A Benjamin Walter Benjamin and History PDF

Walter Benjamin and
History
Andrew Benjamin,
Editor
Continuum
WALTER BENJAMIN AND HISTORY
WALTER BENJAMIN STUDIES SERIES
Series Editors: Andrew Benjamin, University of Technology, Sydney and
Monash University, and Beatrice Hanssen, University of Georgia.
Consultant Board: Stanley Cavell, Sander Gilman, Miriam Hansen,
Carol Jacobs, Martin Jay, Gertrud Koch, Peter Osborne, Sigrid Weigel and
Anthony Phelan.
A series devoted to the writings of Walter Benjamin each volume will focus
on a theme central to contemporary work on Benjamin. The series aims to
set new standards for scholarship on Benjamin for students and researchers
in Philosophy, Cultural Studies and Literary Studies.
Walter Benjamin and Romanticism (2002), edited by Beatrice Hanssen and
Andrew Benjamin.
Walter Benjamin and Art (2005), edited by Andrew Benjamin.
Walter Benjamin and History
Edited by Andrew Benjamin
Continuum
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Andrew Benjamin and contributors 2005
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storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 0826467458
PB: 0826467466
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Fakenham Photosetting Limited, Fakenham, Norfolk
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Abbreviations vii
Introduction ANDREW BENJAMIN 1
1 The Supposition of the Aura: The Now, the Then,
and Modernity GEORGES DIDI-HUBERMAN 3
2 The Shortness of History, or Photography In Nuce:
Benjamins Attenuation of the Negative DAVID FERRIS 19
3 Now: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time
WERNER HAMACHER 38
4 Down the K. Hole: Walter Benjamins Destructive
Land-surveying of History STEPHANIE POLSKY 69
5 The Sickness of Tradition: Between Melancholia and
Fetishism REBECCA COMAY 88
6 Trembling Contours: KierkegaardBenjaminBrecht
RAINER NGELE 102
7 The Subject of History: The Temporality of Parataxis
in Benjamins Historiography DIMITRIS VARDOULAKIS 118
8 Tradition as Injunction: Benjamin and the Critique of
Historicisms PHILIPPE SIMAY 137
9 Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity
ANDREW BENJAMIN 156
10 Walter Benjamins Interior History CHARLES RICE 171
11 What is the Matter with Architectural History?
GEVORK HARTOONIAN 182
12 Messianic Epistemology: Thesis XV ROBERT GIBBS 197
13 Non-messianic Political Theology in Benjamins
On the Concept of History HOWARD CAYGILL 215
Notes 227
Contributors 253
Index 256
Acknowledgements
George Didi-Hubermans chapter was rst published in Negotiating Rapture:
The Power of Art to Transform Lives (The Museum of Contemporary
Art, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Werner Hamachers chapter was rst published in Heidrun Friese (ed.), The
Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought, (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2001), while the German text appeared as Jetzt:
Benjamin zur historischen Zeit, in Benjamin Studies 1.1 (2002).
Portions of Rebecca Comays essay appeared in Research in Phenomenology
29 (1999) under the title Perverse History: Fetishism and Dialectic in
Walter Benjamin.
A version of Charles Rices chapter is published as: Immerger et rompre:
Lintrieur de Walter Benjamin, trans. Philippe Simay, in Philippe
Simay (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Mtropole et Modernit (Paris: Editions
de lEclat, 2005).
Abbreviations
All references to the Convolutes of The Arcades Project are given parentheti-
cally, according to Convolute no., without further specication.
AP The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999).
BA Briefwechsel 19381940: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, ed.
Gershom Scholem (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1994).
BS Briefwechsel 19331940: Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, ed.
Gershom Scholem (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1985).
C The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 19101940, ed. Gershom
Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jakobson
and Evelyn M. Jakobson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1994).
CA Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence
19201940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
CS The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, ed.
Gershom Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and Andr Lefevere (Cambridge,
GB Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Christoph Gdde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt
a.M.: Suhrkamp, 19952000).
GS Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and
Hermann Schweppenhuser (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1974).
MD Moscow Diary, ed. Gary Smith, trans. Richard Sieburth (Cambridge,
OT The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London:
Verso, 1998).
SW Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 19972003).
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INTRODUCTION
ANDREW BENJAMIN
Walter Benjamins concern with history involves a reconguration of the
way the political and the temporality of history interconnect. His writings
on history both the philosophical reections as well as the writing of actual
histories sustain a radical critique of the project of Enlightenment philo-
sophies of time. A critique that can be understood as having been undertaken
in the name of modernity. The implicit understanding of historical time in
Kants conception of the Enlightenment, for example, presupposes a gradual
though inexorable move towards the realization of a specic goal. The goal
in question is of course Enlightenment and thus the move towards it inter-
connects time and perfectibility. As such, this development becomes the
formulation of progress. The goal itself is the telos. The problematic nature
of this position resides as much in the acceptance of a pregiven goal thought
within the determining presence of teleology, as it does in the obviating of
conict as an inherent condition of the movement of history. Fundamental
to Benjamins critique of progress as dening the ambit in which politics and
time are interconnected is the centrality that is attributed to forms of inter-
ruption. While the question of how that interruption is to be understood is
itself an important site of research, what remains the case in the denition
of his projects is, on the one hand, the relationship between interruption and
discontinuity and, on the other, the modern as premised on an inaugurating
interruption. While interruption is central it should not be forgotten that it
is far from absolute. Not only do vestiges of earlier congurations remain,
it is also the case that the struggle to maintain the advent of the modern
has to involve a continual and critical negotiation with the conation of the
new and the temporality of fashion on the one hand and on the other the
insistent presence of historicisms reactualization in the form of continuity
and arguments for gradual development through time. What is of course
fundamental to such arguments is the refusal to take up as a philosophical
question the time through which this development is supposed to take place.
With historicism, time becomes naturalized. To denature time is a further
part of a project marked by interruption.
The intent of this volume is to develop both the detail as well as the
implications of Benjamins extended writings on history. Rather than
concentrate simply on the so-called Theses on the Philosophy of History
(now known, following the title in the Selected Writings, as On the Concept
of History), the chapters presented here move between the interconnection
2 Walter Benjamin and History
within Benjamins writings on art and literature and his conception of
history, Benjamins actual writing of history, the use of his work for the
writing of specic histories (e.g. architecture), as well as engagements with
the philosophical and theological dimensions of the project. Moreover, the
volume makes clear that there is no nal word on the interpretation of
certain passages. The recurring motif of the messianic, for example, is given
different congurations. Not only are the details of differing texts analysed;
moreover, the volume is concerned with what can be described as specic
acts of translation. While it is vital that the texts themselves remain sites of
investigation and scholarly concern, it is also essential that the applicability
of Benjamins project be investigated. Its value for the analysis of art, history,
literature philosophy, etc. has to be pursued. It is not so much a concern with
the works utility as it is with its possible afterlife.
Part of the afterlife involves working with the recognition that Benjamins
texts, for all their intellectual bravura, were sites in which what was being
worked out was the relationship between politics and time. To neglect the
political or to reduce it to no more than its named presence fails to grasp
that what is at stake within those writings is a political and philosophical
engagement with the exigencies of the present. Part of what comprises the
present is a conict concerning the nature of the present itself. The clash,
for example, between historicism and modernity is not a question of choice.
Not only is such a conict staged between different political possibilities,
the conict is itself part of the denition of modernity. As such, modernity
is an unnished project because it is the site of a conict that denes the
modern. Benjamins work is central in allowing both for an understanding
of this complex politics of time as it is in providing some of the resources for
its sustained analysis.
1
THE SUPPOSITION OF THE AURA:
THE NOW, THE THEN, AND
MODERNITY
GEORGES DIDI-HUBERMAN*
Looking at someone carries the implicit expectation that our look will be
returned by the object of our gaze. When this expectation is met (which, in the
case of thought processes, can apply equally to the look of the minds eye and
to a glance pure and simple), there is an experience of the aura to the fullest
extent . . . Experience of the aura thus rests on the transposition of a response
common in human relationships to the relationships between the inanimate or
natural object and man. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked
at, looks at us in turn. To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to
invest it with the ability to meet our gaze. The experience corresponds to the
discoveries of the mmoire involontaire. (These discoveries, incidentally, are
unique: they are lost to the memory that seeks to retain them. Thus they lend
support to a concept of the aura that comprises the unique apparition of a
distance. This designation has the advantage of clarifying the cult nature of
the phenomenon. The essentially distant is the inapproachable: inapproach-
ability is in fact a primary quality of the cult image.) Prousts great familiarity
with the problem of the aura requires no emphasis.
Walter Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire [1939], SW 4: 338
(trans. modied 1939)
THE SUPPOSITION OF THE OBJECT: THAT OF WHICH OUR
EYES WILL NEVER HAVE THEIR FILL
What is the sense today, 60 years after Walter Benjamin, of reintroducing
the question, the hypothesis, the supposition of the aura? Is not the art
contemporary to us inscribed within does it not inscribe within itself
what Benjamin called the age of technological reproducibility (SW 4:
25183), an age supposed to have produced the death, the withering at the
very least, of the aura? Many historians and critics of twentieth-century art
have drawn a lesson from that age of technological reproducibility, have
* Trans. Jane Marie Todd.
drawn its consequences for the very production of artistic objects.
1
But such
reections on reproducibility, on the loss of originality and of origin,
have proceeded as if foregrounding these notions must inevitably make the
archaic and outdated question of the aura, linked as it was to the world of
cult images, fall away and hence disappear.
But falling away is not the same as disappearing. Fortunately, we no
longer have to bow to our knees before statues of gods I note in passing
that Hegel already registered this fact at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, and that others had done so before him.
2
But we bow our knees,
if only in fantasy, before many other things that hang over us or hold us
down, that look at us or leave us stunned. As we know, Benjamin speaks
of the decline of the aura in the modern age, but for him, decline does
not mean disappearance. Rather, it means (as in the Latin declinare) moving
downward, inclining, deviating, or inecting in a new way. Benjamins
exegetes have sometimes wondered whether his position on the aura was not
contradictory, or whether one ought not to oppose his early thoughts on
the question to his mature views, his (quasi-Marxist) philosophy about the
destruction of the aura to his (quasi-messianic) thinking on its restoration.
3
To that, we must rst reply that the notion of aura is diffused throughout
Benjamins oeuvre. Its incorporation into his oeuvre was a response to a
transhistorical and profoundly dialectical experience; therefore, the question
of whether the aura has been liquidated or not proves to be a quintessentially
false question.
4
We must further explain that while the aura in Benjamin
names an originary anthropological quality in the image, the origin for him
does not in any way designate something remaining upstream from things,
as the source of the river is upstream from it. For Benjamin, the origin names
that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance, not
the source but a whirlpool in the river of becoming [that] pulls the emerging
matter into its own rhythm (OT, p. 46, trans. modied).
Hence decline itself is part of the origin so understood, not the bygone
albeit founding past, but the precarious, churning rhythm, the dynamic
two-way ow of a historicity that asks, without respite, even to our own
present, to be recognized as a restoration, a restitution, and as something
that by that very fact is uncompleted, always open (OT, p. 46, trans.
modied). The beauty that rises from the bed of ages as Benjamin writes
with reference to Proust and the mmoire involontaire is never outdated or
liquidated; reality never ceases to sear the image; remembrance continues to
offer itself as a relic secularized. And since silence is fundamentally auratic
in its manifestation as Benjamin writes of Baudelaire modern or even
postmodern man, the man of technological reproducibility, is obliged, in
the midst of the noisy labyrinth of mediations, information and reproduc-
tions, sometimes to impose silence and submit to the uncanniness of what
comes back to him as aura, as thirst-inducing apparition (SW 2: 510; SW 4:
3347; SW 4: 177). Let us say, to outline our hypothesis, that whereas the
The Supposition of the Aura 5
value of the aura was imposed in the religious cult images that is, in the
protocols of dogmatic intimidation within which the liturgy has most often
brought forth its images it is now supposed in artists studios in the secular
era of technological reproducibility.
5
Let us say, to dialecticize, that the decline
of the aura supposes implies, slips underneath, enfolds in its fashion the
aura as an originary phenomenon of the image. It is, to be faithful to Benjamin
in the productive instability of his exploratory vocabulary, an uncompleted
and always open phenomenon. The aura and its decline are thus part of the
same system (and have undoubtedly always been so in every age of the auras
history: we need only read Pliny the Elder, who was already complaining
about the decline of the aura in the age of reproducibility of antique busts).
6
But the aura persists, resists its decline precisely as supposition.
What is a supposition? It is the simple act not so simple in reality
of placing below (ova supponere: placing eggs to be incubated). It means
submitting a question by substituting certain parameters of what is believed
to be the response. It means producing a hypothesis also underneath
which then becomes capable of offering not only the principal subject
of a work of art, but also its deepest principle.
7
Can we, then, suppose the
aura in the visual objects that twentieth-century art, from Piet Mondrian
to Barnett Newman to Ad Reinhardt, for example, offers to our view? We
can at least try. We are prepared to admit that the construction of such a
supposition remains awkward cumbersome, heavy with the past in one
sense, too facile, even dubious, in another.
In the rst place, it is cumbersome for any discourse of specicity: isnt the
aura, which designated that dimension of other presence literally required
by the age-old world of cult images, condemned to obsolescence as soon as
a visual object is in itself its own subject? Hasnt modern art emancipated
itself from the subject, the subject matter whether natural, conven-
tional or symbolic which Erwin Panofsky placed at the foundation of
any comprehension of the visual arts?
8
To that we must reply that there
are other ways of understanding subject matter the subject as matter
than the way proposed by Panofskian iconology. Moreover, our sup-
position is cumbersome only for those historical or aesthetic discourses
closed upon their own axioms. In fact, discourses of specicity usually
present themselves as (pseudo)axiomatic, and the consequence of their
closure their tone of certainty, has often been to pronounce supposedly
denitive death-sentences. The modernist will say, for example, that the
aura is dead, the postmodernist, that modernism is dead; and so on.
But the supposition of the aura is not satised with any sentence of death
(historical death, death in the name of a meaning of history), inasmuch as
that supposition is linked to a question of memory and not of history in the
usual sense, in short, to a question of living on (survivance, Aby Warburgs
Nachleben). It is within the order of reminiscence, it seems to me, that
Benjamin raised the question of the aura, as Warburg had raised that of the
Pathosformeln: beyond, therefore, any opposition between a forgetful present
(which is triumphant) and a bygone past (which has, or is, lost).
As a result, the supposition of the aura must confront the very dubious
alibi of the ideologies of restoration: resentment of all sorts in the face of
modernity, the redemptive return to the values of the art of the past, nostalgia
for religious subject matter, a claim made for spirituality and sense against
all deconstructions or destructions effected by twentieth-century art.
9
Let us
add that the middle position between these two extreme discourses putting
the past to death or restoring the past is not much better than when it tries
to reconcile the iconographism of Panofskian subject matter with the radical
abstraction of artists such as Newman or Reinhardt. While something like an
auratic quality may live on in the works of these painters, may even underlie
them, this cannot mean it lives on as such. To try to reiconographize abstract
art, or to reinject into it as such notions like ecstasy, spirituality, mysticism,
etc., would be to make a muddle of everything. Kazimir Malevich was not
a painter of icons. Mondrian was not (or rather, decided to stop being) a
symbolist theosophical painter. Newman was not a Kabbalist, and Reinhardt
was never a theologian, not even of negativity.
The uneasiness and misunderstanding that today pervade all aesthetic
discourse are no doubt linked, at least in part, to the fact that this discourse
generally cannot understand the nonspecicity the anthropological
dimension of twentieth-century artworks except by returning to the use
of age-old categories more or less tied to the religious world. There is an
analogy an anthropological, but also a phenomenological and metapsy-
chological analogy between Dantes description of a pilgrim who, looking
at the veronica in Rome, cannot satisfy his hunger,
10
and Benjamins
denition, in the context of Baudelaire, of the aura as that of which our
eyes will never have their ll (SW 4: 337). In both cases, what is offered
to our view looks at its viewer (Benjamin called this the ability to meet
our gaze). In both cases, this relation of the gaze implies a dialectic of
desire, which supposes alterity, lost object, split subject, a non-objectiable
relationship.
11
Given the highly problematic terms gaze and desire, there is no longer
any reason to be satised with the sententious judicatory vocabulary of
art criticism, or to seek grace in a vocabulary of empathy or transcendence.
The difculty of our problem lies in this: in opposition to a discourse of
specicity that pronounces and carries out its dogmatic death-sentences
(the aura is dead, so much the better), and to a discourse of nonspecicity
that invents eternal and ahistorical entities (let us seek transcendence, let us
seek the sadness of the veronica in a Newman painting), we must in each
instance formulate something like a specicity of the nonspecic. Let me
explain: we must seek in each work of art the articulation between formal
singularities and anthropological paradigms. We must therefore articulate two
apparently incommensurate orders. And the point of articulation between
these two orders may lie our second hypothesis in the dynamic of labour,
in the process of making art. We must seek to understand how a Newman
painting supposes implies, slips underneath, enfolds in its fashion the
question of the aura. How it manoeuvres the image-making substance in
order to impose itself on the gaze, to foment desire. How it thus becomes
that of which our eyes will never have their ll.
THE SUPPOSITION OF TIME: THE ORIGIN IS NOW
What the usual aesthetic positions lack for approaching the problem of the
aura, then, is a temporal model capable of accounting for the origin in the
Benjaminian sense, or the Nachleben in the Warburgian sense: in short, a
model capable of accounting for the events of memory, not the cultural
facts of history. In a certain sense, Georges Bataille wrote, every problem
is that of a use of time.
12
To speak of dead things or outdated problems
in particular with respect to the aura or to speak of rebirths even
when it concerns the aura is to speak from within an order of consecutive
facts, an order that knows nothing of the indestructibility, transformability
and anachronism of memory events.
13
This is the least apt use of time for
understanding the relics (survivances), declines and resurgences proper to
the aesthetic domain. Even a circular model such as that of eternal return
disputes the validity of the naive belief in the return of the same.
14
Thus we
can see in the model of history-as-forgetting and that of history-as-repetition,
models so often implicit in the discourses of modern art, a continued imple-
mentation of the most idealist model of art history. I am referring to the
Vasarian model, which asserted in the sixteenth century: The Renaissance
is forgetting the Middle Ages now that it is repeating Antiquity.
15
To say
today that we must forget modernism so that we can repeat the ecstatic or
sacred origin of art is to use exactly the same language.
If we thus refute peremptory death-sentences as well as nostalgic rebirths,
what time must we suppose from now on? We should not be surprised to redis-
cover, if not the constructed model, then at least the ash of an intuition in
Benjamin himself. That intuition has also remained outside contemporary
commentaries on the decline of the aura and the loss of originality. Yet, it is
part of the same system as the Benjaminian supposition of the aura and of
the origin understood as a reminiscent present where the past is neither to be
rejected nor to be reborn, but quite simply to be brought back as an anach-
ronism.
16
Benjamin designates this notion by the less than explicit expression
dialectical image.
Why dialectical? Because Benjamin, the author of On the Concept
of History (SW 4: 38997), was seeking a logicotemporal model that
could take contradictions into account, never taming them but rather
concentrating and crystallizing them into the density of any unique artistic
production. He was seeking a model that could retain from Hegel the
prodigious power of the negative and yet reject Hegels reconciliation and
synthesis of Spirit. With the dialectical image, Benjamin proposed an open,
undogmatic even relatively drifting use of the philosophical dialectic,
which he distorted, like other writers and artists of his time: Carl Einstein,
Bataille, S.M. Eisenstein, and even, in another register, Mondrian.
17
Why an image? Because, the image designates something completely
different from a picture, a gurative illustration. The image is rst of all a
crystal of time, both a construct and a blazing shape, a sudden shock:
Its not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is
present its light on what is past; rather, an image is that in which the
Then and the Now come into a constellation like a ash of lightning. In
other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the
present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of
the Then to the Now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly
emergent. Only dialectical images are genuine images. (N2a, 3)
This strange denition has at least two consequences, and it is crucial to
clarify them if we are to address the problem of twentieth-century art, its
position in relation to the aura, and its role in the relation between the Now
and the Then. First, Benjamins denition valorizes a parameter of ambiguity
essential to the structure of any dialectical image: Ambiguity, writes
Benjamin, is the manifest imaging of dialectic (AP, p. 10).
18
In this way, he
lays claim to certain aesthetic choices (the only authentic image is one that
is ambiguous), while at the same time dissociating the dialectical operation
from any clear and distinct synthesis, any teleological reconciliation.
Second, Benjamins denition valorizes a critical parameter, revealing
the dialectical images enormous potential for intervening in theoretical
debates (art, according to Benjamin, goes straight to the heart of problems
of cognition). To produce a dialectical image is to appeal to the Then, to
accept the shock of memory while refusing to submit or return to the past;
for example, it is to welcome the signiers of Theosophy, the Kabbalah or
negative theology, awakening these references from their dogmatic sleep as a
way of deconstructing and criticizing them. It is to criticize modernity (the
forgetting of the aura) through an act of memory and, at the same time,
to criticize archaism (nostalgia for the aura) through an act of essentially
modern invention, substitution and designication. Benjamin dismissed
with the same gesture myth and technology, dreaming and waking, Carl
Jung and Karl Marx. He returned to the fragile moment of awakening, a
dialectical moment in his eyes because it lies at the evanescent, ambiguous
borderline between unconscious imagery and necessary critical lucidity.
That is why he conceived of art history itself as Traumdeutung, dream
interpretation, to be elaborated on the Freudian model.
19
This historical and critical supposition, which I evoke all too briey here,
20
allows us to move beyond or displace a number of sterile contradictions
that have disrupted the aesthetic domain in the matters of modernity and
memory, and especially the pictorial materiality inherent in the adventure
of abstract art and its notoriously idealist references. Nearly all the great
artists, from Wassily Kandinsky to Jackson Pollock, from Malevich to
Reinhardt, from Mondrian to Newman, from Marcel Duchamp to Alberto
Giacometti, have too quickly irritated or delighted their interpreters by their
use, sometimes light-hearted, sometimes profound, of spirituality, original
art, orthodox theology, Theosophy, even alchemy . . . And most historians
spontaneously forget that a philosophical, religious, or ideological claim on
the part of an artist does not in any way constitute an interpretive key to
his oeuvre, but rather requires a separate and joint interpretation that is,
a dialectically articulated interpretation of the aesthetic interpretation as
such.
21
Whether they are materialists, or idealists and in general they
never ask themselves the question in those terms whether they claim to
be avant-garde or nostalgic, artists make their artworks in an order of
plastic reality, formal labour, which must be interpreted for what it offers.
This means it must be understood in its capacity as a heuristic opening, and
not in terms of an axiomatic reduction to its own programmes. That is
another reason art history is related to Traumdeutung. Let us note that artists
writings, parallel to artworks themselves, very often manifest the same critical
ambiguity supposed in the relation Benjamin called the dialectical image.
22
From this perspective, the case of Newman seems to me exemplary and of
awless clarity. We know that in 1947 Newmans artworks and declarations led
Clement Greenberg to form a suspicious judgement, typical of what I have called
the model of specicity, a model trapped within the vicious circle of history-
as-forgetting (modernism as the forgetting of tradition) and history-as-rebirth
(antimodernism as return to tradition). Greenbergs suspicion was directed
precisely at Newmans use of certain words stemming from philosophical and
religious traditions: intangible reality, uniqueness, ecstasy, transcendental
experience, symbolical or metaphysical content. And Greenberg found such
uses archaic, he said, permeated by something half-baked and revivalist in a
familiar American way, something he found excessive and pointless for artistic
activity as such, pointless, in short, for its specicity.
23
Newman gave a vehement response to these arguments: according to
him, they stemmed from an unintentional distortion based on a misunder-
standing.
24
What misunderstanding? That of imagining, in an extremely
traditional frame of mind all in all, that the relation between certain words
(coming from an age-old tradition) and a certain pictorial tradition must
inevitably be expressed in terms of a programme, that is, in iconographical
terms. Newman refuses the idea that the use of the word mystical corre-
sponds to a principle for him or to an a priori, that is, to his assumption
of a pre-existing belief. He refuses to be seen as a programme-maker,
laying claim to a transformed and transforming today we would say decon-
structive use of these words from the Then. And how does he transform
and deconstruct the meaning of such words, if not by taking on the Now
of a singular, absolutely new, and originary experience, of a pictoriality that
dismisses in a single gesture the gurative past and the stylistic present of
abstract, albeit purist, art? That is why, in his response, Newman does
not hesitate to rub together, hence to irritate as a way of decomposing
their accepted usage the words ecstasy and chaos, the expressions
transcendence and nonmaterial stenography, and the (at the very least
interesting) expression materialistic abstractions. This is a way of positing
himself, if not exactly as a master in contradictions, as Thomas Hess said,
25
then at least as a master of the dialectical image in Benjamins sense.
It is signicant that all of Newmans writings between 1945 and 1949
that is, during the gestation period that saw the implementation of his
most novel, most decisive, and most denitive pictorial problematic
26
manifest most acutely a thinking of the origin that has nothing to do with
a nostalgia for the past, but that concerns precisely the productive collision
between the Now and an unexpected, reinvented Then. His thinking has
nothing to do with an aim of restoration or rebirth, but engages the very
issue of a radical modernity.
27
Hence, the new (origin as whirlpool) requires
us to think from top to bottom of art history itself, that is, the relation an
artist now maintains with the past (origin as source). That is why, in The
Plasmic Image, Newman devotes so much time to rethinking primitive
art, in a mode more anthropological than aesthetic, valorizing ecstasy,
desire and terror at the expense of beauty itself. According to him, the
poor comprehension and use of such primitive art recourse to the criterion
of the ornamental, for example have waylaid the entire modern notion of
abstraction.
28
Hence, the new (origin as whirlpool) requires beginning not with something
like the idea of a golden age represented here by Greek art but on the
contrary with its destruction (a direct and explicit echo of the state of the
civilized world in 1945, when the painter felt he was truly beginning his
work).
29
The origin, as Newman proposes it in a very dialectical notion, is
rst of all the destruction of the origin, or at the very least its distortion, its
making strange. That is why the artist of today can feel much closer to a
fetish from the Marquesas Islands, about which he understands nothing,
than to a Greek statue which nonetheless constitutes his most intrinsic
aesthetic past. The collision between the Now and the decomposed Then
logically leads to the barbarian Newmans term decomposition of
traditional aesthetic categories; and the timeless quality of our imaginary
museums had been wrongly conceived in terms of those categories. Thus,
for heuristic purposes, Newman attempts certain conceptual discriminations
plasmic versus plastic, sublime versus beautiful
30
that are designed
above all to deconstruct our own familiarity with the art of the past.
In the end, what is the origin (origin as whirlpool) if not the wrenching
implementation of that critical ambiguity that Benjamin implicitly charac-
terized with the notion of dialectical image? What does it mean to originate
in the whirlpool of an artistic practice, if not to appeal to a certain memory
of the Then in order to decompose the present that is, the immediate
past, the recent past, the still dominant past in a determined rejection of
all revivalist nostalgia? Interpretations that spontaneously use the temporal
categories of inuence, or the semiotic categories of iconography, go astray
when they try to make Newman a spokesperson for, or an heir to, the
Jewish tradition.
31
We must rather hypothesize that a certain kind of critical
memory of the Jewish tradition among other things permitted Newman
to create the collisions and destructions he was seeking in order to originate
his pictorial practice in what he saw as the sclerotic present of abstraction.
In short, the critique of the present the appeal to categories such as
primitive art or the sublime also included a critique of all nostalgia.
Newman was laying claim to the Now to the utmost degree. I believe that,
without betraying Newman, we could paraphrase his famous title of 1948,
The Sublime is Now by saying that, for him, the supposition of artistic time
implies the dialectical and critical proposition that the origin is now. It is from
within the reminiscent Now that the origin appears, in conformity with a
fundamental anachronism that modernist criticism has as yet been unable
to take on. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real
and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without
the nostalgic glasses of history.
32
THE SUPPOSITION OF PLACE: THE APPARITION OF A
DISTANCE
And that revelation an ancient, ambiguous and critical word in relation
to all formalist specicity is characterized by Newman strictly as a
revelation and a conversion of space. This is a way of radically transforming
the usual sense of the word and at the same time giving it back its material
and phenomenological specicity, which, for my part, I shall call a sup-
position of place. In an admirable text written in 1949, Newman gave the rst
description of an experience of this kind. It took place among the simple
walls made of mud of the Indian tumuli in Ohio. The title of the text,
Ohio, 1949, is simply the name of the site and the numeral designating the
time.
33
But we should add that, despite the articles brevity, Newman also
thought of titling it Prologue for a New Aesthetic, which says a great deal
about the theoretical stakes of that altogether phenomenological and private
description.
It was an unexpected, overpowering experience and not a program-
matic decision based on some aesthetic axiom. It was literally the experience
of an apparition. In that excursion of Newmans among a few archaic
walls stripped of any ornamental or aesthetic pretension, it was none other
than the self-evident nature of the artistic act, in its utter simplicity that
suddenly appeared to the American painter.
34
But, in order to be approached
by words, that experience of simplicity required or better yet, revealed
the productive ambiguity of a two-way ow or two-beat rhythm, a dialectic.
To speak of that space made of crude patches is to speak contradictorily,
to crystallize at least two contradictions: on the one hand, the experience
was that of a here . . . and beyond; on the other, it was that of a visibility
. . . and beyond. Here, there is nothing that can be shown in a museum or
even photographed; [it is] a work of art that cannot even be seen, so it is
something that must be experience there on the spot.
What does this mean? That the visible spectacle, objectiable and
describable, of the landscape opens to something I shall call an experience
of the visual; and that space the objectiable coordinates within which we
situate an object or ourselves opens onto an experience of place.
35
When
Newman describes the feeling that here is the space, we must understand
that the here, the here of the place, only works to deconstruct the usual
certainties we have of the space when, spontaneously, we seek to objectify it.
That is why the afrmation of that here goes hand in hand with an acerbic
critique of the clamour over space with which all of art history has assaulted
our ears, from the time of the Renaissance perspective to the so-called pure
space of Mondrian.
36
The axiomatics and aesthetics of space are one thing: a shared experience
objectied into a specic fact in the history of plastic styles. The experience
of place as Newman approaches it here is something else again: it is, he says,
a private, not a shared, experience, a subjective event and not a measurable
fact. The end of Ohio, 1949 communicates the essential feature, through
the very surprise it elicits in the reader: what Newman is speaking of in
that experience of archaic places the Egyptian pyramids will now seem
to him little more than pretty ornaments in comparison is nothing other,
he writes, than the physical sensation of time. Why, suddenly, fall back on
time? Once our stupor has passed, we begin to understand what is at issue:
Newman, very probably without knowing it, has just given a rst, strictly
Benjaminian, denition of the aura: a strange weave of space and time (SW
2: 518). And we gradually understand that almost all the phenomenological
qualities Benjamin had evoked in his denitions of the aura are found not
only in what Newman articulated about his temporal experience of place,
but also in what he produced, precisely beginning in the years when, from
the response to Greenberg to Ohio, 1949, his pictorial and theoretical
problematic was denitively set in place.
What is the aura, and more precisely, what is that strange weave of space
and time? Benjamin responds with a formula that has remained famous:
it is the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be (SW 4:
255).
37
And, in that denition, there is of course the apparition or revelation
Newman speaks of. There is also that uniqueness, that simplicity Newman
experiences so intensely among the vestiges of archaic Indian architecture.
But, to understand better the phenomenology at play here, we must, I think,
move back to the visual and pictorial experience for which the artists texts
serve as displaced witnesses and readable aftereffects. We must therefore
confront that uniqueness from the near side of the atmospheric experience
of the lived landscape,
38
must approach it, that is, in the concrete procedure
to be observed in the key artwork of that entire period, the painting
Onement I, and more particularly, the 1947 drawing that served as its
heuristic starting-point.
39
Newmans entire production in 1947 was limited to two paintings and
two drawings.
40
Onement I which was rst an untitled ink drawing, its
title coming precisely from the pictorial result it went on to produce is of
modest dimensions, but in it there appears, denitively asserted, the famous
principle of the zip, which characterized the artists later style. It thus
functions as Newmans rst absolute image,
41
obtained directly, without
modication or rectication, in immediacy and in apparition, so to speak.
The experimentation proper to the drawing which we nd in earlier
graphic studies now nds something like its decisive and denitive opening
movement: the white opening in the centre of the drawing in fact achieves,
in a more general way, a procedural opening that will lead Newman to use
adhesive strips in the paintings, strips that both reserve and reveal the zips of
paint elaborated on vast neutral backgrounds.
The opening I am speaking of thus possesses this rst characteristic of
the aura, which Benjamin dened as a unique apparition. It possesses the
quality of uniqueness that Newman laid claim to as the absolute beginning
of his oeuvre, a genesis without a preconceived programme.
42
This becomes
even clearer in Newmans assertion that the vertical zip, far from dividing
the visual eld, instead constitutes it as an indivisible unity.
43
Finally, the
very title Onement I one would have expected Uniqueness or Oneness, and
hardly the Roman numeral I next to a word that apparently means the same
thing powerfully suggests by its very strangeness the condition of singular
uniqueness that Benjamin recognized in every auratic image.
A second characteristic of the aura can be recognized, albeit more subtly,
in the 1947 drawing: this is what Benjamin called the apparition of a distance.
The distance in question is not in any way the foreshortened object we
perceive at the very end of linear perspective. The drawing Onement I,
in fact, does not objectify any spatiality of distancing (we need to oppose
spatial distancing to distance as the phenomenological property of place).
It even subverts all the usual values related to the superposition of gure
and ground: hence, the black of the drawing no more withdraws behind
the white vertical shape than the white withdraws behind the two patches
of black ink. Onement I can thus in no case be interpreted guratively, as
a double door left ajar before us: rst, because the edges of the central zip
ooze or bleed as a result of the the procedure of adhering, then removing
ripping off the material strip, which is designed to reserve the white of
the drawings support while the ink is being spread; and second, because
the saturated zones of black, far from being uniformly compact, reveal a
disintegration in the brushstroke, a loss of adhesiveness that makes the
gesture itself visible, and with it, a fraying of the brush-hairs. These are the
marks, the voluntary traces of the procedure, which the pictorial version of
Onement I will push to the extreme, decisively asserting the incompleteness
of the painting.
44
Phenomenologically speaking, the auratic distance invoked by Benjamin
can be interpreted as the depth that Erwin Straus, then Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, constituted as the fundamental sensorial paradigm of distance
and place, a concept far from any spatial depth that could be objectied
by measurement or by perspective.
45
If in Onement I Newman breaks
denitively with any objectiable depth of space, he reconnects, it seems to
me, with the physical sensation of a depth of place. In that sense, Hubert
Damisch was quite right, evoking Newman but also Pollock to challenge
the so-called rejection of the so-called convention of depth.
46
Like all great
American painting of the period, Newmans effort requires a specic optics
whose theory and phenomenology remain to be set forth.
In Onement I, that phenomenology certainly includes a version of
closeness, given the restricted dimensions of the drawing.
47
But, as Benjamin
says, however close the apparition, a distance suddenly irrupts within it.
It irrupts here in the reserve, in the retrait
48
contrived (and not drawn,
outlined, or situated) by Newman. In that sense, it places us squarely before
a kind of dialectic of place close/distant, in front of/inside, tactile/optical,
appearing/disappearing, open/closed, hollowed out/ saturated which
confers on the image its most fundamental auratic quality. It is an inchoate
rhythm of black and white, a physical sensation of time that gives to the
image-making substance the critical ambiguity that Jean Clay, speaking of
Pollock and Mondrian, so aptly named at depth.
49
Why is that ambiguity of the place rhythmic, appearing and disap-
pearing at the same time? Because something in it passes through inltrates,
mixes with, permeates and disintegrates any certainty about space. This
something is again the aura, which we must not understand in terms of a
third characteristic, which returns to the most archaic and physical, the
most material sense of the word aura. This meaning is that of breath, of
the air that surrounds us as a subtle, moving, absolute place, the air that
permeates us and makes us breathe. When in Onement I Newman reveals
the reserve of the support by stripping off the zip the way one might pull a
gag off someones mouth, he creates not so much a spatial form as a rush of
air. When his brush heavy with ink presses on the paper, it does not so much
draw as exhale its pigmentary matter; when he lifts it slightly off the support,
it inhales, creates a kind of subtle voluminosity Merleau-Pontys word
which, above the paper, again produces a kind of rush of air. The aura of
this drawing would thus be related to something like a respiration.
50
And all
Newmans later drawings only reinforce that impression of breathing surfaces
which produce, as their graphic traces, the subtle rhythm of scanning not
serial or atmospheric but auratic scanning.
THE SUPPOSITION OF THE SUBJECT: IM THE SUBJECT. IM
ALSO THE VERB
To speak in these terms, I readily admit, amounts to speaking in anthropo-
morphic terms of a kind of painting that asserts, and this is obvious, that
it is radically abstract. It is not man that Newman thematizes in Onement
I it is place itself and the (auratic) conditions for its visual dialectic,
its phenomenology.
51
Yve-Alain Bois is right to insist on a certain anti-
anthropomorphism in Newman and, as a result, to relativize the inuence
of Giacometti on the genesis of the painting Onement I.
52
For it is precisely
with Onement I that Newmans paintings denitively cease to contain the
vitalist and genetic ideograms recognizable in the works of the preceding
years, Gea (1945), or Genetic Moment (1947), for example. If Onement I
indeed offers this genetic movement of which all critics speak taking
their cue from the painter himself it does not in any case offer itself as the
iconography of a biblical or kabbalistic subject matter in which we would
have to recognize the division between darkness and light accomplished
by YHWH, or the reddish-brown associated with the Hebrew play on the
words Adam and adamah (earth), or the uniqueness of Adam and Eve
according to the Zohar, or even the uniqueness of the one and only God
of monotheism.
53
All these readings, which in spite of themselves pull Newmans art towards
narration, the symbol and the anthropomorphic guration, very quickly
go astray in embracing the idea of a programme, which the artist found so
repugnant. These readings are only aftereffects of readability and resemanti-
zation. Bois is thus right to restore to Newmans art its pure phenomenological
dimension, its visual dimension of being there or, as I would say, of being
in place.
54
But, immediately, anthropomorphism itself is found to be dialecti-
cally reimplicated in that operation: not eliminated (outdated, vanished), but
transformed (reinvented, resupposed). A modernist critic might no doubt
decree the end of anthropomorphism in Newmans abstract art; but it is
better to suppose that with their specic manner of abstraction Newmans
paintings require that we ourselves transform our spontaneous concept of
anthropomorphism, that is, the relation between shape and humanity.
Newman himself formulated this problematic relationship, which he
certainly sensed was fundamental to his entire oeuvre. He named this
relation in philosophically modern but artistically bewildering terms
the subject or subject matter: The central issue of painting is the
subject matter . . . My subject is anti-anecdotal.
55
Is this a return to the
Panofskian subject matter? Not at all. It is, on the contrary, its dialectical
decomposition, its critical reformulation where, in an almost Freudian
vein, the primacy of a subject position imposes itself. In the years 194548,
Newman began to approach that subject position through words such as
desire, terror, ecstasy and even metaphysical exercise.
56
Later, he offered
a grammatical and no longer strictly expressionist analogy to the notion
of subject, by insisting on the relations that link the subject and the object
in the temporal, dynamic, performative exercise or experiment indicated by
the verbal dimension of a sentence:
When I was a young kid studying French, I studied with a man, Jean-
Baptiste Zacharie, who used to teach French by saying, Moi, je suis
le sujet, Im the subject; vous tes lobjet, you are the object; et voici le
verbe, and hed give you a gentle slap on the face. The empty canvas
is a grammatical object a predicate. I am the subject who paints it.
The process of painting is the verb. The nished painting is the entire
sentence, and thats what Im involved in . . . Im the subject. Im also the
verb as I paint, but Im also the object. I am the complete sentence.
57
We sense quite well that in these two variations on a single theme, both
the dimension of the object and that of the verb both the product and the
process focus attention on the subjective instance incarnated by the artist
himself. Newman is attempting, here as elsewhere, to formulate the paradox
of an abstract art where the subject takes precedence,
58
an art that asserts
the subject (as Surrealism did) but, by being abstract, supposes such an
assertion without thematizing it, without signifying it simply by bringing
all its attention to bear on the effective, dynamic, and even affective relation
between the matter and the support, or what the French language designates
so well with the term subjectile.
59
Newmans claim to an effectivity and an affectivity in his practice of
abstraction thus forced him twice to modify the usual notion of subject
matter: rst, he rejected any iconographical thematization in favour
of a more philosophical afrmation of the artist as subject; and second,
he rejected any narcissistic romanticizing in favour of a reection on
the procedural relation that, in the act of painting, unites the words
subject and matter. His grammatical denition of painting amounts to
conceiving artistic labour dialectically, in terms of a three-way relationship
among subject, matter and subjectile, as a kind of Borromean knot where
any pressure exerted on one term structurally modies the position of the
others. Hence, in Onement I, the operation carried out on the subjectile the
central reserve, the removal of the masking strip, and the respiration of
the brush in the case of the drawing; the interruption of this same process
in the case of the painting, where Newman left his colour test as it was,
on the adhesive strip afxed vertically to the centre of the painting that
experimental operation or supposition transforms the usual effectivity of the
matter as it is normally deposited on the canvas by the brush. In the same
way, the suspension of that operation, its critical ambiguity, transforms
the usual position of the subject facing his work in progress. We could say,
paraphrasing Jacques Lacan, that the zip in Onement I functions as a unary
trace (trait unaire) in Newmans work: in a single stroke, it has transformed
everything, has literally invented the subject of his painting.
60
We can then understand that the subjective position of the painter, far
from being reducible to some affective abandon (as we too often imagine
with respect to Abstract Expressionism), is to be deduced from an effective
choice, that is, a procedural choice. Conversely, this relationship illumi-
nates the very notion of procedural choice (as we too often imagine it with
respect to Minimalism, for example) from the angle of a subject position.
There is no procedural negotiation without a displacement, a rapture of a
subject, just as there is no rapture of a subject without the procedural and
even logical negotiation of a heuristic working rule.
61
To say this, to note
this in Onement I, is again, I believe, to speak of the aura. It is to detect in
the supposition of the aura something that Newmans art teaches us even
beyond what Benjamin may have said about the aura. The most beautiful
gift that an auratic work like Newmans can make to the notion of the aura
is to modify it, to transform it, to displace it.
We know that, for Benjamin, the aura as apparition of a distance,
however close it may be was opposed to the trace, which was dened as the
apparition of a proximity.
62
According to him, that opposition conditions
our attitude as spectators of human labour: the auratic images of the past are
in fact often as the example of the veronica forcefully attests objects made
in such a way that people will believe they were not made by the hand of
man.
63
In them the aura imposes itself, as I said, to the degree that the image-
making procedure remains secret, miraculous, beyond reach. With Onement
I, in contrast as with a number of twentieth-century artworks the aura
comes into being, is supposed, through the gazes proximity to a procedural
trace as simple as it is productive, as effective as it is ambiguous. In this type
of artwork, trace and aura are no longer separated; as a result, we can even
recognize the work as an unprecedented combination, which I shall call for
the occasion an auratic trace. In this case, the procedural effectivity and
the hand does not always intervene directly in the procedure, as we see in the
retrait of the central zip in Onement I produces the apparition of distance
and, so to speak, succeeds in making us touch depth. In this contact, it is our
relation to human labour that is implicated, transformed and renewed.
That may be why the twentieth-century artist succeeds in giving us the
gift of artworks that look at us, beyond any objective relation, beyond
anything we see in them: a double distance is established, in which our
proximity to the formal labour to the subjectile and to the matter estab-
lishes the auratic respiration. That respiration does not impose anything
on us, but conforms us with the simple choice of looking or not looking,
of implicating or not the visual effectiveness of the subject. That may be
how the aura declines today, how it is declined and enfolded through its
contact with the subject, the matter, and the subjectile. That may be how
we can suppose the aura as we face a drawing, however modest, by Barnett
Newman
2
THE SHORTNESS OF HISTORY, OR
PHOTOGRAPHY IN NUCE:
BENJAMINS ATTENUATION OF
THE NEGATIVE
DAVID S. FERRIS
Modest methodological proposal for the cultural-historical dialectic . . . The
very contours of the positive element will appear distinctly only in so far 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 what was previously signied. And so on,
ad innitum, until the entire past is brought into the present in a historical
apocatastasis.
N1a, 3
In one of the fragments belonging to the posthumous text On the Concept of
History, a fragment entitled The Dialectical Image, Walter Benjamin borrows
a comparison made by Andr Monglond in the introduction to his 1930
study Le Prromantisme franais. While speaking of the ability of a literary text
to present a meaning inconceivable at the time of its conception, Monglond
compares this effect to a photographic plate from which an image may be
developed at a later date. In the rst sentence of this fragment, Benjamin recalls
this comparison in the following words: If one looks upon history as a text, then
what is valuable in it [dann gilt von ihr] is what a recent author says of literary
texts: the past has left in them images which can be compared to those held fast
by a light sensitive plate (GS 1.3: 1238/SW 4: 405). The comparison is called
upon to exemplify an understanding of history in terms of the process used to
produce a photographic print. In Benjamins account, the comparison, however,
is not so straightforward as the opening phrase of this sentence indicates: if one
looks upon history as a text. As a consequence of this conditional phrase, history
is understood by reference to what photography is said to do more than any
other art: preserve the past for the present by means of the image. But, equally
compelling as this conditional opening is the sequence of comparisons it sets
up. Including the opening phrase, three comparisons are made in this sentence.
The rst, hypothetical, makes history and a text equivalent to one another.
The second compares a text to a photographic plate. The third, by accepting
the terms of the rst hypothetical comparison would offer knowledge of the
initial subject of this whole sequence: history. In effect, the logic enacted by these
comparisons takes the form of a syllogism that can be expressed as follows: if
history is comparable to a text and a text is comparable to a photographic plate,
then, history is comparable to the same photographic plate. Yet, throughout
this sequence it cannot be forgotten that, rst, the premise is conditional, and
second, what is at stake in these comparisons is another relation, the relation
between a looking (betrachten) and a saying (sagen), between a history looked
at as a text and a history that can be spoken about because of this looking in
other words, a history that can be read. As will be seen later in passages from the
Arcades Project, it is the attainment of such a relation that is at stake in the dialec-
tical image. But what is at stake in this relation is that history should mean, be
of value, possess worth as the verb used by Benjamin in the phrase connecting
this looking and saying indicates: gelten. What then decides that such a history
is meaningful (that is, has signicance in the present since history has no other
time in which to be meaningful) is that what can be looked upon belongs to
language. Yet, if history is to attain value in this way, why is it that a visual mode,
photo-graphy, is the chosen means of recognizing this value? Does this mean
that Benjamins understanding of history is only conceivable after the advent of
photography, a history that is then a reection of the modernity announced by
photography? Or does photography effect a change in the structure of history in
the same way that Benjamin claims it does for the work of art in his essay The
Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility, a claim that locates the
signicance of art as a function of the technological?
1
Only with the advent of photography does it become possible to look at what
was actually present to the past, since the moment of the photographic image is
also the moment captured in the image. No painting can make this claim; as
Benjamin argues, its means of production, so dependent on the hand, forbids
it from doing so.
2
Since photography is what allows the past to be captured for
the rst time in an image that also belongs to the moment of the time captured,
what then appears with photography is an image that no longer simply belongs
to the domain of art it now makes an historical claim.
Benjamin expresses such a claim, in the course of The Work of Art
in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility when he relates the work of
the Parisian photographer, Eugne Atget, to the withdrawal of the auratic
presence of the human subject in early photography:
But where the human being withdraws from the photographic image,
there the superiority of exhibition value to cult value steps [tritt] for
The Shortness of History, or Photography in Nuce 21
the rst time. To have given this development its local habitation is the
incomparable signicance of Atget, who, around 1900, captured Paris
streets devoid of their human aspect. It has been justly said that he
recorded them like the scene of a crime. A crime scene, also, is devoid
of the human; its record occurs on account of its evidence. With Atget,
photographic records begin to be evidence in the historical process
[Proze]. This brings out their hidden political signicance [Das macht
ihre verborgene politische Bedeutung aus]. (GS 1.2: 485/SW 4: 258)
3
The absence of the human subject from the street scenes recorded by Atget
becomes, for Benjamin, the sign of an incomparable but also superior signi-
cance. This signicance, concentrated in the exhibition value of the image,
is named the political by the end of these sentences. Photography not only
allows the political to appear, but does so by bringing it out of concealment.
The political is therefore what resides, rst of all, concealed in the photo-
graph as image. But, by what means does this concealment occur? Is it a
natural attribute of the photographic image? Despite the attraction of such a
claim (which presumes an essential effect for photography), the example of
Atget indicates that this ability of photography to bring out the political does
not reside in the technical process of photography as if, by its nature, photo-
graphy excluded the presence of a human subject. Rather, Benjamin derives
the political aspect of these photographs by means of comparison: they are
like the record of a crime scene, a record from which the human subject is
excluded in favour of the objects that remain in such a scene. The political
signicance of Atgets photographs is understood strictly in accordance to
this analogy. In fact, it is the analogy which brings out this signicance
rather than some aspect of photography as a medium. Atgets photographs
thus achieve the importance Benjamin attaches to them because of a choice
to capture street scenes of Paris undisguised by any human presence.
4
As a
result, Atgets photographic images become the record of a street from which
the organizing actions of a human subject have been excluded rather than the
record of photographys technical ability. This demonstration of exhibition
value is not an attribute of the medium but a framing within the medium.
This is why Benjamin will state that Atget has only given this exhibitional
aspect of photography what he calls a local habitation, an abode or a place
(seine Sttte). Yet, despite this limitation, the example reveals the crucial place
the technical will hold as a means of understanding history. The question will
be to account for the technical in terms of the historical since it is through the
recognition of the former in the latter that the political signicance of history
is to be recognized (or, to recall a verb Benjamin uses in the passage just cited
as well as elsewhere in the Reproducibility essay, it is a question of how the
technical steps into the place of history).
5
In an entry to Convolute Y of the Arcades Project, Benjamin locates
this technical aspect in relation to history in the following manner: The
effort to launch a systematic confrontation between art and photography
was destined to founder at the outset. It could only have been a moment
[Moment] in <the> confrontation between art and technology a con-
frontation brought about by history (Y2a, 6). The debate which followed
the invention of photography about whether it belonged amongst the
arts or was, as Baudelaire put it, the servant to art is of little interest to
Benjamin, since the real issue is not photography or any specic photograph
or photographer but what photography represents as a technology.
6
First and
foremost, Benjamin asserts, in photography, exhibition value begins to drive
back cult value all along the line (GS 1.2: 485/SW 4: 257). This remark
makes clear that photography has a role to play. Photography is the means
through which the beginning of a confrontation occurs, a confrontation
caused by history. That this confrontation is not seen for what it is the
beginning of a general confrontation between art and technology, rather
than a confrontation between art and one mode of technology conrms
the extent to which photography is only the beginning of a development
that leads to lm and beyond to digital imagery. To interpret this event, this
confrontation, as the result of history, as Benjamin does in the passage from
the Arcades Project just cited (Sie sollte ein Moment in der Auseinandersetzung
zwischen Kunst und Technik sein, die die Geschichte vollzog), indicates that the
appearance of photography crystallizes a force already present within history.
In this case, just as Atget gives a local habitation to the stepping forward
of exhibition value, so then does photography provide a local habitation for
the political signicance of history. Photography becomes, in this sense, not
merely a means of producing images, but rather becomes itself an image, a
technique for the production of historys political signicance. In fact, it is
a handle, as Benjamin describes it in section V of the Reproducibility essay
when commenting on the exhibition value of art: This much is certain:
today, photography and lm give [geben] to this understanding the most
useful handles [die brauchbarsten Handhaben] (GS 1.2: 484/SW 4: 257).
As handles, neither photography nor lm can be confused with an under-
standing that remains the domain of history, they are rather the means
by which this understanding is developed. For Benjamin, this is true even
when, as he states in the sentence preceding the one just cited, exhibition
value achieves an absolute emphasis: through the absolute emphasis that
rests [liegt] on its exhibition value, the work of art becomes a form [Gebilde]
with quite new functions (GS 1.2: 484/SW 4: 257). Even at the absolute pole
of its exhibition value, the work of art is a functional form.
7
This functional form, as the word Benjamin uses in this context indicates,
das Gebilde, is tied to the production of art in terms of the image, das Bild.
Since it is on the basis of the image that a function can be given to art,
the production of the image is the single most crucial aspect of Benjamins
understanding of the history within which art occurs. Without this image,
there can be no such history, and therefore no art (to the extent that art
claims its signicance through a historical relation to the present). The image
is the handle of history, but as Benjamins description of its appearance in
exhibition value points to, its role as handle only appears at the point of an
absolute emphasis. It is at this point that exhibition value is recognized not
for exhibiting something such as a building or street in a photograph but
rather for exhibiting exhibitionality in general. What is exhibited in this case
is the means of exhibition: photography, exhibition as technique.
Benjamin emphatically bases his understanding of the change in the
function of art on such a means. This can be read in the Reproducibility
essay when he asserts the difference that the camera makes: For the rst
time, photography freed the hand from the most important artistic tasks
in the process of pictorial [bildlicher] reproduction, tasks that now devolved
solely upon the eye looking into a lens [welcher nunmehr dem ins Objektiv
blickenden Auge allein zuelen] (GS 1.2: 47475/SW 4: 253). This freeing
of the hand, enabled by photography, has all the character of an event (for
the rst time and a few a pages later this becomes the rst time in world
history [GS 1.2: 481/SW 4: 256]). But, what does not change is that art
is functional even when it displays itself as technical. A technical art is,
in this respect, no different from an auratic art: they are both claimed by
function.
This shared aspect can be readily seen if the sentence in which Benjamin
speaks of the new function of art is cited in full. This sentence describes this
functionality as occurring both in the absolute emphasis on exhibition value
and in the absolute emphasis on its cult value:
Just as the work of art in prehistoric times, through the absolute emphasis
that rested on its cult value, rst became an instrument of magic which
was only later recognized as a work of art, so today, through the absolute
emphasis that rests on its exhibition value, the work of art becomes a form
[Gebilde] with entirely [ganz] new functions. (GS 1.2: 484/SW 4: 257)
Only in its existence as means is the work of art both an instrument of
magic through cult value and a form with entirely new functions. In each
case, the work of art is a form whose signicance derives from a value that
can be placed on that form. Consequently, the work of art is only known
through the value that steps into its place. Yet, in asserting such an under-
standing, this sentence also poses a question about the existence of a work
of art that is not simply the embodiment of a value. The question is, if
value is the handle by which the work of art may be picked up, what is in
effect being picked up? What remains of the work of art when there is no
such handle? According to what Benjamin says in this sentence, what is
picked up is what has been subject to the forces that produce an image das
Gebilde. But, here, not only is the work of art recognized in terms of what
produces an image, the means of recognizing it also proceeds by way of the
image to the extent that photography becomes both the means of producing
the exhibitional image (that is, the work of art) and the image through
which the production of such a value is recognized.
8
The camera doubles
as a technological instrument whose formation (also Gebilde) permits the
recognition of the technological. Since, as Benjamin claims, the appearance
of absolute exhibition value in an art whose mode of production is techno-
logical is not simply an event in a series of events but the moment in which
a confrontation between history and art takes place, then such recognition
is understood as also being brought on by history that is, history has a
role in the appearance of the technological. How history fulls this role is
directly related to its structuring which, as Benjamin makes clear in the
course of the Reproducibility essay, is a movement between two poles: cult
and exhibition. Despite the fact that Benjamin grants absolute emphasis to
these poles at different times, the latter pole is not excluded from the former
when under the sway of auratic, cult value.
9
This is why Benjamin can speak
of exhibition value as if it had always been there, hidden within the art of
aura and cult value, waiting for the mode of existence most adequate to its
meaning. In recognizing photography as that mode, Benjamin does not just
recognize an example of exhibition value, but also recognizes a history in
which technology and reproducibility are inevitable for art. Photography
thus becomes the means to develop, in the technical, photographic sense
of the word, the history in which its confrontation with the past of art is
already set by history.
In the second sentence of the fragment, The Dialectical Image (discussed
at the beginning of this chapter), Benjamin grants photography just such
a role. And again he refers to Andr Monglonds comparison between
photography and a text to do so. This time, however, Monglond is not
paraphrased as in the rst sentence but cited in Benjamins own translation:
Only the future has at its disposal developers strong enough to allow the
image to come to light in all its details (GS 1.3: 1238/SW 4: 405). Much of
Benjamins understanding of history, as it is expressed in the posthumous
text, On the Concept of History, is condensed here. Above all the sense that
what is properly historical only reveals itself to a future generation capable
of recognizing it, that is, a generation possessing developers strong enough
to x an image never seen before and never to be seen again, as Benjamin
will later insist.
10
Within the Reproducibility essay, photography, as the
future of art, fulls this role. Photography does this not merely because it
brings out exhibition value, but also because at the same time it brings out
the auratic. Only from the perspective of the exhibitional is it possible to
recognize the auratic otherwise art is essentially and unchangeably auratic
even to the point of being incapable of any other determination. In this case,
the auratic could not be a value attached to the work of art. By the same
logic, if it were not something attached, exhibitionality would have no mode
of existence. More importantly, nor would the technological be an essential
pole of art. What is therefore at stake for art in Benjamin is not just a history
that allows the confrontation of these two poles to be recognized as history,
but the recognition of this history through technology. Technology is both
part of this history and the means by which this history and its part in this
history is recognized.
The sentence Benjamin cites from Monglond reects the crucial role
of the image in securing this recognition. However, this emphasis on the
image in Benjamins translation is not exactly what Monglond says. As
Benjamin knew, since he cites the passage in French in Convolute N of
the Arcades Project, Monglond writes: Seul lavenir possde des rvlateurs
assez actifs pour fouiller parfaitement de tels clichs (N15a, 1) [Only the
future possesses developers active enough to search out perfectly such
negatives]. Benjamin translates this sentence as follows: Nur die Zukunft
hat Entwickler zur Verfgung, die stark genug sind, um das Bild mit allen
Details zum Vorschein kommen zu lassen (GS 1.3: 1238) [Only the future
has developers at its disposal that are strong enough to allow the image to
come to appearance in all its details]. Where Monglond uses the French
word for a negative, clich, Benjamin substitutes image, Bild. From one
perspective, there would be no difference here. After all, a negative is an
image even if it is a reversal of how the world is seen. Yet, Benjamins substi-
tution does pose the question of why it occurs at all and of what effect this
change has on the relation between photography and his understanding of
history, a relation so resolutely focused on the image.
Before discussing this substitution of Bild for clich, two other changes of
emphasis in Benjamins translation should be noted: where Monglond says
perfectly (parfaitement), Benjamin writes in all its details (mit allen Details);
where Monglond describes the activities of these developers as searching out
(fouiller), Benjamin says that such developers allow the unperceived image
to come to light, that is, to come to appearance or sight (das Bild mit allen
Details zum Vorschein kommen lassen). Within the example of photography,
what these changes clarify is an emphasis on the image produced, even
to the point of subsuming the negative into that image. For Benjamin,
the negative is already an image waiting for all its details to be brought to
light. As a result, the negative is understood from the perspective of what it
produces to use a Marxist-inected phrase from the introduction to the
Reproducibility essay, it becomes its own prognostic requirement (GS 1.2:
473/SW 4: 252). The difference between negative and print then becomes
a merely technical aspect of an image that has subsumed the process
of its production into itself as technology is recognized less as a means of
producing an image (Baudelaires servant) than a determination of the
image. In this respect, photography is a mode of appearance of the image,
a mode that, quite literally, places the image in its appearance before us: der
Vorschein. As a result, in photography, the image is seen as coming into its
own as image. This result, perhaps only distantly hinted at when Monglond
writes fouiller parfaitement, is made explicit by Benjamins translation. What
emerges as at stake in this use of photography as a means of understanding
history is not just history itself but a history whose promise is fullled by
technology.
11
Here, the historical task of technology can be determined
as the task of reproducing itself in all its details. But, for this task to be
known as history, that is, for technology to be recognized in all its value,
it can make no absolute claim for itself. Otherwise it must fail its inmost
tendency, the reproduction of every detail. This is why in Benjamin the
negative is understood as in the image. Only the image can promise what
it is to become as an image, just as technology can only promise what it is
to be technological rather than what is already technological. Through this
technology, history is developed in Benjamin.
If the negative is already understood as an image by Benjamin then this is
an understanding, as Benjamin clearly states in On the Concept of History,
that cannot be found at any temporal point in the past.
12
Such a negative is
understood according to what it brings to light: the image.
13
Since the print
developed at a later date from a negative reveals what could not be brought to
light at the time of its exposure, the negative does not negate or prevent what
the future can develop. Because the image brings to light what was already
there but could not be seen either in the time of its capture or in the time that
has elapsed since that moment (the time of the past), then these images both
the negative and what is produced from it necessarily vary in the amount
of detail they exhibit. Thus, a deviation is an unavoidable effect of an image.
Since this variation depends on a future in which there are developers active
or strong enough to produce the image in all its details, then this variation
depends on the internal development of technology, on a history that belongs
to technology. If this deviation did not occur, the image in which Benjamin
understands history would already have been brought to appearance in all
its details in the negative and would be known at the time of its exposure
thereby rendering history useless since it would then have no sense. To
account for this difference within technology is to account for history. The
possibility of such an accounting, as Benjamins emphasis on photography
indicates, is itself an effect of technology, since it is only through the rise of
exhibition value that the technological and its image appears in confrontation
to auratic art, on the one hand, and, on the other, to the concept of history
represented by that art. But, the mere appearance of technology will not be
enough. Here, the question of recognizability, that is, the question of how
looking relates to saying, returns crucially (for it is not enough to look at the
negative to see all its details, they must also be recognized as those details to
do so is to register this recognition, to bring it to language, to sagen). In short,
it is a question of how the looking of technology is not only a mere looking,
not merely the image of das blickende Auge.
In the second entry to Convolute N of the Arcades Project, Benjamin under-
lines the crucial importance of this deviation to the historical undertaking
of that project while attributing its cause to time.
14
Benjamin writes: 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 lines of
inquiry), I base my reckoning (N1, 2). In the language Benjamin uses here,
the difference time makes would disturb the hope of returning through the
image to the moment captured in the negative. Yet, as the sentence preceding
the one just cited indicates, the difference registered by this disturbance does
not arise independently of the attempt to achieve such a return. Benjamin
writes: Comparison of other peoples 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 (N1, 2). To discover this North Pole Benjamins
emphasis is, according to his example, to discover the source of deviation,
the source of what makes any intention of arriving at the North Pole go
astray. But, it is only in such an intention that this deviation is exhibited for
Benjamin in the same way that what is developed from the photographic
image utilizes the same process and produces the same image as any other
time, yet what appears in this image is no longer understood as the image
present to the lens in the time of its capture. Although, in the fragment
on the dialectical image, Benjamin attributes this difference to the future
existence of a developer strong enough to bring out the image in all its details
and although it is the privilege of the future (and therefore the passage of
time) to possess such a developer, time is not such a developer. Time does not
produce the image that becomes available to the future. However, time as a
differential is what makes production of this image possible for this future,
since such a time is marked by the occurrence of two events a condition
that is equally true for photography since every negative and every print is
conceived, technically speaking, on the basis of time, the dened time of its
exposure, the opening and closing of the shutter.
In an entry to Convolute Y of the Arcades Project, Benjamin recounts a
transformation of visual forms that explicitly points to time as a technical
condition to which photography owes its signicance:
The entrance of the temporal factor into the panoramas is brought
about through the succession of times of day (with the well-known
lighting tricks). In this way, the panorama transcends painting and
anticipates photography. Owing to its technical condition [technischen
Beschaffenheit], the photograph, in contrast to the painting, can and must
be coordinated [zugeordnet] with a well-dened and continuous segment
of time (exposure time). In this chronological deneability [chronolo-
gischen Przisierbarkeit], the political signicance of the photograph is
already contained in nuce. (Y10, 2)
The political signicance referred to here is also claimed by Benjamin on
behalf of Atgets photographs of Paris streets but for a different reason. In
the case of Atget, it was their status as evidence their exclusion of human
presence that allowed their hidden political signicance and therefore
their relation to the historical process to be brought out. Here, it is not
a question of what is or is not in the photograph. Rather, the emphasis
falls upon the chronological denability that arises from the techno-
logical condition of any photograph: the fact that a photograph can only
exist because of a dened time. By claiming that the signicance of this
dened time is political, Benjamin is also claiming that the technological
already contains the possibility of this signicance in nuce. Consequently,
history in Benjamin becomes the exhibition of this hidden signicance in
technology in effect, developing technology as the example of what it
already is. For history to develop the political signicance of technology is
then for history to develop the means by which it also attains signicance. If
history does not attain this, time, as Benjamin describes it in Thesis XVII of
On the Concept of History will remain a precious but tasteless seed in its
interior (GS 1.2: 703/SW 4: 396). Precious because, without it, no history as
such is conceivable; tasteless because time, in its chronological denability,
that is, in its technological denition, is not the same as history a history
whose seed offers only its shell, that remains, literally, in a nutshell rather
than yielding its fruit, the nut. How, then, does the technological exhibit
what Benjamin refers to as the nourishing fruit of what is historically under-
stood (GS 1.2: 703/SW 4: 396)?
As already seen in the second entry to Convolute N of the Arcades Project,
to exhibit historical signicance is, for Benjamin, to exhibit a relation to
the past that is also a deviation from that past in the sense that the past
occurs in the form of an image not yet developed in all its details. For
this signicance to appear, an account of such images in terms of their
exhibitionability is necessary. While photography offers an account of such
exhibitionability for the rst time, this account runs the risk of remaining,
as Benjamin notes with respect to Atgets photographs of Paris streets, a local
habitation. As such, it does not reside within the means of photography, it
is not, as already pointed out above, a property of its technology. By what
means, then, does technology produce historical understanding, by what
means does it step into the place of this understanding?
In the Reproducibility essay, technology takes such a step when it appears
with an absolute emphasis on exhibition value. This emphasis, Benjamin
claims, rst emerges within photography. As Benjamin describes it, the
moment this rst emergence depends upon is a moment that occurs within
the photographic process, namely, the moment when what is captured in the
image and the image are dened by the same duration of time: their chrono-
logical denability. This denition takes the form of the negative. Although
Benjamin, unlike Monglond, does not retain the negative when he makes
the analogy between photography and history in the fragment entitled
The Dialectical Image (preferring instead to treat the negative as ein Bild,
granting it the same status as the printed image that can be made from it),
the negative is accentuated when the dening property of exhibitionability
is given in the Reproducibility essay. Benjamin denes this ability when he
states that from the photographic plate, for example, a multiplicity of prints
is possible [ist eine Vielheit von Abzgen mglich]; the question of an authentic
print has no sense (GS 1.2: 4812/SW 4: 256). This denition privileges
what is produced from the negative, since it is the print that possesses the
ability to exhibit what is present in the negative not with respect to what
is depicted in the negative (that is again merely a local habitation, not a
property of technology), but with respect to its purpose: to produce reproduc-
tions that have no priority in relation to one another and therefore no claim
to authenticity since each is as authentic as the other. Here, the prints allow
a negative to come to light, but again it is a negative whose property may
only be recognized through its development into those prints. Monglonds
text, hidden behind Benjamins translation, reminds us that photography, in
the stage that Benjamin refers to it as a medium of reproducibility, is only
such a medium because of the clich or negative that permits it to possess
exhibition value. In other words, multiplicity is the effect of a difference
signalled by the image in its negation. The absolute emphasis on exhibition
value of photography, the means by which technology takes its rst historical
step, overwrites this difference. By turning from this difference, Benjamin
brings to light in all its details the invariability of the image produced from
the negative. This emphasis on the absolute exhibition value of the photo-
graphic image is by no means an emphasis on the signicance of an image,
but rather an emphasis on the technological existence of such an image. Such
an emphasis cannot yield a history other than the repetition of this process.
But what is important to remember, and the Reproducibility essay does this
most clearly, is that the absolute emphasis on exhibition value is what estab-
lishes the two poles and therefore the possibility of recognizing deviation
within the auratic (the recognition that the auratic is already in a certain
respect exhibitional). However, once established, this exhibitional pole, in
order to become historical truth, rather than truth, is set against itself. To be
historical, it must be the place in which a deviation steps and steps in the
name of history as something hidden.
If the presentation of photography as the image of history is maintained
as Benjamin describes it in the fragment, The Dialectical Image, then the
image produced from the negative can bring out what could not have been
seen, but remains hidden in the historical moment in which the image was
captured in its negative form. In both the earlier essay on photography (A
Short History of Photography) and the later essay, The Work of Art in the
Age of its Technical Reproducibility, Benjamin explains the possibility of
such an other understanding in the past by reference to what he terms the
optical unconscious. In 1931, Benjamin describes the appearance of such
an effect as follows:
It is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye:
other above all in the sense that in the place of a space interwoven
with human consciousness steps a space interwoven with the human
unconscious [an die Stelle eines vom Menschen mit Bewutsein durch-
wirkten Raums ein unbewut durchwirkter tritt]. For example, it is readily
accepted that one can give an account, if only in general terms, of the
act of walking; for certain, one knows nothing more about its dis-
position in the fraction of a second of stepping out [von ihrer Haltung
im Sekundenbruchteil des Ausschreitens]. Photography, with its devices
of slow motion and enlargement, opens it up. One comes to know this
optical unconscious rst through photography, just as one comes to know
the instinctual unconsciousness through psychoanalysis. (Photography
GS 2.1: 371/SW 4: 51012)
15
To uncover what is hidden is again a matter of stepping into the place of
something else. Here, a space interwoven with the unconscious takes the
place of a space interwoven with consciousness. To know this step, and,
above all, to know this step for the rst time, is the achievement of photo-
graphys technical ability. Thus photography, and its instrument, the camera,
become the means of knowing that this technical means of reproduction has
stepped into the place of non-technical or manual reproduction.
This step (by which the signicance of photography is grasped and its
signicance is that it has made this step) is, in effect, only knowable through
photography. Since what takes place in this step can only be revealed by
the camera, photography becomes the example of the means by which it is
known as a technology. Only by stepping into the place of the auratic, the
space of conscious, meditative understanding, does the technical become
known in its technicality. But, the step by which it achieves this knowledge
is only recognizable because it has already stepped into the place of the
auratic.
16
Already being there is a fundamental principle of Benjamins
understanding of history. But, equally important is the necessity that
what is there becomes recognizable in its hiddenness like the absence
of people in Atgets photographs of Paris streets. It is the signicance of
this hiddenness that remains hidden until the future. Photography in the
Reproducibility essay is an example of such a history as Benjamins refer-
ences to the existence of exhibitionability prior to its appearance indicate.
The advent of photography, then, represents the moment when technology
is seen to exhibit a tendency already present but undeveloped in auratic art.
This is why, within the terms of Benjamins history of the work of art, there
could never have been a debate about whether or not photography is an art
unless art had already recognized this tendency. Without this tendency,
photography would simply have had no relation to art and art could not
have, as Benjamin claims, sensed the approaching crisis (GS 1.2: 475/SW
4: 256). The sense of history expressed here is strongly Marxist to the extent
that this history of art fulls a prognostic requirement (the requirement
that exhibition value attains absolute emphasis).
17
At the same time, for this
prognostic requirement to have value, what it predicts cannot be the cause
of that prediction. If it were, then the processes of photography would have
been deducible from painting before such a technology came into existence
rather than afterwards. For the advent of these processes to become part of a
history, a requirement of such a history is that their existence should already
be distinct from the fact of their pastness. Here, what is at stake in Benjamins
understanding of history is this difference. Hence, Benjamins emphasis in
Convolute N of the Arcades Project on recognizability (Erkennbarkeit) and
readability (Lesbarkeit).
18
The necessity of this emphasis results directly from
the question rst opened in the Reproducibility essay under the name of
exhibitionability or Ausstellbarkeit, the question of a technology that steps
into the place of art as if it were a pure means, exhibiting only its own
exhibitionability in order to discover itself and establish itself as another
pole for art. This is why the development of Benjamins understanding of
history cannot be separated from the history of the work of art, since it is in
that history that the possibility of deviation is rst brought out. This is also
why history in Benjamin cannot be separated from the ascendancy of the
technical since the technical, as the means of producing history becomes the
means of history so produced.
Before taking up this sense in which the historical is an effect of its
technical production, an aspect of Benjamins understanding of photography
needs to be claried, an aspect that is central to establishing the other pole of
art. As indicated in the citation with which this paper begins, photography
provides a metaphor of history to the extent that history is like the photo-
graphic plate from which an image may be developed at a later date. This
understanding, despite relying on the photographic process through which a
print is produced, suggests a variability in what can be developed from this
image. As a result, in the future, the image can reect a signicance other
than what is discerned in it during the time or age of its capture, despite
the fact that every print made from its negative is the same as another. As
already pointed out, this fact explains Benjamins translation of clich as Bild
(even after he initially acknowledges the role of the photographic plate in
the rst sentence of the fragment). Here, the negative is simply the inversion
of the developed image, it is not different in kind, yet its necessary presence
does signal the place of an inversion within this account of photographys
transformation of the work of art into a work of art designed for reprodu-
cibility (GS 1.2: 481/SW 4: 256). Since the photographic process is what
Benjamins account of reproducibility rests upon rather than the subject
or object recorded by photography and, since this process, as a technical
process, can only produce multiple images by virtue of the negative, the
claim that the question of an authentic print has no sense rests upon a
difference that photography holds to in order to sustain its existence as well
as its role as the example of an absolute emphasis on exhibition value. Does
this then mean that technology, despite Benjamins claims to the contrary
when he compares photography to history, must keep the image separate
from the negative it reproduces in order to support a history other than the
history of auratic art?
19
Another way to pose this question would be: when
photography becomes an image of history, why must the negative recede?
Indeed, why is it that this inversion (which separates image and negative
but which also creates the possibility of the comparison of photography to
history) does not carry over into the dialectical image, despite this being
named a dialectical image?
20
What is at stake in this history is not just an interpretation of technology
as exemplied by photography but rather a relation that, nominally, takes
the form of an inversion as Benjamin moves from a visual technology to
history. Despite no explicit reection on this inversion by Benjamin, its
presence can be traced in a phrase and a word that link, on the one hand,
the Reproducibility essay and its account of exhibitionability, and, on
the other, both the theses presented in On the Concept of History and
Convolute N of the Arcades Project. When Benjamin rst speaks of the
difference made by photography in the Reproducibility essay, he states
that the most important artistic tasks have now devolved solely upon
the eye looking into a lens (GS 1.2: 475/SW 4: 253). Within Benjamins
account, this looking eye, this blickende Auge, reduces the intervention
of the human subject to a mere act of looking as the role of the hand in
the formation of art is superseded.
21
Yet, even here, the eye still looks. It
has no choice. The technology requires its involvement. The camera, after
all, is not a subject capable of directing itself to this or that scene. But,
when Benjamin speaks of history in the posthumous theses, the looking
eye becomes the eye in its look, its glance, Augenblick. Linguistically, das
blickende Auge inverts into Augenblick but also with this inversion the
looking eye takes on the dening property of the technical instrument
it looks into: the camera and the chronologically denable time of the
exposure that allows the image to be held fast and subsequently recognized
as an image, its Belichtungsdauer. Here, the Augenblick operates as the inter-
ruption of the looking eye, interrupting its look with another looking, an
interruption measured by the temporal brevity of the glance or look of the
eye. In the Augenblick of Benjamins theses on history, this looking that
interrupts in the moment of its glance steps into the place of what Benjamin
denes as the technical condition (die technische Beschaffenheit [Y10, 2]) of
photography. Just as the political signicance of photography [is] contained
in nuce in this condition, so, in this moment, the historical signicance of
the image is also grasped by this condition in both the theses of history and
Convolute N of the Arcades Project and never more so than when these
works gure the occurrence of this image in the limited and interruptive
duration of a ash of lightning.
22
Here, the phrase in nuce should not be put
aside since it would also reinforce this temporal condition if the German
sense of Nu is also heard.
The temporal factor that coordinates the photograph and the technical
condition of its creation (Y10, 2) can now be discerned in the appearance
of the image through which Benjamin founds his understanding of history.
It is this condition that gives recognizability to such an image, that allows
it to move from what is merely a looking on (the looking into the lens
of the Reproducibility essay) to a look whose duration, however short,
is given signicance by this condition (through its recognizability and
readability, its coming to light zum Vorschein kommen). That this coming
to light takes the form (Gebilde) of the technical condition of exhibition-
ability (through which the work of art takes on entirely new functions)
in the Reproducibility essay reveals the extent to which what is at stake
in Benjamins understanding is the technical condition through which his
historical materialism is reproduced: history as the reproduction of itself
as image. While the condition of this history can be coordinated with the
reproducibility of the work of art after aura (and Benjamins allusion to the
political signicance of Atgets photographs of Paris streets already points to
this relation), this coordination also takes the form of an inversion. Where
the historical image, the dialectical image occurs, it announces itself in a
ash of light just as the shutter of the camera announces the arrival of an
image to the photographic plate or negative on which it is recorded inversely:
darkness as light, light as darkness. But besides this coordination by
comparison (which can only transform photography into a phenomenology
of history), there is another inversion, one in which photography, or rather,
its formation functions as the clich of history.
This inversion, already indicated in the shift from blickende Auge to
Augenblick, is given a local habitation in the lightning ash whose signi-
cance is not its blinding effect but its minimal temporal duration. Only in
such a duration does history and the dialectical image occur for Benjamin
but, in this case, what happens in this duration of the lightning is not the
reception of light, as in photography and the camera, but its emission.
Reception only occurs when, like the photographic plate, the historical
subject receives this ash by recognizing and reading what is received as
an image. Here again, the place of the clich, the historical subject, would
give way to the Bild as the image becomes the only point of reference.
Here, it gives way in the name of a history whose recognizability arises
in its deviation from those forms of history Benjamin would resist if not
overcome, namely, historicism, universal history, progress, a tradition
subject to conformism (the geographical poles rather than the magnetic pole
of Benjamins historical project).
23
But, the condition of this deviation is the
placement of the image in its inverted form in its other pole. (In the terms
of the Reproducibility essay, the relation of cult value to exhibition value
is the inversion of its relation in photography). The dialectical image is in
this sense strictly dialectical, it is the inverse of the history out of which it
appears but at the same time is already within that history.
In the passage previously cited from Convolute Y (10, 2) where
Benjamin traces the political signicance of the photograph to its chrono-
logical denability the recognition of such an image occurs through what
he names the differential of time, the difference that time makes. But, for
an image to appear according to this differential, it must also be lled with
time, for Benjamin the time of the now. An early fragment from the Arcades
Project addresses how this is to be understood. According to this fragment,
the dialectical image contains time in its smallest, its least form:
On the dialectical image. In it lies time . . . The time differential in which
alone the dialectical image is real . . . Real time enters the dialectical
image . . . in its smallest form [Gestalt] . . . All in all, the force of time
[Zeitmoment] in the dialectical image lets itself be discovered [lt sich . . .
ermitteln] only by means of the confrontation with another concept. This
concept is the now of recognizability. (Q, 21)
Time in its least form enters the dialectical image. A form that can only
be discovered in confrontation. A time without time for itself. A time that
needs something other than itself if it is to be itself rather than a timeless
history to which it cannot belong. In its least form this time is the condition
of the dialectical image. But in this case, what is referred to as time cannot
be time at all, at least not in the sense that confuses history with time. Yet,
in order to intervene, this time is given an image. As an image it is given
denition and, as Benjamin states, confrontation is the means by which
this denition arises when the dialectical image comes up against the now
of recognizability. This now is also the moment, the Augenblick in which
the looking of the eye is gured as a look.
24
The inversion that relates the
looking eye to the Augenblick is now revealed as the moment of guration
since, in this moment, seeing becomes what can only be said (in the sense
that the instant is always over in order to be an instant and therefore cannot
be seen but only spoken of ).
25
Yet, when Benjamin describes this movement,
it is not a particular guration or a particular inversion that is at work but
guration itself. In Benjamins own words, it is the image as an image that
produces this arrest, the image in its gurality:
The image is that in which what-has-been [das Gewesene] steps together
[zusammentritt] in a ash with the now to form a constellation. In other
words: the image is dialectics at a standstill . . . the relation of what-has-
been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but gural [bildlich].
Only dialectical images are genuinely historical that is, not archaic
images. (N3, 1)
In the verb zusammentreten, this dialectical relation of what-has-been with
the now is gured as a coming together that takes the form of a step.
26
It
is this stepping that marks the image as genuinely historical for Benjamin.
At the same time, or rather, in the same time (time in its least form), this
stepping is also understood as a momentary halting or interruption of
progression and continuity hence the images of crystallization, constel-
lation, of a monad.
27
These images are what Benjamin refers to in Thesis
XVII of On the Concept of History as the structure [Struktur] in which the
historical materialist recognizes the sign of a messianic arrest [Stillstellung]
of happening (GS 1.2: 703/SW 4: 396). Not only is the image understood
as a structure, but this structure brings the work of placing (Stellung) to a
halt, in effect, denes the work of stellen so that what emerges is a place in
place of a time that has no time of its own, the place of a structure. It is in
this place that what is genuinely historical steps for Benjamin, but in order
for this stepping to be recognized as historical, history (time that has no
time) must step along with the means of its recognition. If these did not
step together, then, this history in which happening is arrested would not
be differentiated from the merely representational. Its Augenblick would
therefore not exhibit its presentation as structure or form (das Gebilde), that
is, as the means of its presentation. For this history the genuinely historical
in Benjamin to attain a critical force with respect to historical progress
and continuity it has no other choice but to confront the foundation of
their means of representation. All else would be, as Benjamin puts it, in the
service of the victor who has not ceased to be victorious (Thesis VI). Yet,
when Benjamin denes further the concept against which the dialectical
image lets itself be known in a confrontation, the concept of the now of
recognizability, the critical force of this image is given a perilous existence:
The image that has been read [gelesene Bild] which is to say the image in
the now of its recognizability bears to the highest degree the imprint of
the perilous critical moment, which lies at the foundation of all reading [des
kritischen, gefhrlichen Moments, welcher allem Lesen zugrunde liegt] (N3,
1). In another entry to this same Convolute, in which what is stated in this
entry is repeated almost word for word, Benjamin does insert, however, one
more phrase between this passage and the passage just cited. The phrase
reads: and the place in which one encounters them [dialectical images] is
language (N2a, 3). Only in language is there a now of recognizability.
Therefore, only in the encounter with language can there be a dialectical
image. This encounter takes on the form of that confrontation Benjamin
ascribes to the relation between art and photography (see Y2a, 6 discussed
above). But why should encountering language reveal the same structure
that is brought out by history as the relation of art to photography? Indeed,
just what is this structure of language for Benjamin: this structure that has
to be read and, whether recognized or not, must be present at every moment
(alle Augenblicke) since it is the foundation of all reading?
Benjamin states that in the dialectical image it is the relation between
what-has-been and the now that is dialectical. This relation is then redened
as not temporal in nature but gural [bildlich]. If the nature of this relation
is not temporal but bildlich, then, the dialectical image can also be redened
according to its own exhibitional structure as das bildliche Bild, as the image
revealed in its image-likeness, its bildlichkeit. In this case, the dialectical
would be exhibited as what it already is and the means of this exhibition
is language since, as Benjamin asserts, it is only there that one encounters
dialectical images. As such, language becomes the handle by which the
dialectical image is recognized as an image that arrests its own dialectical
movement. Thus, the two concepts that encounter one another in this
genuinely historical image are the linguistic and the dialectical. The true
historian, as described by Benjamin in the same fragment with which this
essay begins (the fragment in which history, text and photography are set in
comparison to one another), is the one able to read this image, but such a
historian, Benjamin adds (by way of citing Hofmannstal), must read what
was never written (GS 1.3: 1238/SW 4: 405).
28
To read what was never written. Is not this reading the work of a developer
available only to the future? To develop time in the image of its recogniz-
ability? Here, more than anywhere else, the relation of looking to saying is at
stake as the condition of this reading, since what was never written is what
could only be looked at and what is read belongs to writing. But what can
only be looked at possesses no means of recognition, no denable chronology,
no duration in which it can be present just as time has no time in which
to be present hence the bursting by which Benjamin describes its movement
out of this state.
29
To name this duration as the now of the now of recogniz-
ability is to name language as the place of its reproducibility, but this place,
not to mention its critical function, is, Benjamin insists, perilous since what is
readable in this moment can only be read in this moment. As Thesis V states,
what ashes up at the moment [Augenblick] of its recognizability . . . is never
seen again (GS 1.2: 695/SW 4: 390).
30
Its function in this case is never to
become an image for the past since the signicance of such an image would
always be tied to the here and now of its event in that past an understanding
that is in effect auratic (according to the terms in which the aura is dened in
the Reproducibility essay). Instead, by making it never seen again Benjamin
ensures that every image appearing in the now of recognizability arrests
the means by which historicism, continuous progress, universal history all
lay claim to an authentic account of history as if by this claim the image
assured the eternal value of such histories, the image as timeless truth. Against
this, Benjamin writes that the eternal, in any case, is far more the rufe on
a dress than some idea (N3, 2).
31
With this inversion of the relation between
the eternal and the image the image is no longer an image for the eternal
but rather the eternal is now in it and with the disappearance of the image
from sight, genuine history is interrupted in order to preserve the future as
the place in which its interruptive force may again take place. This is why, for
Benjamin, these images rst come to readability only at a dened time [sie erst
in einer bestimmten Zeit zur Lesbarkeit kommen] (N3, 1). The historical index
of this coming to readability is the now of recognizability the dened time
in which they can be read. But if what is read is their truth, then, what can
only be read is that they will never be seen again. This is the truth that is the
death of intentional history: history as progress, universal history, and so on.
This, in the end, is the content of the truth exhibited in the dialectical image:
never to be seen again. In this aspect, every image so produced has the same
effect history in the age of its reproducibility. There is no authentic image
of time since no image, as photography so clearly illustrates, takes place in
time, but only because of a time that recedes as the condition of its recog-
nition. Within this understanding of time, every image is thus the record of
this recession, that is, every image is the recession in which history takes on a
form. In this, they do not vary and this is also why the interest of Benjamins
concept of history does not, in the end, lie in his claims on behalf of historical
materialism. This concept treats the temporal condition of history, a condition
that assures the reproducibility of history in the image. It is not, in this case,
an example of history but the example of time as the unvarying clich from
which the image is developed. Its force is this exemplariness, which is to say
its citability an aspect reinforced by the presentation of the Arcades Project
as well as the theses on history, both are pre-eminently citable as well as pre-
eminently readable as citations.
In this citability, Benjamin remains the most telling example of a history
understood as example, a history that can and would only be shown
(method of this project . . . nothing to say . . . only to show?). This under-
standing, unlike Kafkas Messiah, does not come later than it should.
32
(But then, who is to say that the lateness of Kafkas Messiah would not
allow the Messiah to arrive on time, unnoticed? An arrival that would not
matter.) This understanding of history has appointed its time now as
if it were a time appointed for it (as if time could ever be late or even on
time). But, to defer this moment to the future is to ensure that history, in
its least form, will show itself on time if not in time. As such, it will show in
the moment of its appointment, the moment of its only possible recognition
as history. Only then does it arrive as das bildliche Bild. Only then does it
arrive in the shortness of a history that has no time to call its own other
than the chronological denability of its event. But to make the example of
times not-coming matter, to make the time that has no time short enough
to be recognized as history, is this not still the task of technology? Even in
the time of an Augenblick, when the looking of the eye is splintered into the
look of messianic time? And is such technology not the reproducible image
of history reproduced as the end of modernity? And is this not in the guise
of something different from what was previously signied, and so on, ad
innitum, until the entire past is brought into the present? Im Nu-ce?
3
NOW: WALTER BENJAMIN ON
HISTORICAL TIME
WERNER HAMACHER*
What Walter Benjamin uncovers in his theses On the Concept of History
is the temporal structure of the political affect. Historical time is founded
upon political time directed towards happiness. Any theory of history of
historical cognition and of historical action therefore will have to take
this time of the affect as its starting point. The fact that pathemata, affects,
passions were already to an extent discredited within political theory during
Benjamins times must have been attributed by him to the disappearance
of their genuine political dimension. Within prevailing historiography the
political impulse was replaced by the rational calculation of an abstract
cognition of the object. Thus, in order to clarify the force of political affects,
it had to be shown that such affects are also decisive for objective cognition.
This occurs in Benjamins second thesis, On the Concept of History. The
thesis demonstrates that cognitive acts, determined by the microstructure
of the affective time, are political operations. The cognition at stake here,
however, is the cognition of happiness. Happiness is never experienced in
a present without this present relating to that which has been (Gewesenes).
It is not, however, experienced on a past reality, but on the irrealis of its
non-actualized possibility. There is happiness such as could arouse envy in
us this is how Benjamin begins his argument, making envy the seal of
authenticity in which happiness manifests itself 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
(GS 1.2: 693/SW 4: 389). The kind of happiness that alone can prove itself
and, according to Benjamins portrayal can only prove itself through envy
is not past happiness, it is the happiness that was possible in the past but
was missed. Happiness is the festum post festum amissum. It does not reside
in an event that could become the subject of objective cognition but rather
in a possibility, which proves to be a possibility only in the miss and which
only by virtue of this miss preserves itself as a possibility for the future.
Happiness is the possible in its miss: it is the possible that could impossibly
have been realized at the time, it is the possible that springs from an im-
*Trans. N. Rosenthal.
Now: Walter Benjamin and Historical Time 39
possible. This kind of happiness only, im-possible happiness, provokes envy.
For envy is an affect that is directed not towards anything real but rather
towards something possible that is disguised, not realized and therefore still
open. For Benjamin, envy is not kindled by the happiness of someone else,
but rather by ones own happiness that was possible and not seized. Envy
is therefore without object like the intention of Lucifers knowledge, an
intention which aims towards the good. This good, happiness, maintains
itself as if according to the platonic formula epkeina tes ousas, beyond the
recognizable essences in the realm of their mere possibility. It is the other
that could have been, and it preserves in what became the actuality the
possibility of its otherness.
Happiness is a contingent possibility of that which has been (des
Gewesenen), a possibility that preserves itself for another time; that is,
rst of all for that future that is now present. In this present, however,
it becomes understandable only to envy, for only envy is the organon of
cognition of that which cannot be held, what cannot be grasped as given
reality and cannot be registered as possession. Cognition is essentially a
manifestation of this envy, an irreducible vitium, and it is just as essen-
tially object-less, for the happiness towards which it is directed is not the
actual and not the possible, but the possible that has become impossible. If
happiness existed as a possession or property, its cognition would be neither
necessary nor possible any longer. Happiness is only cognizable in its pure
that is, missed, deferred and unseized possibility. And only as such a
possibility does it offer itself to a future cognition. Each such cognition,
however, not only has an ethical dimension, directed towards happiness, it is
furthermore structurally historical, in so far as it concerns past possibilities;
in these past possibilities, however, it concerns the possibility of a different
future. Thus it must be said of the temporality of the cognition of possible
happiness that it jumps out of traditional categories of time and history.
Unlike those categories, which concern temporal and historical realities,
rather this cognition addresses possibilities and rst of all possibilities that
are not actualized, that have not entered the series of historical events and
have not become components of historical tradition. In one of the notes on
Baudelaire, Benjamin says: The further the mind goes back into the past,
the more the mass of that increases which has not yet become history at all
(GS 1.3: 1175). Historical cognition is cognition of that which has not yet
become history, that which yet can become history, because its possibilities,
and that is possibilities of happiness, have not yet been actualized. History
is only possible because of the possibilities that were missed.
The true historicity of historical objects lies in their irrealis. Their
un-reality is the store-place of the historically possible. For their irrealis
indicates a direction through which that which could have been is referred
to those for whom it could have been and for whom it is preserved as a
missed possibility. There is happiness, Benjamin writes, 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 (GS 1.2:
693/SW 4: 389). The possible stored in un-reality is not an abstract or ideal
possible in general and for all times but a possible always for a particular
future, that is, for precisely the one singular future that recognizes itself in
it as missed. It is we who could have talked to people but didnt; it is we
who did not seize an opportunity and now have to enviously admit that
we have missed a possibility to speak that only we could have taken, for it
was our possibility, which already now is no more. It is we, again and again,
who leave language in its possibility unused, although it was a possibility
of our happiness, of ourselves, which was therefore an absolutely singular,
irreplaceable and unrepeatable possibility. And it is only us for and in whom
this missed possibility lives on as missed and demands fullment in every
moment.
If possibilities are only ever possibilities for someone, then they are inten-
tions. We have been meant by our lifes possibilities, be they conscious or
unconscious, seized or missed. Possibilities are not abstractly categorical,
relating to objects, conditions and actions in general, but are always poss-
ibilities only for those who could seize them, and belong to the existential
structure of their existence. Therefore, Thesis II remarks: the image of
happiness that we cherish is thoroughly coloured by the time to which
the course of our own existence has assigned us (GS 1.2: 693/SW 4: 389).
Benjamin is only drawing the conclusion from the intentional structure of
possibilities and of the temporal space they open up, when he continues:
The past carries with it a hidden index by which it is referred to
redemption. Doesnt a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress
us as well? In the voices we hear, isnt there an echo of now silent ones?
Dont the women we court have sisters 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. (GS 1.2: 693/SW 4: 390)
Redemption, as Benjamin here talks about it, is meant most prosaically:
a redeeming (Einslsung) of possibilities, which are opened with every life
and are missed in every life. If the concept of redemption points towards a
theology and it does so without doubt and a fortiori in the context of the
rst thesis, which mentions the little hunchback of theology then this
is not straightforwardly Judaeo-Christian theology, but rather a theology
of the missed or the distorted hunchbacked possibilities, a theology of
missed, distorted or hunchbacked time. Each possibility that was missed
in the past remains a possibility for the future, precisely because it has
not found fullment. For the past to have a future merely means that the
pasts possibilities have not yet found their fullment, that they continue to
have an effect as intentions and demand their realization from those who
feel addressed by them. When past things survive, then it is not lived-out
(abgelebte) facts that survive, facts that could be recorded as positive objects
of knowledge; rather what survives are the unactualized possibilities of that
which is past. There is historical time only in so far as there is an excess of
the unactualized, the unnished, failed, thwarted, which leaps beyond its
particular Now and demands from another Now its settlement, correction
and fullment.
The possible is a surplus over the factual. As such, the possible is time: excess
over anything that can become a positive given; excess over that which is;
remainder that itself is not. Every possibility, and a fortiori every missed possi-
bility, survives as the time to full this possibility. Time historical time is
nothing but the capability of the possible to nd its satisfaction in an actual.
As a standing-out (Ausstand) and exposition of that actual in which a mere
possible could nd its fullment, in which the possible as intention could
nd its goal, time is the claim of the unnished and failed, of the broken
and thwarted for its completion and rescue in happiness. Time is always the
time of the unnished and itself unnished time, time that has not reached
its end. It is the time of that which is not yet and perhaps never will be. It
is therefore the dimension of the possible to claim to become actual. For
Benjamin, the addressee of this claim is not an instance that precedes this
claim it is not an already constituted subject that perceives such a claim,
united in itself and in control of itself. The claims addressee is rather funda-
mentally a function of this claim, thoroughly coloured by the time, and of
the possibilities that assert their demands towards this claim, not only in its
time but as its time. Therefore, our coming was expected on earth. What is
said here is that we are rst of all and primarily the ones that were expected
by the missed possibilities of the past. Only qua expected have we been given
a weak messianic power (GS 1.2: 693/SW 4: 390). This messianic power
is the intentional correlate of the claim that calls upon us from the missed
possibilities of the past, not to miss them a second time but to perceive them
in every sense: cognizingly to seize and to actualize them. In this force, those
possibilities and the time in which they survive search for the telos of their
intentions. Messianic power is therefore nothing other than the implicit
hypothesis of the missed possible that there has to be an instance to correct
the miss, to do the undone, to regain the wasted and actualize the has-been-
possible. This power therefore is not one that is our own, independent of
this claim. It is not ours, something we can have at our disposal by our own
means, but it is the power which we have been endowed with by others, it
is the power of the claim itself and of the expectation that the claim is met.
This power is never messianic in the sense that we ourselves are enabled by it
to direct the hope for our own redemption towards the future or, to be more
precise, to future generations, but only in the entirely different sense that
we have been endowed with it by former generations, even by all former
generations, as the compliance with their expectations. The messianic power
is, in short, the postulate of fullability and, in this sense, of redeemability
that is immanent in each missed opportunity and distinguishes it as a possi-
bility. Regardless of whether this power of fullment and redemption of the
possible is ever actually proven or not; regardless also of whether there has
ever been a single case where this messianic power was indeed active in the
actualization of the possible. It is, as this power, given, and we have been
endowed with it by the simple givenness of what has been and, because it
did not reach its goal, did not stay. The possible possible happiness is
that which demands actualization actual happiness and in which the
telos of this demand remains inscribed, even if there has never been and will
never be this actualization. We independent of whether we presently
exist or not are the intentional complement destined to full the postulate
of realizability of this possiblity, in so far as it is possibility. The messianic
power that we have been endowed with by all that is past is weak because
it is not an ability that springs from ourselves but it is the vanishing-point
of missed possibilities and of their demand for fullment. But it is a weak
power also because it has to become extinguished in each future by which
it is not perceived and actualized. Thesis V thus apodictically but consist-
ently pronounces the niteness of this messianic power: it is an irretrievable
image of the past which threatens to disappear in every present that does
not recognize itself as intended in that image (GS 1.2: 695/SW 4: 391). The
weak messianic power is therefore the expectation of others towards us,
the undischarged remains of possibility that are transferred from former
generations to the future ones. It is the rest of time that remains in order to
meet those demands a rest that is not as substantial existence but is given
as time and passes with it. The weak messianic power in us is time as mere
possibility of happiness.
By determining the relationship of the past to the respective present
towards us as an essentially linguistic relationship: as an agreement
between former generations and ours, as echo of now silent voices that we
lend our ear to, as the claim of the unused possibility that we could have
talked to certain people (GS 1.2: 6934/SW 4: 390), Benjamin explains
historical time, if only implicitly, as a time made out of language. History
presents itself as the afterlife of unused linguistic possibilities, which
demand their redemption by other languages and nally by language itself,
as the temporal extension of intentions on to language, as imperative claim,
which the forfeited possibilities of language raise in view of their realization,
and as an expectation that invests every single work with the weak messianic
power to transform the missed possibilities into fullled ones. Awaiting
(Erwartung) is to be understood as a-wording (Erwortung); languages as
the demand of a language that did not become one, for there to be one.
And similarly history, which for Benjamin ever since his The Task of the
Translator is bound up inextricably with language and even identical with
its history and with it language.
The theology of language and history that Benjamin outlines in Thesis II
is a theology of wilted possibilities and thus an essentially wilted, dwarfed
and hunchbacked theology. To be more precise, it is a theory that there
could only be an unnished and therefore an anatheology of the weak poss-
ibility of theology. The formulation weak messianic power talks about the
weak, the insubstantial and thus genuinely historical possibility of historical
cognition and historical action. If theology assumes the necessity, constancy
and certainty of a God and historiography assumes that there already has
been history and there will be history in the future, then both of them
assume essentially unhistorical concepts of deity and history. Historicisms
concept of history is thus the simple counterpart to the concept of God of
substantialist theology. As the latter relies on the constancy of God, so does
the former on the positivity of historical facts. The historicity of such facts,
however, does not have its origin in their steadiness (Stndigkeit), much less
their standing on their own, their autonomy (Selbstndigkeit). Historical is
that which only can be recognized as historical from its contingent possi-
bility to yet have been different and to yet become different, and thus from
its after-history. Historical is only ever that which it is not yet the always
other, open possibility. Only that can become historical that is not yet
historical. This however also means: as it is, namely as a possibility given
and subject to actualization, in principle, this possibility is equally exposed
to the danger of being missed. In so far as it is mere possibility, in so far as it
is not grounded in a substantial actuality, historicity is always also the possi-
bility of becoming impossible and expiring. Facts would last if they existed
as facts outside any intentional relation; only possibilities can be missed;
historical facts, which constitute themselves as having-been only within the
space of their possibilities, ensue solely from the dimension of their capacity
to be missed. They are insubstantial, singular, nite. Even if facts have
the structure of referring and furthermore of intention and tendency (and
Benjamin suggests that they do have this very structure: The past carries
with it a hidden index by which it is referred to redemption), they are still
constitutively designed for their expiration: expiring either in the redemption,
fullment and resolution of their intention or expiring in the miss of this
redemption. The historical is historical only because it manifests itself in
the span between these two possibilities of intention, these two possibilities
of possibility: that the possibility expires in its fullment, or that it passes
away if it is not seized. Thus it follows that each possibility is a possibility of
its actualization only if it is at the same time the possibility of the missing
of this possibility. Only those possibilities are historical possibilities that can
always also not be seized. They are eeting possibilities, not possibilities that
as a substantial stock in the archive of potentialities could be grasped at any
time. Because there is no reservoir xed for all time, in which the treasures
of possibility for ever accumulate, but only a reservoir whose stock dissolves
with every missed chance, history is no progression where given possibilities,
one by one, one out of the other, are actualized, so that in the end all possi-
bilities will have been exhausted and all possible actualities established.
Where there is history, there is no continuum between the possible and the
actual. Any continuum between them would de-potentialize the possible
and turn it into an in principle calculable necessity. Only where its possi-
bility is contingent possibility namely one that can be another possibility,
the possibility of something other or even no possibility at all only there is
the possible historical. As a eeting, non-archivable, contingent possibility,
as one that is just now given and has already gone and thus as always
singular, as the solitarily leaping out of every pre-stabilized formation it
concerns the one who would have to lapse into lethargy in the face of the
automatism of the actualities unfolding homogeneously out of possibilities,
and demands of him his grasping intervention: a grasping without which
there would be no history, but a grasping which would not exist without
the corresponding possibility that it fails to appear or is unsuccessful. Only
because Benjamin thinks of history from the point of view of its possibilities,
from the point of view of its possibility of being other or of not being, can
he view history not as a mechanical series of events but as act. Only because
he does not view historical possibilities as constant and freely available
resources for series of realization does he have to view each historical act as
the always singular answer to an always singular possibility. Only because
his answer can be missed can it also succeed.
History, as it is thought by Benjamin, is never the history of facts, incidents
and developments without initially being the history of their possibilities;
and never the history of these possibilities, without being the history of
their continued unfullment. The redemption to which the past in its
hidden index is referred is redemption only because it can be missed. When
Benjamin talks about a weak messianic power and highlights the word
weak by use of italics (one of the few such words in his Theses) he does not
do so because there would be for him also a strong messianic power or even
one that would overcome with certainty any conceivable opposition, and not
because a power in general would under certain circumstances be reduced
to a weaker one. Weak denotes not so much the quantum of this power in
relation to a larger one be it a demanded one, or even an ideal one but
rather the susceptibility, on principle, to its failure.
There is a messianic power only where it can fail: anything that may be
called messianic power is therefore a weak one. To imagine that it could
be strengthened through vigour or that it could be sufcient to possess it
is equally nonsensical. It is enough to perceive and activate it nothing
else is possible to turn it into a historical force and into the only genuine
force of history; but nothing else is necessary either.
1
If that which has
been and each present that can become past carries with it a hidden index
through which it is referred to a weak messianic power that would realize
its possibilities of happiness, then all historical existence has an irreducible
and irreducibly weak messianic structure. When Benjamin rst touches
upon the referentiality to redemption in historical existence in Thesis II,
the reason he does not talk about the Messiah as a historically determined
religious gure is that each singular historical moment, of whatever epoch
or religious observance, has to be structured with reference to the messianic
imperative if it is to fall into the domain of historical existence at all. If
the index of a messianic power, which we have been endowed with like
every generation that preceded us, marks every historical possibility, then
messianic referentiality is the structure of the possible and of the historical
time in which it lives on. Benjamin attributes weaknesses to this structural
messianicity not in order to note an accidental defect, which, under ideal
circumstances, could be remedied, but in order to emphasize a structural
element of this messianicity, through which it, in turn, is referred to its
possible failure. The possibility of happiness is only indicated together with
the corresponding possibility of its failure. The messianic index is crossed
a priori by its reference to a possible failure and thus a possible impossi-
bility. There is, in short, no referring (Verweisung) to a messianic power
that should not at the same time indicate, as Paul Celan used the word, its
orphaning (Verwaisung); no index that would not have to reach the borders
of its indexicality and become an ex-index; no messianicity that does not
emerge from its non-messianicity. The weakness of the messianic power
lies in its structural nitude. The Messiah, who is supposed to rescue the
missed possibilities of history into actual happiness, can himself be missed.
Any Messiah and each moment in which he should be able to enter, each
Now is essentially nite. That is to say, he can only be Messiah because
there is a possibility of his not being Messiah.
In early drafts of his Arcades Project, which are dated to 1927, Benjamin
took up the Kantian metaphor of the Copernican turn and considered it
in relation to the historical perception: it was thought that a xed point
had been found in what has been, and one saw the present engaged in
tentatively approaching the forces of cognition to this solid ground (h
o
, 2).
This characterizes the historicist conception of history. The turn Benjamin
wants to bring about analogous to Kants intended to indicate the condi-
tions of the synthesis under which that which until now appeared as a xed
point can only be brought to a dialectical xation (h
o
, 2). This xing
in the synthesis between what-has-been and the present that Benjamin
called dialectic does not assume a denite past in that respect it follows
the Kantian turn; nor however, does it assume a xed instrumentation of
the cognitive apparatus that could pre-form its results in that respect it
goes beyond the Kantian assumption of a transcendental form of time. In
the realm of historical perception neither object nor subject and its forms
of cognition can be substantial. Because both can only become effective as
genuinely historical functions, the theorist of history will have to free himself
not only from the traditional realism of the constancy of objects but also
from the transcendentalism of the forms of the perception of these objects.
Kant had a xed continuity of time in the a priori form of perception: a
continuity of time which cannot be historical because as a mere form it has
to be established prior to any historical content. For Kant, history moves in
time, it does not constitute time and does not form specic historical times
that are distinguishable from times empty form. The Copernican turn
in historical perception that Benjamin wants to bring about is thus more
than a transcendentalist turn. For this Copernican turn, what-has-been no
longer offers any xed point, nor can historical perception be considered
as substantial quantity or as a continuum founded upon transcendental
forms. History can be missed. That means, however, that it, and therefore
also the happiness to which it refers, are only ever to be experienced through
the danger of being missed; and that means, furthermore, that history is
only possible at the risk of not being history. What is gained, therefore, is
the concept of a radically nite history: history is nite if in each of its
moments it could as well not be; if at each moment it has to be produced
anew; if it is only in view (Hinblick) from the moment of its rescue from
disappearance. This is what the following passage in Thesis V claims: The
true image of the past its by. The past can be seized only as an image which
ashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again (GS
1.2: 695/SW 4: 390). And Thesis VI:
Articulating the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it
really was. It means appropriating a memory as it ashes up at a moment
of danger. Historical materialism wishes to hold fast that image of the
past which unexpectedly appears to the historical subject at a moment of
danger. The danger threatens both the content [Bestand] of the tradition
and those who inherit it . . . Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition
away from the conformism that is working to overpower it. (GS 1.2:
695/SW 4: 391)
In these passages, Benjamin can combine historical cognition and historical
action because as practical, ethical forms of mindful remembering
(Eingedenken) they both point towards the same goal, namely the seizure
in the present of the missed possibilities of happiness of the past. The danger
that the reign of unhappiness (Unglck) might continue illustrates on the
one hand that the telos of history could be missed; on the other hand, in
this danger the principled deciency appears which makes it possible that
history can be missed. This deciency, namely, rests on there being no stable
form that historical cognition could entrust itself to, and no reliable course
on which history heads for its goal. History has to be won over and again,
at each singular moment, ever again in a singular way. Neither history nor
happiness, which is striven for in the former, is reliable; only the existence
of unhappiness is reliable. World-historical unhappiness manifests itself as a
continuum of catastrophes. Happiness, however, is never given as a state, it
is never embedded in a continuing course of events, but is, at best, offered
as a possibility and assigned as the goal of longing, of desire and of demand.
There is no form of happiness. The domain of forms belongs to the realm
of domination, where permanence of forms can only be secured through
the suppression of other possibilities that is, possibilities of happiness
that rebel against such domination. The danger that threatens historical
cognition as well as the politics of happiness therefore originates in the last
instance from the forms that are to guarantee the rule of a certain reality
over an innity of possibilities of happiness. If, however, this threat does
not only originate from the interest of the current ruling class, but rather
from the most enduring instrument of its domination (i.e., from a particular
form), then in the realm of history and historical time this danger ori-
ginates from the time-form of constancy and persistence. This form of time
is the continuum. In this form, one Now-point follows another, uniformly,
in linear succession. The historical form corresponding to this continuum
of points of time is progress, the equally uniform, steady and inexorable
striving towards a pre-given ideal of political life. At the base of the social
and political conformism that threatens historical cognition, and thus
history itself, lies the transcendental conformism of the form of perception
of time, through which time is represented as the homogeneous continuum
of punctual events. The rst and decisive step towards historical cognition
that does not join forces with the suppression of possibilities of happiness
has to be a step out of the transcendental conformism of the continuum
of time and history. Historians and politicians take a stand for the histor-
ically possible and for happiness only if they do not see history as a linear
and homogeneous process whose form always remains the same and whose
contents, assimilated to the persistent form, are indifferent. Together with
the continuum the conformity of each Now with every other Now of the
time series has to be broken as well. The possibility of this breaking through,
however, must be grounded in the very possibility (Ermglichung) of the
continuum itself and thus in relations of discrete Nows that preceded their
homogenization.
The political critique of social conformism, the historical critique of
the automatism of progress and the philosophical critique of the time
continuum join together in the critique of the structural conformity of
all forms of experience. All three critiques have to retrace, by means of
political intervention, historical cognition and philosophical analysis, the
conformisms and their underlying forms to the constitutive movement,
and they have to push the constitutive elements of these forms to crisis, to
diremption and to the possibility of another conguration. Only in this way
can the political outrage over the ruling injustice, the historical melancholy
over the incessant sameness in progress and the philosophical dissatisfaction
with already constituted forms become productive. Benjamins critique of
progress an element of his philosophy of history that currently receives
little respect even amongst his admirers is only adequately understood if
it is grasped as a critique of time as a transcendental form of perception and
thus of the empty form of experience that progresses in it. And so he writes
in Thesis XIII:
Progress as pictured in the minds of Social Democrats was, rst of all, the
progress of humankind itself (and not just advances in mens ability and
knowledge). Secondly, it was incompletable [unabschliessbar], in keeping
with the innite perceptibility of humankind. Thirdly, it was considered
as inevitable something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral
course. Each of these predicates is controversial and open to criticism. But
when the chips are down, criticism must penetrate beyond these assump-
tions and focus on something that they have in common. The concept
of humankinds 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 underline any criticism of the concept
of progress itself. (GS 1.2: 7001/SW 4: 39495)
The critique of conformism, a conformism that is at each moment on the
point of overpowering this critique, thus has to be founded in a critique of
the form of the homogeneous and empty time, which, as the mere form
of experience, lies at the foundation of each conformism. Any critique of
historical cognition and historical action has to be initially a critique of the
transcendental conformism of the continuum of time.
Benjamins conviction that a Copernican turn in historical perception
must be brought about emerges thus from the insight that history would
not be history if it merely proceeded in time as a stable form of perception,
rather than creating its form in the rst place. It will therefore have to be
proven that time as a continuum of form can only be generated through a
discontinuous historical cognition that is not xed in any form. According
to Benjamins ultra-Copernican turn there is time only by virtue of history:
the latter does not run its course in the former, but time is xed in history
always in different ways, the forms of which are not given beforehand. If,
according to Benjamins formulation, that which has been (das Gewesene)
experiences its dialectic xation in synthesis with cognition, then, together
with that which has been, the time-form in general experiences its dialectic
xation. The time-form is owed to a synthesis and, thus, is not itself the origin
of this synthesis. The reections collected in the theses On the Concept of
History contain only cursory indications of the structure of the genuinely
generative historical synthesis, and the relevant notes from the Convolutes
of the Arcades Project are often prone to misunderstanding. In order to grasp
how Benjamin understood the genesis of the empty time continuum, it is
useful to consult the text in which for the rst time he explicitly expresses
his critique of the idea of progress and argues for a concept of history that
abandons the merely quantitative concept of time. In his dissertation On
the Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism, which he submitted
after giving up his original plan for a thesis on the concept of history in
Kant, as early as 1919, Benjamin, taking up Friedrich Schlegels remarks
against the ideology of progress, contrasts the continuum of forms, which
is supposed to make up the history of art, against any progressing into
emptiness, that is, against any empty, homogeneous continuum. This is
done in the passage where Benjamin mentions twice romantic messianism
and thus the tendency that he, in a letter to Ernst Schoen immediately after
the completion of his draft, describes as the centre of romanticism and its
true nature, well unknown in the literature (letter dated 7 April 1919, GB
2: 23). While one should not identify the conguration of messianism and
critique of the ideology of progress in his early work with his later outlines
on the philosophy of history, it is at the same time evident that the concept
of time in the dissertation on Romanticism acquires a precision which
benets the understanding of the later theses. For there, Benjamin writes:
The temporal innity in which the process [of poetic forms] takes place
. . . is likewise a medial and qualitative innity. For this reason progred-
ibility is not at all what is understood by the modern term progress; it
is not some merely relative connection of cultural stages to one another.
Like the entire life of mankind, it is an innite process of fullment, not
a mere becoming. (GS 1.1: 92 / SW 1: 168)
What is said here is that the historical process is not a progressing into
emptiness and not a progress within a given empty form of time, but the
medial process in which a form of time is constituted as qualitative, as at
each moment determined and substantially fullled. Calling a temporal
innity medial links it with that medium of reection in which Benjamins
text brings together the paradoxes of self-positing. Reection is a medium
for the transcendental I, for only in this reection does it reach the point of
indifference of its positing and its knowledge of it. Reection, however, is
a medium not only as the common middle of act and cognition, but rather
as that element in which they are distinguishably and unmediatedly one.
The reection is medial as self-affection. The interpretation of the innity
of time and thus of time itself as medial, that is, as having sprung from the
reective medium of self-affection, however, cites the Kantian thought of an
original creation of time from pure self-affection. The connection between
the original creation of time and the reective medium can be illustrated
with a quote from Schlegels Athenum-Fragmente and its commentary by
Benjamin. Schlegel writes: The essence of the poetic feeling perhaps lies in
the fact that one can affect oneself entirely out of oneself. And Benjamin:
That means: The point of indifference of reection, where the latter springs
from the Nothing, is the poetic feeling (GS 1.1: 63 SW 1:150). If the point
of indifference of reection, and with it its medium, is self-affection, then
the medial time, which Benjamin associates with Romantic messianism,
is in turn, nothing other than this: an affecting entirely out of oneself . The
Schlegelian poetics of self-affection, however, is derived, as Benjamin must
have realized, from Kants doctrine on time as the way the mind is affected
by its own activity . . . and hence by itself .
2
By extending self-affection to
history, albeit rst of all the history of artistic forms, Benjamin pronounces
self-affection to be the fundamental constitutive mode not merely of time,
but also of history. Before there can be a continuum, be it of time, be it
of history, it has to be produced in the self-touching of the soul. And thus
Kant himself speaks of a paradox
3
in a self-touching only from which
a self emerges. With this self-affection self-affection of something passive,
self-determination of something undetermined historical time rises as the
medium of all elements that enter into a relation in it. With historical time,
the historical subject appears. This subject, which is nothing other than
time, is in its deepest layer, as the happening of becoming denite through
itself, mere medium.
Benjamin never dissociated himself from the Kantian theory of time
constitution. The more determined, however, was his critique of the neo-
Kantian ideology of progress of the social democracy of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries.
4
This ideology of progress is based on the
assumption that time arises not only out of a manifoldness of always
singular auto-affections of the faculty of understanding for this could
only result in an unsteady aggregate of moments but also out of self-
affections in successione as a continuous, linear and therefore also geomet-
rically disaffected time. Such a succession can only exist if it is conditioned
by a faculty identical in its unvarying duration. In this case, however, such
a succession could not be experienced as succession and thus not as time.
Only between the contents of the continuum could differences be perceived;
differences that, in turn, would be numerical but not temporal and least of
all historical differences. To be experienced as succession, a succession of
self-affections must be a constant, directed and inevitable affection between
different and diverse self-affections. But there is nothing in the structure of
these affections (even if they are, as for Kant, merely affections of the faculty
of understanding) that can work towards constancy, strict orientation and
inevitability, there is also nothing in that structure from which a continuous
and homogeneous series could emerge from such an affection between self-
affections. Time can only ever be a homogeneous series if the sameness of
the self that is determined through affection is preserved. If this sameness,
like historical time, is not given with certainty, then the relation between
the discrete moments of self-affection has to be something other than homo-
geneity. Heterogeneity as such cannot prevail among the moments of historical
time, for only under the condition of an at least possible correspondence can
connections between those moments, and therefore history, be experienced.
The non-homogeneous, unsteady relation, which alone Benjamin for that
reason can accept as historical, has to be a relation between moments of a
possible but not automatically self-realizing history; a relation not preformed,
not vouched for by any transcendental schema; a relation that is neither
founded in the sameness of self-affection nor regulated through linearity
or the privileging of a certain moment or series of moments. Nevertheless
it has to be a relation of affection that is, of determination, no matter
what sort and it has to be one of reference, but of an open one, one that
does not automatically full itself. In order for a moment to touch another
moment, for a Now-point to enter into a conguration with another Now-
point, and in order for a historical time to arise out of this conguration,
this moment has to be constituted as a reference (Verweis), an indication
(Hinweisung) and an instruction (Anweisung) towards this other moment.
A moment is genuinely historical only if it recognizes itself as intended by a
former one, if it recognizes itself as the one intended in the other and only
in this intention of the other. For Benjamin, the self is not historical that
enters into a mechanical causal connection as succession and nearest cause,
nor the self that takes the next step towards the goal of its ideal in the path
of progress. Beyond mechanical consequences, directions and consistencies,
and also beyond self-assigned ideals and programmes for the future, the self
is only historical where it experiences itself affected, determined or intended
through another person or something other. History is not a connection
of causes, it is a connection of affect and intention. This connection is the
medium, in which one affection recognizes itself in the other but does not
recognize how it is in the other, rather recognizes how it is meant by the
other, as an instance of realization of its missed possibilities of happiness.
Only because the present Now recognizes itself as meant in a former one,
as Thesis V has it, has the present been given the weak messianic power to
full the demand for happiness of the previous one. History is structured
messianically, for it is the medium of the possibilities of happiness of former
times and is therein the medium of the possibility of happiness of happiness
of the present. The historical moment is a moment not out of auto-affection,
but out of a hetero-affection, in which the autos in which the kairs, the
happy moment crystallizes. This moment has to be medium for itself as
other.
In order to x the relation of reference of one moment to another, a relation,
decisive for history, that is difcult to grasp in Kantian or neo-Kantian terms,
Benjamin had recourse to the terms of phenomenology and scholasticism.
In a paralipomenon to the theses On the Concept of History he writes:
There is a concept of the present according to which the present represents
the (intentional) object of a prophecy. This concept is the (complement)
correlate to that of a history that enters ash-like into appearance (GS
1.3: 1235). If the prophecy intends the present as messianic, then the only
present is the one that fulls the prophecy as Messiah. Then, furthermore,
the only present is the one that was expected. Only as an expected present
and thus, from the perspective at least of minimal historical distance is
its ash-like appearance, which would traumatically blind any unprepared
faculty of cognition, recognizable as the appearance of a present. The
ash of the historical moment can only be endured and only be captured
if it was preceded by an expectation. That is why Benjamin describes the
concept of the present as the intentional object of a prophecy, as correlate
or complement to the shock-like appearance of this object. Expectation is
never a claim without also being a protective measure, never an opening
without also being a means of xing. If again in the context of his Theses
Benjamin writes The last day is a present turning backward (GS 1.3:
1232), what is meant then is that the only present is the present that as
the always youngest, last, decisive and directed turns backward to all that
by which it had been expected in the past. This turning to the past, which
gives the past a belated direction, a turning that directs and judges (richtet)
the past, has, though, a double meaning. First, the present, if it is one, does
not make claims on the future, but is present alone as that upon which the
past makes demands: present is always present out of the past and present
for the past. And second, the past not only has in this present its intentional
object but its intention comes in it to a standstill: what-has-been shines in
the present, if it is one, and unites with the Now of its cognition. That the
present is only a present for the past does not just mean that it stands in
(einsteht) for the past, that it stands in as the goal of the past claims and that
it contracts and replaces the pasts time in its own time. It also means that
the past stands in (einsteht) in the present, that it comes to the fullment of
its intentions and to a standstill. When Benjamin writes about a present that
is not transition but stands in [einsteht] in time and has come to a standstill
in characterizing the moment (GS 1.3: 1250 and GS 1.2: 702/SW 4: 396), he
presumably links the concept Einstand (which is unusual in German), with
the French instant, and interprets the present as the Einstand and pausing of
the movement of historical time in the fullment of it intention. The Now
itself is intentionless, for it is the Now only as that which is intended by the
past prophecy. It does not pass over, but stands still and breaks off the
course of history. Therefore it can be said: The classless society is not the
nal goal of the progress of history, but its frequently miscarried, ultimately
achieved interruption (GS 1.3: 1231/ SW 4: 402). And correspondingly:
The Messiah breaks history off; the Messiah does not appear at the end of a
development (GS 1.3: 1243). Whether it is interrupted or broken off, history
has come to a standstill, for only in this standstill an epoche with the
relation between at least two disparate Now-points, has the minimal form
of historical time been reached and with its fullment it has, simultaneously,
stepped out of any further historical course.
When history occurs, it is only in its xation to a moment and furthermore
to an image. Whatever occurs, stands still. History does not have a course,
it pauses. If the time-form of historical happening is the present namely
the past contracted to and fullled in the present then the present is never
a transition in a series of other presents and yet other ones, but always a
singular moment in which the possibilities and demands of the past are
contracted and xed; the present is not the time-form of waiting for a better
or simply different future, not the state of waiting that preceded the state of
redemption, but the standstill where one no longer waits, a standstill into
which even waiting itself is drawn and in which the demand associated with
the waiting has fallen silent. Present is that which is not embedded in the
empty course of an always identical continuum, but that which leaps out of it
as different, disparate, in order to stand in (einstehen) for another disparate.
The site of history is the present as interruption of the continuum of time
and as the breaking-off even of the continuum of intentions. Expectation,
therefore, cannot direct itself to a certain moment of history; it has to direct
itself to every moment, because it does not have to be fullled in any one
of them, but could be fullled in each. The present can only be expected, it
cannot be anticipated.
It is not something that happens to the historical objects, and these
objects do not have something historical (outside themselves and as a
contingent attribute) that dresses them in opportunistic colours; rather they
are what they are only through the happening of their history (and thus
not theirs, any more, not ours any more). Nothing happens other than the
happening itself: this is true for the events as well as for their cognition.
History, this eminent happening, however, occurs only where a state of
affairs nds its intentional correlate in its cognition and cognition nds
its intentional correlate in the political act, and thus what did not happen
moves towards the happening, or at least the possibility of happening. Since
it does not happen to the objects that could resist its movement, nor is it
under the authority of subjects that could be free to resist it, this happening,
and even more its mere possibility, can, as a pure happening lacking any
exterior determination and thus any measure of its movement, appear in no
way other than as motionless.
Benjamin claries this relation of the happening of history to its pausing
in Thesis XVII, which, together with Thesis II, are the most important
ones. He states that, in contrast to historicism whose procedures additively
muster the mass of facts to ll the homogeneous, empty time, the basis of
a materialist historiography is a constructive principle. He continues:
Thinking involves not only the movement of thoughts, but their arrest
as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a constellation saturated with
tensions, it gives that constellation a shock, by which thinking crystallizes
into a monad . . . In this structure he [the historical materialist] recognizes
the sign of a messianic arrest of happening, or (to put it differently) a
revolutionary chance in the ght for the oppressed past. He takes cog-
nizance of it in order to blast a specic era out of the homogeneous course
of history. (GS 1.2: 7023/SW 4: 396)
It would lead to triviality, and further to confusion, to understand this
passage such that an arrest follows a movement, for then the arrest itself
would still lie in the succession of the movement and its originally claimed
contrast would be negated. Movement and arrest, and therefore continuum
and interruption, stand in a relation other than one of opposition. Where
arrest still belongs to movement, movement has to rest in an indissoluble
substratum of persistence. Benjamins reection is aimed at precisely that
gesture of thought through which this substratum is lifted out of the
appearance of the mere owing. The urgency of this reection can be
demonstrated by a simple thought: if the arrest of movement both of
thoughts and of historical events can neither intervene in this movement
from outside (since then it would not be an historical intervention) nor be a
mere element of the movement itself (since then it would not be its arrest),
then this arrest has to be based within the structure of the movement itself; it
has to be based in the structure in such a way that the movement itself essen-
tially stands still. And vice versa: the arrest can be nothing other than the
movement, it therefore has to be the movement of the movement. Thus, the
gesture of thought as Benjamin grasps it does not bring to light a rigid image
purged of the movement of events, but it is nothing other than the movement
of events itself. He continues the train of thought of Thesis XVII:
[The historical materialist blasts] a specic life out of the era, a specic
work out of the lifework. As a result of his method, the lifework is
preserved and sublated [aufgehoben] in the work, the era in the lifework,
and the entire course of history in the era. The nourishing fruit of what
is historically understood contains time in its interior as a precious but
tasteless seed. (GS 1.2: 703/SW 4: 396)
What the arrest of the movement of work, lifework, era and course of
history brings to light is the time, that is, as the last words of the thesis
emphasize, time in its inside. By virtue of the arrest the genuinely historical
thought preserves in its objects that which makes these objects possible and
the preservation and continuation of which makes these objects contribute
themselves and these objects are not merely works, they are the course
of history itself. The essential object and the decisive yield of thinking, as
of historiography and politics, is time. The movement of a work, of an era
and of the course of history are arrested not in order to present them as a
dead thing to sad contemplation, but in order to expose time and make it
intrinsically productive, i.e. the movement of movement, the time as time,
within it. Only in this standstill, as persisting, is time time; otherwise it
would be transition into timelessness, into the everlasting or ever-same, into
a sempiternitas or aeternitas, that covers up nitude. Only in its Einstand
in the instant is time the preserved and sublated happening of a time
that protects against the empty formalism of a mere form of perception and
against the absolutism of a substantial eternity. It is always again anew and
in different ways the time that stands in, in each instant, in each present, in
each Now: a nunc stans that indicates within the historical objects their true
history and only thus relates history to objects: not oppositionals of the idea
of positioning or propositional subjects, but instants, Einstnde of history.
For these objects are not in time as if in a container merely coloured ex-
ternally; rather, time is in their inside and they are the fruits and carriers of
its seed. When Benjamin talks about time with the unusual word standing
in (einstehen), then that means that time stands in for time for the time
of what-has-been as well as for any time: defends it, preserves it, represents
it and xates it as time in its movement. Without the insisting of time,
which is another sense of its einstehen, there would not be the course of
time. Without instant there would be no moment. Time stands in (steht ein)
because its discrete moments stand together in a unity and because time
stands into the inside, into the nucleus of time in the historical course, and
sets it free. The Einstand of time is mere time.
5
If the historian and the politician and everyone acts like a historian
and a politician in their own history are concerned with the rescue and
fullment of possibilities of happiness, then this is not a rescue in the face
of time, but a rescue of time, redemption is not redemption from time, but
a redemption of time. Happiness would not be to free oneself from time but
to free time in oneself.
In the First Critique, Kant noted on the principle of permanence of
substance: All appearances are in time . . . Hence time, in which all
variation by appearance is to be thought, endures and does not vary. The
fact that time endures qualies it, according to Kant, as belonging to the
substratum of everything real, i.e. of everything belonging to the existence
of things.
6
If for him thus in an enormous overthrow of what was called,
until Kant, substance this substance is now nothing other than time
and therefore neither an idea nor a supratemporal being resting in itself, it
still remains form, and that is an empty one, and remains continuum, and
therefore homogeneous. The insisting of the historical course in the Now
that Benjamin has in mind is a persistence as well; however, it is not the
persistence of the form of a homogeneous course, but that relation that
restraint [Verhaltung] in which a constellation of heterogeneous moments
is formed, moments that are situated neither on a time-line nor in an a
priori common space of time. The Kantian theorem of innertimeliness
(Innerzeitigkeit), according to which all changing appearances are in time
as in something that endures, is thus transformed in a second even more
radical overthrow into the theorem of the immanence of time according
to which time is persisting in the changing appearances. Only its pausing
in a particular appearance a work, a lifework, an era disposes time to
stand out from the homogeneous course and to meet with another time
with which it is not homogeneous. The gure formed by the two instances
of time is no comprehensive or even universal empty form into which yet
other instances could be joined, it is the strict relation connecting these two
alone with each other. Since the critique of epistemology in his preface to the
Trauerspiel book Benjamin calls this relation, probably following Mallarm,
a constellation (GS 1.1: 215/ OT, p. 34). The constellation, which is not
so much a placing-together (Zusammen-Stellung) as a standing-in together
(Zusammen-Einstand), is as much the result of the relation of the instances
as these instances are the result of it. A moment, a Now, a present is always
the constellation of at least two presents, moments: Now that is the Now
of the correspondence of such presents or moments, a correspondence that
cannot be guaranteed by any pre-stabilized form. Only as a formation from
unsecured co-instances can history be the object of a construction. What is
said here is therefore that time is tied to a time of time, to a time for time,
to a time where that Now in which time stands in can evolve. To put it
more precisely: the setting free of a particular time nucleus is tied to the
time of its recognizability. That is the structure of the true image of the
past, which Thesis V supposes: The past can be seized only as an image
that ashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again
. . . 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 (GS
1.2: 695/SW 4: 39091). The central theme of these sentences is without
doubt the uniqueness of each chance for historical insight and therefore also
the untenability of the historicist credo that Benjamin nds summarized in
Gottfried Kellers phrase, truth will not run away from us. This uniqueness,
however, is that of a possible correspondence between an image of the past
and a moment of its recognizability, that is, between a time that offers itself
to cognition and a time in which this time becomes accessible to cognition.
The true image of the past its by that means: there is only ever one
single point where one time and the other touch each other in such a way
that there is Einstand that is, standing together, constellation between
them, an Einstand in which the time of that which is recognized and the
time of cognition, the past and the present arise. Without their touching
in the Einstand of the constellation there is neither an image of the past
nor a present in which that image could be recognized, neither a past nor a
present time, therefore no time at all that would not be the empty ideality of
a mere succession. Time is thus always the doubled, and only in its doubling
united, moment in which one time recognizes itself in another as meant
intended, indicated, demanded, claimed. Neither of its instances, neither
the instance of cognition nor the instance demanding cognition, can be
absent if there is to be time. There is time only if the time for which it, and
only it, is there seizes it.
Benjamin portrays this minimal structure of historical time in one of the
very important notes to an epistemological critique from the Convolutes of
the Arcades Project:
What distinguishes images from the essences of phenomenology is their
historical index. (Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenom-
enology abstractly through historicity.) . . . For the historical index of
the images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says
above all that they attain legibility only at a particular time. And indeed
this acceding to legibility constitutes a specic critical point of the
movement in their inside. Every present is determined by those images
that are synchronistic with it: each now is the Now of a particular recog-
nizability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time. (This
point of bursting, and nothing else, is the death of the intentio, which
thus coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of
truth.) It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what
is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has
been comes together ash-like with the Now to form a constellation. In
other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. (N3, 1)
7
This very complex note that starts with one of the rare but signicant refer-
ences to Heidegger to be found in the Arcades Project serves to identify the
image in contrast to the phenomenological essences, even though not
Heideggers Being and Time but Benjamins own Trauerspiel book is the
likely precedent. Benjamin reproaches Heideggers notion of historicity
as being an attempt to save history abstractly and therefore, ahistor-
ically and uncritically for phenomenology, while only such a concept of
history could be seen as historical and critical, where what-has-been carries
with it a historical index, and thus a critical one, for the present in which
it becomes recognizable. Benjamin thus also undertakes, as he suggests, to
save history for phenomenology, but, in contrast to Heidegger, concretely
and critically through the concepts of image and historical index. This
index, which Benjamin also discusses in Thesis II, marks a double time:
the time of what-has-been and the time of the Now that is directed towards
the formers cognition. This index, thus, is a twofold one: it stands in for
two times; it is critical: it marks the point at which an internal crisis divides
time into a Before and an After, into the time of the past and the time
of the present; and it synchronizes: it connects both times even in their
disjunction. By virtue of its historical index each Now is marked as the
Now of another Now, and only by virtue of this internal split of the Now is
each Now the Now of a particular recognizability. It would be quite simply
unrecognizable, unperceivable, it would not be what it is intended to be, if
it lacked the complement of a second Now, a distinct one and yet one that
is united with it, it would lack the chance to become encircled as the Now
that it is. There is no Now that could qualify as being temporal or even
historical if it lacked all tension to another, distinct Now. But neither would
there be a Now if it were separated by an impermeable barrier from the other
Now and were untouchable by that other Now, in which it is supposed to
be recognized. In order to be Now and one Now, it has to be one that takes
itself apart into two. This is brought about by the critical point of movement
at the inside of time. This critical point, or more precisely, the crisis of the
Now-point, is what rescues time and the historical phenomena in which
it contracts itself: as Benjamin notes, phenomena are rescued through the
exhibition of a leap within them (N9, 4). Therefore this leap, the discon-
tinuous as such, that which creates clefts in the course of time, is at the
same time the nucleus, the time nucleus of the phenomenon, time out of
which the phenomenon forms itself. The crisis in the Now that disperses and
moves it, that turns it into a movement of the Now in the Now, is as the
absolute medium historical time itself.
The identity of leap and nucleus of the Now and thus the temporalizing
direction [Zeitigungssinn] of its crisis can also be deciphered in another note
from the Convolutes of the Arcades Project: The present determines where,
in the object from the past, that objects fore-history and after-history diverge
so as to circumscribe its nucleus (N11, 5). The present lies in the difference,
the leap or the interval, that separates the fore- and after-history of an object,
and is thus, in its disjunction, the agreement between it and its cognition.
The nucleus of time lies in the cleft that its crisis opens up. Splitting between
fore- and after-history, this nucleus lies between object and cognition, and
is that in which the two touch each other, not in a positive third, but in the
gap between them. About truth Benjamin thus says that it is not merely
bound to a temporal function of cognition, as Marxism claims, but to a
nucleus of time placed within the recognized and the one who recognizes
at the same time. This is so true that the eternal, in any case, is far more
a rufe on a dress than some idea (N3, 2). The nucleus of time, which is
placed at the same time in the recognized and in the one who recognizes,
can lie in nothing else than in this at-the-same-time. Since the simultaneity
of the non-simultaneous, if it is understood as the being-at-the-same-time of
positive Now-points, can in no way bring about the nucleus of time and
thus time as time but, in the collapse of the entire temporal expanse, has
to lead to the destruction of time, the at-the-same-time must not determine
itself as identity within a single Now, but as leap between discrete Now-
points. This leap (Sprung) has to be understood in the twofold sense of both
rift and leap over the rift (bersprung): the difference between Now and
Now has to preserve each instant as discrete and has to refer them strictly
to each other as the difference between precisely these discrete points. What
is at-the-same-time is only that which is not-at-the-same-time between the
recognized and the one who recognizes and within each of them and thus
that in them which as nucleus of a differential time resists its erasure.
Time namely would be erased as soon as different Now-points contracted
into a single one or were assimilated into the continuum of an always
identical line; time would also be erased as soon as the difference between
discrete Nows extinguished any relation between them. The possibility not
only of historical cognition but of historical time as well thus has to be based
on a third that is neither identity nor inability to relate, but distinction
and relation at the same time. This possibility, is, for Benjamin, based in
a leap which is not secured, held or founded, it is based in an original leap
(Ur-sprung) that separates the discrete Nows and one can say paradox-
ically, or, as Benjamin puts it, dialectically joins them in their separation.
This leap, and nothing else, is the Now, the nucleus of time, the irreducible
historical happening, which the historian has to bring to experience.
In the leap of time (Zeit-Sprung), in the origin of time (Zeit-Ursprung), at
least two different Nows stand together as one. The leap is Einstand of time;
in it, the crisis that separates and the difference that relates stand together as
one it is critical movement; in it movement and standstill stand together
it is what Benjamin, using Gottfried Kellers words, calls petried
unrest (J50, 5);
8
in it, nally, the dialectical movement between has-been
and present, object and cognition, stands still the leap is dialectics at a
standstill and as such, for Benjamin, image. Because the image is the
constellation in which one Now meets precisely the other one in which it
becomes recognizable, the image alone is the place of historical time, being
historical time in contrast to time as a mere ux. The image is dialectics
at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely
temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the Now is
dialectical: it is not progression but image, suddenly emergent (N2a, 3). For
Benjamin, the image is the historical relation kat exochen, for it brings about
and holds on to the discontinuity of appearances, the leap within them.
It appears at that moment when nothing but the medium the middle
and the element and thus the irreducibly dia-chronical and a-chronical
between and in the phenomena is preserved. It is historical time as the crisis
in the Now which only opens space for the times and sets free all times as
nucleus of time.
Benjamins claim that every present is determined by the images that
are synchronistic with it will have to be made more precise with regard to
the critical point in their movement: this synchrony can only be situated in
the critical separation, that is, in an asynchronic difference as the common
medium of the synchronistic images. Benjamin can therefore compare the
process of determining this medium with the method of splitting the atom,
i.e. not just with the enclosure of the nucleus of time but with nuclear ssion.
If, however, only the ssion of the time nucleus sets free its historical forces,
then this nucleus with its forces, paradoxically, is situated in the ssion. Now
is Now always in the leap to another Now and is thus always a Now of the
crisis of the Now. In its crisis the Now does not just split, it also becomes
recognizable as Now only in its crisis: only by virtue of the ssure of the
Now is its krinein, its cernere, its enclosure and cognition as nucleus and
seed of time possible. If the Now is only Now and knowable in its crisis,
then the truth of the Now is only fullled in the leap to another Now, the
goal of its intention and it is not only fullled, but due to the doubling of
the Now it is charged to bursting-point. Thesis XIV states: History is the
subject of a construction whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but
time lled by the presence of the Now [Jetztzeit] (GS 1.2: 701/SW 4: 395),
and this statement is specied by a note from the Convolutes of the Arcades
Project, namely that the truth is not only fullled with time, but fullled
to the bursting-point and thus overlled because it is charged with another
than its own time. Fullment the Paulinian pleroma is the pregnancy
of a truth that cannot stay with itself and thus in the bursting becomes the
origin the birth, as Benjamin puts it of the time of truth, of authentic
historical time. This bursting, and nothing else, is the death of the intentio,
which thus coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of
truth (N3, 1).
With all these formulations, Benjamin takes up again the insights from
his critique of epistemology in the preface to The Origin of German Tragic
Drama, which are dedicated to truth as the death of the intention and
where origin is characterized as that which springs from becoming and
passing (GS 1.1: 216, 226/OT, pp. 36, 45).
9
The rhythm of the original
is there characterized as being open uniquely to a double insight: on the
one hand, it needs to be recognized as a process of restoration and re-
establishment, but, on the other hand, and precisely because of this, as
something imperfect and incomplete. That is to say that in the origin
singularity and repetition are conditioned by one another (GS 1.1: 226/OT,
pp. 456). The uniqueness of a moment that has been only comes to light
in its repetition, i.e. in its recognition; this repetition is nothing, however, if
it does not demonstrate uniqueness, if the repeated moment is not itself, and
therefore still unnished, incomplete and open for further repetitions. The
Now has precisely this structure of the origin (Ursprung), which Benjamin
calls dialectic. It is thus the Now of recognizability both as that which has
been reaching its recognizability in the present, and as the present Now in
which that which has been becomes recognizable. Both the ability of the
thing to be known and the ability of the historian to know it have a share in
the recognizability as well as in the Now. The one, however, is not restored,
re-established or repeated in the other without remaining unnished and
incomplete precisely therein. Just as repetition has to be execution in order
to testify to the uniqueness of what is repeated within it, so the Now can
only occur in the happening and thus only as incomplete, as present, and
cannot exist in the perfection of completeness. The Now of recognizability
is thus to be thought of as an in principle incomplete or over-complete
happening of its crisis, in which the discrete elements overll each other
to the point of bursting and remain in the bursting. Now is its leap. Or,
to use a mathematical metaphor that Benjamin repeatedly employs: Now
is the time differential (Q
o
, 21).
10
If the Now, however, establishes in the
leap and the differential the immanence of historical time in phenomena,
then the path of the historian and of the politician which leads to the Now
has to correspond to the structure of this Now and be transcendence in the
immanence of time.
The Kantian theorem of innertimeliness (Innerzeitigkeit), namely that
all appearances are in time, is overthrown in Benjamins theorem of the
immanence of time; time stands in (steht ein) in the appearances, that is,
in the Now of recognizability of the appearances. This theorem is made
more precise in the theorem of the crisis of time: the Now of recognizability
is a critical moment and the moment of the leap in the Now, of the leap
between one Now and another exactly corresponding to it.
This leap in the Now is what Benjamin considers when noting in Thesis
XIV that, for Robespierre, Ancient Rome was a past charged with the time
of the Now which he blasted out of the continuum of history (GS 1.2: 701/
SW 4: 395). This blast becomes possible only by virtue of a leap, which
transports the time of the Now into one that has been and identies it as the
repetition of what-has-been. The French Revolution viewed itself as a return
to Rome. It cited ancient Rome the way fashion cites costumes of the past
(GS 1.2: 701/SW 4: 395). This citation pulls together Now-time and Now-
time in such a way that what has been is charged with present time and
overcharged to the point of bursting. The repetition is not a replica, it is the
explosion of that which is repeated. For it there are given no historical data
analogous to data of the senses. Any datum is datum only if it is marked
with the datum of the Now-time that corresponds to it. A datum is only
ever the one dated by another datum. For this dating a somersault of data is
necessary: a leap that is only possible if it does not only proceed between the
two Nows, but rather if it opens up each single Now to the other that corre-
sponds to it. Fashion is a tigers leap into the past. Such a leap, however,
takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands. The
same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical leap Marx understood
as revolution (GS 1.2: 701/SW 4: 395). Benjamin prefaces these thoughts
with a verse of Karl Kraus: Ursprung ist das Ziel (origin is the goal). This
sentence is misunderstood if one interprets origin as starting-point and the
movement towards it as return. Origin is rather the goal as that leap that
tears apart each point and each series of points, it is the moment of disconti-
nuity by virtue of which there is, always for the rst time, historical time at
all. Any revolution that, unlike the bourgeois revolution, did not take place
in the arena of the ruling class, would be such a leap. Not a former Now
into which a present Now leaps, but the leap itself is the revolution. Because
the Now that has been as well as the present Now are Now only by virtue
of this leap, the one that leaps ahead of both of them is the original leap
(Ur-Sprung). Only as such an original leap (Ur-Sprung) that is, original
crisis (Ur-Krisis) can it reach what Benjamin in the fragment Aus einer
kleinen Rede ber Proust, an meinem vierzigsten Gerburstag gehalten calls
original past [Urvergangenheit] (GS 2.3: 1064), that is: a past which was not
there before the remembrance of it. In this sense, the Now is the origin of
the historical. And in this sense it is messianic: the rescue of that which was
not there before the rescue.
With the notion Now of recognizability, which is fundamental for his
philosophy of history, Benjamin insists on the transcendental status of that
to which it refers. He is not concerned with the Now of cognition, but
with the Now which, ahead of every actual cognition, xes the structural
condition of the possibility of cognition. Just as the centre of his early study
On Language as Such and on the Language of Man is not communication
but communicability, the centre of his studies on historical time is the
Now of recognizability. Thus no decision has been made on whether there
is actual historical cognition and a corresponding politics. Neither has it
been decided whether there is indeed a Now of cognition. The object of
Benjamins analyses is not this Now as it actually now is, but rather
how it has to be constituted in order to be able to be an actual Now. As
little as this says about the existence of actual historical cognitions, as much
does it say about the conditions it needs to full in order to become real as
genuine historical cognition. Each actual Now is Now and actual only if it
corresponds to the constitution which has been prescribed by this structure
of possibility of the Now by Nowability (Jetztbarkeit). Historical cognition
is cognition and historical only if it fulls the conditions put forward by
the structure of recognizability: in all other cases it is not historical, that
is, no cognition that triggers history, and not a cognition that intervenes in
history; that means it is, in fact, no cognition at all.
The historico-philsophical aperus that Benjamin noted during his work
on the Arcades Project and provisionally summarized in the theses On the
Concept of History are both diagnostic and propaedeutic and in both respects
critical. Written immediately after the HitlerStalin pact, which Benjamin,
according to his friend Soma Morgenstern, saw as the total discrediting of
the communists
11
as well as of the social democratic movement, these notes
give an explanation for the powerlessness of social democratic politics with
respect to National Socialism: social democracy was powerless because it
supported an ideal of a community of work and communication, an ideal
that was to be reached on the path of the inevitable progress of mankind
in the continuum of a time seen as an a priori form. Against this polit-
ically as well as epistemologically disastrous ideology, which mechanizes
history as an automatic progression and neutralizes the subject of history
to a homogeneous mankind that heads for an ideal of universal consent,
Benjamin objects as follows (and this is what constitutes the arguments
propaedeutic nature): the subject of history cannot be mankind, but only a
class, that is, the class of the oppressed, of those deprived of their rights and
of the exploited (even if they exploit themselves); and history cannot be an
automatic process in an already constituted form of time, but can alone be
that movement whose form is not set in advance, i.e. not directed towards
pregiven goals but rather a movement that is in principle open to unfor-
seeable realizations. History is not history as long as it does not happen. It
cannot happen if it merely follows a predestined form and goal. Therefore,
neither a form nor the goals of history can be regarded as historically neutral
and established once and for all. The transcendental conformism of the
social democratic ideology represents such a xing of form and goal, which
in principle, i.e in its ideal of a consensual homogeneous mankind, joined
forces with Nazism and the entire tradition of oppression that preceded it. In
this conformism, however, it is not just one particular class that is exploited
and oppressed, one that denes itself throughout history in diverse ways and
thus not only as proletarian; in it, anything that diverges from the form of
the course of history and the ideal of its goal is oppressed and exploited.
The question that must be asked by anyone who is concerned that there
be history and not merely a tradition of oppression; the question that, since
anyone can become the victim of such oppression we must all ask ourselves,
and that Benjamin had to ask himself most pressingly at that moment when
he saw himself and all those who were close to him fall victim not just to
oppression but to extermination; the question is simply and necessarily this:
what is oppressed and what is exploited in the construction of a homogeneous
course of history and of a similarly homogeneous mankind? In Benjamins
writing the answer is as clear as it is often obscured by his readers, namely in
the following insight: in this construction the fact of its constructedness, in
the homogeneity the necessity of its genesis, in the continuity the structure
of its creation is used, but used as a means for another end than that of its
creation, i.e. exploited, driven out of the result and oppressed. If history is
thus to be possible, then it is only possible as a history of all such oppressed
that has no place in any form and yet is indispensable for its constitution.
It is indispensable and a minimal condition for history, however, that it
happens; that it is not xed in unvarying forms, but on the contrary that
it happens each time in unpredictable ways, and that it happens between
at least two moments that were not previously coordinated. History is the
un-preformable event in which one Now meets another corresponding Now.
History this is Benjamins nding is thus founded as happening in the
possibility of a Now for a second Now, a possibility that can carry the logical
and epistemological title Now of recognizability. Wherever this minimal
structure of history is ignored and assimilated to a mere progressive form
between equally valid points in time, the formal conditions are in place for
the catastrophes of the progress to homogenization carried out by German
National Socialism.
But how, if at all, can this minimal structure of history be observed,
realized in historiography and actualized in politics? For as long as this
possibility is not secured and these forms are not made more precise,
any reection on the philosophy of history has to suspect that history in
Benjamins strict and emphatic sense cannot be realized and the progress
in the destruction of historical possibilities is still underway. Neither this
suspicion one could equally justiably say concern, doubt, horror or even
despair nor the desire, longing or the hope that such history may exist can
be external to the possibility of history and thus its structure. The desire
for genuine history as well as the horror that it could be impossible have
to be integral elements of the possibility of history itself. With this move,
however, the perspective of an analysis in terms of philosophy of history is
altered on principle: it is not merely that the conditions of the possibility of
history will have to be claried, they also have to be claried with regard to
their possible failing and thus with regard to a category an allocategory
which has been regarded within transcendental philosophy, dialectics
and phenomenology only as an exclusionary criterion, rather than as a
structural threat, one that endangers the constitution of its subject domain
as well as its procedure. Philosophy of history can no longer be transcen-
dental philosophy and content itself with exploring the irreducible forms of
historys constitution as happening and as cognition of this happening. In
these forms it also has to address their possible failure, the de-constitution of
even the irreducible in the register of forms, and thus address that which in
history, were it to succeed, yet remains open to that which does not enter any
forms but accompanies each form as that which is its exterior and other. The
analysis must not direct itself towards a transcendental, and not towards
anything that resembles it somehow: if it did resemble it namely as a quasi-
transcendental, then the principles of analogy or of correspondence would
still remain within it, which can, however, emerge only with history itself
and the synthesis of distinct Nows. The analysis rather has to look for that
which cannot be predicated in any other terms than its being open to history
be it open to the happening of history, open to its impossibility or to the
happening of its impossibility and as such it belongs to a prehistorical, i.e.
a non-historical that is nevertheless ready for history. That which is open
to form, that which colours every possible form as the unexecutable in it,
can be called attranscendental: as ante-transcendental, i.e. preceding every
transcendental; as ad-transcendental, i.e. innitely open; as a-transcen-
dental, i.e. not occupied by any transcendental. If there can be a history,
then it can be only as that happening in which also its Not happens.
In the phrase of Thesis V on the irretrievable image of the past which
threatens to disappear in any present that does not recognize itself as
intended in that image (GS 1.2: 695/SW 4: 391), Benjamin characterizes
history as an in principle singular, that is, unrepeatable, repetition of what-
has-been in a present Now. If this repetition is the index for the doubleness
and thus for the crisis of the Now in its historical experience, then the
unrepeatability of this repetition is the index for the possibility of its failing.
If history is always singular and unique, then it is missed if this one time it is
not seized. Not only does every time therefore have a virtually corresponding
time, in which it is recognized, and this means recognized as intending the
latter; furthermore, this time is only a single one. What follows from this is:
time is time only in the danger of not being time. Thus it is noted in Thesis
VI: Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it the way
it really was. It means appropriating a memory as it ashes up in a moment
of danger (GS 1.2: 695/SW 4: 391). The moment of remembrance is the
moment of a danger for the remembrance as well as for the one who seizes
it. For the remembrance there is the danger of not being seized, or, even if
seized, of being conformistically assimilated to the good of the powerful.
In both cases there is a threat to that which has been missed that which
is past that the slim chance to be transformed into happiness slips away.
For whatever can enter remembrance is a promesse de bonheur which in
remembering searches out the door to fullment. Since the claim only ever
poses itself a single time, the one who could remember is threatened with
the danger that the claim of the past is no longer intended for him, that he is
no longer the addressee of the claims of the past and that he is no longer the
one who has been endowed with a weak messianic power. That which does
not enter remembrance has missed the possibility of nding redemption in
remembering: there is no longer a messianic time for it, if the one that was
meant in it does not recognize itself as the one that was meant.
If remembering only ashes up in a moment of danger, it is the danger of
disappearing never to be seen again. If danger is the index of uniqueness,
involuntariness and authenticity of remembering, and thus also an index
of the possible failure of remembering and history, then danger cannot be
understood as being a mere external threat. On the contrary, danger belongs
to the innermost structure of historical cognition to such a degree that it is,
in each singular case, not merely cognition in the danger but also cognition
out of that danger. Whoever remembers, remembers at the risk of not remem-
bering, of not being demanded by a past, at the risk of missing the missed
and that which demands completion all over again, and at the risk of missing,
together with the claims of the past, their historical possibilities and thus
history in general. In order to determine more pronouncedly the relation
between the moment of remembering and the moment of danger, Benjamin
thus writes, still in Thesis VI: The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer;
he comes as the victor over Antichrist. The only historian capable of fanning
the spark of hope in the past is the one who is rmly convinced even the dead
will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious (GS 1.2: 695/SW 4: 391).
A historiographer namely has been given a weak messianic power only if he
remembers the danger of not being able to remember, the danger of not being
able to resurrect the passed-away times in his remembering, to re-present
what-has-been, to wake the dead. Only the one who is imbued with the idea
that even the dead could be killed and could stop asserting their claims upon
the living, will stand up against this cessation; only the one who remembers
the possibility that the past could become silent for him will help to bring up
its claim towards language; only the one who is aware of the danger that there
could be could be no history can write history. Thus, only because history is
in danger of becoming impossible does remembering set in: for it is not only
the remembering of a loss, an omission or a failure that lies in the past, it has
to be primarily a remembering of that loss that also threatens it, hic et nunc,
in the Now of recognizability: no longer being able to remember, no longer
being equipped with the ability to recognize and the ability for the Now.
That is what is remembered by the one who remembers, who remembers at
the moment of danger; is imbued with that which never has been, is never
supposed to be and yet threatens. One remembers Nothing.
In each remembering the not-remembering is remembered: but it is not
co-remembered as if it were a second object beside the initial one of the Now
that has been; it is not remembered as a mere alternative to the image of the
past. In the possible impossibility of remembering the making possible of
the remembering is remembered, for only in the danger of not being remem-
bered does remembering emerge. That is the minimal structure of history:
that each Now of recognizability, in which one time leaps into another one,
can also not be this Now, can extinguish its recognizability, and the leap
can fail to succeed. There is no messianic claim that could not be missed
and could fail to nd its Messiah. That is, no messianic structure of history
that did not arise only out of the possibility that there could also not be a
messianic structure of history. A Now of recognizability is only ever one
that can be devoid of any cognition and can be not Now.
The minimal messianism Benjamin sketches in Thesis II namely
that the past carries with it a hidden index in which it refers to the weak
messianic power of the present is connected, at the latest in the sixth
thesis, to the internal endangering of its structure. This is rendered more
precisely as something that could be called a-messianism: the notion that
this weak messianic power inhabits only those who are imbued with the
possibility of its failure; that a force is messianic only if it can fail.
The Messiah could not come if his coming were assured and that means:
if the Messiah himself would be certain as the one he is, if he comes. The
Messiah is only the one who can also not come and can also not be the
Messiah. The Messiah is only he who, even in his coming, might as well
not come. Only he, who in his not-coming can still come. Because only
the coming of the Messiah can give rise to time and can thus in no way
by subjected to the form of a continuous and homogeneous course of
time, he has to be the one who can come even before he has come, and
who can come after he has already come. The Messiah only comes in a
time that is distorted, however slightly, against any linear course. And
only as distorted in such a way, as an always leaped time (ersprungene Zeit),
can the messianic time come; it can only come as the distortion of time,
distortion of the conditions of experience, distortion of its very possibility.
The deepest distortion of the possibility of messianic time, however, the
distortion of the messianic ability itself, which Benjamin calls messianic
power, lies in its being exposed to the inability and thus the impossibility
of perceiving itself, acting and fullling itself as the possibility, ability and
power. Because messianic power is not a transhistorical substantial ability
that realizes itself in history from case to case, but an ability out of which
alone history could arise, it is a force that opens history without substantial
and without historical assurances. It is only effective under the condition
that it remains exposed to its own impotence (i.e. under the condition that
it includes even this impotence into itself. It is a weak power because it is
the power of weakness, because it is the power out of the missing of power.
This weakness is not in contrast to power, but lies in its centre. For that
power cannot be messianic that rescues only itself; messianic is only the
power that rescues even its own failing. A Messiah is only he who rescues
even the impossibility of a Messiah. He can only come in such a way that
he might also not come, and come as someone other than the Messiah. And
his coming this future expected by all pasts, that Benjamin touches upon
in his theses this coming can only be possible out of that which not only
holds back all coming but also threatens it with the possibility of being for
ever impossible. The future of the Messiah would not arise out of the wealth
of his possibilities, not even out of the single possibility that something like
history and thus world, freedom and happiness could be experienced; it
would arise from the complete loss of all possibilities of the future, out of
the impossibility of its coming, and out of that alone. This impossibility of
the coming, the impossibility of the future would be that which comes. In
this coming of something that does not come and could not come and
therefore can not come only therein would the coming be even in its most
extreme possibility: that it fails to appear; only therein future itself and thus
time would be rescued. What would be rescued is that there is no rescue.
And this would be the Now of recognizability, the critical and only thus
messianic Now of recognizability, the Now that constitutes history in the
moment of its disappearance and with its disappearance: the Now of its
Not.
Among Kafkas notes the following sentence can be found: The Messiah
will come only when he is no longer needed, he will come one day after his
coming, he will not come on the last day, but on the very last
.
12
Benjamin
does not cite this passage, although it can be assumed he knew it. However
distant it may be from the manifest content of the theses on history, it
draws out the lines that become visible in Benjamins reections. For when
Benjamin notes that the past can only nd its Messiah in the moment of
danger and thus ties the messianic possibility to the possibility of its impos-
sibility, then Kafkas remark brings this possibility into the structure of the
messianic future itself. He xes it in a paradoxical distortion of time. If the
Messiah only comes the day after his arrival, that is, only after his coming,
then the coming of the Messiah is his coming only in his not-coming, and
thus it is the arrival of his failing to appear. The Messiah who only comes
after his coming is not only the split and twofold Messiah that Jewish
tradition knows under the names of the suffering and dying Messiah ben
Joseph and the triumphant Messiah ben David. The one who comes after
his coming, the Messiah that comes after himself and as another than
himself, is the Messiah who is not necessary, who does not rescue and who is
no Messiah; and more precisely, he is the Messiah of the Not-Messiah. The
Messiah is Messiah of there not being a Messiah. This messianicity of the
non-messianic, this messianic without the messianic this a-messianic is
the last and nal crisis of which the structure of the messianic is capable. It
is not destroyed by this crisis, but steps into it as into the centre of its force.
In it, even the Nothing of the messianic is rescued.
4
DOWN THE K. HOLE:
WALTER BENJAMINS
DESTRUCTIVE
LAND-SURVEYING OF HISTORY
STEPHANIE POLSKY
When is drawing a line a means of escape? When is freedom no longer the
object, but simply a way out, right, or left, in any direction so long as it
is as little signifying as possible?
1
When does a surveyor begin charting a
course? Perhaps it is the case that his task begins him. That he nds himself
in the middle of a charter of events already in progress. Events which
beseech him to take on a their course as much as his own. Perhaps this was
the case with Kafkas character K. from The Castle who, when he arrived at
the inn one snowy night, seemed to surface from nowhere, only to pick up
an ofcial telephone and impulsively identify himself as the land-surveyor.
Through this single gesture he was instantly and yet unwittingly part of the
culture in the village. Perhaps this was also the case with Walter Benjamin
at a point when his property rights on existence became so infringed upon in
Berlin, that he responded by wilfully cutting himself off from Germany and
alternatively identifying himself as the land-surveyor of European culture.
His experience is similar to Kafkas K., in so far as there is no precedent for
Benjamins role; he enters the village of cultural criticism without author-
ization. Like K. he must spend his time both devising his function and
courting higher-ups, and above all biding his time always from a strategic
distance. Indeed, Benjamin retains his post in life in a way similar to how
K. retains his post in the Castle, that is to say through earnest follow-up on
an absurd course of contestation, misrecognition and postponement of his
job description. The crucial factor with Benjamin, like K. before him, will
be an ability to obscure his points of entry, in such a way that he makes an
anti-genealogy for his intellectual and personal motivations.
This sort of approach requires a fair bit of meandering around ones os-
tensible goal. And indeed, what critics nd so maddening about Benjamin is
the seemingly endless meandering of his thought, whose outcomes moreover
can be readily described as Kafkaesque.
2
In a somewhat reactionary stance
many critics seem to approach Benjamins work with a mind toward bureau-
cratization, obsessively seeking out ways to reorganize and recatalogue his
Schriften. What they disregard is that maintaining a disordered strategy of
mind was quite possibly the most advantageous intellectual practice for a
man in Benjamins situation. Here is a man who nds himself dropped in the
middle of a modernist ethical scheme whose political programme institutes
a position of dire scarcity (fascism), or replete abundance (communism),
both of which are founded on a shaky platform of humanism. Benjamin,
as someone wary of those projects, is nonetheless implicated in them, as he
variously inhabits societies for which there is a termination scheme imposed
upon those who are believed to fail compliance with these human regulation
programmes.
Indeed, for our purposes in mapping Benjamins political and cultural
whereabouts, it is crucial to bear in mind that his coordinates are always
already joined in a constellation of protofascism, not beginning in 1933 but
rather in 1892, the year of his birth. He is in the unique position to claim
that he was born into a generation of men, German Jews, whose lifetimes
were determined from the start to end in cultural and historical obliteration.
From the outset Benjamin had to confront a possible failure of traces. The
Nazis determination to rub out gures like Benjamin from the historical
record failed, but others less obviously succeeded in blurring his conceptual
project so far as to obscure it in our readings of his work.
One of the greater elements of that project, which remains somewhat
obscured in current readings of Benjamin, is his interest in deploying
writing as politics. It is widely known that Benjamin was a great admirer
of Kafkas literary approach. What is less known is the degree to which he
relied upon Kafkas literary work to cast his own politics in the later years
of his work. Deleuze and Guattari (Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, A
Thousand Plateaus, On The Line) are the only critics willing to stumble upon
a political modus operandi within Kafkas writing, and therein provide great
assistance in an attempt to lay the groundwork for a topographical histori-
ography as opposed to a biography of Benjamins life. This topographical
exercise has its beginnings in a rather conspicuous assumption, one that
Deleuze and Guattari will come to associate with Kafka, and I later with
Benjamin. Simply put, the assumption is that there is no ideology, and
indeed there never has been.
3
Thus it becomes evident to all parties that
it is useless to choose political strategies, outside of your own. Even then,
for the sake of expediency, this position too must be periodically voided.
Therein there are no hard and fast demarcations of belonging, positionality,
or as K. calls it t, but rather a geography extending outward composed of
politicized gestures. Ideology or t would imply that these are solid cong-
urations, when in fact they are, simply put, a matter of ows. Initially, K.
will complain to the teacher, I dont t with the peasants, nor, I imagine,
with the Castle. The teacher will reply, There is no difference between
Down the K. Hole 71
the peasantry and the Castle.
4
Why is this so? Because as groups they are
constantly negotiating for the same territory and in so doing rhythmically
take on the characteristics of each other. In Deleuze and Guattaris words,
they form a rhizome.
5
A rhizome is not a matter of t, but rather a concern of mutual trans-
formation. K. soon realized after making this assertion that he would need
to rethink his approach and in so doing enter into mutual relations with
both Barnabas, a Castle functionary, and Frieda, a peasant, both of whom
have intimate contact with the Castle. There is no room for imitation in
these relationships. Nor is any identication made between his and their
position. Instead, K.s presence works to shift the ground of Barnabas and
Friedas relationship of obedience to the Castle. Ironically, in doing so K.
is becoming more and more engaged in his role as Castle functionary.
K. deterritorializes their position, at the same moment that he reterritori-
alizes his own. Conversely, it is Barnabas and Frieda who act to block K.s
total absorption into Castle law. They function as blocks to encourage his
continued strategy of building an adjacent relationship to the Castle: a way
out that does not resemble escape so much as it reassembles the layout of the
whole territory. K. is the land-surveyor after all, and the blocks he nds on
his way to the Castle extend his capability to deterritorialize its signicance
while dodging an understanding of it as a discrete signier.
K.s task eventually reveals itself not to be to get to the Castle, but rather
to get around it. This approach is fundamentally related to Benjamins
project of a consistent realignment of our approach toward history. Real-life
gures such as Asja Lacis, Gershom Scholem, Theodor Adorno and Bertolt
Brecht play similar roles to Kafkas characters Frieda and Barnabas, in so
far as they act as pressuring forces that periodically harden or solidify a
contemporary position around Benjamin with regard to the entity of state
politics. Through a series of intense encounters with these individuals,
Benjamin is able to at once determine a political position for himself, and at
the same time extend his professional viability by occupying an ostensible
position within a particular political milieu. Indeed, he manages to operate
quite convincingly within these milieux, using the reective extension of
what is told to him by the others. In point of fact he possesses no deep-
rooted understanding of leftist debates, seldom enough to back himself
up concretely within these arenas. He relies almost solely on his rhetorical
prowess to get him by. This is not to say that Benjamin operates as a political
charlatan, for at no point does he explicitly identify himself as a Bolshevik,
Zionist, Critical Theorist, or even as a Marxist. Rather it is much more the
case that through contact with the gures of Asja Lacis, Gershom Scholem,
Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht respectively, he is able to extend,
for a certain period of time, his own personal capability in tackling the
subjects. That is how he manages to carve out a provisional place within all
these ideological camps. One example of this happened during his visit to
Moscow in 1926. Here Benjamin employs Asja Lacis as his guide through
the local terrain of Marxist thinking. Within a matter of days of being there,
he has cause to remark in his diary: once again I realized just to what extent
the possibility of tackling these subjects depends on my contact with her
(MD, p. 18). This situation of seeming political dependency on Lacis does
not appear to trouble Benjamin. On the contrary, he is quite happy for these
sorts of majoritarian Politics with a capital P to ow over him, and for them
to remain a point of contingency indenitely. This is the case so long as he
maintains loyalty to a more pressing political objective: the task of assem-
bling an intimate minor geography of European protofascistic terrains.
This is perhaps the reason why Walter Benjamin never really made it to
Central Park.
6
Indeed, when recalling his writings, we confront another
territory altogether. A territory transversed by a series of long-distance
calls, signals coming in from a Europe that has long since been levelled,
a summons that perhaps may even travel beyond the zone of Benjamins
personal nitude. There is no history of Benjamins discursive impact in
this century that does not have a past like that, an unworked-through
dialling route beginning and in some ways ending along a Berlin-based
circuit. We must take care not to undermine the signicance of the disap-
pearance of Berlin and indeed of Europe as the fundamental aporia within
the Benjaminian project. Benjamin does not wish to be emancipated from
the scene of Europes devastation, but instead wishes to come to its defence,
to argue for its continued recognition as a place beyond the realm of
fascism, to argue for its future, its worthwhile position in the world, despite
Hitlers appropriation of the place, and against the ever-encroaching forces
of Americanism on one side and Stalinism on the other. What Deleuze and
Guattari characterize as diabolical powers knocking on the door.
7
If need be,
Benjamin would prefer to greet these diabolical powers on the common
ground of a European corpus, and by extension on the territory of his
singular body as he understands it to be fundamentally European.
With this attitude in mind, it should come as no surprise that the nomadic
Benjamin of the 1930s was wary of joining Adorno and Horkheimer in New
York. He took out his insurance policy with Kafka roughly 20 years before
that, and had read the ne print carefully. When Kafka, in the opening
lines of The Stoker describes the Statue of Liberty as holding aloft a sword,
rather than a torch, Benjamin meticulously takes note of it. This was not
a territorial defect on the part of Kafka: one made by a man who could
barely convince himself ever to leave Prague. Rather it reads for Benjamin
as a substantive prediction of what America was to become in the rst half
of the twentieth century: a burgeoning imperial power poised to unseat the
cultural domination of Europe, whose popular stance was one of hostility
towards so-called European intellectualism (read Marxism).
Kafka is ironically positive about this throughout Amerika, convinced
that everyone has a place in the circus of American life. Perhaps this is so,
Down the K. Hole 73
because there is a deliberate absence of social critique in Kafka.
8
Deleuze
and Guattari observe that:
In America, the most terrible work conditions dont inspire any critique
in K. but simply make him more afraid of being excluded from the hotel.
Although familiar with the Czech socialist and anarchist movement,
Kafka doesnt follow in their path. Passing a workers march, Kafka
shows the same indifference as K. in America: They rule the streets,
and therefore they think they rule the world. In fact, they are mistaken.
Behind already are the secretaries, ofcials, professional politicians, all the
modern satraps for whom [he] is preparing the way to power.
9
Populism such as this exacts its control through different, though no less
beguiling, channels in a technocratic America than it does in a protofascistic
Austro-Hungarian empire, or for that matter in a communist Soviet Union.
All function to diminish the rights of the citizen against the state apparatus
in ways that somehow naturalize the process of infringement. Benjamin
rst started reading Kafkas work in 1927,
10
and it may have been Amerika
that rst convinced Benjamin that he and Kafka had a similar outlook on
state violence, as something that is not altogether unpalatable to the average
citizen. It is most probably In the Penal Colony, however, that awakened
Benjamin to the fact that writing had some denite part in carrying out its
outcomes.
Kafka had difculty getting this story published. In a letter to his publisher
Wolff, who had initially rejected it as too repulsive, Kafka replied: By way
of an explanation, I will merely add that it is not only my latest narrative
which is distressing; our time in general and mine in particular have been
and still are distressing, and mine has even been so for longer than our time
in general.
11
In the Penal Colony was written during the First World War,
when wartime sovereign exception had led to a toughening of the penal code
and permitted infringements upon a private citizens basic rights of privacy.
Fear of denunciation, arbitrary scapegoating and bureaucratic restriction
began to form part of everyday life in Prague. These conditions were shortly
to arrive in Berlin. The ofcial assures the visitor that Our sentence does
not sound severe. The Harrow will write whatever commandment the man
has disobeyed onto his body. This condemned man, for instance . . . will
have written on his body: honour thy superiors.
12
This is the same sentence
that is rendered in numbers on the bodies accounted for by the National
Socialist regime. The sheer number of prescriptions written onto the bodies
of those it holds responsibility for allows for a certain mobility, that is, it
allows the regime to mobilize through the various doctrinal signications
these bodies communicate and display on their surfaces. The proliferation of
messages therein get transported off the backs of citizens. Such corporeal
branding allows National Socialism to spread in numbers through bodies
in a way concurrent with its aggressive annexation strategies. In this way
National Socialism assumes the character of a molecular ow. Deleuze and
Guattari stress that under Nazi protocol the number is no longer a means of
counting or measuring, but of moving: it is the number itself which moves
through space.
13
And therein results a proliferation of conicting and often
contradictory messages from the regime onto bodies as they move through
the spaces of its ever-expanding Reich.
One example of this messaging strategy appears as part of the brochure
State and Health of 1942, which was meant to promote the success of
Nationalist Socialist policy to countries like France and Denmark. It was
authored by, among others, Otto von Verschuer, whom Giorgio Agamben
describes as one of the key persons responsible for the medical politics of the
Nazi Party. As von Verschuer inscribes it:
This politics begins rst of all with the establishment of a budget to
account for the living wealth of a people and proposes to assume the
care of the biological body of the nation. While Helferich estimated the
German national assets to be about three hundred and ten million marks,
there is also a living wealth worth one thousand and sixty marks.
14
This living wealth, beyond being a means of accounting for bodies, becomes
something that authorizes the state to rank them in terms of viability. In
order for a body to remain viable it must carry on (it) the mandate of certain
discursive economics. Any resistance to the assumption of such messages is
understood as something that is bad for state business. Therein, anytime
bare life resists its discursive politicization, a ow of potential state wealth
escapes and in so doing reduces national worth. The state struggles to
maintain and increase the quality of its living wealth through rhetorically
and materially promoting various biological improvement campaigns. This
process of enforcing the states rhetorical health policy is by no means a
stable system, and uctuations are a constant reminder to the state that it
must bear down upon or even eliminate bodies that do not comply suf-
ciently with such corporeal reform strategies.
In keeping with the theme of ows in our discussion, it is signicant to
note that von Verschuer adds to his comments the assertion that Fluctuations
in the biological substance and in the material budget are usually parallel.
15
Such uctuations must, however, remain in check, and the state attempts
to do this through various tracing techniques which include a combination
of statistics, biological determinism and binary logic. These epistemological
practices reinforce the overall notion of what Deleuze and Guattari refer
to as a pretraced destiny, whatever name is given to it divine, anagogic,
historical, economic, structural, hereditary or syntagmatic.
16
Deleuze and
Guattari would remind us that the trace always involves an alleged com-
petence.
17
The appearance of state competence can be periodically under-
Down the K. Hole 75
mined and this can occur through the introduction of a new diagram or
map of the states operations which temporarily removes blockages and
allows long disused connections to function again. However, a more likely
scenario to take place from within this overcoded structure is that the trace
itself becomes intense and in so doing takes on a diagrammatic, as opposed
to grammatic, character trait. That is to say, it no longer subtends the
solidied grammar of the state but rather forms out of that grammar a map
of its utterances in such a way that it begins to assemble a radical parabasis to
the states discursive logic, loosening the foundation of its signiers along the
way. Deleuze and Guattari illustrate how this might happen:
Accounting and bureaucracy proceed by tracings: they can begin to
burgeon nonetheless, throwing out rhizomatic stems, as in a Kafka novel.
An intensive trait starts working for itself, a hallucinatory perception,
synesthesia, perverse mutation or play of images shakes loose, challenging
the hegemony of the signier.
18
In this instance the trace might expose the rhetorical signier of life in the
Nazi state to be something that in material terms equates itself with
death, with a death-dealing force. This is a force that goes on to exploit
the living wealth by choosing to annihilate its own servants rather than
terminate its own process. This is the moment at which the messages of
National Socialism stop resonating in a state apparatus and causes them
to interact with the war machine. The overall effect being that a line of
destruction takes just so many bodies both docile and resistant with it in a
massive march toward abolition.
In response to the appearance of this telling trait in National Socialism,
Benjamin is compelled to wage a last critical deterritorialization of literature.
He does so through his essay of 1934, which reissues a critical consideration
of Franz Kafka on the Tenth Anniversary of the Authors Death. In it he
identies Kafka as someone uniquely able to put the writing on the wall
to document violence, and moreover protofascism, portraying them both
as a routine effect of the machinery of modernization. Kafkas job at the
Accident Insurance Company was endured for reasons having nothing to do
with a consistently stalled writing technique, but rather it was utilized as a
means to train his skills of observation and reportage. Kafkas writing raised
the tenor of bureaucracy to a political programmatics, making his own
line of ight contingent on being wedged permanently in the bureaucratic
apparatus of the ofce. Benjamin writes: the citizen of the modern state,
confronted by an unfathomable bureaucratic apparatus whose operations are
controlled by agencies obscure even to the executive bodies, not to mention
the people affected by them. (It is well known that one level of meaning in
the novels, especially in The Trial, is located here.) (SW 3: 325). Deleuze and
Guattari concur with Benjamin and offer further that
If Kafka is the greatest theorist of bureaucracy, it is because he shows
how, at a certain level (but at which one? it is not localisable), the barriers
between ofces cease to be a denitive dividing line and are immersed
in a molecular medium (milieu) that dissolves them and simultan-
eously makes the ofce manager proliferate into microgures impossible
to recognize or identify, discernible only when they are centralizable:
another regime, coexistent with the separation and totalisation of the
rigid segments.
19
In Kafkas world the ofce manager becomes something of an inadvertent
rhizomatic gure. Like the trace, he is able to break free of the overcoded
bureaucratic environment and burgeon his appearance in such a way as to
become his own boss, a general manager unto himself: one who starts to
have an hallucinatory perception of his own power. He becomes paranoid
and begins to mutate the bureaucratic codes to his own ends, imagining
other ways they could appear or be understood.
In keeping himself within that nebulous milieu, Kafka exposed himself
to these gures on a day-to-day basis and was then able to appreciate that
these protofascist managers were at heart over-industrious bureaucrats
who took the rigidity of totalitarianism, sped it up, causing it to become a
molecular ow which consequentially poured into all segments of society.
Bureaucracy still very much exists under National Socialism, but instead of
functioning sensibly, manageably on a mass level as in other totalitarian state
apparatuses, it becomes something cellular and therein capable of travelling
anywhere it wishes within the body politic. The fact that violence in these
bureaucracies took a superior, classicatory tone, bespeaks the magnitude of
networks of penetration it encompassed. The modern citizen could hardly
say where the violence began and the law ended; only that the law seemed
to exist both nowhere and everywhere within protofascistic societies and
therein it was understood as a kind of mythic entity. Benjamins Critique of
Violence shares the modern citizens preoccupation with violence outside
the law (SW 1: 252) which nds its cohort examples in the description of
K.s ofces in the Trial.
Benjamin explores the issue of an unassignable law in his correspondence
with Gershom Scholem. In a letter dated 20 September 1934, Scholem
denes the relation of the law described in Kafkas Trial as the Nothing
of revelation, intending by this expression to name a stage of life in which
revelation appears to be without meaning in which it still asserts itself, in
which it has validity but no signicance. A state in which the wealth of
meaning is lost, and what is in 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 (CS, p. 142). According to Scholem, a law
that nds itself in such a condition is not absent but rather appears in the
form of its unrealizability. The pupils of whom you speak at the end are
Down the K. Hole 77
not so much those who have lost the Scripture . . . but students who cannot
decipher it (CS, p. 127). Benjamin nds Scholems understanding of a
law being in force without signicance objectionable based on his opinion
that, as Agamben puts it, a law that has lost its content ceases to exist and
becomes indistinguishable from life.
20
Whether the pupils have lost It [their
Scripture] or whether they are unable to decipher it comes down to the
same thing, because without the key that belongs to it, the Scripture is not
Scripture but life, the life as it is lived in the village at the foot of the hill on
which the castle is built (CS, p. 135).
Giorgio Agamben credits Scholems formulation of being in force without
signicance as a faultless description of the ban (the term Agamben used
to describe the relationship between bare life and the form of law), that our
age cannot master, something which is directly akin to the status of the law
in Kafkas novel.
21
He gleans further from Scholems comments, that:
For life under a law that is a force without signifying resembles life in
the state of exception, in which the most innocent gesture or the smallest
forgetfulness can have the most extreme consequences. And it is exactly
this kind of life that Kafka describes, in which the law is all the more
persuasive for its total lack of content, and in which a distracted knock
on the door can mark the start of uncontrollable trials . . . in Kafkas
village the empty potentiality of law is so much in force as to become
indistinguishable from life . . . The existence and the very body of Joseph
K. ultimately coincide with the Trial, they become the Trial.
22
Moreover, Agamben contends this transformation of the body into law
persists so long as:
Law is maintained as pure form in a state of virtual exception, [and] it lets
bare life (K.s life, or the life lived in the village at the foot of the castle)
subsist before it. Law that becomes indistinguishable from life in a real
state of exception is confronted by life that, in a symmetrical but inverse
gesture, is entirely transformed into law.
23
I would argue that it is on this point of subsistence versus absorption before
the law that the virtual fate of the bare life meets with its real-life con-
sequence. It is here, in a real state of exception, that Benjamins formulation
of an asignifying law outstrips the virtual limitations of Scholems cong-
uration of that same principle and emerges as the real life threshold of this
new era of biopolitics. For in a biopolitical era, bare life is compelled to fold
back upon itself, to invert its liberties toward a proliferation of state orders,
to offer the body itself as a foundation for the assertion of sovereign power,
for the transference of an asignifying law. Ultimately, Agamben too comes
down on the side of Benjamins formulation as the denition of the law
which best described the political parameter of the status of the law in this
present era.
Moreover Benjamin grasped, better than most critics of his time, how this
condition of life under a law that is for all intents and purposes asignifying,
inuenced writers like Kafka to transform themselves and their characters in
response to tremendous pressures exerted on the organic body and assume
the form things assume in oblivion, meaning that they are distorted.
Benjamin goes on to cite a litany of examples of this distortion:
The cares of the family man, which no one can identify, are distorted;
the bug, of which we know all too well represents Gregor Samsa is
distorted; the big animal, half lamb, half kitten, for which the butchers
knife might be a release is distorted. These gures are connected by a
long series of gures with the prototype of distortion, the hunchback.
(SW 2: 811)
These creatures occupy a corporeality that is composed solely out of writing,
as such they could hold a place in a world so distorted that the virtual
exception of the law now exists as a real state of exception. Under such a
state of affairs these demonic creatures will continue to proliferate in their
aberrant forms and can only disappear with the coming of the Messiah
(SW 2: 811). This is interpreted by Agamben as an event wherein the law
being in force without signicance has come to an end. For the Messiah will
only be able to enter after the door of the law has been closed.
24
Persisting in
this state of distortion helps these abysmal creatures to elude what Agamben
calls the absolute intelligibility of a life wholly resolved into writing which
corresponds to the impenetrability of writing that having become indeci-
pherable now appears as life.
25
This is the condition a true-life gure like
Benjamin faces. Only at this juncture of reality do the terms distinguished
and kept united by the relation of ban (bare life and the form of the law)
abolish each other and enter into a new dimension.
26
Benjamin would argue
that the cusp of this dimension has already emerged within protofascist
Berlin, through an era in which, as Agamben would have it,
That state of exception turned into rule signals laws fullment and its
becoming indistinguishable from the life over which it ought to order.
Confronted with this imperfect nihilism that would let nothing subsist
indenitely in the form of a being in force without signicance, Benjamin
proposes a messianic nihilism that nullies even the Nothing and lets no
law remain in force beyond its own content.
27
Prior to the arrival of this nullication, the existence and body of Walter
Benjamin are left to coincide with National Socialism, destined to contend
with its inuence, as the state of exception could not be separated out from
Down the K. Hole 79
the bare life of any individual residing in Berlin in the era National Socialism
came to envelope. Under such an exceptional rule of law his existence, his
very body, coincided with National Socialism to such a profound extent it
began not just to resemble, or imitate the effects of National Socialism on
his person but actually to manifest them rhizomatically. His body, thus
written over with a force of law that was at once asignifying and profoundly
consequential, meant that for Walter Benjamin ones only form of agency
was to become a point on a point of view on the events which followed in
its immanent wake, to become National Socialisms reporter.
It was Leibniz:
Who subjected the points of view to exclusive rules such that each opened
itself onto the others only in so far as they converged. Nietzsche, contrary
to Leibniz, argued that the point of view is opened onto a divergence
which it afrms. In other words each point of view becomes the means of
going all the way to the end of the other, by following the entire distance.
In Nietzsches scheme divergence is no longer a principle of exclusion, and
disjunction no longer a means of separation.
28
The convergence of disjunctive events is now a means of communication.
Everything thereafter happens through a resonance of disparities, point
of view on a point of view, displacement of perspective, differentiation
of difference, and not through the identity of contraries.
29
The violence
that Benjamin denes in the Critique of Violence as divine moves along
on a similarly disjunctive principle. Following in line from Agambens
arguments, it is situated in a zone in which it is no longer possible to
distinguish between exception and rule.
30
As such divine violence functions
as a dissolution of the link between violence and the law.
31
Benjamin can
say that divine violence neither posits nor conserves violence, but deposes
it. Divine violence shows the connection between the two [positing and
preserving violence] and even more between violence and the law the
single real content of the law.
32
For Benjamin divine violence with its
characteristic mode of incompossibility emerges in the modern age as the
states most powerful agent for communication and perpetuation of law with
signication, namely the law of dictatorial power.
In the last paragraph of Critique of Violence, Benjamin asserts that the
critique of violence is the philosophy of its history the philosophy of this
history, because only the idea of its development makes possible a critical,
discriminating, and decisive approach to its temporal data (SW 1: 251).
In analysing this data Benjamin cautions that we must not take the short
view:
A gaze directed only at what is close at hand can at most perceive a
dialectical rising and falling in the lawmaking and law-preserving forms
of violence. The law governing their oscillation rests on the circumstances
that all law-preserving violence, in its duration, indirectly weakens the
lawmaking violence it represents, by suppressing hostile counterviolence.
(SW 1: 251).
The only means to break the cycle of this duration, and in doing so bring
upon a new historical epoch is through the suspension of the law and
the abolition of state power (SW 1: 252). The agent necessary to carry such
an operation would be revolutionary violence, what Benjamin refers to as
unalloyed violence, implying that it is a pure form of violence, perhaps
related, in some sub- or superhistorical sense, to law in its pure form. For
Benjamin, use of such violence is possible. What is less possible and also less
urgent for humankind, however, is to decide when unalloyed violence has
been realized in particular cases (SW 1: 252). That the appearance of this
unalloyed violence persists as an uncertainty is largely due to the fact that
it remains invisible to the judgement of mankind. Furthermore, Benjamin
argues, the expiatory power of violence itself is invisible to men (SW 1: 252).
This expiatory power of violence relates to history in so far as it grants it the
power of redress.
What I am pointing the way toward is Benjamins nal materialist
document, The Theses for a Philosophy of History, which essentially promotes
a rhizomatic approach to history; a situation where the future and past are
constantly in the process of becoming each other. Undoubtedly some transhis-
torical material is always getting into the works of those becomings: what
Benjamin refers to as the messianic. History then emerges as something far
beyond the reach of mimetic historicism, the trace getting pre-empted by the
code, history emerging as the capture of a code, the codes surplus value, an
increase in valence, a genuine becoming
33
porosity. In this essay, Benjamin
is inuenced by Nietzsches Of the Use and Abuse of History, quoting him
as saying, We need history, but our need for it differs from that of the jaded
idlers in the garden of knowledge (SW 4: 394). Thus Benjamin is telling us
that he is striving for an operative history, rather than a nostalgic one. Rather
than looking to enslaved ancestors, Benjamin wished to direct our focus to
their liberated grandchildren(SW 4: 394). This is an untimely view of history
in so far as it seeks out futural probabilities for the coming moment, from the
clues embedded within our understanding of the past. For Benjamin:
Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between
various moments in history. But no state of affairs having causal signi-
cance 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. The historian who proceeds from this consideration ceases to tell
the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. He grasps the constel-
lation into which his own era has entered, along with a very specic earlier
Down the K. Hole 81
one. Thus, he establishes a conception of the present as now-time shot
through with splinters of Messianic time. (SW 4: 397)
For Nietzsche the historical formulation is slightly different; he opposes
historicism not to the eternal but to the subhistorical or superhistorical: the
Untimely, which is another name for becoming:
The unhistorical is like an atmosphere within which life can germinate
and with the destruction of which it must vanish. It is true that
only by imposing limits on this unhistorical element by thinking,
reecting, comparing, distinguishing, drawing conclusions, only through
the appearance within that encompassing cloud of a vivid ash of light
thus only through the power of employing the past for the purposes of
life and of gain, and introducing into history that which has been done
and is gone did man become man: but with an excess of history man
again ceases to exist, and without that envelope of the unhistorical he
would never have begun or dared to begin. What deed would man be
capable of if he had not rst entered into that vaporous region of the
unhistorical?
34
Benjamin relates Nietzsches concept of the unhistorical to the sign of
a messianic cessation of happening which enables the materialist histori-
ographer effectively to blast a specic life out of the era, a specic 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 4: 396). Thus making history as well as biography dependent
on a series of breaks and constant realignments, a vehicle of its own changing
signicance over time. One way actively to effect these sorts of ruptures of
history, both social and personal, is to develop a reliance on short-term
memory, therein allowing for the replay of events in their singularity, as
opposed to contiguity, in relation to all other surrounding happenings. This
practice undermines historicism in so far as short-term memory eliminates
the drive to focus on the totalized account of what happened. In line with
Deleuze and Guattaris thinking on the subject, even the molar categories
of history and biography can be deterritorialized through use of the faculty
of short-term memory. Qualitatively speaking, short-term memory is of the
rhizome or diagram type and long-term memory is aborescent and centralised
(imprint, engram, tracing or photography). With those distinctions in mind
it would appear that short-term memory has some distinct traits which make
it amenable as an agent of deteriorialization. Deleuze and Guattari charac-
terize short-term memory as being in no way subject to a law of contiguity
or immediacy to its object. What is more, short-term memory can act at a
distance, come or return a long time after, but always under conditions of
discontinuity, rupture or multiplicity. These attributes, which Deleuze and
Guattari associate with short-term memory, are common to both Nietzsches
unhistorical and Benjamins monadology when it comes to dening a
spatial relation to events in history. This is also true of short-term memorys
approach to time, which is one of disjointed recurrence as opposed to
seamless continuum. Moreover, it extends to the very conceptualization of
how to write history and to the idea of history of itself, which is at a certain
level profoundly integrated with the idea of memory. Deleuze and Guattari
would argue for a charting of history in which one writes using short-term
memory and thus using short-term ideas, even if one reads or rereads using
long-term memory for long-term concepts. Through this approach history
is not the present, which becomes static through its recording, but history as
a functionary of short-term memory which includes memory as a process.
Historical memory then merges not with the instant but instead with the
nervous temporal and collective rhizome. This approach does not signal
the elimination of long-term memory, but rather effects an alteration in
the way it organizes material. Long-term memory (civilization, family, race,
society) traces and translates, but what it translates continues to act in, from
a distance, offbeat and in an untimely way.
35
When applied to personal history, short-term memory takes on a quality of
experimentation in contact with the real.
36
In his essay Moscow, Benjamin
countenances revolutionary life as one where, each thought, each day, each life
lies here as on a laboratory table. And as if it were metal from which an unknown
substance is by every means to be extracted, it must endure experimentation
to the point of exhaustion (SW 2: 28). Adopting such a comportment for
himself, Benjamin spews out before him a political eld (similar to Foucaults
episteme) that is neither imaginary nor symbolic; instead it represents a heter-
otopic register of political spaces yet to come, whose possibility for emergence
still lies dormant beneath the strata of the American technocratic apparatus or
the Russian bureaucracy or the machinery of Fascism.
37
Foucault points out
that one of the features of heterotopias is their capability to juxtapose in a
single real place several spaces, several sites that are themselves incompatible.
38
These are the spaces Benjamin wishes to excavate, to nd their mineral as well
as molecular contents, to locate their technical enplacements and to discover
beyond these their monadology. History according to a materialist historiog-
raphy is then borne of out of a history of abrupt blockages, what Benjamin
terms monads. These monads congure themselves according to a logic of
forces: Where thinking suddenly comes to a stop in a constellation saturated
with tensions, it gives that constellation a shock, by which thinking is crystal-
lised as a monad (SW 4: 396). For Benjamin thinking, and in this instance
the thinking of politicized spaces, involves not only the ow of thoughts, but
their arrest as well (SW 4: 396). For Benjamin this blockage presents us with a
tremendous opportunity: a revolutionary chance in the ght for the oppressed
past (SW 4: 396). Therein thinking is always rhizomatic, a becoming encoun-
tering a blockage, encountering another becoming.
Down the K. Hole 83
Benjamins thought approaches politics as though it were an experimental
machine, a machine for effects.
39
He learns this approach from Kafka, whose
work was, from a certain point of view, to be taken literally: in a word, that
it functioned on the surface of its signs and that the issue was not at least,
not only to try and interpret it but above all to practice it as an experi-
mental machine, a machine for effects, as in physics.
40
Benjamins enforced
transience by those political formations meant that he conducted many
of these experiments on himself, as a political operative by other means.
Literally then his writing becomes a means of giving authority to himself,
not through anything resembling a fascist diktat, but rather by material-
izing a space in which he might proliferate his political campaign through
various cultural formations that were not strictly speaking authorized for his
perusal. Basically, then, Benjamins work might be viewed as a trespass, a
kind of unauthorized intervention taking place at the crossroads of various
historical formations paving the road to a universally adopted totalitari-
anism; one, I might add, that would dwarf the German war-machine of
fascism according to Benjamins estimations. It is my opinion that we have
yet to pick up on Benjamins signal in this regard. In a political discussion in
1938 with Brecht in Denmark Benjamin notes: I felt the impact of powers
equal to those of Fascism, powers that sprang up from the depths of history
no less deep than Fascist powers.
41
Surely these depths will rise up again and
require our most sober attentiveness. We can begin to chart these historical
uprisings by examining Benjamins preoccupation with combinations, what
Benjamin referred to as an awakening combination, at once a modern
surface and an archaic depth, signal and oracle!
42
I mentioned earlier Benjamins vision of what it means to become a
materialist historiographer; it is to become a critical thinker who is able to
grasp the constellation into which his own era has entered, along with a
very specic earlier one (SW 4: 397). Hence Benjamins historical preoc-
cupations with series: events that join up in places never thought of, never
concerned to be closely situated. The topographical map he gives to history
is similar to the one Deleuze and Guattari describe as the most striking
topography in Kafkas work: two diametrically opposed points bizarrely
reveal themselves to be in contact.
43
For Benjamins part, he chooses to
expose these sorts of alignments in history along the fault-lines of political
objective. Thus, his approach to historical formation resembles something of
a geological study, a plate tectonics of the will of nations. Benjamins early
concepts of the ruin and porosity in Naples suggest that he was conducting
a kind of archaeological dig into history to recover its lost features. Thus
his approach surveys history on the level of the matrixial and molecular,
beginning with the Trauerspiel and carrying right the way through to his
Theses on the Philosophy of History. This happens well in advance of Deleuze
and Guattaris combined use of the molar and the molecular as a means of
assembling their views about the epochal events of history. This statement is
not meant to inaugurate some stratied competition of philosophical might,
but rather to demonstrate how molecules of Benjamins thought have lodged
themselves into Deleuze and Guattaris battle-plan on the Signier.
It is important to recognize that Benjamins is a tactical approach much
more subtle than any taxonomic history standing alone. His interest lies
in the potential of historical adjacencies; he is reticent about registering
divisions since he does not accept that they materially exist. The historical
materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called Once upon a
time in historicisms bordello (SW 4: 396). An historical materialist cannot
do without the notion of a present which is not in transition but in which
time stands still and has come to a stop. Historical materialism supplies
a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist remains in
control of his powers, and thus is man enough to blast open the continuum
of history (SW 4: 396). Benjamin is acting at the elemental level to re-map
the coordinates of historical understanding. This is in line with Deleuze
and Guattaris assertion that what distinguishes the map from the tracing
is that it is entirely orientated toward an experimentation with the real.
44
Such an experimental approach enables Benjamin, in the role of historys
land-surveyor, to detonate with one hand historical materialism, and with
the other to blast over a mimetic code of historical destruction.
In that same spirit of experimentalism Benjamin himself might be
approached as a map, a territory mapped onto himself, following Deleuze
and Guattaris interpretation of the map as open and connectable to all
dimensions as well as detachable, reversible and susceptible to constant
modication. Moreover, they assert that as opposed to a trace, the map
can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an
individual group, or social formation. Deleuze and Guattari also give us
ultimate licence for situating a map; for instance, It can be drawn on the
wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as
a meditation. Since Benjamins project inherently occupies most of these
potential locations, there is a great cause for it to manifest itself here along
similar lines of formation. What is not made manifest in Benjamins body
of work is the proverbial map drawn on a wall.
45
The absence of this map raises both a crucial omission and a crucial
opportunity in the survey of Benjamins opus. It spurs the imagination
toward an opening out of the territorial locations that lie dormant in his
writing. But in doing so one must remain cautious about the means by
which one endeavours to expose these zones in the body of the text. If they
are inscribed too much they run the risk of being overcoded. On the other
hand, too subtle a survey of them would leave them vulnerable to obscurity,
or, worse still, open to endless bouts of aestheticization. What is required is
not a tracing out of these areas, but rather a mapping technique that could
relate them through diagrammatic extension, one aimed at composing a
series of gestures as opposed to pinning down a singular meaning; one
Down the K. Hole 85
moreover that could install productive blockages as well as opportunities for
subverting them. The apparatus most suited to this task would be histori-
ography. This is not of course the most obvious tool of deterritorialization.
Particularly when we take into account Deleuze and Guattaris views on
history, as something associated with long-term memory, something that
blocks desire, makes mere carbon copies of it, xes it within a stratum,
cuts it off from all of its connections.
46
When asked if they feel there is any
potential for it to become a deterritorializing tool their response is tongue-
in-cheek, playing up a Jewish sense of humour: But, what, then can we
hope for? It is an impasse. Nonetheless, we can realize that even an impasse
is good if it forms part of rhizome.
47
Benjamin quotes Kafka as having once
said there is an innite amount of hope only not for us (SW 3: 327).
Most people thought he was expressing desperation. Deleuze and Guattari
read him as expressing humour. It is a politicized humour that they clearly
wish to emulate: a humour which they credit in Kafka as forming A micro-
politics of desire, a politics that questions all situations . . . Everything leads
to laughter starting with The Trial. Everything is political starting with the
letters to Felice.
48
It is that way with A Thousand Plateaus, as well as their
book on Kafka. A politics that questions all situations, which can see levity
even in the most molar formations can also allow for a different formation of
history to appear. A history that challenges memory, challenges the narrative
form and challenges the regime of signication that reigns over the majority
of historic enterprises. This approach, moreover, could bring an alternative
practice of history into being to serve a linguistic enterprise.
What I am proposing is a minor approach to history that would meet
the criteria of Deleuze and Guattaris for a minor literature. Namely, that
the events are affected by a high coefcient of deterritorialisation . . . that
everything in them is political in so far as each individual happening
is connected immediately to politics and that every event takes on a
collective value . . . another possible community and to forge the means for
another consciousness and another sensibility.
49
History as a thing that no
longer forms anything but a sequence of intensive states, a ladder or circuit
for intensities that one can make race around in one sense or another, from
high to low, or from low to high. The [Event] is the race itself; it has become
becoming.
50
This mode of history has the potential to become something
deterritorializing that would have no particular delity to a place, or for
that matter in a signifying placement. It would produce events that form
a rhizome with their surrounding accounts. Deleuze has already suggested
that events might be further along than words in their potential to deterri-
torialize. In his volume on Leibniz, The Fold, he offers Borges The Garden
of Forking Paths as being an example of such a deterritorialized becoming
for the historical event, wherein history acts as a series of bifurcations or
as a point in the neighbourhood of series divergences.
51
Deleuze describes
Borges as one of Leibnizs disciples who nonetheless takes a divergence
from this pathway to become compossible with the Chinese philosopher-
architect Tsui Pen, the inventor of the garden of bifurcating paths, a
baroque labyrinth whose innite series diverge or converge, forming a web
of time embracing all possibilities.
52
Remarking on Tsui Pens work, Deleuze
observes that all outcomes are produced, each being the point of departure
for other bifurcations.
53
A similar pattern of bifurcation is responsible for
establishing the individual in so far as Deleuze posits the real denition of
the individual as an ad hoc mixture of concentration, accumulation, coinci-
dence of a certain number of converging preindividual singularities.
54
Therein the category of historical event no longer slavishly responds
to the commands of the symbolic meaning, but instead proliferates those
commands into innity, creating a series of transformations of meaning
based on an intimate connection with somebody who is able to import them
in line with their own unique zone of expression, dispersing them within his
own mimetic idiom.
Rather than contextualize the writings, minor histories are meant to
speed the narrative, but not toward any particular outcome. Instead, they
are meant to indicate something gestural, as opposed to symbolic, for the
individual. Benjamin describes Kafkas work as something that constitutes
a code of gestures which surely had no denite symbolic meaning for the
author from the outset; rather, the author tried to derive such a meaning
from them in ever-changing contexts and experimental groupings (SW 3:
801). A minor history operates in a similar way, through series, pairings,
repetitions and deviations of the appearance of ordinary locations. These
happenings then are not linked but instead form a constellation of little
dramas. Benjamin, in describing how gesture functions in Kafkas work,
explains that Each gesture is an event one might even say a drama in
itself (SW 3: 802). Therein these gestures form a map of constantly shifting
happenings, one that neither concerns itself with the vagaries of timing,
nor space, but rather with the instant. As Benjamin had observed in The
Theses on the Philosophy of History: The true image of the past its by. The
past can be seized only as an image which ashes up at the moment of its
recognizability, and is never seen again (SW 4: 390). This is very much the
work of the topographical historiographer: to seize upon moments that are
itting from existence. However, the historic act does not have to be one of
memorial to the dead or drained instant, rather it can be used as a signpost
for instants yet to come which share the same eeting appearance.
A minor history is able to get involved in the proliferation of these
instants, merging them into a collective rhizome, rather than isolating
them and forcing their attenuation. Building up such a mimetic dossier
on Benjamin is a perilous assignment, requiring recovering tactics of a
different order than the archiving tendency of the trace can offer. This is
why a minor approach is necessary, one that refuses to entertain any desires
to house Benjamin, to remember him, to replace him as displaced gure,
Down the K. Hole 87
to mollify him. Instead these composites hope to speed his signalled
departure, to send it racing into a series of departures and connections.
Through a certain distribution of terms this can certainly be accomplished.
Among these are:
Connection. The construction of singular series. Also Conjunction. The
construction of convergent series. And nally Disjunction. The distri-
bution of a divergent series. These three tactics together equal an
afrmation of mobility and of duration. Divergence however acts as
the teeth that interlock the sequences, which are subdivisible in their
respective series.
55
It is this quality of divergence that also allows one to afrm distance over
locatedness, as a starting-point of view.
In the book Logic of Sense, Deleuze holds that:
With Nietzsche, the point of view is opened onto a divergence which
it afrms; another town corresponds to each point of view, each point
of view is another town, the towns are linked only by their distance
and resonate only through the divergence of their series, their houses
and their streets. There is always another town within the town. Each
term becomes the means of going all the way to the end of the other, by
following the entire distance.
56
It is in this sort of town that the ight of a minor history can commence
from end to end, term to term, series to series, convergence to divergence
and further on from there.
During the course of his lifetime Benjamin faces a scenario of events
where getting through might be just as bad as being disconnected: a
somewhat horrifying prospect for anyone setting out. Benjamins journey
is a prodigious operation which translates this horror into a topography of
obstacles (where to go? how to arrive? Berlin, Moscow, Paris?).
57
The surveyor
has no choice but to journey onward, as he is compelled by forces beyond
his true understanding: diabolical forces that are knocking at the door,
jamming up the signal, confusing the network as to the vital task at hand.
That task comes down to a redirection of the nineteenth centurys course
of understanding, through twentieth-century communication tactics which
could potentially act as line of ight, a means of distribution of a particular
thesis; one requiring the transformation of the event of thought and of
history back into a minor discourse.
5
THE SICKNESS OF TRADITION:
BETWEEN MELANCHOLIA AND
FETISHISM
REBECCA COMAY
FROM MELANCHOLIA TO FETISHISM
Is it possible to acknowledge loss without thereby surreptitiously disavowing it?
For whatever cultural and historical reasons, melancholia the unappeasable
attachment to an ungrievable loss seems to have a peculiar resonance
today. It might indeed be tempting to see in the very stubbornness of the
attachment the loyalty to things a certain ethical dimension: the refusal
to perform the mourning work of renunciation through symbolic mediation
might seem to involve an encrypting of alterity within the interiority of
the subject, which would as such divest itself of its illusory sufciency or
self-containment. Freuds open wound
1
would be the site of an originary
extimacy as the subjects own opening to an innite responsibility. Buried
alive within the vault of a self fractured by the persistence of what cannot
be metabolized, the lost object would seem to assert its continued claim on
those still alive. Melancholia would articulate this claim. Its tenacity would
be the measure of the incommensurability of a loss whose persistence points
both to the innite need for and to the nal impossibility of all restitution.
The issue proves to be somewhat more complicated. Simply to invert
Freuds infamous hierarchy between normal, normalizing mourning and
pathological melancholia would be to ignore that the antithesis between
mourning and melancholia nds an echo within the structure of melan-
cholia itself, which displays its own internal conceptual self-division. The
very history of the concept of melancholia shows a systematic oscillation
between denigration and overvaluation a split which suggests that
whatever the resonance of the concept today it should not be a question
simply of privileging melancholia as somehow most responsible to the
historical demands of an epoch devastated by the cumulative horror of its
losses. Typically stigmatized in the medical tradition from Stoicism through
The Sickness of Tradition 89
Scholasticism (where, not coincidentally, its perils were typically coded as
feminine), valorized in the Renaissance and Romantic tradition (where its
benets were correspondingly coded as masculine), melancholia has from
the beginning been burdened with a double valency. Linked, on the one
hand, to paralysing pathology (the noonday demon of the Middle Ages),
and, on the other, to ecstatic creativity (the divine mania of Ficino or
Tasso), the concept of melancholia is itself ssured by a crucial ambiguity.
2
The aporia is not simply that the emphasis on the opacity of the lost
object deects attention from the lost object to loss as such, and from here,
eventually, to the subject of loss a movement of abstraction which paradox-
ically aggrandizes the subject in its very abjection. Freud, who was to observe
the righteous grandiosity of the melancholics self-lacerations, was thus led
to draw the conceptual link between melancholia and a certain narcissism.
More precisely: the preoccupation with an originary loss (as such) logically
preceding the loss of any determinate object could function equally as a
pre-emptive denial of loss which would mask the real inaccessibility of its
object by determining it in advance as lost thus negatively appropriable in
its very absence. The melancholic attachment to unknown loss (SE 18: 245)
would in this way function apotropaically as a defence against the fact that
the object lost was in fact never mine for the having. Melancholia would
thus be a way of staging a dispossession of that which was never ones own
to lose in the rst place and thus, precisely by occluding structural lack
as determinate loss, would exemplify the strictly perverse effort to assert a
relation with the non-relational. (Which is not to say that the assumption
of lack in general cannot equally function pre-emptively by dissolving
the singularity of contingent losses.) Trauma would itself in this way be
mobilized as a defence against an impossible enjoyment: the melancholic
derealization of the real here functions, as Giorgio Agamben has compel-
lingly argued, not only to aggrandize the subject of fantasy, but in so doing
ultimately to hypostatize what is unreal (or phantasmatic) as a new reality.
3
The example of Baudelaire may briey clarify this recuperative logic of gain
through loss. The strange coalescence of emptiness and plenitude explored in
so many poems Andromache, for example, bent in ecstasy near the empty
tomb of Hector (Le Cygne) points to the paradox that grief can provide
its own most potent form of consolation. Lack yields its own fullment in
the allegorical personications whereby the poets preoccupation with his
own grief ma Douleur: capitalized, humanized, hypostatized comes to
ll the vacuum left by the absent object. In Recueillement death itself is
pre-empted by the intensity of the living sorrow which the poet cherishes
like a mother her ailing child. The language of grief in this way comes to
eclipse the loss which occasioned it and another familiar Baudelairean
gesture announces the alchemical transformation of black bile into ink.
4
It is not the formal dialectic of reversal per se which is my concern here,
but rather what is at stake in it. Nietzsches analysis of the ascetic ideal is
supremely pertinent. Over and above the logical loop evident in the melan-
cholic conversion of privation into acquisition is the spectre of acquiescence
which would this is Hegels beautiful soul embrace the present in the
gratication of its own despair. There is nothing neutral about the drift to
compensatory gratication. The sublime abstraction which nds power in
disempowerment threatens to evaporate the object into an aesthetic phantas-
magoria which would adapt the subject to the requirements of the present.
The effacement of negativity would still the repetition which is the essential
legacy of trauma the signature of its inherent historicity but which is
equally, by that very token, its most generative power. The occlusion of the
traumatic past cuts off any relation to a radically (perhaps catastrophically)
different future.
The structure of melancholia in this way begins to bleed into that of
fetishism the compensatory construction of imaginary unities in response
to a traumatic loss (castration) which structurally can be neither fully
acknowledged nor denied.
5
Perversion not only names the simultaneity
of recognition and disavowal: it hints at the deeper paradox that the very
recognition is the disavowal. There is no acknowledgement of trauma which
in its claim to adequacy (a claim implicit in the very protestation of inad-
equacy) does not efface the loss it would concede. Despite appearances, the
celebrated Je sais bien . . . mais quand mme structure outlined by Octave
Mannoni in no way neutralizes by partitioning the contradiction it would
announce.
6
The fetishistic split which maintains the contradiction between
knowledge and belief traumatic loss, on the one hand, redemptive totality,
on the other provides no protective containment of its antitheses, but
rather implicates both within a contaminating porosity and oscillation of
one term into the other.
Could such a perverse simultaneity of acknowledgement and disavowal
be the condition of historicity? Far from indicating a simple deviation from
some norm of repression (together with its counterpart of enlightenment),
fetishism might rather indicate the subjects irreducible split between two
contradictory imperatives an antinomy which itself marks the ambivalent
legacy of every trauma. If every relation to history is always at some level a
non-relation to another history a missed encounter with the others lack
and as such a traumatic relation to the others trauma history itself would
be dened by the recursive or reexive pressure of a loss recognizable only in
its own effacement. Could perversion be the mark of the subjects impossible
relationship to a loss which is ultimately not its own to acknowledge in the
rst place but so too, equally, the index of a certain promise?
The issue is all the more pressing at a time when the very proliferation
of memorials, the manic drive to museify, threatens to spell the erasure of
memory. It is less a question here of disavowing such disavowal (in the name,
for example, of a demystied or disenchanted mourning) than to consider
what might be at stake in such a contradiction. How to respond to the claim
of the dead when every response (starting with the piety of the response
which invokes the dead as if they were some kind of self-evident corporate
subject) threatens to escalate the amnesia against which the anamnestic
project is directed?
SURROGATE MEMORIES IN THE AGE OF MASS MONUMENTS
We could begin, for example, by reconsidering the frequently remarked
peculiarity of the contemporary memory industry;
7
the recent discomfort
over the cruelly labelled Shoah-biz is here symptomatic. At issue is the
dramatically inverse ratio between the current proliferation of memorial
institutions and the experience of direct memory: a ratio which expresses
itself temporally, as the distance between the current spate of mnemonic
products and the tangible experiences they reference; spatially, as the gap
between these products and the subjects who consume them; cognitively,
as the epistemic gap between the intensication of memorials and the
numbing boredom and distraction these so frequently occasion. Rather than
deploring this distance in the name of a more authentic or more inward work
of memory, or simply denouncing the various opportunisms so frequently at
work here, one might examine the precise logic of this dissonance.
What does it mean that memory feeds on what structurally evades it: that
our drive to remember is directed towards memories that essentially are not
our own to remember, or that we perpetually seek our memories elsewhere
in objects, in places, even in a frenzied theorizing about memory? The
logic of this expropriation needs to be considered. The current lament
that this cultural frenzy of commemoration is a prosthetic substitute for
remembrance that we make things which will not only tell us how, when,
where, to remember, but which will effectively do our remembering for us
(a complaint which effectively resumes Platos denunciation of writing in
the Phaedrus) only circles around the problem. Slavoj iek has elaborated
the amusing and suggestive notion of interpassivity: you come home from
work, op in front of the television, tune into the sitcom, and are suddenly
confronted by this eruption of canned laughter.
8
ieks point is that this
onslaught of prefabricated response does not simply function, as one might
think, as a tyrannical reminder to start laughing the notorious superegoic
injunction to enjoy but that it actually does our laughing for us. And this
not only as one more labour-saving device on a par with the remote control
and the popcorn machine, but rather so as to mark the inescapable condition
of self-dispossession which spells our inscription in a symbolic order.
Such a dispossession was already noted by Adorno and Horkheimer when
in the Dialectic of Enlightenment they observe how the commodied piece
of music hears for the listener. It was noted by Heidegger in Sein und Zeit
in describing the stubborn condition of Abstndigkeit distantiality or
of self-dissension: the consumerist chain of surrogacy which denes the
experience or rather non-experience of das Man (we take pleasure and enjoy
ourselves as they enjoy themselves, we read, see, and judge literature the way
they see and judge, and so on).
9
Where ieks Lacanian formulation differs
from, and just possibly explodes, the residual mandarism lurking in both
Heidegger and Adornos earlier renderings is that this surrogacy, rather than
constituting a limit on an authenticity predicated (mutatis mutandis) on the
self-proximity of a subject, becomes the condition for an abyssal freedom in
which the decentred subject nds itself overwritten by a signifying network
that exceeds it: its own desire is registered as the desire of the Other.
What would it mean for memorials to do our remembering for us? What
Pierre Nora identies as the need for a lieu de memoire can be interpreted
doubly:
10
at once the situatedness of memory, memorys inherent drive to
embodiment, and its inevitable displacement in a place or situation which
usurps it. The lament that memorials take the place of memory assumes too
quickly that memory itself is not from the start dened as expropriation. The
idea that we are not contingently (according to the dictates of the market,
the nation-state, the various pathologies of power) but structurally dispos-
sessed of our own memories may be horrible, but it would at least suspend
any automatic determination of memory as reappropriation, or (a certain
interpretation of ) Hegelian Er-innerung or internalization. It may indeed
explain what Hegel could not have possibly meant, but nonetheless almost
said, when he determined in the Phenomenology the fr sich (substance-as-
subject) as what presents itself fr uns. What appears for us is not only a
function of our conceptual mediations but may reveal the impossibility of
every standpoint from which to mediate; the very we who we are appears at
once on our behalf and instead of us; experience is effectively determined
as the experience of the impossibility of experience.
The memorial which usurps or pre-empts our memories not only assumes
the subjective attributes of its now reied consumers but inscribes the limits
of the possibility of inscription. If every fetish is a mnemonic registration
of a loss which is simultaneously repudiated (both a victory monument
over and the stigma indelibile of castration, says Freud), then the fetishized
memorial ambiguously commemorates not the lost object per se but the loss
of loss: in staging the coincidence of memory with its own evacuation the
memorial performs an impossible mourning rite for mourning itself and
thereby demonstrates our irreducible eviction from our own experience. It is
mourning as such which is now, impossibly, being mourned.
BETWEEN MELANCHOLIA AND FETISHISM
The entwined destinies of melancholia and fetishism thus begin to
emerge. This may seem surprising: are not the two attitudes opposed? Is
not the immediate, banal contrast between the determined misery of the
former and the voluptuous determination of the latter decisive? A grain of
Nietzschean suspicion might go some way here: the deant exhibitionism
of the melancholic reveals a streak of luxurious enjoyment matched only
by the severity of the fetishists commitment to a jouissance which in its
workmanlike assiduity displays a discipline and focus verging on the
ascetic. Both loss and jouissance present themselves here as symmetrically
and reciprocally traumatic. If castration names the trauma of our symbolic
mediation, the encounter with the Real brings the equally devastating
trauma of an unmediated proximity the hard kernel which marks at
once the limit and the possibility of experience. The fantasy of loss can
itself function as a defence against the trauma of enjoyment, just as jouis-
sance itself can be reinected as a defence against the trauma of castration.
Just as obsessional rituals can defend against the real death threatening
to engulf the subject on the battleeld of enjoyment, so too even little
deaths can be reconstructed as so many miniaturized defences against the
symbolic mortications on the plane of language. The operative antithesis
in this case would be thus not between symbolic castration and real
enjoyment per se, but rather between the imaginary overlay each inevitably
acquires in the face of the other: according to this Borromean logic, even
trauma can be mobilized as a fantasmatic defence against trauma. The
manifest opposition between the experiences of lack and excess is thus
ultimately less decisive than the structures of fantasy which pre-emptively
sustain them.
One might then proceed to schematize the various parallels. Both
melancholia and fetishism involve a doubling or splitting of the self in the
face of a loss, the intractability of which structurally prohibits the recog-
nition it thereby, as prohibition, demands. In the terms of Mourning and
Melancholia the topological cleavage between the critical faculty of the ego
and the ego as altered by identication (SE 14: 249) reects the ambiguity
of a loss which is simultaneously accepted (by way of metabolizing identi-
cation) and disavowed (by way of literalizing incorporation) a permanent
open wound which ambiguously commemorates the original instance
of traumatic wounding in so far as it at once drains away every interior
plenitude of the subject and (the catch) reies the resultant void of sub-
jectivity as a last, stubborn surd of positivity, thereby reconrming or
sustaining narcissism in the very injury which would deface it. A lack
congeals, which in its hypertrophy pre-empts the very possibility of the
substitution which it at the same time renders necessary. This brings
melancholia virtually to coincide with fetishism, where the epistemic split
between the afrmation and the denial of lack inevitably reproduces the
very antithesis it seeks to neutralize: the split both retraces and effaces the
castration which it is designed to regulate, in that it functions simultaneously
both as catastrophic ssure and as stabilizing partition.
11
The Ichspaltung in
this way not only creates the very possibility of forming fetishist attachments
but in itself functions as the ultimate fetish.
Various other parallels ow directly from this. The paradoxical relation
to loss in each case leads directly to an intensied attachment to things
whose prosthetic role is neither countenanced nor entirely denied. Thus the
apparent literalism of fetishist desire, the refusal of symbolic mediation,
the irreplaceable thisness or singularity of the fetish object, and thus
similarly the peculiar tenacity of melancholia. The cathectic loyalty
12
to the lost object in this latter instance not only does not preclude but
requires the secret construction of a substitute the remnant of the object
incorporated within the empty interior of the subject which functions
as a screen memory the very opacity of which remains both refractory
and innitely tantalizing. (It is ultimately memory itself which gets deter-
mined as the ultimate fetish-object: the veil.) Thus the familiar paradoxes
of recuperation: mourning itself becomes a fetishistic proxy for an object
whose loss is overshadowed by the clamorous grief it occasions, and in
this way furtively stages substitution precisely by insisting on the latters
impossibility.
Substitution in each case structurally requires the construction of a part-
object whose fragmentation both prolongs and occludes the traumatic wound
it commemorates. The fetishistic passion for the inanimate to objects, to
body-parts, and even to the whole body itself now refashioned as its own
synecdoche of itself (the erect body posing as substitute for its own absent
member)
13
displays a chiasmic exchange between unity and fragmentation
whereby the subject nds vitality in the mortication which most shatters it
and thereby retrieves a weird, excessive organicity in dismemberment as such.
The supplement thus both denies and reveals the irreparability of the lack to
which it is consecrated the part-object functions as the whole object and
as such blocks the syntagmatic completion which it simultaneously incites
and enables and in this way erodes the opposition between unity and frag-
mentation, an opposition which is in turn elaborated as the opposition
between jouissance (oriented toward the viscosity of life-substance) and
the dead letter of the law. In enunciating the law of enjoyment as his very
own private law posited without the detour of symbolic mediation the
pervert effectively elides the structural gap which is the essential condition
of the law as such, and in this way, and through the various literalisms of
his practice, aunts the law precisely in usurping as exclusive occupant the
site of the laws own enunciation.
Melancholia displays a similar logic. The incorporation of the object
requires the latters abbreviation as a frozen attribute and thereby inicts
upon it a kind of second death miniaturization reproduces the death
which it simultaneously reduces a violence which will in turn reverberate
within the sadomasochistic theatre of grief wherein, famously, it is the lost
object itself which is being whipped by the subjects most intimate self-
agellations. The refusal to admit the objects lack involves the concession
of that very lack and exacerbation of the latters mortifying dismemberment.
Reduced to a part-object within the hollow crypt of subjectivity, the object
persists as living corpse, at once congealed remains and extruding surplus,
whose death accretes like so much cellular eforescence.
FROM REPETITION TO RUPTURE
Time here undergoes its own peculiar shattering: a ssure erupts within
the continuum of experience. The melancholic xation on the past may
explode the nostalgia to which it simultaneously seems committed, just
as the perverse temporality of suspense or lingering may undermine its
own implicit consecration of an embalmed or reied present. This may
seem surprising: how might xation yield a form of rupture? At the level of
fantasy, that is, as parallel forms of defence, the temporal registers of melan-
cholia and fetishism surely appear equally and symmetrically conservative.
The melancholic too late may function as a pre-emptive assumption
of trauma which evaporates impending catastrophe by insisting on the
latters absolute anteriority: no contingency remains; death is installed as
always already accomplished; the sacrice is over before it begins. This
is Kierkegaards denition of recollection as an aesthetic ideology, and it
equally determines the ight from time in innite resignation: one lives in
the present as if the worst has already happened. Recollection has the great
advantage in that it begins with the loss; the reason it is safe and secure is
that it has nothing to lose, writes Kierkegaard of the lover who mourns his
beloved in advance, an old man by the second date.
14
In a similar fashion the
knight of innite resignation jumpstarts the dreadful moment of decision,
rushes too eagerly up the mountain so as to bypass the night of Abrahams
unbearable decision, and thus effectively overleaps time itself so as to win
the payback of an otherworldly compensation: loss is staved off as always
already in the past.
Fetishism displays the same temporal logic in reverse: loss is warded off
as always already in the future. Thus Freuds emphasis on the ritualized
suspense which denes the temporality of perversion: traumatic belatedness
is perpetually siphoned off to the next moment; perpetual foreplay seeks to
recapture, immobilize and thereby retroactively construct the moment before
the traumatic encounter to forestall disaster by deferring it to a chronically
receding horizon. I turn back the clock so as to forever relive the very last
icker of an imaginary innocent anticipation: the worst is forever in abeyance,
I am permanently on this side of danger I reassure myself with the fantasy
of a permanent not-yet.
15
This is Lessings explanation of the strange beauty
of the Laocon sculpture: the sculptor has captured the pregnant moment
just before the full horror strikes the fathers mouth open but not yet
screaming, the serpents venom not quite completely penetrated, the agony
not quite yet at its climax: the gaze xes on the penultimate moment so as
to block the revelation of the monstrous void. Penultimacy incompletion
as such becomes a defence against a mortifying conclusion.
Melancholia and fetishism would thus seem to collude to produce the
illusion of an intact present solitary, sufcient, immune from past or
future threat. Indeed they come to coincide: postponement of a death
forever pending consummates itself in the pre-emptive fantasy of a death
always already accomplished. Thus, in Proust, the blink of an eye from
chronic prematurity to chronic, irreversal senescence, from the phantasm of
the blank page to the phantasm of the bal de morts, from perpetual virginity
to premature, perpetual mummication and into the no less reassuring
fantasy that having already died, I have nothing left to fear from death.
16
What would it mean to traverse the fantasy so as to release the present
from a reassuring stasis? To negotiate the switching station between the too
early and the too late, between fetishistic before and melancholic after,
so as to change the terms of both postponement and its obverse? Here
Benjamins reections on history may prove compelling.
BENJAMINS LOSSES
. . . This is so true, that the eternal is more the frill on a dress than any idea.
N3, 2
Is there a way of disentangling the dialectical image from the phantasma-
goria of late capitalism? Adorno famously did not think so. The arresting,
sometimes distracting details of the debate between Benjamin and Adorno
at times veil over the depth of the rift between the two thinkers but so too,
perhaps, their secret complicity. Responding to the sprawling, smorgasbord-
like assemblage of the Passagen-Werk, Adorno charges Benjamin with vulgar
Marxism: thus the lack of mediation notoriously discerned in Benjamins
various attempts at linkage from base to superstructure, from sidewalk size
to nerie, from wine tax to Lme du vin, etc. (C, p. 582) an inference
which in its metonymic crudity at best overlooks the complex negotiations of
the commodity fetishism chapter in Kapital, at worst falls under the spell of
bourgeois psychology (C, p. 497). Vulgar Marxism would in this case conspire
with vulgar psychoanalysis (Jung) in its reduction of the social imaginary
to a dreaming collectivity which in its abstract homogeneity dissolves the
explosive ambivalence the blend of desire and fear which signals at once
the traumatic burden of the dialectic, the ssure of uncontainable negativity,
but, so too, equally, its objective liberating power (C, pp. 4956).
Implicit in Adornos repeated accusation of magical thinking is the
suggestion that Benjamin has succumbed to more than one kind of fetish:
to elide the dialectic is to veil the social conditions of production as the
ongoing hell which denes the modern age (C, p. 496). Benjamins
legendary Medusa gaze (C, p. 500) would on this reading function
apotropaically to deect and mask a devastation whose pressure remains
all the more unassailable in being reproduced. Benjamins superstitious
enumeration (C, p. 583) of partial objects would in this sense plaster over
the ultimate catastrophe ssuring history as a whole the dissonance of
irremediable class oppression and as such blunt any demand for total
social change. Although Adorno does not invoke these terms, the logic of
pre-emptive fragmentation discerned here comes close to the psychoanalytic
model. To linger on the disjecta membra (shoe, velvet, shine on nose, etc.)
would be simultaneously to register and to occlude a deeper fragmentation
(castration, death, irrecuperable negativity), and so to function both as
victory monument over and traumatic reminder stigma indelebile of
the loss it commemorates.
17
Marxs celebrated analysis of the fetish, which
Adorno does invoke, is in this respect not dissimilar. The animation of
things both reects and veils the mortication of persons and thereby
provides the compensatory phantasm of unity in the face of an irredeemably
fractured social world. The commodity occludes the alienated labour it
congeals and consecrates, and thereby commemorates a loss of bodily
and social integrity ungrievable under existent relations of production. In
both cases the fetish assumes an ideological role: by providing the consoling
image of totality it pacies any desire for a different world, and this precisely
by freezing time at the moment before the catastrophic insight.
Underpinning Adornos charge of positivism is the suspicion of an ideali-
zation that naturalizes what it seeks to mobilize and thereby negates the very
negativity it seeks to honour. Benjamins projection of a utopian horizon
for the scraps of actually existing culture occludes the hell of a history
eternalized as second nature, and thereby mollies the demand for radical
social change. Chaque poque rve la suivante (GS 5.1: 46). Benjamins
repeated recycling of Michelet is for Adorno symptomatic in that it elides
the radical caesura between catastrophe and its antithesis, and thus absorbs
utopia within the mythic continuum of the ever-same (C, p. 495). The
attempt to read redemptive content directly from the bits and pieces of
phenomenal history presupposes a synecdochal reduction to immanence
the part stands in for the whole and thus blocks its possibility which in
its elision of the dialectic of fragmentation (loss) and totality (redemption)
inevitably sties the last, dwindling possibility of change. The dialectical
image betrays utopia precisely by anticipating or imagining it, and in this
agrant violation of the theological ban on graven images
18
would fetish-
istically disavow the alterity it would thereby acknowledge. The problem
with Benjamins micrological patchwork is thus, on this reading, not in fact
fragmentation but just the opposite: Adornos less obvious and more painful
reproach is that in renouncing the dialectical continuity durchdialektisieren
of conceptual mediation
19
Benjamin only reinstates a kind of identity
philosophy all the more oppressive for going unnamed. If Benjamin abstains
from theoretical totalization, this is only in the end so as to smuggle in a
series of imaginary continuities within and between the epochs and within
the body politic as such which in their very inconspicuousness assume an
apologetic form.
Underlying the ostentatious disaggregation of Benjamins so-called sur-
realist method is there a faith in unity all the more magical for being
unspoken? Fragmentation as such can provide the most perfect alibi for its
own denial; preoccupation with the rubble heap can serve to cloak a deeper
devastation. Benjamins position would from this perspective slide inexorably
into that of the pervert whose loyalty to the scattered things only prolongs
a commitment to imaginary unities the phantasm of the revolutionary
collective, of the golden age, of history itself as the site of specular conden-
sation whose persistence inevitably assumes a consoling or ideological cast
(lingering over the waxworks of the nineteenth century might in this sense
satisfy more than one agenda). However irritating, Adornos harangue brings
into perfect focus an ineluctable antinomy at the heart of Benjamins project.
CUTTING THROUGH HISTORICISM
. . . the exact point where historical materialism cuts through [durchschlgt]
historicism.
Theses on History
The chronicler who recites events without discriminating between major
and minor ones takes into account the truth that nothing that has ever
happened is to be taken as lost for history (GS 1.2: 694 SW 4:390). How
to distinguish the prodigious contraction of messianic Rettung from a
capacious historicism regulated by the consoling teleology of universal
history?
20
If the tigers leap into the past (GS 1.2: 701 SW 4:395) assumes as
its truly problematic condition the determination to give nothing up (N3,
3) Origens heretical doctrine of apokatasis is always hovering (cf. GS 2.2:
458 SW 3:157) this ows explicitly from a theological conviction regarding
the indestructibility of the highest life in all things (N1a, 5).
Do the frozen cut-ups of Benjamins montage method secretly prolong
the historicism they interrupt? The question reverberates well beyond the
unnished monster which is the Passagen-Werk. Adorno had no particular
reason to restrict his criticism, nor to reduce it to the notorious terms he did
(arcades, balconies, etc.). If Adornos suspicion has any pertinence it should
apply equally to Benjamins entire set-up from the early Trauerspielbuch
to the nal Theses on History, the very texts Adorno thought he loved the
best which is in this respect perfectly continuous from start to end. As the
metaphysical problematic of part and whole unfurls into the more poignant
Benjaminian problematic loss and redemption, death and resurrection
the political, historical and indeed theological stakes begin to emerge.
The issue here is not just the familiar paradox of capitalist recuperation
the endless reintegration of every dissonance within the syncopated
continuum of the history of the victors. Nor is it simply a question of
Benjamins seemingly limitless capacity to blur antitheses the exquisite
oscillation of virtually every item on the menu between subversion and
subvention. Does the scavenging operation of, for example, Baudelaires
chiffonier disrupt or merely reproduce the consumerist compulsion of
capitalist modernity?
21
Does the lingering hesitancy of the neur obstruct
the trafc ow (as the transit authorities feared) or, by fostering the illusion
of surplus leisure, secretly reinforce it?
22
Does the enigmatic satisfaction
of the allegorist the lingering lasciviousness toward the thing-world
challenge the aesthetic plenitude of the symbolic or supply a brand of
private consolation? Do the obsessional arrangements of the collector defy
the functionality of capital or furnish it with the alibi of aesthetic disinter-
estedness?
23
Is the melancholic delity to the dead decisively distinguished
from the luxurious despondencies empathic acedia, left-wing melancholy
of the vainglorious victors?
24
Such fretful questions (the list continues)
have from the beginning plagued the reception of Benjamin. The symmet-
rical chorus of reproaches too happy, too sad circles around, but perhaps
itself shies away from the most intractable aporia.
Does the revolutionary standstill blasting, freezing, exploding time,
shooting the clocks, pulling the emergency brake, etc. disrupt the triumphal
procession of the victors or merely invert it (thereby buttressing it, etc.) by
reproducing the crystalline abstraction of alienated labour? The question
is not entirely well-posed, but does have the merit of focusing attention for
a moment on the profound congruity between, for example, the essays on
mass culture and the various reections on history.
25
Photography presents
each time the privileged metaphor and model of temporal contraction: to
seize hold of a memory as it ashes up at a moment of danger (GS 1.2: 695
SW 4:391) is to experience a synchronization of past and present which can
be understood in the strictest sense as traumatic: the posthumous shock
inicted on the past under the pressure of a present danger which is to
say that history is experienced only as and at an irreversible delay. Where
thinking suddenly stops in a constellation saturated with tensions it gives
that constellation a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad (GS 1.3:
703 SW 4:396). Benjamin does more here than extend Freuds or Prousts
celebrated analogy between the deferred action of the photograph and
the structural belatedness of experience. In pointing to the coincidence of
trauma with its own abreaction the lightning ash retroactively inicts the
shock it shockingly discharges he also points to an irreducible contami-
nation between the messianic rupture and the oppressive viscosity in which
it intervenes. The revolutionaries who shot all the clocks had, in the rst
place, to synchronize their watches, had to afrm the historicist continuum
in the moment of negating it, just as, in another register, the moment of
awakening is negotiated only from within the claustral connes of the
dream: the dream or phantasm not only gropes numbly towards the next
enthralling episode but in so doing (Adorno ignores this part) turns with
stealth and cunning towards its own overcoming (cf. AP, p. 13)
Fetishism informs not only the content of the Passagen-Werk, and not just
the form of its peculiar windowshop appearance. One might set aside the
(by now) tiresome speculations regarding the mimicry at work here: is the
Passagen-Werk itself a kind of literary arcade, a collection, a site of nerie,
a department store, a museum, a cluttered interieur, a sad inventory; is
Benjamin a shopper, a ragpicker, a brooder, a thief? A deeper and more
intractable ambiguity informs the project: is it a ruin, a heap, a sketch, a
scaffold, a constructivist construction? Is its posthumous, unnished quality
provisional, accidental, structural: what is the measure of its incompletion?
Is its unnishedness that of the collection (forever structurally just one item
short completion both its presupposition and its logical undoing), and if
so what sustains this logic of perpetual penultimacy? Is the fragmentation
pre-emptive, the serial production of a lack generated so as to maintain the
ction of totality, and as such a kind of fetishism in reverse?
Liminal experiences pervade the Arcades Project and dene its most familiar
landmarks from Metro entrances to railway stations to the twilight zone of
the arcades themselves and Benjamin repeatedly invokes the magic of the
threshold as paradigmatic both of nineteenth-century urban experience and
of the work that commemorates it; the various spatial and optical ambigu-
ities generated architecturally by glass and iron inside and outside, near
and distant, past and future correlate with the deep existential ambiguities
between human and non-human, animate and inanimate, living and dead.
The very porosity of these distinctions in the dream-world of Baudelaires
Paris speaks to the unease and fascination generated by the ambiguous time-
space of capitalist modernity itself the birth-pangs of commodity culture as
it pervades the interstices of the big city and acquires layered political and
historical resonance in the aftermath of repeated revolutionary defeat. In the
architectural phantasmagorias of post-1848 Paris, ruin and sketch converge
monuments to missed opportunities, ciphers of futures foreclosed.
Writing in 1935, and remarking on the preliminary nature of Baudelaires
modernity (that is to say, his modernity tout court), Benjamin insists on
the provisional or penultimate status of the various nineteenth-century
innovations: all these products are on the point of entering the market as
commodities. But they hover on the threshold [Alle diese Produkte sind im
Begriff, sich als Ware auf den Markt begeben. Aber sie zoegern auf der Schwelle]
(AP, p. 13/GS 5.1: 59). There is a sense in which Benjamin himself, on the
eve of fascisms triumph, keeps on lingering on the mid-nineteenth century,
prolonging the quotations, deferring the ending. Like the fetishist who keeps
dwelling on the moment just before the inevitable, irreversible catastrophe,
Benjamin keeps on constructing a retroactive before of missed oppor-
tunities, the moment before the nal congealing of capitalist social relations,
the ickering of possibilities rendered legible only from the perspective of an
irredeemably damaged present day. Hope in the past is just this counter-
factual construction of an anterior future the retrospective awakening of
a blocked possibility, the perpetually ringing alarm clock (cf. Surrealism
essay) which rings all the more stridently for having been set too late.
This denes the peculiar temporality of Benjamins messianism the
rescuing of a past futurity and the retroactive stimulation of a not yet
forever to come. Its secret fetishism, perhaps, but also the trace of a melan-
choly approaching that of a Kafka, for whom the Messiah always comes a
day too late not judgement day but always the day after that, the day when
he is no longer necessary, or no longer possible, or both. Arguably, too, by
this token, hope in the past is the eruption of what Kafka equally describes
as hope, an innite amount, but not for us.
6
TREMBLING CONTOURS:
KIERKEGAARDBENJAMIN
BRECHT
RAINER NGELE
The conguration indicated in the title Benjamin between Kierkegaard
and Brecht is not one that imposes itself self-evidently. Not only does there
seem to be an unbridgeable abyss between Kierkegaard and Brecht, but also
a glaring asymmetry between Benjamins very intense relation to Brecht on
the one hand and his very rare references to Kierkegaard on the other.
1
If
we linger for a moment with the image of the abyss in the conguration
and sequence of the three names: Kierkegaard Benjamin Brecht, the
name Benjamin would then take the place of the abyss that separates the
two incommensurable names Kierkegaard and Brecht and perhaps, at the
same time, it is the impossible bridge but, no doubt, a shaky and trembling
bridge.
Benjamins essay on Brechts epic theatre Was ist das epische Theater?,
2
which will be the focus of this essay, begins indeed with an abyss and with
the levelling of an abyss: What is at stake today in the theatre can be deter-
mined more precisely in regard to the stage than to the drama. At stake is
the levelling of the orchestra. The abyss that separates the actors from the
audience like the dead from the living, the abyss whose silence increases
the sublime in the drama, and whose resounding increases the intoxication
in the opera, this abyss, that bears the traces of its sacred origin most
indelibly among all the elements of the stage, has lost its function (GS
2.2: 519).
3
Three times the abyss is invoked, as if in an act of conjuration
to exorcise it forever. And indeed, at the end of the sentence, the abyss
has disappeared or, more precisely, it has lost its function, ist funktionslos
geworden. With the word funktionslos we enter into a different sphere and
a different age: emerging from the world where depth and height, abyss
and the sublime (Erhabenheit), the living and dead structure a world of
metaphysics and of intoxication, we enter suddenly into a technological
world of functions and utter sobriety. It is the world of Brechts epic theatre,
so Benjamin tells us. And in telling it and in the way he tells it, it is as if in
these initial sentences he were drawing in one bold line the movement and
Trembling Contours: KierkegaardBenjaminBrecht 103
transformation of his own thinking and his style: from the dense and even
esoteric metaphysical writings of the teens and early twenties to the stark
and sober style of such essays as Der Autor als Produzent, Das Kunstwerk
im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit and, Was ist das
epische Theater?
It is of course not that simple. The essays on Karl Kraus (1931) and on
Kafka (1934), written in a rather different style and register, go hand in
hand with the seemingly so different tones of Was ist das epische Theater?
(1931) and Der Autor als Produzent (1934). And the more Benjamin, in
the last ve years of his life, launches into his major project on the Parisian
arcades and the nineteenth century in the recognizability of the Now of
the early twentieth century, the more Benjamin notices and recognizes, in
another Now of recognizability, the foundational return of his early essay
on language ber Sprache berhaupt und ber die Sprache des Menschen
and his book on the baroque drama of mourning.
No doubt, there were changes in Benjamins mode of thought and
presentation, radical ones that even such a close friend and sensitive reader
as Gretel Karplus, with whom Benjamin shared in the thirties perhaps the
most intimate secrets of his thoughts as far as they were communicable,
confessed that she did not recognize his hand in some of his texts any more.
Benjamins reaction to this confession indicates a deep consternation:
When you write of my second outline, that one would never recognize in
it the hand of WB, I would call this a somewhat rude remark [so nenne
ich das doch ein wenig geradezu gesagt] and you transgress with this remark
certainly the borderline where you can be certain not of my friendship
but of my agreement . . . WB has and this is not self-evident for a
writer but in this he sees his task and his best right two hands. At
the age of fourteen I decided one day [hatte es . . . mir in den Kopf gesetzt]
that I had to learn to write with my left hand. And I still see myself today
sitting for hours at the school desk in Haubinda and practice. Today my
desk stands in the Bibliothque Nationale and I have taken up again the
lesson to write temporarily in such a way on a higher level.
4
In not recognizing WBs hand, Gretel Karplus has transgressed a limit, a
border line and such limits were explicitly a constitutive part in the close
friendship between Benjamin and his Felizitas, as he called and addressed
her; she has transgressed the limit of an accord and almost, if not quite, as
the denegation indicates, the limit of friendship.
In a sense, in not recognizing WBs hand, Gretel Karplus has mutilated
her friend, has cut off one of his two hands that Benjamin claims for himself.
Claiming two hands is, as Benjamin remarks, not self-evident for a writer.
For while most writers might have two hands, very few write with two
hands, at least in the pretechnological age when people still used to write by
hand, and by a hand that left its signature and mark in the writing as the
signature and mark of the writer himself. Benjamin was among other things
also a graphologist who occasionally earned some extra money from rare
books with his graphological expertise.
As a 14-year-old, Benjamin tried literally to learn to write with his left
hand, and he now tries again to learn to write in such a way on a higher
level, as he puts it. The line drawn from the school desk of the 14-year-old
in Haubinda to the desk of the Bibliothque Nationale, where the 37-year-
old Benjamin exercises his new style of writing with the left on the left is
more than a shift from the literal, physical hand to a gurative hand: it is
at the same time and this is at the centre of Benjamins whole project as
a physiognomic project the inseparable interrelation, the Verschrnkung,
of the literal and the gurative, the suspension of their clear separation in a
hovering sphere of trembling contours that promise a new physics beyond
metaphysics, something Benjamin will call a materialist doctrine of ideas or
also an anthropological materialism.
But I have jumped far ahead. We must return and patiently follow the
traits of the two-handed writing of Benjamin. Benjamins exercise in left-
handed writing, temporary auf Zeit! as it might be, no doubt has left
indelible marks in the style of his thinking and writing. But this trans-
formation goes beyond the wilful exercise which itself seems more like a
symptom of another transformation that the writer can only ascertain after
the fact, as Benjamin writes to Werner Kraft on 25 May 1935:
The Saturnine tempo of the matter has its deepest ground in a process
of complete turning around [Umwlzung], that a mass of thoughts
and images, dating back to a long past time of my more immediate
metaphysical, even theological thinking, had to undergo in order to
nourish with its full force my present condition. This process took place
silently; I myself knew so little of it that I was immensely astonished,
when due to an external occasion the plan for the work was written
in just a few days.
5
Benjamin diagnoses the transformation as an Umwlzung, which literally
means a rolling over or turning over of a heavy object or mass, such as a
big stone or rock. It is also often used in German as a literal translation of
revolution. Benjamin speaks of the rolling over of a mass of thoughts and
images originating in a metaphysical and even theological thinking. He
seems thus to conrm a radical revolution of his early metaphysical and
theological thinking. But it is rst of all a revolution in the literal sense
of the word, which after all originates in astronomy: something rolls over,
turns around, yet it remains in its substance. The mass of thoughts and
images originating in metaphysical and theological thinking are, to be sure,
no longer in immediate connection with this mode of thinking after the roll
over, but the emphasis on the unmittelbar indicates that a mediated relation
might still continue. At the same time the rolling over seems to invest the
mass with a kind of dynamic force, a Kraft that nourishes and propels the
new condition.
Only a few days later, Benjamin restates the transformation in a letter to
Adorno in a slightly shifted image. He rst detects with some astonishment
the striking analogies between his new project on the Parisian arcades and
the book on the baroque drama of mourning, and he comments: You must
allow me to see in this circumstance an especially signicant conrmation
of the refounding process [des Umschmelzungsprozesses], that leads the whole
mass of originally metaphysically motivated thoughts towards an aggregate
state, in which the world of dialectical images is secured against all objec-
tions that metaphysics provoke.
6
The Umwlzung has now become an
Umschmelzung, a refounding, a transformation of the mass into a different
aggregate state. The images and thoughts originating in metaphysical and
theological thinking are melted in order to reemerge as dialectical images,
that now seem immune against interventions and objections, the Einrede, of
metaphysics or against metaphysics, the phrase can be read in both direc-
tions. And yet, this transformation nds its substantiation and conrmation
precisely in the clearly emerging analogies with the earlier work.
Umwlzung and Umschmelzung: the rst process leaves the substance of
the mass intact, but rolls it over in order to expose its formerly hidden side.
It is an image that recurs at various moments in Benjamins work on the
Parisian arcades. If one turns over a stone, in the forest for example, that
has rested on the ground for a long time, at the moment of the rolling over,
a rush of countless little creatures will take place that leave nothing behind
but a labyrinth of patterns that might appear like a script on the under-
neath side of the stone. Reading such scripts and traces is one of the tasks
of the anthropological materialst and physiognomist. The second process
of melting and refounding transforms the aggregate state of the substance
in a procedure that evokes the traditions of alchemy. But alchemy itself is
transformed in this process and reemerges as construction: This much is
certain: the constructive element has the same signicance for this book as
the philosophers stone for alchemy.
7
It is in the middle of this process of Umwlzung and Umschmelzung in the
early 1930s that Benjamin enters into a complex conguration with Brecht.
It is one of the most enigmatic congurations in Benjamins life. While it is
tempting to see in Brecht the secular, materialist, sober countergure to the
metaphysical and theological sides of Benjamin, and while Brecht certainly
liked to project this image of his role, there is something deeply enigmatic,
deeply troubling like a cloudy kernel in Benjamins relationship to Brecht.
Benjamins three closest friends Adorno, Scholem and Gretel Karplus
were in agreement about one thing: their fear of Brechts inuence on
Benjamin. There was apparently something in Brechts ways that evoked
strong affects in all three of them. But while Adorno more or less ration-
alized his affect with his reduction of Brecht to a vulgar Marxist, and
Scholem with his refusal to read the texts of Brecht that Benjamin kept
sending him, Gretel Karplus addressed this affective level in a letter full of
concern to Benjamin. And Benjamin responded for once on the same level
in a long letter of June 1934 (GB 4: 440f.).
In contrast to his letters to Scholem, where Benjamin vigorously defends
his interest in Brechts work and its afnity with his own mode of thought
on political and ideological grounds, the letter to Gretel Karplus approaches
the cloudy kernel of the relationship. Benjamin recognizes rst a pattern of
repetition: What you say about [Brechts] inuence on me recalls for me a
signicant and ever returning constellation in my life. He mentions two prece-
dents: the friend of his youth, the poet C.F. Heinle, who committed suicide at
the beginning of the First World War, and a little later the somewhat dubious
Simon Guttmann, whose inuence was the object of a passionate opposition
on the part of Benjamins wife. Her opposition culminated in the reproach
that Benjamin was under some kind of hypnotic inuence. Benjamin makes
no attempt at refuting such a suggestion, but instead attempts to analyse
the forces involved in such relations: In the economy of my existence, a few
relations, that can be counted, play indeed a role that allow [sic] me to assert
a pole that is opposite my original being. It is no longer a simple question
of ideology, but one that concerns both existence (Dasein) and being (Sein).
Benjamins concept of thinking in other peoples heads, his mimetic ability
to occupy the most extreme opposite positions, nds here its most radical
expression. The repetitive pattern of Benjamins excentric circles of friendship
opens up to a Haltung, a posture, that involves an existential positioning of
ones innermost being in the extremes. It is the most radical ex-position of
ones existence. Benjamin is well aware of the protest of his friends: These
relations have always provoked a more or less violent protest in those closest
to me, as does now the relationship to B[recht]. Benjamin can only plead
for an understanding of the incomprehensible: In such a case, I can do little
more than ask my friends to trust me, that these ties [Bindungen], whose
dangers are obvious, will reveal their fruitfulness. And, once more, Benjamin
invokes the necessity of moving and of positioning himself in extremes but
also the liberating potential of such a movement and position:
It is not at all unclear to you that my life as well as my thinking moves [sic]
in extreme positions. The expanse that it [sic] thus asserts, the freedom to
move side by side things and thoughts that are considered irreconcilable,
assumes its face only through the danger. A danger that generally appears
also to my friends only in the form of those dangerous relations.
These are, then, literally liaisons dangereuses with all their perverse implica-
tions.
8
And yet, the danger appears as a physiognomic force that gives a
face to the otherwise faceless; and the face is the gure of a readability of
physiognomic traits. Thus danger is also the condition that the dialectical
image appears as a moment of readability.
Dialectical images, we have read, are the result of an Umschmelzung, of a
refounding of images and thoughts that originated in and were motivated
by metaphysical and theological thinking. But how do metaphysical and
theological images become dialectical images? And what happens to
metaphysics and theology in this process? For one thing is clear: it is not
a question of simply discarding them. It is here that a closer reading of
Benjamins essay on Brechts epic theatre might give us some clues.
A theatrical abyss, the orchestra, has lost its function. What was its
function? To separate the stage from the audience like the dead from the
living, Benjamin says. The comparison with that radical separation of the
world of the dead and the world of the living points at the representative
function of the separating abyss: the physical separation represents a
metaphysical separation between the physical space of the stage and what
it represents and signies, the separation between a phenomenal world of
appearance and a noumenal world of true being.
What happens when this separation has lost its function? Audience and
stage are now in the same physical space; the stage no longer represents
another world. The stage is a stage, one might say. Yet it is still elevated,
Benjamin points out, thus still indicating a difference. But the elevation
is no longer the elevation of the sublime, no longer Erhabenheit, but the
purely physical elevation, an Erhebung of a podium or a platform. And, as
if to underline the atness of this platform, Benjamin states dryly: Das ist
die Lage, this is the situation, here we have to install ourselves. Das ist die
Lage. The sentence itself sounds at in its factual assertiveness. As Marx
says of the ultimate condition of the proletarian revolution: the conditions
themselves, the situation itself not any arbitrary wilfulness and decision
must call out [die Verhltnisse selbst rufen]: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
9
And
yet, this Lage that according to Benjamin categorically demands of us to
install us here, resonates with one of Benjamins earliest and most densely
written texts, his essay on two poems of Hlderlin. There, in the middle of
a seemingly well ordered metaphysical world, where gods and mortals move
in well distinguished orders and in opposite rhythms (GS 2.1: 113) through
the poem, Benjamin invokes the Lage as the space of truth. Hlderlins
world, he writes, is die Erstreckung des Raumes, der gebreitete Plan, the
extension or expansion of space, the expanded plain. This at plain of
Hlderlins world becomes die Wahrheit der Lage als Ordnungsbegriff der
hlderlinschen Welt, the truth of the situation as the conceptual order of
Hlderlins world (GS 2.1: 114). The Wahrheit der Lage, the truth of the
situation, the situation as a space of truth rests literally in the fact that the
Lage is gelegen, opportune, and thus a Gelegenheit, an opportunity for truth.
Es sei alles gelegen dir, says Hlderlins poem, and thus the poet walks on
that which is true like on carpet: Geht auf Wahrem dein Fu nicht, wie auf
Teppichen?
10
And this is what Benjamin calls die Wahrheit der Lage. There
seems to be an abyss between this Wahrheit der Lage in Hlderlins poem
and the Lage that is the stage of Brechts epic theatre. Yet the line that arches
over the abyss from Lage to Lage is perhaps opportune enough to form the
bow that Benjamin hoped for in order to be able to shoot the ultimate arrow
of his work, as he writes to Scholem in October 1934:
Whether I will ever be able to stretch the bow in such a way that the
arrow speeds off, is of course uncertain. But while my other projects have
soon come to the end where I took leave from them, this project will
occupy me longer. Why this is so, is indicated by the image of the bow:
here I have to deal with two ends simultaneously, namely the political
and the mystical.
11
The two ends of the bow, that Benjamin characterizes here as political
and mystical, reaching from Lage to Lage, are both situated in a plain, in a
surface which, according to Benjamin, is the condition of readability: Lesbar
ist nur in der Flche [E]rscheinendes, Readable is only what appears in the
surface (GS 6.1: 32).
It might seem that the essay on Brechts epic theatre only handles the
political end of the bow. Yet we must not overhear the resonances of the
Lage, as at and sober as it might be in the form of a podium. Benjamins
rst step is to redene the function of the podium: it is not simply an
elevated space from which political messages are sent to the audience, but
it becomes part of a functional context and what is at stake is the trans-
formation of this functional context by changing the relations of its elements
that include, besides the stage, the audience, the text, the performance, the
director and the actors. Each of these elements assumes a new function in
the epic theatre: the stage becomes for the audience an exposition space
instead of a space of illusion, the audience is no longer a hypnotized mass
but an assembly of interested individuals, the text loses its central signi-
cance for the theatre and becomes an experimental sketch that has to prove
itself and its potentials in the performance. Thus Benjamin moves through
each of the elements and characterizes the functional changes in its relation
with the others. For, like Marx, Benjamin locates the materialist ground not
in reied things, but in relations, in Verhltnisse.
Almost as a by-product of these changes in the theatrical relations, another
relation is put into question and confronted with the challenge of a radical
change: that of theory and praxis, or, in Benjamins words of theory and
existence (Dasein), a word perhaps better translated more literally as being-
there, in order to avoid the heavy ideological burden of the word existence.
Benjamin speaks of the professional critics who were unable to recognize the
exemplary staging of Mann ist Mann in Berlin, because of a theory languishing
in the Babylonian exile of a praxis that has nothing to do with our being there
[mit unserem Dasein]. Theory is in a Babylonian exile, because it is cut off
from our Dasein, from its specic situation, its Lage, it thus has no relationship
any more to the Wahrheit der Lage, the only rm ground as changing and
volatile as it might be for theory, and, one might add, for art. For already in
his book on the baroque mourning play, Benjamin criticizes what he considers
to be the abyss of Nietzsches aestheticism: The abyss of aestheticism opens
up, Benjamin writes, where art takes up the centre of existence [Dasein] in
such a way that it makes the human being its appearance instead of recog-
nizing in the human being its ground not as its creator but his existence [sein
Dasein] as its eternal pre-position [als ihren ewigen Vorwurf ] (GS 1.1: 2812).
Dasein as Vorwurf, as pre-position, as pre-disposition of art and theory, cannot
be reduced to a reied, naively understood reality, although it is real enough
as that which pre-positions and pre-disposes the structures of our relations in
our sphere of living, the possible movements in our environment, the horizon
of our space of freedom to the degree that we have such a space. The task of
theory would then be to articulate these structures and their disposition. To do
that, theory sometimes must become silent, must at least be kept at a distance,
as Benjamin writes already on 23 February 1927 in a letter to Martin Buber,
proposing a report on his experience in Moscow for Bubers journal Die Kreatur
(GB 3: 2312). All theory, Benjamin insists, will be kept away from this report,
in order to let something else speak, what Benjamin calls das Kreatrliche.
Kreatur, which was also the title of Bubers journal, and das Kreatrliche are
located at a curious intersection of theology and materialism. Kreatur embraces
animals and human beings as creatures (of god, theolo-gically) and as bodies
and esh subjugated and exposed to the sufferings of the body and the esh,
and ultimately exposed to death. It is a word that plays a central role in what
Benjamin calls later anthropological materialism, a word that is as important to
Buber as it is to Brecht. Paul Celan, in his Meridian speech will talk of Georg
Bchner as the Dichter der Kreatur. While Kreatur is often thought of as mute
die stumme Kreatur Benjamin wants to let it speak. And in order to let it
speak, theory has to be silenced for a while. How does it speak? Its language is
determined by the dispositions of Dasein, and these, for Benjamin, are radically
new in the Moscow of his experience, and thus the language is a very new,
very strange language (diese sehr neue, befremdende Sprache), and it resonates
through a resonating mask (durch die Schallmaske) of a completely changed
environment.
When the Kreatur enters the stage of the epic theatre and Brecht indeed
often speaks of Kreatur it speaks less in resounding speeches than in
gestures, and when it resounds it might be the sound of the mute Kattrin in
Mother Courage, drumming on the roof to awaken the city. That is how the
stone speaks: Der Stein spricht, is the title of the scene. But more than the
sound of the drum, it is the slowly diminishing rhythm of the gestures of the
drumming Kattrin that makes up the language of the creature.
In another short, apodictic sentence, that corresponds to the apodictic Das
ist die Lage, Benjamin sets the accent of the epic theatre: Das epische Theater
ist gestisch (the epic theatre is gestural, GS 2.2: 521). Gestisch, gestural,
is not the same as gesticulating; while it has its basis in the postures and
movements of the body in its environment and in relation to other postures
and movements in that space, it also encompasses the settings and postures
of words and sentences. The apodictic brevity of the two Benjaminian
sentences is itself a gesture. Brechts rst explicit discussion of what Gestus
and gestisch is demonstrates it in Luthers translation of a biblical sentence.
Das epische Theater ist gestisch: the apodictic character of the gesture
of this sentence is not only due to its sharp brevity, but it gains its strong
gestural character because it abruptly interrupts the previous paragraph and
its discussion of the inadequacy of the critical vocabulary in face of this
new kind of theatre. It cuts off, so to speak, the language of an inadequate
aesthetic theory in Babylonian exile, it cuts itself off from it in order to
open another space and another language. It interrupts abruptly, but not
without an ironic hidden gesture waving back to the last sentence of the
previous paragraph. The conventional critical language and its aesthetics
are all the more inadequate, that last sentence says, because they are xated
on the poetic and literary text, whereas the epic theatre concentrates on the
construction of the new stage and allows itself all liberty in regard to the
poetic text, literally allows itself a free hand in regard to the poetic text (der
Dichtung gegenber sich freie Hand lt). The hand is there, free and ready
now for the gesture.
But in the gesture, more precisely in the gestural space of the epic
theatre, the hand is no more free than the word in the sentence; it is part
of a structure, the gestural space of the epic theatre is structured like a
language. But Benjamin ascribes a certain privilege to this other language of
the gestural, that is not only another language besides the verbal language,
but also a language underlying the spoken and written language, a kind of
underground, and also, perhaps, underlying it, its subject, its immediate
Vorwurf. Gestures, Benjamin says, are the privileged material of the epic
theatre; and they are a better material than other expressions and statements
of people for two reasons. They are less deceptive and, secondly, each gesture
can be framed with a specic beginning and end.
Why should gestures be less deceptive? The assertion seems to come
dangerously close to the naive assumption that gestures are somehow more
natural and therefore more spontaneous than words. But that is not what
Benjamin writes. First of all it is not a simple opposition of deceptive or true
utterance, it is a matter of degree. Gestures are less deceptive than other
expressions, which in Benjamins formulation are thoroughly deceptive
(durchaus trgerisch). If gestures are somewhat less deceptive it is to the
degree that they can be less easily dissimulated, not because they are more
natural, but the difculty of dissimulating them increases to the degree in
which they are unobtrusive and habitual. The more unobtrusive, the more
habitual, the more mechanical they are, the less consciousness, which in
Benjamins as in Freuds experience is the primary agent of deception, can
interfere. Such gestures are like the hand in Dr Strangelove that constantly
rises up to the Hitler salute against the will of its subject. But gestures are
more than revelations of an individual subjects hidden intentions: they are
witnesses of an interest in the most literal sense of that word. They testify
to a sphere of inter-esse, of a sphere between the subjects and between their
world. Gestures are, so to speak, sedimentations of movements in a sphere
of interests. Their movements reveal the patterns of the network of pathways
possible or impossible in a given social and cultural setting.
While the relative distance of gestures to the controlling consciousness
thus allows them to be witnesses of the sphere of interests, the possibility
to frame them in terms of a clear beginning and ending turns them into
means to dissect what Benjamin calls the complexity (Vielschichtigkeit) and
opaqueness (Undurchschaubarkeit) of peoples actions. Gestures are the epic
theatres equivalent to the Aristotelian plot, the mu` qo~, with a beginning, a
middle, and an end. As such, they interrupt the constant ow and current
of life and events which, of course, have no xable beginning or end. Every
beginning in our experience has something before, and every end something
after it. The gesture, frozen in a xed beginning and a xed end, functions
as a caesura in the ow of actions and events, just as Hlderlins caesura
interrupts the torrential stream of representations (Vorstellungen). While the
interruption of the current of Vorstellungen uncovers the Vorstellung itself,
according to Hlderlin, the interruption of the action in the epic theatre
uncovers and discovers, according to Benjamin, states of affair, conditions
or situations (Zustnde).
This functioning of the gesture as a caesura would demand a further
extensive reading and analysis. But it is time for a caesura in this text
whose title promised not only the names of Benjamin and Brecht, but also
of Kierkegaard. The latter seems to have disappeared with the abyss of the
orchestra in the epic theatre. To nd him again, to nd him at all will
not be easy on this stage and podium. But then, even in his own writings,
Kierkegaard is often quite evasive, hidden behind pseudonyms, if indeed
he can be found there. Pathways to Kierkegaard tend to be circuitous,
demanding most of the time elaborate detours.
If a shade or a trace of Kierkegaard can be suspected at all in Benjamins
essay and evidently I am suspecting something of that order it would
most likely be found at that end of the bow of Benjamins writing that he
called the mystical end, where the transformations of the earlier more
directly metaphysical and theological elements are taking place in a kind of
alchemistic melting process. It is of course that end of the bow that in this
particular essay is particularly unobtrusive; but then it is the unobtrusive
that is invested with a special revelatory quality. We have already noted
a subtle resonance of Hlderlin in the Lage that offers a rst precarious
ground over the aesthetic abyss of the conventional theatre. With the
acknowledgment of the crucial function of the caesura in the epic theatre,
the Hlderlinian resonance emerges with full force; and this is more than
a literary game of allusions, because it touches at the centre of the problem
of (re-)presentation, of Vorstellung and Darstellung. The caesura, as we
have seen, interrupts, according to Hlderlin, the torrential stream of (re-)
presentations, of Vorstellungen in order to allow the Vorstellung itself to
emerge. In an analogous way, the gesture, as a framed entity with a xed
beginning and a xed end, interrupts the changing scenes of the theatrical
(re-)presentation in German also called a Vorstellung in order to allow the
emergence of the underlying Lage, the situation, the conditions that shape
the structure of the gestural space.
What precisely is the status of a Vorstellung? This is the question that
Hlderlin poses in a fragmentary text of philosophical letters, written several
years before the remarks on the Sophoclean tragedies, probably in 1797.
Why is it, the interlocutor of the fragmentary dialogue asks, that humans
must represent to themselves the relationship between themselves and their
world? (Warum sie den Zusammenhang zwischen sich und ihrer Welt gerade
vorstellen . . . mssen).
12
The gerade gives a special turn to the question in
the sense of why is it specically in the form of Vorstellung that this takes
place? This form of Vorstellung is further differentiated into two modes:
why must they [i.e. humans] form an idea or an image of the relationship
between themselves and their world (warum sie sich eine Idee oder ein Bild
machen mssen). These are the two modes of (re-)presentation: sensual
representation in the form of images, and representation as thought in the
form of ideas. But precisely these two alternatives are inadequate for the
representation of the sphere that constitutes the space of interaction between
human subjects and their world, because this sphere, which constitutes the
Geschik that structures the human world, a word that encompasses fate, but
also the subjective ability and hability to act in the appropriate way, as well
as the objective suitability, the Schicklichkeit, to act in a way that is adequate
and suitable to the situation this sphere of Geschik, the interlocutor says
and the main voice of the essay agrees can, strictly speaking, neither be
adequately thought nor does it actually lie before our senses (das sich genau
betrachtet weder recht denken liee noch auch vor den Sinnen liege). The sphere
of the human world, of the world of human interaction, is a sphere that
always already transcends the purely empirical state and yet it is not a world
of pure thought. Thus a different mode of representation needs to be found.
And it is that mode that Hlderlins fragment tries to articulate.
And this is precisely the question and task that Brechts epic theatre
confronts. As committed as this theatre is to a strictly materialist view and
interpretation of the world undercutting all idealist transgurations, it is
yet structured on the assumption that the simple empirical reproduction
of the world is inadequate. A set of photographs of the Krupp factories,
Brecht writes, will not necessarily reveal the social reality in which they
function, for the social reality is structured by relations, what Marx called
Verhltnisse. And it is the sphere of Verhltnisse, of relations that can neither
be adequately represented in a purely empirical mode, nor purely in abstract
thought. Thus the epic theatre works with constellations of scenic images,
lmic images, texts, slogans, songs and above all interruptions.
The same problem of (re-)presentation leads Benjamin to the construction
of the dialectical image, which is neither an empirical pictorial repres-
entation of the world, nor an abstract thought or idea, but a kind of
Denkbild, a thinking image, that has its place in language, because it is
structured like a language. Benjamins essay on Brechts epic theatre is one
of the crucial texts toward the construction of such a different kind of repre-
sentation. For this reason he needs the bow with the two ends, in order to
shoot the arrow of the dialectical image.
And it is here that we nally encounter not Kierkegaard, but an echo of
Kierkegaard in a moment where the sober text literally begins to tremble. It
happens in a long paragraph whose movement almost emblematically draws
the line of the bow with the two ends. It begins at the height of technology:
The forms of the epic theatre correspond to the new technological forms,
the cinema and radio. It [the epic theatre] stands at the height of technology
(GS 2.2: 524); and it ends with emissaries of higher powers, Platonic ideas
and trembling contours (das Zittern der Umrisse, GS 2.2: 525). This
paragraph thus performs the inverse movement of the rst sentences of the
essay: from the metaphysical abyss to the functions of technology there,
from the height of technology to the Platonic ideas here. The movement of
this line passes through Caspar Nehers stage decorations, which, according
to Benjamin, are actually less decorations than posters. Benjamin also
calls them projections: Nehers Projektionen, a word that already suggests
both the technology of optical projections on the stage and something
approaching the fantasmatic, and even the fantomatic. (Brecht himself talks
of lmic projections on the stage as taking over the role of Hamlets ghost,
or of ghosts generally in the older theatre.) Nehers projections in their sober
function as posters, Plakate, are in Benjamins eyes a means for the literal-
ization of the theatre, the interweaving of image and letter, turning the
scene into a kind of Denkbild. But something else happens with and
through these posters, a curious doubling takes place, when for example
in Mahagonny Jakob der Vielfrab, the character who eats himself to death,
sits in front of another Jakob der Vielfrab, drawn by Caspar Neher. The
pictured Vielfrab is not an illustration of the real Vielfrab, says Brecht
and Benjamin quotes him but he takes a stand in relation to the real
one. At this point, for the rst time in the essay, Benjamins gesture indicates
a certain distancing from Brecht, or at least takes a step further. So far so
good, he writes, after having quoted Brechts statement about the double
Vielfrab, but, he continues, who guarantees [wer steht mir dafr] that the
Vielfrab played on the stage [der gespielte Vielfrab] has the advantage of
reality over the pictured one [vor dem gezeichneten die Wirklichkeit voraus
hat]? Benjamin undermines Brechts simple opposition of a real and a
pictured Vielfrab. Instead he confronts two representations: one played,
the other drawn. At this point, the status of the real is suspended. Nothing
hinders us, Benjamin says, to have the played gure sitting in front of the
real one, that is to let the pictured gure be more real than the played one.
Once the status of reality as a rm ground and difference to the ctional has
been suspended in the double representation, another space and structure
enter into play; another scene opens up on the stage of the epic theatre. Once
the real is movable and can move from the foreground into the background,
the play in the foreground assumes a kind of fantomatic aura: many of
the players, Benjamin writes, appear as emissaries of the greater powers
[als Mandatare der grberen Mchte] that remain in the background. As
in medieval and baroque allegories, the gures on the stage gure another
reality, with the minor spatial difference in this case that the other reality,
the other scene, der andere Schauplatz, as Freud called it, is not a higher,
metaphysical sphere, but horizontally displaced in the background from
where their effects emanate into the foreground, functioning like Platonic
ideas.
13
Thus Nehers projections become something very paradoxical, what
Benjamin calls materialist ideas. But to the degree that these projections
are visible they assume themselves a strange intermediary place: although
being materialist ideas, they can become visible only by tearing themselves
off from their status as ideas, for even materialist ideas are outside the realm
of the empirically visible. But how then do we recognize their real status?
Through a minimal effect in the mode of their appearance: as close as they
have moved to the event [on the stage], the trembling of their contours [das
Zittern ihrer Umrisse] still betrays from what much more intimate proximity
they have themselves torn away in order to become visible. A trembling at
the edges indicates the effect of another scene.
And in this trembling in Benjamins text, the effect of another gure can
be read: the effect of an ever so brief intersection, an ever so brief crossing of
paths between Benjamin and Kierkegaard, after which their paths will move
in opposite directions. But what legitimates such a reading? To simply base
it on the word Zittern that evokes the title of the German translation Furcht
und Zittern, would certainly seem far-fetched although, as we will see, it
is not all that far-fetched in Benjamins unconscious. Yet the trembling in
Benjamins text is the echo of another trembling that Kierkegaard evokes in
his text as the signal and effect of another sphere, and it is as unobtrusive as
the trembling of Caspar Nehers posters. Kierkegaard describes the gure of
the knights of innity (Unendelighedens Riddere Ritter der Unendlichkeit,
in the German translation).
14
These knights are completely inconspicuous
in this world, they even have in Kierkegaards description a striking
resemblance to bourgeois philistinism (p. 38), such a knight makes one
think of him as a pen-pusher who has lost his soul to Italian bookkeeping,
so punctilious is he (p. 39). But like Kafkas betters at horse races, who
immediately recognize in the gait of the lawyer Bucephalus the gait of a
horse, Kierkegaard, or rather Johannes de Silentio, is a keen observer of
movements and gestures. And it is in this particular gaze and attentiveness
that the brief encounter and intersection between Benjamin and Brecht is
possible.
As unobtrusive as these knights are in everyday life, they are also dancers,
whose movements elevate them from time to time into a higher sphere, but
only an ever so slight wavering, when they touch ground again, indicates
that other sphere from which they return:
The knights of innity are ballet dancers and have elevation. They make
the upward movement and come down again, and this, too, is not an
unhappy diversion and is not unlovely to see. But every time they come
down, they are unable to assume the posture immediately, they waver for a
moment [de vakle et jeblik], and this wavering shows that they are aliens
in the world. It is more or less conspicuous according to their skill, but
even the most skilful of these knights cannot hide this wavering. (p. 41)
A slight wavering (vakle in the Danish text, Schwanken in the German
translation of 1923) signals that these gures come from elsewhere, just
as the trembling of the contours signals that also the gures on the stage
of the epic theatre are emissaries of greater powers. The small, yet signi-
cant difference, as I have already indicated, is the spatial structure of the
relationship between the spheres: vertical in Kierkegaards text, horizontal
in Benjamins text. It is the difference of two kinds of invisibility: the
invisibility of a metaphysical and theological transcendence in Kierkegaard,
and the structuring invisibility of determining relations in Benjamin and
Brecht.
Benjamin does not mention the name Kierkegaard in this text. The constel-
lation of his trembling contours with the wavering posture of Kierkegaards
dancer thus might still seem an all too thin thread for establishing a relation.
Indeed Benjamins text seems to move immediately into a very different
direction, evoking afnities with the Chinese theatre. But precisely in this
move, the text begins again to resonate with echoes from Kierkegaard. First
Benjamin displaces the accent from the general structures that might lead
to certain expected effects to an emphasis on the incommensurable and
singular (aufs Inkommensurable, Einzelne); and here, suddenly, the gure of
the ballet dancer appears: someone who writes for the epic theatre, Benjamin
says, has a relationship to the plot [verhlt sich zur Fabel ] as the ballet master
to his pupil [wie der Balletmeister zu seiner Elevin]. It is his rst task to loosen
the joints to the limits of the possible (GS 2.2: 525). Not only in the gure
of the dancer, but in the homophony of a curiously displaced word, the
echo of Kierkegaard can be heard. Kierkegaards elevation of the dancer
(Elevation in the Danish text, Elevation in the German translation of 1923)
reappears in Benjamins Elevin.
It seems that Kierkegaard can appear in Benjamins texts only in strange
displacements. But he does appear, against Benjamins intention, with a
curious insistence and in curious slips of the pen. Eight years after this rst
version, Benjamin rewrote his essay on the epic theatre for publication in
the journal Mab und Wert in 1939. In this version he refers to Brechts play
Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reichs, but the title is disgured and appears
as Furcht und Zittern des Dritten Reichs (GS 2.3: 1387). Benjamin is rather
embarrassed about this lapsus and, on 6 August 1939, he writes an apolo-
getic letter to Margarete Stefn only to produce another lapsus: In puncto
Essai bin ich reumtig, was den Titel von Brechts Stck angeht (es gab da eine
unentschuldbare Kollision mit Kierkegaards Furcht und Sitte). (Concerning
the essay, I regret what happened to the title of Brechts piece [there was an
inexcusable collusion with Kierkegaards Fear and Manners]: GS 2.3: 1386).
The Zittern has turned into a Sitte, a custom, a habit, manners, perhaps even
a haunting mannerism through which the ghost of Kierkegaard invades
Benjamins writing.
It might also be the ghost of theology in the process of its trans-
formation that appears in the displaced and displacing effects of Kierkegaard,
who seems to occupy the place of theology as the hunchbacked dwarf in
Benjamins version of the chess automaton (GS 1.3: 693 ).
15
The hunchback,
that also plays a signicant role in Benjamins Kafka essay, is the gure of
the displaced, forgotten things that haunt, as emissaries of greater powers,
our lives and (hi)stories. The hunchbacked dwarf theology, small and ugly,
remains invisible in Benjamins allegory, but the puppet plays all the better
even, and perhaps especially, on the sober stage and podium of Brechts epic
theatre, where Kierkegaards ghost as a revenant of the ghost of Hamlets
father insists with Benjamin on that intermediary status of a Vorstellung at
the edge of the visible and invisible.
The displaced encounter between Benjamin and Kierkegaard takes place
on the site where the theological and political are at the same time in the
most extreme opposition and in the most intimate interpenetration. It is
the innitely small point of a metabol V h, an Umschlag, a sudden shift and
turning around from the one to the other without any mediation. And here,
in the rejection of mediation, Benjamin comes closest to Kierkegaard, when
he tries to explain the paradoxical event of the reversal, the metabolhV of
the extremes. It is also the point of the transition from theory to praxis and
to being-there.
This transition [Benjamin says] is humanly possible only in a paradoxical
event: This is humanly possible only in two ways: in a religious or a
political viewpoint. I do not concede a difference of these two viewpoints
in their quintessence. No more, however, a mediation. I am speaking of
an identity that proves itself only in the paradoxical turning [Umschlag]
of the one into the other (no matter in which direction) and under the
presupposition that each view of the action proceeds without consid-
eration and radically in its own sense.
16
7
THE SUBJECT OF HISTORY: THE
TEMPORALITY OF PARATAXIS IN
BENJAMINS HISTORIOGRAPHY
DIMITRIS VARDOULAKIS
1
Focusing on the subject of Walter Benjamins notion of history inevitably
conjures up the image of the chess-playing automaton of Thesis I of On the
Concept of History. In the writing of history, the subject gures both as
the hidden chess-player inside the mechanism, and as the puppet that moves
the pieces on the chessboard outside. There is a mechanism that can poten-
tially be propelled indenitely, but its operation at each time is determined
by the denite stamina of the player crouched in the dark, suffocating
compartment. On the board, the continuation of the game is related to
the hidden player, while the puppets jerky movements are incidental to the
games duration. Thus the image of the Turk, as the automaton was known,
provides a complex temporality: in terms of movement, the machine can go
on for ever, while the man only as long as he can cope; whereas in terms of
the game, its perpetuation is dependent on the calculating man, while the
puppet is incidental. Thus the complexity of time is created by the juxta-
position the parataxis of man and puppet. Thereby, the subject becomes
an integral part of the act performed by the automaton, but the medium of
that act is time itself.
As the image of the automaton is refracted through Benjamins writings
the subject as historian and as the subject that appears within written history
will assume a clearer outline. The coordinates for such an outline can
only be provided by Benjamins writings themselves, and rst of all by the
unnished Arcades Project to which the Theses were conceived in part as a
methodological grid. The fact that the Arcades Project to remain unnished
is be a problematic element in such an investigation, and one that Benjamin
is well aware of: Outline the history of The Arcades Project [die Geschichte
der Passagenarbeit] in terms of its development. Its properly problematic
The Subject of History 119
component: the refusal to renounce anything that would demonstrate the
materialist presentation of history as imagistic in a higher sense than in
the traditional presentation (N3, 3). Benjamin is not referring simply to
the book that was published posthumously as volume 5 of his Gesammelte
Schriften. Benjamin is also referring to the work (Arbeit) of collecting in les
a huge volume of material the enormous list or parataxis of copied citations
and written notes. If this material is regarded as constituting the objects of
history, then those objects are given through their relation to the subject in
the unfolding of time. And since both the object and the subject are given
through forms of parataxis, then parataxis becomes the concept that can
yield forms of temporality that determine the subject of history.
Parataxis, as the refusal to give anything up, has at least two conceptual
aspects: First, to the extent that the parataxis of notes aspires to present a
specic place (Paris) in a specic period (the nineteenth century), what the
refusal announces is the totality of everything that makes up that specicity.
Yet this totality was to remain incomplete. A single specic moment is
impossible to grasp in its totality, let alone the complete specicity of a
whole era. The second conceptual aspect is to be discerned in the criterion
for collection: the materialist historiography. To the extent that materialism,
as understood by Benjamin, is a transformative critique, a writing in which
the material itself unfolds towards a future happiness, historiography has a
weak messianic power (Thesis II). The past is indexed to something incom-
plete, the future. Yet this indexing depends upon completeness as the past
without which the incomplete future is inconceivable. Thus, the two aspects
of parataxis show that the subject of history the historian who writes the
history and the subjects for whom the history is written can only be given
through this process of destruction whereby a complete specicity is made
incomplete and an incomplete innity is made complete. The interplay
between completeness and incompleteness introduced by parataxis yields
forms of temporality that are in each case disruptive. This disruption is the
manner in which the complete gives itself up to the incomplete, and vice
versa.
To introduce the notions or concepts of completeness and incompleteness
in historiography is to view the writing of history through the prism of
universal history. Universal history is not an arbitrary choice of term. There
are two reasons why universal history is crucial. First, universal history at its
most basic introduces the issue of a comprehensive inventory of the course
of history. Universal history is a form of list-making, the writing-down of
parataxis. The list has a vital connection to a philosophy of language and
hence to narrative, as well as to the condition of the possibility of knowledge.
This can be demonstrated with a brief look back at list-making. On the
one hand, from the perspective of the development of different narrative
forms, it is important that the earliest examples of different genres utilize
lists in crucial ways: thus, Homer in his epic poem of the Trojan war is not
frugal with space in recording each citys contribution to the Greek army,
or the items on Achilles shield; and Herodotus in his Histories provides
detailed inventories of the armies in the Persian wars or of what he saw in
his travels; and it should not be forgotten that the earliest European script
that has been deciphered, the Minoan Linear B, has been preserved as clay
tablets recording the goods produced and stored at the Cretan palaces. The
fact that decisively different narrative forms use the same apparatus, only
proves, as Longinus recognized, that the list is a fertile topos for stylistics
to turn into a philosophy of language thereby addressing both the human
and the object.
1
On the other hand, the thinkers of the modern era were
equally aware of this: Montaignes use of the list as the only way to record
his own experience is a telling example, even if somewhat timid compared
with the compulsive list-making of a Rabelais or the lists that comprise La
Popelinires perfect history.
2
It is not a coincidence that Foucault starts
his history of words and things from the seventeenth to the nineteenth
century with extrapolating on the way that a list records not only the objects
perceived as well as the reection upon these objects, but also the pistme
that is sedimented between the individual listed items and which comprises
the order, or the grammar, of the list.
3
The issues of narrative, subjectivity
and the epistemological status of objects coalesce in the notion of the list so
that their relation to history can be examined.
The second reason that universal history is crucial is derived from
Benjamins writings. It is not only that the huge list known as the Arcades
Project can be viewed as a type of universal history. In addition, universal
history is a term employed by Benjamin himself. Although Benjamin refers
to it only once in the Theses, that reference in Thesis XVII is of extreme
importance for a discussion of the historiographic method. Further, if
universal history is taken to mean a completed history, then contra-
puntal to this idea is that universal history is also messianic. The authentic
concept of universal history [Universalgeschichte] is a messianic concept
(N18, 3). This assertion is signicant enough for Benjamin to jot down
a number of times in the preparatory notes for the Theses, for instance:
Only in the messianic realm does a universal history exist (SW 4: 404/GS
1.3: 1235). Universal history, as the term around which completeness and
incompleteness entwine and unfold, is a necessary condition of Benjaminian
history. However, it is not a sufcient condition of history. The stress in the
last citation from the preparatory notes is on the only: universal history
can be actualized only with the coming of a Messiah, on Judgement Day.
Moreover, Benjamin warns: Universal history in the present-day sense is
never more than a kind of Esperanto. (It expresses the hope of the human
race no more effectively than the name of that universal language) (SW 4:
404/GS 1.3: 1235). The utopian vision of universal history in the present-
day sense a qualication which will be shown to be of signicance for
Benjamin is nothing but wishful daydreaming. If humanity could ever
think of pinning its hopes on a universal language such as Esperanto, the
historical actuality in which Benjamin was writing the Theses (Nazism, the
HitlerStalin pact, etc.) would beg to differ.
Yet, if hope and its language or the language of hope, the spero in the
Esperanto are halted by a pervasive impossibility, Benjamin can still insist
that such an impossibility is annexed to a possibility. It is a regulative impos-
sibility. This impossibility could be made productive, so long as it remained
regulative. In other words, the aporia about the insufcient necessity of
parataxis and messianic temporality for history may yet provide a methodo-
logical reorientation or reversal. After all, as the essay on The Elective
Afnities afrms, hope is for the hopeless, and the hopeless in Benjamins
notion of historiography are the oppressed, in whose name the history that
insists on recording the minor detail is constructed. The hopeless are the
subjects of written history. The reversal, then, that will recongure universal
history has to be performed by/through the subject of history. Yet the hapless
historian who undertakes the enormous collecting task of a Passagenarbeit
is no less hopeless. In unfolding the notion of the subject of history,
the historian will prove at the end to be as important as the oppressed of the
past although what is ultimately of the most importance is the way that
the subjects of written history are related to the gure of the historian. What
has to be avoided is to place the oppressed and the historian in a hierarchical
structure, that is to pit them against each other in a power struggle.
2
To avoid such a power struggle, it is important that the two notions of the
historical subject are clearly delineated. Only then would it be possible at
the end to indicate what kind of struggle they avoid, what is the nature of
their alliance their complicity. For the moment, the investigation should
proceed with the oppressed by asking the question: Who are the oppressed?
Who are the hopeless? An answer will reveal that according to Benjamin
there is no one identiable group of people that can be called the oppressed.
The question leads to the realization that a philosophy of time is needed.
Temporality will yield the historiographic method. Yet this method will
require the reshaping of the question: How are the hopeless to gure in a
historical narrative? The latter question will lead back to the historian.
It may appear self-evident who the oppressed have been. To assume
that there is an obvious way of identifying the oppressed and the hopeless,
namely as those who have suffered injustice, the slain [who] are really slain,
as Horkheimer put it in a letter of March 1937, would be to miss the crux
of Benjamins thought. When Benjamin transcribed Horkheimers letter in
Convolute N of the Arcades Project, he appended the corrective that history
is not merely science but also a remembrance (Eingedenken) that can modify
the facts of science. Remembrance can make the incomplete (happiness)
into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something
incomplete (N8, 1). Historiography then identies the suffering as the
realm of particularity that tends to be viewed as completed. However, this
suffering cannot be grasped in toto and thus always remains incomplete.
At the same time, the promise of happiness that the oppressed hope to be
carried out in the future remains incomplete, since the future cannot be
foreclosed, it is always open to possibilities. Yet these possibilities are always
already circumscribed by the past, they are dependent upon the past and
thus complete. This chiasmus between completeness and incompleteness
unfolds in remembrance (Eingedenken) and, in Benjamins sense, yields
history. Thus, at the heart of history, at the chiasmus of Eingedenken, there
is an aporia: the hopeless and the oppressed are not merely discovered in the
past they also solicit the discovering of that past. History does not exist
without them, no less than they do not exist without history. This twofold
movement is crucial. The response offered to Horkheimer makes it clear
that the hopeless and oppressed are not to be discovered directly in a past,
historical occurrence; rather, they are to be determined by the chiasmus.
Benjamin is not contending that the oppressed are in some sense unreal,
a kind of simulacra marching forward from a bygone time. If anything,
the opposite is his very point. The reality of hopelessness has to be secured
through a conception of time that does justice to such a reality. There is a
negative part to Benjamins assertion, when he denies that history is science.
This is the rejection of historicism. Although the attack on historicism
permeates Benjamins thought on history, from the Arcades Project, to
the Theses, to several published works of the same period such as the
Fuchs essay, as well as the preparatory notes for the Theses although,
then, the assault on historicism is unrelenting, historicism remains a term
never adequately dened by Benjamin. Historicism would indicate at least
three distinguishable conceptions of history. First, there is the teleological
history, one that asserts that enlightened man will head towards a cosmo-
politan ideal, as Kant argues, or one that poses freedom as an end whose
attainment in the present would signal historys end, according to Hegel.
Second, historicism also includes the attempts to identify independent
historical disciplines, a history of art, a history of politics, of economy, of
technology and so on. The problem with autonomous historical inquiries is
that they either presuppose a rupture between that discipline and society, or
they extrapolate inadequate relations between the two, as for instance the
psychologism of the Warburg school.
4
Third, historicism nally includes
the practice of adding up facts, while insisting in Rankeian fashion on the
self-evidence of these facts what Benjamin calls the strongest narcotic
of the century (N3, 4). What these different types of historicism have in
common is a conception of time as continuous. They presuppose a linear
chronological development, which is always dependent on empathy with the
rulers who determine that linearity. Conversely, historical materialism has to
blast apart the historical continuum. Time has to come to a standstill. The
dialectical image activates the emergency brakes of history. Therefore, who
the hopeless are cannot be secured by their being conceived as originating
from within a chronological continuum. This would merely be tautological,
trying to secure history from within history itself. To say that ultimately the
slain are really slain is nothing other than reverting to historicism.
Had Horkheimer been presented with the problem of who the hopeless
are in this way, he might have retorted that the tautology cuts both ways:
does not dialectical rigour demand that continuity and discontinuity, as
its opposite, mutate to each other? Therefore, Benjamin himself would not
overcome historicism, if he merely imposed a different form discontinuity
to the already existent material. This line of argument misconstrues
Benjamins rejection of the presupposition of a temporal continuum. The
call to blast apart the historical continuum presupposed by historicism is
not a call to hypostatize discontinuity. Discontinuity cannot be equated
with a generic narrative that identies a specic group of people as hopeless.
This would not make sense, if, as already intimated, the hopeless both
make history and are made by it. Discontinuity is not content. History
is not self-legitimating. There is no narrative particular to history (cf. SW
4: 406/GS 1.3: 1240), there is no narrative particular to the oppressed.
Thus, when Benjamin refers to montage in relation to the writing of the
Arcades Project, montage is not at all a stylistic device but a methodological
procedure (cf. N1a, 8). And, when Benjamin talks about the historiography
in a positive manner, he does not refer to the narration of history, but to its
construction: History is the subject of a construction (SW 4: 395/GS 1.2:
701). The sentence goes on to assert that the site of this construction is lled
with now-time (Jetztzeit). What underlies historiography is an operation
of temporal discontinuity. Thus, the philosophy of history has turned into
a philosophy of time. This is the inevitable conclusion, if discontinuity is
not to be reduced to content, and if history and historiography are not to
be locked in a vicious circle. Further, viewing discontinuity as a temporal
category, rather than merely a stylistic mannerism, accords with the devel-
opment of Benjamins thought. As Andrew Benjamin has shown in tracing
the meaning of the caesura in Benjamins work, the caesura in the early
critical writings, such as the dissertation and the Goethe essay, is that which
stages the contact between particular and absolute. But this interruption
works on a formal level and it can be reduced neither to content, nor to
something transcendental that legitimates that content. The relationality
of the elements of this structure makes possible judgements about the truth
content (Wahrheitsgehalt) of the artwork. The notion of temporal discon-
tinuity in Benjamins thinking on history transposes the formal structure of
the caesura from art to time. Time as the absolute is that which allows for
interruption; but equally what is evidenced by that interruption.
5
The extrapolation of the Absolute in relation to time does not only hark
back to Benjamins early writing. It also recalls the extrapolation earlier
of the oppressed in relation to history. With the oppressed it was shown
that a chiasmus takes place between history and those for whom history is
written. The temporal caesura repeats the chiasmic structure. The fullness
of time makes incompletion possible, but it is also made by incompleteness.
This chiasmus does not indicate that the complete and the incomplete, the
particular and the absolute, the oppressed and messianic temporality are the
same thing. Rather, the point is that the terms of those conjunctions are
given within the same structure that has arisen out of Benjamins philosophy
of time. Thus, what is repeated is not solely the complete in the incomplete,
and so on, as if they were identical. What is repeated is the constructive
principle of history. The paratactically presented information in histori-
ography and the messianic temporality can only be necessary conditions
of history. The additional constructive principle indicates that they have a
structural connection. This is what makes possible the mutual transform-
ability of the complete and the incomplete, as Benjamin wrote in reply to
Horkheimer. It makes possible the little gate of particularity through which
the Messiah might enter any second now (SW 4: 397/GS 1.2: 704). In other
words, it is the structural arrangement that makes particularity and the
absolute consupponible and codeterminable. The Messiah is not a religious
concept; rather, the Messiah is the regulative impossibility that allows for
interruption as the temporality that pertains to history.
At this juncture, nothing more can be said about who the hopeless are,
other than that they are whoever occupies the nexus of particularity in the
formal structure of the constructive principle of history. This formulation
already discloses at least three points: rst, the subjectivity of the hopeless
does not conform to historicisms forms of selfhood, such as its identi-
cation with a Geist or with an autonomous individual I. Second, if the early
Benjamins structural argument about criticism is indeed transportable to
the later philosophy of time, then the hopeless will occupy a position akin
to that of the material content; and to the extent that the material content
is always in a process of ruination, the same process of disintegration of
subjectivity will be expected to take place in history.
6
Simultaneously, and
this is the third point, specifying the particularity of subjectivity as other
than a fact of historicism discloses the limit of the question who are the
hopeless?. For it can only provide an answer in the negative. A positive
articulation requires the hopeless to gure in a different question: how are
they to be presented? This in effect asks for the way that the subject gures
in, as well as congures, the chiasmic relations between the complete and
the incomplete. In other words, what sort of gure of the subject can make
possible Benjamins philosophy of time? What is the nature of this subjective
act that allows for guration?
3
To start answering these questions requires to focus on the historian and
the methodology of historiography. The crucial passage in this respect is
Thesis XVII. This thesis is important enough to be quoted in full here,
even though only the rst half will be treated in the present section, and the
second at the end:
Historicism rightly culminates [gipfelt] in universal history. It may be that
materialist historiography stands out [abhebt sich] in method more clearly
against universal history than from any other kind. Universal history has
no theoretical armature. Its technique [Verfahren] is additive: it musters
the mass of facts in order to ll the homogeneous and empty time.
Materialist historiography, on the other hand, is based on a constructive
principle. Thinking involves not only the movement of thoughts, but
their arrest [Stillstellung] as well. Where thinking suddenly comes to
a stop in a constellation saturated with tensions, it gives that constel-
lation a shock, through which thinking crystallizes itself into a monad.
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 [Stillstellung des Geschehens] or, to put it
differently, a revolutionary chance in the ght for the oppressed past. He
perceives the monad in order to blast a specic era out of the course of
history [Verlauf der Geschichte]; thus he blasts a specic life out of the era,
a specic work out of the lifework. The product of his technique [Der
Ertrag seines Verfahrens] is that the lifework is both preserved and sublated
[aufbewahrt ist und aufgehoben] in the work, the era in the lifework, and
the entire course of history [der gesamte Geschichtesverlauf ] in the era. The
nourishing fruit of what is historically understood contains time in its
interior as a precious but tasteless seed. (SW 4: 396/GS 1.2: 7023)
On the one hand, Thesis XVII offers a formulation about the method of
historiography. There are two techniques contrasted, universal history and
materialist historiography. On the other hand, in order to expand on the
latter, Benjamin refers to the historian. The materialist historian is based
on a constructive principle. Thus, subjectivity is implicated in method. The
latter point will be left unattended for the time being.
Approaching technique means paying attention to the complexities of this
passage. And a complexity emerges from the very beginning in the contrast
between materialist historiography and universal history. For if the entire
course of history is something that can be methodologically entertained,
as Benjamin suggests in the penultimate sentence, then what is it that
really separates it from universal history, taken to mean precisely the aim
of representing the entirety of facts? The problem will not be solved easily
with reference to the precious seed, time. For the very next thesis states
that messianic or now-time comprises the entire history of mankind in a
tremendous abbreviation (SW 4: 396/GS 1.2: 703). Prima facie a moment
that comprises the entire history of mankind may not appear all that
different from the project of a universal history, namely to add up all the
facts. Thesis XVII may indicate why Benjamin relates elsewhere universal
history to the messianic (e.g. N18, 3), but universal history is thereby, if
anything, even more elusive. A closer look at the term universal history is
called for, yet it should be kept in mind that Thesis XVII explicitly address
the historiographic method. Universal history will become a fruitful
concept only if it is viewed in relation to writing, and thus in connection
to narrativity. This is not to say that there is a specic kind of historical
narrative this has been rejected already. There still is, nonetheless, a
method and a technique of writing history.
The issue of what can be recorded in written history the historical
object in general, which includes the oppressed revolves around the
notion of universal history. The reason is that universal history can present
most clearly the difference in technique between historical materialism and
historicism. What does Benjamin mean by the term universal history? The
assertion in Thesis XVII that historicism culminates in universal history is
not a straightforward identication of historicism and universal history. If
the metaphors in the verbs of the rst two sentences are heeded, then what is
conjured is an image of vertical mobility. Universal history is at the summit
(der Gipfel ) of historicism.
7
And materialist historiography only rises (heben)
even higher. Thus, universal history is not only the meridian of historicism,
but also a median between historicism and materialism. Further, the twist
in Benjamins logic has it that universal history as messianic concomitantly
functions as a meridian of materialism. The middle point between histor-
icism and historical materialism is, simultaneously, the highest point of each.
The fact that the term universal history is used only once in the Theses in
Thesis XVII makes it all the more enticing given that Benjamin refers to
it consistently in the preparatory notes. There, Benjamin strategically draws
a qualitative distinction between the present-day sense of universal history
and a more authentic sense. After repeating the call for the destructive
energies of materialism to blast apart the temporal continuum, Benjamin
observes that this would serve as the precondition to attack the three most
important positions of historicism. Benjamin continues by immediately
identifying universal history as the rst such position: The rst attack must
be aimed at the idea of universal history. Now that the nature of peoples
is obscured by their current structural features as much as by their current
structural relations to one another, the notion that the history of humanity
is composed of peoples is a mere refuge of intellectual laziness (SW 4: 406/
GS 1.3: 1240). Universal history is unproblematically a historicist category,
only if the completeness alluded to in it is meant to signify the sum of
people. In other words, only the history that sees the victors as those who
were really victorious and the slain as those who were really slain.
Yet this is not the whole story; Benjamin immediately opens a qualifying
parenthesis:
(The idea of a universal history stands and falls with the idea of a
universal language. As long as the latter had a basis whether in theology,
as in the Middle Ages, or in logic, as more recently in Leibniz universal
history was not wholly inconceivable. By contrast, universal history as
practised since the nineteenth century can never have been more than a
kind of Esperanto.)
The universal history of historicism the universal history in the present-
day sense is that of nineteenth-century positivism. Conversely, universal
history is still relevant to a Leibnizian monadology, a monadology recon-
gured in Benjamins philosophy of time as the monad or the dialectical
image which, according to Thesis XVII, crystallizes thinking into a
constellation in order to make it possible for the historian to approach the
object. The distinction, then, between the two notions of universal history
hinges on the way that the historian presents an entire record of objects.
The question of how the subject of history is presented can be reformulated
as how the subjectivity of the historian is to be construed in relation to
the writing of the historical object. Universal history coalesces three terms
the subject, the narrative and the historical object under the rubric of
completeness. The endeavour to record the entire course of history recalls
what was called at the beginning the paratactic presentation of the specic.
A parataxis of things is by denition the most emphatic attempt to present
those things in their entirety. Such an inventory is a necessity for history.
Lists may appear to be simple grammatical structures to the extent that they
repeat the same part of speech. This simplicity is deceptive.
The historicist fault is to be deceived by this simple grammar. Historicism
contents itself with establishing a causal nexus among various moments in
history (SW 4: 397/GS 1.2: 704). The story that this causal connecting
presents is precisely an adding up of facts, an unreective universal history.
The positivist historiographic methodology can be likened to a vast collection
of index cards, each card representing a fact. The historian merely arranges
the cards in a way that makes sense utilizing the causal methodology of
the natural sciences.
8
Such a historian can never question the rhetorical
structure of the narrative, because its language is all along assumed to be
referential to be scientic. But this is nothing but the wishful thinking
of an Esperanto. Just as positivisms facts rely on a metaphysics that
pronounces an unproblematic relation between those facts and their inter-
polations, so also Esperanto relies on a simplied grammar which assumes
the unproblematic relation between the name and its referent. And, just as
positivism was blind to the grammar of its metaphysics, so was Esperanto
blind to the metaphysics of its grammar. This conguration of languages
formal properties vis--vis its referential power and the metaphysics under-
lying it prescribes a narrative dogmatism. It presupposes a grammar which
makes language purely referential.
This corresponds to the grammar of the pure language that Benjamin
extrapolated as early as 1916 in On Language as Such and on the Language
of Man. It is the recognition from within a philosophy of language that
universal history not only presupposes a pre-Babel language in which every
sentence can be translated, but moreover that it is that language itself (GS
1.3: 1239). A pure concept of universal history requires a pure language. In
other words, it requires a narrative devoid of all ambiguity and essentially
self-referential. In On Language as Such Benjamin identied the essential
property of such a language: it is both creative and the nished creation;
it is word and name (SW: 1: 68/GS 2.1: 148). Thus, it is a completely
self-enclosed language, the completed language of God which Benjamin
distinguishes sharply from the human language of names. Just as a pure
language is non-human, so also a completely self-referential narrative is
impossible for the historian. To the extent that this grammar is presup-
posed in a way that makes an ontological commitment, then it can only
posit itself. Starting from the innity of pure language, it is impossible to
reach the particularity of the naming of human language. In this sense, the
grammar of positivism turns out to be no grammar at all, but merely a sol-
ipsistic onomatopoeia. The movement from the innite to the nite is always
curtailed, never fullled. No wonder that the second fortied position of
historicism, which Benjamin attends to straight after the parenthesis that
distinguishes between nineteenth-century universal history and authentic
universal history, is the idea that history is something that can be narrated
[sich erzhlen lasse] (SW 4: 406/GS 1.3: 1240). There is no technique of
presenting a linear narrative that will lay a claim to present the facts as
they really are, no matter how many facts are enumerated. For these facts,
derived as they are from an innite grammar, will always remain incom-
plete. Thus, for the historian, there can never be an essentially historical
narrative.
4
This is not to say that historiography is impossible. Rather, historiography
is to be viewed from the vantage point of a philosophy of time. If incom-
pleteness and innity are to be retained, then they cannot be constructed
as positivisms pure language. Only then will the qualitative difference
between the present-day universal history, and the universal history as a
possibility or at least as that notion of history that allows for a conception
of the possibility of history. For a genuine historiography, Benjamin insists
that time cannot be conceived as an accumulation of constitutive moments.
Only by overcoming the historical continuum will the grammar of time
assume a regulative function. After having singled out the universal history
of positivism as the rst historicist position to be attacked, Benjamin
continues his attack on the second bastion of historicism by elaborating
on its narrative form: In a materialist investigation, the epic moment
will always be blown apart in the process of construction (SW 4: 406/GS
1.3: 124041). Just like linear time, so also the linear narrative must be
blasted apart. The mention of epic narrative, as it comes immediately after
Benjamins discussion of universal history, points to the Leskov essay. The
Storyteller can be read as an argument about how the temporality of story-
telling (Erzhlung) can produce a notion of particularity as the temporal
ground of the innite.
9
Storytelling presupposes a rich notion of experience,
attainable through a slow-paced life. Thus, the audience can achieve the
ultimate state of relaxation, that is boredom, so that the story can be retained
in memory (Gedchtins). Immediacy also gures as the literal presence of
the narrator whose purpose is to provide practical advice and counsel. The
righteous man, as the subject who has the know-how and moral rectitude, is
the subject to which storytelling aspires. With death, the immediacy of the
telling of a story is referred to the idea of eternity (SW 3: 150/GS 2.2: 449).
Everything that the storyteller can offer refers to this eternity. In which case,
death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell (SW 3: 151/
GS 2.2: 450). The movement of storytelling is from the immediate to the
innite. Benjamin illustrates this movement the technique of storytelling
with the example of a list.
The example, which comes from a story by Hebel titled Unexpected
Reunion, is concerned to show how parataxis the writing of the historical
object can be allowed to gure in historiography. The story describes the
death of a young girls betrothed in a mine collapse and the subsequent redis-
covery of his corpse many years later. What catches Benjamins attention is
the paragraph that bridges the gap between the two distant times. This
paragraph is the parataxis of historical events: In the meantime the city of
Lisbon was destroyed in an earthquake, and the Seven Years War came and
went, and Emperor Francis I died and so on (SW 3: 152/GS 2.2: 450). In
this list, death is present in every turn of phrase. In the rst paragraph of
the section that follows, section XII, Benjamin elaborates on the meaning
that death assumes in the narrative form of storytelling. This is conducted
in terms of historiography, and in such as way that it points directly to the
Theses:
An examination of a given epic form is concerned with the relationship
of this form to historiography . . . The chronicler is the history-teller
[GeschichtsErzhler]. If we think back to the passage from Hebel, which
has the tone of a chronicle throughout, it will take no effort to gauge the
difference between one who writes history (the historian) and one who
narrates it (the chronicler). The historians task is to explain in one way or
another the events with which he deals; under no circumstances can he
content himself with simply displaying them as models of the course of the
world [Weltlaufs]. But this is precisely what the chronicler does, especially
in his classical avatars, the chroniclers of the Middle Ages, the precursors
of todays history. By basing their historical tales [Geschichtserzlungen] on
a divine and inscrutable plan of salvation, at the very outset they have
lifted the burden of demonstrable explanation from their shoulders. Its
place is taken by interpretation, which is concerned not with an accurate
concatenation of denitive events [Verkettung von bestimmten Ereignissen],
but with the way these are embedded in the great inscrutable course of the
world. (SW 3: 1523/GS 2.2: 4512)
Every epic form, that is every linear narrative, is intricately connected
to historiography. But this is not to say that every narrative is properly
historical. However, even if the chronicle is still not history, nonetheless it
still aspires to history in a manner that presents its objects as inscrutable.
What this manner precludes is a conception of historiography as a chain of
independent events there is no concatenation of denitive events, that is,
there is no causal narration in the manner practised by positivism. Such a
collection of independent facts can never be tted into the great inscrutable
course of the world. In contrast to positivism, storytelling makes possible
a different form of innity, and hence a different notion of totality. The
difference arises from the immediacy of the presence of the storyteller and
the rich experience of storytelling. This is an experience of particularity,
an immediate specicity. Whereas the pure language of positivism presup-
posed an innite and self-referential grammar, the storyteller starts with the
immediacy of the multicoloured (bunte) world view (SW 3: 153/GS 2.2: 452).
And, whereas positivism is trapped in that innite grammar, the storyteller,
because he starts with particularity, still has access to innitude. This is
Benjamins point when he evokes the chronicler in the Thesis II:
The chronicler who narrates events without distinguishing between major
and minor ones acts in accord with the following truth: nothing that has
ever happened should be regarded as lost to history. Of course, only a
redeemed mankind is granted the fullness [vollauf ] of its past which is
to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its
moments. (SW 4: 390/GS 1.2: 694)
The demand of the universal history is clear in the chronicle: nothing is
to be lost for history. The chronicler can entertain this refusal to let the
thing disappear, because his narrative the Geschichtserzlung is one of
immediacy. The chronicle then, in the language of Thesis XVII, stands at
the summit of materialist historiography.
Pointing the road to innitude from the standpoint of nitude is both
the strength of storytelling and the chronicle, as well as the reason that
they are not genuine history. For they pose a bad notion of innitude.
Storytelling has no denite end. In the manner of Scheherazade, the end of
a story is only the beginning of a new one (SW 3: 154/GS 2: 453). Equally,
the chronicles notion of totality is an impossible one: it is the totality of the
Judgement Day (der jngste Tag) (SW 4: 390/GS 1.2: 694). The last day is
also the rst (jngste), and thus completion gives way to incompletion in
a movement of eternal return. If the chronicler makes possible the com-
pilation of a list and thus raises the possibility of a record of the historical
object and of a universal history, then this remains outside the possibilities
of historiography. The summit that the chronicle represents is separated
from the mountain of historical materialism as if by a bed of clouds. The
clouds may always be moving and the demarcation between the two may
never be a xed line. But it is a demarcation nevertheless, because for the
materialist that summit is always impossible to scrutinize through the clouds
it is inscrutable. The value of the storytelling narrative is that, despite its
impossibility, it still moves history to a region where possibility becomes
an issue. This is the region of the particular. Storytelling departs from the
particular. Thus, its technique makes immediacy possible. The failure of
storytelling only shows that potentiality alone is not enough for Benjamin
to guarantee historiography. What is also needed is an act the very act that
the chronicler lacks because he refuses to distinguish between events. This is
the act of explaining, which according to the Leskov essay distinguishes the
historian from the chronicler.
Earlier in The Storyteller, in section VII, Benjamin uses another
example which not only includes death and parataxis, but also pregures
his distinction between the historian and the storyteller. This story from
Herodotus tells of the Egyptian king Psammenitus, who has been defeated
in battle, lost his kingdom and, to add insult to injury, he is made to attend
the victors triumphal procession. Psammenitus remains unmoved at his
daughter and son passing by he may not even have recognized them since
he stood with his eyes xed to the ground (SW 3: 148/GS 2.2: 445). But he
was deeply moved at the sight of his old manservant, which prompted him
to beat his head and wail. Herodotus, Benjamin argues, is a real storyteller
because of the complete lack of explanation. The story is presented in a dry
manner, and does not expend itself it reaches a point of incompletion
from which it will not budge. Nevertheless Benjamin moves on by offering
four different explanations:
Montaigne referred to this Egyptian king and asked himself why he
mourned only when he caught sight of his servant. Montaigne answers:
Since he was already over-full of grief, it took only the smallest increase
for it to burst through the dams. Thus Montaigne. But one could also
say: The king is not moved by the fate of those of royal blood, for it is his
own fate. Or: We are moved by much on the stage that does not move
us in real life; to the king, this servant is only an actor. Or: Great grief
is pent up and breaks forth only with relaxation; seeing this servant was
the relaxation. (SW 3: 148/GS 2.2: 446)
These explanations are acts of judgement. The historian differs from
the chronicler in that he makes judgements. But here judgement is not
understood as any arbitrary ascription of value on a given object. Rather,
judgement is the act that intervenes in what is possible. The judgement
halts the innity of potentiality, it intervenes in the perpetual pendulum of
completeness and incompleteness. More emphatically, it is the interruption
of the movement between innite and nite.
5
Interruption is the act of the technique of materialist historiography and
that which makes possible a conception of the innite and the nite, of the
complete and the incomplete. However, if interruption is also to be linked
to judgement, the parataxis of judgements with which Benjamin responds to
Herodotus story does not seem to x the problem of a bad innity. For they
may appear as individual judgements, pointing towards a notion of innity
as an aggregate of similar judgements a dialogue between independent and
individual points of view. However, innity and the nite have to be given
by temporality itself. Therefore, time will have to operate in judgement.
The time inscribed in the parataxis of judgements in section VII of The
Storyteller can be presented only when it is distinguished from the tem-
porality of each judgement on its own.
The rst judgement, which Benjamin copies from Montaigne, emphat-
ically asserts the immediacy of experience. It was at the point that the
king was lled up with grief that he had a visceral reaction as if his
body could not help it. This is the temporality of specicity. Conversely,
the invocation of fate in the second judgement installs a temporality that
eschews specicity, the temporality that knows only of the decisions of the
gods and effaces human freedom and ethical responsibility. The image of
the world as a theatre in the third explanation partly repeats the temporality
of fate: the actors act according to a script that cannot be altered. However,
here the exclusion of the king from the innite play on the stage makes it
possible that the king could stop being indifferent at the drama and react.
The kings reaction is provoked by the eternity of the stage-action. The nal
explanation, with its proverbial nature, has the structure of a storytelling
narrative: it offers wisdom. Thus it has the temporality of an immediacy
that is directed towards an eternity. None of these construals of time offers
a genuine possibility of interruption, since neither can offer an interruption
of the relation between the innite and the nite that does not privilege one
of the two terms.
The argument here is that for Benjamin none of these judgements on
their own in the parataxis could have been a genuine judgement. The poss-
ibility of judgement in this passage depends entirely on the gure of the king
Psammenitus and the way that he intervenes interrupts the parataxis of
judgements. As already noted, in Benjamins retelling of the story, the king
stood with his eyes xed to the ground during the parade, hardly noticing
his own children. To this parataxis for parataxis in Greek means precisely
placing side by side, like a parade of individual catastrophes the king
remains impervious, like the bored and distracted spectator of a play. His
eyes look at his son, but there is hardly a recognition. Until, that is, he acts
himself. Until the moment that his eyes are raised and stop on an image.
That this moment is precisely when his old manservant walks in front of
him is fortuitous although one might contend, even more emphatically,
that it is entirely gratuitous. All that matters is not what the king sees but
how he sees: he recognizes in a frozen moment, in an instant. The angel of
history may x his gaze on the entire course of humankinds catastrophes,
but the gaze of the subject is not all-encompassing; rather, it is instant-
aneous, a rapid adjustment of the eyes. This instant already transports him
from the auditorium where he previously sat indifferent into the centre-stage
of the narration where he has to assume his responsibility. This xing of
the eye, the gaze directed to the image of the oppressed confronting him,
this hardly perceptible adjustment whose condition of possibility has been
parataxis, is all that was missing for a Benjaminian judgement to be made
possible.
It is very important that Benjamin has changed Herodotus story in
a very crucial respect. While Benjamin claims that Herodotus offers no
ex-planation, in matter of fact paragraph 14 of Book 3 concludes with
the Persian king sending a messenger to inquire why Psammenitus cried
over the old man but not over his own children. And Herodotus records
Psammenitus answer: My private grief [oikeia] was too great for weeping; but
the misfortune of my companion [hetairou] called for tears.
10
Recognition,
and hence judgement, can only take place when the other is a hetairos,
someone who is distinguished from the self, yet also someone who belongs
in a community with the self. Judgement is not merely a private affair it is
not an opinion about ones own house (he oikia). Rather, judgement takes
place on the communal, and hence on the political, space. Just as judgement
is distinguished from private opinion, on the same grounds recognition
is distinguished from mere looking: recognition involves the political. In
recognition, self and other become complicit. In this instant of judgement,
the king recognizes in the manner that the historian judges. His tears are the
historians judgement. The complicity that is established between the king
and this hetairon is the complicity that also pertains between the historian
and King Psammenitus at that moment.
The act of judgement is the act whereby a spectator becomes simul-
taneously an actor. The historian makes, and is also made by, the object
of history. This chiasmus corresponds to the chiasmus identied earlier in
pursuing the question of who the subject of history is. It will be recalled
that then it was shown that the hopeless make and are made by history;
and also that time, as the absolute, creates and is created by the interruption
of the temporal continuum. These chiastic relations were shown to be the
structural principle of historiography. The correspondence of Psammenitus
gaze to the earlier chiasmoi discloses the essential quality of the principle
of historiography: it is the act of judgement. The most general answer as to
how the subject gures in history is: through this instantaneous act. The
act that is performed in such a way that the parataxis is recognized. If it
is recognized as parataxis, then the historians gaze cannot be xed on the
whole parade of catastrophes but it has to concentrate on the anonymous
(cf. SW 4: 406/GS 1.3: 1241) old man. Yet the old has to be recognized as
a paratactic object, that is as belonging to the structure that unravels the
relation between completeness and incompleteness to the innity of time.
6
If this innity of time is consistently pursued, the conclusion can only be
that a subjective judgement is no longer possible. What this means is that a
subjects judgement can never attain a self-consistent truth. The subjective
act is never occlusive. No matter how many individual acts of judgement
are possible, they can only be secondary to the possibility of judging as
such. This signals the destruction of the subject. The subject cannot x
itself on a stable position from which to pronounce a judgement. The act
of judgement destroys the singular individual, because the subject is now
dissolved into the I and the hetairon, the I and the object that looks back at
it forming a community that is complicit in judging. The standstill of this
judgement is not that of standing on a xed point. It is, rather, a dispersal,
which is crucial to the constructive methodology of materialist histori-
ography, as it is described in Thesis XVII. It will be recalled that Thesis
XVII starts with a vertical movement between historicism, universal history
and materialist historiography. The ascent (abheben) from historicism to
materialism is mediated by universal history. However, by performing a kind
of leap, universal history in the form of the chronicle has been shown to be
also at the summit of materialism. Benjamin insists in Thesis XVII that
this up-and-down movement is not enough: Thinking involves not only
the movement of thoughts, but their arrest [Stillstellung] as well. But this
Stillstellung is not something exhausted within the gure of the historian:
He [the materialist historian] perceives the monad in order to blast a
specic era out of the course of history; thus he blasts a specic life out of
the era, a specic work out of the lifework. The product of his technique
is that the lifework is both preserved and sublated [aufgehoben ist] in the
work, the era in the lifework, and the entire course of history in the era.
(GS 1.2: 703 / SW 4: 396)
The historian perceives the monad, he recognizes the historical object. But
the product is not up to the historian on his own. Rather, the product is
given through his technique. In the aufheben of Benjaminian sublation the
abheben from historicism to universal history to historical materialism is
halted by erasing the subject from the sublating. The individual I is no more,
because historiography can methodologically entertain the entire course of
history only through the complicity of the historian with the hopeless. The
process of sublation, in Benjamins sense, is to disperse the historian in the
hetairon, the hetairon in the historians writing, and then both, as subject of
written history, to historys innite unfolding.
This destruction of the subject does not mean that the practice of history
does not matter. It does not say that the construction of history destroys the
historian as such. Rather, it indicates that destruction is constitutive of historiog-
raphy. There is no psychological communication between the historian and the
historical object no empathy that mediates their relation. The relation is given
through time. On the one hand this is a full time, one that allows for the entire
course of history to parade before the historian; on the other hand it is a now-
time, the instant of recognition that concentrates on one object in the parataxis
rupturing its relation to the whole of history. The subject is occupying the
position at this point of tension between relationality and nonrelation, between
the complete and the incomplete. The subject is given through its occupying.
This is another way of saying that the question who are the subjects of history?
is inadequate. The destruction of the subject demands that only the manner
in which the subject acts that is, only the judgement can be questioned.
And, thus, it is a productive destruction, the condition of the possibility of the
historical construction. What is destroyed is history as pure immediacy, under-
stood either as specicity or as a transcendental other. What is constructed is
a political community, and the possibility of a materialist historiography as
political praxis. In the dialectical reversibility between completeness and incom-
pleteness, the nite and the innite, politics attains primacy over history (K1,
2). The destruction of the individual subject announces the political in the
complicity established between the I and its hetairon.
This complicity is captured in the image of the Turk from Thesis I.
To see it, it is crucial to follow the movement of the relation between the
chess-player and the puppet. The parataxis of man and puppet precludes
any sharp denition of one independently of the other. They can only be
independent in their interdependency. Thus, what matters in the operation
of the chess-playing automaton is not who controls the game of chess.
11
Asking this question will inevitably conate the movement of the pieces
and the game itself. In relation to the movement of the pieces, what matters
is the cooperation between the hidden chess-player and the puppet. And in
relation of the game itself, both the player and the puppet as independent
entities are secondary compared to the move the act on the board. This
board is the historians writing page which, however, is not blank. The black
and white pieces are already poised in a parataxis without which histori-
ography is impossible. But historiography is equally impossible without the
empty squares that form the space between the pieces. Those squares can
be lled to innity with different moves, but in each case are occupied by a
single piece, which is the product of a single move a single judgement of
the complicit man and puppet.
8
TRADITION AS INJUNCTION:
BENJAMIN AND THE CRITIQUE OF
HISTORICISMS
PHILIPPE SIMAY*
Most commentaries on Benjamins conception of history have focused on the
critique of positivism and of the philosophy of progress, which are common
traits of vulgar Marxism, conservative historicism and social-democratic
evolutionism. Several of Benjamins texts present themselves indeed as a
disavowal of the naive optimism which characterized the thinking of the
Left between the World Wars, and which would lead the Right to failure.
To prevail over fascism, historical materialism had to annihilate in itself the
idea of progress as quickly as possible. Hence, the necessity of an inversion,
properly revolutionary, announced in Zentralpark: the concept of progress
must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are status quo is
the catastrophe (GS 1.2: 683/SW 4: 184). This fragment, as it is known, will
nd its allegoric translation in the gure of the Angelus Novus, whose gaze,
turned toward the past, contemplates the ruins of history. Consequently
the usual reading goes On the Concept of History will object to the
existence of a progress as well as of a causality and purpose in history, and
will develop a conception based on discontinuity, privileging the gaps of
time.
This reading is correct, but it does not fully account for the complexity of
the theoretical device deployed in the Theses. Against the idea of progress,
it would have been enough to mobilize a conception of time centred on the
present; there was no need to displace the question of history to the eld
of tradition, or to bind the latter to the recollection of a forgotten or badly
transmitted past, which waits to be redeemed. This displacement is all the
more intriguing since Benjamin considers the discontinuity of tradition
as the cornerstone of the Theses, but also as their fundamental aporia.
Why then did Benjamin put tradition at the centre of his conception of
history? Because only tradition allows him to think in ethical terms of the
relationship which the present maintains with its own anteriority. And it is
precisely in the name of this anteriority that Benjamin contests not just one,
*Trans. Carlo Salzani.
but two forms of historicism: the rst, which is well known, postulates the
existence of a historical evolution; but also a conception of time apparently
close to Benjamins discontinuous, retrospective, entirely devoted to the
present which however swims with the current, because it considers the
past as a reserve of moments and things freely exploitable. If this second
side has gone relatively unnoticed, it is due mostly to the mixture of the
different characterizations of the concept of tradition which Benjamin
developed throughout his work. In this chapter I intend to go back over the
route which leads Benjamin to think the tradition in the present, to invent
other modalities of transmission, to reject the instrumental uses of the past,
in order to restore the subversive force contained in it. And in order to show
that tradition is not at all a principle of continuity, or something that can be
mastered, but rather the sudden appearance of an ethical injunction.
TRADITION IN THE PRESENT
Let us start from the commonly accepted idea that Benjamin diagnosed a
rupture of tradition. Modernity would designate the moment from which
tradition cannot reach us any more, and in which the past ceased to hold
any authority in order to make room for an uncertain present. From the very
rst texts up to the great essays of the 1930s, Benjamins thought is indeed
marked by the feeling that the continuity between the generations has disap-
peared for good. Thus, in Experience and Poverty, he observes, not without
bitterness:
Who still meets people who really know how to tell a story? Where do
you still hear words from the dying that last, and that pass from one
generation to the next like a precious ring? Who can still call on a proverb
when he needs one? And who will even attempt to deal with young people
by giving them the benet of their experience? (GS 2.1: 214/SW 2: 731)
Incontestably, Benjamin diagnoses a crisis of the transmission: what the
past used to entrust to us under the sign of continuity is no longer obvious
or self-evident, and we do not know anymore what or how to transmit. On
the other hand, it is difcult to know to which conception of tradition his
remarks relate. Is tradition a reality with clear contours, or is it a nominal
entity to be used in a descriptive way as it is the case with many thinkers
of modernity? In other words, is tradition something transmissible, or is it
a repetitive concept within the history of representations? The whole interest
of Benjamins reection on tradition resides in the rst place in the rejection
of this alternative. Few philosophers have questioned with the intensity of
Benjamin the protean notion of tradition. In The Storyteller, Benjamin
proposes a novel approach to this notion. Unfortunately, this essay is read too
Tradition as Injunction 139
often as a funeral oration for tradition, or as the nostalgic acknowledgment
of the end of a world. It is therefore important to read it again, leaving aside
the question of the disappearance of the storyteller, in order to focus better
on the anthropological aspects of the text.
Reading the essay, we notice right away two points: rst of all, Benjamin
is not interested in the story as a product, but, rather, as an activity. What
interests him is the pragmatics of narrative communication: the fact of telling
stories, not the stories in themselves. Then, this activity is all but literary.
Even if Benjamin uses Leskov as a model, the latter is but the illustrious
representative of the anonymous storytellers whose common trait is the
fact of never having written their stories. What matters to Benjamin here is
the fact that the story is transmitted orally, by mouth. The Storyteller is a
reection on the oral transmission: on its destiny, of course, but rst of all on
its functioning. Very explicitly, the essay blames writing for the relegation of
the oral transmission to the domain of the archaic. As it is known, writing
allowed for the storing and ling of information in a more massive way
that memory could do. It presented itself at the same time as a means of
relieving the individual memory and as the possibility of its exteriorization,
whereas oral transmission depends on the uctuant capacities of memory,
writing, changing support, introduces the exactitude of all that is xed and
denitive.
We better understand why, by comparison, Benjamin denes storytelling
as a craft form of communication. In fact, the story depends on the capacity
of the storyteller to listen and repeat a certain amount of information. Now,
the cognitive capacities of memory are limited and inevitably give way to
oblivion, deformation, but also innovation. From one generation to the next,
stories change without their modication being detected by the listeners.
Everybody, on the contrary, agrees on the fact that the stories are told with
exactitude. The thing is that, as Marcel Mauss emphasized, for want of an
objective referent, it is impossible to verify if a story corresponds to its original
form. Thus, we cannot but take the storytellers word for it. The storyteller
is certainly aware of his limits. Therefore, for Benjamin, the storyteller does
not pursue in the least exactitude, but only delity. The story does not aim
to convey the pure in itself or gist of a thing, like information or a report.
It submerges the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it
out of him again. Thus, traces of the storyteller cling to a story the way the
handprints of the potter cling to a clay vessel (GS 2.2: 447/SW 3: 149). Far
from considering the story a denite sum of information, the storyteller
refuses to consider the past as a closed chapter, as if it had been consumed
for good. He knows well that for his listeners the past extends a long way
back, and that it invests every new experience with its authority. So that,
to the identical reproduction of writing, which reveres the past as past, the
storyteller opposes the spoken word which, in a concern for transmission,
recurred to the mediating inventiveness.
This aspect allows for the seizure of the authentic temporality of narrative
communication. If the story presents itself as an ancestral account, it
nevertheless takes form in the present: there is in it a part of invention, of
recreation. To make his account transmissible, the storyteller must actualize
what has been bequeathed to him according to the expectations of his
listeners; otherwise the listeners will pay no attention to him. He always
performs a critical evaluation of the past from the starting-point of its own
context of reception. This inventory work, properly hermeneutic, allows
him to make actual what is not actual any longer. The story is thus an
answer found in the past to a question formulated in the present. But, as it
is in the past that the present nds its answer, it inscribes itself within the
framework of a continuity a retrospective continuity, since it is the critical
recovery of the past, not the past itself, that has here a power of liation.
For Benjamin, wisdom designates precisely this capacity of narration to
make past experiences actual and, vice versa, to make novel experiences
customary, relating them with things different from themselves in order
to create liation and establish an intergenerational continuity. In fact,
the account, at the same time as resumption and as variable, possesses a
singular power of implication. On the one hand, the storyteller is always
concerned with describing the source from which his message comes and
his supposed competence ensues. He is authoritative just inasmuch as he is
able to mobilize in the narrative act the lineage of storytellers within which
he inscribes himself. On the other hand, he invites his listeners to inscribe
themselves too within this continuity. A man listening to a story is in the
company of the storyteller (GS 2.2: 456/SW 3: 156), says Benjamin. He
reinscribes dialectically in his own person the whole of past and present
generations. Thanks to his account, the past is constantly actualized and
the present is interpreted within the language of tradition. Precisely for this
reason, the storyteller is not simply the representative of a past tradition: he
fabricates tradition.
These analyses on the narrative pragmatics introduce a novel approach to
the traditional phenomena. Displacing the attention to an anthropological
ground, they disclose the way in which tradition is constituted in time. They
invite an investigation of its genesis in the present and no longer in the past,
as had been done until then. It is this displacement which leads Benjamin to
reject respectively the substantialist, essentialist, prospective and cumulative
conception of tradition.
Actually, it is with the substantialist conception that Benjamin rst
breaks off. This conception, which identies tradition with a thing or
group of things, is the most ancient and the most widespread. It originates
in the Roman law where it designates the transfer of material goods from a
possessor to a purchaser. By extension, it eventually came to designate only
the thing itself susceptible of being alienated and handed over in person.
Benjamin takes the opposite course of view. For him, not only is tradition
not a thing, but the elements which compose the tradition are not a priori
traditional. They become traditional only from the moment in which
they are transmitted. It is transmission that traditionizes its objects. The
important thing to reect on is the process, not the product.
This change of perspective implies another change: if the elements which
constitute the tradition are not a priori endowed with a specic quality which
confers on them the privilege of being transmitted, that is because they do
not have an essence. Benjamin redoubles his critique of substantialism in a
critique of essentialism. He insists on showing that the content of tradition,
far from resembling an immutable truth, alters with time. Antiquity and
continuity are thus not the essential attributes of tradition. Tradition, even
though it has an identity within time, does not have an essence. What is
being discredited here are all those representations that assimilate tradition
with an intangible deposit and, therefore, also the institutions which claim
to be the traditions exclusive keeper.
Finally, Benjamin rejects the prospective and cumulative conception,
which postulates that tradition, far from being a simple repetition,
integrates also new elements. This novelty would introduce a cumulative
dimension, purely quantitative, which would explicate the continuity of
tradition within time. Whether it is assimilated to a concatenation of
prejudices by the French Enlightenment, or to a sedimented wisdom by
the English counterrevolutionaries, tradition is, in both cases, assimilated
to a continuum. It is against this conception that Benjamin will deploy
his most radical arguments. They can be found already, in a form indeed
highly speculative, in the epistemo-critical prologue of the Trauerspiel book.
His questioning the notion of origin did in fact lead him to doubt the
possibility of a veritable transmission of the past in a linear and continuous
form. Origin [Ursprung], he said, 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 to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming
and disappearance (GS 1.1: 226/OT, p. 45). Since origin is that which
recurs as absolutely primary at any instant of its historical deployment, any
form of linear transmission cannot but betray it. Tradition as a continuum
ruins all that it transmits; it crystallizes the past considering every one of
its moments as bygone. In The Storyteller, Benjamin rather concentrates
on the prospective aspect of this continuum. The double movement of
reception and bequeathing indicates well that the active locus of tradition is
not to be found in the past, as the traditionalists like to repeat, but rather
in the present. The authentic movement of tradition does not go from the
past to the present but, inversely, from the present to the past. Benjamin
thus turns inside out, like a glove, the prospective conception of tradition.
The constitution of tradition happens always afterwards, in a properly
retrospective way. Therefore, it is not possible to consider tradition as a
continuum. A fragment of the Passagen-Werk conrms the purely nominal
nature of traditions continuity: It may be that the continuity of tradition
is mere semblance. But then precisely the persistence of this semblance of
persistence provides it with continuity (N19, 1). In other words, continuity
is not in the least an attribute of tradition. It is a simple appearance, but so
old and so commonly shared that eventually it came to don the appearance
of an essential characteristic.
If the storyteller has been able to maintain for a long time the appearance of
a continuity of tradition keeping together the generations within the web of his
account, his time has passed now. For Benjamin, this is not simply because the
conditions of existence of the storyteller have disappeared, but above all because
he becomes aware of the ethical and political stakes which go together with the
uses of tradition. This is the reason that he rejects the recourse to any form of
continuity: the one, prospective, from which originates the classic historicism,
and the one, retrospective, from which proceed the historiographies inuenced
by the narrative model and its hermeneutics of temporality. It would be wrong
to think that Benjamin rejects only the prospective conception of the continuum
as anthropologically false. He equally condemns the retrospective conceptions,
the solutions of continuity which occlude the discontinuities of history. For the
retrospective fabrication of the continuum is not solely the mark of the storyteller,
it also characterizes a type of historic construction which makes tradition an
instrument at the service of the dominant class. Certainly, this instrument has
historically changed its face. Tradition is no longer the code in whose name the
heterodox practices are condemned and repressed. It is now an instrument of
conformity, susceptible to modelling the idle masses awaiting for a reassuring
vision of the world. Where mercantile society produces in excess, fragments and
secularizes, it exhumes also, as a compensation, something authentic, something
ancestral and something traditional, as if they were forged anew in their entirety.
This strategy of pacication and control is today well known. The historians Eric
Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger have established that, at the time of the English
industrial revolution, a great number of traditions were invented, without, for all
that, lacking effectiveness. The peculiarity of invented traditions, emphasizes
Hobsbawm, is that the continuity with it is largely factitious. In short, they are
responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations,
or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition.
1
The invention
of all sorts of traditions conceals the lines of division that society generates and
the breaches where contestation risks always taking place; it turns out to be a
powerful instrument of legitimation of the institutions and an effective means to
evade social antagonisms. It is precisely this that Benjamin had anticipated, half
a century before and in a clearly more critical perspective:
The enshrinement or apologia is meant to cover up the revolutionary
moments in the occurrence of history. At heart, it seeks the establishment
of a continuity. It sets store only by those elements of a work that have
already emerged and played a part in its reception. The places where
tradition breaks off hence its peaks and crags, which offer footing to
one who would cross over them it misses (N9a, 5)
Thus, Benjamin aims less at the prospective dimension of tradition than
its retrospective reconstruction, and the instrumental uses which follow.
This point shows well that Benjamins critique does not deal solely and
not even mainly, with the philosophies of progress. Thinking the tradition
in the present and as discontinuity must hinder any instrumental form
of transmission and reception of the past. What remains to be done is
to establish a different relationship with the past, to nd how it can be
transmitted without lapsing into the pitfall of a normative continuity.
DESTRUCTIVITY AND TRANSMISSIBILITY
It is in destructivity that Benjamin discovers the gesture susceptible of estab-
lishing a different relation with the past. This intuition is already present
in The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism and in the Trauerspiel
book; moreover, during the 1930s it will play a central role in many essays.
Thanks to Hannah Arendt, attention has been drawn to these texts,
neglected in the study of Benjamins conception of history. She has the merit
of having seen in destructivity the modus operandi of a new system of his-
toricity characteristic of modernity. Unfortunately, her analysis leaves
aside the connections which link destructivity to the question of tradition.
For her, Benjamins destructivity comes directly from the traditions loss
of authority and from the rupture which followed. She points out the
ambivalence of modernity, divided between the desire to keep the past and
the desire to destroy it. We think on the contrary that what is at stake for
Benjamin is not whether to destroy or to conserve the past, nor is knowing
where we are when we think without the support of tradition. These are
questions which are peculiarly Arendtian, and which she confounds with
those of Benjamin. What Benjamin questions are the normative forms of
transmission, not tradition itself. Rescuing tradition from a certain form
of thinking, transmitting and utilizing it is, on the contrary, a constant
preoccupation in Benjamins thought. It is this that determines his whole
reection on destructivity.
In The Destructive Character, a quasi-autobiographical text of 1931
which Arendt omits to mention, Benjamin articulates the practice of
destructivity with a more general reection on the sense of tradition:
The destructive character stands in the front line of traditionalists. Some
people pass things down to posterity, by making them untouchable
and thus conserving them; others pass on situations, by making them
practicable and thus liquidating them. The latter are called the destructive.
The destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose
deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and
a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong.
Therefore, the destructive character is reliability itself. (GS 4.1: 396/SW
2: 542)
Benjamin is clear: the destructive is a traditionalist. Nevertheless, such an
assertion raises a certain number of paradoxes: how can one transmit what
one destroys? Why are the traditionalists those who destroy? In what way
will the distrust towards the course of things be more faithful to the past?
These paradoxes are related mainly to how Benjamin seems to compare
the two modes of transmission as if each was autonomous. On the other
hand, the contradiction disappears if we do not consider destructivity as an
autonomous practice, but as a response to the aporias of the conservative
approach. It is therefore important not to dissociate Benjamins considerations
on destructivity from the critiques of tradition as a continuum. Once again,
what must be destroyed is a type of tradition, not tradition as such.
Destructivity is not just, as Arendt thought, a simple destruction. Its rst
vocation is rather of a critical nature. Its rst task is to reveal. Attacking
the conservative mode, destructivity casts light on that dark part which
tradition strives to mask behind a normative continuity. It unveils its
violence. This violence pertains to the process of transmission itself, which
manages to retain the past only at the expense of its appropriation and
reication: it morties and strikes to make it powerless in order to keep
only the material content. Once transmitted, the past becomes then the
object of tradition patrimony or booty at the disposal of the present. The
destructive character reveals that tradition is also a destructive force itself,
because it ruins all that it transmits. And if he uses a violence against it,
thats because of another violence, more insidious, which anticipates and
founds it. Violence for violence then, destruction of what is destructive: such
are the elements of a strategy which consists in turning tradition against
itself. This permits the wrenching of moments of the past from the process
of transmission, to restore to them the force of which they were deprived
by the normative continuity, to make them transmissible again. If there is a
paradox of destructivity, it lies in the fact that it reveals, restores and rescues
that which the linear transmission keeps betraying. The study of three
authors Kafka, Kraus and Fuchs allows Benjamin to bring to light these
three functions of destructivity.
Within the tradition of destructive characters who inspire Benjamin,
Kafka incontestably holds the rst place. For Benjamin, as for many
intellectuals of his generation, Kafkas work embodies the disarray of the sons
facing the secularized Judaism of the fathers, the authoritarian guarantors
of a tradition fallen into abeyance. Kafkas texts evoke this atrophied,
incomprehensible tradition, in which he cannot recognize himself because
it has been transmitted to him as a simple material devoid of wisdom.
Unlike the ones who adapt to this situation, Kafka had the courage to reject
and denounce the legacy of tradition. In his long letter of 12 June 1938,
Benjamin exposes to Scholem the destructive device from which Kafka
unveils the arbitrariness and violence of tradition:
Kafkas real genius was that he tried something entirely new: he sacriced
truth for the sake of clinging to transmissibility, to its haggadic element.
Kafkas writings are by their nature parables. But that is their misery
and their beauty, that they had to become more than parables. They do
not modestly lie at the feet of doctrine, as Haggadah lies at the feet of
Halakhah. When they have crouched down, they unexpectedly raise a
mighty paw against it. (C, p. 565)
Exporting into the literary eld the form of the Jewish parable, Kafka freed
the latter from its legal reference. Far from submitting to the law which it
is supposed to illustrate, the parable turns against it, asserting its autonomy.
Keeping only the transmissibility of the parable, Kafka thus catches out
tradition at its own game: every one of his texts seems to conceal a secret
meaning, but all the parables which would allow accession to it are illusory
references, for they generate so many interpretations that it is impossible
to retain even one of them. Through an excess of transmissibility, they
dissolve the truth content of tradition. Consequently it is no longer possible
to consider tradition as the preservation of an ancestral knowledge; tradition
is but a collection of indecipherable prescriptions, debris of a law which in
the past was a living thing but now is exerted only as an unjustied power
of sanction.
The destructivity of the Kafka parable has thus mainly a heuristic
function. This is its force but also its weakness: if, on the one hand, it unveils
the moribund and tyrannical nature of tradition, on the other hand it does
not destroy it. Because at all costs it clings onto the pure transmissibility of
the account, the narrator has sacriced its content. There is nothing more
to say. He lacks above all that which would allow consideration of the debris
of tradition as the fragments of a rescued world, and not as simple products
of decomposition. Because of this Kafkas work bears the marks of failure.
What the Kafka parable lacks the faculty of seizing hold of the past in
order to return it in a different form Benjamin will nd in Karl Kraus, in
the modern practice of citation. Contrary to its ordinary use, citation does not
have solely an illustrative function. It also possesses a perturbing, disordering
force. The citation does not merely unveil the false peace instituted by any
normative usage; it also possesses the force to purify, to tear from context,
to destroy (GS 2.1: 365/SW 2: 455). In opposition to all that the text strives
to unify, the citation works in undermining it: it dissociates, singularizes,
fragments until it empties the text of its own substance. The destructivity
of citation does not consist merely in extracting fragments of thought out of
texts, but also, and maybe principally, in subtracting them from the course
of their exposition in time, in breaking with the process of transmission that
inscribes them within a unique reading and a unique usage.
Here comes to light the restoring function of citation: its destructivity
emancipates, frees from the discursive order, that is, at the same time from
the texts and from the contexts of their reception. It is, says Benjamin, the
only power in which hope still resides that something might survive this
age because it was wrenched from it (GS 2.1: 365/SW 2: 455). What
conservation neutralizes, destructivity restores. Diverting these fragments of
thought from their primary signications and destinations, citation opens up
for them a different destiny. It makes its own content exploitable and hence
transmissible. It then regains its critical intensity and its subversive power.
Wrenching things from the continuity of tradition this is, for the
destructive character, the means to make them transmissible. For Benjamin,
no one demonstrates this better than the collector. He too wrenches the
work from its original context and frees it from the continuum of art
history. In his collections, things, far away from the world which saw their
creation, gain a novel signication. Like the one who cites, who recuperates
apparently insignicant fragments of texts, the authentic collector like
Pachinger or Fuchs becomes attached to any kind of object independently
of its commercial value or its cultural recognition. He destroys the codes
of the art market. For the fetish of the art market, Benjamin reminds
us, is the masters name. From a historical point of view, Fuchss greatest
achievement may be that he cleared the way for art history to be freed from
the fetish of the masters signature (GS 2.1: 503/SW 3: 283). The collector
makes visible the objects in the act of citing them, that is, in the fact of
considering them for themselves. As Benjamin says, the collectors true
passion, very misunderstood, is always anarchic, destructive. For this is his
dialectic: to tie the delity towards the thing, towards the singularity that
it conceals, with a subversive and obstinate protestation against the typical,
the classiable (GS 3: 216). For the collector, the only understanding
of things lies in the acknowledgment of their uniqueness and in the
rejection of their normativity. Arendt acutely spotted, behind the collectors
apparent irreverence, the blow dealt to tradition: Therefore, while tradition
discriminates, the collector levels all differences. Against tradition the
collector pits the criterion of genuineness.
2
But, according to Benjamin,
for the collector it is less a question of levelling all differences than of
questioning the classicatory logic of tradition, the legitimacy of criteria by
which it isolates and transmits cultural contents. In the essay on Fuchs, the
collector appears as opposing all the normative processes of transmission
and reception. Beside the ofcial art history, which conserves from the past
only the masterpieces, his collection lets a subterranean history appear; it
gives a right of inclusion to those anonymous objects never considered by
the dominant class; it does justice to the ignored objects. An innite task,
in which the collector would exhaust himself, if he proceeded otherwise
than by accumulation. If the collector nurses the dream of offering a place
to the objects, of gathering everything up, following the example of the
ragpicker, he tries rst of all to make his collection transmissible. That is
why Benjamin recognizes that a collectors attitude toward his possessions
stems from an owners feeling of responsibility toward his property. Thus it
is, in the highest sense, the attitude of an heir, and the most distinguished
trait of a collection will always be its heritability (GS 4.1: 395/SW 2: 491).
The collector inscribes his collection within a complex, discontinuous,
non-genealogical liation, for even when his pieces are dispersed, they still
remain things which are inherited and which one tries in ones turn to
transmit.
Through his essays on Kafka, Kraus and Fuchs, Benjamin thus discovered
that, wrenching phenomena from the continuum of tradition, we renew
the relationship that the present maintains with them, we make them
transmissible again. Moreover, Benjamin has made destructivity the motive
force of a writing capable of restoring the pasts force of contestation. First
of all by recovering for his own benet the subversive usage of the citation:
quotations in my work, Benjamin says, are like wayside robbers who leap
out, armed, and relieve the idle stroller of his conviction (GS 4.1: 138/SW 1:
481). Here again, Benjamin departs from the modern hermeneutic approach,
for which every quoted fraction of the text is apprehended as a truth in
which the interpreter participates, but that he cannot comprehend except by
actualizing it, that is, translating it into his own language and accordingly
to his own expectations. In this perspective, the dialectical reinscription
within an actual context of reception clears away the disturbing strangeness
of past vestiges in order to turn them to the patrimony of the present.
Citations are no more those autonomous and rebel fragments, but, wrapped
up in a mass of commentaries, the instruments of opportune retrospective
liations. As Benjamin emphasizes, reconstruction within identication is
homogeneous. Construction presupposes destruction (N7, 6). To the
traditionalizing effects of commentary, Benjamin thus opposes the citation
as shock, which shatters the continuum and which does not resolve itself in
any solution of continuity; and, on the other hand, the citation as montage
the literary equivalent of the collectible item which puts the fragments of
the past in a relation of simultaneity. Montage is this construction (different
from any recomposition under the form of a whole or of a sequence) in
which the fragments come into connection in order to form a constellation
intelligible to the present, because no kind of continuity exists between
them and it.
Thanks to the practice of citation and montage, Benjamin becomes aware
of the historical and historiographical value of destructivity. He knows that
the past has become citable. And if it is not in the power of the historian to
cite integrally every one of its moments, he can nevertheless wrench some
of them from the homogeneous and empty time in which various forms of
historicism put them. It is these forms of historicism that the Theses will
contest in order to restore the true face of the past.
THE WORK OF CONTESTATION
At the beginning of the 1940s, a certain number of steps in the characterization
of tradition had already taken place. It is they that, for a large part, will
constitute what Benjamin calls tradition as discontinuity. The expression
appears in the preparatory notes to the Theses, but curiously not in the
denitive text. Benjamin opts for another formulation, entirely different:
the tradition of the oppressed. Do these two formulations refer to different
traditions? No, the distinction is but nominal. For Benjamin, there is just
one tradition, but it goes together with diverging representations whose
majority come from an instrumental usage. However, this distinction is not
gratuitous. It points out that Benjamins conception of tradition is deployed
on several fronts and confronts different adversaries. Some of them are well
known: Theses XXII take charge of the critique of vulgar Marxism and of
social democracy, both adhering to a naive philosophy of progress; Theses
IIIVII deal with historicism and, more exactly, with the relationship
between the sense of the past and writing of history. It is on the latter Theses
that we wish to focus here.
They present themselves rst as an attack against certain representatives,
ofcial or unofcial, of the historic school. Certainly, these historians mistrust
the metaphysical speculation from which the course of history is thought.
To the idea of a unilinear progress, Ranke counterposes the equal value of
the epochs in the eyes of God; against the idea of a teleology indifferent
to the historic moments, Droysen sticks to the singularity of facts. In order
to rediscover the historical facts in their integrity, the historian must, as
Fustel de Coulanges prescribes, study directly and uniquely the texts in the
most minute details, believe only what they demonstrate, separate resolutely
from the history of the past the modern ideas introduced by a false method.
3
These prejudices towards the temporal distance favoured by the scientic
approach will lead Dilthey to advocate empathy as a comprehensive method
consisting in bracketing the historicity of the historian and of the object
being studied in order to re-experience it. Now, for Benjamin, the historicist
school remains prisoner at the same time of the philosophies of history and
of the sciences of nature from which it intended respectively to free itself.
On the one hand, it does not escape the causal logic, since, unlike the
materialist historian who wants to cite everything, it retains the past only as
the events susceptible of returning the unity of an epoch. Univocal more
than unilinear causality, but one that nonetheless recreates a continuum.
On the other hand, when it avoids progress and claims to seize the past
the way it really was (GS 1.2: 695/SW 4: 391), it levels the moments of the
past conferring on all the same importance. Its relativism and its positivism
which also originate in a purely additive logic institute a temporality
incapable of seizing the content of the events. The method of empathy only
reinforces this fault, because for Benjamin it is evident that the past allows
itself to be seized only by being robbed, but also it can only be understood
in the light of the present, within their mutual recognition. 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 (GS 1.2: 695/SW
4: 391).
If Benjamins critique of empathy consisted only in the condemnation of
the positivism of the historicist school, in reminding us that it is not possible
to abolish the temporal distance or that the past cannot be comprehended
but in the light of the present, then it would not present anything original.
In fact, that critique had been already advanced by Heidegger. For the
author of Being and Time, Diltheys hermeneutics remained a prisoner of
the aporias of a foundation of knowledge of a Cartesian type. Dilthey tried
in vain to force on the human sciences and on the historical conscience
a model of methodical knowledge incompatible with the experience of
historicity. Now, it is because we are thoroughly historical beings that no
knowledge or positive foundation of the human sciences can transcend these
conditions. Gadamer will prolong this analysis in Truth and Method, by
rehabilitating the work of the history of effect (Wirkungsgeschichte), which
thought it was able do without empathy. Not only the transmitted contents
undergo modications with time, but history affects us too.
4
With this
argument, Gadamer intends to overstep the objectivizing conception of
Diltheys hermeneutic. Understanding is an event which draws us into the
game of tradition, and understanding is to be thought less as a subjective
act than as a participating in an event of tradition, a process of transmission
in which past and present are constantly mediated.
5
It is this experience
of temporality which phenomenology puts in the heart of the hermeneutic
project of existence in Heidegger and of works in Gadamer. In both cases,
understanding is not a method any longer: it is a way of being that we can
understand only in the present but on the background of a belonging to
tradition.
In many aspects, Benjamins position seems close to Heidegger and
Gadamers: a critique of positivism, a rehabilitation of the anteriority of
tradition, the retrospective viewpoint, etc. Nevertheless, Benjamin, who
was acquainted with Heideggers thought, makes a point of differentiating
himself from it. From 1930, he evokes in a letter of 20 January to Scholem
the confrontation between our two very different ways of looking at history
(C, p. 360), and in the Arcades Project he species that Heidegger seeks in
vain to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly through historicity
(N3, 1). Benjamins disinterest towards historicity does not implicate just
Heidegger, but the whole phenomenological approach from Husserl to
Gadamer, whose conclusions Benjamin had assuredly anticipated. Benjamin
points out that the acceptance of the temporal distance does not constitute
an alternative less questionable than the one of empathy. Because of this, in
a quite signicative way, Benjamin does not draw a distinction between the
hermeneutics of historicism and that of phenomenology, in which, although
according to different methods, the questioning of the sense of transmission
is almost absent. Benjamins critique places itself far upstream from the
methodological or even ontological questions of understanding; it is instead
directed towards the ethical and political legitimacy of the hermeneutic
project. Thus, whereas Gadamer is concerned mainly to dene the inventory
work to which the modern conscience submits tradition according to its
own expectations, Benjamin, twenty years before, questions the origin of
such a legacy: before we can know how we have to inherit, we must ask
from whom we inherit. Bringing to light the tradition of the oppressors,
Benjamin does not merely question the identication with the victors of the
history from which empathy derives; but, far more broadly, the possibility
of a hermeneutics which, no matter what it considers the work of history to
be, is nonetheless dependent upon the cultural contents transmitted by the
dominant class. This is precisely the meaning of Thesis VII:
All rulers are the heirs of prior conquerors . . . 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 . . . There is no document of culture which is not
at the same time a document of barbarism. 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. (GS 1.2: 696/SW 4: 3912)
Here the attack is addressed no longer only against the historians who went
into the service of the powerful, but against all those who, consciously or
not, take part in a kind of transmission whose modalities are dened by
the dominant class. The victors are those who, having the possibility of
transmitting, decide what will have the right to exist in history, but also the
modalities according to which we will have to relate to it. The triumphal
procession that Benjamin evokes designates the process of transmission
itself. For Benjamin it is the process of transmission of the works that is to
be blamed, not the works themselves. For it is only as documents of culture
that they become documents of barbarism. This process neutralizes the
contestation contained in the works assigning them a place and a usage in
the mausoleum of culture. The Benjaminian notion of the victor must thus
be broadened: with the manifest oppressors side also the conservatives, who
contemplate the past only under its patrimonial form.
Therefore, Gadamers hermeneutician is not so different from the
historian who identies with the victor. Both take part in the same
hypocrisy which consists in remaining insensible to the nonfullment of
the past and to the laments contained in it by transforming them into
heritage. It is proper here to remember that, for Gadamer, understanding
the tradition means rst of all nding in the past a legacy accepted with
reservations. This appropriation of the tradition is only possible if we
postulate that the past has ceased to send signals to the present and that
we do not expect anything more from it. Gadamer, moreover, willingly
conrms this. According to him:
Traditions essence implicates the unreected restitution of the transmitted
past. In order to form an explicit conscience of the hermeneutic task of
appropriating tradition, tradition itself must have become problematical
. . . With the emergence of the historical conscience, which implicates
the presents gaining a fundamental distance from the whole of the
transmitted past, understanding has become an entirely different problem
that requires the guide of a methodology.
6
The approach of understanding proceeds deliberately from a double outdistance
from tradition: on the one hand the past presents itself a priori as a text to be
deciphered, which will be proper to translate according to our own criteria;
and, on the other hand, the present claims to be the instance of judgement
which allows it to become the heir of the tradition without being under
any obligation to it. Postulating that the past is henceforth stricken with
strangeness, hermeneutics neutralizes the contestation which comes from it;
remaining deaf to the injunctions that it transmits, hermeneutics betrays the
tradition from which it claims to derive its authority; assimilating tradition to a
legacy, hermeneutics reduces it to a sum of items, it makes it an alienable good
that can be mastered: an instrument in the hands of the dominant class.
If, in Benjamin, the tradition as discontinuity makes way to the tradition
of the oppressed, it is because this is inseparable from the recollection of
a past of suffering, absent in Gadamer. Benjamins critique of the schemes
of historicity thus also includes a certain mode of thinking tradition in the
present. For Benjamin, the present cannot be that margin of exteriority
from which we redene tradition in order to make it more easily a principle
of conformity to anything whatsoever. The notion of tradition of the
vanquished commits us to think of the ethic relationship that the present
maintains with its own anteriority: if the present turns towards the past, it is
not in order to interpret it or to nd in it its benet, but rst of all in order
to be questioned by it. The past is not written in a foreign language. What it
says is clear to anyone who makes the effort to listen to it. For it:
Carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption . . .
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.
(GS 1.2: 694/SW 4: 390)
Nothing is more remote from Benjamin than the idea of a present
disinvestment which will have no obligation whatsoever towards the past,
and that will ignore the injustice from which it originates. The present
cannot elude the injunctions that the past addresses to it; it must do justice
to it, rescue it by answering its call. Some have said that Benjamins rescuing
exposes the image of the past to a radical process of historicization. It is
exactly the opposite: the historicization of the past is precisely the strategy
of the victors. But for the one who detects behind the rewriting of history
the presence of a different tradition, the rescuing of the past in the present
means wrenching it from the normative process of transmission, citing it to
restore its true face, continuously deformed by its successive recompositions.
Benjamin well remembers that the materialist presentation of history leads
the past to bring the present into a critical state (N7a, 5), that is, to deprive
it of its arbitrariness. Tradition will not be able to become a product, and
the reconstructions which constitute it, although efcient, are not, for that,
less illegitimate. Otherwise there would be no difference between tradition
and the institution which represents it.
Having said this, Benjamin is perfectly conscious of the difculties that
his conception of tradition raise. In the preparatory notes to the Theses,
he calls it a fundamental aporia: Tradition as the discontinuity of the
past in opposition to history as the continuity of events . . . The history
of the oppressed is a discontinuity. The task of history is to get hold of
the tradition of the oppressed (GS 1.3: 1236). We easily make out the
nature of this aporia: if the tradition of the oppressed is discontinuous and
constitutes itself only subsequently, what distinguishes it from a simple
reconstruction, from a reversed liation where the son invents his own
father, according to the interests of the moment? Vice versa, if there is no
real continuity between the oppressed of yesterday and the ones of today,
by virtue of what will we recognize that the working class is the heir of all
the vanquished? Because it is not able to keep together the retrospective
character and the certainty of being the authentic addressee of the
tradition, Benjamins conception becomes as arbitrary and opportunist as
that of his adversaries.
For Benjamin, the key to this aporia lies in the notion of the dialectical
image. With it, he postulates the existence of a correspondence between the
present instant and a moment from the past.
Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with
it: each now is the now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is
charged to the bursting point with time. . . . It is not that what is past
casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is
past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a ash
with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics
at a standstill. (N3,1)
The dialectical image forms a constellation where the past and the present
nd, in a dialectic movement, their historical correspondence without the
necessity of going through the mediation of the temporal continuity. This
way, Benjamin manages to keep together the idea of discontinuity and the
one of a true relationship with the vanquished.
We can regret that the critics main concern has been to nd out
whether materialism or theology will remove this aporia in interpretation,
without exploring other tracks. We wish, as a conclusion, to interrogate a
bit more the anthropological dimension of the tradition of the oppressed
and examine once again the Benjaminian concept of discontinuity.
Discontinuity is associated with the idea of breaches, of ruptures, or of
the explosion of the continuum of the tradition of the vanquished, but it
characterizes also the tradition of the oppressed as such. The conclusion is
generally that the tradition of the oppressed is the reverse of the one of the
oppressors, which makes it similar to the linear model, with the exception
that it will be punctuated with interruptions. Now, the tradition of the
oppressed is not structurally identical with the one of the victors: the
discontinuity of the tradition which characterizes the former is different
from the one which affects the latter. The discontinuity of the tradition
of the oppressed is not a rupture, even though it solicits a rupture in the
continuum of the victors. Nor is it linked to the retrospective character of
tradition, but to the fact that it is not something which can be possessed
and transmitted from hand to hand. Actually, in so far as this tradition is
neither a deposit nor a sum of items an inheritance susceptible to being
alienated it is impossible to establish in advance or retrospectively the
chain of its successive heirs. It is not simply something whose advance
within space and time we can follow. Discontinuity is thus to be thought
differently: it is more similar to a discrete in the mathematical sense
of the term series than to an addition of segments. The linear model,
with its axial, sinusoidal, segmentary logics, has to be substituted by a
radial model: diffusionist, disseminating, rhizomatic, even if these words,
foreign to a Benjaminian vocabulary, still spatialize too much the mode
of action of the tradition. We could here reverse Ren Chars sentence
according to which our heritance is not preceded by any testament,
for Benjamin, unlike Arendt,
7
does not lament here the rupture of a
continuum, but rather afrms that the tradition of the oppressed points
to a testament without inheritance, without heirs, which belongs to no one
and which no one can master.
Therefore, it must be admitted that this tradition is not transmitted, in
the proper sense of the term. It is conveyed by different linear traditions,
inscribed within the reverse or the lining of a process of transmission
that is foreign to it. Therefore, it becomes transmissible as soon as it is
wrenched from the continuum. The citation, the collection, the montage
are the privileged modes of this transmissibility: breaking up the historical
continuity, they rescue from oblivion all that the powerful occludes or
rejects, the scrap of the triumphant history which can constitute the material
of a subversive relationship with the present and contest it in its basic egoism;
exploiting this material, the ethic injunction that exists in it is deployed in
every direction and addresses those who want to listen. All who remain
attentive to the way in which the past enjoins the present can become at any
moment the authentic addressees of tradition. There is thus no contradiction
between the retrospective character of tradition and the fact of being its
legitimate addressee.
Nonetheless, it remains to be claried what is implied in this ethical
injunction. It is not enough to recognize oneself among the victims of
the past in order to be its legitimate heir, otherwise anyone could claim
it for him/herself. Without its theological guarantee, the recognition of a
correspondence between the past and the present is not in itself sufcient to
dismiss the risk of arbitrariness. The oppressed class is not a priori innocent,
it can exploit the past to its own prot, with the same empathy and the
same historicism as the oppressors, even though in a minor mode. Moreover,
todays victors do not recognize themselves any longer among those of
yesterday: they have understood that the strategy of playing the victim
clearly pays off better. It would be thus erroneous to think that in Benjamin
oppression stems solely from a sociohistorical condition. It rather stems
from, as we saw, a certain mode of transmission. The oppressed becomes
oppressor as soon as s/he celebrates the past as his or her own possession,
as soon as s/he inscribes it within a normative process of transmission. The
present generation cannot be the heir of yesterdays vanquished if it does not
wrench tradition from the hands of its actual administrators, if it ignores
the re-vindication of the victims of history. For tradition is not an instance
that can be claimed as an authority. We can only answer its call. Becoming
an heir means honouring the demands of justice and liberation that the past
pushes forward to the present. Thus the oppressed class is not a priori the
heir of the tradition of the vanquished: it becomes the heir only inasmuch
as it is the avenging class, that is, inasmuch as it fulls hic et nunc a promise
incessantly betrayed and incessantly deferred. As long as this event does
not take place, we are always at risk of opportunism. Thats why only a
redeemed mankind is granted the fullness of its past (GS 1.2: 694/SW 4:
390). This last point shows well enough that to belong to the tradition of
the vanquished does not release one from the (responsibility of ) the decision.
Subjectivity is not the place of its inscription. It is only when the exigency
of justice will be entirely fullled that we could tell what this tradition was
and to whom it belonged. In the meantime the way we relate to tradition
constitutes nothing less than its condition of possibility.
The tradition of the vanquished is thus neither an authentic relationship
with time nor the assurance of a rectication of the past injustice. It offers
no guarantee. But it has the advantage of staying clear of all historicisms
and of their instrumental constructions of time. Benjamins message is
subtle but of great importance: it reminds us that considering tradition as
the transmission of a content which the past entrusts to us under the sign of
continuity or, on the contrary, as a reconstruction of the past in the present,
leads to a misunderstanding of its essential character. What is expressed in
the tradition is not an unmodiable and intangible core which, from afar,
gives form to the present. Nor is it the game of innite recompositions
according to the exigencies of actuality. The action proper to the tradition is
not to determine the conformity of different attitudes to a code of conduct,
but rather it is the investing of every new decision with the exigency on
whose behalf it claims to speak. In this sense, tradition and contestation
are one and the same. Forgetting this means to open the door to those
who, ready to run it, to administer it, to make it an instrument of control,
enclose tradition within conservatism. To wrench the tradition from the
conformism that wants to seize it means, on the contrary, to prevent what
freezes it in a normative system which will decide on the usages of the past.
It is in this sense that Benjamin, in Thesis VI, recognizes in the threat of
the tradition the very fact of it becoming tradition: The danger threatens
both the content of the tradition and those who inherit it. For both, it is
one and the same thing: the danger of becoming a tool of the ruling classes
(GS 1.2: 695/SW 4: 391). A double menace always weighs on tradition: the
rst comes from the monolithism in which it can freeze; the second from
the opportunism in which it can dissolve and lose its instance of convening.
If, in fact, tradition is that modality of relation with the past that accepts
the contestation which derives from it, then to be within the tradition does
not mean to be guardians of a truth or a normative knowledge which in the
present nds a moment of its historical deployment; it rather means to feel
questioned by it in its own mode of being and to be called to answer for it
at any instant.
9
BOREDOM AND DISTRACTION:
THE MOODS OF MODERNITY
ANDREW BENJAMIN
OPENING
History, once freed from the hold of dates, involves bodily presence. The
presence of those bodies is positioned within a nexus of operations. If that
nexus can be named then it is the locus of moods. Moods are lived out;
equally, however, they are lived through. Implicit in the writings of Walter
Benjamin is a conception of historical subjectivity presented in terms of
moods. The project here is the formulation of that implicit presence. This
necessitates not just the recovery of this direction of thought, but the attempt
to plot possible interconnections of historical time and the complexity of
lived experience. What is essential is that their occurrence be understood
as integral to the formulation of modernity. Subjectivity cannot simply be
assumed. Its modern conguration is essential.
History, in Benjamins writings, is not a distant concern. While a late
work, On the Concept of History is a short text a set of theses through
which Benjamin began to give systematic expression to the nal development
of a philosophy of history. The theses or notes contain certain allusions to
subjectivity. And yet, subjectivity is not incorporated as a condition of
history. Precluding a concern with subjectivity would seem to leave out an
important element through which experience and hence the subjects being
in the world takes place. This condition does not pertain to the psychic
dimension of subjectivity. The organization of experience experience as
organized takes place in terms of moods. Boredom and distraction, to cite
but two, are not conditions of a subject. On the contrary, they are conditions
of the world. And yet, they are neither arbitrary conditions, nor are they
historically random. Moods, it will be contended, are inextricably bound
up with the modern. This occurs both in terms of what would count as a
description of the modern and equally in terms of what will be described
as modernitys self-theorization. It should be added immediately that any
one instance of this self-theorization is not assumed to be true; indeed this
Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity 157
could not be the case given fundamental distinctions as to how terms such as
boredom are conceived.
1
Rather, part of what marks out the modern is the
presence of this self-theorization, a process bound up with the inevitability
of a form of conict. Conict can be dened, at the outset, as designating
differing and incompatible constructions of the present constructions
enjoining specic tasks that occur at the same point in chronological
time.
2
This is the context within which a conception of mood needs to be
located.
Highlighting the centrality of moods has to be seen as a way of thinking
through a relationship between bodily presence and the operation of
historical time. (An operation thought beyond any conation, let alone
identication, of historical time and chronology.) To the extent that
boredom functions as a mode determining experience, there will be an
important distinction between the factual boredom of a given individual
and the world that continues to present itself as boring. In the second
instance boredom will have a greater scope precisely because it is not
subject-dependent. (This form of boredom is not more authentic. Rather
it identies a different locus of intervention and thus enjoins a different
politics.) However, there is the subjects boredom. There is the subjects
distraction; distracted by the world, though distracted nonetheless. If there
is a critique of experience that takes as its object an overcoming of the hold
of Kants Transcendental Aesthetic as the organization of experiences
possibility, then, it will be conjectured that it takes place not just through
the addition of moods but in relation to the complexity of subjectivity
that the interconnection of moods and historical time creates.
3
The tran-
scendental aesthetic need not refuse the hold of history per se, what it
refuses is a conception of history in which the detail of the now of its
happening demands specic attention. Moreover, it will be the identi-
cation of that now that allows for the advent of inventions and innovations
enjoining their own philosophical and political response. Interruption and
innovation demand more than simple incorporation. They allow for forms
of transformation. This is an argument advanced by Benjamin in relation
to the interruption within the presence and the practice of art brought
about by the emergence of reproducibility. (Clearly reproducibility, while
central to Benjamins position, can be read as a transformative gure. In
other words, reproducibility need not be literalized since more is at work.
Not only therefore can it be retained as a mark of interruption; in this
context it will also be the case that interruption as a potentiality need not
be identied with reproduction tout court.)
Positioning the importance of moods necessitates noting the way the
techniques of arts production are connected to the relationship between the
advent of the new and the recognition thus experience of the demands
made by it. The new therefore is not just a different image, let alone
another image. Benjamin argues this point in the following terms:
It has always been one of the primary tasks of art to create a demand
whose full hour of satisfaction has not yet come. The history of every art
form has critical periods in which the particular form strains after effects,
which can be easily achieved only with a changed technical standard
that is to say, in a new art form. (SW 4: 266/GS 1.2: 5001)
What has to be read within this formulation is a state of affairs that is more
complex than rst appears. Complexity arises precisely because the recog-
nition of a demand is a position that can always be created retrospectively
by the advent of a new art form. (Development is neither deterministic
nor teleological.) The presence of the new the identication of the new
as the new can be grounded in the twofold movement of locating limits
and then dening their having been overcome. There is an inbuilt fragility
to this position since technological reproduction reproducibility, if only
in this context, being the mark of the new cannot preclude attempts to
explicate its presence within concepts and categories that are inappropriate.
(Fragility will re-emerge as an important motif.) However, what counts as
appropriate is not dened by the positing of an essential quality to art, but
rather is present in terms of the particularity of the art form itself. After all,
Benjamins formulation pertained to a new form einer neuen Kunstform
and not a new content. Particularity is as much concerned with the medium
as it is with the accompanying effect that forms will have on perception.
They will make up part of a general conception of the what and how of
perception. An example here is photography. The photograph breaks the
link between art and what Benjamin calls a works cult value.
Two points need to be made concerning this break. This rst is that it
occurs because of the nature of the photograph as opposed to a work whose
particularity is located within ritual and thus as part of cult. On the other
hand, precisely because what is important is not the photographic content
per se, but the condition of its production and the implications of those
conditions, it will always be possible that a given content will have a greater
afnity to cult value than to its break with that value. The presence of the
face in a portrait, for example, will bring into play considerations that are
already incorporated in the oscillation between a set of eternal values,
the essentially human, the soul, etc., and the rearticulation of those values
within the ethics and politics of humanism. While the photograph of the
face will allow for such a possibility, the technique resulting in the photo-
graph of the face holds out against it. The presence of these two possibilities,
a presence whose ambivalence will be a constitutive part of the work even
though only ever played out on the level of content marks the need for a
form of intervention. The site of intervention is this ambivalence the cause
of politics.
4
In addition, though this is the argument to be developed, ambi-
valence will come to dene not just art work but mood itself. The ontology
of art work will be dening the conguration of the moods of modernity.
(Hence art will only ever enjoin politics to the extent that both content
understood as a predetermined image structured by a concern with meaning
and instrumentality are displaced in the name of technique.)
5
Rather than assume this position, a specic location in Benjamins work
will provide a point of departure. The moods of distraction and boredom will
be central. Working through these organizing moods will demand a consid-
eration of Convolute D of Benjamins The Arcades Project (a Convolute
whose title is Boredom, Eternal Return). A prelude is, of course, necessary.
It will be provided by Benjamins famous engagement with architecture
in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.
That engagement is presented in terms of distraction (Zerstreuung). The
argument to be developed is that distraction is an organizing mood of
modernity. Benjamins concern is to situate the emergence of distraction
within the context of arts reception. However, were it to be situated, in
addition, in relation to the emergence of art, remembering that Benjamin
limits his analysis to reception, then a further argument would be necessary.
What would need to be underlined is that distraction, as a mode of
reception, arises because of the unavoidable link between art and secular-
ization. Art arises because the necessary inscription of objects within ritual
has been checked by developments within art itself. These developments
are themselves part of the process of secularization.
6
With the abeyance of
ritual, differing subject positions arise. In this context therefore the link
between art and the secular entails the ineliminability of distraction as a
mode of reception. Distraction involves fragility. It is never absolute. The
subject is drawn across positions. Edges fray. Distraction is a form of ambi-
valence, one that presages another possibility. (Distraction and ambivalence
are signs of the secular.)
DISTRACTION
I am distracted, unable to concentrate, hence adrift. Not noticed, a haze
perhaps eine Nebelwelt (D1, 1) overtakes me. Of course, it is a haze
through which I see. As the haze settles perhaps the brouillard des
villes (D1, 4) its presence as a felt condition has vanished. In the grip of
boredom, inured to the situation in which I come to nd myself, even my
boredom the imposition, its imposing presence leaves me unmoved.
What little interest there is. The subject, the fetish of a residual humanism,
matters little. What matters precisely because it matters for the subject is
the there is. Hence what little interest there is. How then does this there
is provide a way into the mood and thus into the subjects distraction, my
being distracted? The question therefore is what happens to the my within
the opening up of distraction in its encounter with the there is? Within
the movement, I return to myself. Once my being as me, my being me,
emerge as questions, then there will be the possibility of their rearticulation
within a different framework. Rather than the my having centrality and
thus dening distraction, the concern will be with the relationship between
what is presented in terms of the mass as opposed to a form of singularity.
How this distinction, individual/mass a distinction rather than a straight-
forward opposition is to be understood is one of the questions that have
to be addressed. Addressing it will indicate in what way a conception of the
interplay of moods and subjectivity can be given a distinctly modern ori-
entation rather than being simply assumed. That orientation will arise from
having located the relationship between moods and subjectivity beyond
the hold of the opposition dened in terms of the individual as opposed to
the mass. I will take another quality. The state of my being be me will
have acquired a different location.
With The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility
distraction has to be situated within the framework of a specic argument
arising in the context of a general engagement with arts technical structure.
Distraction is a result of a fundamental shift in those structures. Strategically,
the term is deployed as part of Benjamins critique of Duhamels Scnes de
la vie future.
7
The strategy of that critique is the attempt to reposition
distraction; winning the term back for a different critical project. What
Benjamin refuses to accept is Duhamels argument that the masses seek
distraction, as opposed to the singular spectator as the one on whom art
makes a demand. This commonplace is insufcient. The inadequacy is not
simply philosophical. Its occurrence is linked to the demands made by the
medium of lm. This medium does not become an end in itself rather it
generates other concepts and categories through which arts work is to be
understood. In Benjamins analysis the distinction between distraction and
contemplation is central. He repositions the terms in the following way: a
man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it . . . In contrast
the distracted mass [die zerstreute Masse] absorbs the work of art (SW 4:
267/GS 1.2: 504). The example used to capture the force of this distinction
is architecture. Architecture, he argues, has always offered the prototype
of an art work that is received in a state of distraction and through the
collective [das Kollektivum] (SW 4: 268/GS 1.2: 504). The unpacking of this
position demands careful attention since, among other things, it works to
reposition the components of the opposition individual/mass.
A preliminary point needs to be noted prior to proceeding. As was
intimated above, what is at play here is the question of what happens to
the relationship between the individual and the mass once there is a shift,
not just in the production of art work, but with the structure that is then
produced, even though art, both in terms of practice as well as its history,
is the continuity of its taking place. The mere presence of continuity, which
concedes no more than the possibility of art having a history, does not
entail that art has an essential quality. Indeed, art cannot be essentialized
since what takes place is the practice and history of discontinuities the
continuity of the discontinuous which are present both formally and
technically. This presence will have differential effects both on subjectivity
and relatedly on conditions of reception.
What arises from the centrality attributed to architecture is the possibility,
for Benjamin, of distinguishing between two modes of arts reception. The
rst is the tactile and the second the optical. The rst is linked to usage
(Gebrach). What is important is that within the opposition between the
tactile and the optical, the position that would be taken up by contem-
plation, and thus individual attention, no longer gures. The individual
as opposed to the mass does not have a position. A transformation has
occurred. Indeed, if there is to be a conception of the individual, then it will
have to be reworked after having taken up this new position. In other words,
if the individual is to emerge, it will only do so in relation to this reworked
conception of the mass. This conception is presented by Benjamin in the
opening lines of section XV of the essay the masses are a matrix adding
that it is in regard to this matrix that all habitual behaviour [alles gewohnte
Verhalten] towards works of art is today emerging newborn (SW 4: 267/GS
1.2: 503). The question of the habitual (the customary) is central. Art is
given again reborn because of a reconguration of the relationship
between subject and object. There is a shift in the comportment towards
the art object; because its occurrence is internal to art, such a move has to
be understood as concerning arts mode of formal presentation. The object
of art comes to be repositioned. (Thereby underlining the proposition that
objects only ever have discontinuities as histories.) Therefore, the disclosure
of art does not open beyond itself, precisely because the unity that bears the
name art is already the site of divergent activities and histories. Questions
of reception and production will always need to have been refracted through
this setting.
The mode of reception demarcated by the tactile, a mode that will also
predominate in relation to the optical and which denes reception in terms
of perception (Wahrnehmung) is structured by habit. That architecture
whose concern is with dwelling Wohnen should be dened in relation to
habit Gewohnheit is an important opening move and yet on its own is not
sufcient. What matters is the subject of habit and, as will be noted, habits
implicit temporal structure. Learning to live comes through habit. Within
the terms given by this setting the mass becomes the site of distraction.
The mass is distracted. The lm positions the mass as mass. And yet, the
lm brings with it a real possibility. Benjamin writes that the lm makes
the cult value recede into the background not only because it encourages
an evaluating attitude in the audience, but also because, at the movies, the
evaluating attitude requires no attention (Aufmerksamkeit) (SW 4: 269/GS
1.2: 505). It is, of course, attention that, for Benjamin, is the term that
denes art as a relation between an individual and the singular work. The
evaluating attitude is a concern neither of the individual nor of the mass
understood as no more than an abstraction grounded in the individual. The
use of this term therefore announces a distancing of the opposition between
the individual and the mass. Moreover, what is distanced in addition is
the all or nothing response to the operation of arts work. The distancing
means that a type of ambivalence has been introduced. While the lm, as
with architecture, is received in a state of distraction, lm as a medium
lm in terms of what Benjamin identies earlier in the essay in regards to
its technical structure, not simply in regards to its content brings with it
the capacity to reposition the hold of distraction. This does not occur on the
level of the individual as opposed to the mass, nor the mass in opposition to
the individual. (The mistake made by Duhamel was not just the retention
of the opposition mass/individual as an either/or, but the failure to recognize
that the technique of reproducibility meant that the terms themselves had to
be rethought.)
The adoption of what is described as an evaluating attitude by the mass
occurs because of the works operation. Distraction endures as both subject
and object. The state of distraction can become an object without this
leading to a position of pure overcoming. The audience is an examiner
(ein Examinator), even though a distracted one. What this points to is
not a critique of ideology as though truth were simply counterposed to
the ideological. Rather, what is in play is the implicit recognition that
countering the hold of distraction is to work with what it was that engen-
dered the determining role of habit. (The examples of lm and architecture
are the most appropriate in this instance since they indicate ways in which
mood and modernity are interconnected.) Undoing habit means deploying
what made its recognition possible in the rst place. Namely, that habit is
lived out within a specic temporal framework. Continuity brings with it
the possibility that clings perhaps on the underside to ambivalence.
There is an important temporality to this structure, one that is also at work
in the implications found in the description of the masses as a matrix.
In regards to this conception of temporality what arises is a positioning
dened as much by partiality partial occurrences, the state of being not
quite there, etc. as it is by the necessity for forms of activity. The truth of the
hold exerted by moods is found neither in the mood having been completely
overcome, nor in the refusal of activity. Activity, not voluntarism, needs to
be understood as the type of deliberative calculation identied by Benjamin
as the evaluating attitude. When Benjamin nishes the essay with the
evocation of criticality and distraction, the suggestion should be read as
the claim that one arises in the context of the other. Arising, not because
of distance, nor from absolute differentiation a differentiation that would
have to be thought within the posited divide between truth and ideology
that his explicit project has already distanced but arising in the context
of what is occasioned by particular art works. Film has an ambivalence.
However, its technical structure enables that movement in which a type of
partiality occurs, a seeing that is neither simple contemplation nor complete
absorption; the latter being that absorption in which either the subject or
the object would have vanished. The move is from the individual to the
mass. The seeing in question is as much a seeing in time, as it is a seeing
through time in the sense of a seeing without end. Occurring concurrently
is a restructuring of time that stems the hold of eternal recurrence which
for Benjamin is the temporality of mythic doom by the introduction of
what he identies elsewhere as the now of recognizability. However, two
questions arise. Who sees? What is the quality of this now and for whom?
These questions mark the intersection of moods and time.
The question of the identity of the mass needs to be taken further
since the mass is invariably thought of as in opposition to the individual.
Even the recognition that the mass is not reducible to the sum total of the
individuals who comprise it a lesson presented with exacting concision in
Fritz Langs lm Fury leaves the opposition in play, even if enigmatically.
8
Once the mass is understood as a matrix thus a network it becomes
possible to locate what will henceforth be described as the mass individual,
9
not the individual that is always the same, nor a conception of mass as a
site of an all encompassing sameness the mass as the site of Heideggers
das Man (a positioning of the mass still in terms of a structure of authen-
ticity). What emerges in their place is a conception of the mass individual
as that which is both dispersed across, though also articulated within, this
matrix.
10
Presence involves a network. Equally, central to the construction
of the mass individual is the structure of ambivalence. The co-presence of
distraction and criticality are central to that construction. What becomes
important therefore is the extent to which the mass individual becomes a
site of conicting forces. Positioning is neither absolute nor complete. As
will be noted, Benjamins account of the construction of subjectivity and
intersubjectivity in terms of the move from play to habit is integral to an
account of why ambivalence is constitutive. Only through ambivalence does
a cessation of what can be described as always-the-same become a possibility.
Ambivalence is marked by a potentiality within which interruption will have
conditions of possibility that resist the hold of eternal return.
An additional point needs to be made. Formulations such as mass
individual and the mass is a matrix are not just registers. Both are inex-
tricably woven within a conception of history in which culture and barbarism
are intertwined. If history is the history of victors, this accounts for why
undoing the hold of historicism is, in part, overcoming empathy with the
victor. The subjectivity of the mass individual does not stand opposed to
the mass. The site of the mass, as already a locus of differential relations of
complex and incompatible determinations all balancing the distinct ways
in which power operates, means that the mass individual is neither the one
nor the many. As an abstraction, therefore, the mass individual is the many
in one. What then is the mood of (for) the mass individual? Answering this
question will, in the end, necessitate returning to the relationship between
the there is and the my. In the move from my boredom to boredoms
there is quality, a different question emerges: Who is bored? This is the
question addressed to the mass individual.
BOREDOM
Convolute D of Benjamins the Arcades Project die Langeweile, ewige
Wiederkehr (Boredom and Eternal Return) does not have an intentional
structure. This must be necessarily the case. Nonetheless, the move from
the thematic of boredom to Nietzsche takes place via the intermediacy of
Blanqui. In regards to the latter, Benjamin cites specic passages from his
LEternit par les asters, a work that Benjamin will deem to be Nietzschean.
Deeming it as such was not based on a clear study of Nietzsche in any
straightforward sense, but rather from what he develops, using as its basis a
citation from Karl Lwiths 1935 study of Nietzsche. A quotation in which
the central section of Die frhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science) concerning
eternal recurrence is, indeed, repeated. The whole project therefore is
not just selective in terms of the tendentious nature of the quotation, but
its selectivity would be compounded if the proper names were allowed to
dominate. The Convolute is about the mood of boredom and the reality of
boredoms already present structural location within certain conceptions
of historical time. Again, mood meets time. The centrality of that connection
provides the way in and moreover allows the proper names to be positioned
beyond the hold or the accuracy of either citation or interpretation. Viewed
in this light, the interpretive question then has to concern the Convolutes
actual project.
Even though the elements of the Convolute would in the end need to
be detailed a move in which the identication of boredom is caught
between the weather, the sameness of grey, somnambulism, etc. the philo-
sophical dimension of boredom is presented with its greatest acuity in the
following:
We are bored when we dont know what we are waiting for [worauf
wir warten]. That we do know or think we know is nearly always the
expression of our superciality or inattention. Boredom is the threshold
[die Schwelle] of great deeds. Now it would be important to know: What
is the dialectical antithesis to boredom? (D2, 7)
The force of this nal question resides in part in the answer not being
found in any attempt to identify the content of what we are waiting for.
This reinforces the centrality of Benjamins formalism in the sense that
what matters is the structure of an awaiting rather than lling in that
structure with specic images of the future. The project is not to give the
future an image or to reduce it to an image. As such, what must be taken
up is boredom as a threshold. A threshold is of course as much a line or
division as it is the site allowing for equivocation hence it functions as the
locus of ambivalence, par excellence. What this means is that the crossing
of a threshold a crossing in which futurity is introduced as made possible
by the presents potentiality has to be thought beyond a conception of
the future that is already pictured. An already present picture would mean
that the future had already been given in advance by its conation with a
pre-existing and thus already identiable image. (There is an important
connection here between the possibility of politics the political as the
winning of the future and a type of iconoclasm.)
11
The Convolute opens with an evocation of weather as that which blankets
the all leading to a form of sameness. Equally, dust settles on the rooms and
is attracted even by the brightest and most intricate of clothes. Dust is the
stier of perspective. Perhaps, dusts potential lies in its capacity to absorb
blood. As such, and despite the continuity of its always being the same,
dust can absorb the passage of time, part of which is historys continual
encounter with barbarism. As with dust so with grey. Countering the grey
a countering presaged by an encounter with grey as a site of potentiality
is not to juxtapose it with colour, hence Benjamin citing with evident
approval de Chirico Only here is it possible to paint. The streets have
such gradations of grey (D1a, 7). With this formulation with the grey, its
depth, even depth within the subtle solche Skalen von Grau there is the
rst intimation of the threshold. The relationship between grey and the
threshold will emerge as central.
As is often the case with the Arcades Project it is not just Benjamins
actual writings that are fundamental, equal emphasis should also be given
to the nature as well as to the content of his quotations. He cites a long
passage from Rodenbergs book on Paris. The passage concerns a visit with
a millionaire (Benjamins term). Entering the house, despite the glitter
understood as the play of surfaces, Schein without beauty Rodenberg notes
that Something like suppressed boredom lay in the air [Etwas wie heimliche
Langeweile lag in der Luft]. In the room were a series of brightly coloured
parrots. They, for Rodenberg, all seemed to suffer from homesickness [alle
scheinen an Heimweh zu kranken] (D2, 3). While a lot could be made of
the repetitive force of terms involving heim, what is of signicance in the
passage lies elsewhere. Namely, that in order to come to an understanding
of boredom as a mood it is essential to recognize that it is not undone by
the introduction of colour. While the parrots were at a distance, holding
to a type of separation, boredom still prevailed. It should be remembered
that this is not Benjamin writing but Rodenberg. However, the extract
from Rodenbergs text works precisely because it captures the problem of
boredom in terms of what was identied earlier as the there is quality of
moods. Once there is boredom, then it is not countered by that which
seems to stand against its phenomenal presence, hence Benjamins interest
in the dandy, the one who despite colour and due to the insistent presence
of a form of singularity compounds boredom. The dandy is, of course, only
the individual within a structured opposition between mass and individual.
The dandy is not the mass individual. Donning a new garb history as the
play of no more than surfaces becomes a conception of the new in which
its conation with novelty denes its presence. To utilize another quotation
deployed by Benjamin, Monotony feeds on the new [La monotonie se nourrit
de neuf ] (D5, 6).
Once, therefore, the question of the new emerges it can be linked to the
threshold. What matters is that the threshold not be explained in terms
of the new. What could be more boring? And yet, the constancy of the
new is hardly news. Hence there needs to be another understanding of the
temporality of moods. A given mood is not countered by its juxtaposition
with its phenomenal opposite. Nor, moreover, is it undone by the mere
assertion of the new. (The question of the new and the posited overcoming
of boredom through novelty makes it clear why the Convolute has to deal
in the end with the problem of eternal return.) Asserting the new and the
positing of boredoms having been overcome has to dene both the new
and boredom in relation to the individual. However, it is essential to be
precise, the individual in question is the one given within the opposition
individual/mass. What this does is to dene boredom as the province of the
individual. At the same time, therefore, it elides any possible concern with
boredoms there is quality. Once that quality is denied, then a different
politics opens up; rather than the mass individual and thus a commitment
to a form of mass action, the political would be dened by the individuals
centrality and orchestrated in terms of the happiness or the well-being of the
individual. (The political distinction is between a conception of the political
linked to individual needs and aspirations a version of liberalism and one
dened by the ever-present possibility of mass action.)
12
Benjamin provides a way into this formulation of the problem of time
the temporality of moods in terms of what he describes as the tem-
porality of awaiting. What is the time of awaiting? Benjamins response
to this question necessitates that this awaiting be distinguished from an
awaiting in which the image of the future determines both what is to occur
as well as its having occurred. What cannot be expected even though it
is too often expected is victory to come through continuity. This recalls
the passage cited earlier in which Benjamin dismisses as a form of binary
opposition boredom linked to not knowing what is awaited as one pole, and
the superciality or lack of attention inherent in the claim that we can give
a form to that which is awaited as the other. (The latter point is, despite
moments of real equivocation, an inherent part of Benjamins critique of a
version of utopian thinking.) Awaiting transforms time. Benjamin writes
that the one who waits takes in time and renders it upon in altered form
[in vernderter Gestalt] that of expectation (D3, 4). Expectation and the
one awaiting die Erwartung and der Wartende become gures. Equally,
this holds open the possibility of another formulation of moods. It may be
therefore though this is still a conjecture that what counters boredom
as a mood is not just action but the possibility of a counter-mood: a mood
not just as a disposition, but as that which organizes experience. Awaiting
and expectation as necessitating the transformation of time a transfor-
mation in which the future becomes a condition of the present, rather than
the present being a series of empty moments awaiting a future, would mean
that there is another mood. This possibility does more than tie moods and
time together. They become linked to a possibility and thus to a form of
potentiality.
Potentiality inheres in one of the most striking presentations of the
threshold condition. This takes place when boredom is described as a
warm grey fabric that has, on its other side lustrous and colourful silk.
For Benjamin we sleep wrapped in this blanket. The sleeper appears
bored. On awakening the sleeper wishes to communicate the dream
and yet all that is narrated is this boredom. Overcoming boredom is the
narrating of the dream. Doing so, however, necessitates at one stroke (mit
einem Griff ) turning the lining of time to the other side (nach auen zu
kehren). This other side times other side, a side revealed or turned out
in an instant by an action, is the narrating of the dream as the overcoming
of boredom. What is signicant here is twofold. In the rst instance this
possibility is already present in the fabric holding boredom in play. In other
words, it is present as a potentiality. That is why in the following entry in
the Convolute boredom becomes the external surface [die Aubenseite] of
unconscious events (D2a, 2). Crossing the threshold therefore will involve
more than simple movement. Secondly, the fabric one side of which
is grey, the other lustrous, two sides holding a threshold in place, a place
whose articulation is given as that across which something would occur
when one side is turned to another provides a way into understanding
what a dialectical antithesis to boredom would involve. For Benjamin,
the dialectical needs to be explicated as a juxtaposition of elements rather
than their synthesis. Opposition needs to be shown. It becomes a form of
narration whose conditions of possibility are themselves already possible.
The possibility lies in the construction of boredom itself. Rather than
existing as a discrete entity, it exists as bound up with its opposite. The
overcoming of boredom is not the move to the coloured underside. Indeed,
it is not even a matter of the simple juxtaposition of grey and colour, as
though all that was involved amounted to choice. Benjamins formulations
should not be taken as literal. Rather, narrating the dream that would be
the movement across the threshold the movement on from boredom
needs to be thought in relation to the structure of temporality marked
out by awaiting. Moreover, it is a sense of awaiting that depends upon the
potential actuality of interruption.
Boredom is an awaiting without an object. This cannot be countered
by the presentation of images of the future. Boredom works as a threshold
precisely because the move away from boredom is carried by it as a potenti-
ality. The site of potentiality is the present. However, it is not a conception
of the present that is reducible to the moment thought within the passage of
chronological time. Rather, the present moment is the event happening as
the now of recognizability. The coat turning with a rapidity within which
both the grey and the colour in an instance the instance as standstill
become the opening where great deeds will occur. The grey and the
lustrous are brought into play. Their juxtaposition will have become an
opening. An opening that appears within the repetition of habit, though
equally it appears within repetition as habit. (Occurring within these
settings and not as them.) Once again what appears is an occurrence, which,
in having to be thought in terms of an interruption, eschewing the hold of
both novelty on the one hand and on the other the repetition of a given
content that cannot be represented within the temporality of eternal return,
takes on the form of a caesura.
13
Repetition has to be understood in relation
to a founding interruption; the interruption that founds. As will be seen this
is the opening up of habit.
In writing about childrens toys Benjamin produces one of his most
important reections on habit. While the position arises from within the
context of a discussion of play a context whose importance will be decisive
two other aspects, those providing the very basis of his actual argument,
are fundamental. The rst is that for Benjamin it is through the rhythms of
play that we rst gain possession of ourselves. We gain is prior to those
other stages such as love in which there is an entry into the life and
often alien rhythm of another human being (SW 2: 120/GS 3.1: 131). Not
only is there a conception of subjectivity announced in this formulation; of
equal signicance is the related additional aspect that both subjectivity as
a construction and then its enactment in the realm of others is articulated
in terms of repetition. Play, for Benjamin, is presided over by the law of
repetition. Within play there is a necessity for the same thing to be done
over again. Both for the child and then for the adult (the adults version
will contain important differences, however) repetition through, and as,
play allows for what frightens (or has frightened) to be incorporated and
therefore mastered. Equally, the reiteration of the disturbing enables it to
be lived with. With its repetition what had initially frightened becomes
parody. In Benjamins argument, the adult articulates this position in terms
of storytelling while the child repeats the event in all its details. An adult
relieves his heart from its terrors and doubles happiness by turning it into
a story. A child creates the entire event anew and starts again right from
the beginning (SW 2: 120/GS 3.1: 131). In both instances there is a type
of transformation. What is fundamental is its nature. The essence (Wesen)
of play resides in its being the transformation of a shattering experience in
to habit [der erschtterndsten Erfahrung in Gewohnheit]. Play allows an ori-
ginating event to be accommodated. Living with it, becomes the registration
of play within habit and thus within dwelling. (This is the link between
Gewohnheit and Wohnen.) Habit, now as the living out of a certain structure
of activity, contains within it an element that cannot be mastered even by
the demand that habit has to be lived out continually. It harbours that trans-
formative moment that is its own construction. Habit contains therefore not
the capacity to revert to play but the fundamental doubling that brings two
incompatible elements (unassimilable both as an occurrence and as image)
into a type of constellation; a constellation containing both the experience
that shatters and its transformation. This complexity has to be run back
through the construction of subjectivity; construction as a process of self-
possession. What will emerge is that in terms of their formal presence one
will mirror the other.
Gained in this act of self-possession is a doubled site. Play is the continual
encounter with a particular conception of the founding of subjectivity.
Founding involves a dislocation that locates. The re-presentation thus
reiteration of this positioning occurs as habit. The possession that we
have of ourselves prior to any encounter with the other is of a site that
is not simply doubled but constructed within and as ambivalence. What
enters into relations with the other, therefore, is this doubled entity who can
love and therefore be surprised because that transformative potential is
there from the start. However, precisely because it is given by a founding
ambiguity, even love will not transform absolutely. (Loves end is, after
all, an insistent possibility.) Nonetheless, love is only possible because of
an original ambivalence. However, this original condition is not to be
understood as epistemological. Ambivalence is not relativism. Even though
within the precise structures of Benjamins own formulation it may not have
been presented in these terms, ambivalence needs to be understood as an
ontological condition. As such, it is another description of what has already
been identied as the many in one. In other words, the mass individual is
the locus of ambivalence; the potentiality of the masses lies therein. The
realization of that potential, however, should not be interpreted as a move
from an ideological condition a state of self-deception towards truth.
Benjamin brings these elements together in the following formulation:
The sort of distraction that is provided by art represents a covert measure
of the extent to which it has become possible to perform new tasks of
apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to evade such
tasks, art will tackle the most difcult and important tasks where it is able
to mobilize the masses. (SW 4: 2689/GS 1.2: 505)
Mobilization, the clear instance of which is in lm, occurs as a mobilization
within distraction. Central to the passage therefore is the conception of the
mass it envisages. Individuals are not transformed into the mass. Rather,
the site of transformation is the mass individual. Ambivalence becomes
production. For this very reason ambivalence brings with it an inevitable
fragility. There is an instability.
Art that mobilizes the masses is not a conception of art that transforms
the life of an individual. The art in question creates the mass. It demands
the mass and makes demands of it. The mass individual is the subject of
modernity whose potential for collective action and thus acts of solidarity
is grounded in the structure of ambivalence. Integral to that structure is
the awaiting linked to boredom. Accompanying both is the potentiality for
interruption. In general terms, interruption comes about. An interruption
that will be an occasioning. Precisely because interruption has to be thought
beyond the hold of the temporality of fashion the positing of the completely
new there will always be fragility. Fragility, however, marks as much the
inevitability of contestation as it does its possible recuperation. Subjectivity
and historical time mirror each other. The structure in question, however,
does not pertain to the individual as such but to the mass individual. This
conception of the subject takes on boredom as a condition. But in taking it
on, it brings with it, because it recapitulates it, the very set-up that is itself
given by boredoms there is quality. Boredoms being overcome under-
stood as a potentiality rather than the countering of a set of dead images
with apparently new and enlivening ones becomes the moment in which
the straining after effects encounter their possibility. In other words, the
dialectical antithesis to boredom is experimentation; experimentation both
as mood and as act. However, there cannot be any naivety concerning ex-
perimentation. It occurs at the time of the commodity. Moreover, its
occurrence cannot be disassociated from the temporality of commodity
production, though equally with a complacency in which continuity both
as a political process and as a form of production has been naturalized.
Experimentation has to be thought in relation to its inherent fragility.
Once again it is that very fragility that demands the afrmation of experi-
mentation an afrmation in the face of the inescapable possibility for its
recuperation. That afrmation is the project of criticism. Equally, it is the
project of politics. If images of the future are forbidden, the imaging of the
future involves the continual encounter in the present an encounter that
works equally to construct the present with what there is. Subjectivitys
incorporation in to the there is gives to the subject a capacity for action. It is
however not the action of a hero, but the cunning of the mass individual.
10
WALTER BENJAMINS
INTERIOR HISTORY
CHARLES RICE
Against the armature of glass and iron, upholstery offers resistance with
its textiles (I3, 1). In this single line, embedded within the voluminous text
of Walter Benjamins Arcades Project, arcade and domestic interior come
together. This coming together is, however, arranged around a point of
resistance. Arcades offer a structural armature and a hardness of material
nish that upholstery and textiles resist in their stufng and covering.
Arcades gure the wedded advance of technology and commerce, the
emblem of the modernizing city; upholstery and textiles gure the domestic
interior as a site of refuge from the city and its new, alienating forms
of experience. Yet this resistance heightens their mutual entanglement.
Benjamin writes of arcades themselves as kinds of interiors in the city, spaces
that reorganize relations between inside and outside: Arcades are houses or
passages having no outside like the dream (L1a, 1). And: The arcades,
which originally were designed to serve commercial ends, become dwelling
places in Fourier (AP, p. 17).
This chapter will think Benjamins historical work on the nineteenth
century through the concept of the interior, considering it as part of the
historical terrain he worked over, and as a gure for an organization of this
terrain, an organization which produced the Arcades Project, a document
which has largely been seen as incomplete, a provisional organization
for a complete conception of a materialist history of Paris, capital of the
nineteenth century.
In producing what might be called a history of discontinuity, Benjamin
recognized a productive instability in the concept of the interior, and in its
associated concepts such as dwelling and domesticity:
The difculty in reecting on dwelling: on the one hand, there is something
age-old perhaps eternal to be recognized here, the image of that abode
of the human being in the maternal womb; on the other hand, this motif
of primal history notwithstanding, we must understand dwelling in its
most extreme form as a condition of nineteenth-century existence. (I4, 4)
At one level, the interiors resistance to its supporting armature is regressive.
The sense that dwelling is an eternal and immutable experience denies how
the emergences and discontinuities within historical time affect experience.
At another level, the counterpart to this regressive, dream-like immersion in
the interior is the opportunity that it offers for an awakening to the reality
of present conditions. Conceptually, the interior offers the space to organize
revolutionary thinking: a space where collected fragments of the nineteenth
century could be sifted and interpreted like objects of an archaic past. Such
an archaeological interrogation of history stands in contrast to a nineteenth-
century coupling of historical progress and eternal values, the dangers of
which were made startlingly clear in interwar Europe, the time and place of
Benjamins thinking. The clash of the eternal and the historically new, and
the lightning ash of knowledge that this could produce, was Benjamins
preoccupation (N1, 1). In reading the Arcades Project through the interior,
we shall see the interplay between regressive and revolutionary forces,
between the new and the outmoded, and we shall engage with this terrain
through a concept and a cultural form that is entangled with historical
interpretation in complex ways.
1 THE SHORT HISTORICAL LIFE OF THE BOURGEOIS
DOMESTIC INTERIOR
Benjamins difculty in reecting on dwelling is the difculty in capturing
the eternal conception of dwelling as a precise historical condition of the
nineteenth century. This is where the arcades become indispensible in
thinking about the interior. While arcades embody technological, commercial
and spatial developments of the nineteenth century developments which,
precisely framed in terms of technological progress, become radically old
from the perspective of the twentieth century dwelling appears to stand
outside of time, unfolding eternally and naturally within the interior. Yet
we might also think of the resistance offered by the interiors upholstery
and textiles as a necessary response to the emergence of the arcades, and the
effects of the modernizing city that they imply. In other words, we can think
of the domestic interior in a bourgeois context as having a short historical
life, or, more properly, a natural lifespan equal to that of the arcades. The
interior is born, matures and dies out within the space of a century.
As such, Benjamins account of the bourgeois domestic interior given
in his two exposs (of 1935 and 1939) for the intended publication Paris,
Capital of the Nineteenth Century, are focused on drawing out the interiors
emergence and liquidation within the span of that century. The expos of
1939 is structured in three main parts, each of which is summarized below
under the text that begins each part: Under the reign of Louis Philippe, the
private individual makes his entry into history. For the private individual,
Walter Benjamins Interior History 173
places of dwelling are for the rst time opposed to places of work. The
former come to constitute the interior. Its complement is the ofce (AP,
p. 19). The interiors emergence is identied with a new sort of division in
the urban and social fabric of nineteenth-century Paris. For the bourgeoisie,
dwelling becomes divided from work, and in this division the conditions for
the emergence of the domestic interior are made possible. This interior is a
space of immaterial, illusory experience produced from insistently material
effects. These effects are produced through the collection, consisting of
objects whose commodity character has been divested through their
presence in the interior. The particular affect of the interior emerges out of a
double play between the material nature of the collection and the expansive
illusion that the collection supports in bringing the distant in space and time
close to hand.
The interior is not just the universe of the private individual; it is also his
tui (AP, p. 20). This ability to dream away with objects is only possible
to the extent that the interior is a completely enclosed environment.
Benjamin writes of the interior encasing the inhabitant along with the
inhabitants objects. The surfaces of this encasing register the impression
of both inhabitant and objects alike. These traces of occupation, of a life,
are registered as a compensation for the alienation which is at the core
of a contemporary urban experience. Yet private life is also produced as
a life that can be detected and followed up through the traces that form
it. Here Benjamin locates the birth of the detective novel, a genre of the
private par excellence. The other side of this liberation into the private
is the mortication produced by the interior as encasing. Following the
traces registered in the interior leads to something akin to the uncovering
of a dead body.
1
The liquidation of the interior took place during the last years of the
nineteenth century, in the work of Jugendstil, but it had been coming
for a long time (AP, p. 20). The interior confuses distinctions between
the animate and the inanimate, the living and the dead. The Jugendstil
artist/architect begins to assume the role of total designer, taking up the
tectonic elements of new constructional forms, and naturalizing them with
a distinctly animated and vegetal stylistic line. The individuality expressed
within the interior shifts from being that of the inhabitant, mediated
through collected objects, and becomes that of the architect-turned-artist,
whose artistic vision constricts the inhabitant. This liquidation of the
interior presents itself as the last moment of a bourgeois private life made
possible there.
In just two pages of text, we have a crystallization of the short historical
life of the bourgeois domestic interior. But, as Benjamin himself recognized,
it is a short historical life that has engendered a sense of timelessness. In his
seminal Illustrated History of Interior Decoration, Mario Praz has associated
this timelessness with the idea of a progressively developing history of the
interior. Introducing this idea, he cites Benjamins expos in detail, em-
phasizing how it illuminates the relationship between the interior, its
decoration and the character of an inhabitant. Yet this relationship loses its
historical specicity and becomes generalized. In witnessing the destruction
of houses just after the Second World War, their interiors laid open with
some still furnished corner, dangling above the rubble, surrounded by ruin,
Praz muses:
The houses will rise again, and men will furnish houses as long as there
is breath in them. Just as our primitive ancestor built a shapeless chair
with hastily chopped branches, so the last man will save from the rubble a
stool or a tree stump on which to rest from his labours; and if his spirit is
freed a while from his woes, he will linger another moment and decorate
his room.
2
Praz does not grasp how Benjamins account of the liquidation of the
interior, which Praz translates as its consummation,
3
carries a force relative
to the political context of interwar Europe. For Benjamin, the liquidation
of the interior presages a cultural necessity to overcome the sort of thinking
that would essentialize the experience of dwelling in the interior, that would
make it something timeless and essential to identity. In the essay Experience
and Poverty Benjamin remarks:
If you enter a bourgeois room of the 1880s, for all the cosiness it radiates,
the strongest impression you receive may well be, Youve got no business
here. And in fact you have no business in that room, for there is no
spot on which the owner has not left his mark the ornaments on the
mantelpiece, the antimacassars on the armchairs, the transparencies in the
windows, the screen in front of the re. A neat phrase by Brecht helps us
out here: Erase the traces! is the refrain in the rst poem of his Lesebuch
fr Stdtebewohner [Reader for City-Dwellers] . . . This has now been
achieved by Scheerbart, with his glass, and the Bauhaus, with its steel.
They have created rooms in which it is hard to leave traces. It follows from
the foregoing, Scheerbart declared a good twenty years ago, that we can
surely talk about a culture of glass. The new glass-milieu will transform
humanity utterly. And now it remains only to be wished that the new
glass-culture will not encounter too many enemies. (SW 2: 734)
Benjamin writes of the need to overcome experience (Erfahrung), and the
connections to tradition that it implies, by overcoming the way in which
the interior resists the revolutionary aspects of an architecture of glass. This
overcoming was a political necessity, a necessity in not re-establishing a
connection to tradition and timeless values from the rubble of its destruction
but instead in accepting destruction, and the poverty of experience which
it produces, as a way of moving beyond a culture organized upon such an
appeal to tradition. It is Prazs traditional historical work that produces a
sleep of historical consciousness that would be, in Benjamins terms, polit-
ically dangerous.
In taking on this problematic relation between the eternal and the histor-
ically specic, Benjamin opens the possibility for thinking critically about
the interiors relation to history. Rather than the interior being the exclusive
object of its own history, where the tendency towards the timeless and
the eternal is amplied,
4
the specic conditions of the bourgeois domestic
interiors historical emergence provide a way of structuring a thinking that
recognizes the critical value of the discontinuous and the fragmentary.
2 THE INTERIOR OF THOUGHT
As an historical object, the interior can be considered within a discon-
tinuous, fragmentary sense of historical time. It is a cultural form which
emerges historically, and its proper conditions of existence are short-lived;
however, we can also consider how the interior participates in the very
structuring of this conception of historical time as fragmentary and discon-
tinuous. Moving on to another sort of account of the interior contained
within the Arcades Project, Convolute I, entitled The Interior, The Trace,
we shall see how its interiorized structuring carries the force of Benjamins
thinking on historical time.
5
Initially, the Convolutes of the Arcades Project can be considered the polar
opposites of the exposs. Where the exposs are pithy, the Convolutes come
across as unstructured; the line of thought travelling between the com-
mentaries and quotations that they contain is often obscure. At one level this
has to do with the fact that the Convolutes were the notes to an historical
narrative on the nineteenth century that was never nished, a narrative for
which the exposs offer a synopsis. Yet much of Benjamins thinking has
been explored through the convolute material, which has been treated in
a way that casts his thinking in terms of what the Arcades Project could or
should have been in complete form.
Rolf Tiedemann presents the incompletion of the Arcades Project via an
architectural analogy: 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. He describes
the exposs as:
Outlines of the plan . . . The ve or six sections of each expos should have
corresponded to the same number of chapters in the book, or, to continue
the analogy, to the ve or six oors of the projected house. Next to the
foundations we nd neatly piled excerpts, which would have been used
to construct the walls; Benjamins own thoughts would have provided the
mortar to hold the building together.
6
The metaphor is architectural, one of structural coherence from which an
image of completion can be projected. Yet in incomplete form, Tiedemann
remarks upon the oppressive weight of the excerpts. As editor of the
original German edition of the Arcades Project, he mentions the temptation
to publish only Benjamins comments. But the necessity of including the
excerpts, which are largely quotations from nineteenth-century sources and
which make up the bulk of the convolute material, comes with the possi-
bility of seeing the Arcades Project as a complete edice, one which the reader
should construct through his or her own reading of it.
Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, the editors and translators of the
English version, invoke a more structurally complex metaphor in describing
its ordering. The Arcades Project is the blueprint of an unimaginably massive
and labyrinthine architecture a dream city, in effect.
7
They comment that
this might describe the project as research rather than the nished writing-
up or application of research. But they also note that the convolute material
was itself subject to revisions, itself being treated as a manuscript. Eiland and
McLaughlin ask: Why revise for a notebook? They describe the combining
of quoted fragments and Benjamins own commentaries as a deliberate
montaging:
[Such a] transcendence of the traditional book form would go together,
in this case, with the blasting apart of pragmatic historicism grounded,
as this always is, on the premise of a continuous and homogeneous tem-
porality. Citation and commentary might then be perceived as intersecting
at a thousand different angles, setting up vibrations across the epochs of
recent history, so as to effect the cracking open of natural teleology.
8
Susan Buck-Morss also confronts the reality of the compositional form of the
Arcades Project, writing of this nonexistent text.
9
Yet for Buck-Morss, such
a nonexistent text can still be described as having an overall philosophical
conception, bringing together an earlier, theological stage in Benjamins
intellectual development, and a second Marxist phase. This conception she
describes as a dialectics of seeing.
10
To aid in making manifest an overall
sense of order in the project, Buck-Morss develops several organizational
diagrams or displays that aim to give several forms of overview for the
project. She explains that there is no narrative continuity in the project,
but there is a conceptual coherence. Her own analysis of the project aims to
show its coherent and persistent philosophical design.
11
Metaphors and diagrams of structure and organization drive these
analyses. Yet we might return again to Benjamins aphorism which opened
this chapter: Against the armature of glass and iron, upholstery offers
resistance with its textiles. Against the stability of an architectural ordering,
a form of surfacing and lling which privileges a complex, non-hierarchical
weave (emphasized through a shuttling, a back-and-forth motion) resists,
offering a different possibility for thought, yet one which is entangled with
the structuring provided by architecture. In contrast to the act of building,
and following up Benjamins own thinking on the formation of the interior,
the act of upholstering denotes the preparing of an interior to receive objects,
where the soft, upholstered materials of that space receive the impression
of those objects. Benjamins own commentary can be thought of as the
moulding of this soft surface around the collected quotations, the taking
of their impression, their being enfolded softly rather than xed rigidly
with mortar, and, as such, allowing their positioning to be provisional in
both time and space. This supple sense of the upholstered surface links
to the idiosyncratic subjectivity of the collector, rather than the idealizing
subjectivity of the master-builder. After all, as Benjamin notes in the expos
of 1939, architectures attempt to control the interior through Jugendstils
totalizing art leads to the literal downfall of the artist/architect. Ibsens
master-builder Solness plunges from the height of his tower (AP, p. 20).
This brings us closer to the interiors opening up of a specic sort of
ordering. Pierre Missacs understanding of the Arcades Project approaches
this idea when he writes of an internal composition in some of Benjamins
writings:
Although Benjamin does not provide any illumination on the subject,
what seems to result is a deepening of the composition, an interiorization
of the dialectic (in the object dealt with, not in the writing subject), which
also indicates an advance in Benjamins thinking and a concealing of his
intentions.
12
Missac then calls to mind a fragment from Benjamins One-Way Street
entitled Interior Decoration:
The tractatus is an Arabic form. Its exterior is undifferentiated and
unobtrusive, like the faades of Arabian buildings, whose articulation
begins only in the courtyard. So, too, the articulated structure of the
tractatus is invisible from the outside, revealing itself only from within. If
it is formed by chapters, they have not verbal headings but numbers. The
surface of its deliberations is not enlivened with pictures, but covered with
unbroken, proliferating arabesques. In the ornamental density of this
presentation, the distinction between thematic and excursive expositions
is abolished. (SW 1: 462)
Taking the interior as a mode of organization for Benjamins thinking
is not the same as taking the house or the city as its metaphor. What
Benjamin recognizes at the level of the organization of his thinking is
the interiors conditions of historical emergence. While this emergence is
marked with the division in the city between a public and a private life,
it is also marked by a division within architecture, that between an inside
space and an interior that covers and resists the architecture of this inside
space through upholstery. In other words, the domestic interior emerges
as not simply the inside space of domestic architecture. There is also a
new linguistic emergence at stake from the beginning of the nineteenth
century. For the rst time, the interior comes to mean in English: The
inside of a building or room, esp. in reference to the artistic effect; also,
a picture or representation of the inside of a building or room. Also, in a
theatre, a set consisting of the inside of a building or room.
13
A sense of
the interior being doubled between the imagistic and the spatial in this
linguistic emergence goes hand-in-hand with an idea of the interior in
publication. Important folios of interiors, including Charles Percier and
Pierre Fontaines Receuil de dcorations intrieurs of 1801, and Thomas
Hopes Household Furniture and Interior Decoration of 1807, contextu-
alize the newly emergent domestic interior as a specic site of decorative
endeavour. These publications are emblematic of attempts by architects to
claim inuence over the interior, yet through the nineteenth century the
interior develops as a site of intense contestation between architects and
newly emergent professionals known as interior decorators.
14
Ultimately it
is the victory of the Jugendstil architect/artist that liquidates the interior,
or, more specically, that liquidates the conceptual and actual separability
of the interior from architecture. The antagonism between architecture
and the interior is where Benjamin begins his convoluted account of the
interior. The bourgeois domestic interior may have a short historical life,
but it is never simply nished.
3 THE CONVOLUTIONS OF THE INTERIOR
To the extent that we can say there is a beginning to Convolute I, The
Interior, the Trace, it is one where furniture, which is movable, begins to
take on aspects of architectures immovability. Architecture and furniture
enter into battle: You see beds and armoires bristling with battlements (I1,
1). Architecture itself becomes interiorized. The interior becomes bigger
than architecture, enfolding it in a kind of dream space where scale shifts.
Considering furniture as the movable as opposed to architecture as the
immovable allows Benjamin a more immediate access to the dreamworld
of the nineteenth century. Immediately after the quotations on architectures
relation to furniture through fortication, Benjamin offers this comment:
The importance of movable property, as compared with immovable
property. Here our task is slightly easier. Easier to blaze a way to the heart
of things abolished or superseded, in order to decipher the contours of the
banal as picture puzzle (I1, 3).
Benjamin next moves to the idea of the interior furnished in dreams (I1,
6), as an explanation of the stylistic mixing and differentiation in bourgeois
interiors, where the faraway and exotic are brought together in an instant-
aneous and total effect. More comments and quotations are devoted to the
qualities of exotic, dreamlike interiors, until the idea of furniture as forti-
cation surfaces again, this time with a more pointed comment about spatial
arrangements of furniture that mark out a defensible space in the interior.
Benjamin quotes architectural critic Adolf Behne on the diagonal placement
of carpets and furniture:
The deeper explanation for all this is, again, the unconscious retention
of a posture of struggle and defense . . . Just as the knight, suspecting an
attack, positions himself crosswise to guard both left and right, so the
peace-loving burgher, several centuries later, orders his art objects in such
a way that each one, if only by standing out from all the rest, has a wall
and moat surrounding it. (I2, 3)
This defensive posture in the interior leads on to the idea that interiors
provide the costumes of moods, the interior itself a stimulus to intox-
ication and dream (I2, 6). Benjamin then recalls his second experiment
with hashish.
Comments and quotations on the purity of an interior vision, masquerade,
the interior features of the city, the emergence of genre painting and the
fumeuse as an extinct piece of furniture, culminate in a citation from
Theodor Adorno on the relation between environment and the inwardness
of thought in Kierkegaard. This passage leads Benjamin to more considered
notes that can be seen to underpin the exposs comments on the interior,
these comments having to do with the difculty in reecting on dwelling
(I4, 4) the reference to dwelling that was mentioned at the beginning of
the chapter. At this point the theme of the trace emerges more strongly:
Plush the material in which traces are left especially easily (I5, 2). He
includes material on how particular people are positioned within interiors,
and then an idea, in a kind of interiorization of the city, of a Multiplication
of traces through the modern administrative apparatus (I6a, 4).
While this might be a radically reduced iteration through Convolute I, it
shows as much how Benjamins thinking moves in the interior as it does the
interiors historical contours. The interior offers a space of immersion for his
thinking, and, in turn, the trajectories of his thinking can be traced out, in
the sense of a detection of his thinking. To postulate that such traces belong
to a diagram or structure of thinking is to impose a system of thought
indeed, systematic thought over an idiosyncratic gathering together of
fragments. Rather, the convolute registers as a plane of immanence, a surface
gathering but also being formed and deformed through the impressions
made by the collected quotations: the plane of immanence is ceaselessly
being woven, like a gigantic shuttle.
15
4 THE INTERIOR AS IMAGE
But the question still remained for Benjamin: how is the force of these
impressions to be divined? This question might be approached by thinking
through the relation between the Convolutes and the exposs. The exposs
can be seen as a way of exteriorizing his thinking, of letting it be imaged
within a world of intellectual formalities; yet the counterpart to this exteri-
orization is the deepening interiorization at work: an interiorization which,
as Missac suggests, conceals intentions.
16
This double-play between the
Convolutes and exposs mimics the interiors historical emergence as both a
spatial and representational condition. In this doubled condition, an image
is not simply transparent to a space. So too with the exposs and Convolutes;
yet we might think of the trajectory of Benjamins thinking being traced out
between them. In this traced line, a dialectical image is formed, allowing
the fragments wrested from their temporal and associational embeddedness
to deliver the force of an argument to a present context of reception. Here is
Benjamin on the dialectical image:
What distinguishes images from the essences of phenomenology is their
historical index . . . 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. For the historical index of the images not only says that they
belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain legibility
only at a particular time. And indeed, this acceding to legibility consti-
tutes a specic critical point in the movement at their interior. (N3, 1)
The dialectical image, formed through the trace between Convolutes and
exposs, is the trace between the nineteenth century as archaic past and
Benjamins temporal present. It carries a force that produces an awakening
to the problems of the present. Specically for the interior as a cultural
form, this awakening had to do with its abandonment as a space of retreat
and immersion. It is in the crystallization of a concept of modern dwelling
as rootless, open and on the move that the bourgeois domestic interior is
delivered of its regressive resistance, being delivered instead into a different
kind of resistance, one of revolutionary thinking, where the radical potential
for dwelling of a glass architecture is illuminated.
The force of Benjamins interiorized thinking breaks the interior apart.
This breaking apart, only possible through an immersion within the
interior, renders the eternal sense of dwelling radically historical. But this
radical historicity renders the broken fragments archaic. An image of the
interior the interior as image arises with most clarity at the moment of
its historical passing. The intention concealed within the interior was the
critical exposition of its own historical demise.
11
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH
ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY?
GEVORK HARTOONIAN
1 OUT OF SIGHT OUT OF MIND. IS THAT SO?
In a letter written in February 1929, Walter Benjamin acknowledged the
reception of Sigfried Giedions book Building in France, Building in Iron,
Building in Ferro-Concrete published a year before, and admired Giedions
intellectual capacity in uncovering the tradition by observing the present.
1
Two things strike us in this short phrase: Firstly, the word uncover endows
the historian with skills of a person who rescues what is beneath the dirt
if not the time passed as is the case with an archaeologist.
2
Secondly, for
Benjamin, vision is central to the historians search for that which should
be rescued. But what is this vision equipped with? Is it the historians
intellect, the breadth of knowledge and information accumulated through
observation and collection of facts and gures? Or is it a world-view, the
philosophy of history, as Benjamin believed to be the case?
Following Benjamins discourse on history, this essay presents autonomy
as a strategic position to underline the importance of the disciplinary
history of architecture for historiography. Rethinking the idea of autonomy
is necessary because in the present situation design is informed by motives
prevalent in all cultural production activities, leaving no room for a creative
engagement with the culture of building, that which is architectural in
architecture. The extraphenomenal, which is nurtured by the physicality of
building, is indeed the content of architectures autonomy. This entails the
argument for a doubling which is informed, rstly, by themes developed
through the work of architects, critics, and historians. Secondly, such an
argument demands a reinterpretation of the thematic of the culture of
building through the techniques that prevailed in any particular historical
period. The conjunction between technique and autonomy should not be
taken as discursive by denition; rather, it involves investigating the strategies
by which the architectural project problematizes the linear continuum of
history. This observation necessitates understanding autonomy beyond the
What is the Matter with Architectural History? 183
modernist theories of architecture that interpreted the disciplinary history
of architecture either in the light of the zeitgeist, or the tropes developed
through art history. The early historiography of modern architecture is,
indeed, primarily informed by the spatial potentialities of technology and
the aesthetic of abstract painting.
2 THE GHOST OF HISTORY
My wing is ready for ight,
I would like to turn back.
If I stayed everliving time,
I would have little luck.
Gerhard Scholems poem stimulated Walter Benjamins insightful reading of
a Paul Klee painting entitled Angelus Novus. This is how Benjamin pictured
the angel of history: eyes wide open, and wings spread, the angels face is
turned to the past where we (my italics) perceive a chain of events, the angel
sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage
and hurls it at his feet. Benjamin continues: The angel would like to stay,
awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is
blowing from Paradise. The storm propels the angel forward, into the future
to which the angels back is turned. According to Benjamin, this storm is
what we call progress (SW 4: 392).
3
What Benjamins reading of the Angelus Novus involves can be described
in the following words: Once the storm of progress is associated with the
myth of paradise, the task of the historian turns to deconstruction of the
chain of events, and uncovering the catastrophe. A distinction should
be made between natural catastrophe, such as ood and earthquake, and
the historical catastrophe. The temporality entailed in history necessitates
distinguishing the ruins of the past from the wreckage that is left by the
storm of progress. The ruin is not just the effect of time; rather, it involves
the decay of material and of course a sense of aesthetic appreciation that is
bound with that sense of transitoriness that is essential to modernity.
4
There is nothing new in saying that material decays: in modernity, things
get outmoded even before the material is rotten. In modernity, the specicity
of time is experienced in the absence of a unity that would set the subtext for
durability and meanings assigned or expected from every action including
the act of design and production of architecture. In the Renaissance, for
example, or even in the rst decades of the last century, architecture played
a crucial role in housing and gathering communities that were connected
to the various institutions of the society. In contrast, the architects good
intentions today cannot escape the forces of commodication of values and
techniques that want to turn every edice into a spectacular ornament. In
this situation, any relation to the past is subject to temporality, as the storm
of progress moves from one catastrophic situation to another. According to
Franoise Choay, the historic monument has a different relationship to living
memory and to the passage of time. On the one hand, she continues:
It is simply constituted as an object of knowledge and integrated into
a linear conception of time: in this case its cognitive value relegates it
irrevocably to the past, or . . . to the history of art in particular; on the
other hand, as a work of art it can address itself to our artistic sensibility,
to our artistic will.
5
If Choay is correct in claiming that the dawn of this new century witnesses
the decay of our competence to build, then, how should architecture
articulate the architectonic of that witnessing? Choays idea of the decay
of competence to build alludes to the disappearance of that totality which
prevailed in premodern era. The artistic representation of that totality was
indeed the content of what architects and builders would create under the
name of place. But does that decay also banish the vision of competence to
build?
6
The place is experienced through technique. But techniques are not just
an assembly of tools: besides doing what they are invented for, techniques
set up a particular movement and rhythm the temporality of which coord-
inates the bodys action and its relation to a place.
7
Those who lived through
the modern times had access to technologies that launched the rst attack
on the spirit of the place, the experience of which was based on natural
time. The present experience of time, framed by the advent of electronic
networking, enjoys a different temporality. Modern industrial techniques
and machines were operating at such a capacity that Karl Marx charac-
terized them as tools extending the performance of the organic potentialities
of the body. Electronic technologies, if one relies on Jean-Franois Lyotards
account in The Postmodern Condition, are changing the balance between the
natural, the body and the built-form. Computer technologies have changed
our communication system. They have also shaken the situation where one
could have space for self-contemplation. Privacy, the microspace, is invaded,
if not taken over by the global ow of information and goods. We eat,
wear, watch and even dream about things that have the least relation to our
immediate place. Involuntary memory of a bygone place is the only thing
left to the present generation, and the next generation of architects might
have even less chance to imagine and contemplate a memory that would
evoke any aspects of the competence to build.
This discussion entails two assumptions; rstly, that progress is registered
in an understanding of time that orchestrates ones experience of the natural
time. Progress progresses, but its ow does not suggest that history unfolds
according to a pre-planned linear path. Secondly, the juxtaposition between
the natural and the ruins of modernity the piled wreckage of the past is
essential for understanding that in the landscape of modernity everything is
already history. According to Harry Harootunian, all production immedi-
ately falls into ruin, thereafter to be set in stone without revealing what it
had once signied, since the inscriptions are illegible or written in the dead
language. And he concludes: beneath the historical present, however, lie
the spectres, the phantoms, waiting to reappear and upset it.
8
What does
this statement, which addresses something central to Benjamins vision of
history, entail for architecture?
The question necessitates two considerations: First, to differentiate history
from historiography, and second, to underline the specicity of architec-
tures relation to history. The difference between history and historiography
is obvious, but needs to be reiterated mainly because of Benjamins unique
intellectual cause. The title of Werckmeisters essay, mentioned in note 3,
anticipates the authors detailed account of Benjamins various rewritings
of what nally would be formulated as the angel of history. The transg-
uration of the revolutionary into the historian, the subtitle of Werckmeisters
essay, summarizes the tale of Benjamins intellectual life, which was closely
connected to the broader praxis of the Left in 1930s. In the available
four versions of Benjamins text the reader notes a modication at work
which not only demonstrates Benjamins disappointment with the fate of
revolution in those days, but also unfolds the process of distillation of the
concept of angel from all religious connotations except one: that the angel,
like a superman, represents the image of a gifted revolutionary gure who
could read more into the rubble of history than anybody else. In giving up
the idea of progress as the ultimate engine of political revolution, Benjamin
turned the revolutionary and constructive aspects of Marxs understanding
of history into the act of historiography. While historicism is content with
establishing a causal connection between various moments in history, and
perpetuates the eternal image of the past, materialistic historiography,
according to Benjamin, is based on a constructive principle. Thinking
involves not only the movement of thoughts, but their arrest as well (SW 4:
396). What is involved in arresting the thought?
If historicism endorses the ow of time, then, one way to halt this
continuum would be to arrest the time.
9
When the time is out of joint, as
Shakespeare puts it in Hamlet, then the present is saturated by the propelling
wreckage of the past. In this standstill situation the present merges with the
past, but the distinction between the old and the new does not disappear.
The redemptive power of the past rather shines out of the surface of the new.
The historian should capture the gaze of that power.
Such was the situation in the Russia of 1920s, a historical period the
transformation of which was of great interest to Benjamin. In his journey to
Moscow, he witnessed how his concept of history was under construction.
The Russian constructivists considered themselves constructors and not
artists. Emptied of the vision of historicism, their work merged with
history, and architecture was conceived not only as a constructive form,
tecktonica, but an agent of historical reconstruction. Rodchenko, according
to Hubertus Gassner, called the constructivists objects comrades.
10
These
architects and artists not only thought of their work in a temporality in
which technology was not conceived as a means to an end, or as a tool to
overpower nature. Rather, following the Marx of the 1884 manuscript,
constructivists attempted, as Susan Buck-Morss reminds us, to liquidate the
distinction between artist and worker, not by the subservience of aesthetic
pleasure to industrial instrumentality, but by the interpretation of activities,
which provided images suggestive of a reconciliation with nature, wherein
sensual (aesthetic) pleasure was understood as the goal, transcending mere
physical need.
11
This observation warrants the following question: Was
not the work of constructivists unleashing the fear Giedion noticed resting
beneath the historicists masking of construction? According to Giedion,
construction in the nineteenth century plays the role of the subconscious.
Outwardly, construction still boasts the old pathos; underneath, concealed
behind facades, the basis of our present existence is taking place.
12
While
Giedion was making rather radical remarks in connection to Le Corbusiers
early architecture, Russian constructivists, instead, were weaving the anti-
cipatory potentialities of technology into the collective practice, and thus
grafting the collective experience of those revolutionary moments into the
linguistic potentialities of architecture.
The experience of the Russian constructivists is one instance which
highlights the implication of Benjamins vision of history for architecture.
This is an important one because, while constructivist architecture disso-
ciated itself from the dominant cultural values of the prerevolutionary
statehood, it was not until the mid 1930s that their work became subject to
the politics of a dictatorial state.
13
This observation necessitates the following
distinction; although the culture of building (architectures interiority) runs
through many historical periods, its thematic remains autonomous from
the politics of any state except when the state apparatus attempts to control
the language of architecture; or when an architect, or a group of architects,
chooses to inict the autonomy of architecture with extradisciplinary
values.
Are there other moments to discuss architectures specic relation to
history? If Werckmeisters reading of the motives involved in Benjamins
rewriting of the thesis of history is correct, then, transguration connotes
Benjamins turn from the realism of revolutionary praxis to historiography
(theory) of that practice. An argument could be made that even if this
turn were central to Benjamins thesis of history, any discussion of archi-
tectural history entails a reversal of that turn, signifying the move from
historiography as a theoretical thesis into the writing of the actuality of
architectures project. The shift is implied in Benjamins essay on the work
of art. According to him, buildings have accompanied human existence
since primeval times. Many art forms have come into being and passed
away . . . Architecture has never had fallow periods. Its history is longer than
that of any other art, and its effect ought to be recognized in any attempt to
account for the relationship of the masses to the work of art (SW 4: 268).
What is the implication of Benjamins statement for architectural history?
In the rst place, the anthropological dimension of Benjamins remark
needs to be addressed. That architecture is inconceivable apart from the
everyday life of the masses does not necessarily suggest that architecture
mirrors the social and technological development of its context. Architecture
enjoys a degree of autonomy, which paradoxically assures its bond to various
layers of the social environment. Architecture progresses by readjusting
the conventions intrinsic to the art of building, that is, architectures dis-
ciplinary history. James Ackerman is correct in discussing architecture as a
convention equal to what we expect of language: once its elements are estab-
lished it maintains an astonishing constancy through time.
14
This duration,
buildings companionship with masses, however, is fragile; otherwise the
wreckage of the past would have no meaning. The loss of aura, discussed
by Benjamin, raises an opposing view to the dominant form of humanism
whose discourse has been central to many architectural historians, including
Ackerman, who sees humanism as the only way of making a positive sense
out of progress.
15
Benjamins anthropological materialism, instead, draws
its conclusions from a bodily collectivity that is traceable in the sphere
of images, and the bodily self-consciousness stimulated by technological
development.
16
The historical intertextuality, if not the confrontation,
between modernity and the idealist conventions of humanism underlines
the import of psychoanalysis
17
(unconsciousness) for the anthropological side
of Benjamins belief that architecture has never been idle.
That Benjamins discourse was a critique of the romantic yearning for a
unied state of art, that his aspiration for technology was not aligned with
the instrumental logic and the total afrmation of technology, does that
implicate his concept of the loss of aura with a psychological dimension.
Similar to the dream world construed by Freud, the wreckage of progress
relates to history without having any actual presence. Again, this distinction
underlines the difference between historical ruins and architectures relation
to history. The physical presence of the ruin stimulates a romantic relation
to the past, sustaining a totalized image of a bygone time. The work of archi-
tecture, instead, maintains a complex relation with history; this complexity
could become reductive and simplistic when architecture is forced to simulate
historical forms, as was the case with the 1970s postmodern historicism.
Benjamins reections on architecture in the work of art essay entail a
radical understanding of architectures relation to history.
18
As the storm of
progress blows, architecture maintains its companionship with the masses
through Verwindung, which is discussed by Gianni Vattimo. Accepting
Benjamins characterization of the loss of aura, this Italian thinker conceives
the attainability of a tectonic dialogue between conventions and the excess
offered by technical development, through radicalization of the process
of the secularization of values.
19
And according to Beatrice Hanssen, for
Benjamin secularisation announced the fall away from religious, historical
time into an inauthentic, excessive preoccupation with space and spatial-
ization a predicament for which, once again, the natural sciences were
to be held partly responsible.
20
This suggests that architecture does not re-
present an ossied image of the past. History, rather, is presented through
the inevitable doubling that takes place between the intrinsic laws of the art
of building and the actuality of the present experienced in both technical
and aesthetic realms. What this means is that, what must be maintained, the
laws of the art of building, are construed at the present as the present.
21
Not only architecture takes place in time, but there is also the time that
involves construing the act of construction. While the former sense of time
forces architecture to internalize the latest available techniques, the latter
is experienced in the drive for technication of architecture and confron-
tation of this process with the essentiality of the tectonic for the linguistic
autonomy of architecture.
Once this doubling is established, what needs to be added is the
recognition of two moments when the ghost of history has haunted
architecture.
22
Architectures departure from the classical wisdom in the
eighteenth century, and later with the discovery and invention of industrial
material and techniques in the mid-nineteenth century, both these historical
moments had critical repercussions on contemporary architecture.
23
In the
rst moment, architecture enjoyed a temporary state of autonomy, one
paradoxical result of which was its deeper entanglement with the institutions
of capitalism discussed by Manfredo Tafuri. In the second moment, the
ontological bond between the body, landscape, and the craft of architecture
was shaken, and the initial steps were taken towards the disappearance of
the competence to build. The latter development, whose impact on archi-
tecture is not yet nalized, set the pretext for Kenneth Framptons discourse
on critical history. The degree to which these two contemporary historians
are relevant to the present situation opens a discussion that cannot take
place here.
24
What needs to be said is that these two historical ruptures are
the theoretical underpinning of the import of historical unconsciousness
for architectural historiography even today.
25
Once this is established, the
discourse of the autonomy of architecture should be understood at two
levels: rst in reference to architectures confrontation with techniques
developed outside of architectures disciplinary history; and second, in the
extent to which the autonomy of architecture is considered as a phenomenon
differentiating architectural historiography from other histories. The matrix
of these two discourses sustains the praxis that upholds autonomy as a
strategic position for the present situation of architectural practice.
3 THE GHOST OF THE ARCHITECT
To say that the historians vision is overcast by the apparition of an archi-
tects work necessitates a discussion that, in the rst place, involves the task
of the historian, and in the second, demands specifying the subject matter
of architectural history. The point is not to picture the architect as a gifted
seer, but to underline the importance of the work itself. How the project
addresses the interiority of architecture, and in doing so interjects a critical
horizon into the historians discourse?
The autonomy of architectures interiority has always been understood in
reference to architectures dialogue with institutions, among which the most
inuential are land, capital and technology. These three factors are essential
for differentiating architecture from other artistic activities. Paradoxically,
it can be claimed that the very realization of architectures project is bound
to the investment of capital, land and technology. Architecture cannot be
constructive and transform the built environment effectively without these
factors. This is not to deny the fact that utopian projects could also inform
the historical development of architecture.
To avoid general theorization of the task of the historian, the subject
should be discussed in conjunction to the ways architecture differs from
visual arts, painting and sculpture in particular. Hence the importance
of asking an old question: what is architectural in architecture? And, how
is architectures particularity approached in the historians text? That the
discipline of architectural history is a young one and was born out of the
bone of art history says nothing new. What is important in reiterating this
old story, however, involves an argument to address architectural history in
reference to the formative themes of architectures disciplinary history; a
subject dismissed by art history in most cases.
Before the mechanical reproduction of art, the symbolic content of the
artwork was detrimental in differentiating artistic creativities from each
other. In the Renaissance, for example, the homology between arts was
discussed in reference to simulacra the symbolic association made between
everyday life and the divine world of Christianity. Although the symbolic
content, the aura of the artwork discussed by Benjamin, disappeared when
modern technologies were infused into the process of production, never-
theless the artisanal dimension of architecture was little changed. This is one
reason why, towards the end of the work of art essay, Benjamin discusses
architecture in terms of habit and the tactile, rather than the optical. Even
transformation taking place in the optical realm is considered effective
when it is changed into habit. That which bonds architecture in premodern
societies with painting and sculpture is indeed the works symbolic content
and not the technique specic to each artistic activity. Still, after the birth
of art history in the nineteenth century, the perceived homologies between
different artistic productions was formulated in terms of style, understood
either as a subjective choice or expression of the will of the time. In neither
period did the technique specic to each artistic production process remain
identical. Both painters and architects were obliged to actualize their ideas,
even the ones evoked by simulacra, with the mtier of painting or building
respectively. That the mediums of the work for painters is surface and paint,
and those of architects the tectonic articulation of material and technique
are obvious and need no further discussion in this place. What must be
added is how the proponents of contemporary art history have approached
these issues.
In 1888 Heinrich Wlfin,
26
the father of contemporary art history,
introduced the term painterly to discuss baroque art and architecture. To
him the concept of the painterly was qualied to make a distinction between
Renaissance and baroque art. For reasons that are outside our consideration
here, Wlfin argued that the art of building in baroque abandoned its
characteristic nature and looked for effects that belonged to another art,
and thus it became painterly. His discourse set criteria for periodization. The
interrelationship between different arts, he exhorted, was theological, though
he argued that those homologies are motivated by the technique of one or
another art. For him architecture was neither painterly nor sculptural, but
essentially the art of shaping space. However, the sense of painterly spread,
in his observation, over all three arts is suggestive of the stylistic characteri-
zation of a period. At the same time, he failed to outline the specicity of the
work and ended in over-generalization. Benjamin identies Wlfins failure
in a dualism formulated in the following words: a at, universalising history
of the art of all cultures and times, on the one hand, and an academic
aesthetic, on the other hand without, however, being able to overcome it
entirely (SW 2: 666). The problems with Wlfins argument are two: rst,
he casts his own interpretative tool, painterly, as a phenomenon shared by
the artists and architects of the period under consideration. He mixes the
time invested in the work with those of the historian. Second, his analysis
remains formalistic, even though his line of argumentation charges the idea
of painterly with a sense of aura.
What is missing in Wlfins all-encompassing whole is the essentiality
of the work and how its material content is tied closely to historical circum-
stances. In his remarks on Wlfins methodology, Benjamins argument
is suggestive of a historical vision, which, in the rst place, underlines
the signicance of the work. But not every work: only those whose life is
most deeply embedded in their material content, which over the course of
their historical duration these material contents present themselves to the
researcher all the more clearly the more they have disappeared from the
world (SW 2: 669). In the second place, which concerns the appropriation
of the work, Benjamin emphasizes architectures particularity apprehended
as an objective entity whose structures effect the imaginative being of the
viewer. At both levels, the image is crucial in Benjamins remarks on the
ways the work presents itself to the historian. This prompts a discussion
that concerns the essentiality of the tectonic for architecture but also the
poetics (image-laden quality) of construction: a subject that triggered debate
between Alois Riegl and Semperians.
27
Riegl, an Austrian art historian, challenged the idea of autonomy implied
in Wlfins remarks on the formal properties of art, and underlined the
beholders role in the internal unity of painting and its necessity for the
evolution of art from the haptic (volumetric) to the optic (spatial).
28
Riegl
was also interested in the autonomous nature of the work of art. He was less
concerned for the subjective process of creation, or a materialistic interest
in matter-of-factness. Kunstwollen, artistic volition, was for Riegl a gestalt
of continuous ow of thought that would make a reciprocal dialogue with
sociotechnological transformations.
29
Riegls importance, however, lay in
his argument that stylistic changes are driven by the perceptual world.
When Benjamin made his famous statement that, just as the entire mode
of existence of human collective changes over long historical periods, so too
does their mode of perception (SW 4: 255), the major historical example he
provided was from the late Roman art industry whose birth, according to
Riegl, coincided with a sense of perception different from the classical one.
Obviously Benjamin had read Riegls Late Roman Art Industry; nevertheless,
he criticized Riegl for not discussing the social sources of the alleged new
perception (SW 2: 255). What was intriguing to Benjamin was the contem-
poraneity that would catch up with Riegls writing a decade later through
expressionism. This opens an opportunity to make a similar claim: Riegl was
not just reformulating Wlfins ideas; it was rather the contemporaneity of
Sempers position on history and style that haunted Riegls discourse.
Semper and Riegl agreed on one point: that techniques, skills and forms
developed in the applied and decorative arts are important for major artistic
production beyond territorial constraint. Their difference, however, points
to the art historians concern for surface and image, and the tectonic for
Semper. This is how Alina Payne articulates the ways these two important
gures of the late nineteenth century read fabrication and surface:
For Riegl the carpet was not an example of fabrication, of manipulation
by the hand, tied into an anthropological explication of the development
of shelter-making as it had been for Semper. Instead, he looked at the
carpet as a decorative, painting-like surface, displaying a will-to-form that
reached all artistic production and manifested itself in the predilection for
a particular range of decorative motifs.
30
The difference is obvious: abstraction in Riegls position unfolds a new
horizon in discussing the work of painting. Abstraction gures itself, in
the rst place, in the virtual space sought by the painter (Rembrandt in his
Dutch Portrait paintings). The painted image embodies both the space
of the beholder and that of the canvas. Thus according to Benjamin Riegl
exemplies the masterly command of the transition from the individual
object to the cultural and intellectual [geistig] function (SW 2: 668). In
the second place, abstraction is recognized as a cognitive tool to periodize
history. In contemplating the developmental process of art from the haptic
to the optical, Riegl failed to recognize the import of modern institutions for
any production activity. His main focus was directed towards a discussion
of architecture that is not a self-reecting object, but includes the spectator.
Semper, instead, chides the thing character of the artefact whose aesthetic
is not seen as an autonomous entity perceived by the beholder; rather it is
revealed through the embellishment of material and purpose (ur-form). The
surface of the carpet has no life of its own; it is woven into the technique of
fabrication, even if the latter is not visible as is the case with the carpet, or
implied as understood in Sempers formulation of the relationship between
the art-form and the core-form. Furthermore, contrary to Riegl, Sempers
theorization of architecture does not end in a closed system; once the
particularity of architecture is recognized in the tectonic, the autonomy
of architecture is located in the matrix of the disciplinary history of archi-
tecture and techniques developing outside of that history, but in close ties
with historical transformation.
The discussion presented here does not attempt to pit Semper against
Riegl. The aim is to show how the architects understanding of the dis-
ciplinary history of architecture differs from those which have prevailed in
art history. Also mention should be made to the specicity of the suggested
openness in Sempers theory: he not only theorized architecture beyond
the historicity of the nineteenth-century debates on style but, more im-
portantly, his discourse on the tectonic places architecture squarely in
relation to modernization. That architecture should rethink its own history
based on the prevailed techniques of making does, paradoxically, subject
architecture to the nihilism of modernity. This is one reason why the tectonic
has become of interest to most contemporary historians who attempt to
formulate the thematic of critical practice. Paradoxically, those who want
to theorize at present architecture along with the spectacle generated by
computer technologies appropriate Sempers ideas too.
31
The suggested openness and closure is not exclusive to Semper: many
modernists who wanted to avoid making a one-to-one correspondence
between the spirit of time and architecture also sought to rethink archi-
tectures interiority according to the demands of time.
32
This much is clear
from Charles Garnier, the architect of the Opera House in Paris, who
discusses architecture not only within history but also in its engagement in
the construction of history. In his words, architects who build monuments
must consider themselves to be the writers of future history; they must
indicate in their works the characteristics of the time in which they create;
nally they must, through duty and through the love of the truth, inscribe
in their buildings those indisputable signs of the period of construction.
33
This observation takes notice of the importance of the disciplinary history
of architecture for architectural historiography. Firstly, how is the topicality
of a particular theme at a given historical junction understood by architects;
and secondly, how is architecture the object of knowledge awaiting to be
unbounded by the historian. This argument necessitates a discussion that
concerns the idea of time and its role in mapping the task of the architec-
tural historian.
In two instances, Benjamins text on history is suggestive of images that
prompt a standstill understanding of time. The rst instance is marked by
the angels reception of the wind of progress: a move that pushes the angel
into the future to which his back is turned. The angel looks at and contem-
plates that which is left behind by the storm. The angels body and direction
of his gaze indeed block the movement of the time-forward; the time of
contemplation is not presented in its apartness from the past, but the past
is infused, or recognized, in the now of the present. The second moment is
noticed in the image when Benjamin makes an analogy between the ways
fashion evokes the costumes of the past with a tigers leap into the past (SW
4: 395). Again the continuity of time is interrupted by the collision of the
expected natural forward-looking movement of the tiger with the latters
jump into the past. What these images mean is not to establish the stand-
point of the angel as the standpoint of critique, but the reverse. It is a part
of the critique of the concept of progress.
34
Here Peter Osborne makes a
critical distinction between the gure of angel and that of a historian. While
the historical avant-garde has demonstrated special concern for the new,
that which is located behind the back of the angel (the future), the historian
attempts to save the historical specicity, opening a different horizon of
activity by the critique of progress. And Andrew Benjamin argues that
criticism should not concern itself with the factuality of history, but with
the temporality that such facts display and within which such a facts are
able to be displayed. History cannot be thought other than as a philosophy
of time.
35
Both images presented in Benjamins text ask the historian to
explode the continuum of history.
36
A task, which could only be fullled
through the dialectical image, a construction whose principle is the act of
montage.
37
Thus the task of the historian is to dismantle the work and to demon-
strate how architectures interiority was seen in a particular time. The task
also necessitates the challenge of the works claim for standing up to the
demands of the time of its construction. Adhering to the ethics of truth to
material and construction, Garnier could suggest that an architect should
face the demand of the time; but the historian should instead question the
architects very claim for the works ability to arrest the spirit of its time,
and the unity that the work claims to hold. According to Benjamin, the
products of arts and science owe their existence not merely to the efforts
of the great geniuses who created them, but also, in one degree or another,
to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. And he continues: There
is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of
barbarism (SW 3: 267). One implication of Benjamins statement can be
formulated in the following words: by dismantling the work, the historian
ends in the construction of a montage of stories, each unfolding the contra-
dictions involved in the process of the design and construction of the work.
How architecture relates to institutions, for instance? As a document, the
work should be read, as Benjamins remarks on history suggests, against the
network of intentions that create the condition for the works production.
Only in this way, Carlo Ginzburg reminds us, will it be possible to take
into account, against the tendency of the relativists to ignore the one or the
other, power relationships as well as what is irreducible to them.
38
Secondly,
attention should be given to how the work translates material and technique
into tectonic guration. The tectonic as theorized by Semper allows decon-
struction of all kinds of unities and continuities essential for the humanist
discourse on architecture. By distancing his theory of architecture from
the theological aspects of Riegls ideas implied in Kunstwollen, the tectonic
formulates what is intrinsic to the art of building (architectures interiority)
with factors extraneous to architecture. What the tectonic means to archi-
tecture could be associated with the impact of the mechanical reproduction
of the artwork and the loss of aura. This suggests a passage from poesis to
techne,
39
an opening that necessitates a critical dialogue between architecture
and modernity. Another implication of Benjamins observation concerns
the durability of the work: that architecture survives its time through the
culture of building rather the intentions of the architect, or because of the
physical strength of building.
In leaving the architects intentions behind, it remains to establish
another aspect of the task-awaiting historian: what is the particularity
of the work, a building that invites criticism? And, given the disjunction
between autonomy and historicity, is it not, then, the particularity of a work
that opens itself up as historical? To make an opening to these questions,
a distinction should be made between the work of a connoisseur and that
of the historian. The formers task is limited to recognizing the presence
of the hand of the genius in the work and issues relevant to style. Before
the rise of art history, most discussions concerning architectural history
aimed at characterizing the particularity of the work in association with
a style-determined period, and/or the artists skills in demonstrating the
essentiality of mimesis for the work.
40
The historian instead cuts through
the work and produces knowledge. And yet, the knowledge one receives
from architecture would not become constructive if it does not stand as
historical. If historical does not concern style, then what does it stand for?
In the rst place, historical concerns the question of modernity in its many
manifestations, including criticism as a negative court of judgement,
41
but
more importantly, in regard to Benjamins articulation of the loss of aura.
His argument, on the one hand, suggests the end of symbolism which has
prevailed in Renaissance art and architecture. Reproduction, according to
Beatrice Hanssen, destroys the shrine to the arcane secret it was believed to
hold, but also it sundered arts links to the divine place (topos) on which the
temple or shrine were formerly built.
42
On the other, Benjamins discourse
on technology is consequential for any discussion concerning the destiny
of architecture in modernity. What it is essential to point out here is that
since the modernization of production activity, the techniques inherent to
architecture were inicted by technologies developed outside of the culture
of building. Furthermore, the knowledge of architectural praxis which
was handed down from one architect to another, as the mtier of building,
and the fact that in premodern societies a particular building could not
have been nished in the life-span of a single architect, frame a historical
situation that could not continue (for many reasons that should not be
discussed here) in modernity. The importance of tectonics is obvious again,
but it needs to be qualied not in association with the architect but with
the work of the historian. The distinction made by Benjamin between the
history of art work and art criticism from human history opens a discussion
concerning the specicity of architectural historiography.
43
Wlfin argued that all paintings owe more to other paintings than they
owe to direct observation.
44
This statement suggests that the knowledge
that unfolds in critique should address the ways a given work of architecture
relates to architectures interiority. The parallelism drawn between critique
and the thematic of architectures interiority qualies the historian with
historical knowledge of architecture in the rst place. What critique further
unfolds is the historians knowledge of the problematic of the time of his/her
world, and projection of that knowledge into the body of work under exam-
ination. Only in this way is critique saved from claiming the absolute truth,
and thus the possibility of opening itself to criticism. The degree with which
the work of the historian addresses the dialogical relationship between truth
and criticism underscores a process that rst makes what is to be known
into that as which it is known (SW 1: 148). That which is known is the
disciplinary history of architecture. And that which has to be known is how,
through the critical reading of a chosen work of architecture, the thematic of
the culture of building is seen in different light. The light is already in the
work itself and the task of historian is to displace it out of its context and
present it as historical.
What does the argument presented in this essay entail for architectural
historiography? Firstly, the work of an architect should be seen as a document
in its own right, but also as a project re-presenting its historicality; the
architects metanarratives, but also the body of work, that is, the culture of
building whose themes and strategies differentiate architectural praxis from
other artistic activities. This last point is essential for a semi-autonomous
understanding of architecture, but it also underlines any critical reinterpre-
tation of contemporary architecture. Secondly, the idea of project should
be understood as a failure in the architects attempt to present a totalized
picture of diverse stories involved in the works realization. This demands
inicting the historicality of the work with the problematic of the present
architectural praxis, that is, the technication of architecture,
45
and the level
of abstraction involved in the process of design as architects utilize telecom-
munication technologies. Finally, the future that a project assigns to itself
should be regarded as the architectonic realization of a past whose traces can
be recovered by the eeting moments of the present. In this reconstruction
architecture loses its autonomy and becomes a fragment in the constellation
of a broader knowledge, the constructive principle of which is montage.
46
Architecture is indeed recognized as architecture by opening itself into the
world. In doing so architecture saves its own claim on history taking a critical
role in the construction of the conditions of life.
12
MESSIANIC EPISTEMOLOGY:
THESIS XV
ROBERT GIBBS
The representation of time too easily divides into the opposition of lines
and circles. One seems to be either looking down the line from the height
of progress (modernity) or up the line, back from the decline of civilization
(ancient) or else one is stuck on the wheel of time, fated to repeat what has
gone before. Historians oblige us by compiling chronicles and chronologies
of events or occasionally painting a grand canvas of rises and falls. Time
moves on inexorably, either off to the horizon or in an endless spinning of
the eternal return of the same.
We do not live time in some special nonrepresentational way, where the
owing-off of the moment is given in pure immediacy. Rather, we live
time through our representations of it, in the newspaper, on the television,
according to the clock, following the prompting of the palm-pilot. Time is
not simply a ow or a river for us, but is rather broken into chunks, hours,
minutes, days, weeks of holidays, quarters of a game, seconds downloading
images, years watching our children grow. It is not one event after another,
but it is measurable and publicly standardized and, while punctuated, there
is a memory of a past and an expectation of the future that hangs on our
clock and calendar. The messianic, however, is a name for a not-yet, a future
that exceeds the present, that interrupts it and our own expectations for a
future. If we were able to draw time as a line or as a circle, the messianic
would break it apart. It is not the end of the line, a distant, far-off moment,
thousands of years hence, but rather, an interruption now, or almost now.
In the next moment. Today. . .
There is likely no theme more over-exposed and over-theorized in
Benjamins work than the messianic. In this volume alone, there will be
several serious discussions of it, and the bibliography on that topic would
run to dozens if not scores of important essays by scholars, by critics, by
philosophers.
1
This discussion will not serve as a literature review, but will
offer a specic angle of enquiry. For a few years I have explored a group of
twentieth-century Jewish thinkers who developed a parallel interpretation
of the messianic: Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber,
Gershom Scholem, Ernst Bloch, as well as Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques
Derrida. Scholars do not lavish the same fascination on the messianic in
their works as they do on the messianic in Benjamins. One could ask: What
is the attraction to this theme as found in Benjamin, a Jewish thinker who
rarely reects on Jewish texts and traditions? Does Benjamin represent a
formal messianic (Derridas messianicity) or a lapsed-Jewish messianic? Have
we written to excess on this topic due to a fascination with the residue of
abandoned and defunct Jewish tradition?
My task, however, is not primarily a metadiscussion of the Benjamin
scholarship, but rather to look at the way that the messianic transforms the
division of time into lines and circles. Thus, you might have expected me
to write about Thesis B: For the Jews, however, the future was nonetheless
not turned to homogeneous nor empty time. Because in it every second was
the narrow gate through which the Messiah could enter, or perhaps Thesis
II: Because like every generation before us, we have been endowed with a
weak messianic power, to which the past has a claim. Instead, I will focus
on Thesis XV, and not on the whole of it. I am concerned to think through
what a calendar does (as a circle), and more importantly, how that circle
as calendar has been transformed in our time. Moreover, I believe that a
layering of circles upon circles, or circles within circles, begins to disrupt
the narrativity of the circle itself. That superpositioning of circles or that
impositioning of circles will allow us to see a specic relation to Benjamins
own interpretation of the standstill and the dialectical image.
[i] The consciousness of exploding the continuum of history is character-
istic of the revolutionary classes in the moment of their action. The great
revolution introduced a new calendar. [ii] The day, with which a calendar
begins, functions as a historical time-lapse camera. And it is basically
the same day that always returns in the form of festival days, the days of
remembrance [Eingedenkens]. [iii] The calendar, therefore, does not count
time like clocks. They are the monuments of a historical consciousness,
and for a hundred years in Europe not even the slightest trace of them
appears. (Thesis XV, GS 1.2: 7012/SW 4: 395)
Calendars are a mode of historiography. They count time, but in the return of
an event, year after year, they build our awareness of the past, representing time
and making of a given year a circle from a linear narrative. Calendars are the
circles. To change a society we would have to change the calendar, to change
the representation of the past as lived in a cycling in our present. The full inter-
pretation of this calendar will follow in section two, but for now I wish to take
a step to the side to see how Rosenzweig interpreted calendars in his The Star
of Redemption, a work that was familiar to and respected by Benjamin. Others
have explored the relation between the two thinkers, but I will focus instead on
the way that Rosenzweig thinks calendars work, and relate this to Thesis XV.
2
Messianic Epistemology: Thesis XV 199
1 ROSENZWEIG ON CALENDARS
There are three kinds of calendars, according to Rosenzweig, and each offers
a way of living time in a cycle. The three are, as is typical for Rosenzweig:
Jewish, Christian and Pagan. The one that requires the most explanation
is the Jewish calendar, but not because it is lunar and so has a complicated
intercalation formula. No, its demand is that we think about time not
merely linearly, but more importantly, not merely circularly.
Rosenzweig develops an account of eternity that requires eternity not to
be a ight from time, but an insertion of eternality into temporality. Our
lived time must itself become changed, and become in that sense messianic.
We live time socially and experience time with the breaks and units that
society imposes. In the evening we seek shelter and eat; at sunrise we rise.
Of course, the seasons also provide a certain kind of regularity, but the
most basic units in our lives arise from the regular repetitions of socially
constructed bits of time: the hour, the week and the year as marked on our
calendars. Constructions that are not merely time-lines, that measure the
passing away of time, but allow for the circling back of time. The revolution
in time by which the messianic enters, for Rosenzweig, is the bending of
time into a circle that allows the past moment to come again. The contrast
begins, for Rosenzweig, with the hour, and proceeds from the hour to the
week, and thence to the year.
The new we seek must be a nunc stans, not a vanishing moment thus, but
a standing one. Such a standing now is called, in contrast to the moment,
an hour [Stunde]. Because it is standing, the hour can already contain
within itself the multiplicity of old and new, the fullness of moments.
Its end can discharge back into its beginning, because it has a middle
indeed many middle moments between its beginning and its end. With
beginning, middle, and end it can become that which the mere sequence
of individual and ever new moments never can, a recoiling circle. In
itself it can now be full of moments and yet ever equal to itself again.
When an hour is up, there begins not only a new hour, much as a new
moment relieves the old one. Rather, there begins again an hour. This
re-commencement, however, would not be possible for the hour if it were
merely a sequence of moments such as it indeed is in its middle. It is
possible only because the hour has beginning and end. Only the striking
of the bells establishes the hour, not the ticking of the pendulum. For the
hour is a wholly human institution. (3223/290)
3
For Rosenzweig, the hour allows for a specic form of repetition: where
it is not simply the same thing over and over again, but when the unit is
born from a holding together of beginning, middle and end. They are held
together through the time of the hour. The diachrony of the moments allows
for a new one to replace the old one, in the precise sense of repeating. Not
the incessant ow of one thing after another (tick-tock), but the chiming
signals the ow that is contained within a narrative of the hour. What comes
after an hour? Another one with another narrative. But what comes after the
instant? Some other instant with no repetition, no recurrence. Rosenzweig
does not replace the random ow of events with a synoptic vision of the
whole. Rather, in moving into the next hour, we are cast back on the
beginning to live through it again. When we hear the chime, we think, it
is starting again. Time has passed, but it is a new hour.
In an even bolder manner, the week structures our experience of time
because on the seventh day we stop our work. Here the end bears a specic
mark of reection, of completion. Rosenzweig accepts Hermann Cohens
reading that emphasizes the social justice dimension of the Sabbath
(depending on reading the Deuteronomy version of the commandment).
Thus the week with its day of rest is the proper sign of human freedom.
Scripture thus explains the sign by its purpose and not its basis. The week
is the true hour of all the times of the common human life, posited for
people alone, set free from the orbit of the earth and thus altogether law
for the earth and the changing times of its service . . . But how then does
the power to force eternity to accept the invitation reside in prayer? . . .
Because time which is prepared for the visit of eternity is not the indi-
viduals time, not mine, yours or his secret time: it is everyones time. Day,
week, year belong to everyone in common, are grounded in the worlds
orbit of the earth which patiently bears them all and in the law of labor
on earth which is common to all. The clocks chiming of the hour is for
every ear. (3245/291)
Here two further claims are bound up with the recycling circle: the social
dimension of lived time and the invocation of eternity. They are not haphaz-
ardly linked, however. For Rosenzweig the key to interpreting eternity is
to see it as a social reality, a world to come, a way for individuals and the
community to be bound together in institutions and practices. The univer-
sality of the lived time of a calendar, particularly when the Sabbath requires
all to rest; not just the masters, but also the servants; not just the men, but
also the women; not just the citizens, but also the resident aliens. This public
rhythm of the week embraces all and so marks the sense of eternity in time.
Only at the end of days is everything common, Rosenzweig comments on
this page, and so the common time now is an image, a pre-experience, of
the messianic time.
So far, we would have, then, a circle that repeats, and a moment of inter-
ruption that allows us to see the repetition, to experience it only through
the distended experience of living in time. Not so much a circle, then, as a
kind of gear, or counter. But in the Jewish tradition there is also a calendar
for the year, and that calendar is built out of the weeks. The building up
of the year depends on reading a different portion of the Torah scroll (the
rst ve books of the Bible) each week. Those portions are read in sequence.
Rosenzweig explains how the sequence of sabbatical readings makes a year:
In which the spiritual year is grounded, the recurrence in its recurrence,
of the Sabbath. In the cycle of weekly portions, which in the course of
one year, run through the whole of the Torah, the spiritual year is paced
out, and the paces of this course are the Sabbaths. By and large, every
Sabbath is like every other, but the change in the portions of Scripture
distinguishes each from each, and this lets us know that there is not a
last portion, but that they are only individual parts of a higher order, of
the year. For in the year the individual parts rst again fuse into a whole.
The Sabbath bestows existence [Dasein] on the year. This existence must
be recreated week by week. The spiritual year must always completely
begin in the weekly portions of the running week. It knows, so to speak,
only what is found in this weeks portion, but it will become a year rst
through that, so that each week is only a eeting moment. It is rst in the
course of Sabbaths that the year rounds to a garland. The very regularity
in the course of the Sabbaths, the very fact that, aside from the weekly
portions, one Sabbath is just like the other makes them the cornerstones
of the year. (344/310)
Here is the production of a year. The next week is the same as last week
when viewed as a week. One nishes and it begins again. But a year is
a longer story than a week, and the Jewish year is told with a sequence of
holidays, and even more basically with a course of Sabbaths, each one a
piece of the Torah scroll. Of course, one year is the same as the last, too,
because we read the relevant portions one after the other. The eternity is the
repetition of the Torah, but now the Torah as read in synagogue. It takes
Jews today one year to read the Torah. The narrative is built on the portions
of Torah read, week by week, that make a year of the scroll. And at the end
of the year, the scroll must be re-rolled. The rolling and re-rolling of the
Torah is the image of this circle of Jewish reading. Thus rolling the scroll
is the time that is the performance of eternity. It always begins again, even
when it has just nished. The year is the diagetic time, just long enough to
tell the story of the Torah. The time it takes to read through the scroll is the
measure of the year.
But what of the text read? The portions do not lead up to the present
time. This is not a New York Times bestseller that explains how the USA got
into Iraq. The story told is the history of the world up to the Patriarchs
and Matriarchs, and then up through the birth of the nation (drawn forth
through the waters), the giving of the law, the wandering in the desert and
preparation for entering into the promised land. Although the story is the
story of the Jews, the current readers are not the characters in it. It is set,
even in its textual development, as a history of what happened long ago. The
story told does not connect with the time of its telling. Indeed, the story told
does not lead continuously into the time of the editing of the Torah, or to
the time of its rst public reading under Ezra.
Surely this account of the history of the world up through the birth
of the Israelite nation works as a kind of history because it is unwilling
to collapse the distance between its listeners/readers and the events being
told. But it is not merely that we now perceive a gap between us moderns
and this ancient text: the text itself is built on a gap of time. A gap that is
not bridged by the story. Rosenzweig managed to read Jewish holidays as
following that sequence creationrevelationredemption, showing that the
cycling in our calendar has within it a cycle of a history of past events, events
held in their pastness. This cycle is experienced as weeks of portions of an
earlier story itself rolled up in a scroll. The way to experience eternity is
not by a collapse of this historical gap. Rather, each year the exodus from
Egypt repeats, and each year it seems to be not about us, the readers; (it has
its internal connection to the plagues and the revelation at Sinai), and yet
we readers participate in eternity by listening to it each year. That it takes a
year to read the scroll, gives it a certain kind of narrativity, that each station
on the cycle of our year has its own story, law, genealogy, etc., has its own
bit of Torah, that seems more perplexing.
The waters part year after year on the same week (of the lunar calendar).
Does it mean the same thing to its readers, year after year? No, of course not.
But Jews do not substitute some other event (for instance, the death of Julius
Caesar). Always the same text at the same season, whatever is happening
to the readers. Whatever has happened since last year. (Because what has
happened is the congregation has read to the end of Deuteronomy, re-
rolled the scroll.) The weekly portion is the template of Jewish time, even
though there is no connection from past to present.
But perhaps we have not quite grasped the Torahs own temporality. For
the events that happen there are not governed by necessity but by freedom,
and told by a specic kind of discontinuity. Hardly a chronicle, the Torahs
sequence follows enigmatic construction principles. The beginning, middle
and end are themselves neither a haphazard sequence nor a straight narrative
line. What we do see, however, is that people speak and they act, and they
are surprised by events. Perhaps they are even more surprised than we,
because we have read the story just last year. But if our sequence of reading
is xed, our own lives are not governed by a necessity.
The Hegelian historiography that Rosenzweig rebelled against was one
of world-historical necessity. When Rosenzweig says the Jews are eternal,
or rather have eternal life implanted within them, he is saying, at least, that
they do not participate in the dialectics and the necessities of world-history.
For many people, this has meant that Rosenzweig thinks that Jews and
Judaism have no history of any sort. But I think I can begin to show how
we might release Rosenzweig from this prison.
Jews experience their eternality, the eternal life, by reading each year the
same portion, a portion which always has its own discontinuities within
it and its sense of contingency. That reading alerts us to see our present
moment as also one that is not fated or governed by the sway of world-
history. Whether we are in Babylon or Spain, under emperors, kings, or even
President Bush, we persist in seeing our own time as bound to a template
that resists a reduction to necessity. Messianic hope arises from a Torah
portion promising change and justice and it does not stop short of criti-
cizing the practices and ideas of its narrated time. Indeed, one can consult
biblical historians who recognize the concerns of the redactors, and see the
Torah text itself criticizing the prevalent ideas and practices at the time of
its editing or its rst public reading. The Torah portion messianically breaks
the spell of our present moment, and so makes us free due to the discon-
tinuity between our own moment and the moment of which we read.
This is a calendar of a specic sort because of its mapping onto the Torah
reading. The Torahs own modes of discontinuity and demands for justice,
and dreams of peace, interrupt its story, but our reading of it places a series
of discontinuities into our experience of the year. The year is a set of circles.
At the innermost one is the Torahs text. It follows the patterns of its written
scroll, but what it tells of is fraught with interruptions and even messianic
shards. At the outside is the time of our year, marked out by the portions
of the scroll. The outer circle is the time of reading, not continuous, but set
apart to mark the change of the weeks that as units are alike. The relation
of the inner and outer circles is one of mutual disruption, but performed by
the community.
However, there are two other forms of calendar, and it is in confronting
these that we may nd insight into the specicity of this Jewish calendar.
Every society has its holidays. Rosenzweig acknowledges these as follows:
Here is the place for all of the historical commemorative days [Gedenktage],
in which humanity is conscious of its course through time. Such anni-
versaries change with the changing centuries, are different from place to
place and from government to government; but as long as each one is
celebrated, it is lled with human joy in the living worldly present and
the hope for a still better, still richer, in short a growing life in the future.
For us, the few remembrance days of our peoples history we have, because
they are past, have become permanently xed. (410/368)
These are holidays that are in principle changeable, and indeed, changing.
The Jewish calendar, though built on the rolling of the scroll, also has its
set of holidays, holidays which do not change. Victorias birthday, however,
was not destined to be celebrated after the end of her reign. Pearl Harbor
Day is quickly fading from importance as Martin Luther King Jr Day rises
on the scene. But the need to commemorate is linked here to the future, to
allow past events to enhance our present hope. What is past connects us to
our nation, to our peoples, fashioning a certain resistance to the owing off of
time. But the sequence does not follow a single text, is not marked off by the
sequence within the Torah scroll. And when the Jews add events, they become
utterly xed, and so do not breathe with the sense of adding and dropping
of holidays that show the way that secular communities live in the owing of
time, even that their communities are destined to ow along and disappear.
The retention of the memory is clearly linked to an identifying process. It is
not the simple task of the positivist historian, but it is a more unambiguous
sense of joining ones fate in order to become stronger in the future.
The third calendar, however, makes everything messier. For Rosenzweig
has a strong interpretation of the need for both Judaism and Christianity.
Judaism stays within its own circle, a re burning at the centre of the star,
and Christianity goes forth as rays of light. This mission of Christianity is
to convert the world to the truth of Gods will, to bring the other nations
into a community of redemption. This mission requires Rosenzweig to
articulate both the truth and the limitations of the pagan world. For
Rosenzweig, Christianity is always on the way, always converting pagan
aspects of the nations, but never consummated. Thus the world is not really
split between pagans, Christians and Jews, but only between Jews and the
others. The others are at once pagan and Christian, for becoming Christian
is the history of the world. But the conversion transpires in three dimensions
(borrowing heavily from Schelling). A Petrine church converts the body
and the polity; a Pauline church converts the soul and the mind; and the
Johannine church converts the culture. The third church is the most recent,
dating to the late eighteenth century, and includes Goethe, Schelling and
Hegel as church fathers. So to be Christian in the age of this last church is to
live in a culture that in its very secularity has become Christian (cf. Libert,
Egalit, Fraternit which Rosenzweig derives from the Johanine church).
The rediscovery of the Eastern church and the emancipation of the Jews are
hallmarks of this church. Love of the neighbour and the hurrying of the
kingdom of God are the tasks which have now moved outside the church,
into the streets and the squares, where culture is formed. In a challenging
way, this church does not build or dwell in church buildings, but dissem-
inates throughout the community, recruiting institutions and practices to
the task of redemption. The church in its expansion takes its laws from the
peoples it approaches, and so in this vast secularization, it Christianizes by
recasting institutions that were content to ght the owing on of time (as
pagan temporality does) into institutions that bend time into the cycle of
eternity.
In order to do that Christian calendars must be more than the circles of
the Jewish reading of scripture. They cannot close within themselves, but
must open to the pagan national calendars. And so they do according to
Rosenzweig in a remarkable passage which plots the Christian calendar as
the three-dimensional circle, the conic section in motion, the spiral.
Now the Church takes hold here and joins the celebration. It grows into
the people and its history, in that it accompanies its days of remem-
brance with its blessing. This is a piece of its mission to the nations that
it is pursuing, by throwing its transguring light on the branches of the
national life, it carries out a piece of its work on the way of redemption,
which is never anything else but as the sowing of eternity into the living.
(41011/369)
So Rosenzweig recognizes that the church must baptize the national
holidays of the second calendar. It elevates the temporal markers of the past
into part of an eternal cycle that is, it lets them gain a place in the cycle
of the holidays, a cycle that marks out Christian time as that time that leads
from Creation through revelation in Christ to redemption, which is awaited
as a universal community of redeemed institutions. That cycle appropriates
the wars and regencies and armistices of national life, integrating them into
a cycle that stands beyond the rise and fall of states.
Where it is constituted by national boundaries, it establishes penitential
and prayer days annually or for the great occasions of the peoples life.
Festivals of thanksgiving, celebrations of declarations of war and of
armistices it must join in everywhere. But it also has its own history;
thus the Lutheran Church celebrates its Feast of the Reformation, and
the Roman proclaims yearly its unabated opposition to the heretics in the
festival of Corpus Christi. (Ibid.)
The church as an institution asserts its own calendar along with the national
calendar. That is, not the central points of the Christian calendar (Christmas,
Easter, Pentecost, as well as the year of Sundays), but the holidays of the
specic church itself. The Protestant churches celebrate their founding,
their new beginning. The Roman Catholic Church celebrates the loyalty to
its tradition and its theology of the body of Christ. Indeed for Rosenzweig,
elsewhere, the procession of Corpus Christi becomes emblematic of the
expanding of the church outside the church into the city as the procession
comes forth from the church. But here we have the intercalating of both
church holidays and national holidays because the basic structure of the
circle of Christian holidays requires this addition. The national and church
events are now preserved as commemorated in the yearly cycles.
And the Roman Church most of all has not renounced directly the inter-
weaving into its own life of a sequence of feasts of the church year. It does
this generally with the festivals, which in the course of the life of Mary
mirror the existence of the church itself. And it does this specically even
more in the saints days, which in its limitless capacity to change, adapt
and grow, makes possible a completely intimate bond between it and the
local, the class, and the personal interests of the world, and so it inserts
this temporal and worldly always again into the eternal circle, which even
in these festivals that change with time and place, the eternal way of
redemption through place and time has already for a long time no longer
remained a circle, rather it has opened itself into a spiral. (Ibid.)
And Rosenzweig notes that the paradigm is the Roman Catholic Church
(the Petrine church), which so emphatically interweaves local events, whose
calendar is almost overloaded with saints days. Here we see the temporal
expression of the mission of Christianity: its way takes the pagan seriously,
takes it up into itself and does not merely assimilate it, but more importantly
changes itself. While the Jewish calendar can only integrate a new event by
xing it, and so preserves the notion of a cycling but immutable eternity,
the Christian calendar is expanded and transformed as the outward motion
of the eternal way one encounters new events. Thus the Christian calendar
becomes a spiral, expanding outward each year. It takes in more of time and
allows its messianic futurity to shine on it. Such a spiralling out is neither a
line, nor a circle. It is also neither the dialectic moved by necessity, nor the
bittersweet remembrance of all that must eventually fade away. Rather, the
Christian calendar allows for remembrance and change. It is not constructed,
like the Jewish calendar, around the tension of the inner and the outer. And,
perhaps more interestingly, lacking a xed inner circle, the spiral does not
disrupt itself as radically as the two circles of Jewish reading.
Or does it? We have so little further discussion by Rosenzweig of the spiral
itself that we are left with the general sensation of outward motion. The new
constitution or victory in battle reciprocally coordinates with the traditional
Christian holidays. They are dated by the Christian calendar (itself a transfor-
mation of the Roman): 4 July, or 14 July, or 1 May or, as we all know, 9/11.
These days are dated by the Christian calendar (even in Israel and Brooklyn
where the Jewish calendar is also in place). We remember them in the renewing
context of Christian time. Renewal requires a tension between the old and the
new, and so the next old one, the next pagan institution or pagan nation, to be
confronted by the Christian Western culture, is marked as not-yet Christian.
But the identity of the past is key to negotiating not only that future, but the
instability of the present: for it too is both not-yet Christian and Christian.
When the events enter the calendar, they are marked as one step further out
on the spiral (as being added from the last time around), as being intrinsically
becoming and not achieved. And so the unwinding of the spiral reveals the same
lack of necessity that we found in the circles within circles. A similar sense of the
demand of the messianic to pull it further out, but to whatever comes next.
Let me draw to a close this account of Rosenzweigs calendars. A calendar
repeats and, in so far as it organizes itself, it structures our experience of our
own time through the remembrance of previous events. A pagan calendar
is bound exclusively to the events of ones nation or people, and recalls the
key events in the season in which they occurred, building identity across
temporal gaps. The Jewish calendar breaks the simple linearity (wound
around a wheel), into a complex machine of wheels within wheels. By
generating the present time through the reading of a scroll, Jewish time
stands apart from the events of present time and even of the recent past. It
stakes its sense of temporality on the complex narrativity of the Torah itself.
The discontinuities and challenges of the Torahs text become a model for
experiencing present time, a model not of necessity, but of a messianic call
and interruption. The Christian calendar, on the other hand, opens up into
a spiral, intercalating the pagan/national/church events into the funda-
mental cycle of Christian holidays. The historical is integrated and alters the
Christian year, but the identity of the Christian is plotted against the prior
non-Christian aspect, and so split in two at each moment. The messianic
in the Jewish calendar is the interruptions and the call to justice; in the
Christian calendar, it is the call to expand the spiral and the sense that each
year we have moved around again but also further out.
2 BENJAMINS THESIS XV
If we now return to our text, Thesis XV, we are faced with a series of key
questions for interpreting Benjamins work.
[i] The consciousness of exploding the continuum of history is character-
istic of the revolutionary classes in the moment of their action. The great
revolution introduced a new calendar. [ii] The day, with which a calendar
begins, functions as a historical time-lapse camera. And it is basically
the same day that always returns in the form of festival days, the days of
remembrance [Eingedenkens]. [iii] The calendar, therefore, does not count
time like clocks. They are the monuments of a historical consciousness,
and for a hundred years in Europe not even the slightest trace of them
appears. (GS 1.2: 7012/SW 4: 395)
We begin, easily enough, with the revolutionary sentiment. We can see
that a revolution would require a new calendar, not merely the insertion of
a new holiday in the old calendar. For the change of calendar is a change
in historical consciousness, and altering an old calendar will preserve the
sense of history from the old regime. Not a matter of simply putting in
a new holiday of emancipation, a revolutionary change of calendar is a
refashioning not only of the present institutions but rather a refashioning of
history. In the context of national calendars (the pagan ones of Rosenzweig),
the past as remembered, as recalled from year to year, must be altered in the
moment of revolution. Although, one does sense a shadow of Marxs 18th
Brumaire, in this gesture.
But what I have labelled the second section, [ii] The day, with which
a calendar begins, functions as an historical time-lapse camera. And it is
basically the same day that always returns in the form of festival days, the
days of remembrance [Eingedenkens], requires quite a different reading. The
sense of repetition here is much more focused. Festivals bring the same day
back again, and again. That is, the day remembered becomes the present
moment. Calendars are a special time-machine. Indeed, from the basic
structure of repetition we can move back one sentence to the time-lapse
camera. For there is a rst day in each calendar: New Years Day. Thus we
have two cycles to confront: First, the cycle of the year we are living. It is
tracked along a set of holidays, and begins on New Years Day. But there
is a second cycle, which begins with the event of founding a calendar. Thus
for a Christian calendar, Christmas is the beginning of the liturgical year
(advent leads up to it). For a Jewish calendar, there is New Years Day as a
day of remembrance and a day of judgement! When we desire to break the
hold of the past upon us, we call the day of the revolution day one of month
one. And the history begins from that point and follows its path, which is
plotted around the year we are living. Near the beginning of the Jewish Year
is a holiday called Simchat Torah (Rejoicing in the Torah), and it is the day
that the end of the scroll is read, the scroll is re-rolled to the beginning, and
the beginning is read again In the beginning, God created. . .
The whole year unrolls as an account of the early history of the Israelites.
The time of those events is hurried up to last only one year, and the year that
we read it in follows their story. The time-lapse kind of history requires the
diagetic time that we have in the Jewish calendar (lasting one year), but it
also holds history in consciousness through that diagesis. What is interesting
to Benjamin is that national calendars do that, too. They start at the appro-
priate moment and tell the tale of the history of nation throughout the time
(time-lapse) of a year. Thus they speed up the events of a year, but they do
not reduce it to mere snapshots or collage. The past has a beginning-middle-
and-end that is mapped onto our experience of a year. But a day stands
out in the calendar, and so for Benjamin the time-lapse recoils back to the
notion of the repetition of a specic day. Moreover, it is the strong sense of
remembrance (Eingedenken) that appears here. We are not merely recalling
the past, representing it, but rather returning to it, or holding ourselves in
that moment.
The complexity of remembrance is caught in an early fragment from
the Passagen-Werk where there is a battle against the presumption of every
epoch, culture, movement, etc., that holds itself as the most modern and at
a crisis in history. Remembrance is a way of holding the past in tension with
our present. Benjamin cites the uprising of the anecdote, because it does not
depend on empathy with the tale told, but allows us to see the reality of the
event in our time. He continues:
The true method for making things present is to place them in our space
(and not us in theirs). That is why only anecdotes have the power to move
us. The things, so placed before us, endure no mediating construction
from major connections This is also the sight of major past things
Chartres Cathedral, the temple of Paestum in truth they are received
in our space (no empathy for their builder or priests). We are not trans-
posed in them; they step into our life. The same technique of nearness
is to be observed, calendrically, against epochs. (I, 2)
Anecdotes make the characters come into our world. And so the great
monuments must be entered in our world, and not seen as a time-machine
that takes us back to theirs. They retain their life when we go and see them.
But the calendar also functions this way in relation to epochs. That is, the
past is not some hoary ancient event, but becomes part of our celebrations
and accounting of time. The distant epochs are lived again. Christmas is
not an event two thousand years ago, but rather happens each year with the
birth of new babies in the dark of midwinter. What he calls Eingedenken in
Thesis XV here is vergegenwrtigen a making-present. The calendar draws
the past near: [iii] The calendar, therefore, does not count time like clocks.
They are the monuments of an historical consciousness, and for a hundred
years in Europe not even the slightest trace of them appears. The calendar is
not like a clock, for Benjamin, but we can readily see that it is very much like
a clock for Rosenzweig. The next hour is a repetition of this hour, and the
hour, as we saw, is not the tick-tock of the clock. The clock, it seems to me,
for Benjamin is the inability of time to cycle, but only to move in an empty
way forwards. Precisely because the calendar brings the past forward, brings
it near, it produces our past, that is the past that is alive for us. Calendars
are monumental: public, xed and commemorative.
This notion of historical consciousness is at some distance from the his-
torians and, of course, that has been our concern. In an essay on Baudelaire
from 1939, Benjamin wrote: Correspondences are the data of remembrance
[Eingedenkens]. These are not historical but rather the data of prehistory.
What makes festival days grand and meaningful is the encounter with an
earlier life (GS 1.2: 638/SW 4: 3334). We will return to correspondences (a
term of Baudelaires), but here we see a notion of festival days that connects
not to historical events, but to prehistorical ones, events that have a hold on
us not because of their historical connection to us, but because they form
our categories of temporal existence. Like the visit to ancient sites, they are
a way for a past that exceeds the continuum of historical memory to intrude
into our time.
And calendars are also punctuated, in the way that Rosenzweig noted.
Benjamin later comments:
Chronology, which subordinates duration to uniformity, still cannot
forgo letting heterogeneous exceptional fragments occur within it. To
have united the recognition of a quality with the measure of a quantity
is the work of the calendar, which leaves the space for remembrance as it
were with the holidays. (GS 1.2: 642/SW 4: 336)
Even the practice of marking off time as uniform, in the clock and calendar,
leaves extraneous bits. The heart of the calendar are the empty spaces, the
holidays. There quantity and quality merge, by breaking up, in a regular
way, the monotony of the standard units. The calendar is public, orderly, but
somehow heterogeneous. Rosenzweigs clocks chiming, weekly Sabbaths and
seasonal festivals all serve Benjamin by opening a space where the historical
continuum is broken open in a break in the temporal continuum.
But, says, Benjamin, they are no longer to be found in Europe (Thesis XV).
Here is the key conict with the Rosenzweigian account: for Rosenzweig
held that the calendars are still doing their thing. That people live their own
time through the calendar. Surely we still have calendars! But Benjamins
point is more severe: the past does not live in the calendar anymore. The
modern culture has dispensed with the religious dimension of the calendar
particularly. That recent past, for Benjamin, is the time of the industrial and
consumerist transformation of Europe. Rosenzweig may have an accurate
picture of how the Jewish liturgical calendar is supposed to function, and
by extension other calendars, too, but the culture of Europe has abandoned
that manner of experiencing time and remembering history. Benjamin here
appears as the critic not of Rosenzweigs theory of calendars and memory,
but of the world which has moved away, beyond, below such means of
remembering.
Perhaps we can, with the help of Rosenzweigs three calendars, see just
what is now lost. That is, the Jewish eternal calendar might still suit the
small set of traditional Jews, who are eager to live outside of world-political
time. But it is hard to live through the 1930s and not conclude that that
calendar has become defunct, even for the religious Jews, and of course,
Benjamins world is lled with liberal and post-liberal Jews, for whom the
religious calendar holds no promise. Judgement Day is no longer New Years
Day for his world.
The key question is whether the enlarging spiral of Christianity as it
opens out to the secular world functions with its calendar. Does the spread
of Western culture bring about the progress on the way to the messianic, or,
on the contrary, has the spiral lost its bearings and become the spread of one
more pagan tale of war and conquest? While Rosenzweig offers true insight
into the development of modern culture, as a Jew looking at the secular-
ization of Christianity, Benjamin offers quite another prospect. In an early
essay on Naples, he considers a kind of dissolution of the separation of week
and Sabbath:
This music is a remnant of the last and a prelude to the subsequent
holiday. Irresistibly the festival permeates every work day. Porosity is the
law of this life, inexhaustibly to be discovered anew. A grain of Sunday is
hidden in every week day and how much week day is in this Sunday! (GS
4.1: 311/SW 1: 417)
Benjamin nds a special kind of secularization, where the Christian goes
over into the pagan and the pagan inltrates the Christian. This has,
quite obviously, a similarity to Rosenzweigs account of the spiral, but for
Benjamin the weekly calendar cannot hold out against the modern reality
of Naples. While the holy is diffused into the profane, the Sunday also is
released from its purity. Life pulses across the lines of a calendar, and in
general the festival becomes not merely the telos of each day (live for the
weekend), but actually dissolved into the everyday. The saints days of
Rosenzweigs calendar are marshalled by Benjamin to exhaust the weeks
structure. For Benjamin the calendar that spiralled out has all-but disin-
tegrated. Hence the punch-line in the thesis: for a hundred years in Europe
not even the slightest trace of them appears.
The Theses are written after more than a decade of research into the
emergence of the modern as a process of developing consumerism, ad-
vertising, mass production and mass marketing, all explored in the context of
the Passagen of Paris. It would be absurd to draw up a one-line description of
the passage from Christian culture to consumer culture and the radical loss of
remembrance and calendar, but it is far from obvious that it can be compared
with Rosenzweigs sense of an expanding spiral. The expanse of capitalism,
the colonization of desire, the impossibility of just social relations these all
lead Benjamin toward a profound desire for a messianic interruption.
But if we step aside from the profound critique that Benjamin would offer
to Rosenzweigs spiralling Christianity, we might still see how the calendar
casts an important shadow for Benjamin. I do not wish to overemphasize
here the relation to Rosenzweig. Benjamin did read and admire The Star of
Redemption, but Rosenzweig was not the only theorist of calendars. What
we look for in the calendar, however, is something beyond the mere circle.
The messianic quality is how the eternal inserts itself into time, not arresting
temporality but punctuating it and allowing us to live messianically. That
the calendar might have served that function for the Jews is not Benjamins
concern. Rather, he struggles with a mode of remembering that can allow
that messianic punctuality in an unredeemed present.
It is not surprising, then, that it is in relation to Baudelaire, and particu-
larly the poem Correspondances, that Benjamin writes about the calendar,
and also about the failure of the calendar. The quotation above claimed:
Correspondences are the data of remembrance [Eingedenkens]. These are
not historical but rather the data of prehistory. What makes festival days
grand and meaningful is the encounter with an earlier life (GS 1.2: 638/SW
4: 3334). Baudelaires correspondences are between archaic monuments,
temples, hieroglyphs, etc., not simultaneous links. They are not quite
history, but rather the recollection of juxtapositions from the archaic past
to the present. In Baudelaire, moreover, they remain suspended. Benjamin
notices that the correspondences also fail, that the modern world corrodes
the possibility for a linking to the prehistory. But Baudelaires writing
evokes the no longer accessible correspondence. If Rosenzweigs calendar can
envision the disruption of two historical sequences, the interruption of the
messianic then and now, then Baudelaire offers Benjamin a way of marking
the jumps from then to now that do not quite connect, that have been
corroded by the emergence of modern society. But Baudelaire still strives to
capture the correspondence in art, even the failed correspondence.
Benjamins historical work produces a new possibility for a remembering,
drawing on Baudelaire as well as Rosenzweig. The acts of remembrance
can be carried further in the work of the historian a work that is not the
task of an isolated consciousness, but of a socially located interpreter. While
Rosenzweig had hoped to resuscitate the Jewish community in Germany at
the end of the First World War, Benjamin despairs of that community and
indeed of the modern society while living in Paris on the eve of the Second
World War. What is more important for us, however, is how the structuring
of interruption that Rosenzweig discovered can become a way, even a task,
for the historian.
Benjamin collected a set of theoretical reections in a folder entitled
Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress. These reections are roughly
contemporaneous with the Theses, and while they are also among the most
commented-upon texts in his writings, we can attend to the specic relation
to the calendar, and specically to the circles within circles of the Jewish
calendar. If we imagine those circles scattered, so that each circle has disin-
tegrated, neither one held together by the practice of the other, we can begin
to see how the dialectical images might be conceived.
The historical index of the images says not only that they belong to a
determinate time, it says, above all, that they rst become legible in a
determinate time. And indeed this to be legible is reached in a deter-
minate critical point in the motion into its interior. Every present is
determined through these images, those that are synchronic with it: every
now is the now of a determinate knowability. In it the truth is loaded with
time to the point of exploding. (This explosion, is nothing other than
the death of the intention, which coincides therefore with the birth of
genuine historical time, the time of truth.) (N3, 1)
The primary insight is that there is a moment of our present at which a
specic interpretation or reading of a previous event becomes possible.
Just as there is a week in the year when the exodus from Egypt is read,
there is a moment of crisis or decision in which earlier events yield new
interpretations and new possibilities. The present then offers a specic set
of possible readings, possibilities that exceed any account of intentionality
in the original events, artworks, institutions, etc. The now is constituted
in relation to new versions of the past. But the key, for Benjamin, is that the
two do not collapse.
It is not that what is past throws its light on what is present, or that what
is present throws its light on what is past, rather the image is that in which
the past and the present meet in a lightning ash in a constellation. In other
words: image is the dialectic at a standstill. While the relation of the present
to the past is a purely temporal one, the relation of the gone to the now is
a dialectical one: its nature is not temporal but imaged. Only dialectical
images are genuinely historical, that means, not archaic images. (N2a, 3)
The two remain apart, and do not illuminate each other (they do not
consummate a correspondence). Rather, they collide in an image, a specic
conjunction of the past and the present. Stripped out of the cycles of litur-
gical calendars, we still have a moment of arrest in the present (and in the
past). The two moments interrupt each other. This rhythm is structured so
that the past and present are related without becoming identied. It is not
that the present is assimilated to the past, a mythic repetition of what has
already happened where the past throws its light on what is present. For
the pasts light would only show in the present what the past had already
contained, and so the present moment would be subsumed. But similarly,
the present does not merely nd itself transported into the past, where the
present throws its light on what is past. At each now there is a new reading
of a past image, but what is read is not identical or necessarily easily assim-
ilated into the present. Like a calendrical moment, the past and present
meet, but now only in a ash, without the hours beginning, middle and
end. The juxtaposition is not, as in Rosenzweig, a gure (Gestalt), but rather
a constellation, a set of discrete stars. The ash prevents any dialectic that
has its own necessary motor, its own ongoing, progressive zigzag through
suffering and reconciliation. To interrupt the dialectic is to catch dialectic at
a standstill a relation of past and present that borrows no dynamic inherent
connectivity. Which is not to say that it is merely a positing of two points
in time. From the present to the past is temporal: looking back measures a
time that is elapsed, a gap from here to there. But the past is related to the
present through its legibility in the now. The gone is not merely directed
toward a future which now occurs, but is rather itself bound up with the
now of reading in so far as the past is past. Thus the past appears through
the image, through a dialectical relation with the present; while the present
looks back in a simply temporal way. History has become these dialectical
images, in contrast to the archaic images. The latter would be the images
that do not measure the distance that time marks, but merely repeat a
non-temporal myth obliterating time, change and the discontinuity that
governs the signifying of the past.
But the historian engages, then, in a specic kind of remnant of the
calendar. And while Rosenzweig could nd eternity entering time and, indeed,
the messianic interrupting in a social practice, for Benjamin modernity has
debased the calendar, leaving the historian the task of framing the dialectical
images, of engaging in the danger of a reading doubling of then and now.
Here arises that weak messianic force of Thesis II. In contrast to a strong
force, which could force the future with a social movement or revolution, the
historian struggles to redeem the past, and in redeeming the past to unstick
the present from its seemingly necessary future.
Our nal question, however, then turns to the relation of the messianic
as a theological category and its reactivation as a historiographic practice.
The fascination for the scholars of Benjamin has lain in the question of how
theological his work is. The texts are familiar the ink blotter, the midget,
the promise in Thesis B of the straight gate and, if not overworked, at
least well-explored. Benjamin is emphatic about being theological. But he
surely is not pious, nor engaged in Rosenzweigs renaissance. If we put him
in the context of Buber, Scholem and Rosenzweig, he shares a passion about
theology and the exigencies of the messianic. But of all four of those, his
work holds a special fascination for us: in our moment of reading. I suggest
that the ghost, the spectre of theology has a great appeal for us. For many
of us, religious renaissance is beyond our range. Such a holiday calendar has
become impossible. It is like an artefact of a vanished civilization. Except
that the calendars still lurk behind our deformed working calendar. The act
of remembrance that binds our events with those of the past, dialectically
and with the needed standstill, is lacking in our calendar. But we yearn for
it, with Yom Ha Shoah (Holocaust Day), and with 9/11 we want to be
able to remember in that messianic way, where the press forward of time
is arrested by a breakup of history in the past. The triumph of chronology
of the line leads us to desire a simple circle. And in such a moment the
practice of the circle within the circle (and the spiral), serves as a critique
of lines and simple circles. Benjamin remembers those holiday circles in the
midst of framing his own dialectics of points. They offer a dialectic of past
and present that opens the future more radically than the simple circles of
fate and the liberal myth of progress. They charge the present with some gap
from the past, exploding the continuum of history and, if they are no longer
potent, re-examining them alerts Benjamin and his readers to a messianic
dialectical relation with the past. The messianic charge from the spinning
of the circles is now dispersed into the dialectical images.
13
NON-MESSIANIC POLITICAL
THEOLOGY IN BENJAMINS ON
THE CONCEPT OF HISTORY
HOWARD CAYGILL
The theses that comprise On the Concept of History describe a constel-
lation made up of the crossing of persistent themes in Benjamins thought
with contemporary political events. His reections on the collapse of the
European Left in the face of fascism as well as the HitlerStalin pact are
modulated through a persistent fascination with, and enquiry into, political
theology. His thoughts on social democracy and communism are thus shaped
by a deeper meditation upon the possible relationship between historical
materialism and theology. However, the character of this relationship in the
On Concept of History is usually framed in terms of the question of the
present and immediate future of revolutionary action, framed as the choice
between catastrophe and the messianic end of history. However, another
understanding of the future is also possible, one that complicates this choice
by means of locating political theology in a cosmo-politics dedicated to the
liberation not only of humanity, but also of the whole of creation.
The rst thesis establishes a complicated scenario regarding the relationship
between historical materialism and theology. Thesis I is about the famous
chess-playing automaton who could respond to every move of a chess-player
with a counter-move and always win. The puppet with the hookah made
the moves on a table under which, concealed by mirrors, sat a hunchbacked
dwarf who controlled the puppet. There are many enigmatic features to this
scenario Benjamin had already played with the theme of the hidden dwarf
who controlled illusion in Rastellis Story (SW 3: 96) but the terms of the
analogy that he goes on to draw are fairly clear. He imagines a philosophical
counterpart to this apparatus in which the puppet is historical materialism
and the dwarf theology which today, as we know, is small and ugly and has
to be kept out of sight. Together, historical materialism and theology can
win all the time, political theology thus providing a winning combination.
The nature of the political theology or combination of historical
materialism and theology intimated in philosophical counterpart to the
chess-playing automaton is usually sought in the discussion of the messianic
in Thesis XVIII with which the On Concept of History ends. The evoca-
tions of messianic time, and the notion of a messianic break between
present and future in Thesis XVIII are prepared in Theses XVXVII
which reect on breaks and the revolutionary. The last ve theses certainly
provide an astonishing vision of revolutionary political theology, but it
is one whose power emerges from a contrast with the political theology
explored in Theses VIIIXIII. These theses are more diagnostic, analysing
the catastrophe confronting the angel of history and the limits of the social
democratic response to it.
Theses VIIIXIII begin by evoking the understanding of the tradition
of the oppressed that the Ausnahmezustand (state of emergency) is not the
exception but the rule and end with a critique of social democracy. Social
democracy is criticized not only for its concept of progress against which
is poised the philosophy of history as a revolutionary, messianic break but
also for its political and economic conformism. The attempt to achieve
democratic reform of the state apparatus that characterized social democratic
political action during the Weimar Republic is dismissed by Benjamin as
contributing to the eventual success of fascism, but underlying both the
concept of progress and the practice of reformism was a more fundamental
limitation regarding the concept of work and through it of the relationship
to nature. Of this relationship and its concomitant faith in the development
of technology Benjamin notes, in Thesis XI, that the old Protestant ethic
[protestantische Werkmorale] celebrated its resurrection among German
workers in secularized form.
It is striking that the critical discussion of social democracy in the
middle theses of the Concept of History is framed by references to two
central concepts of non-Marxist political theology Carl Schmitts state
of emergency and Max Webers Protestant ethic. Max Webers The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) may indeed be said to
have provoked, or at least provided a locus for the reinvention of political
theology in the early twentieth century.
1
It was important not only for
provoking the alternative formulation of political theology developed by
Schmitt, but also in fundamentally changing Benjamins own views on the
political theology of capitalism. The importance of Webers thesis for the
development of Benjamins thought and his analysis of capitalism in the
On Concept of History is evident from an analysis of his 1921 fragment
Capitalism as Religion (SW 1: 28891).
Capitalism as Religion is remarkable in many ways, not least for its
provocative radicalization of Max Webers Protestant ethic thesis. The
fragment is pivotal in the development of Benjamins thought, closing
a period of reection on social and political theory that began in 1916
and opening up avenues of enquiry that were to occupy him up to, and
including, On the Concept of History. The analysis of Reformation culture
Non-Messianic Political Theology in On the Concept of History 217
in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) and the theory of the techno-
logical body in One Way Street (1928) as well as the analyses of the fetish
commodity in the Arcades Project (192840) were all responses to questions
provoked by this fragment, and thus indirectly by the political theology
of Weber. It marks an important turn in the development of Benjamins
political theology whose consequences still inform the On Concept of
History.
Capitalism as Religion closed a phase of social, political and religious
reection that was rooted in Benjamins principled opposition to the First
World War and his exile in Switzerland. Benjamins focus on issues of political
theology, notably the critique of theocracy, was indebted to a diverse range of
inuences ranging from the new thinking represented by a group of writers
working in the philosophy and sociology of religion comprising Florens
Christian Rang, Eugen Rosenstock and Franz Rosenzweig to the Catholic
Dadaism of Hugo Ball, the neo-Marxism of Ernst Bloch and above all the
utopian science ction of Paul Scheerbart. While only fragments from this
period have survived the major work, Die wahre Politiker, inspired by the
ideas of Scheerbart being lost it is nevertheless possible to trace an outline
of the main concerns of Benjamins political theology from what remains.
This will provide the context for understanding his interpretation of Webers
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and also the reason for its
shattering impact on his thought.
The overall direction of Benjamins early political theology is evident in
a series of ve numbered reections from 191920, the rst, World and
Time, giving the editors title to the entire collection. The rst reection on
revelation and its relationship to the end of history introduces the overall
problem of the place of the divine in the secular or temporal sphere. The
exploration of this problem begins with a critique of the political theology
of Catholicism. Benjamin criticizes Catholicism for its ecclesiastical organ-
ization or the (false, secular) theocracy (SW 1: 226). The establishment of
the church is described as the process of the development of anarchy since
authentic divine power can manifest itself other than destructively only in the
world to come (the world of fullment) (SW 1: 226). Here Benjamin adopts
the position of the adversaries of the church criticized by Augustine in the
City of God, the foundational text of ecclesiology.
Benjamin radicalizes his opposition by applying his critique of theocracy
to any form of legally regulated social organization. The implications of this
step become evident in the Critique of Violence (published, like the original
1905 essay by Weber in the Archiv fr Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik
in 1921) where divine violence is held to be destructive of all law. In this
text Benjamin focuses on the destructive, revolutionary aspect of divine
violence, whereas in World and Time he pays more attention to the slow
self-destruction of theocracy. Benjamin claims that where divine power
enters the world it breathes destruction whether in its revolutionary or its
organized forms since in this world nothing constant and no organisation
can be based on divine power, let alone domination as its supreme principle
(SW 1: 226). While the basis of this claim is nowhere explicitly defended at
length by Benjamin, it is evidently a forceful if underdeveloped critique of
any attempt to give a transcendental legitimacy to an organizational form,
whether it be church or political party.
Benjamin follows the rejection of Catholic political theology with his
own denition of politics as the fullment of an unimproved humanity
(SW 1:226). The premise of his politics is the same as that of the church
whose sacraments are directed to the fullment of sinful or unimproved
humanity but the consequences Benjamin draws are radically opposed.
He lls out his denition of politics with a reection on the Mosaic laws.
For him, the Ten Commandments are not theocratic profane legislation
decreed by religion but rather legislation governing the realm of the body
in the broadest sense . . . they determine the location and method of direct
divine intervention (SW 1: 226). It is on the border of this intervention that
Benjamin locates the zone of politics, of the profane, of a bodily realm that
is without law in a religious sense (SW 1: 226). The distinction between the
divine and the profane legislations of the body the latter being political
but without law presents severe problems to Benjamin, both within World
and Time itself, but more intensely after reading Weber, whose thesis
precisely breaks down the distinction between the religious and the secular
governance of the body.
The fourth of the series of reections in World and Time begins to
unravel the distinction between a divine immediacy and the zone of politics.
First of all, in its present state, the social is a manifestation of spectral and
demonic powers (SW 1: 227), that is, the zone of politics already stands
in a relation to the divine. This is exemplied in the Critique of Violence by
the institution of the police as a nowhere tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly
presence in the life of civilized states ruling in the interstices between
sovereign and executive power. This position might be consistent with
Benjamins critique of theocracy whose object is precisely such illegitimate
mediations of the divine in the secular or profane realm.
Yet the problem of how to detect, criticize or overcome this theocratic
tendency is avoided. Benjamin instead insists on the immediacy of revelation:
The divine manifests itself in only in revolutionary force. Only in the
community [Gemeinschaft], nowhere in social organisations does the
divine manifest itself either with force or without (SW 1: 227). Such a
criterion for the separation of divine and profane is not itself immune to
theocratic abuse for every theocracy legitimates its organization by the
claim of divine manifestation to the community it serves/dominates. This
holds not only for ecclesiastical but also for political theocracies, as when,
in the Critique of Violence, Benjamin identies the divine community with
the anarchistic proletarian general strike in which the proletariat is the
self-present Gemeinschaft capable of giving the divine immediate expression.
There is nothing in his argument that would prevent it being appropriated
by a Leninist party (according to his theory a theocracy) that would create
the working-class community (proletarian class-consciousness) capable of
the general strike.
It is then not surprising that in World and Time Benjamin straightaway
qualies the appeal to immediate community by transferring the manifesta-
tions of the divine from the sphere of political action to those of perception
and the word: Such manifestations are to be sought not in the sphere of
the social but in perception oriented toward revelation and, rst and last,
in language, sacred language above all (SW 1: 227). Here certain forms of
religious and literary expression are preferred to political action as direct
manifestations of the divine, but this qualication only provokes further
problems. All theocracies will claim theoretical legitimation of their claims
over the community on the basis of privileged knowledge or capacity of
expression. By locating revelation in perception and the word, Benjamin
opens the possibility of a theoretical, religious and aesthetic avant-garde,
whose prescriptions, if applied to social action, could only lapse back
into theocratic legislations. He accordingly concludes the reections with
problems for further reection: The question of manifestation is central
(SW 1: 227) in other words, the question of whether revelation can ever be
immediate, or whether it is always already mediated and organized.
The last word of World and Time is the claim that there is no essential
distinction between religion and religious denomination, but the later concept
is narrow and in most cases peripheral (SW 1: 227). With this Benjamin
masks the essentially Protestant inclination of his critique of theocracy and
its debt to the new thinking. The severe qualication of the claims of the
church over the individual believer and the separation of church and state
in Protestant ecclesiology pointed (in theory) to the critique of theocracy
mounted by Benjamin. His interpretation of the Ten Commandments is
Protestant in distinguishing between an area of direct divine governance of
the body and a separate zone of politics that is the site for politics as the
fullment of an improved humanity (SW 1: 226). However, this under-
standing of the separation of the divine and the secular was to be severely
challenged by Webers thesis which shows the attenuation, if not collapse, of
any theoretical transcendence through the routine practice of Protestantism.
Benjamin approached the reading of Webers Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism from the standpoint of his critique of theocracy, but
found that Webers thesis challenged the very grounds of his critique, and
thus the social and political theory that he was in the process of devel-
oping. Benjamin read Webers text in the context of the 191920 edition
of Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion and was thus aware of the
broader implications of the thesis and of Webers organizing concept of the
economic ethic. The specic analysis of the economic ethic of capitalism
led Weber to analyse the relationship between the spirit of capitalism and
Calvinist Protestantism in terms of Goethes concept of elective afnity
(Wahlverwandschaft).
Weber analysed the elective afnity between Protestantism and capitalism
in terms of the partial translation/mutation of a rigorous religious doctrine
into everyday economic behaviour. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism (especially in the remarkable footnotes) Weber described how
the rigorously transcendent doctrine of predestination was translated into
the secular concept of the vocation. The anxieties provoked in the early
generation of Protestants by the inscrutability of the divine will in its choice
of the elect and its relation to earthly business and social concerns led the
Calvinist spiritual advisers to elaborate as series of casuistic responses that,
Weber showed, crystallized into an economic ethic. In Benjamins terms, what
was at stake was the adaptation of the divine to the earthly social and realm,
or the systematic breakdown of the limits between the zones of the divine and
the political. From Benjamins viewpoint, what was even more striking about
Webers thesis was that the adaptation of divine to the secular was not accom-
plished by means of a theocratic organization such as state or church, but by
means of a decentralized economic ethic tangible only in its effects.
The opening sentence of Benjamins response to Weber recapitulates
one of Webers theses: that the economic ethic of capitalism serves essen-
tially to allay the same anxieties, torments and disturbances to which the
so-called religions offered answers (SW 1: 288). However, prompted by
the Protestant ethic Benjamin drew an even more radical conclusion from
this than Webers own cautious claims for an elective afnity between
Protestantism and capitalism. For Benjamin, capitalism is not merely,
as Weber believes, a formation conditioned by religion, but an . . . essen-
tially religious phenomenon (SW 1: 289). In effect, Benjamin proposes
to transform Webers elective afnity into an identity Protestantism and
capitalism are not mutually related, but are identical. Such an interpretation
of Goethes concept as a veiled identity was developed by Benjamin in his
essay Goethes Elective Afnities (see SW 1: 346 and 35051), written at the
same time as Capitalism as Religion. While Weber, in the concluding lines
of his essay, regarded capitalism as having cast off its religious origins and to
have relegated its elective afnity with religion to its past, Benjamin believed
it to have itself become a religion.
More is at stake in Benjamins difference with Weber than the inter-
pretation of one of Goethes aesthetic concepts. By unifying capitalism and
religion Benjamin is acknowledging the dissolution of the separation of
the divine and the secular. This dissolution, moreover, is more serious even
than the theocratic organization of the divine represented by Catholicism,
since with capitalism as religion the divine invades not only the zone of
the political but also the realm of the body. The implication is that one
of the organizing distinctions of Benjamins political thought has broken
down before the realization that capitalism a form of social and political
organization is religion and that, consequently, it fulls the denition
of theocracy. The secularization thesis is here inverted: it is is not that the
secular takes over the space vacated by the religious, but that the religious
becomes identied with the secular.
Benjamin surveys the implications of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism for his social and political theory through two routes: a
critique of Webers account of the genesis of capitalism and a description
of the structural characteristics of capitalism as religion. The basic claim
is that the Christianity of the Reformation period did not favour the
growth of capitalism; instead it transformed itself into capitalism (SW 1:
290). This is of course opposed to Weber, who saw the elective afnity
between capitalism and Protestantism as one of a number of factors for
the development of modern capitalism. Additional important factors for
Weber included the bureaucratization of political administration, the rise of
standing armies and military discipline and changes in broader economic
organization. Benjamin, however, insists that Capitalism has developed as
a parasite of Christianity . . . until it reached the point where Christianitys
history is essentially that of its parasite that is to say, of capitalism (SW
1: 289). The questions raised in these genetic claims and their reduction
of elective afnity to identity are claried by Benjamins structural view of
capitalist religion.
Benjamin claims that there are three aspects of the religious structure of
capitalism (although he adds a fourth, a secret codicil): it is (1) a cult that
(2) makes total claims on its members through (3) creating guilt and not
atonement (SW 1: 288). In the rst place, Benjamin claims that capitalism
is a religious practice, or cult rather than a church: capitalism has no
specic body of dogma, no theology (SW 1: 288). It is not a theocracy in
the sense of the Catholic Church that distributes salvation according to a
theologically legitimated system of sacraments. Nevertheless, capitalism is
perhaps the most extreme [cultic religion] that ever existed (SW 1: 288) in
that its claims are total: things have meaning only in their relationship to
the cult (SW 1: 288), or, in the language of historical materialism, exchange
value dominates use value. Another aspect of the total character of the
cult is that it has no weekdays, for there is no day that is not a feast day
. . . each day commands the utter fealty of each worshipper (SW 1: 288).
Benjamin sustains this ruthless inversion of Webers secularization thesis by
his third structural claim, that capitalism is a religion that creates guilt/debt
(Schuld).
Benjamin devotes most attention to the third claim, pushing Webers
view of the iron cage of modern bureaucratic capitalism to its limit
through reections on Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. Central to his argument
is the expansive character of capitalism, here interpreted not only on a
global but even on a cosmic scale. Benjamin understands capitalism as not
only creating guilt/debt through its reduction of all value to money or the
measure of exchange value, but also as universalizing guilt/debt to implicate
even God in universal despair: Capitalism is entirely without precedent, in
that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete
destruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair itself becomes
a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation
(SW 1: 289). At this point, God is not dead but has been incorporated
into human existence or has become totally immanent: for Benjamin this
moment marks the end of the epoch of the human and the beginning of
the superhuman.
Benjamins observation that Nietzsches superman is the rst to recognize
the religion of capitalism and to bring it to fullment (SW 1: 289) offers
an important clue to his understanding of the cultic nature of capitalism
as religion. For Nietzsche, the superman is the one capable of willing the
eternal return rather than suffer it as the greatest weight. Consequently,
it can be assumed that the cultic ritual of capitalism for Benjamin is
repetition. The suffering of this repetition (as in Webers prediction of
the millennial future of the iron cage) as a burden is contrasted with its
afrmation that effects a transformation, creating something new in an
afrmed repetition. Thus Benjamin can claim that Nietzsches superman
is both the afrmation and destruction of capitalism as religion. On the
one hand, the paradigm of capitalist religious thought is magnicently
formulated in Nietzsches philosophy, while on the other the idea of the
superman transposes the apocalyptic leap not into conversion, atonement,
purication and penance, but into an apparently steady, though in the nal
analysis explosive and discontinuous intensication (SW 1: 289). Benjamin
sees a similar outcome in Marx, namely that a capitalism that is afrmed
as capitalism already becomes something else: Marx is a similar case: the
capitalism that refuses to change course becomes socialism by means of the
simple and compound interest that are functions of Schuld (SW 1: 289).
So with Freud, the intensication of repetition qualitatively transforms
inherited guilt/debt.
Benjamins readings of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud in terms of their
alleged views on the self-overcoming of capitalism rest on a logic dependent
on the fourth appropriately concealed feature of capitalism as religion. This
concerns the demonic character of capitalism the fact that the secret of its
destruction is hidden. Benjamin claims that capitalisms God is hidden from
it and may be addressed only when his guilt is at its zenith the secret of the
divinity of capitalism lies in its immaturity (SW 1: 129). Capitalism extends
its measure of value to the point where the universe has been taken over by
that despair that is actually its secret hope (SW 1: 289). When there is only
repetition then the afrmation of it creates a novelty and thus breaks the
immanence of repetition. It is at this zenith of immanence that divinity can
be afrmed and become again transcendent. For Benjamin this may consist
in the Nietzschean superman afrming eternal return, or the proletariat
realizing itself as the subjectobject of history at its stage of maximum
reication (to use the language of Georg Lukcs contemporary History and
Class Consciousness).
The catastrophic or nihilistic logic described by Benjamin marked a
desperate response to his interpretation and intensication of Webers
Protestant ethic thesis. In the face of such total theocratic immanence,
intensication might appear to provide the only avenue of transcendence. It
is a reading that is far from faithful to Weber, although it brings out some
interesting implications of the Protestant ethic thesis. But it was an interpre-
tation largely governed by the early development of Benjamins social and
political thought. His early critique of theocracy related the divine to organi-
zational structures such as church or state and not to broader social and
economic organization. Webers Protestant ethic, however, forced Benjamin
to entertain the prospect of a broader social and economic diffusion of
theocratic structures. Benjamin took literally Webers citation of Sebastian
Brandts ironic comment on Luther who in leaving the monastery left us all
monks. Capitalism, far from being an agent of secularization, might itself be
a mutated form of religion, and if so, then the possibilities for revolutionary
action were narrow or only conceivable in catastrophic or nihilistic terms.
The sense of reaching an impasse in Capitalism as Religion is supported
by Benjamin interrupting his explicit work on social and political theory
and turning to other interests. But the thesis of capitalism as religion was
not abandoned, nor the possibility for a non-theocratic politics, nor the
active nihilism of revolution as catastrophe. The Origin of German Tragic
Drama takes up again the theme of the political theology of the Counter-
Reformation and Protestantism, examining it in terms of the mourning
play (Trauerspiel). Benjamin reads forgotten Protestant mourning plays,
in the same way that Weber read Protestant moral casuistry, as evidence
of the tormented negotiation of the removal of God from the world.
However, by identifying the organizing principle of the mourning play
as repetition and the stylistic mode as allegorical, Benjamin was able to
nd an exit from despair in the intensied repetition of repetition that
deprives meaninglessness itself of meaning. The allegorical nihilism that
strips transcendence of any signicance and makes all meaning immanent
to itself breaks down when its immanence or transitoriness is not
signied or allegorically presented, so much as its own signicance as
allegory (OT, p. 233). With this, the Protestant contemplation of the
vanity of a world without God faithlessly leaps forward to the idea of
resurrection (OT, p. 232).
In the contemporaneous One Way Street Benjamin intimated another
line of social and political argument that contrasted with the catastrophic
revolution of the mourning play. Returning to an approach opened in
World and Time but left unexplored, Benjamin sought a means of escape
from Nietzschean active nihilism through considering the zone of politics
that governed the body without religious law in terms of technology. In
the concluding section, To the Planetarium, Benjamin describes the devel-
opment of the superhuman not in terms of willing repetition but through
the emergence of a new technological relation between nature and the
human:
Men as species completed their development thousands of years ago; but
mankind as a species is just beginning his. In technology, a physis is being
organised through which mankinds contact with the cosmos takes a new and
different form from that which it had in nations and families. (SW 1: 487)
The technological physis or zone of the political reorganized the relationship
of humanity to the cosmos in a different way to the catastrophic nihilism
of the bermensch. Instead of poising social and political action upon the
single decision at the zenith of catastrophe, the technological body was in a
state of continuous emergence. Yet the energies in terms of speed and power
released by its development could become destructive if abused. Benjamin
ends One Way Street with the transcendent energies released by technology
ready to realize themselves in a new covenant between man and the cosmos
or annihilate themselves in warfare.
The sense of an imminent crisis requiring a decision that emerged
from the reading of Weber is similar to that arrived at by Carl Schmitt in
his Political Theology.
2
The proximity between Benjamin and Schmitts
thought, exemplied by the letter to Schmitt when Benjamin sent him a
copy of The Origin of German Tragic Drama (You will quickly notice how
much this book, in its exposition of the doctrine of sovereignty, owes to
you) may also be traced to the debates around the Protestant ethic in the
early 1920s. The rst three chapters of Schmitts Political Theology (there
are four) Denition of Sovereignty The Problem of Sovereignty as the
Problem of the Legal Form and of the Decision and Political Theology
originally appeared as Sociology of the Concept of Sovereignty in a
collection of essays in memory of Weber, Erinnerungsgabe fr Max Weber.
3
Schmitt argues here and elsewhere, that the state completes the Reformation
taking over from the church the power of absolute decision.
Schmitts rigorous and implacable analysis of the transformation of
church into absolute state as the outcome of the Reformation is not only a
fundamental criticism of Webers thesis but also a strange complement to
Benjamins argument in Capitalism as Religion. For Benjamin, religion
was identied with capitalism, while for Schmitt the state is identied with
capitalism. Benjamin would experiment with Schmitts thesis in The Origin
of German Tragic Drama, but in the gure of the mad sovereign would show
the identication of religion and state to lead not to decision but to madness.
At the same time, however, in One Way Street, he was developing another
account of political theology based on a technological cosmopolitics. His
Arcades Project of the 1930s would develop further this project.
In the Arcades Project Benjamin attempted to bring together the theocratic
and technocratic strands of his political theology. The project tries to explain
why the utopian social and political potential of technology intimated in the
Parisian arcades of the early decades of the nineteenth century was not realized.
His explanation evoked the theme of capitalism as religion, arguing that the
fetish commodity harnessed the energies released by technology to the ends of
commodity production. The themes of Capitalism as Religion are ubiquitous
throughout the Arcades Project, as are its four structural principles.
First of all, Parisian high capitalism is analysed in terms of the cult of the
exchange of commodities. Second, the cult of exchange is characterized as
total immanence, or the eternal return of the same, with the entire universe
and the eternity of the future reduced to the status of exchange value (a
condition exemplied for Benjamin by Grandevilles illustrations). Third,
it is a system that creates guilt/debt, analysed in terms of Baudelaires
allegorical melancholy, and nally it possesses a guilty secret that is its
self-overcoming whether as self-destruction or as its transformation into
socialism. The main conceptual difference between Capitalism as Religion
and the Arcades Project consists in the role given to technology as a source
of transcendence: a difference that removes the latter work from the sphere
of political theology since transcendence is no longer thought in terms of
divinity but in terms of energy.
In the light of this analysis of the tensions within the development of
Benjamins political theology it is possible to return to the On Concept of
History. The future of political theology is not only restricted to a messianic
interruption of previous history but also to an intensication of its previous
development. The theological potentials in capitalism which after all for
Benjamin is a political theology can be intensied or realized in non-
capitalist directions. Thus in Thesis XI Benjamin can nd in Fouriers
surprising sound fantasies of the power of technology and co-operative
labour a complement to the corrupted conception of labour or Protestant
ethic that had been embraced by social democracy.
Perhaps these hints in the Theses of a future not governed by the choice
between catastrophe and messianic interruption should be explored further.
The Fourier comments, for example, point to a trail that leads back through
the Arcades Project to Benjamins early political philosophy, his politics,
inspired by Scheerbart. In Convolute W on Fourier he wrote:
Fouriers conception of the propagation of the phalansteries through
explosions may be compared to two articles of my politics: the idea
of revolution as an innervation of the technical organs of the collective
(analogy with the child who learns to grasp by trying to get hold of the
moon) and the idea of the cracking open of natural teleology. (W7, 4)
He develops the latter argument with a reference to Mickey Mouse in which
we nd carried out, entirely in the spirit of Fouriers conceptions, the moral
mobilisation of nature . . . Mickey Mouse shows how right Marx was to see
in Fourier, above all else, a great humorist. The cracking open of natural
teleology proceeds in accordance with the plan of humour (W8a, 5). In
place of the Protestant ethic embraced by social democracy emerges a notion
of technology that releases rather than contains energy.
Perhaps the most extra-ordinary development of the cosmopolitical
technological development of the political theology of the On Concept of
History is a fragment on Scheerbart from 1940. With it Benjamin returns
to the original inspiration of his political theology, a reading of Scheerbart
in 1914 shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. He recognizes
in Scheerbart almost the twin brother of Fourier both of whom are able
to mock current humanity in the name of a faith in the humanity of the
future (SW 4: 387). The emergence of this humanity is related to the
development of a liberatory technology: an idea which as seen marks a
development of political theology. Benjamin notes that this non-messianic
possibility of a liberated future invoked by Scheerbart involved a humanity
which had deployed its full range of technology and put it to human use.
To achieve this state of affairs, Scheerbart believed that two conditions were
essential: rst people should discard the base and primitive idea that the
task was to exploit the forces of nature; second, they should be true to the
conviction that technology, by liberating human beings, would fraternally
liberate the whole of creation (SW 4:386). With the latter idea of a cosmic
liberation achieved through technology the Benjamin of 1940 returns to the
utopian insight of the Benjamin of 1916 who wrote On Language as Such
and on the Language of Man.
The presence of a non-messianic political theology in the On Concept
of History does not replace the messianic, but situates it in a more complex
conguration. The middle and the nal theses perhaps should be seen as
posing an alternative within the alternative to catastrophe. Decision, in this
case, would not be simply between the alternatives of a catastrophic or the
messianic end of history, but between the end of history and its radical and
immanent transformation.
Notes
CHAPTER 1
1 See, for example, Arthur Danto, The Transguration of Commonplace (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1981) and Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the
Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
2 [Greek] statues are now only stones from which the living soul has own, just as
the hymns are words from which belief has gone. The tables of the gods provide no
spiritual food and drink, and in his games and festivals man no longer recovers the
joyful consciousness of his unity with the divine. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of the
Spirit (1807), trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 455. No
matter how excellent we nd the statues of the Greek gods . . . it is no help; we bow
the knee no longer. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975), 1:103.
3 See R. Tiedemann, Studien zur Philosophie Walter Benjamins (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1973); P. Brger, Walter Benjamin: Contribution une thorie de la culture-
contemporaine, Revue dEsthtique, new series 1 (1981): 27; R. Rochlitz, Walter
Benjamin: Une Dialectique de limage, Critique 39 (1983): 287319.
4 See C. Perret, Walter Benjamin sans destin (Paris: La Diffrence, 1992), pp. 979.
5 For the moment, I refer to the studio because institutional exhibitions (galleries,
museums) often have a tendency to reproduce while at the same time transforming
of course the intimidating and dogmatic liturgy of the old rituals of display, the
old monstrances (ostensions) of images. This fundamental aspect would need a specic
analysis devoted to it.
6 Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35:114. See also G. Didi-Huberman, Imaginum
picture . . . in totum exoleuit: Der Anfang der Kunstgeschichte und das Ende des
Zeitalters des Bildes, Kunst ohne Geschichte? Ansichten zu Kunst und Kunstgeschichte
heute, ed. A.-M. Bonner and G. Kopp-Schmidt (Munich: Beck, 1995), pp. 12736.
7 Subject of a work of art and fundamental principle are two meanings of the Greek
word hypothesis.
8 E. Panofsky, Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance
Art, in Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1939), pp. 331.
9 See G. Didi-Huberman, Dun Ressentiment en mal desthtique (1993), in LArt
contemporain en question (Paris: Galerie nationale de Jeu de Paume, 1994), pp. 6588;
and its sequel, Post-scriptum: Du ressentiment la Kunstpolitik, Lignes 22 (1994):
2162.
10 Dante, Divine Comedy, Paradise 331.1035. Qual colui che forse di Croazia/viene a
veder la Veronica nostra, / che per lantica fame non sen sazia.
11 See J. Lacan, Subversion du sujet et dialectique du desir dans linconscient freudian
(1960), in Ecrits (Paris: Le Seuil, 1966), pp. 793827.
12 G. Bataille, Mthode de mditation (1947), Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard,
1973), 5:201 [my translation].
13 On the notion of memory event, see M. Moscovici, Il est arriv quelque chose: Approches
de l vnement psychique (Paris: Ramsay, 1989).
14 See G. Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: PUF, 1962), p. 55: It is not the same
that comes back, it is the coming back that is the same as what is becoming [my
translation].
15 [My translation]. See G. Didi-Huberman, Devant l image: Question pose aux ns dune
histoire de lart (Paris: Minuit, 1990), pp. 65103.
16 We should note the convergence of this model with the meta-psychological model of a
Freudian theory of memory as detailed by Pierre Fdida, especially in Pass anachro-
nique et prsent rminiscent, LEcrit du temps 10 (1986): 2345.
17 See Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: T.W. Adorno, W. Benjamin,
and the Frankfurt Institute (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1977). On the use of the
dialectic in Bataille and Eisenstein, see G. Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance informe,
ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris: Macula, 1995), 201383. On the use
of the dialectic in Mondrian, see Y.-A. Bois, LIconoclaste, in Piet Mondrian (Milan:
Leonardo Arte, 1994), pp. 33843.
18 This formula is commented on in Perret, Walter Benjamin sans detin, pp. 11217.
19 It seems to me that konvolute N on the theory of knowledge and progress is the best
methodological introduction possible to the very problem of art history.
20 I have attempted to develop certain aesthetic implications of this supposition in G.
Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyans, ce qui nous regarde (Paris: Minuit, 1992), in
particular. pp. 12552.
21 This is an essential point of method, which Panofsky formulated clearly in 1932
even though he sometimes forgot to apply it to his own interpretations. See E.
Panofsky, Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der
bildenden Kunst, Logos 21 (1932): 10319. And even if Drer had expressly declared,
as other artists later attempted to do, what the ultimate plan of his work of art was,
we would rapidly discover that that declaration bypassed the true essential meaning
[wahren Wesenssinn] of the engraving and that the declaration, rather than offering us
a denitive interpretation, would itself be greatly in need of such an interpretation. [my
translation].
22 Regarding Mondrian, for example, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn has recently proved to
be unfair and almost naive in criticizing Bois interpretation because it drops the
theosophical paradigm. Lebensztejn makes the criticism with as much vehemence as
if Bois were speaking of Masaccios Trinity while spurning the Christian dogma that
provided its iconographical programme. J.-C. Lebensztejn, review of the exhibition
Piet Mondrian: 18721944 [La Haye, Washington, New York], Cahiers du Muse
national dart moderne 52 (1995): 13940. Far from ignoring the role of Theosophy in
Mondrians art, Bois says it plays the role of a detonator, and it is very probable that
Mondrian would have remained a talented provincial landscape artist if he had not
come into contact with it. Bois, LIconoclaste, p. 329 [my translation]. Lebensztejn
pretends to ignore the obvious fact that the philosophical or religious commitment of
a twentieth-century artist cannot be compared with an iconographical programme of
the quattrocento. It is the very notion of programme that is in the question here a
notion whose deconstruction abstract art has obviously completed, along with the
deconstruction of the entire traditional iconographical approach.
Nonetheless, without articulating it clearly, Lebensztejn is getting to the heart
of the problem, which concerns the logical and temporal structure to be drawn from
the relations in play ambiguous, critical relations between idealism and material
engagement (plastic engagement as such), between the discourse of meanings laid
claim to and the formal labour actually performed. It is probable that Bois has not
yet completely articulated that structure in writing that it is the materiality of the
painting itself that [in Mondrian] guarantees the efcacy of his struggle against
matter (LIconoclaste, p. 330 [my translation]). Signicantly, it is at that moment
in his analysis that Bois comes closest to the question of the dialectic. A remarkable
analysis of this type of dialectical reversal has also been done for the case of Paul
Notes 229
Gaugin, in J. Clay, Gaugin, Nietzsche, Aurier: Notes sur le renversement matriel
du symbolisme, in LEclatement de l impressionisme (Saint-Germain-en-Laye: Muse
dpartmental du Pieur, 1982), pp. 1928.
In Ad Reinhardt as well, the ecstatic, auratic and religious references are
not lacking: Sacred space, separate, sacred against profane . . . Contemplative act,
continuous absorbed attention, kind of sanctity . . . Transcendent, transpersonal,
transgurative, transparent . . . Detached territory, pure region, timeless, absolute . . .
Painting began by making sacred the things it decorated? Form xed by tradition,
mandala, ritual, tanka, Xian, 4 evangelists . . . Gate, door image of opening, possibility
of transcendence . . . Product of past. Religious aura. A. Reinhardt, Art-as-Art: The
Selected Writings, ed. B. Rose [New York: Viking Press, 1975], pp. 1923).
But, as we also know, these references belong to the same system as the deep-seated
irreligiosity of what is an essentially ironic and critical artist. See J.-P. Criquei, De visu
(le regard du critique), Cahiers de Muse national dart moderne 37 (1991): 8991.
How then, to express the structural necessity of that apparent contradiction?
Bois, it seems to me, almost succeeds by making the argument for the fragile relation
contained, precisely, in the word almost (Y.-A. Bois, The Limit of Almost, in Ad
Reinhardt [Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art; New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1991], pp. 1133). But in the almost what linguists call a derealizing
modier, which tends solely to attenuate the information of the word to which it
is applied (see O. Ducot, Les Modicateurs dralisants, Journal of Pragmatics 24
[1995]: 14565) the structural necessity fails to express itself as such: the terms of the
relation remain unresolved, in a lesser and not critical state. Only the Benjaminian
hypothesis of the dialectical image succeeds, I believe, in expressing that necessity, that
true power of ambiguity. See Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, pp. 14952.
23 C. Greenberg, Review of Exhibitions of Hedda Sterne and Adolph Gottlieb (1947), in
The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. J. OBrian (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1986), 2: 189. Greenberg adds: But as long as this symbolism serves to stimulate
ambitious and serious painting, differences of ideology may be left aside for the time
being. The test is in the art, not in the program.
24 B. Newman, Response to Celement Greenberg (1947), in Barnett Newman: Selected
Writings and Interviews, ed. J.P. ONeill (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), p. 162.
Subsequent quotations in this paragraph are from pp. 1624.
25 T.B. Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971), pp. 1516.
26 On this pictorial period in Newman, see J. Strick, Enacting Origins, in The Sublime
is Now: The Early Work of Barnett Newman. Paintings and Drawings, 19441949 (New
York: PaceWildenstein, 1994), pp. 731.
27 On the importance of the origin motif in Newmans writings, see J.-C. Lebensztejn,
Homme nouveau, art radical, Critique 48 (1991): 32935.
28 Newman, The Plasmic Image (1945), in Selected Writings, pp. 13855, especially
p. 139: The failure of abstract painting is due to the confusion that exists in the under-
standing of primitive art [as well as that] concerning the nature of abstraction. See also
idem, The First Man Was an Artist (1947), in Selected Writings pp. 15660.
29 See Newman, The New Sense of Fate (194748), in Selected Writings, pp. 1649. In
these pages, the motifs of archaic art, tragedy, and the destruction of Hiroshima are
all tied together.
30 Newman, The Plasmic Image, pp. 13855; and, The Sublime is Now (1948), in
Selected Writings, pp. 1713. On the aesthetics of the sublime and Newman, see
Jean-Franois Lyotard, LInhumain: Causeries sur le temps (Paris: Galile, 1988),
pp. 98118.
31 See Hess, Barnett Newman; B. Richardson, Barnett Newman: Drawing His Way into
Painting, in Barnett Newman: The Complete Drawings, 19441969 (Baltimore, MD:
Baltimore Museum of Art, 1979), p. 14.
32 Newman, The Sublime is Now, p. 173.
33 Newman, Ohio, 1949, in Selected Writings, pp. 1745.
34 Ibid., p. 174.
35 I take a certain liberty in using conceptual distinctions elaborated in some of my earlier
studies.
36 Newman, Ohio, 1949, p. 175.
37 I have commented on this denition in Ce que nous voyons, pp. 10323.
38 We should note the analogy between this kind of experience and those that will later
be related by other American artists such as Tony Smith (see Didi-Huberman, Ce que
nous voyons, pp. 6384) or, 20 years later, James Turrell in the Arizona desert. G. Didi-
Huberman, LHomme qui marchait dans la couleur, Artstudio 16 (1990): 617.
39 Drawing (Onement I), ink on paper, 27.6 18.7 cm, Mr and Mrs B. H. Friedman, New
York; Onement I, oil on canvas, 69.2 41.2 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
40 Richardson, Barnett Newman: Drawing his Way into Painting, p. 17. On Newmans
graphic production in general, see also A. Pacquement, Le Parcours des dessins, and
B. Rose, Barnett Newman: Les Oeuvres sur papier, both in Barnett Newman: les
dessins. 19441969 (Paris: Muse national dart moderne/Centre Georges Pompidou,
1980), pp. 710 and pp. 1229.
41 Rose, Barnett Newman, p. 26.
42 See Hess, Barnett Newman, pp. 5585; H. Rosenburg, Barnett Newman (New York:
Abrams, 1978), p. 48; and Strick, Enacting Origins, p. 8.
43 I feel that my zip does not divide my paintings . . . it does not cut the format in half or
whatever parts, but it does the exact opposite: it unites the thing. It creates a totality.
Newman, Interview with Emile de Antonio (1970), in Selected Writings, p. 306.
44 On that decision to make Onement I incomplete, see Hess, Barnett Newman,
556; and especially Y.-A. Bois, Perceiving Newman (1988), in Painting as Model
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 19092.
45 See Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, pp. 10323.
46 H. Damisch, Stratgies, 19501960 (1977), in Fentre jaune cadmium, ou les dessous
de la peinture (Paris: Le Seuil, 1984), p. 166. And he adds, as if the effect of depth in
painting could be reduced to a procedure, an arbitrary formula [my translation]. For
his discussion of a specic optics, see p. 165.
47 But recall that, for Newman, what counts is the scale, which has nothing to do with
the objective dimensions of the work of art. See P. Schneider, Les Dialogues du Louvre
(1969) (Paris: Adam Biro, 1991), pp. 131 and 149. The size is nothing: what matters
is the scale.
48 [Retrait: Both the removal of the adhesive strip and the mark or trace left once it has
been removed. trans.]
49 J. Clay, Pollock, Mondrian, Seurat: La profondeur plate, LAtelier de Jackson Pollock
(Paris: Macula, 1978; 1994), pp. 1528. Let us recall here the decisive theoretical
role played by the staff of the journal Macula, in 197679, regarding the questions of
surface and depth. See especially C. Bonnefoi, A Propos de la destruction de lentit
de surface, Macula 3.4 (1978): 1636; and, Sur lapparition de visible, Macula 5.6
(1979): 194228.
50 Here I arrive, by other paths, at what Pierre Fdida, speaking of Paul Czanne,
Giacometti and Andr du Boucher, magnicently called the indistinct breath of the
image [my translation]. See P. Fdida, Le Site de l tranger: La situation psychanalytique
(Paris: PUF, 1995), pp. 187220.
We could, moreover, continue the excellent analyses of Bois on Mondrian
(LIconoclaste, pp. 31377) by working with the hypothesis that Newmans charac-
teristic stumping at the edges, his elaborations on the frame, and his interruptions in
the zips may stem from that logic of air, or rather of the aura.
Notes 231
51 See B. Newman, Frontiers of Space: Interview with Dorothy Gees Seckler (1962), in
Selected Writing, p. 251: Instead of using outlines, instead of making shapes or setting
off spaces, my drawing declares the space. Instead of working with the remnants of
space, I work with the whole space.
52 Bois, Perceiving Newman, p. 195 and pp. 31011.
53 See Hess, Barnett Newman, pp. 556; Rosenberg, Barnett Newman, p. 61. Another
interpretation even accomplishes the tour de force of reconciling the Jewish messianic
yihud and the Christian kenosis in an allegorism of nongurativity. See D. Payot,
Tout uniment, in LArt moderne et la question de sacr, ed. J.-J. Nills (Paris: Le Cerf,
1993), pp. 16389.
54 See Bois, Perceiving Newman, pp. 1936 and 203.
55 Newman, Frontiers of Space, p. 250.
56 Newman, The Plasmic Image, p. 145; and idem, The Sublime is Now, pp. 1715.
57 Newman, Interview with Lane Slate (1963), in Selected Writings, pp. 251 and xiii (in
another version corrected by Newman himself ).
58 In Lebensztejns very apt expression in Homme nouveau, art radical, p. 327 [my
translation].
59 On the notion of the subjectile, see J. Clay, Onguents, fards, pollens, in Bonjour
Monsieur Manet (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1983), pp. 624; G. Didi-
Huberman, La Peinture incarne (Paris: Minuit, 1985), pp. 2562; and J. Derrida,
Forcener le subjectile, Natonin Artaud: Dessins et portraits (Paris: Gallimard, 1986),
pp. 55108.
60 Fundamental in this respect is the reection found in Newman, The Fourteen
Stations of the Cross, 19581966 (1966), in Selected Writings, p. 189: It is as I work
that the work itself begins to have an effect on me. Just as I affect the canvas, so does
the canvas affect me.
61 In particular, this is the lesson of Gilles Deleuzes remarkable analysis of the work of
Samuel Beckett. See G. Deleuze, LEpuis, afterword to S. Beckett, Quad et autres
pices pour la tlvision, trans. E. Fournier (Paris: Minuit, 1992), pp. 55106.
62 The trace is the apparition of a proximity, however far away that which it left may
be. The aura is the apparition of a distance, however close that which evokes it may
be. With the trace, we grasp the thing; with the aura, the thing becomes our master
(M16a, 4, my translation).
63 See Didi-Huberman, Devant l image, pp. 22447, and especially the vast survey by H.
Belting, Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Munich:
Beck, 1990) [Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. E.
Jephcott (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994)].
CHAPTER 2
1 In pursuing these questions, this essay will take up the crucial importance of photo-
graphy to Benjamins thought, an importance convincingly and extensively explored
by Eduardo Cadava in Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Indeed, it is only as a consequence of Cadavas
study that this essay can be written, and, it is as a contribution to Cadavas study that
this reection on photographys relation to place within Benjamins writing is intended
while opening the question of the consequences for history of the technical and the, at
times, conicted role photography performs within that writing.
2 Only the eye, Benjamin argues, can keep up with speech, something the hand cannot
do: since the eye perceives more quickly than the hand can draw, the process of
pictorial reproduction was enormously accelerated (GS 1.2: 475/SW 4: 253).
3 Unless otherwise noted all references are to the third version of The Work of Art in the
Age of its Technical Reproducibility (GS 1.2: 471508/SW 4: 25183). In many cases,
the translation of this and other works from this edition has been modied in order
to provide a more accurate reection of Benjamins language. Where these modica-
tions occur, the German words or phrases have been inserted parenthetically into the
translation.
4 In the collection of Atgets photographs Benjamin was familiar with, Lichtbilder (Paris
and Leipzig: Henri Joquires, 1930), none of the explicit street scenes (where the focus
of the image is on the street rather than a building or something along or in the street)
exhibit human gures (see plates 5, 6, 9, 68 in this edition). However, this is not ex-
clusively true for all of Atgets photographs of such scenes. In some, the ghostly
presence of gures who left the frame before the end of the exposure can be seen, in
others, there are gures who remain throughout the exposure. These exceptions do
not necessarily contradict the observations Benjamin makes after seeing only the 1930
volume. Little is known of Atgets intentions in these photographs whether or not the
presence of such gures is incidental to these intentions.
5 The verb treten recurs eight times and frequently, as here, to express when something
appears for the rst time or else appears within something else (see GS 1.2: 481n8, 482,
491n20, 500, 502, 503, 507).
6 Charles Baudelaire, Salon de 1859, in Oeuvres compltes (Paris: Pliade, 1976), 2:
618.
7 On the denition of art as a movement from one pole to another see, Reproducibility,
GS 1.2: 48283/SW 4: 257.
8 It is in this sense that Susan Blood, in an incisive reading of Baudelaire and Benjamin
on photography, remarks: not only is the photograph an object upon which Benjamin
may construct a history; photography also becomes the gure for that history
(Baudelaire Against Photography, in Baudelaire and the Aesthetics of Bad Faith
[Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997], p. 168).
9 Benjamin gives a sense of this when he speaks of the history of exhibition value: in
principle the work of art has always been reproducible (GS 1.2: 474/SW 4: 252); and in
a note on Raphaels Sistine Madonna Benjamin speaks of the primary exhibition value
of Raphaels painting (GS 1.2: 483n11/SW 4: 274n15). The divide between cult and
aura on the one hand, and the exhibitional on the other is not so absolute as to preclude
the presence of exhibitionality already within the history of the auratic. This sense is
reinforced when Benjamin speaks of the anticipation of one form within another: Just
as the illustrated newspaper virtually lay hidden within lithography, so the sound lm
was latent in photography (GS 1.2: 475/SW 4: 253).
10 See On the Concept of History, Thesis V: The true image of the past its by. The
past can be held fast only as an image that ashes up at the moment of its recogniz-
ability, and is never seen again (GS 1.2: 695/SW 4: 390). The verb festhalten, used
here to describe the holding of the true image of the past, is also used in Benjamins
translation of Monglond. There it describes what the photographic plate does to the
past.
11 Benjamin uses the technical word for developer here: Entwickler.
12 See Thesis VI: Articulating the past does not mean recognizing it the way it was (GS
1.2: 695/SW 4: 391).
13 Even historicism is subject to this condition. In Thesis XVI, Benjamin writes,
Historicism offers the eternal image [Bild] of the past (GS 1.2: 702/SW 4: 396).
14 On the interruptive force of this time, see Andrew Benjamin, Benjamins Modernity, in
The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), pp. 97-114; repr. in Andrew Benjamin, Style and Time: Essays on
the Politics of Appearance (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), Ch. 1.
Notes 233
15 This passage reoccurs, virtually unchanged except for the removal of quotation marks
around Ausschreiten, the replacement of photography by camera, and the addition of
two examples (picking up a cigarette lighter or a spoon; however, stepping remains the
primary example) in the third version of The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical
Reproducibility (GS 1.2: 500/SW 4: 266). This property of photography is also stated
earlier in the third version (photography can bring out aspects of the original that
are accessible only to the lens (which is adjustable and can easily change viewpoint)
but not to the human eye; or it can use certain processes, such as enlargement or slow
motion, to record images which escape natural optics altogether (GS 1.2: 476/SW 4:
254). On the relation of photography to psychoanalysis in Benjamin, which could only
be treated here at the risk of repeating the problematic it brings to light as an example,
see Cadava, Words of Light, pp. 98100.
16 In the rst version of the Reproducibility essay (a version in which treten occurs less
frequently than the third), there is one instance when Benjamin, describing the means
by which an art becomes founded on a new practice, writes stepped: An die Stelle
ihrer Fundierung aufs Ritual ist ihre Fundierung auf eine andere Praxis getreten:
nmlich ihre Fundierung auf Politik (GS 1.2: 442).
17 On this requirement, see GS 1.2: 473/SW 4: 2512.
18 See N3, 1.
19 That Benjamin makes a claim to the contrary is not just an effect of his translation
of Monglond, but may also be discerned in one of the most frequently cited sentences
of the Reproducibility essay: To an ever increasing degree, the work reproduced
becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility. What is reproduced,
the work, is already the reproduction of itself as a work designed to be reproduced.
Herein lies its principle of reproducibility. The work is the image of a reproducibility
that it reproduces itself in and through this image. Here, what would be the negative
in the photographic sense the principle of reproducibility enables but also becomes
what is reproduced as it is subsumed into the reproduced image or work. Such is the
work of art heralded by the advent of photography for Benjamin.
20 The closest Benjamin comes to invoking explicitly an inversion in On the Concept of
History is when he speaks in Thesis VII of brushing history against the grain (GS 1.2:
697/SW 4: 392).
21 Within the history inaugurated by this change in the artistic task, the hand will
eventually be reduced to mere gesture but does not disappeare completely, it becomes
a sign. On this development, Benjamin cites Valry: Just as water, gas, and electricity
are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs with minimal effort, so
we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear
at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign (GS 1.2: 475/SW 4: 253).
22 The ash is referred to three times in On the Concept of History (Theses V, VI, and
VII); in Convolute N of the Arcades Project it recurs ve times (N1, 1; N2a, 3; N3, 1;
N9, 7 [two instances]).
23 Only once in both On the Concept of History and Convolute N of the Arcades Project
does Benjamin speak of an overcoming or berwindung: The overcoming of the
concept of progress and the overcoming of the concept of period of decline are one
and the same thing (N2, 5). Yet, such overcoming, as Benjamin attests to, is not the
end of these concepts an insight that ensures the reproducibility of what Benjamin
calls the dialectical image since such concepts carry with them a secret index (GS 1.2:
693/SW 4: 380; Thesis II) to such an image.
24 In this respect, the movement from das blickende Auge to Augenblick repeats the
relation of the eye to the image in photography. The image that the eye looking into
the lens sees can be read as the look of that eye the image as the Augenblick of das
blickende Auge is already an effect of photography, of technology. Here, what is retained
in the photographic image is not the look of things but the look in which things are
seen.
25 Seeing becomes this despite Benjamins methodological intention expressed in
Convolute N: Method of this project: literary montage. I have nothing to say. Only to
show (N1a, 8).
26 In an entry from Convolute N which can be read as a virtual draft (but with slight
variations) for the entry just cited from the Arcades Project also states this coming
together in the form of a stepping: zusammentreten (N2a, 3).
27 That progression and continuity dene a temporal relation between what-has-been and
the now is also made explicit in N2a, 3.
28 This phrase was also evoked at the end of the Benjamins 1933 text On the Mimetic
Faculty. In this context, Benjamin states that such reading is the most ancient reading
prior to all languages (GS 2.1: 213/SW 2: 722). In this same text, language, as the
nexus of meaning of words or sentences, is the bearer through which, like a ash,
similarity appears (GS 2.1: 213/SW 2: 722). If it is through the same ash that the
dialectical image appears or comes to light the light of this ash then what could
be more closely related to similarity than das bildliche Bild?
29 In it [the now of recognizability], truth is charged to the bursting point with time
(N3, 1). This bursting (zerspringen) can be related to the image in which Benjamin
speaks of the present as now-time shot through [eingespringt] with splinters of
messianic time (GS 1.2: 704/SW 4: 397; Thesis A).
30 Without reference to this aspect of the dialectical image, Sylviane Agacinski speaks
of the photographic image in these terms: In stopping time, in xing the imprint of
things in a motionless image that the gaze can now explore, any photo offers, forever,
the never seen (Historical Polemic: The Modernity of Photography, in Time Passing
[New York: Columbia University Press, 2003], pp. 878).
31 When this sentence is repeated in Convolute B, Benjamin marks it under the heading
Dialectical Image (B3, 7) indicating the proximity of fashion to the nature of this
image. For a searching and provocative reading of this relation, see Andrew Benjamin,
Being Roman Now: The Time of Fashion. A Commentary on Walter Benjamins On
the Concept of History XIV, in Style and Time, Ch. 2.
32 On the timeliness of the Messiah and on how this assures that only the Messiah has
messianicity, see Werner Hamacher, Now: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time in
the next chapter of this volume, p. 678.
CHAPTER 3
The translations of Walter Benjamins works have occasionally been modied in
keeping with the emphasis in the development of the argument.
1 In the notes on Kafka, Benjamin similarly addresses a revolutionary weakness:
Revolutionary energy and weakness are for Kafka two sides of one and the same state.
His weakness, his dilettantism, his unpreparedness are revolutionary (GS 2.3: 1194).
2 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN:
Hacking, 1996), B 678.
3 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 152.
4 Compare the following note:
With the idea of the classless society, Marx has secularized the idea of the messianic
time. And that was a good thing to do. Disaster sets in with the social democracy
elevating this idea to an ideal. In Neo-Kantian theory, the ideal was dened as an
innite task. And this theory was the basic philosophy of the Social Democratic
Notes 235
Party from Schmidt and Stadler to Natorp and Vorlnder. Once the classless
society had been dened as an innite task the empty homogeneous time was
transformed as it were into an anteroom where one could wait more or less calmly
for the onset of the revolutionary situation. There is, in reality, one moment that
did not carry with it its revolutionary chance it just needs to be dened as a
specic one, namely as the chance of an entirely new solution in the face of an
entirely new task (GS 1.3: 1231).
It will not be necessary to point out that the social democratic ideals, which Benjamin
blames for the passivity of the working class in the face of National Socialism, were
promulgated as regulative ideas in social philosophy in particular in Germany even
after the Second World War. They still dominate the discussion today.
5 In particular when reading Thesis XVII and its emphatic talk about arrest and
monad, one should keep in mind that probably as early as 1913, but no later than
1917, Benjamin had read Husserls essay Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft from
the journal Logos (which was published during 191011), and got to know the rst
major attempt of a philosophical critique of historicism and at the same time of
psychologism and scientic objectivism (see the letter to Franz Sachs, 11 July 1913 and
the one to Gershom Scholem, 23 December 1917, which was important for Benjamins
dissertation plans on the philosophy of history [GB 1: 1414 and 40611]). On the
decisive p. 50 of his Logos essay Husserl summarizes in a few sentences some of his most
important thoughts from his 1905 lectures on the phenomenology of internal time
consciousness, Zur Phnomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, which edited by
Edith Stein were published for the rst time in 1928 by Martin Heidegger. There are
indications that Benjamin knew Husserls lectures when he started making plans for
the historico-critical introduction to his Arcades Project, from which the Theses later
emerged. In the Logos essay the psychic is said to be an experience [Erlebnis] viewed
in reection, appearing as self through itself, in an absolute ow, as Now [and thus
enters] into a monadic unity of consciousness. Husserl complemented the motives
of absolute reection, of the Now and of the monadic unity which will play a most
important role in Benjamins work by characterizing this monadic unity and the
limitless ow of phenomena as a continuous intentional line, which is, as it were, the
index of the all-penetrating unity. This intentional line the index is for Husserl
the line of the beginning and endless immanent time, of a time as Husserl stresses
that is not measured by any chronometer. (This immanent time Husserl talks
about is, as in the lectures, the time of the internal time consciousness, in contrast
to the objective or transcendental time which can be measured by chronometers).
The fact that at this point many more convergences between Husserl and Benjamins
motives accumulate can hardly be a coincidence. Nor can it be a coincidence that
Benjamins attacks in the Theses on the Philosophy of History are directed at the
concept of empathy, which is central in the Logos essay and is also central to the
earlier works of Moritz Geiger, a pupil of Husserls, with whom Benjamin studied in
Munich. At this point, I can go only briey into the relevant convergence between
Husserls lectures on internal time-consciousness and Benjamins notes from the late
1930s: they are mainly found in the conceptions of the image and of the protention
of re-remembering. Husserl writes in section 24: Each remembrance contains inten-
tions of expectation, whose fullment leads to the present. And: The re-remembering
is not expectation, but it does have a horizon directed towards the future, the future
of the re-remembered [Martin Heidegger ed.], The Phenomenology of Internal Time-
Consciousness, [The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964].
6 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 225.
7 Heidegger is mentioned several times in the Convolutes of the Arcades Project, but not
even once without Benjamins massive criticism of his philosophy of historical time
which can be assumed to be the criticism of the philosophy of Being and Time and
not just that of Heideggers early Marbach lecture leaving no doubt that Heideggers
philosophy of historical time is seen as the only serious philosophical competition
to Benjamins planned work. In a letter to Gershom Scholem Benjamin announces
that in his introduction to the Arcades Project, which would be a critique of historical
knowledge, je trouverai sur mon chemin Heidegger et jattends quelque scintillement
de lentre-choc de nos deux manires, tres diffrentes, denvisager lhistoire (letter dated
20 January 1930, GB 3: 503). It would be misleading to assume Heideggers inuence
on Benjamins later conception of time and history. This is not just because of the
vulgar idea of an inuxus physicus could not do justice to the complexity of both trains
of thought but also because that would leave aside the inuence that St Paul, Sren
Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Edmund Husserl have exerted on both authors.
The inuence is particularly apparent in the conceptions of fullment, the fullled
time and the moment. The distinction between that which is past and that which
has been (Vergangenem und Gewesenem), which Benjamin tries to respect in some of
his notes, may have been taken from Being and Time and not from Dolf Sternbergers
dissertation Der verstandene Tod. It speaks in favour of the deep impression Heideggers
book exerted on Benjamin, perhaps even the threat that he may have felt it posed, that
he, together with Brecht, thought of organizing a critical community of reading for
the shattering of Being and Time as mentioned in a letter to Gershom Scholem on
25 July 1930 (GB 3). A detailed account of Benjamins relation to Heidegger, which
oscillated between fascination and abhorrence, would have to begin with Benjamins
engagement with Heideggers habilitation thesis on Duns Scotus theory of categories
and meaning (Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre). Such an account could dig deeper into
the problems of the work of both authors than the admirers of the one and the despisers
of the other would like.
8 Kellers verses cited by Benjamin evoke the reecting shield that paralyses the Gorgon.
In Verlornes Recht, verlornes Glck, which peculiarly crosses the positions of Medusa
and shield, it is said of a sailor: War wie ein Medusenschild / Der erstarrten Unruh
Bild.
9 In the essay on Eduard Fuchs, der Sammler und der Historiker (GS 2.2: 468/SW 3:
288), Benjamin also quotes this passage from the preface to The Origin of German
Tragic Drama in the context of formulations that later on contributed to the theses On
the Concept of History.
10 The concept is derived from the context of neo-Kantianism and the calculus of
the innitesimal and, as an emphatic concept of happening, is here brought up by
Benjamin against Hegels discovery of the dialectical thought-time (Denkzeit) and
thus against Hegels dialectic as well as at another place against Heideggers phenom-
enology, which, as Benjamin insists, is unable to set free a strict conception of history,
at best a concept of time. Benjamin uses the formula of differentials of time in another
place (N1, 2) in the sense of a deviation or digression (albeit a minimal one) away from
the grand lines, and thus, once again, from the linear continuum of tradition. In the
note relating to Hegel, the concept of the Now of recognizability is also brought into
play. It does so as complement of the time differential and thus is not a thought time
(Denkzeit) but an event time (Geschehniszeit) a time of the happening of time. Their
relation can be formally characterized such that it is only the time differential that
opens up the latitude where a Now of recognizability and thus history can happen.
Because time differential and Now of recognizability are two aspects of the same
happening, it can be said: the Now is differential.
The concept of the Now of recognizability, which gives its title to an extended
and important reection in the context of the theses On the Concept of History (GS
1.3: 12378/SW 4: 405), nds its most signicant exposition in a text dated by Rolf
Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhuser to 1920 or 1921. This text asks for the
Notes 237
medium of being true (Wahrsein) and truth (Wahrheit) and counters the epistemo-
logical dualism (Kants in particular, it seems) with the constitution of things in the
Now of recognizability. The Now of recognizability is the logical time, which has to
be reasoned for in the place of timeless validity. Logical time, however, is the time of
truth which in the Now contains in an unbroken way only itself . That means however:
the Now of recognizability, which contains itself, is its own medium it is Now as that
which is recognizable and Now, in which cognition is possible, only because it is the
point of indifference of both. As such, however, it is the medium in which both move.
With this concept of logical time, that is, a time of language that can be characterized
as a time of pure mediality in the sense of the essay on language from 1916, Benjamin
on the one hand opposes over a period of 20 years the denial or levelling of time
in theories of validity and within the Kantian and neo-Kantian epistemology. On the
other hand, he also opposes the uncritical assimilation of the concept of history to the
concept of time in Hegelian dialectics and Heideggerian phenomenology. With the
Now of recognizability Benjamin not only achieved a theory of genuine historical
cognition independent of the historical doctrines. With the Now of recognizability
he also managed to lead the motives of transcendental and dialectical phenomenology
while remaining loyal to them to the point where they leap over into the motive of
the possibility of the Now of historical cognition. This is a possibility which does not
just contain the resources of any reality, but also determines those resources according
to the measure of this possibility, in so far as it is mere possibility. As mere possibility
it determines this cognition, however, as a cognition that can be missed.
In a text from Zentralpark, cognition is therefore characterized as missable, and
even unrescuable if it is reachable only under the conditions of mere recognizability.
This text can be read as a predecessor of Thesis V: The dialectic image is an image that
ashes up. The image of what has been . . . must be caught in this way, ashing up in
the now of recognizability. The redemption enacted in this way, and solely in this way,
is won only against the perception of what is been unrescuably lost (GS 1.2: 682/SW 4:
1834). As incomplete as this sentence is, it is clear at the same time: only that which
is unrescuable is rescued and even in its rescue it remains unrescuable. This can only
mean: the Now of recognizability is the crisis, in which alone the crisis can be rescued
and not its positive basic data. The crisis the medium is messianic.
11 In the letters dated 21 December 1972 and 12 January 1973 to Gershom Scholem, in
Gershom Scholem, Briefe III, 19711982, ed. Itta Shedletzky (Munich: Beck, 1999),
pp. 299 and 3001.
12 Quoted from Franz Kafka, Hochzeitvorbereitungen auf dem Lande (Frankfurt a.M.:
Fischer, 1980), p. 67.
CHAPTER 4
1 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana
Polan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 6.
2 Franoise Meltzer, Acedia and Melancholia, in Walter Benjamin and the Demands of
History, ed. Michael P. Steinberg (New York: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 145.
3 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone
Press, 1988), p. 10.
4 Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (London: Penguin, 1992),
p. 17.
5 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 10.
6 This comment is a reference to Benjamins failed effort to come and join the Frankfurt
school in New York and to the title of his article Central Park.
7 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 41.
8 Ibid., p. 57.
9 Ibid., pp. 578. This is also the way Kafka would describe protofascism to Gustav
Janovoch in a conversation of 1928.
10 See Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography, trans. Malcolm R. Green and
Ingrid Ligers (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 21819.
11 Juan Insua (ed.), The City of K.: Franz Kafka and Prague (Barcelona: Centre de cultura
contemporania de Barcelona, 2002), p. 123.
12 Kafka, In the Penal Colony, in The Transformation and Other Stories, trans. Malcolm
Pasley (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 131.
14 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 145.
15 Ibid.
16 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 1213.
17 Ibid., p. 12.
18 Ibid., p. 15.
19 Ibid., p. 214.
20 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 50.
21 Ibid., p. 53.
22 Ibid., pp. 523.
23 Ibid., p. 55.
24 Ibid., p. 57.
25 Ibid., p. 55.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., p. 53.
28 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (London: Athlone
Press, 1990), p. 174.
29 Ibid., p. 175.
30 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 65.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line, trans. John Johnston. (New York: Semiotext(e),
1986), p. 19.
34 Fredrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 634.
36 Ibid., p. 12.
38 Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, Diacritics 16 (1986): 25.
39 Reda Bensmaa, Foreword: The Kafka Effect, in Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka,
p. xi.
40 Ibid.
41 Irving Wohlfarth, No-mans Land: On Walter Benjamins Destructive Character, in
Walter Benjamins Philosophy, eds Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (Manchester:
Clinamen, 2000), p. 164.
42 Ibid.
45 All quotations in this paragraph are from A Thousand Plateaus, p. 12.
46 Ibid., p. 18.
Notes 239
48 Ibid., p. 42.
49 Ibid., pp. 1617.
50 Ibid., pp. 212.
51 Deleuze, The Fold, trans. Tom Conley (London: Athlone Press, 1993), p. 62.
52 Ibid., p. 62.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid., p. 63.
55 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 154.
56 Ibid., p. 174.
57 Ibid., p. 31.
CHAPTER 5
1 Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1960), 18: 253.
Henceforth references to this edition are abbreviated as SE.
2 See for some of these vacillations, the various histories provided by Giorgio Agamben,
Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993); Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1989); and, Giulia Schiesari, The Gendering of
Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), together with the inaugural work by
Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (New
York: Basic Books, 1964).
3 See Agamben, Stanzas.
4 Cf. Jean Starobinski, La Mlancolie au miroir (Paris: Julliard, 1989).
5 See Freud, Fetishism, SE 21: 155 f. and Splitting of the Ego in the Process of
Defence, SE 23: 2718.
6 Cf. Octave Mannoni, Je sais bien . . . mais quand mme: la croyance, in Clefs pour
l imaginaire ou lautre scne (Paris: Seuil, 1969).
7 Cf. Andreas Huyssen, Monuments and Holocaust Memory in a Media Age, in
Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York and London:
Routledge, 1995), pp. 24960.
8 Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1989).
9 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1927), section 27.
10 Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de memoire, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).
11 The oscillation is reected in the contrast between the description in the Abrib, where
the ego structurally assumes the unstable condition of fragmentation and supplementary
accretion it perceives in the object, and the New Introductory Lectures, in which splitting,
now generalized to the point of a universal topographical structure, is dissected in terms
of a crystalline division temporary and recuperable along stable, pre-established lines.
Thus, on the one hand, Outline of Psychoanalysis, SE 23: 204:
Disavowals of this kind occur very often and not only with fetishists; and whenever
we are in a position to study them they turn out to be half-measures, incomplete
attempts at detachment from reality. The disavowal is always supplemented by an
acknowledgement; two contrary and independent attitudes always arise and result
in the situation of there being a splitting of the ego. Once more the issue depends
on which of the two can seize hold of the greater intensity.
Compare, on the other hand, New Introductory Lectures, Lecture XXIII, SE 22:
58 f.:
So the ego can be split; it splits itself during a number of its functions tem-
porarily at least. Its parts can come together afterwards. That is not exactly a
novelty, though it may be putting an unusual emphasis on what is generally
known. On the other hand, we are familiar with the notion that pathology, by
making things larger and coarser, can draw attention to normal conditions which
would otherwise have escaped us. Where it points to a breach or a rent, there may
normally be an articulation present. If we throw a crystal to the oor, it breaks; but
not into haphazard pieces. It comes apart along its lines of cleave into fragments
whose boundaries, though they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystals
structure.
12 Cf. Freud, Analysis Terminable and Interminable, SE 23: 241.
13 Cf. Freud, Medusas Head, SE 18: 273.
14 Sren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Repetition, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong
and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 136:
He was deeply and fervently in love, that was clear, and yet a few days later he was
able to recollect his love. He was essentially through with the entire relationship.
In beginning it, he took such a tremendous step that he leaped over life. If the girl
dies tomorrow, it will make no essential difference; he will throw himself down
again, his eyes will ll with tears again, he will repeat the poets words again.
What a curious dialectic! He longs for the girl, he has to do violence to himself
to keep from hanging around her all day long, and yet in the very rst moment
he became an old man in regard to the entire relationship . . . Recollection has the
great advantage in that it begins with the loss; the reason it is safe and secure is
that it has nothing to lose.
Nietzsches analysis of the it was the fantasy of the spectator before the
pageant of ever-completed history is rigorously parallel. Nietzsche, On the
Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life, Untimely Meditations and
Beyond Good and Evil 277: The everlasting pitiful too late! The melancholy
of everything nished! . . .
15 Again, Nietzsche demonstrates the profound complicity between the too early and
the too late at the level of fantasy:
The problem of those who wait It requires luck and much that is incalculable if a
higher human being in whom there slumbers the solution of a problem is to act
break out one might say at the right time. Usually it does not happen, and
in every corner of the earth there are people waiting who hardly know to what
extent they are waiting but even less that they are waiting in vain. Sometimes the
awakening call, that chance event which gives permission to act, comes but too
late when the best part of youth and the strength to act has already been used up
in sitting still; and how many a man has discovered to his horror when he rose up
that his limbs had gone to sleep and his spirit was already too heavy! It is too late
he has said to himself, having lost faith in himself and henceforth forever useless.
(Beyond Good and Evil 274)
16 Marcel Proust, A la Recherche du temps perdu.
17 Cf. Freud, Fetishism, p. 154.
18 For a fuller reading of the AdornoBenjamin entanglement in terms of the theological
Bilderstreit or iconoclastic controversy see Rebecca Comay, Materialist Mutations
of the Bilderverbot, in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), Walter Benjamin and Art (London:
Continuum, 2004), pp. 3259.
19 Motifs are assembled without being developed (C, p. 580). Note how the charge more
or less resumes Lukcs own earlier opposition between narration and description in
Narrate or Describe?, in Writer and Critic and Other Essays (London: Merlin, 1978),
pp. 11048.
Notes 241
20 See Irving Wohlfarths suggestive essay Et Cetera? Lhistorien comme chiffonier, in
Heinz Wismann (ed.), Walter Benjamin et Paris (Paris: Cerf, 1986), pp. 559610.
21 Cf. Wohlfarth, Et Cetera?
22 Cf. Susan Buck-Morss, The Flneur, the Sandwichman, and the Whore: The Politics
of Loitering, New German Critique 39 (1986): 99141.
23 Cf. Max Pensky, Tactics of Remembrance: Proust, Surrealism, and the Origin of
the Passagenwerk, in Michael P. Steinberg (ed.), Walter Benjamin and the Demands of
History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 16489.
24 Cf. Benjamins citation of Flaubert in the Theses on History (GS 1.2: 696): Peu de gens
devineront combien il a fallu tre triste pour ressusciter Carthage . . .
25 See in particular Eduardo Cadavas exemplary remarks on the conjunction of these two
texts and on the essentially photographic nature of historical memory (and vice versa)
in Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1997).
CHAPTER 6
1 Thus the editors of a German collection of essays on Kierkegaard lament the fact
that Benjamin, with the exception of his review of Adornos book on Kierkegaard
had nothing to say about Kierkegaard: Leider hat er sich ber Kierkegaard ander-
norts [except in the review of Adornos book on Kierkegaard] nicht geubert. Dab
er ihn gleichwohl verarbeitet, lbt zumal seine Geschichtsphilosophie vermuten. In
ihr scheint er geradezu darauf aus zu sein, Kierkegaards theologische Intention aus
ihren idealistischen Fesseln zu lsen. Michael Theunissen and Wilfried Greve (eds),
Materialien zur Philosophie Sren Kierkegaards (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1979),
p. 80.
2 I am referring mainly to the rst version of 1931: Was ist das epische Theater? (GS
2.2: 51931). Translations, if not otherwise indicated, are my own.
3 Worum es heute im Theater geht, lbt sich genauer mit Beziehung auf die Bhne
als auf das Drama bestimmen. Es geht um die Verschttung der Orchestra. Der
Abgrund, der die Spieler vom Publikum wie die Toten von den Lebendigen scheidet,
der Abgrund, dessen Schweigen im Schauspiel die Erhabenheit, dessen Klingen in
der Oper den Rausch steigert, dieser Abgrund, der unter allen Elementen der Bhne
die Spuren ihres sakralen Ursprungs am unverwischbarsten trgt, ist funktionslos
geworden.
4 Wenn Du nmlich von meinem zweiten Entwurf schreibst darin wrde man nie
die Hand WBs erkennen, so nenne ich das doch ein wenig geradezu gesagt und Du
gehst dabei bestimmt ber die Grenze hinaus, an der Du gewib meiner Freundschaft
nicht aber meiner Zustimmung sicher bist. [. . .] Der WB hat und das ist bei einem
Schriftsteller nicht selbstverstndlich darin aber sieht er seine Aufgabe und sein
bestes Recht zwei Hnde. Ich hatte es mir mit vierzehn Jahren eines Tages in den
Kopf gesetzt, ich msse links schreiben lernen. Und ich sehe mich heut noch Stunden
und Stunden an meinem Schulpult in Haubinda sitzen und ben. Heute steht mein
Pult in der Bibliothque Nationale den Lehrgang so zu schreiben habe ich da auf
einer hhern Stufe auf Zeit! wieder aufgenommen. (Letter to Gretel Karplus, 1
September 1935, GB 5: 151).
5 Das saturnische Tempo der Sache hatte seinen tiefsten Grund in dem Proze einer
vollkommenen Umwlzung, den eine aus der weit zurckliegenden Zeit meines
unmittelbar metaphysischen, ja theologischen Denkens stammende Gedanken- und
Bildermasse durchmachen mubte, um mit ihrer ganzen Kraft meine gegenwrtige
Verfassung zu nhren. Dieser Prozeb ging im stillen vor sich; ich selber habe so wenig
von ihm gewubt, dab ich ungeheuer erstaunt war, als einem uerlichen Anstob
zufolge der Plan des Werkes vor kurzem in ganz wenigen Tagen niedergeschrieben
wurde. (letter to Werner Kraft, 25 May 1935, GB 5: 889).
6 Sie mssen mir erlauben in diesem Umstand eine besonders bedeutsame Besttigung
des Umschmelzungsprozesses zu sehen, der die ganze, ursprngliche metaphysisch
bewegte Gedankenmasse einem Aggregatzustand entgegengefhrt hat, in dem die
Welt der dialektischen Bilder gegen alle Einreden gesichert ist, welche die Metaphysik
provoziert. (Letter to Adorno, 31 May 1935, GB 5: 98).
7 So viel ist sicher: das konstruktive Moment bedeutet fr dieses Buch was fr die
Alchemie der Stein der Weisen bedeutet. (Letter to Gretel Karplus and Adorno, 16
August 1935, GB 5: 143).
8 The curious status the Liaisons dangereuses had for Benjamin is expressed in a letter to
Adorno on 29 January 1937: Sie haben mir gestern eine grobe Freude gemacht. Die
Geschichte der Rolle, die die Liaison dangereuses fr mich gespielt haben, hren Sie
einmal mndlich von mir. Genug, dab sie so verlief, da ich das Buch bis heute noch
nicht gelesen habe. Ihr Geschenk erffnet mir einen unvermuteten gewib den fr
mich gangbaren Weg zu Laclos. (You gave me great pleasure yesterday. I will tell you
the story of the role the Liaisons dangereuses have played for me sometime orally. Sufce
it that it had the effect that I have not read the book to this date. Your present opens
up an unexpected and for me possible way to Laclos.) GB 5: 454.
9 Karl Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, in Politische Schriften, ed.
Hans-Joachim Lieber (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), 1: 275.
10 Friedrich Hlderlin, Bldigkeit, vv. 5 and 2, in Smtliche Werke und Briefe, ed.
Michael Knaupp (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1992), 1: 443.
11 Ob ich den Bogen jemals so werde spannen knnen, da der Pfeil abschnellt, ist
natrlich dahingestellt. Whrend aber meine sonstigen Arbeiten recht bald den
Terminus gefunden hatten, an dem ich von ihnen schied, werde ich es mit dieser lnger
zu tun haben. Warum, deutet das Bild vom Bogen an: hier habe ich es mit zwei Enden
zugleich zu tun, nmlich dem politischen und dem mystischen (GB 4: 5134).
12 Friedrich Hlderlin, Smtliche Werke und Briefe, 2: 53.
13 Again we might hear an echo from Marxs Der achtzehnte Brumaire where the pro-
letariat disappears in the background of the revolutionary stage after the June revolt
(Mit dieser Niederlage tritt das Proletariat in den Hintergrund der revolutionren
Bhne, p. 279). But it is from that background of the stage from where the ghost
that haunts Europe emerges and from which a trembling emanates through France
and Europe: nicht nur Frankreich, ganz Europa zitterte vor dem Junierdbeben (ibid.,
p. 280).
14 Danish quotations from Sren Kierkegaard, Frygt og Baeven, Samlede Vaerker, ed. Peter
P. Rohde (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1962), 5: 39; German quotations from the edition
of 1923 that was available to Benjamin: Sren Kierkegaard, Furcht und Zittern / Die
Wiederholung, trans. H.C. Ketels, H. Gottsched and Chr. Schrempf, (Jena: Eugen
Diedrichs, 1923), p. 37; English quotations from the Princeton edition: S. Kierkegaard,
Fear and Trembling. Repetition, in Kierkegaards Writings, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong
and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 4: 41.
15 Kierkegaard was indeed slightly hunchbacked.
16 Dies ist auf menschliche Weise nur zwiefach mglich: in religiser oder politischer
Observanz. Einen Unterschied dieser beiden Observanzen in ihrer Quintessenz
gestehe ich nicht zu. Ebensowenig jedoch eine Vermittlung. Ich spreche hier von
einer Identitt, die sich allein im paradoxen Umschlagen des einen in das andere (in
welcher Richtung immer) und unter der unerllichen Voraussetzung erweist, dab
jede Betrachtung der Aktion rcksichtslos genug, und radikal in ihrem eignen Sinne
verfhrt. (Letter to Scholem, 29 May 1926, GB 3: 1589).
Notes 243
CHAPTER 7
1 See Longinus, Peri Hupsous, 43.
2 Of Experience, in The Complete Works of Montaigne: Essays, Travel Journals, Letters,
trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1948) is the
conclusion of Montaignes Essays and it consists of an inventory of the authors
bodily and habitual attitudes. On this famous essay, see Jean Starobinski, The
Bodys Moment, trans. John A. Gallucci, Yale French Studies 64 (1983): 273305; on
Rabelais lists, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Hlne Iswolky
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), passim and Forms of Time and
of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes towards a Historical Poetics, in The Dialogic
Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of
Texas Press, 1988), pp. 167206; on the use of lists in La Popelinires perfect history
see Zachary Sayre Schiffman, On the Threshold of Modernity: Relativism in the French
Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), chs 1 and 2.
3 Michel Foucault, Preface to The Order of Things: An Achaeology of the Human Sciences
(London: Routledge, 2002), pp. xvixxvi. (The French title is Les Mots et les choses
[1966]).
4 For Benjamins attitude to Warburg vis--vis the independence of disciplines, or, as
Benjamin also called it, cultural history, see Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamins
Concept of Cultural History, in David S. Ferris (ed.), The Cambridge Companion
to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 839.
Another article on the relation between Benjamin and the Warburg school that
deserves mention is Beatrice Hanssens Portrait of Melancholy (Benjamin, Warburg,
Panofsky), in Gerhard Richter (ed.), Benjamins Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary
Literary and Cultural Studies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002),
pp. 16988. Although Hanssen does not address explicitly the issue of the independence
of disciplines, her reading is still valuable for the investigation of the subject of history
in showing that what distinguishes Benjamins method from Warburgs method is that
for the former there is a disappearance of the human (p. 186).
5 Andrew Benjamin, Benjamins Modernity, in Ferris (ed.), Cambridge Companion to
Walter Benjamin, p. 113.
6 The historical method is a philological method, writes Benjamin in a note from the
Paralipomena titled Dialectical Image (SW 4: 405/GS 1.3: 1238). And the philologist
is, according to the essay on the Elective Afnities, the chemist who investigates the
ashes of the pyre i.e. the material content of the work of art, or the historical pile
of catastrophes. The constructive principle of historical materialism presupposes
destruction (cf. N7, 6).
7 The culmination of historicism equates universal history with the third sense of histor-
icism indicated earlier, the positivism claiming to present the facts as they really were.
8 The metaphor of the positivist historian as a collector of index cards comes from Carl
Becker, Detachment and the Writing of History: Essays and Letters, ed. Phil Snyder
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958), pp. 245.
9 The Storyteller is of course much more complex. The argument unfolds partly
as a contrast between storytelling and the novel. See Timothy Bahtis Death and
Authority: Benjamins The Storyteller, in Allegories of History: Literary Historiography
after Hegel (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 22654 for an
incisive reading of the difference between the two genres in terms of the temporality
of the end and of ending.
10 Herodotus with an English Translation, trans. A.D. Godley (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard
University Press, 1957), 2: 21.
11 The inadequacy of the question is indicated by the indecision as to who really is in
control. Thus Jrgen Habermas discerns Benjamins failed notion of history in that
materialism cannot be tted into theology, if the dwarf representing theology is taken
to be in control (Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique, in
Gary Smith (ed.), On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections [Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1988], pp. 11314). Conversely, Bahti emphasizes Benjamins
assertion that the puppet takes the chess-player into its service, and correctly shows
that this reversal of control presents a chiasmus between the two terms (Bahti, History
as Rhetorical Enactment: Walter Benjamins Theses On the Concept of History , in
Allegories of History, pp. 2001). However, in relation to subjectivity Bahtis reading
requires a further step: the subject is not presented in the reversal of control between
man and puppet, but rather in the process of reversibility that the relation between
man and puppet makes possible. Ian Balfour perceives this process of reversibility
but concludes from this that the puppet and dwarf . . . have to combine forces, and
it is the cooperation of the two that guarantees victory in the chess game of history
(Reversal, Quotation (Benjamins History), MLN 106 [1991]: 627). This image of an
alliance between the man and the puppet may be construed as purporting that they
are independent entities. Reversibility must emphasize instead the complicity between
man and puppet which undoes any notion of cooperation between individual parties.
CHAPTER 8
I wish to thank heartily Antoine Parzy for his helpful contribution to this work.
1 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 2.
2 Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, 1968), p. 199.
3 D. N. Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions politiques de lancienne France, t. III,
La monarchie Franque (Brussels: Ed. Culture et civilisation, 1964), p. ii.
4 See on this point Jean Grondin, Introduction H-G Gadamer (Paris: Le Cerf, 1999).
5 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzge einer philosophischen
Hermeneutik, in Gesammelte Werke (Tbingen, J.C.B Mohr, 1990), 1: 295 / Truth
and Method, rev. trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York:
Continuum, 1989), p. 290.
6 Gadamer, Vorwort zur 2. Auage, in Gesammelte Werke 1: 443.
7 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (London: Faber & Faber, 1954), p. 3.
CHAPTER 9
1 Clearly the other important thinker about boredom is Martin Heidegger. While both
Heidegger and Benjamin locate boredom as a condition of the modern and thus as one
of the moods of modernity, there is a fundamental difference as to how the conception
of the present is understood and thus in the way that it determines the philosophical
project. For Heideggers most sustained engagement with boredom see his The
Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995).
2 I have tried to give a detailed account of this conception of the present in my Present
Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism (London: Routledge, 1997).
3 Benjamins relation to Kant is a topic of research in its own right. In general terms
however, Kant positions Space and Time as providing the conditions of possibility for
experience. They are the pure forms of sensible intuition (Critique of Pure Reason,
trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], A
Notes 245
39). While experience is essential in terms of its possibility, what is left untreated by
denition is the nature of the experience and any strong conception of the experi-
encing subject.
4 Ambivalence is an ontological state, rather than one linked to the relativism of
epistemology. What this means is that ambivalence is an aspect that is constitutive
of subjectivity itself. Within the prevailing presence of ambivalence, knowledge is
essential.
5 The heritage in which the technology of art is discussed usually oscillates between
two predetermined positions. In the rst instance the term technology assumes a
monolithic quality and is thus not able to be used effectively to account for different
and conicting practices that stem from the same technological source. While in
the second techniques, as a domain of practice, are linked to a humanist conception
of techne and as such presented in terms of human skill. The hand works with the
machine. As opposed to both of these directions of research what needs to be pursued
is what could be described as the development of an ontology of techniques. This is
of course a project to come. However it is one that can be located within a mode of
thinking that begins with Benjamin.
6 I have tried to provide a more sustained version of this argument in Disclosing Spaces:
On Painting (Manchester: Clinamen, 2004), see in particular Chs. 1 and 3.
7 For other uses of the term distraction, see for example Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass
Ornament, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1995). One of Kracauers formulations opens up the question of who sees and thus the
nature of the subject of distraction. Writing of the interior design of the cinema he
notes that the stimulation of the senses succeed one another with such rapidity that
there is no room left between them even for the slightest contemplation (p. 326). The
temporality of this movement one marked by the elimination of any possible inter-
vention is implicitly challenged by Benjamins notion of distraction. The audiences
state of absorption retains a partiality precisely because of the ineliminability of the
potential for criticality.
8 For a detailed investigation of the complex politics of Fury see Anton Kaes, A Stranger
in the House: Fritz Langs Fury and the Cinema of Exile, New German Critique
(2003), 89: 3358.
9 An obvious site in which it would be possible to begin to identify this development is
in Freuds Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, in The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychoanalytical Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London:
Hogarth Press, 1973), 17: 65143. The value of Freuds work is the way it complicates
any straightforward distinction between the individual and the group. What is inter-
esting with Benjamin however is the possibility of introducing not the constraint of
the ego-ideal, but a relationship between distraction and criticality that links their
presence to a founding ambivalence. The ambivalence means that the critical will have
a relation to formal presence, rather than the projection of one content as opposed to
another. While it cannot be undertaken here, the question of ambivalence as a motif
in psychoanalysis would need to be pursued through section II of Totem and Taboo.
10 While its detail cannot be pursued, here the distinction between authentic and
inauthentic self is formulated in Being and Time in the following terms: The self of
everyday Dasein is the they-self which we distinguish from the authentic self that
is from the self which has been taken hold of in its own way. As the they-self, the
particular Dasein has been dispersed into the they, and must rst nd itself . Martin
Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1978), p. 167.
11 The iconoclasm involves the need to retain technique and thus abstraction as site of
the political and not to identify the political nature of art with content. As such the
image must always be secondary. What matters therefore is not an image but an under-
standing of techniques within which (and with which) the future is produced. It is in
this regard that it becomes possible to link the political in art to abstraction where the
latter is understood as a site of potential.
12 See in this regard Werner Hamacher, Afformative, strike: Benjamins Critique
of Violence , in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds), Walter Benjamins
Philosophy. Destruction and Experience (Manchester: Clinamen, 2000), pp. 10837.
13 This is of course the point at which the encounter with Nietzsche has to be staged.
The section from The Gay Science that Benjamin quotes would need to be the site of
engagement.
CHAPTER 10
1 An earlier conception of the bourgeois domestic interior emphasizes this aspect of
mortication: The bourgeois interior of the 1860s to the 1890s with its gigantic
sideboards distended with carvings, the sunless corners where potted palms sit, the
balcony embattled behind its balustrade, and the long corridors with their singing
gas ames ttingly houses only the corpse. On this sofa the aunt cannot but be
murdered. The soulless luxury of the furnishings becomes true comfort only in the
presence of a dead body. (SW 1: 447)
2 Mario Praz, An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration from Pompeii to Art Nouveau,
trans. William Weaver (London: Thames & Hudson, 1964), pp. 178.
3 Ibid., p. 25.
4 For a more detailed account of how Benjamins thinking critiques conventional
ways of writing the history of the interior, privacy and domesticity, see Charles Rice,
Rethinking Histories of the Interior, The Journal of Architecture 9.3 (2004): 27587.
5 While Benjamins notational thinking on the interior is not conned to Convolute I,
it does offer the most intense coalescence of thinking and sources on the interior.
6 Rolf Tiedemann, Dialectics at a Standstill: Approaches to the Passagen-Werk, in AP,
p. 931.
7 Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Translators Foreword, in AP, p. xi.
8 Ibid., p. xi.
9 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 6.
10 Ibid., p. 6.
11 Ibid., p. 59.
12 Pierre Missac, Walter Benjamins Passages, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 136.
13 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
14 See Peter Thornton, Authentic Dcor: The Domestic Interior 16201920 (New York:
Viking, 1984), pp. 1011.
15 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, The Plane of Immanence, in What is Philosophy?
trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994), p. 38.
16 For a discussion of the status of the two exposs in Benjamins conception of The
Arcades Project, see Missac, Walter Benjamins Passages, pp. 13945.
Notes 247
CHAPTER 11
1 The letter is published in Sokratis Georgiadiss introduction to the English translation
of Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete,
trans. J. Duncan Berry (Santa Monica, CA: The Getty Center Publication Programmes,
1995), p. 53. Noting Benjamins remark on Goethe, Kevin McLaughlin suggests that,
the business of criticism for Benjamin was a kind of excavation in the sense of mining
taking something out of the earth but in this case, more accurately, also bringing
to light . McLaughlin, Virtual Paris: Benjamins Arcade Project, in ed. Gerhard
Richter (ed.), Benjamins Ghosts (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002),
p. 212.
2 The intention is not to revive the eighteenth-century archaeological approach to the
past, but the act of understanding the past as a recovery, construction based on the
memories of the past and the demands of the present. For a critique of archaeology
as an approach to the past see Barry Bergdol, Archaeology vs. History: Heinrich
Hbschs Critique of Neoclassicism and the Beginnings of Historicism in German
Architectural History, Oxford Art Journal 5 (1983): 313.
3 I am paraphrasing Walter Benjamins remarks mainly because he refers to the angel
as a male person. For the history and a comprehensive account of Benjamins thesis
on history see O.K. Werckmeister, Walter Benjamins Angel of History, or the
Transguration of the Revolutionary into the Historian, Critical Review 10 (1996):
23967.
4 On the concept of ruin in Walter Benjamins discourse see Beatrice Hanssen, Walter
Benjamins Other History (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1998), Ch. 4,
pp. 9681. For transitoriness in reference to fashion and time in Walter Benjamins
discourse on history, see Andrew Benjamin, Being Roman Now: The Time of
Fashion: A Commentary on Walter Benjamins Theses on the Philosophy of History
XIV, Thesis Eleven 75 (2003): 39-53.
5 Franoise Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), p. 13. Choay pursues the development of the idea of the
monument from its anthropological dimension in pre-Renaissance time through
Albertis discourse on monument as a work of art, to the nineteenth century when the
purpose of the Latin monumentum gave way to the historic monument.
6 I am using image in interchange with the phenomenon of building as discussed by
Fritz Brethaupt. According to him, within the phenomenon there is something non-
phenomenal that does not appear, and within the event there is something that does
not take place. And he continues, history comes into play by delaying the appearance
of this nucleus within the phenomenon (History as the Delayed Disintegration of
Phenomena in Richter, Benjamins Ghosts, p. 191).
7 According to Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Pre-industrial trafc is mimetic of natural
phenomena . . . Only during a transitional period did the travellers who transferred from
the stagecoach to the railway carriage experience a sense of loss due to the mechani-
sation of travel: it did not take long for the industrialisation of the means of transport
to alter the consciousness of the passengers: they developed a new set of perceptions.
Schiverblusch, Railway Journey: The Industrialisation of Time and Space in the 19th
Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), p. 15. See also Sigred
Giedion, Mechanisation Takes Command, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
8 Harry Harootunian, Historys Disquiet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 19.
9 The true picture of the past its by. The past can be seized only as an image that
ashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again (SW 4: 390).
10 Hubertus Gassner, The Constructivists: Modernism on the way to Modernization,
in The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 19151932 (New York:
Guggenheim Museum, 1992), p. 318.
11 Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in the East
and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 119.
12 Giedion, Building in France, p. 87. Giedions statement in part stimulated Walter
Benjamin to invest in technology as the source of new collective needs. After receiving
a copy of Giedions book Benjamin admired him in a letter using the following words:
I am studying in your book . . . the differences between radical conviction and radical
knowledge that refresh the heart. You possess the latter, and therefore you are able
to illustrate, or rather to uncover, the tradition by observing the present (quoted in
Building in France, p. 53). In Convolute N of the Arcades Project Benjamin returns to
Giedion criticizing his inclination for historicism: just as Giedion teaches us to read
off the basic features of todays architecture in the buildings erected around 1850, we,
in turn, would recognize todays life, todays form, in the life and in the apparently
secondary, lost forms of that epoch (N1, 11). Here is Detlef Mertins interpretation
of the Benjamins cited statement: In reworking Giedions dualism into a dialectic
between physiological processes and phantasmagoric dreams, Benjamin pointed to the
immanence of truth within the expression of bodily labours and the physiognomy of
historical event (Walter Benjamins Glimpses of the Unconscious: New Architecture
and New Optics, History of Photography, 22 (1998): 118.
13 On this subject see Buck-Morss, Dreamworld, especially Ch. 2, On Time,
pp. 4296.
14 James S. Ackerman, Origins, Imitation, Conventions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2002), p. 249.
15 One is reminded of David Wattkins position in Morality and Architecture (London:
Clarendon Press, 1977).
16 I am paraphrasing John McCole in Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 172. The author makes these claims
based on Benjamins remarks in Experience and Poverty (SW 2: 7316).
17 For the complex inuence of Freuds work on Benjamin, see Laurence A. Rickels,
Suicitation: Benjamin and Freud, in Benjamins Ghosts, pp. 14253.
18 For a brief and concise documentation of Benajmins attraction to the work of modern
architects, specially Le Corbusier and Scheerbart, see Detlef Mertins, The Enticing
and Threatening Face of Prehistory: Walter Benjamin and the Utopia of Glass,
Assemblage, 29 (1996).
19 Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1988), pp. 7989.
20 Hanssen, Walter Benjamins Other History, p. 54.
21 I am beneting from Andrew Benjamins reections on Time and Task: Benjamin
and Heidegger Showing the Present, in Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism
(London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 2655.
22 For Walter Benjamin, revolution, a moment of danger, offers the historian the oppor-
tunity to seize hold of a memory as it ashes up (SW 4: 391).
23 The work of two historians amongst others comes to mind: Manfredo Tafuri and
Kenneth Frampton. For Tafuri, architectures ideology unfolds itself in a stressful
search for a space beyond the domain that is already occupied, or will be occupied,
by capitalist forces of production and consumption. Every aspect of the everyday life
which in one way or another relates to the art of building has either already been in-
ternalized into the representational realm of capitalism or would be part of it through
architecture. See Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development
(Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1976). Important to Framptons discussion of modern archi-
tecture are dichotomies such as tradition and innovation, mtier and technology, but
also site and material. Frampton reads these dichotomies through Walter Benjamins
ideas on the loss of aura and Martin Heideggers discourse on dwelling. What these
Notes 249
readings entail is the loss of the unity between architecture and place, and the historical
impossibility of retaining such a unity even through mechanical reproduction of the
object. Thus Framptons quest for modern architecture where the inection of a
chosen tectonic penetrates into the inner most recesses of the structure, not as a
totalizing force but as declension of an articulate sensibility. See Frampton, Place,
Production and Architecture, in Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London:
Thames & Hudson, 1980), p. 297.
24 Briey, what makes these two gures important, however, is the difference involved in
their emphasis on architectural praxis. While Tafuri expands ones understanding of the
problematic of the project of modernity, exploring the work of architects who attempt
to retain architectures autonomy in spite of the expected failure, Frampton, instead,
highlights marginal victories when aspects of place-making are retained, as the instru-
mental reason tightens its circle on architecture. Their difference has also to do with the
fact that Tafuri recognizes the historicity of separating the task of the historian from that
of the architect. The latter, he believed, should design and build, regardless of the histo-
rians attempt to disclose the immanent gap between form and meaning in modernity.
Framptons methodology, on the other hand, enjoys a strategic doubling: in analysing
a building, Frampton tries to understand, as much as possible, how the architect had
sought an architectonic solution for the given situation.
25 This is not the rule: the classicatory means employed by historians who are inuenced
by post-structuralist theories is different: instead of discussing the work in reference
to the project of modernity, an attempt is made to write the history of modern archi-
tecture based on themes central to the development of modernism. See, for example,
Alan Colquhoun, Modern Architecture (London: Oxford University Press, 2003). His
vision of history differs from that of Kenneth Frampton and Manfredo Tafuri. While
Frampton sees modernity as an incomplete project, for Tafuri it represents a historical
project with its own modalities of closure.
26 On Wlfin see Principles of Art History, trans. M.D. Hottinger (New York: Dover,
1950). Also see Michael Podro, The Critical Art Historians of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1982), pp. 98-110.
27 On this subject see Harry Francis Mallgrave, Epilogue, The Semper Legacy: Semper
and Riegl, in Gottfried Semper (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp.
35581. Also Debra Schafter, The Order of Ornament, The Structure of Style: The
Theoretical Foundations of Modern Art and Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), especially pp. 3259.
28 Alois Riegl, The Dutch Group Portrait, October, 74 (1995): 335. Analysing
Rembrandts (The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp), Riegl argued that:
The picture accordingly contains a double unity through subordination: rst,
between Tulp and the seven surgeons, all of whom subordinate themseleves to him
as the lecturer, and, second, between the crowning surgeon and the beholder, the
latter subordinated to the former and indirectly through him to Tulp in turn.
Such a perception of the beholder and painting remains, according to Rigel, closely
dependent upon the works of his direct predecessors . . . and one becomes convinced
that Rembrandt, too, was primarily merely an executor of the artistic volition of his
people and his time (p. 4).
29 According to Margaret Iversen, for Riegl, different stylistic types, understood as expression
of a varying Kunstwollen, are read as different ideals of perception or as different ways of
regarding the minds relationship to its objects and of organizing the material of perception.
Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), p. 8.
30 Alina Payne, Architecture, Ornament and Pictorialism: Notes on the Relationship
Between the Arts from Wlfin to Le Corbusier, in Karen Koehler (ed.), The Built
Surface (Burlington: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 5472.
31 See for example, Bernard Cache, Digital Semper, in Anymore (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2000), pp. 19097. And Neil Leach (ed.), Digital Tectonics (London:
WileyAcademy, 2004).
32 A point of view which has nurtured some historians, Manfredo Tafuri and Kenneth
Frampton in particular, to theorize history according to the problematic relation of
architecture to capital, technique, land and institutions of capitalism. An argument
could be made that there are other historians who were also inspired by architects. The
obvious examples could be Zevis inspiration from Frank L. Wright, or Le Corbusiers
inuence on Giedion. In these two latter cases, the issue was not reconstruction of the
history, but construction of a future based on a normative practice. While one sought
to perpetuate the Zeitgeist, the other opted for a holistic practice inspired by Wright.
33 Quoted in Ann-Marie Sankovitch, Structure/Ornament and the Modern Figuration
of Architecture, The Art Bulletin 80 (1998): 715.
34 Peter Osborne, Small-scale Victories, Large-scale Defeats: Walter Benjamins Politics
of Time, in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds), Walter Benjamins Philosophy:
Destruction and Experience (Manchester: Clinamen, 2000), p. 88.
35 Andrew Benjamin, Benjamins Modernity, in David S. Ferris (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
p. 149. Discussing interruption in Benjamins essay on Goethes Elective Afnities and
rhe Arcades Project, Andrew Benjamin associates the very understanding of modernity
with Benjamins discourse on the caesura, an essential concept for understanding
modernitys departure from the past and thus the interruption of historical continuum
so important for historicism.
36 Reecting on the July revolution Walter Benjamin makes insightful reections differ-
entiating calendar from clock. Against the transient nature of the time registered by
the clock, the calendar suggests a notion of present in which time stands still, and this
is also the time in which a historical materialist is writing history (SW 4: 395).
37 When historical references are called natural in uncritical afrmation, identifying
the empirical course of their development as progress, the result is myth; when prehis-
toric nature is evoked in the act of naming the historically modern, the effect is to
mystify. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1989), p. 68. For Peter Osbornes critique of Buck-Morsss reading of the dialectical
images, see Small-scale Victories, in Benjamin and Osborne (eds), Walter Benjamins
Philosophy, p. 88. Andrew Benjamin argues that the dialectical image is an inter-
ruption. The image becomes a type of temporal montage and therefore should not be
understood within the conventions of images (Benjamins Modernity, p. 111).
38 Carlo Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric, and Proof (London: University Press of New
England, 1999), p. 24.
39 According to Andrew Benjamin, this passage is historical. Noting the difference
between time and the object, he writes: Poesis involves a different relationship than the
one at work in art dened as techne. Indeed, it is because the relationship is formulated
in this way that the temporal considerations at work in the latter the conception
of the work of art determined by techne are such that they open up as historical
(Benjamins Modernity, p. 107).
40 On this subject see James S. Ackerman, Origin, especially the Introduction.
41 This is Walter Benjamin characterizing the differences between the early Romantic
understanding of knowledge and the modern concept of criticism. See The Concept
of Criticism, SW 1: 152.
42 Here Beatrice Hanssen suggests a contrast between Martin Heideggers essay on the
work of art where the Greek Temple is praised in terms of its poetry, and Walter
Benjamin, for whom the ancient temple no longer had any place. From now on, it
could exist only as a ruin. Hanssen, Benjamins Other History, p. 78.
Notes 251
43 On this distinction see ibid., Ch. 2, in particular.
44 Quoted in Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore, MD
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 101.
45 On this subject see, Gevork Hartoonian, Notes on Critical Practice, Architectural
Theory Review 7 (2002): 114.
46 Here I am beneting from Harry Harootunian, The Benjamin Effect: Modernism,
Repetition, and the Path to Different Cultural Imagination, in Michael P. Steiberg,
(ed.) Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1996), pp. 6287.
CHAPTER 12
Translations from the German texts by Benjamin and Rosenzweig are mine, although
I have provided reference to the available English translations.
1 Most helpful have been: Rebecca Comay, Benjamins Endgame, in Walter Benjamins
Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne
(Manchester: Clinamen, 1994), pp. 25191. Irving Wohlfarth On the Messianic
Structure of Walter Benjamins Last Reections, in Glyph 5 (1978): 148212, and the
more recent Eric Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2003).
2 Stphane Moses, Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig, in Gary Smith (ed.),
Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1989), pp. 22846.
3 References are to Franz Rosenzweig, rst the German, then the equivalent English.
Der Stern der Erlsung, in Franz Rosenzweig: Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte
Schriften, Vol. 2 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976); The Star of Redemption, trans.
William W. Hallo (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971).
CHAPTER 13
1 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons
(London: Unwin, 1968).
2 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans.
George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
3 Max Weber, Hauptprobleme der Soziologie: Erinnerungsgabe fr Max Weber, ed.
Melchior Palyi (Munich: Duncker and Humblot, 1923).
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CONTRIBUTORS
Andrew Benjamin has taught philosophy and architectural theory in
both Europe and the USA. He is Professor of Critical Theory in Design
and Architecture, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, in the
University of Technology, Sydney, and Adjunct Professor of Critical Theory
at Monash University. His previous books include: The Plural Event (1993),
Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism (1997); Philosophys Literature
(2001) and Disclosing Spaces: On Painting (2004).
Howard Caygill is Professor of Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College,
University of London, where he teaches philosophy, aesthetics and cultural
history. His publications include: Art of Judgment (1989); A Kant Dictionary
(1995) and Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (2002).
Rebecca Comay is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. She
has published extensively in areas of European philosophy, and particularly
on the work of Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Hegel and contem-
porary French thought.
Georges Didi-Huberman teaches at the Ecole des hautes tudes en sciences
sociales, Paris. He is the author of numerous books in French. His books
in English translation include: Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration
(1995); Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of
the Salptrire (2003); Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain
History of Art (2004) and Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (2004).
David Ferris is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at
the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of Theory and the
Evasion of History (1993) and Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity
(2000); and the editor of Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions (1996) and
The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin (2004). He is currently
completing a book on Walter Benjamin entitled Torsos of Modernity: Walter
Benjamin and the Moment of Criticism.
Robert Gibbs is Professor in the Department of Philosophy, University
of Toronto, in the eld of modern Jewish philosophy. He taught at St
Louis University and Princeton University, and has published widely on
ethics, continental philosophy, and Jewish thought. His rst major project
addressed ethics and Jewish thought, including two books: Correlations
in Rosenzweig and Levinas (1992) and Why Ethics? Signs of Responsibilities
(2000). His ongoing project focuses on ethics and laws, and he is completing
a book, Commands and Laws: Ethics and Laws in Contemporary Jewish
Philosophy, that explores the different interpretations of law in twentieth-
century Jewish philosophers.
Werner Hamacher is Professor of German and Comparative Literature,
Goethe University, Frankfurt a.M., and has taught at the Free University
Berlin, Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, the University of
Amsterdam and the Ecole normale suprieure. His publications include:
Pleroma: Reading in Hegel (1998); Premises: Studies in Philosophy and
Literature from Kant to Celan (1996, 1999) and Maser (1998).
Gevork Hartoonian is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University
of Canberra. He has taught at many US universities, including Columbia
University and the Pratt Institute. He is the author of Modernity and its Other
(1997), and Ontology of Construction (1994). His most recent publications
include, Modernism, the entry essay for the Encyclopaedia of 20th Century
Architecture (2004); Gottfried Semper: The Structure of Theatricality,
Art Criticism (2003); Beyond Historicism: Manfredo Tafuris Flight, Art
Criticism (2002) and Frank Gehry: Roong, Wrapping, and Wrapping the
Roof , Journal of Architecture, (2002).
Rainer Ngele is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. His books and essays deal mainly
with literature in the intersection of philosophy and psychoanalysis, concen-
trating on Benjamin, Freud, Kafka, Hlderlin, Brecht, Artaud and others.
His publications include: Reading after Freud (1987); Theatre, Theory,
Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity (1991); Echoes of
Translation: Reading between Texts (1997) and Literalische Vexierbilder: Drei
Versuche zu einer Figur (2001).
Stephanie Polsky has recently received her doctorate in the history of
ideas from Goldsmiths College, University of London, for her thesis
Walter Benjamins Transit: A Destructive Tour of Modernity. She has
lectured widely on Benjamin at various institutions including Goldsmiths,
Camberwell College of Arts, Central St Martins and the London College of
Printing. She currently lectures in the department of Creative Critical and
Communication Studies at Greenwich University. Her most recent work has
focused on Benjamin and the history of technology.
Charles Rice is Lecturer in Architecture at the University of New South
Wales, Sydney, and has taught in architectural history and theory at the
Architectural Association, London. He researches the historical emergence
of the bourgeois domestic interior, the theoretical issues surrounding its
inhabitation, and the contemporary mediatization of the interior and the
city. He is coeditor, with Barbara Penner, of Constructing the Interior, a
special issue of The Journal of Architecture (2004), and his work is also
published in Archis, Architectural Design, Architectural Theory Review and
Critical Quarterly.
Philippe Simay is Directeur de programme at the Collge international
de Philosophie and associate researcher at the Laboratoire danthropologie
sociale of the Centre national de la recherche scientique (CNRS). His
research interests are architecture, theory of modernity, constitution of
anthropological knowledge. He has published several articles on these
subjects and has edited two books: La Ville dvoile: Benjamin et la modernit
urbaine (2005), and La Ville en tat de choc: Simmel, Kracauer, Benjamin
(2005).
Dimitris Vardoulakis teaches at the Victorian College of the Arts and
is research assistant at Monash University. Publications include articles in
Greek and in English, recently in the International Journal of Philosophical
Studies, Angelaki and Modern Greek Studies, as well as translations into Greek
of short stories, poetry and a novel, Alasdair Grays Poor Things (2001). He
is coeditor of the journal Colloquy and coeditor, with Leslie Hill and Brian
Nelson of After Maurice Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy (2005).
Contributors 255
Index
Ackerman, James 187, 250n.
Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund 71,
72, 912, 968, 100, 105, 179,
240n.
Agacinski, Sylviane 234n.
Agamben, Giorgio 74, 779, 89
Alberti, Leon Battista 247n.
Arendt, Hannah 1434, 146, 153
Aristotle 111
Atget, Eugne 202, 278, 30, 33,
232n.
Augustine 217
Bahti, Timothy 243n., 244n.
Bakhtin, Mikhail 243n.
Balfour, Ian 244n.
Ball, Hugo 217
Baudelaire, Charles 4, 6, 25, 89,
100, 20912, 232n.
Bataille, Georges 7, 8, 227n., 228n.
Becker, Carl 243n.
Beckett, Samuel 231n.
Behne, Adolf 179
Belting, H. 231n.
Benjamin, Andrew 123, 193,
232n., 234n., 247n., 248n.,
250n.
Benjamin, Dora 106
Benjamin, Walter
A Short Presentation on
Proust, Held on my Fortieth
Birthday 62
The Arcades Project 8, 17, 19,
202, 258, 317, 456, 48,
49, 5763, 968, 100, 103,
105, 11822, 126, 1413,
147, 149, 1523, 159, 1648,
17181, 2089, 21213, 217,
2256, 228n., 231n., 233n.,
234n., 2356n., 243n.
The Author as Producer 103
Berlin Childhood around
1900 226
Capitalism and Religion 216,
2205
Central Park 4, 137, 237n.
The Concept of Criticism in
German Romanticism 4950,
143, 194, 195, 250n.
Critique of Violence 76, 7980,
21718, 219
The Destructive
Character 1434
Eduard Fuchs, Collector and
Historian 122, 1467, 1934,
236n.
Experience and Poverty 138,
1745, 248n.
Franz Kafka 758, 86, 103,
116, 147
Goethes Elective Afnities 121,
123, 220, 243n., 250n.
Karl Kraus 103, 1456, 147
Little History of
Photography 4, 12, 2930
Moscow 82
Moscow Diary 72
Naples 83, 211
On Language as Such and on
the Language of Man 62,
103, 128, 226, 237n.
On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire 3, 4, 6, 39,
20912
On the Concept of History 1,
7, 24, 26, 28, 32, 357,
3848, 527, 607, 804, 86,
989, 116, 11820, 1227,
1301, 1346, 137, 14855,
156, 183, 185, 186, 193, 197
8, 20714, 215, 233n., 234n.,
235n., 236n., 237n., 241n.,
247n., 248n., 250n.
On the Mimetic Faculty 234n.
One-Way Street 147, 177, 217,
2234, 246n.
The Origin of German Tragic
Drama 4, 56, 57, 60, 83, 98,
103, 105, 109, 141, 143, 217,
2234, 236n.
Paralipomena to On the
Concept of History 19, 24
5, 279, 36, 523, 120, 1223,
126, 12930, 134, 148, 151,
152, 2345n., 236n., 243n.
Praise of the Puppet: Critical
Comments on Max von
Boehns Puppen und
Puppenspiele 146
Rastellis Story 215
The Rigorous Study of
Art: On the First volume
of Kunstwissenschaftliche
Forschung 1902
The Storyteller 98, 12934,
13842
Surrealism 101
The Task of the
Translator 423
Toys and Play: Marginal
Notes on a Monumental
Work 1689
Two Poems by Friedrich
Hlderlin 1078
What is Epic Theatre 1023,
10717
The Work of Art in the
Age of its Technological
Reproducibility 3, 12,
17, 205, 2833, 36, 103,
15764, 169, 1867, 189, 191,
232n., 233n.
World and Time 21719, 223
Bensmaia, Reda 238n.
Bergdol, Barry 247n.
Blanqui, Luis-Auguste 164
Bloch, Ernst 198, 217
Blood, Susan 232n.
Brodersen, Momme 238n.
Bois, Yve-Alain 15, 2289n.,
230n., 231n.
Bonnefoi, C. 230n.
Borges, Jorge Luis 85
Brandt, Sebastian 223
Brecht, Bertolt 71, 83, 102, 105
17, 117, 236n.
Brethaupt, Fritz 247n.
Buber, Martin 109, 197, 214
Bchner, Georg 109
Buck-Morss, Susan 176, 186,
228n., 241n., 248n, 250n.
Brger, Peter 227n.
Bush, George W. 203
Cache, Bernard 250n.
Cadava, Eduardo 231n., 233n.,
241n.
Caygill, Howard 243n.
Celan, Paul 45, 109
Czanne, Paul 230n.
Char, Ren 153
Chirico, Giorgio de 165
Choay, Franoise 184, 247n.
Clay, Jean 14, 229n., 231n.
Cohen, Hermann 197, 200
Colquhoun, Alan 249n.
Comay, Rebecca 240n., 251n.
Criquei, J.P. 229n.
Damisch, Hubert 14, 230n.
Dante 6, 227n.
Danto, Arthur 227n.
Index 257
Deleuze, Gilles 706, 79, 80, 817,
227n., 231n., 246n.
Derrida, Jacques 160, 162, 231n.
Didi-Huberman, Georges 227n.,
228n., 229n., 230n., 231n.
Dilthey, Wilhelm 148, 149
Droysen, Johann Gustav 148
du Boucher, Andr 230n.
Ducot, O. 229n.
Duhamel, Georges 160, 162
Duschamp, Marcel 9
Eiland, Howard 176
Einstein, Carl 8
Eisenstein, Sergei Mikhailovich 8,
226n.
Flida, Pierre 228n., 230n.
Ficino, Marsilio 89
Flaubert, Gustave 241n.
Foucault, Michel 82, 120
Fountaine, Pierre 178
Fourier, Charles 171, 2256
Frampton, Kenneth 188, 2489n.
250n.
Freud, Sigmund 8, 16, 889, 92,
95, 99, 111, 114, 187, 2212,
23940n., 248n.
Fuchs, Eduard 144, 146
Fustel de Coulanges, Numa
Denis 148
Gadamer, HansGeorg 14951
Garnier, Charles 1923
Gassner, Hubertus 186
Gauguin, Paul 2289n.
Geiger, Moritz 235n.
Georgiadis, Sokratis 246n.
Giacometti, Alberto 9, 15, 230n.
Giedion, Sigfried 182, 186, 247n.,
248n., 250n.
Ginzburg, Carlo 194, 251n.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
von 204, 220, 247n., 250n.
Grandville (Jean-Ignace-Isidore
Gerard) 225
Greenberg, Clement 9, 12, 229n.
Grondin, Jean 244n.
Guattari, Flix 706, 80, 815,
246n.
Guttmann, Simon 106
Hamacher, Werner 246n.
Habermas, Jrgen 243n.
Hanssen, Beatrice 188, 195, 243n.,
247n., 250n.
Harootunian, Harry 185, 186, 251n.
Hebel, Johann Peter 129
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich 78, 90, 92, 122, 202,
204, 227n., 236n., 237n.
Heidegger, Martin 57, 91, 149,
163, 2356n., 237n., 244n.,
245n., 248n., 250n.
Heinle, Christoph Friedrich 106
Herodotus 119, 1313
Hess, Thomas 10, 229n., 230n.,
231n.
Hitler, Adolf 62, 72, 111, 120, 215
Hobsbawn, Eric 142
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 36
Hlderlin, Friedrich 1078, 11112
Homer 119
Hope, Thomas 178
Horkheimer, Max 72, 912, 1213
Husserl, Edmund 150, 235n., 236n.
Huyssen, Andreas 239n.
Ibsen, Henrik 177
Iversen, Margaret 249n.
Jacobsen, Eric 251n.
Janovoch, Gustav 238n.
Jung, Carl Gustav 8, 96
Kaes, Anton 245n.
Kafka, Franz 37, 678, 1445,
234n., 237n.
Kandinsky, Wassily 9
Kant, Immanuel 1, 456, 4950,
52, 556, 61, 6978, 823, 85
6, 101, 122, 157, 234n., 235n.,
236n., 237n., 2445n.
Karplus (Adorno), Gretel 103, 1056
Keller, Gottfried 56, 59, 236n.
Kierkegaard, Sren 95, 102, 111,
11317, 179, 236n., 240n., 241n.
King, Martin Luther, Jr 204
Klee, Paul 183
Klibansky, Raymond 239n.
Kracauer, Siegfried 245n.
Kraft, Werner 104
Kraus, Karl 61, 144, 145
Kraus, Rosalind 227n.
Kristeva, Julia 239n.
La Popelinire, Lancelot Voisin
de 120, 243n.
Lacan, Jacques 92
Lacis, Asjia 72
Leach, Neil 250n.
Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard
Jeanneret-Gris) 186, 248n., 250n.
Lebensztejn, Jean-Claude 228n.,
229n., 231n.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 79, 85
Leskov, Nikolai 129, 139
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 95
Levinas, Emmanuel 198
Longinus 120
Lwith, Karl 164
Lukcs, Georg 223, 240n.
Luther, Martin 110, 223
Lyotard, Jean-Franois 184
Malevich, Kazimir 6, 9
Mallarm, Stphane 56
Mallgrave, Harry Francis 249n.
Mannoni, Octave 90
Marx, Karl 8, 301, 58, 61, 96,
97, 107, 108, 113, 184, 185, 186,
208, 2212, 226, 234n., 242n.
Masaccio 228n.
Mauss, Marcel 139
McCole, John 248n.
McLaughlin, Kevin 176, 247n.
Meltzer, Franoise 237n.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 14
Mertins, Detlef 248n.
Michelet, Jules 97
Missac, Pierre 177, 180
Mondrian, Piet 5, 6, 8, 9, 12, 14,
228n., 230n.
Monglond, Andr 19, 245, 289,
232n., 233n.
Montaigne, Michel de 120, 132
Morgenstern, Soma 62
Moscovici, M. 227n.
Neher, Gaspar 1134
Newman, Barnett 5, 6, 67, 918,
22931n.
Nietzsche, Friedrich 79, 81, 87, 89,
93, 109, 264, 2212, 223, 236n.,
240n., 246n.
Nora, Pierre 92
Osborne, Peter 193, 250n.
Panofky, Erwin 5, 6, 16, 227n.,
228n., 239n., 243n.
Payne, Alina 191
Payot, D. 231n.
Pen, Tsui 856
Pensky, Max 241n.
Percier, Charles 178
Perret, C. 227n., 228n.
Plato 113, 114
Pliny the Elder 5
Podro, Michael 249n.
Pollock, Jackson 9, 14
Praz, Mario 1735
Proust, Marcel 3, 4, 62, 69, 99
Rabelais, Francois 120
Rang, Florence Christian 217
Index 259
Ranger, Terence 142
Ranke, Leopold von 122, 148
Raphael 232n.
Reinhardt, Ad 5, 6, 9, 229n.
Rembrandt 191, 249n.
Rice, Charles 246n.
Richardson, B. 229n., 230n.
Rickels, Laurence A. 248n.
Riegl, Alois 1912, 194, 249n.
Rodchenko, Alexander 186
Rose, B. 230n.
Rosenburg, H. 230n.
Rosenstock, Eugen 217
Rosenzweig, Franz 197214, 217
Sachs, Franz 235n.
Saxl, Fritz 239n.
Schafter, Debra 249n.
Scheerbart, Paul 174, 217, 2256,
248n.
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm
Joseph von 204
Schiffman, Zachary Sayre 243n.
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 247n.
Schlegel, Friedrich von 4950
Schliesari, Giulia 239n.
Schmidt, Johannes 235n.
Schmitt, Carl 216, 224
Schneider, P. 230n.
Schoen, Ernst 49
Scholem, Gershom 71, 767, 105
6, 108, 145, 149, 183, 198, 214,
235n., 236n., 237n.
Schweppenhuser, Hermann 236n.
Scotus, Duns 236n.
Semper, Gottfried 1912, 194
Shakespeare, William 185
Shankovitch, Ann-Marie 250n.
Stadler, August 235n.
Stalin, Joseph 62, 72, 120, 215
Starobinski, Jean 239n., 243n.
Stefn, Margarete 116
Stein, Edith 235n.
Sternberger, Dolf 236n.
Strauss, Erwin 14
Strick, J. 229n.
Tafuri, Manfredo 188, 248n.,
249n., 250n.
Tasso, Torquato 89
Tiedemann, Rolf 1756, 227n.,
236n.
Vasari, Giorgio 7
Vattimo, Gianni 1878
von Verschuer, Otto 74
Vorlnder, Karl 235n.
Warburg, Aby 5, 7, 122, 243n.
Wattkin, David 248n.
Weber, Max 21623
Werkmeister, O. K. 185
Wohlfarth, Irvin 238n. 241n.,
251n.
Wolff, Kurt 73
Wlfin, Heinrich 190, 195
Wright, Frank L. 250n.
Zevi, Bruno 250n.
iek, Slavoj 912

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