussion of these plays. Baudelaire would then be portrayed as a modern Socrates who, if not quite able to give birth to truth out of the ambivalent shadowy existence of the idler, arrests the play of semblance in the existence of the flâneur ( just as Socrates is said to provoke paralysis in his interlocutor). 2. In “Paris of the Second Empire” there is an attempt to develop the physiology of the dandy that contains both flâneur and one “jostled,” both the reaction to shock and the leisure: The dandy is a creation of the English, who were leaders in world trade. The trade network that spans the globe was in the hands of the London stock exchange; its meshes were subject to extraordinarily varied, numerous, and unforeseeable tremors. A merchant had to react to these, but he could not publicly display his reactions. The dandies took over the management of the conflicts thus created. They developed the ingenious training necessary to overcome these conflicts. They combined extremely quick reactions with a relaxed, even slack demeanor and facial expression. The tic, which for a time was regarded as fashionable, is as it were, a clumsy, inferior manifestation of the problem.” (SW IV, 60)

However, just as Baudelaire cannot pattern his existence according to the figure of the flâneur, so the adoption of dandyism is denied him: “His love for dandyism was unsuccessful. He did not have the gift of pleasing, which is such an important element in the dandy’s art of not pleasing” (ibid.). 3. This should be distinguished from a vision of the crowd involving a moral stance: In E. T. A. Hoffman’s story to which Benjamin refers the crowd provides the occasion for “tableaux vivants” with an edifying moral. Similarly, Engels’s description of the encounter with the masses of London, quoted by Benjamin, is guided by a moral and political vision. 4. The notion of the trace also has its essential place in relation to the conception of the bourgeois interior, which is viewed as compensating for the disappearance of traces of the individual in collective existence: “Since the days of Louis Philippe, the bourgeoisie has endeavored to compensate itself for the fact that private life leaves no traces in the big city. It seeks such compensation within its four walls—as if it were striving, as a matter of honor, to prevent the traces, if not of its days on earth, then at least of its possessions and requisites of daily life, from disappearing forever. The bourgeoisie unabashedly makes impressions of a host of objects. For slippers and pocket watches, thermometers and egg cups, cutlery and umbrellas, it tries to get covers and cases. It prefers velvet and plush covers which preserve the impression of every touch” (SW IV, 26). Consider also that Benjamin associates trace with the object of craft. “[A

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Notes to Pages 147–150 story] bears the trace of the storyteller, much the way an earthen vessel bears the trace of the potter’s hand” (SW IV, 316). Such traces disappear in the product of technology. One might say that traces remain in photography but require for their decipherment something of the detective’s logic. 5. In her essay “Benjamin’s Aura” Miriam Hansen argues against a reductive reading of the notion of aura that would be directed solely to concerns of aesthetics. I fully agree with her diagnosis of the problem. Indeed, it is significant experience in general that I take to have the structure of the auratic. Undoubtedly, art is a paradigmatic place in which such a structure is manifest. Hansen adds: “Anything but a clearly delimited, stable concept, aura describes a cluster of meanings and relations that appear in Benjamin’s writings in various configurations and not always under its own name; it is this conceptual fluidity that allows aura to become such a productive nodal point in Benjamin’s thinking” (“Benjamin’s Aura,” in Critical Inquiry 34 [Winter 2008]: 4). As my analysis in the present chapter, as well as the discussion of film in the next chapter, make, I hope, evident, I find the notion of the aura to have an extremely tight structure. That is, I find its different characterizations to be essentially interrelated. It is by bringing out their interrelation that one can appreciate the force of that notion (or the loss that we are experiencing with the decline of the aura). 6. This can be compared with Hegel, for whom the immediate is associated with the most abstract rather than with the unique. True uniqueness requires meaningful articulation (see further on uniqueness in Chapter 8). What Benjamin adds to Hegel is that modernity creates the conditions in which a reverting to the immediacy of Erlebnis is prevalent within culture. 7. In his introduction to Benjamin’s essay on Baudelaire, Michael Jennings focuses on the problem of heroism in Baudelaire. Central to his conception of Baudelaire’s heroism is the figure of martyrdom: “Baudelaire is rendered defenceless against the shocks of modern life. His heroism thus consists in his constant willingness to have the character of his age mark and scar his body” (Introduction to Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 16). This image of willing victimization can be related the figure of the artist as engaged in a duel with the onslaught of experience. Jennings’s view guides his interpretation of Baudelaire’s reaction to the shock aspect of modern experience: “Isolated experience” . . . emerges . . . as a form of experience bound to the shocks experienced by the individual strolling the urban mass; isolated experience . . . is in fact parried by consciousness and leaves a trace in the unconscious. Of particular interest to Benjamin, though, is the case in which this defensive mechanism fails—that is, the case in which the shock is not parried by consciousness but instead penetrates and deforms it. These unparried shocks give rise for Benjamin, to the central images of Baudelaire’s poetry” (ibid., 20). It is when an experience escapes conscious attention that it leaves a trace. Yet, I believe that Benjamin argues that

Notes to Pages 152–161 the force and peculiarity of Baudelaire’s poetry are that it is lyric poetry composed with the utmost degree of consciousness. As Benjamin puts it: “One wonders how lyric poetry can be grounded in experience for which exposure to shock has become the norm. One would expect such poetry to have a large measure of consciousness; it would suggest that a plan was at work in its composition. This is indeed true of Baudelaire’s poetry” (SW IV, 318). Indeed, poetry would usually be associated with inspiration, genius, and so on, precisely pointing to some source that is not consciousness. However, arguing that Baudelaire is an allegorist means that he is a highly conscious poet. The allegorist is the “intellectual” poet. So when Benjamin focuses on the image of the poet as a fencer in Baudelaire, it is the duelling as a whole (with its calculated strikes and careful defenses) that is the creative process. 8. What can be “achieved” by such rage? It is not directed to reform or transform society. If rage has to do with a sense of being covered by the storm of time, then its object is to arrest time: “To interrupt the course of the world—that was Baudelaire’s deepest intention. The intention of Joshua. Not so much the prophetic one, for he gave no thought to any sort of reform. From this intention sprang his violence, his impatience, and his anger” (SW IV, 170). To understand the possibility and value of such an arrest requires one to further develop the function of allegory in Baudelaire’s poetry in its relation to modern experience. Arrest is the mortification of semblance essential to the recognition of the dialectical image. See in this context my discussion of the expressionless in the remark in Chapter 2. 9. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 72 (New York: International Publishers, 1967).

8. Rescue 1. Friedrich Meinecke, in German Essays on History, New York: Continuum, 1991, 196. 2. Benjamin quotes a similar claim from Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England, in his essay on Baudelaire: “. . . these Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature in order to bring to pass all the marvels of civilization which crowd their city; that a hundred powers which slumbered within them have remained inactive, have been suppressed” (quoted in SW IV, 322). 3. I have already emphasized the opposition that Benjamin makes between the “great,” the cultural riches, or the view of culture as the treasure trove of humanity on the one hand and his own involvement with the rags and the refuse on the other. Thinking of the notion of possession further relates to Benjamin’s criticism of the conflation of truth with forms of knowledge that are construed as taking possession of their object.

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Notes to Pages 162–169 4. Friedrich Meinecke, in German Essays on History, p. 196 5. Insofar as what is at stake here is the realization of meaning, the historicist’s relation to the past is analogous to a problematic model of translation. The historicist has a certain conception of what fidelity to the original comes to. Fidelity and freedom are compatible in the historical materialist relation to the past, just as they come together in a proper understanding of the nature of translation. It is by the fidelity manifest in incorporating the mode of signification of the original in the language of the translation that the latter is opened up and revolutionized. 6. Consider the epigraph to Section XII of “On the Concept of History” (SW IV, 394): “We need history, but our need for it differs from that of the jaded idlers in the garden of knowledge” (Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life). 7. Meinecke, in German Essays on History, 197. 8. The possibility of decisiveness in the present depends first and foremost on the complete articulation of the present position by way of the dialectical image of the past. In his “Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier,” Irving Wohlfarth derives from the identification of the materialist historian with the chiffonnier [ragpicker] a certain endlessness in the historian’s task or at least a moment of undecidability between the necessity of completing any task and the impossibility of bringing it to an end: “The historian’s task, as Benjamin conceives it, is as necessary and impossible as that of the translator. It is that task . . . Even though our ‘messianic power’ is ‘weak,’ ‘nothing,’ according to the Theses, ‘is to be given up as lost for history.’ The Passagen-Werk was destined to draw the consequences from that extravagant postulate—and to do so, in consequence, at every level. Perhaps, then, it was destined to remain unfinished. But this could not release its author from having to multiply the chiffons” (in Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project, ed. Beatrice Hanssen (New York: Continuum, 2006), 31–32). There is a justification to bring together the figure of the chiffonier with the materialist historian if we consider Benjamin’s claim that he “shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse” (A, 460). Yet, it seems to me that Wohlfarth’s analysis leaves no room for concepts such as emergency and danger and for turning the present into a critical moment. For an analysis of the possibility of overcoming the antithesis of postponement and urgency see my Remark B in Chapter 9, which deals with Benjamin’s essay on Kafka. 9. This relation between sovereignty and power in the realm of meaning is made very clear in an early fragment of Benjamin’s titled “Language and Logic”: “In the sphere of essences the higher does not devour the lower. Instead it rules over it. This explains why the regional separation between them, their disparateness, remains as irreducible as the gulf between monarch and people” (SW I, 273).

Notes to Pages 169–171 10. The relation formed between realization of meaning and political action is already a theme in Benjamin’s letter to Buber from 1916 on language and the political: The opinion is widespread, and prevails almost everywhere as axiomatic, that writing can influence the moral world and human behavior, in that it places the motives behind actions at our disposal. In this sense, therefore, language is only one means of more or less suggestively laying the groundwork for the motives that determine the person’s action in his heart of hearts. What is characteristic about this view is that it completely fails to consider a relationship between language and action in which the former would not be the instrument of the latter. This relationship would hold equally for an impotent language, degraded to pure instrument, and for writing that is pitiful, weak action and whose origin does not reside within itself, but in some kind of sayable and expressible motives . . . I can understand writing as such as poetic, prophetic, objective in terms of its effect, but in any case only as magical, that is as un-mediated. Every salutary effect, indeed every effect not inherently devastating, that any writing may have resides in its (the word’s, language’s) mystery. In however many forms language may prove to be effective, it will not be so through the transmission of content, but rather through the purest disclosure of its dignity and nature. And if I disregard other effective forms here—aside from poetry and prophecy—it repeatedly seems to me that the crystal-pure elimination of the ineffable in language is the most obvious form given to us to be effective within language and, to that extent, through it. This elimination of the ineffable seems to me to coincide precisely with what is actually the objective and dispassionate manner of writing, and to intimate the relationship between knowledge and action precisely within linguistic magic. My concept of the objective and, at the same time, highly political style and writing is this: to awaken interest in what was denied the word; only where this sphere of speechlesness reveals itself in unutterably pure power can the magic spark leap between the word and the motivating deed, where the unity of these two equally real entities resides. Only the intensive aiming of words into the core of intrinsic silence is truly effective. I do not believe that there is any place where the word would be more distant from the divine than in “real” action. Thus, too, it is incapable of leading into the divine in any way other than through itself and its own purity. Understood as an instrument, it proliferates.” (C, 79–80)

11. This corresponds to the passing nature of even the best of translations. A translation does not survive. It has no afterlife. 12. A certain form of oblivion becomes a force. As Benjamin puts it in his essay on Jochmann: “He could have dedicated his writings ‘To your majesty, Oblivion.’ He turns his back on the future (which he speaks of in prophetic tones), while his seer’s gaze is kindled by the vanishing peaks of earlier heroic generations and their poetry, as they sink further and further into the past” (SW IV, 360). Benjamin wants to incorporate this understanding into the very framework of the Arcades: “The passage on Jochmann’s visionary gaze should be worked into the basic structure of the Arcades (SW IV, 407).

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Notes to Pages 171–174 13. In a letter to Scholem, Benjamin refers to the “Work of Art” essay as an offshoot of The Arcades Project: “My last work . . . has also evolved from this planning. It touches on the major project only superficially, but it indicates the vanishing point for some of its investigations” (C, 527). The notion of the end point is then developed in terms of the figure of perspective and its vanishing point. Such vanishing point, to follow up the figure, is what provides for the meeting of all the lines of inquiry. In a letter to Scholem dated 1935 Benjamin writes: “These reflections anchor the history of the nineteenth-century art in the recognition of their situation as experienced by us in the present. I am keeping these reflections very secret, because they are incomparably better suited to theft than most of my ideas. Their provisional formulation is entitled ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ ” (CBS, 171). There is indeed something about the simplicity of tone in the essay that, when seen together with the possibilities it creates, is an exemplary instance of a sober style of thinking. This means also that it is always at risk of being read simplistically. 14. The turn to the ordinary is sometimes associated with reactionary or conservative tendencies (as though expressing that nothing can fundamentally change). It is therefore important to distinguish the satiety of common sense from a revolution of the experience of the ordinary as is afforded by film. 15. The notion of distraction can be set in opposition to that of seriousness, concentration, and involvement, but it can also be viewed against boredom. Boredom, just like distraction, is a state that detaches from serious involvement but also creates the conditions conducive to a certain form of aesthetic experience. Boredom comes up especially in Benjamin’s discussion of the conditions of storytelling. Indeed, it is presented as the ideal condition for absorbing stories. See further the remark to the present chapter. 16. At the beginning of the essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” Benjamin describes Baudelaire’s audience on the basis of the introductory poem of Les fleurs du mal: “Willpower and the ability to concentrate are not their strong points. What they prefer is sensual pleasure; they are familiar with the ‘spleen’ which kills interest and receptiveness. It is strange to come across a lyric poet who addresses himself to such readers—the least rewarding type of audience” (SW IV, 313). 17. The self-presentation of the actor in playing a character is also at issue in Brecht’s epic theater: “ ‘The actor must show his subject, and he must show himself. Of course he shows his subject by showing himself, and he shows himself by showing his subject. Although the two tasks coincide, they must not coincide in such a way that the difference between them disappears.’ ” Benjamin comments on these words of Brecht’s: “In other words, an actor should reserve to himself the possibility of stepping out of character artistically. At the proper moment, he should insist on portraying an individual who reflects on his part” (SW IV, 306).

Note to Page 175 This particular dissociation from oneself is not to be conceived on the model of reflection that pervades Romantic irony (which is a form of reflection that remains in the structure of the auratic). It is in film that we find the doubling of actor and character to be, so to speak, the most natural, an inherent possibility of the medium itself. Film provides automatically the possibility of a third-person perspective on oneself, a detached expertise of one’s own presence. 18. Testing is related to the notion of experiment, suggesting not only expertise but also a certain scientific register created by film. Stressing the centrality of testing and experiment, we can understand a further theme of the essay, namely, the transformed relation of art and science in film: “Demonstrating that the artistic uses of photography are identical to its scientific uses—these two dimensions having usually been separated until now—will be one of the revolutionary functions of film” (SW IV, 265). It would seem that, as with other issues, it is Goethe’s idea of experiment that is central to Benjamin’s understanding of the transformed relation of art and science. Goethe provides a model of experiment as “intermediary” steps, as mediator between subject and object (i.e., occupying the position of judgment as a middle term). The ordering of the series of experiments is designed to present the archetype, namely, the standard of judgment. It is that Goethean conception of science that Benjamin has in mind with the investigation of physiognomy by photography in the essay “The Little History of Photography.” Speaking of the investigations of August Sander, Benjamin writes: The photographer did not approach this enormous undertaking as a scholar, or with the advice of ethnographers and sociologists, but, as the publisher says, “from direct observation.” It was assuredly a very impartial, indeed bold sort of observation, but delicate too, very much in the spirit of Goethe’s remark: “There is a delicate empiricism which so intimately involves itself with the object that it becomes true theory.” So it was quite in order for an observer like Döblin to have hit on precisely the scientific aspects of this work, commenting: “Just as there is comparative anatomy, which helps us to understand the nature and history of organs, so this photographer is doing comparative photography, adopting a scientific standpoint superior to that of the photographer of detail.” . . . Sander’s work is more than a picture book. It is a training manual. (SW II, 520)

Contrast this description of Sander with an earlier, peculiar attempt to make a scientific use of photography for the investigation of physiognomy in the practice of Francis Galton. Galton attempted to create portraits of types of human beings. However, contrary to the earlier physiognomists, he turned to photography. By juxtaposing photographs of different individuals belonging to one kind (examples), he created a composite portrait representing the type. Galton’s method might be called one of averaging, and Galton indeed contributed to the development of statistics.

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Notes to Pages 176–177 Galton’s procedures for bringing out the characteristic stand in contrast to the singularity of types revealed in August Sander’s photographs. Sander reveals how types are not necessarily stereotypes (that is, understood in relation to prejudgment or prejudice. The way the study of physiognomy was connected to racial discrimination is the clearest instance of such tendency.) In photography, one might say the automatic and the ordinary can come together in a new and peculiar beauty, that of the typical. 19. A photograph, on the other hand, is not self-enclosed. It is, as Stanley Cavell has argued, of the world. Its cropping a part of the world is essential to its ontological status. I find deep affinities between Benjamin’s analysis of film and central themes of Cavell’s The World Viewed (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). In discussing the relation of film to his analysis of modernism in the arts, Michael Fried (referring to Cavell’s account) writes: “There is . . . one art that, by its very nature, escapes theater entirely—the movies . . . Because cinema escapes theater—automatically, as it were—it provides a welcome and absorbing refuge to sensibilities at war with theater and theatricality” (“Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998], 164). 20. In Benjamin we find early on a problematization of the structure of representativeness and exemplification in tradition. In a letter to Scholem dated September 1917 he writes: “The concept of example (to say nothing of that of ‘influence’) should be totally excluded from the theory of education. On the one hand, what inheres in the concept of the example is the empirical; on the other hand, the belief in pure power (of suggestion or something similar). Example would mean showing by doing, that something is empirically possible and to spur others on to imitation. The life of the educator, however, does not function indirectly, by setting an example” (CBS, 93). See also Benjamin’s essay on a proletarian children’s theater, where performance is the realization of the possibility of play rather than the result prepared for by rehearsals. There, too, we find a problematization of the structure of representativeness, that is, of the idea of teaching as exemplification. 21. In his “Objective Diversions: On Some Kantian Themes in Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ ” Rodolphe Gasché draws an opposite conclusion from the comparison of the notion of aura with Kantian aesthetics. He takes the effect of the auratic to essentially depend on real existence. Thus, Kant’s requirement that the aesthetic judgment be independent of the real existence of the object can, according to Gasché, precisely be aligned with Benjamin’s view of the transformation of the perception of art in the decay of the aura: “Kant’s detachment of the beautiful and the sublime from the object seems to have been Benjamin’s model for the transformed perception of art, a perception free from the authority of the object, that he delineates in his 1935 essay” (in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy, ed. A. Benjamin and P. Osborne [New York: Routledge, 1994], 183).

Notes to Pages 179–180 For yet a different alignment of Kant and Benjamin on the question of the nearness of distance in the aura, see Peter Fenves’s thought-provoking “Is There an Answer to the Aestheticizing of the Political?” in Walter Benjamin and Art, ed. Andrew Benjamin (New York: Continuum, 2005). 22. Indeed, the question Benjamin raises for surrealism also holds for the understanding of the position of Dadaism: “But are they successful in welding this experience of freedom to the other revolutionary experience, which we must acknowledge because it has been ours—the constructive dictatorial side of revolution?” (SW IV, 215). I take it that Benjamin shows in his essay ways to go beyond the merely anarchic aspects of the surrealist and Dadaist practice. In her complex and subtle essay “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street” Miriam Hansen sees Benjamin’s turn to the everyday at the end of the essay as a retreat from the possibilities opened to cinema: “What drops out of the concept is the specificity of the cinema experience, in particular its sensory-somatic immediacy, anonymous collectivity, and unpredictability. Accordingly, collective reception is segregated into the following section, subsumed under the notion of distraction, which in turn is reduced to a Brechtian attitude of critical testing and thus robbed of its mimetic, eccentric, as well as mnemothechnical dimensions” (Benjamin’s Ghosts, 71). Benjamin, according to Hansen, ultimately did not make the “leap of faith” to the world of possibilities opened by film but reverted to a Brechtian “presentist politics of distraction, renouncing the cinematic play with otherness in view of the increasingly threatening otherness of actual mass politics” (ibid., 71). For another reading of the notion of distraction closer to the one I develop here, see Howard Eiland’s “Reception in Distraction” (Boundary 2, vol. 30:1 [Spring 2003]). Eiland suggests that “when . . . [Benjamin] asserts that reception in distraction is becoming increasingly noticeable in all areas of art today, and is moreover a symptom of profound changes in human “apperception” . . . he is offering both a description and a challenge. Reception in distraction is conditioned, first of all, by the dynamics of modern technology, by the technologization of things . . . At the same time, it is a covert measure of the ability to perform new tasks of apperception” (56–57). 23. In “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street” Miriam Hansen analyzes the ways in which the idea of an unconscious revealed by photography emerges at the same time as photography’s erosion of the mémoire involontaire. She considers the following passage in Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography” to be paradigmatic for the technological reopening of a space of memory: “No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it” (SW II, 510). Hansen comments on that passage as follows: “The

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Note to Page 180 eruption of the uncanny into representational space/time is experienced—and provoked—by the beholder, but the forgotten culture that answers to the searching gaze is assumed to be deposited, seared, encrypted in the photographic image. This unconscious archive makes photography, early photography at least, a mnemotechnical device capable of compensating for the historical loss of ‘all natural physiological aids of memory’ ” (Benjamin’s Ghosts, 67). Hansen thus follows, it seems, the analysis of photography given by Barthes, with its emphasis on the wounding “punctum” of the image. However, it would seem that there is a slide from the idea that we can discover in the subject, posed where that subject has been seared by reality, to the claim that, in beholding the photograph, we experience this searing. It is only that latter claim that can lead to the view that the temporality of the drawing out of meaning from photography is that of the traumatic or uncanny. The beholder may indeed look for traces of reality in photography, but this would make the beholder more of a detective searching for evidence, that is, one whose logic depends on conscious detachment. I take this to be what Benjamin implies as he considers Atget’s photographs of deserted Paris streets: “It has justly been said that [Atget] photographed [deserted Paris streets] like scenes of crimes. A crime scene, too, is deserted, it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographic records begin to be evidence in the historical trial. This constitutes their hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of reception. Free—floating contemplation is no longer appropriate to them. They unsettle the viewer; he feels challenged to find a particular way to approach them” (SW IV, 258). The unsettling of the viewer, just like Baudelaire’s way of being jostled by the crowd, provokes a particular conscious response. The challenge is to see indeed how such conscious responses can have the weight of experience. 24. Consider in this context Rosalind Krauss’s interpretation of the idea of the optical unconscious, which is at the same time critical of Benjamin’s understanding of the term: . . . what can we speak of in the visual field that will be an analogue of the “unconscious” itself, a structure that presupposes first a sentient being within which it operates, and second a structure that only makes sense insofar as it is in conflict with that being’s consciousness? Can the optical field—the world of visual phenomena: clouds, sea, sky, forest—have an unconscious? . . . Freud . . . is also clear that the world over which technical devices extend their power is not one that could itself have an unconscious. It may have a microstructure that lies beyond the range of the naked eye, but that structure is neither conscious/unconscious, nor can it be in conflict with consciousness.” (R. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, 178)

This leads Krauss to suggest that the most convincing example of an optical unconscious is in Benjamin’s reference to the relation of the technology of film and fascism:

Notes to Page 180

It is only at the end of the essay where Benjamin, speaking of fascism, writes that “mass movements, including war, constitute a form of human behavior which particularly favors mechanical equipment . . . [for] mass movements are usually discerned more clearly by a camera than by the naked eye,” that we encounter some form of “unconscious” that the camera could intercept. If “gatherings of hundreds and thousands” are a fact that the human sensorium simply cannot register, such gatherings, which Freud also had in mind in his own essay on mass psychology, can indeed be thought to display a collective consciousness, leading to their analysis in terms of an unconscious. But the masses of the parade grounds at Nuremberg, though they may make patterns for the camera eye that can be organized within the optical field, are human masses, and if they have an unconscious, collective or not, it is a human unconscious, not an “optical” one. (ibid., 179)

Importantly, Krauss describes her own attempt to develop the idea of an optical unconscious in terms of a lack of mastery of vision over the body that conditions it: “human vision can be thought to be less a master of all it surveys in conflict as it is with what is internal to the organism that houses it” (ibid., 180). However, this leads her to focus on the “formless” visions of the optical unconscious so favored by the surrealists. I note in this context that Benjamin draws the connection of film to Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life. 25. The idea of the prosaic has been essential to Benjamin’s writings throughout. It appeared as early as Benjamin’s essay titled “Two Poems of Hölderlin,” where it is identified with the idea of sobriety. This theme is further taken up in “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism” as the Romantics’ sense that the novel is the absolute form of poetry. It is the novel that fulfills the idea of poetic prose. In the Trauerspiel book this theme is taken up in relation to the spirit of Socratic sobriety, which is set implicitly against Nietzschean ecstatic intoxication. The prosaic is further understood in terms of the anecdotal in contrasting the story and storytelling to the grandeur of the novel. However, it is film that most strikingly realizes this ideal of the prosaic. It is film that makes the prosaic be the language of realized experience most naturally. 26. Benjamin’s passion for the genre of storytelling (and its subgenres, fairy tale and legend) goes back to the mid-twenties. He then was deeply at work on a fairy tale titled “The New Melusine” (in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Wandering years) and conceived of a project of compiling a collection of legends: My preliminary research for the fairy tale book is overlapping with my plans for another project . . . What I have in mind is an anthology of legends, German legends. It would be based on two approaches: 1) the formulation of a motif, always in the most laconic manner, combined with its most important linguistic variations. What concerns me here is the mystery of the formulas of legends, and the different and significant way in which legends know how to intimate things. 2) A selection of eccentric and somewhat more obscure motifs, regardless of whether they are authentic or not. In short, what I have in mind is an attempt to approach, for the first time since Grimm (as far as I am

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Notes to Pages 188–192

aware), the entire complex, not bound by local or historical limitations, and to do so by proceeding from the linguistic nature of the legend. (C, 277)

27. See Friedrich Schiller, Two Essays: Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, New York: Ungar, 1966. 28. Storytelling as a form of recounting experience is identified in various places in the essay as a mode of “speaking for creation.” This aspect becomes apparent toward the end of the essay in the figure of the righteous man who is the representative of creation. Benjamin ends the essay with the following claim: “The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself” (SW III, 162).

9. Remembrance 1. An elaboration of this tension is a central theme of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) See in particular Chapter 3, “The Absolute Paradox.” 2. To realize the enormous complexities of bringing together the messianic and Marxist revolutionary practice, see Rolf Tiedemann, “Historical Materialism or Political Messianism? An Interpretation of the Theses ‘On the Concept of History,’ ” in Benjamin—Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). The essay interweaves the theoretical and practical issues of a political messianism with Benjamin’s response to the specific historical present, in which he writes. In particular, drawing on the resources of religion to revive Marxism should be seen, according to Tiedemann, in the context of the way historical materialism has become a puppet or straw man in the political trials of the Stalinist period. 3. The famous parable that opens Benjamin’s last text, “On the Concept of History,” bears on that matter: “There was once, we know, an automaton constructed in such a way that it could respond to every move by a chess player with a countermove that would ensure the winning of the game. A puppet wearing 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 on all sides. Actually, a hunchbacked dwarf—a master at chess—sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings” (SW IV, 389). The peculiarity of this parable is only reinforced by the ensuing commentary Benjamin provides: “One can imagine a philosophic counterpart to this apparatus. The puppet, called ‘historical materialism,’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is small and ugly and has to keep out of sight” (SW IV, 389). Far from providing a straightforward interpretation of the parable, the commentary only raises further questions. If the story is one of trickery, why would

Note to Page 193 Benjamin want to use it to elaborate the relation between historical materialism and theology? Indeed, what would be the point of identifying historical materialism with the puppet if it is the view of history that Benjamin advocates in his essay? Would that not mean that materialism is merely the front or disguise for the latest form of the continued rule of religion? However, it is also not the case that the parable is meant to characterize the form of materialism to be rejected and replaced by Benjamin’s version. For Benjamin does not simply adopt the Marxist critique of religion, and one of the more important features of the essay is precisely the link between revolutionary politics and messianism. At the risk of multiplying questions, one could note that the setting of the parable is a matchup in a game, in which Benjamin does not merely stress the excellent moves of the automaton but also chooses to emphasize the countermove (Gegenzug), the countermeasure, the response that would ensure the winning of the game. The commentary is itself referred to as a “philosophical counterpart” (Gegenstück), raising the possibility that it relates to the parable as a dialectical repartee rather than a simple analogy. In an essay in which it is said that the “enemy has not ceased to be victorious” (SW IV, 391), how should one think of the position that always wins? Furthermore, if dialectics is never a matter of straightforward winning, even of taking sides, what would count as a practice of history always restricted to countermeasures, that is, foregoing certain ways of discovering the authentic and the original. Assuming Benjamin rethinks dialectically the opposition between historical materialism and religion (which, initially, would face each other as though matched up), overcoming their antithetical position, that is, placing religion in historical materialism would also require reconceiving how theology can be in technology (in the automaton), without, so to speak, resorting to any deus ex machina. 4. “In the idea of a classless society, Marx secularized the idea of messianic time. And that was a good thing. It was only when the Social Democrats elevated this idea to an ‘ideal’ that the trouble began. The ideal was defined in Neo-Kantian doctrine as an ‘infinite [unendlich] task.’ . . . Once the classless society had been defined as an infinite task, the empty and homogeneous time was transformed into an anteroom, so to speak, in which one could wait for the emergence of the revolutionary situation with more or less equanimity. In reality, there is not a moment that would not carry with it its revolutionary chance—provided only that it is defined in a specific way, namely as the chance for a completely new resolution of a completely new problem [Aufgabe]” (SW IV, 402) The reference to Neo-Kantianism is significant. For what is at stake here is precisely the problem of taking the highest good, the object of hope, to be a regulative idea whose approach is characterized by the improvement of humanity, that is, by the gradual harmonization of nature and morality. Probably the clearest example of translation of the Jewish idea of messianism into such Kantian terms

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Notes to Pages 194–197 is Herman Cohen’s Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism trans. S. Kaplan, New York: Ungar, 1972. 5. The apocalyptic dimension of messianism opposes it to any ideology of progress, even moral progress understood by way of a regulative ideal: The nineteenth century, and nineteenth-century Judaism, have bequeathed to the modern mind a complex of ideas about Messianism that have led to distortions and counterfeits from which it is by no means easy to free ourselves. We have been taught that the Messianic idea is part and parcel of the idea of the progress of the human race in the universe, that redemption is achieved by man’s unassisted and continuous progress, leading to the ultimate liberation of all the goodness and nobility within him . . . Traditionally, however, the Messianic idea in Judaism was not so cheerful; the coming of the Messiah was supposed to shake the foundations of the world . . . The nineteenth-century view is blind to this catastrophic aspect. (Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, New York: Schocken, 1995, 37)

The question raised in Benjamin’s appropriation of messianic thinking is how to secularize the catastrophic or apocalyptic moment. See Remark to chapter 6. 6. A different reading of the relation between present and past is given in Howard Caygill’s “Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Cultural History”: “For Benjamin, the incompleteness of the objects and events of the past is not recuperated by the present but serves to unsettle and threaten its conceptual frameworks.” And he adds, “The incompleteness of the past forces the present to face its own fragmentation” (Cambridge Companion to Benjamin, 94–95). 7. Note here the similarity to a line from Goethe, quoted in Benjamin’s discussion of Baudelaire’s poem “La vie antérieure”: “Ah—in times gone by, you were my sister or my wife.”—this declaration of love is the tribute which the beautiful as such is entitled to claim” (SW IV, 338). Consider also Benjamin’s use of the figure of kinship in discussing the relation of beauty and truth in the essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities. 8. Compare this with Kant’s claim in the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals: “There can be no imperative which would, in the strict sense, command us to do what makes for happiness, because happiness is an ideal not of reason but of imagination, depending only on empirical grounds which one would expect in vain to determine an action through which the totality of consequences— which is in fact infinite—could be achieved” (Ak. 419). 9. To comprehend that point, compare these considerations with the opening passage of Thought Figures, titled “Death of an Old Man”: The loss that a much younger person may feel directs his gaze perhaps for the first time, to the laws that govern the relationship between people who are separated by a great distance in terms of age, but who may nevertheless be linked by bonds of affection. The dead man was a partner with whom the majority of things that concerned you, and the most important ones, could not possibly be discussed. Yet con-

Notes to Pages 199–205 versation with him had a freshness and a peaceful quality that could never be achieved with someone of the same age. This had two causes. First, any confirmation, however faint or un-effusive, that was forthcoming and that succeeded in bridging the gulf between the generations was far more convincing than confirmation between equals. Second, the younger partner found something that quite disappears later on, when the old have left him and until he himself grows old—namely a dialogue that is free of calculation of every kind and the need to spare anyone’s feelings, because neither has any expectations of the other and neither comes up against any feelings, except one that is rarely encountered: benevolence without admixture of any kind. (SW II, 723)

10. This is reflected in the following formulation of the relation between the secular order and the messianic: The secular order should be erected on the idea of happiness. The relation of this order to the messianic is one of the essential teachings of the philosophy of history. It is the precondition of a mystical conception of history, encompassing a problem that can be represented figuratively. If one arrow points to the goal toward which the secular dynamic acts, and another marks the direction of messianic intensity, then certainly the quest of free humanity for happiness runs counter to the messianic direction. But just as a force, by virtue of the path it is moving along, can augment another force on the opposite path, so the secular order—because of its nature as secular— promotes the coming of the Messianic Kingdom. The secular, therefore, though not itself a category of this kingdom, is a decisive category of its most unobtrusive approach. (SW III, 305)

11. The figure of time as a storm of forgetting is significantly developed in the essay on Kafka: “It is a tempest that blows from forgetting, and study is a cavalry attack against it” (SW II, 814). 12. Peter Osborne notes this point but draws a different moral as to the relation between the angel of history and historical materialism: The point of the passage is not to establish the standpoint of the angel as the standpoint of critique, but the reverse. It is part of the critique of the concept of progress. “This storm is what we call progress.” The homogeneous temporal continuum that underlies the idea of “progress” mirrors, in a distorted form, the indifference to all historical specificity characteristic of the Messianic view. When placed in the context of the Passagen-Werk, the passage functions to distinguish the historian from the angel. For the angel, who at each moment sees history up to that point as a single whole, outside of any living relation to the present, it is “one single catastrophe.” For the historian, on the other hand, who is always inside a specific present, and whose “now” is always the now of a “specific recognizability,” history appears in the light of the idea of actualization, as possibility. (“Small—Scale Victories, Large-Scale Defeats: Walter Benjamin’s Politics of Time,” in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne [New York: Routledge, 1994], 91)

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Notes to Pages 206–217 13. “Does Ottilie’s essence have its share in that genuine natural innocence which has as little to do with equivocal intactness as with blessed guiltlessness? Does she have character? Is her nature, not so much thanks to her own openheartedness as by dint of her free and open expression, clear before our eyes? Rather, the opposite of this characterizes her. She is reserved; more than this, nothing she says or does can deprive her of reserve. Plant-like muteness . . . lies about her being and darkens it even in its most extreme moments of distress . . . All speechless clarity of action is semblance-like, and in truth the inner life of those who in this way preserve themselves is no less obscure to them than to others.” (SW I, 336–337) 14. Sigrid Weigel provides a thought-provoking elaboration of many of the themes that I attempt to link in the present remark. Particularly important is her problematization of the narrator’s stance. Weigel sees in the narrator’s “Nazarene lapse” a problematic mingling of the orders of the human and those of the divine: “Where Benjamin’s theory of art—in the sense of the mystery’s right to dwell in the work—originates from a strict delineation between human and divine orders, the Nazarene at the end of Goethe’s novel by contrast presents the human imitation of divine power (martyrdom and resurrection), thus levelling the distinction between human and divine orders. While in Goethe’s novel the human characters assume a divine position, in Benjamin’s essay the divine is admitted a place within the language of the artwork, or, better, assigned a breach through which what lies beyond the work juts into its language” (“The Artwork as a Breach of a Beyond” in Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, New York: Continuum 2002, 199). 15. Note also that in “The Task of the Translator” Benjamin thinks of the passing nature of translation through the same figure: “If, however, these languages continue to grow in this way until the messianic end of their history, it is translation that catches fire from the eternal life of the works and the perpetually renewed life of language” (SW I, 257). Translation is that material which, by burning out, keeps the flame perpetually alive. In the preface of the Trauerspiel book, the image of the burning of the husk is similarly an image at once of the transience of beauty and the way it acquires its highest intensity as it is about to disappear in truth. Further, in the paralipomena to “On the Concept of history” this image of eternal life is again developed: “The eternal lamp is an image of genuine historical existence. It cites what has been—the flame that once was kindled—in perpetuum, giving it ever new sustenance” (SW IV, 407). Consider that, in the image, eternal life is predicated on the constant burning up of the material; that is, it depends on a sense of the transience of things. 16. In a later letter to Scholem Benjamin quotes Eddington’s “scientific” description of a man who is attempting to cross the threshold of a door. He sees the description as particularly fitting existence in Kafka’s world. If early on Benjamin wishes to find a way to overcome the poverty of the image of experience that

Notes to Page 220 emerges out of Kant’s reliance on mathematical physics, here we find a confluence of the scientific picture of the world and the mythical condition. This is the surest sign of the destruction of experience: “What is actually and in a very precise sense folly in Kafka is that this, the most recent of experiential worlds, was conveyed to him precisely by the mystical tradition. This, of course, could not have happened without devastating occurrences . . . within this tradition” (CBS, 224). 17. Given the task of constructing the dialectical image from quotations, it is worth noting the connection between gesture and quotation, evident in the function of interruption in both: “Quoting a text implies interrupting its context” (SW IV, 305). 18. Compare how Benjamin writes of Brecht’s theater of gestures: “The art of the epic theater consists in producing not empathy but astonishment. In a world instead of identifying with the protagonist, the audience should learn to feel astonished at the circumstances under which he functions” (“What Is Epic Theater?” in SW, vol. 4, 304).

277

INDEX

Abbreviation, 8, 66, 70–73, 102, 201, 245, 259–260. See also Miniaturization Adorno, Theodor W., 1, 3–4, 47, 155 Afterlife, 22–23, 50, 63–66, 108, 114–115, 248, 265 Agamben, Giorgio, 244, 259 Allegory, 16, 49–51, 59, 85, 109, 129–131, 151–156, 163, 181–182, 185, 201, 226, 239, 253, 257, 260, 263 Amit, Amichai, 233 Analogy, 20, 45, 166, 198, 236, 246, 255 Angel of History, 204–205, 275 Aragon, Louis, 4, 91, 224 Arcades, 5, 65–66, 74, 90–93, 98, 100, 102–103, 153, 234, 260 Archetype, 43–49, 53, 60, 65–66, 68, 113–114, 182, 234, 236–237, 239, 253, 267 Arendt, Hannah, 1, 238 Arrest, 23, 27, 43, 46, 56–58, 68, 119, 192, 201–202, 220, 233, 235, 241– 243, 261, 263 Articulation, 26, 33–34, 36, 41, 46, 52, 59, 76–79, 81, 83–85, 116– 119, 133–134, 170, 180, 182, 185– 186, 188, 213–219, 229, 240–241, 247 Atget, Eugène, 270

Aura, 87, 102, 107–108, 110, 116, 131, 147–150, 153–155, 172–173, 177, 184, 238, 251, 262, 267–269 Authenticity, 12, 141, 148–150, 166, 210–211 Automatism, 146, 179, 267–268, 272–273 Awakening, 51, 90–99, 102–103, 109, 112, 170, 204, 216, 224, 249–252 Balzac, Honoré de, 142 Barbarism, 160–161, 173–174 Bare Life (Blosse Leben), 80, 132–133 Baroque, 49, 127, 129–130, 135–136, 143, 152–153, 155, 163, 226, 258, 260 Beauty, 21–23, 27, 42, 47, 49–51, 56–57, 79, 87, 122, 140, 144, 172–173, 176, 206–210, 235, 240–243, 249, 268, 274, 276 Bergson, Henri, 147 Body, 50, chapter 4 passim, 101, 104, 129, 143–144, 146–147, 208–209, 220, 246–248, 262, 271 Boredom, 98–99, 178, 183, 185, 266 Brecht, Bertolt, 173, 238, 244, 256, 266, 269, 277 Buck-Morss, Susan, 234 Caesura, 57, 58, 243 Cassirer, Ernst, 233, 246, 253 279

280

Index

Catastrophe, 116, 127–136, 152, 155, 157, 168–169, 194, 202–205, 258, 260, 274–275. See also Destruction Cavell, Stanley, 268 Caygill, Howard, 226, 232, 274 Chaplin, Charlie, 121, 176 Character, 84, 86, 98–99, 117, 120– 122, 130, 133, 139, 142, 144, 146, 183, 206, 247, 255, 262, 276 Cinema, 177–178, 268–269. See also Film; Movie Citation, 9–11, 201, 226, 238 Clark, Timothy J., 226 Cohen, Hermann, 274 Collective, 74, 80–81, 89–94, 100–101, 104, 114, 116, 118–119, 121, 140, 143, 146, 148–149, 160, 179–180, 248, 261, 269, 271. See also Crowd; Masses Color, 52–53, 79, 99, 106, 150, 228, 232, 239, 244, 247–248 Comay, Rebecca, 231 Commentary, 13–14, 46–48, 50–51, 59, 238 Commodity, 152–156, 184, 233–234 Conspirator, 129, 134, 137, 257. See also Intriguer Constellation, 40–43, 45, 51, 57, 60, 67, 102, 126, 131, 141, 168, 189, 224, 226, 235 Context, 10–11, 20–22, 34–35, 39, 61, 66, 68, 110, 117, 158–159, 162–164, 166–167, 238, 277 Corporeal, 76–85, 88–89, 101 Critical, 48, 168–169, 177–179, 264 Criticism, 4, 17, 21–23, 44–45, 47–51, 53–57, 122, 149, 172–173, 230, 237, 240–241 Crowd, 141, 143–147, 152, 261, 270 Culture, 13, 26, 28, 153, 158–161, 164, 173, 179, 237, 263 Cunning, 96–97, 109, 123, 137, 181, 185, 189, 216 Dadaism, 150, 178–179, 269 Danger, 157–158, 167–170, 194, 244

Death, 40, 51, 96, 120, 122–125, 129–131, 143, 151–152, 154, 163–164, 181, 185–188, 194, 202, 204, 206–207, 209, 211, 215, 274 Decision, 56, 127, 135, 137, 168–169, 173, 177, 179, 201–202, 207–209 Descartes, René, 146 Destruction, 23–24, 26–27, 48, 50–51, 122, 130, 133–134, 136, 155–156, 167, 178–179, 194, 199, 203–204, 238, 248, 251, 255, 257–258 Detour, 12, 96–97, 217, 219–220, 226, 257 Dialectical Image, 27, chapter 2 passim, 61–62, 64–65, 68–69, 89–91, 93, 96, 102, 112, 114, 120, 130, 133, 167–170, 190–192, 200–202, 204– 205, 226, 233–234, 236, 238–239, 250, 252, 256 Dialectics, 43, 47, 49, 56, 63–65, 68–70, 72, 92, 95–96, 127, 134, 145, 165–166, 168, 185, 189, 199, 233, 250, 252, 273 Dissolution, 44, 55, 82–83, 97–99, 110–111, 132, 186–187, 199, 224, 248 Distance, 45, 67, 85–89, 101, 110, 148, 174, 176, 249, 260 Distortion, 88, 93, 95–96, 101–102, 218, 220–221 Distraction, 172–173, 175, 178–179, 184, 266, 269 Divine, 15, 19, 24, 132–133, 135–137, 191, 203–205, 208–209, 211, 213, 246, 257, 259, 265, 276 Dream, 74, chapter 5 passim, 112–113, 122, 170, 183, 200, 224, 233–234, 249–252, 260 Eiland, Howard, 250, 269 Emergency, 128, 134–135, 137, 168–169, 202, 257, 264 Empathy, 20, 161–164, 166–167, 175, 231, 277 Engels, Friedrich, 261, 263 Eros, 79, 83–88, 110, 123, 206, 209–210, 242

Index

Everyday, 97–99, 102, 183, 251, 269, 271. See also Ordinary; Prosaic Experience (Erfahrung, Erlebnis), 2, 27–36, 39, 41–43, 45, 48, 52, 61, 63–68, 78, 87–88, 90–96, 98–100, 104–109, 143–145, 147–156, 160–162, 166–167, 171, 174–176, 178–188, 215, 223, 229, 232–233, 235, 245, 247–251, 253–254, 262–263, 266, 269–272, 277 Expression, 15–19, 22–25, 50–58, 67, 71–72, 77, 78, 81–85, 102–103, 115–117, 129–130, 152–155, 191, 227–230, 240, 245, 248 Expressionless, 25–26, 55–59, 235, 238, 243 Fable, 181, 183, 215. See also Fairy Tale; Parable; Storytelling Fairy Tale, 108–109, 188–189, 214– 215, 271. See also Fable; Parable; Storytelling Fascism, 147, 171, 270 Fate, 86–87, 112, 116–119, 121, 123–128, 132, 142, 146, 188, 214, 219 Feldman, Yotam, 233 Fenves, Peter, 232, 269 Ferber, Ilit, 257 Ferris, David, 237 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 18, 240 Film, 175, 179–180, 267. See also Cinema; Movie Flâneur, 91, 100, 142, 144–146, 249–251, 260–261 Force, 24–26, 62, 64–65, 67–68, 72–73, 82–83, 89, 94–96, 116, 127, 132– 134, 158–159, 161, 169, 198–199, 203–205, 244, 248, 257–259, 275. See also Power; Violence Forgiveness, 202–204 Form, 7, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20–23, 26, 28–35, 39–41, 43–47, 51, 54–55, 57, 65, 70, 75–83, 89–90, 101–102, 113, 116–120, 124–125, 128, 133–134, 144, 153, 160–162, 171, 176, 179, 213–215, 219, 225, 227, 229,

232–233, 235, 240, 242–243, 246, 250, 252–253, 256, 259, 271 Fragment, 27, 35, 42–43, 55–58, 66, 155, 209, 219–220, 225–226, 228, 238, 243 Frege, Gottlob, 10, 231 Freud, Sigmund, 93, 96, 150, 270–271 Fried, Michael, 143, 176, 268 Galton, Francis, 267, 268 Gasché, Rodolphe, 268 Genesis (book of), 14, 15, 17, 229 Genius, 22, 75, 79, 81, 94, 141, 160, 171, 174, 263 Gestalt, 69, 75, 91, 246 Gesture, 215, 217–220, 277 God, 13, 24, 31, 80–81, 98, 116, 118, 135–136, 192–193, 203, 208–209, 211, 229, 230, 246. See also Divine Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 22, 35, 43–44, 46–50, 52–53, 60, 65, 67, 87, 117 141, 206–212, 228–229, 237, 239, 240, 244–245, 248–249, 256, 267, 271, 274, 276 Greenberg, Clement, 237 Guilt, 112, 117–120, 125–127, 132–133, 145–146, 204, 214, 219, 255 Guys, Constantin, 144 Hamacher, Werner, 259 Hansen, Miriam, 262, 269–270 Hanssen, Beatrice, 249, 252 Happiness, 81, 82, 108, 115–116, 193–200, 274 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 3, 35, 43, 62, 69, 72–73, 76, 96–98, 119, 224, 241, 262 Hero, 58, 109, 119–120, 123–127, 134, 141–143, 165, 185–187, 255–257, 262 Historical materialism, 70, 153, 157–158, 166, 170, 272–273 Historicism, 157–170, 231, 264 History, 3–6, 10, 14, 26–27, 42–43, 49, 60, 62, 64–73, 80, 82–83, 85, 92, 96, 98, 112–116, 118–121, 125–127,

281

282

Index

History (continued) 129–137, 140, 152, 157–171, 190– 192, 195–196, 200, 202–205, 224, 241, 252–253, 256–260, 264, 275 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 57–58, 141, 231, 243, 246, 271 Hope, 87–88, 136, 193–194, 206, 211–216, 218, 273 Horkheimer, Max, 139 Idea, 12, 17, 22–23, 31–36, 38–46, 49, 52–53, 55–57, 61–62, 64, 65, 70–72, 102, 134, 176, 190, 195–196, 224, 228, 235–237, 239–243, 273–275 Ideal, 44–46, 48, 57, 67–68, 136, 192–193, 237, 239–240, 273–274 Immortality, 56, 82, 119, 124, 190, 193–194, 196, 200 Ineffable, 13, 26, 191, 235, 265 Innocence, 114, 120–121, 132–133, 137, 258 Intention, 10, 12, 20–21, 25, 27, 33, 39–41, 45, 53, 77–78, 98, 105, 128, 129, 131, 163, 175, 180, 227, 232, 234, 250 Intentionless, 13, 93, 131, 191, 243, 250 Interior, 72, 99–103, 110, 251–252, 261 Intriguer, 128–129 Involuntary memory (Mémoire involontaire), 95–96, 148–151, 180, 191 Irony, 44, 58, 116, 123, 125, 128, 267 Jennings, Michael, 225, 238, 262 Jochmann, Carl Gustav, 160–161, 165 Judgment, 16–18, 21–22, 30, 40, 43, 53–55, 84, 116–117, 136, 149, 172–177, 179, 214, 229–230, 240, 242, 245, 267–268 Jung, Carl, 147, 236, 253 Justice, 123–124, 192–195, 200–203, 214, 259 Kafka, Franz, 97, 181, 201, 212–220, 253, 276–277 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 18, 21–22, 27–36, 38–39, 44–45, 53, 55–56, 64–65, 84,

86, 135–136, 172–177, 193, 223, 229, 232–233, 235–237, 240, 242–243, 253–255, 268, 273–274, 277 Keller, Gottfried, 170 Kierkegaard, Søren, 272 Kraus, Karl, 139, 238–239 Krauss, Rosalind, 270–271 Language, chapter 1 passim, 37–39, 41, 54–59, 66, 77, 82, 84, 116–117, 128, 191, 198, 209, 227–232, 238, 241, 245, 251–252, 264–265, 276 Last Judgment, 42, 195, 200–204, 214 Law, 17, 26, 28, 33, 40–41, 56, 80, 116–121, 123–124, 128, 132–133, 135–136, 158, 162, 168, 191–192, 202, 212–216, 218, 256, 259 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 6, 70–71, 102–103, 224, 233, 245 Life, 5, 11, 14, 16, 19–27, 50–52, 56–58, 61, 66, 69, 71, 73, 76, 80–83, 85–87, 101, 103–111, 113–125, 127, 129–134, 143–146, 149, 151–156, 159, 161–167, 170–171, 173, 183, 185–188, 196–197, 199, 201–212, 214–219, 230–231, 239, 244–248, 250, 256, 259–260, 276 Limit, 44–45, 53, 76–80, 123–124, 136, 186–188, 228, 244–245, 248 Magic, 4, 86, 116, 227, 252, 254, 265 Martyr, 124, 128–129, 132, 136–137, 142, 257, 262, 276 Marx, Karl, 113–114, 153–155, 171, 202, 224, 252, 273 Masses, 100, 141, 144–146, 160, 172, 175–177, 179, 261–262, 271 McLaughlin, Kevin, 241 Medium, 9, 15–19, 25, 30, 44–45, 53, 55, 58, 95–96, 105, 149, 151, 159, 172, 187, 227–228, 231, 240, 242, 248, 267 Melancholy, 103–104, 131, 37, 151–152, 161, 163–165, 168, 199, 204, 257 Memory, 64, 88–89, 91–96, 98–99, 102, 104–109, 148, 150–151, 157,

Index

167, 170, 178, 180, 183–187, 190–191, 198–200, 251, 269–270 Messianic, 126, 190–195, 197, 200– 201, 205, 213, 220–221, 259, 264, 272–276 Metamorphosis, 66, 239 Mimesis, 101, 103, 106, 236, 251–252 Miniaturization, 5, 260 Modernism, 44, 70, 268 Modernity, 82, 87, 89, 94–95, 112, 140–147, 149–150, 152–153, 171, 181, 191, 234, 238, 253–254, 262 Molière, 121 Monad, 5–6, 45, 65, 70–73, 77, 102–103, 134, 166, 192, 201, 245–246, 258–260 Mortification, 23, 51, 129, 130, 263 Movie, 172, 175, 268. See also Cinema; Film Music, 122, 210 Mysticism, 41, 191, 223, 235, 238, 275, 277 Myth, 101, chapter 6 passim, 144, 146, 156, 164, 166, 188–189, 203, 206, 212, 215–216, 219, 224, 236, 246– 248, 253–255, 257, 277 Nägele, Rainer, 243 Name, 15–19, 23, 55, 116–117, 134, 139, 144, 229–230, 238, 245, 255 Natural History, 82, 127, 188 Naturalism, 13–14, 46, 48–49, 90 Nature, 13–18, 22–24, 26, 28, 42, 46, 48–50, 52–53, 60, 65–67, 79–89, 113–117, 119–120, 127–130, 132– 133, 150, 180, 188, 200, 208, 228, 230, 239–240, 244, 248–249, 251, 253, 255, 258 Nearness, 85–89, 101, 148, 249 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 119, 121–122 Nonsensuous Similarities, 88, 107, 236, 252 Optical Unconscious, 270–271 Ordinary, 35, 91–92, 97, 99, 171, 174, 178–180, 184, 266, 268. See also Everyday; Prosaic

Origin, 60–62, 65, 67, 73, 82, 122, 134, 148, 163, 234, 238, 241, 260 Osborne, Peter, 275 Parable, 97, 181, 214–216, 220. See also Fable; Fairy Tale; Storytelling Pensky, Max, 233 Phenomena, 30, 35, 39–46, 48–50, 52–53, 60–62, 64–69, 71, 75, 93, 102, 122, 133, 148, 157, 190, 228, 235, 238–240, 242, 250, 266–270 Phenomenology, 33, 232 Photography, 178–179, 262 Physiognomy, 130, 139, 145, 256, 261, 267–268 Plato, 6, 38, 84, 88, 122, 134, 190, 206, 211, 224, 242, 256 Play, 22, 50, 56, 99, 143, 164, 173–174, 177–179, 181, 218–219, 260, 266, 268 Poe, Edgar Allan, 145, 146 Poetic, 18–21, 24, 27, 50, 58, 88, 95, 140–147, 150–153, 160–161, 210, 238, 246–247, 262–263, 265–266, 271 Polarity, 43, 62, 66–68, 78, 83, 86, 96, 109, 129, 134, 168, 185, 189, 233, 239, 244 Power, 24, 58–59, 62, 82, 86–87, 95, 124, 128, 132–138, 169, 194, 197, 203, 229, 241, 243, 257, 259, 264, 276. See also Force; Violence Practical, 31, 95, 153–154, 181–182, 184, 215, 229 Presence of Mind, 95, 145, 168, 185 Presentation, 4, 10, 12, 17, 27, 31, 35, 37–43, 45–46, 48, 52–53, 58, 61, 65, 68, 72, 134, 175, 191, 227, 235, 266 Primal Phenomenon, 43–44, 52–53, 65–67, 69, 237. See also Archetype; Ur-phenomenon Progress, 65, 68, 113, 156, 161, 164–168, 186–187, 194–195, 202–205, 245, 274–275 Prosaic, 180, 271

283

284

Index

Proust, Marcel, 88–89, 94–96, 99, 105, 139, 151, 180, 187, 198–199, 223, 248, 252 Recollection, 104–105, 190–191 Reconciliation, 203, 206–211 Redemption, 42, 48, 51, 111, 120, 125–127, 131–132, 171, 190, chapter 9 passim, 231, 257, 260, 274 Reflection, 18, 21, 24, 41, 44–45, 53–55, 57, 125, 149, 173, 176–179, 186, 220, 236, 240, 242–243, 260, 266–267 Relationship, 13, 45, 55, 69, 84, 88, 95–96, 107, 128, 150–151, 186, 206, 208, 211, 219, 236, 244–246 Remembrance, 99, 107, 109, 148, 185–186, chapter 9 passim Repetition, 61, 127, 146, 154–156, 164–167, 199, 219. See also Return Rescue, 109, 111, 157–158, 167, 169–171, 205–209, 212 Return, 82–83, 85, 116, 129–131, 149–150, 156, 158, 166, 184, 199, 213, 219–220, 258. See also Repetition Revelation, 33, 42, 191–192, 199, 212–214, 219, 232 Reversal, 64, 91, 96, 216–220 Richter, Gerhard, 246 Romanticism, 18, 22–23, 44–51, 53–55, 57, 149, 213, 226, 228, 230–231, 237, 240–241, 260, 267, 271 Rotlevy, Ori, 259 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 143, 145, 258 Sacrifice, 119–120, 123–126, 132–133, 142, 203, 216 Sander, August, 267–268 Santner, Eric, 244 Schiller, Friedrich, 188, Schmitt, Carl, 135, 168–169 Scholem, Gershom, 5, 7, 10, 31, 32, 213, 219, 223–224, 254, 266, 268, 274, 276 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 164–165

Secular, 130, 136, 191–192, 194, 197, 237, 257–260, 273–275 Semblance, 21–23, 42, 50–51, 56, 102, 117, 122, 141, 145–146, 152, 154–156, 166, 176, 206–212, 239, 241–242, 253, 257, 260–261, 263, 276 Sexuality, 83–84, 86–87, 120–121 Shock, 43, 96, 144–147, 150, 152, 178–179, 210–211, 250, 261–263 Similarity, 20, 45, 48, 88, 106, 107, 150, 166, 198, 236, 238–239, 252. See also Analogy; Nonsensuous Similarities Socrates, 122–125, 256, 260–261, 271 Sovereignty, 6, 10, 128, 132, 134–137, 168–169, 257, 259, 264 Space, 28, 40, 85–90, 99–101, 104, 106, 109, 167, 182, 200, 220, 255, 258–260 Spengler, Oswald, 256 Spinoza, Baruch, 32 Spirit, 3, 15–16, 54, 67, 75–78, 81–86, 96, 120–122, 131, 133–134, 137, 163, 182, 200, 206, 208, 230, 244, 246–248, 255 Storytelling, 176, 180–189, 215, 262, 266, 271–272 Sublime, 53, 56, 209, 211, 235, 236, 243, 248, 255 Surrealism, 89, 92, 93, 150, 178, 249–251, 269, 271 Symbol, 19, 24, 34–35, 36, 49–50, 56, 57, 129, 148, 152, 233, 238, 239 Technology, 81, 89, 112–113, 172, 174–179, 219, 251, 255, 262, 269–270, 273 Theology, 13–15, 26, 49, 135–136, 154, 190–192, 212–213, 272 Tiedemann, Rolf, 225, 272 Time, 28, chapter 3 passim, 87, 90–91, 94, 99, 104, 106, 125–127, 152, 164, 166, 168, 192–193, 200–205, 220, 238, 244–245, 251, 258–260, 263, 273, 275

Index

Tradition, 27, 32, 93–94, 147–149, 154, 161, 169, 173, 179–180, 191, 200, 212, 214–215, 232, 259, 268, 277 Tragedy, 57–58, 75, 119–129, 132, 142, 255–257 Translation, 17–27, 58–59, 66, 72, 114, 134, 170, 194, 198, 228, 230–231, 238–239, 241, 245, 258, 260, 264– 265, 276 Trauerspiel, 119, 121–130, 132, 134–138, 142, 236, 257–258, 261 Truth, 2–4, 9–13, 17, 23, 25–27, 39–40, 43–51, 54, 56–58, 62–63, 66–67, 90–93, 98, 100, 102–103, 107–108, 122, 123, 125, 130–131, 169–170, 191, 206, 212, 227, 232, 234–238, 241–243, 249–250, 252, 254, 257, 263 Type, 91, 112, 121, 139, 142, 144–145, 152, 183, 251, 267–268

Uniqueness, 73, 79, 82, 87, 113, 148, 159, 164–168, 176, 186–187, 262 Urgency, 157, 167–170, 185, 192–193, 216–218 Ur-phenomenon, 46, 48, 50, 60, 65, 153, 238–239. See also Archetype; Primal Phenomenon Veil, 110–111, 144, 207–210, 241–242, 252, 257 Violence, 49, 56, 112, 119–120, 132–133, 136, 144–145, 194, 203–204, 248, 263. See also Force; Power Weber, Samuel, 240–241 Weigel, Sigrid, 276 Wohlfarth, Irving, 264 Writing, 50, 186

285