Benjamin and History

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Walter Benjamin andHistory

Andrew Benjamin, Editor

Continuum



WALTER BENJAMIN AND HISTORY



WALTER BENJAMIN STUDIES SERIES

Series Editors: Andrew Benjamin, University of Technology, Sydney andMonash 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 focuson a theme central to contemporary work on Benjamin. The series aims toset new standards for scholarship on Benjamin for students and researchersin 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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ISBN: HB: 0–8264–6745–8

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall



Contents

Acknowledgements vi Abbreviations vii

Introduction A NDREW 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 : Benjamin’s Attenuation of the Negative D AVID FERRIS 19

3 ‘Now’: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time W ERNER H AMACHER 38

4 Down the K. Hole: Walter Benjamin’s Destructive Land-surveying of History STEPHANIE POLSKY 69

5 The Sickness of Tradition: Between Melancholia and

Fetishism R EBECCA COMAY 886 Trembling Contours: Kierkegaard–Benjamin–Brecht R AINER N ÄGELE 102

7 The Subject of History: The Temporality of Parataxis in Benjamin’s Historiography DIMITRIS V ARDOULAKIS 118

8 Tradition as Injunction: Benjamin and the Critique of Historicisms PHILIPPE SIMAY 137

9 Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity

A NDREW BENJAMIN 15610 Walter Benjamin’s Interior History CHARLES R ICE 171

11 What is the Matter with Architectural History?GEVORK H ARTOONIAN 182

12 Messianic Epistemology: Thesis XV R OBERT GIBBS 197

13 Non-messianic Political Theology in Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ HOWARD C AYGILL 215

Notes 227Contributors 253Index 256



Acknowledgements

George Didi-Huberman’s chapter was first 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 Hamacher’s chapter was first published in Heidrun Friese (ed.), The

Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought , (Liverpool: LiverpoolUniversity Press, 2001), while the German text appeared as ‘ “Jetzt”:Benjamin zur historischen Zeit’, in Benjamin Studies 1.1 (2002).

Portions of Rebecca Comay’s essay appeared in Research in Phenomenology 29 (1999) under the title ‘Perverse History: Fetishism and Dialectic in Walter Benjamin’.

A version of Charles Rice’s chapter is published as: ‘Immerger et rompre:

L’intérieur de Walter Benjamin’, trans. Philippe Simay, in PhilippeSimay (ed.), Walter Benjamin: Métropole et Modernité (Paris: Editionsde l’Eclat, 2005).



Abbreviations

All references to the Convolutes of The Arcades Project are given parentheti-cally, according to Convolute no., without further specification.

AP The Arcades Project , trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999).

BA Briefwechsel 1938–1940: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin , ed.Gershom Scholem (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1994).

BS Briefwechsel 1933–1940: Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem , ed.Gershom Scholem (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1985).

C The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940 , ed. GershomScholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jakobsonand Evelyn M. Jakobson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,

1994).

CA Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence1920–1940 , 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 André Lefevere (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

GB Gesammelte Briefe , ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurta.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995–2000).

GS Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften , ed. Rolf Tiedemann andHermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1974).

MD Moscow Diary , ed. Gary Smith, trans. Richard Sieburth (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).

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, 1997–2003).



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INTRODUCTION

ANDREW BENJAMIN

Walter Benjamin’s concern with history involves a reconfiguration of the way the political and the temporality of history interconnect. His writingson history – both the philosophical reflections 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 undertakenin the name of modernity. The implicit understanding of historical time inKant’s conception of the Enlightenment, for example, presupposes a gradualthough inexorable move towards the realization of a specific goal. The goalin question is of course Enlightenment and thus the move towards it inter-connects time and perfectibility. As such, this development becomes theformulation 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 ofconflict as an inherent condition of the movement of history. Fundamentalto Benjamin’s critique of progress as defining the ambit in which politics andtime are interconnected is the centrality that is attributed to forms of inter-ruption. While the question of how that interruption is to be understood isitself an important site of research, what remains the case in the definitionof his projects is, on the one hand, the relationship between interruption anddiscontinuity and, on the other, the modern as premised on an inauguratinginterruption. While interruption is central it should not be forgotten that itis far from absolute. Not only do vestiges of earlier configurations remain,it is also the case that the struggle to maintain the advent of the modernhas to involve a continual and critical negotiation with the conflation of thenew and the temporality of fashion on the one hand and on the other theinsistent presence of historicism’s reactualization in the form of continuityand arguments for gradual development through time. What is of coursefundamental 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 furtherpart of a project marked by interruption. The intent of this volume is to develop both the detail as well as theimplications of Benjamin’s extended writings on history. Rather thanconcentrate simply on the so-called ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’(now known, following the title in the Selected Writings , as ‘On the Conceptof History’), the chapters presented here move between the interconnection



2 Walter Benjamin and History

within Benjamin’s writings on art and literature and his conception ofhistory, Benjamin’s actual writing of history, the use of his work for the

writing of specific histories (e.g. architecture), as well as engagements withthe philosophical and theological dimensions of the project. Moreover, thevolume makes clear that there is no final word on the interpretation ofcertain passages. The recurring motif of the messianic, for example, is givendifferent configurations. Not only are the details of differing texts analysed;moreover, the volume is concerned with what can be described as specificacts of translation. While it is vital that the texts themselves remain sites ofinvestigation and scholarly concern, it is also essential that the applicabilityof Benjamin’s 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 withthe work’s utility as it is with its possible afterlife.

Part of the afterlife involves working with the recognition that Benjamin’stexts, for all their intellectual bravura, were sites in which what was being worked out was the relationship between politics and time. To neglect thepolitical or to reduce it to no more than its named presence fails to graspthat what is at stake within those writings is a political and philosophicalengagement with the exigencies of the present. Part of what comprises the

present is a conflict 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 conflict staged between different political possibilities,the conflict is itself part of the definition of modernity. As such, modernityis an unfinished project because it is the site of a conflict that defines themodern. Benjamin’s work is central in allowing both for an understandingof this complex politics of time as it is in providing some of the resources forits 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 bereturned by the object of our gaze. When this expectation is met (which, in thecase of thought processes, can apply equally to the look of the mind’s eye andto a glance pure and simple), there is an experience of the aura to the fullestextent . . . Experience of the aura thus rests on the transposition of a response

common in human relationships to the relationships between the inanimate ornatural object and man. The person we look at, or who feels he is being lookedat, looks at us in turn. To perceive the aura of an object we look at means toinvest it with the ability to meet our gaze. The experience corresponds to thediscoveries of the mémoire involontaire. (These discoveries, incidentally, areunique: they are lost to the memory that seeks to retain them. Thus they lendsupport to a concept of the aura that comprises the ‘unique apparition of adistance’. 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.) Proust’s great familiaritywith the problem of the aura requires no emphasis.

Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ [1939], SW 4: 338(trans. modified 1939)

THE SUPPOSITION OF THE OBJECT: ‘THAT OF WHICH OUREYES WILL NEVER HAVE THEIR FILL’

What is the sense today, 60 years after Walter Benjamin, of reintroducingthe question, the hypothesis, the supposition of the aura ? Is not the artcontemporary to us inscribed within – does it not inscribe within itself– what Benjamin called ‘the age of technological reproducibility’ (SW 4:251–83), an age supposed to have produced the death, the withering at thevery least, of the aura? Many historians and critics of twentieth-century arthave 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 suchreflections 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 nolonger have to bow to our knees before statues of gods – I note in passingthat Hegel already registered this fact at the beginning of the nineteenthcentury, 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 usdown, that ‘look at’ us or leave us stunned. As we know, Benjamin speaksof the ‘decline of the aura’ in the modern age, but for him, ‘decline’ doesnot mean disappearance. Rather, it means (as in the Latin declinare ) movingdownward, inclining, deviating, or inflecting in a new way. Benjamin’sexegetes have sometimes wondered whether his position on the aura was notcontradictory, or whether one ought not to oppose his ‘early thoughts’ onthe question to his ‘mature’ views, his (quasi-Marxist) philosophy about thedestruction of the aura to his (quasi-messianic) thinking on its restoration.3

To that, we must first reply that the notion of aura is diffused throughout

Benjamin’s oeuvre. Its incorporation into his oeuvre was a response to atranshistorical and profoundly dialectical experience; therefore, the questionof whether the aura has been ‘liquidated’ or not proves to be a quintessentiallyfalse question.4 We must further explain that while the aura in Benjaminnames an originary anthropological quality in the image, the origin for himdoes 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 emergingmatter into its own rhythm’ (OT , p. 46, trans. modified). Hence decline itself is part of the ‘origin’ so understood, not the bygone– albeit founding – past, but the precarious, churning rhythm, the dynamictwo-way flow of a historicity that asks, without respite, even to our ownpresent, ‘to be recognized as a restoration, a restitution, and as somethingthat by that very fact is uncompleted, always open’ (OT , p. 46, trans.modified). The ‘beauty that rises from the bed of ages’ – as Benjamin writes

with reference to Proust and the mémoire involontaire – is never outdated orliquidated; reality never ceases to ‘sear the image’; remembrance continues tooffer itself as a ‘relic secularized’. And since silence is fundamentally auraticin its manifestation – as Benjamin writes of Baudelaire – modern or evenpostmodern man, the man of ‘technological reproducibility’, is obliged, inthe midst of the noisy labyrinth of mediations, information and reproduc-tions, sometimes to impose silence and submit to the uncanniness of whatcomes back to him as aura, as thirst-inducing apparition (SW 2: 510; SW 4:334–7; 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 theprotocols of dogmatic intimidation within which the liturgy has most often

brought forth its images – it is now supposed in artists’ studios in the secularera of technological reproducibility.5 Let us say, to dialecticize, that the declineof 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 Benjaminin the productive instability of his exploratory vocabulary, an ‘uncompleted’and ‘always open’ phenomenon. The aura and its decline are thus part of thesame system (and have undoubtedly always been so in every age of the aura’shistory: we need only read Pliny the Elder, who was already complainingabout 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 meanssubmitting a question by substituting certain parameters of what is believedto 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 theaura in the visual objects that twentieth-century art, from Piet Mondrian

to Barnett Newman to Ad Reinhardt, for example, offers to our view? Wecan at least try. We are prepared to admit that the construction of such asupposition remains awkward – cumbersome, heavy with the past in onesense, too facile, even dubious, in another. In the first place, it is cumbersome for any discourse of specificity: isn’t theaura, which designated that dimension of ‘other presence’ literally requiredby the age-old world of cult images, condemned to obsolescence as soon asa visual object is in itself its own ‘subject’? Hasn’t modern art emancipated

itself from the ‘subject’, the ‘subject matter’ – whether ‘natural’, ‘conven-tional’ or ‘symbolic’ – which Erwin Panofsky placed at the foundation ofany comprehension of the visual arts?8 To that we must reply that thereare 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 discoursesclosed upon their own axioms. In fact, discourses of specificity usuallypresent themselves as (pseudo)axiomatic, and the consequence of their

closure – their tone of certainty, has often been to pronounce supposedlydefinitive death-sentences. The modernist will say, for example, that ‘theaura is dead’, the postmodernist, that ‘modernism is dead’; and so on.But the supposition of the aura is not satisfied with any sentence of death(historical death, death in the name of a meaning of history), inasmuch asthat supposition is linked to a question of memory and not of history in theusual sense, in short, to a question of living on (survivance , Aby Warburg’sNachleben ). It is within the order of reminiscence, it seems to me, thatBenjamin 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 dubiousalibi of the ideologies of restoration: resentment of all sorts in the face ofmodernity, the redemptive ‘return’ to the values of the art of the past, nostalgiafor religious subject matter, a claim made for ‘spirituality’ and ‘sense’ againstall ‘deconstructions’ or ‘destructions’ effected by twentieth-century art.9 Let usadd that the middle position between these two extreme discourses – puttingthe past to death or restoring the past – is not much better than when it triesto reconcile the iconographism of Panofskian subject matter with the radicalabstraction of artists such as Newman or Reinhardt. While something like anauratic quality may live on in the works of these painters, may even underliethem, this cannot mean it lives on as such . To try to ‘reiconographize’ abstractart, 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) asymbolist 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 discoursegenerally cannot understand the nonspecificity – the anthropologicaldimension – of twentieth-century artworks except by returning to the useof age-old categories more or less tied to the religious world. There is ananalogy – an anthropological, but also a phenomenological and metapsy-chological analogy – between Dante’s description of a pilgrim who, lookingat the veronica in Rome, ‘cannot satisfy his hunger’,10 and Benjamin’sdefinition, in the context of Baudelaire, of the aura as ‘that of which our

eyes will never have their fill’ (SW 4: 337). In both cases, what is offeredto our view looks at its viewer (Benjamin called this ‘the ability to meetour gaze’). In both cases, this relation of the gaze implies a dialectic ofdesire , which supposes alterity, lost object, split subject, a non-objectifiablerelationship.11

Given the highly problematic terms ‘gaze’ and ‘desire’, there is no longerany reason to be satisfied with the sententious – judicatory – vocabulary ofart criticism, or to seek ‘grace’ in a vocabulary of empathy or transcendence.

The difficulty of our problem lies in this: in opposition to a discourse ofspecificity that pronounces and carries out its dogmatic death-sentences(the aura is dead, so much the better), and to a discourse of nonspecificitythat invents eternal and ahistorical entities (let us seek transcendence, let usseek the sadness of the veronica in a Newman painting), we must in eachinstance formulate something like a ‘specificity of the nonspecific’. Let meexplain: we must seek in each work of art the articulation between formalsingularities and anthropological paradigms . We must therefore articulate twoapparently 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 – thequestion of the aura. How it manoeuvres the ‘image-making substance’ inorder to impose itself on the gaze, to foment desire. How it thus becomes‘that of which our eyes will never have their fill’.

THE SUPPOSITION OF TIME: ‘THE ORIGIN IS NOW’

What the usual aesthetic positions lack for approaching the problem of theaura, then, is a temporal model capable of accounting for the ‘origin’ in theBenjaminian sense, or the Nachleben in the Warburgian sense: in short, amodel capable of accounting for the events of memory, not the culturalfacts of history. ‘In a certain sense’, Georges Bataille wrote, ‘every problemis 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’ forunderstanding the relics (survivances ), declines and resurgences proper tothe aesthetic domain. Even a circular model such as that of eternal returndisputes the validity of the naive belief in the ‘return of the same’.14 Thus wecan 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 theVasarian model, which asserted in the sixteenth century: ‘The Renaissance

is forgetting the Middle Ages now that it is repeating Antiquity.’15

To saytoday that we must forget modernism so that we can repeat the ecstatic orsacred 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 flash of an intuition inBenjamin himself. That intuition has also remained outside contemporarycommentaries 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 ofthe origin understood as a reminiscent present where the past is neither to berejected nor to be reborn, but quite simply to be brought back as an anachronism .16 Benjamin designates this notion by the less than explicit expression‘dialectical image’. Why ‘dialectical’? Because Benjamin, the author of ‘On the Conceptof History’ (SW 4: 389–97), was seeking a logicotemporal model thatcould take contradictions into account, never taming them but ratherconcentrating 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 Hegel’s 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 completelydifferent from a picture , a figurative illustration. The image is first of all acrystal of time , both a construct and a blazing shape, a sudden shock:

It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what ispresent its light on what is past; rather, an image is that in which theThen and the Now come into a constellation like a flash of lightning. Inother words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of thepresent to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation ofthe Then to the Now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenlyemergent. Only dialectical images are genuine images. (N2a, 3)

This strange definition has at least two consequences, and it is crucial to

clarify them if we are to address the problem of twentieth-century art, itsposition in relation to the aura, and its role in the relation between the ‘Now’and the ‘Then’. First, Benjamin’s definition valorizes a parameter of ambiguity essential to the structure of any dialectical image: ‘Ambiguity’, writesBenjamin, ‘is the manifest imaging of dialectic’ ( AP , p. 10).18 In this way, helays claim to certain aesthetic choices (the only authentic image is one thatis ambiguous), while at the same time dissociating the dialectical operationfrom any clear and distinct synthesis, any teleological reconciliation.

Second, Benjamin’s definition valorizes a critical parameter , revealingthe dialectical image’s enormous potential for intervening in theoreticaldebates (art, according to Benjamin, goes straight to the heart of problemsof cognition). To produce a dialectical image is to appeal to the Then, toaccept the shock of memory while refusing to submit or ‘return’ to the past;for example, it is to welcome the signifiers of Theosophy, the Kabbalah ornegative 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 essentiallymodern invention, substitution and designification. 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 , adialectical moment in his eyes because it lies at the evanescent, ambiguousborderline between unconscious imagery and necessary critical lucidity.That is why he conceived of art history itself as Traumdeutung , ‘dreaminterpretation’, to be elaborated on the Freudian model.19




This historical and critical supposition, which I evoke all too briefly 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 andmemory, and especially the pictorial materiality inherent in the adventureof abstract art and its notoriously idealist references. Nearly all the greatartists, from Wassily Kandinsky to Jackson Pollock, from Malevich toReinhardt, from Mondrian to Newman, from Marcel Duchamp to AlbertoGiacometti, have too quickly irritated or delighted their interpreters by theiruse, sometimes light-hearted, sometimes profound, of ‘spirituality’, ‘originalart’, orthodox theology, Theosophy, even alchemy . . . And most historiansspontaneously forget that a philosophical, religious, or ideological claim onthe part of an artist does not in any way constitute an interpretive key tohis oeuvre, but rather requires a separate and joint interpretation – that is,a dialectically articulated interpretation – of the aesthetic interpretation assuch.21 Whether they are ‘materialists’, or ‘idealists’ – and in general theynever ask themselves the question in those terms – whether they claim tobe ‘avant-garde’ or ‘nostalgic’, artists make their artworks in an order ofplastic 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 isanother 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 offlawless clarity. We know that in 1947 Newman’s artworks and declarations ledClement Greenberg to form a suspicious judgement, typical of what I have calledthe model of specificity, 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). Greenberg’s suspicion was directedprecisely at Newman’s use of certain words stemming from philosophical andreligious traditions: ‘intangible reality’, ‘uniqueness’, ‘ecstasy’, ‘transcendentalexperience’, ‘symbolical or metaphysical content’. And Greenberg found suchuses ‘archaic’, he said, permeated by ‘something half-baked and revivalist in afamiliar American way’, something he found excessive and pointless for artisticactivity as such, pointless, in short, for its ‘specificity’.23

Newman gave a vehement response to these arguments: according tohim, they stemmed from an ‘unintentional distortion based on a misunder-standing’.24 What misunderstanding? That of imagining, in an extremelytraditional frame of mind all in all, that the relation between certain words(coming from an age-old tradition) and a certain pictorial tradition mustinevitably be expressed in terms of a ‘programme’, that is, in iconographicalterms. 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 assumptionof 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 Nowof a singular, absolutely new, and originary experience, of a pictoriality thatdismisses in a single gesture the figurative past and the stylistic present ofabstract, albeit ‘purist’, art? That is why, in his response, Newman doesnot hesitate to rub together, hence to ‘irritate’ – as a way of decomposingtheir accepted usage – the words ‘ecstasy’ and ‘chaos’, the expressions‘transcendence’ and ‘nonmaterial stenography’, and the (at the very leastinteresting) expression ‘materialistic abstractions’. This is a way of positinghimself, if not exactly as a ‘master in contradictions’, as Thomas Hess said,25

then at least as a master of the dialectical image in Benjamin’s sense. It is significant that all of Newman’s writings between 1945 and 1949– that is, during the gestation period that saw the implementation of hismost novel, most decisive, and most definitive pictorial problematic26

– manifest most acutely a thinking of the origin that has nothing to do witha nostalgia for the past, but that concerns precisely the productive collisionbetween the Now and an unexpected, reinvented Then. His thinking hasnothing 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) requiresus to think from top to bottom of art history itself, that is, the relation anartist now maintains with the past (origin as source). That is why, in ‘ThePlasmic Image’, Newman devotes so much time to rethinking primitiveart, in a mode more anthropological than aesthetic, valorizing ‘ecstasy’,‘desire’ and ‘terror’ at the expense of beauty itself. According to him, thepoor comprehension and use of such primitive art – recourse to the criterionof the ornamental, for example – have waylaid the entire modern notion of

abstraction.28

Hence, the new (origin as whirlpool) requires beginning not with somethinglike the idea of a golden age – represented here by Greek art – but on thecontrary 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, isfirst 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 intrinsicaesthetic past. The collision between the Now and the ‘decomposed’ Thenlogically leads to the ‘barbarian’ – Newman’s term – decomposition oftraditional aesthetic categories; and the timeless quality of our ‘imaginarymuseums’ 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 designedabove 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 wrenchingimplementation of that critical ambiguity that Benjamin implicitly charac-

terized with the notion of dialectical image? What does it mean to originatein the whirlpool of an artistic practice, if not to appeal to a certain memoryof the Then in order to decompose the present – that is, the immediatepast, the recent past, the still dominant past – in a determined rejection ofall ‘revivalist’ nostalgia? Interpretations that spontaneously use the temporalcategories of influence, 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 criticalmemory – of the Jewish tradition among other things – permitted Newmanto 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 afundamental anachronism that modernist criticism has as yet been unableto take on. ‘The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, realand concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it withoutthe nostalgic glasses of history.’32

THE SUPPOSITION OF PLACE: ‘THE APPARITION OF ADISTANCE’

And that ‘revelation’ – an ancient, ambiguous and critical word in relationto all formalist specificity – is characterized by Newman strictly as arevelation and a conversion of space . This is a way of radically transformingthe usual sense of the word and at the same time giving it back its materialand phenomenological specificity, which, for my part, I shall call a supposition of place . In an admirable text written in 1949, Newman gave the first

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 thetime.33 But we should add that, despite the article’s brevity, Newman alsothought of titling it ‘Prologue for a New Aesthetic’, which says a great dealabout the theoretical stakes of that altogether phenomenological and privatedescription. 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 Newman’s 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’ thatsuddenly appeared to the American painter.34 But, in order to be approachedby words, that experience of ‘simplicity’ required – or better yet, revealed –the productive ambiguity of a two-way flow 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 oreven photographed; [it is] a work of art that cannot even be seen, so it issomething that must be experience there on the spot’. What does this mean? That the visible spectacle, objectifiable anddescribable, of the landscape opens to something I shall call an experienceof the visual ; and that space – the objectifiable coordinates within which wesituate an object or ourselves – opens onto an experience of place .35 WhenNewman describes the ‘feeling that here is the space’, we must understandthat the here , the here of the place, only works to deconstruct the usualcertainties we have of the space when, spontaneously, we seek to objectify it.

That is why the affirmation of that here goes hand in hand with an acerbiccritique of ‘the clamour over space’ with which all of art history has assaultedour 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 experienceobjectified into a specific fact in the history of plastic styles. The experienceof 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, throughthe very surprise it elicits in the reader: what Newman is speaking of inthat experience of archaic places – the Egyptian pyramids will now seemto him little more than pretty ornaments in comparison – is nothing other,he writes, than ‘the physical sensation of time’. Why, suddenly, fall back ontime? Once our stupor has passed, we begin to understand what is at issue:Newman, very probably without knowing it, has just given a first, strictlyBenjaminian, definition of the aura : ‘a strange weave of space and time’ (SW

2: 518). And we gradually understand that almost all the phenomenologicalqualities Benjamin had evoked in his definitions of the aura are found notonly in what Newman articulated about his temporal experience of place,but also in what he produced , precisely beginning in the years when, fromthe response to Greenberg to ‘Ohio, 1949’, his pictorial and theoreticalproblematic was definitively set in place. What is the aura, and more precisely, what is that ‘strange weave of spaceand 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 definition, 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 artist’s textsserve as displaced witnesses and readable aftereffects. We must thereforeconfront that uniqueness from the near side of the ‘atmospheric’ experienceof the lived landscape,38 must approach it, that is, in the concrete procedureto be observed in the key artwork of that entire period, the paintingOnement I , and more particularly, the 1947 drawing that served as itsheuristic starting-point.39

Newman’s entire production in 1947 was limited to two paintings andtwo drawings.40 Onement I – which was first an untitled ink drawing, itstitle coming precisely from the pictorial result it went on to produce – is ofmodest dimensions, but in it there appears, definitively asserted, the famousprinciple of the ‘zip’, which characterized the artist’s later ‘style’. It thusfunctions as Newman’s first ‘absolute image’,41 obtained directly, withoutmodification or rectification, in immediacy and in apparition, so to speak.The experimentation proper to the drawing – which we find in earlier

graphic studies – now finds something like its decisive and definitive openingmovement : 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 useadhesive strips in the paintings, strips that both reserve and reveal the zips ofpaint elaborated on vast neutral backgrounds. The opening I am speaking of thus possesses this first characteristic ofthe aura, which Benjamin defined as a ‘unique apparition’. It possesses thequality of uniqueness that Newman laid claim to as the ‘absolute beginning’

of his oeuvre, a genesis without a preconceived programme.42

This becomeseven clearer in Newman’s assertion that the vertical zip, far from dividingthe visual field, instead constitutes it as an indivisible unity.43 Finally, thevery title Onement I – one would have expected Uniqueness or Oneness , andhardly the Roman numeral I next to a word that apparently means the samething – powerfully suggests by its very strangeness the condition of singularuniqueness 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 weperceive at the very end of linear perspective. The drawing Onement I ,in fact, does not objectify any spatiality of distancing (we need to opposespatial distancing to distance as the phenomenological property of place).It even subverts all the usual values related to the superposition of figureand ground: hence, the black of the drawing no more withdraws behindthe white vertical shape than the white withdraws behind the two patchesof black ink. Onement I can thus in no case be interpreted figuratively, as




a double door left ajar before us: first, 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 ofthe drawing’s support while the ink is being spread; and second, becausethe saturated zones of black, far from being uniformly compact, reveal adisintegration in the brushstroke, a loss of adhesiveness that makes thegesture itself visible, and with it, a fraying of the brush-hairs. These are themarks, the voluntary traces of the procedure, which the pictorial version ofOnement I will push to the extreme, decisively asserting the incompletenessof the painting.44

Phenomenologically speaking, the auratic distance invoked by Benjamincan 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 objectifiedby measurement or by perspective.45 If in Onement I Newman breaksdefinitively with any objectifiable depth of space, he reconnects, it seems tome, with the ‘physical sensation’ of a depth of place . In that sense, HubertDamisch was quite right, evoking Newman – but also Pollock – to challengethe ‘so-called rejection of the so-called convention of depth’.46 Like all great

American painting of the period, Newman’s effort requires a ‘specific optics’ whose theory and phenomenology remain to be set forth. In Onement I , that phenomenology certainly includes a version ofcloseness, given the restricted dimensions of the drawing.47 But, as Benjaminsays, ‘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 beforea kind of dialectic of place – close/distant, in front of/inside, tactile/optical,

appearing/disappearing, open/closed, hollowed out/ saturated – whichconfers on the image its most fundamental auratic quality. It is an inchoaterhythm of black and white, a ‘physical sensation of time’ that gives to theimage-making substance the critical ambiguity that Jean Clay, speaking ofPollock and Mondrian, so aptly named ‘flat depth’.49

Why is that ambiguity of the place rhythmic, appearing and disap-pearing at the same time? Because something in it passes through – infiltrates,mixes with, permeates – and disintegrates any certainty about space. This

something is again the aura , which we must not understand in terms of athird characteristic, which returns to the most archaic and ‘physical’, themost material sense of the word aura . This meaning is that of breath, ofthe air that surrounds us as a subtle, moving, absolute place, the air thatpermeates us and makes us breathe. When in Onement I Newman revealsthe reserve of the support by stripping off the zip the way one might pull agag off someone’s mouth, he creates not so much a spatial form as a rush ofair . When his brush heavy with ink presses on the paper, it does not so muchdraw as exhale its pigmentary matter; when he lifts it slightly off the support,




it inhales , creates a kind of subtle voluminosity – Merleau-Ponty’s 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 allNewman’s later drawings only reinforce that impression of breathing surfaces which produce, as their graphic traces, the subtle rhythm of scanning – notserial or atmospheric but auratic scanning.

THE SUPPOSITION OF THE SUBJECT: ‘I’M THE SUBJECT. I’M ALSO THE VERB’

To speak in these terms, I readily admit, amounts to speaking in anthropomorphic terms of a kind of painting that asserts, and this is obvious, thatit is radically abstract . It is not ‘man’ that Newman thematizes in OnementI – 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 influenceof Giacometti on the genesis of the painting Onement I .52 For it is precisely with Onement I that Newman’s paintings definitively cease to contain the

vitalist and genetic ideograms recognizable in the works of the precedingyears, Gea (1945), or Genetic Moment (1947), for example. If Onement I indeed offers this ‘genetic movement’ of which all critics speak – takingtheir cue from the painter himself – it does not in any case offer itself as theiconography of a biblical or kabbalistic subject matter in which we wouldhave to recognize the ‘division’ between darkness and light accomplishedby 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’ Godof monotheism.53

All these readings, which in spite of themselves pull Newman’s art towardsnarration, the symbol and the anthropomorphic figuration, very quicklygo astray in embracing the idea of a programme , which the artist found sorepugnant. These readings are only aftereffects of readability and resemanti-zation. Bois is thus right to restore to Newman’s art its pure phenomenologicaldimension, 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), buttransformed (reinvented, resupposed). A modernist critic might no doubtdecree the end of anthropomorphism in Newman’s abstract art; but it isbetter to suppose that with their specific manner of abstraction Newman’spaintings require that we ourselves transform our spontaneous concept ofanthropomorphism, that is, the relation between ‘shape’ and ‘humanity’. Newman himself formulated this problematic relationship, which hecertainly 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 thePanofskian subject matter? Not at all. It is, on the contrary, its dialecticaldecomposition, its critical reformulation where, in an almost Freudianvein, the primacy of a subject position imposes itself. In the years 1945–48,Newman began to approach that subject position through words such as‘desire’, ‘terror’, ‘ecstasy’ and even ‘metaphysical exercise’.56 Later, he offereda grammatical – and no longer strictly ‘expressionist’ – analogy to the notionof subject, by insisting on the relations that link the subject and the objectin the temporal, dynamic, performative ‘exercise’ or experiment indicated bythe 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 suisle sujet , I’m the subject; vous êtes l’objet , you are the object; et voici leverbe ’, and he’d give you a gentle slap on the face. The empty canvasis a grammatical object – a predicate. I am the subject who paints it.The process of painting is the verb. The finished painting is the entire

sentence, and that’s what I’m involved in . . . I’m the subject. I’m also theverb as I paint, but I’m also the object. I am the complete sentence.57

We sense quite well that in these two variations on a single theme, boththe dimension of the object and that of the verb – both the product and the process – focus attention on the subjective instance incarnated by the artisthimself. Newman is attempting, here as elsewhere, to formulate the paradoxof an ‘abstract art where the subject takes precedence’,58 an art that asserts

the subject (as Surrealism did) but, by being ‘abstract’, supposes such anassertion without thematizing it, without signifying it – simply by bringingall its attention to bear on the effective, dynamic, and even affective relationbetween the matter and the support, or what the French language designatesso well with the term subjectile .59

Newman’s claim to an effectivity and an affectivity in his practice ofabstraction thus forced him twice to modify the usual notion of subjectmatter: first, he rejected any iconographical ‘thematization’ in favour

of a more philosophical affirmation of the artist as subject; and second,he rejected any narcissistic ‘romanticizing’ in favour of a reflection onthe procedural relation that, in the act of painting, unites the words‘subject’ and ‘matter’. His ‘grammatical’ definition of painting amounts toconceiving artistic labour dialectically, in terms of a three-way relationshipamong subject , matter and subjectile , as a kind of Borromean knot whereany pressure exerted on one term structurally modifies the position of theothers. Hence, in Onement I , the operation carried out on the subjectile – thecentral reserve, the removal of the masking strip, and the ‘respiration’ of




the brush in the case of the drawing; the interruption of this same processin the case of the painting, where Newman left his colour test as it was,

on the adhesive strip affixed vertically to the centre of the painting – thatexperimental operation or supposition transforms the usual effectivity of thematter as it is normally deposited on the canvas by the brush. In the same way, the suspension of that operation, its ‘critical ambiguity’, transformsthe 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 ‘unarytrace’ (trait unaire ) in Newman’s work: in a single stroke, it has transformedeverything, has literally invented the ‘subject’ of his painting.60

We can then understand that the subjective position of the painter, farfrom 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 withrespect to Minimalism, for example) from the angle of a subject position .There is no procedural ‘negotiation’ without a displacement, a ‘rapture’ of asubject, just as there is no ‘rapture’ of a subject without the procedural andeven 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 inthe ‘supposition of the aura’ something that Newman’s art teaches us evenbeyond what Benjamin may have said about the aura. The most beautifulgift that an ‘auratic’ work like Newman’s can make to the notion of the aurais 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 defined 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 arein fact often – as the example of the veronica forcefully attests – objects madein such a way that people will believe they were not ‘made by the hand ofman’.63 In them the aura imposes itself , as I said, to the degree that the image-making procedure remains secret, miraculous, beyond reach. With OnementI , in contrast – as with a number of twentieth-century artworks – the auracomes into being, is supposed , through the gaze’s proximity to a proceduraltrace 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 evenrecognize the work as an unprecedented combination, which I shall call forthe occasion an auratic trace . In this case, the procedural effectivity – andthe hand does not always intervene directly in the procedure, as we see in theretrait 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 ourrelation to human labour that is implicated, transformed and renewed. That may be why the twentieth-century artist succeeds in giving us thegift of artworks that ‘look at us’, beyond any objective relation, beyond




anything ‘we see’ in them: a double distance is established, in which ourproximity to the formal labour – to the subjectile and to the matter – estab-

lishes the auratic respiration. That respiration does not impose anythingon 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 behow the aura ‘declines’ today, how it is declined and enfolded through itscontact 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 BarnettNewman



2

THE SHORTNESS OF HISTORY, OR PHOTOGRAPHY IN NUCE:

BENJAMIN’S ATTENUATION OF

THE NEGATIVE DAVID S. FERRIS

Modest methodological proposal for the cultural-historical dialectic . . . Thevery contours of the positive element will appear distinctly only in so far asthis 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 thisinitially excluded, negative component so that, by a displacement of theangle of vision (but not of the criteria!), a positive element emerges anew init too – something different from what was previously signified. And so on,ad infinitum, until the entire past is brought into the present in a historicalapocatastasis.

N1a, 3

In one of the fragments belonging to the posthumous text ‘On the Concept ofHistory’, a fragment entitled ‘The Dialectical Image’, Walter Benjamin borrowsa comparison made by André Monglond in the introduction to his 1930study Le Préromantisme français . While speaking of the ability of a literary textto present a meaning inconceivable at the time of its conception, Monglondcompares this effect to a photographic plate from which an image may bedeveloped at a later date. In the first 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 literarytexts: the past has left in them images which can be compared to those held fastby a light sensitive plate’ (GS 1.3: 1238/SW 4: 405). The comparison is calledupon to exemplify an understanding of history in terms of the process used toproduce a photographic print. In Benjamin’s account, the comparison, however,is not so straightforward as the opening phrase of this sentence indicates: ‘if onelooks upon history as a text’. As a consequence of this conditional phrase, historyis 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, equallycompelling as this conditional opening is the sequence of comparisons it sets

up. Including the opening phrase, three comparisons are made in this sentence.The first, 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 first hypothetical comparison would offer knowledge of theinitial subject of this whole sequence: history. In effect, the logic enacted by thesecomparisons takes the form of a syllogism that can be expressed as follows: ifhistory is comparable to a text and a text is comparable to a photographic plate,then, history is comparable to the same photographic plate. Yet, throughoutthis sequence it cannot be forgotten that, first, the premise is conditional, andsecond, what is at stake in these comparisons is another relation, the relationbetween a looking (betrachten ) and a saying (sagen ), between a history lookedat as a text and a history that can be spoken about because of this looking – inother 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, beof value, possess worth – as the verb used by Benjamin in the phrase connectingthis looking and saying indicates: gelten . What then decides that such a history

is meaningful (that is, has significance in the present – since history has no othertime in which to be meaningful) is that what can be looked upon belongs tolanguage. 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 meanthat Benjamin’s understanding of history is only conceivable after the advent ofphotography, a history that is then a reflection of the modernity announced byphotography? Or does photography effect a change in the structure of history inthe 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 thesignificance 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 isalso the moment captured in the image. No painting can make this claim; asBenjamin argues, its means of production, so dependent on the hand, forbidsit from doing so.2 Since photography is what allows the past to be captured forthe first 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 belongsto 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 ofthe Parisian photographer, Eugène Atget, to the withdrawal of the auraticpresence 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 first time. To have given this development its local habitation is theincomparable significance of Atget, who, around 1900, captured Paris

streets devoid of their human aspect. It has been justly said that herecorded them like the scene of a crime. A crime scene, also, is devoidof the human; its record occurs on account of its evidence. With Atget,photographic records begin to be evidence in the historical process[Prozeß ]. This brings out their hidden political significance [Das machtihre verborgene politische Bedeutung aus ]. (GS 1.2: 485/SW 4: 258)3

The absence of the human subject from the street scenes recorded by Atgetbecomes, for Benjamin, the sign of an incomparable but also superior signi-ficance. This significance, concentrated in the exhibition value of the image,is named the political by the end of these sentences. Photography not onlyallows the political to appear, but does so by bringing it out of concealment.The political is therefore what resides, first of all, concealed in the photo-graph as image. But, by what means does this concealment occur? Is it anatural attribute of the photographic image? Despite the attraction of such aclaim (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 derivesthe political aspect of these photographs by means of comparison: they arelike the record of a crime scene, a record from which the human subject isexcluded in favour of the objects that remain in such a scene. The politicalsignificance of Atget’s photographs is understood strictly in accordance tothis analogy. In fact, it is the analogy which brings out this significancerather than some aspect of photography as a medium. Atget’s photographs

thus achieve the importance Benjamin attaches to them because of a choiceto capture street scenes of Paris undisguised by any human presence.4 As aresult, Atget’s photographic images become the record of a street from whichthe organizing actions of a human subject have been excluded rather than therecord of photography’s technical ability. This demonstration of exhibitionvalue 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 exhibitionalaspect of photography what he calls a ‘local habitation’, an ‘abode’ or a ‘place’

(seine Stätte ). Yet, despite this limitation, the example reveals the crucial placethe technical will hold as a means of understanding history. The question willbe to account for the technical in terms of the historical since it is through therecognition of the former in the latter that the political significance of historyis to be recognized (or, to recall a verb Benjamin uses in the passage just citedas well as elsewhere in the ‘Reproducibility’ essay, it is a question of how thetechnical ‘steps’ into the place of history).5

In an entry to Convolute Y of the Arcades Project , Benjamin locatesthis 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 followedthe invention of photography – about whether it belonged amongst thearts or was, as Baudelaire put it, the ‘servant’ to art – is of little interest toBenjamin, since the real issue is not photography or any specific photographor photographer but what photography represents as a technology.6 First andforemost, Benjamin asserts, ‘in photography, exhibition value begins to driveback cult value all along the line’ (GS 1.2: 485/SW 4: 257). This remarkmakes clear that photography has a role to play. Photography is the meansthrough which the beginning of a confrontation occurs, a confrontationcaused by history. That this confrontation is not seen for what it is – thebeginning of a general confrontation between art and technology, ratherthan a confrontation between art and one mode of technology – confirmsthe extent to which photography is only the beginning of a developmentthat leads to film and beyond to digital imagery. To interpret this event, thisconfrontation, as the result of history, as Benjamin does in the passage fromthe Arcades Project just cited (Sie sollte ein Moment in ‘der’ Auseinandersetzung

zwischen Kunst und Technik sein, die die Geschichte vollzog ), indicates that theappearance of photography crystallizes a force already present within history.In this case, just as Atget gives a local habitation to the stepping forwardof exhibition value, so then does photography provide a local habitation forthe political significance of history. Photography becomes, in this sense, notmerely a means of producing images, but rather becomes itself an image, atechnique for the production of history’s political significance. In fact, it isa 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 film give [ geben ] to this understanding the mostuseful handles [die brauchbarsten Handhaben ]’ (GS 1.2: 484/SW 4: 257). As handles, neither photography nor film can be confused with an under-standing that remains the domain of history, they are rather the meansby which this understanding is developed. For Benjamin, this is true even when, as he states in the sentence preceding the one just cited, exhibitionvalue 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 poleof 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 Benjamin’sunderstanding 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 significance through a historical relation to the present). The imageis the handle of history, but as Benjamin’s description of its appearance in

exhibition value points to, its role as handle only appears at the point of anabsolute emphasis. It is at this point that exhibition value is recognized notfor exhibiting something – such as a building or street in a photograph – butrather for exhibiting exhibitionality in general. What is exhibited in this caseis the means of exhibition: photography, exhibition as technique. Benjamin emphatically bases his understanding of the change in thefunction 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 firsttime, photography freed the hand from the most important artistic tasksin the process of pictorial [bildlicher ] reproduction, tasks that now devolvedsolely upon the eye looking into a lens [welcher nunmehr dem ins Objektivblickenden Auge allein zufielen ]’ (GS 1.2: 474–75/SW 4: 253). This freeingof the hand, enabled by photography, has all the character of an event (‘forthe first time’ and a few a pages later this becomes ‘the first time in worldhistory’ [GS 1.2: 481/SW 4: 256]). But, what does not change is that artis 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 Benjaminspeaks of the new function of art is cited in full. This sentence describes thisfunctionality as occurring both in the absolute emphasis on exhibition valueand in the absolute emphasis on its cult value:

Just as the work of art in prehistoric times, through the absolute emphasisthat rested on its cult value, first became an instrument of magic which

was only later recognized as a work of art, so today, through the absoluteemphasis 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 ofmagic through cult value and a form with ‘entirely new functions’. In eachcase, the work of art is a form whose significance derives from a value thatcan 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 workof art that is not simply the embodiment of a value. The question is, ifvalue is the handle by which the work of art may be picked up, what is ineffect being picked up? What remains of the work of art when there is nosuch handle? According to what Benjamin says in this sentence, what ispicked up is what has been subject to the forces that produce an image – dasGebilde . But, here, not only is the work of art recognized in terms of whatproduces an image, the means of recognizing it also proceeds by way of the




image to the extent that photography becomes both the means of producingthe exhibitional image (that is, the work of art) and the image through

which the production of such a value is recognized.

8

The camera doublesas a technological instrument whose formation (also Gebilde ) permits therecognition of the technological. Since, as Benjamin claims, the appearanceof 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 whicha confrontation between history and art takes place, then such recognitionis understood as also being brought on by history – that is, history has arole in the appearance of the technological. How history fulfils this role isdirectly related to its structuring which, as Benjamin makes clear in thecourse of the ‘Reproducibility’ essay, is a movement between two poles: cultand exhibition. Despite the fact that Benjamin grants absolute emphasis tothese 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 speakof exhibition value as if it had always been there, hidden within the art ofaura and cult value, waiting for the mode of existence most adequate to itsmeaning. In recognizing photography as that mode, Benjamin does not justrecognize an example of exhibition value, but also recognizes a history in

which technology and reproducibility are inevitable for art. Photographythus becomes the means to develop, in the technical, photographic senseof the word, the history in which its confrontation with the past of art isalready set by history. In the second sentence of the fragment, ‘The Dialectical Image’ (discussedat the beginning of this chapter), Benjamin grants photography just sucha role. And again he refers to André Monglond’s comparison betweenphotography and a text to do so. This time, however, Monglond is not

paraphrased as in the first sentence but cited in Benjamin’s own translation:‘Only the future has at its disposal developers strong enough to allow theimage to come to light in all its details’ (GS 1.3: 1238/SW 4: 405). Much ofBenjamin’s understanding of history, as it is expressed in the posthumoustext, ‘On the Concept of History’, is condensed here. Above all the sense that what is properly historical only reveals itself to a future generation capableof recognizing it, that is, a generation possessing developers strong enoughto fix an image never seen before – and never to be seen again, as Benjamin

will later insist.

10

Within the ‘Reproducibility’ essay, photography, as thefuture of art, fulfils this role. Photography does this not merely because itbrings out exhibition value, but also because at the same time it brings outthe auratic. Only from the perspective of the exhibitional is it possible torecognize the auratic – otherwise art is essentially and unchangeably auraticeven 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 samelogic, if it were not something attached, exhibitionality would have no modeof 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 historythat allows the confrontation of these two poles to be recognized as history,

but the recognition of this history through technology. Technology is bothpart of this history and the means by which this history and its part in thishistory is recognized. The sentence Benjamin cites from Monglond reflects the crucial roleof the image in securing this recognition. However, this emphasis on theimage in Benjamin’s translation is not exactly what Monglond says. AsBenjamin knew, since he cites the passage in French in Convolute N ofthe Arcades Project , Monglond writes: ‘Seul l’avenir possède des révélateursassez actifs pour fouiller parfaitement de tels clichés’ (N15a, 1) [Only thefuture possesses developers active enough to search out perfectly suchnegatives]. Benjamin translates this sentence as follows: ‘Nur die Zukunfthat Entwickler zur Verfügung, die stark genug sind, um das Bild mit allenDetails zum Vorschein kommen zu lassen’ (GS 1.3: 1238) [Only the futurehas developers at its disposal that are strong enough to allow the image tocome to appearance in all its details]. Where Monglond uses the French word for a negative, cliché , Benjamin substitutes image, Bild . From oneperspective, 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, Benjamin’s substi-tution does pose the question of why it occurs at all and of what effect thischange has on the relation between photography and his understanding ofhistory, a relation so resolutely focused on the image. Before discussing this substitution of Bild for cliché , two other changes ofemphasis in Benjamin’s translation should be noted: where Monglond saysperfectly ( 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 imageto come to light, that is, to come to appearance or sight (das Bild mit allenDetails zum Vorschein kommen lassen ). Within the example of photography, what these changes clarify is an emphasis on the image produced, evento 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 tolight. As a result, the negative is understood from the perspective of what itproduces – to use a Marxist-inflected 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 becomesa merely technical aspect of an image that has subsumed the processof its production into itself as technology is recognized less as a means ofproducing an image (Baudelaire’s servant) than a determination of theimage. 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: derVorschein . As a result, in photography, the image is seen as coming into itsown as image. This result, perhaps only distantly hinted at when Monglond




writes fouiller parfaitement , is made explicit by Benjamin’s translation. Whatemerges 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 fulfilled bytechnology.11 Here, the historical task of technology can be determinedas the task of reproducing itself in all its details. But, for this task to beknown 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 inmosttendency, the reproduction of every detail. This is why in Benjamin thenegative is understood as in the image. Only the image can promise whatit is to become as an image, just as technology can only promise what it isto be technological rather than what is already technological. Through thistechnology, history is developed in Benjamin.

If the negative is already understood as an image by Benjamin then this isan 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 isunderstood according to what it brings to light: the image.13 Since the printdeveloped at a later date from a negative reveals what could not be brought tolight at the time of its exposure, the negative does not negate or prevent whatthe 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 thathas elapsed since that moment (the time of the past), then these images – boththe negative and what is produced from it – necessarily vary in the amountof 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 activeor strong enough to produce the image in all its details, then this variationdepends on the internal development of technology, on a history that belongsto technology. If this deviation did not occur, the image in which Benjamin

understands history would already have been brought to appearance in allits 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. Toaccount for this difference within technology is to account for history. Thepossibility of such an accounting, as Benjamin’s emphasis on photographyindicates, is itself an effect of technology, since it is only through the rise ofexhibition value that the technological and its image appears in confrontationto 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 beenough. Here, the question of recognizability, that is, the question of howlooking relates to saying, returns crucially (for it is not enough to look at thenegative to see all its details, they must also be recognized as those details – todo 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: ‘Whatfor others are deviations are, for me, the data which determine my course.

– On the differentials of time (which, for others, disturb the “main lines” ofinquiry), I base my reckoning’ (N1, 2). In the language Benjamin uses here,the difference time makes would disturb the hope of returning through theimage to the moment captured in the negative. Yet, as the sentence precedingthe one just cited indicates, the difference registered by this disturbance doesnot arise independently of the attempt to achieve such a return. Benjamin writes: ‘Comparison of other people’s attempts to the undertaking of a seavoyage in which the ships are drawn off course by the magnetic North Pole.Discover this North Pole’ (N1, 2). To discover this North Pole – Benjamin’semphasis – is, according to his example, to discover the source of deviation,the source of what makes any intention of arriving at the North Pole goastray. But, it is only in such an intention that this deviation is exhibited forBenjamin – in the same way that what is developed from the photographicimage utilizes the same process and produces the same image as any othertime, yet what appears in this image is no longer understood as the imagepresent to the lens in the time of its capture. Although, in the fragmenton the dialectical image, Benjamin attributes this difference to the future

existence of a developer strong enough to bring out the image in all its detailsand although it is the privilege of the future (and therefore the passage oftime) to possess such a developer, time is not such a developer. Time does notproduce the image that becomes available to the future. However, time as adifferential is what makes production of this image possible for this future,since such a time is marked by the occurrence of two events – a conditionthat is equally true for photography since every negative and every print isconceived, technically speaking, on the basis of time, the defined time of its

exposure, the opening and closing of the shutter. In an entry to Convolute Y of the Arcades Project , Benjamin recounts atransformation of visual forms that explicitly points to time as a technicalcondition to which photography owes its significance:

The entrance of the temporal factor into the panoramas is broughtabout through the succession of times of day (with the well-knownlighting tricks). In this way, the panorama transcends painting and

anticipates photography. Owing to its technical condition [technischenBeschaffenheit ], the photograph, in contrast to the painting, can and mustbe coordinated [zugeordnet ] with a well-defined and continuous segmentof time (exposure time). In this chronological defineability [chronolo- gischen Präzisierbarkeit ], the political significance of the photograph isalready contained in nuce. (Y10, 2)

The political significance referred to here is also claimed by Benjamin onbehalf of Atget’s photographs of Paris streets but for a different reason. In




the case of Atget, it was their status as evidence – their exclusion of humanpresence – that allowed their ‘hidden political significance’ and therefore

their relation to ‘the historical process’ to be brought out. Here, it is nota question of what is or is not in the photograph. Rather, the emphasisfalls upon the chronological definability that arises from the techno-logical condition of any photograph: the fact that a photograph can onlyexist because of a defined time. By claiming that the significance of thisdefined time is political, Benjamin is also claiming that the technologicalalready contains the possibility of this significance – in nuce . Consequently,history in Benjamin becomes the exhibition of this hidden significance intechnology – in effect, developing technology as the example of what italready is. For history to develop the political significance of technology isthen for history to develop the means by which it also attains significance. Ifhistory 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 itsinterior ’ (GS 1.2: 703/SW 4: 396). Precious because, without it, no history assuch is conceivable; tasteless because time, in its chronological definability,that is, in its technological definition, 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 significance is, for Benjamin, to exhibit a relation tothe past that is also a deviation from that past – in the sense that the pastoccurs in the form of an image not yet developed in all its details. Forthis significance to appear, an account of such images in terms of their

exhibitionability is necessary. While photography offers an account of suchexhibitionability for the first time, this account runs the risk of remaining,as Benjamin notes with respect to Atget’s photographs of Paris streets, a localhabitation. As such, it does not reside within the means of photography, itis not, as already pointed out above, a property of its technology. By whatmeans, then, does technology produce historical understanding, by whatmeans 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, Benjaminclaims, first emerges within photography. As Benjamin describes it, themoment this first emergence depends upon is a moment that occurs withinthe photographic process, namely, the moment when what is captured in theimage and the image are defined by the same duration of time: their chrono-logical definability. This definition takes the form of the negative. AlthoughBenjamin, unlike Monglond, does not retain the negative when he makesthe 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 defining property of exhibitionability

is given in the ‘Reproducibility’ essay. Benjamin defines this ability when hestates that ‘from the photographic plate, for example, a multiplicity of printsis possible [ist eine Vielheit von Abzügen möglich ]; the question of an authenticprint has no sense’ (GS 1.2: 481–2/SW 4: 256). This definition privileges what is produced from the negative, since it is the print that possesses theability to exhibit what is present in the negative – not with respect to whatis depicted in the negative (that is again merely a local habitation, not aproperty of technology), but with respect to its purpose: to produce reproduc-tions that have no priority in relation to one another and therefore no claimto authenticity since each is as authentic as the other. Here, the prints allowa negative to come to light, but again it is a negative whose property mayonly be recognized through its development into those prints. Monglond’stext, hidden behind Benjamin’s translation, reminds us that photography, inthe stage that Benjamin refers to it as a medium of reproducibility, is onlysuch a medium because of the cliché or negative that permits it to possessexhibition value. In other words, multiplicity is the effect of a differencesignalled by the image in its negation. The absolute emphasis on exhibition

value of photography, the means by which technology takes its first historicalstep, overwrites this difference. By turning from this difference, Benjaminbrings to light in all its details the invariability of the image produced fromthe negative. This emphasis on the absolute exhibition value of the photo-graphic image is by no means an emphasis on the significance of an image,but rather an emphasis on the technological existence of such an image. Suchan 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 certainrespect exhibitional). However, once established, this exhibitional pole, inorder to become historical truth, rather than truth, is set against itself. To behistorical, it must be the place in which a deviation steps – and steps in thename 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 theimage produced from the negative can bring out what could not have beenseen, but remains hidden in the historical moment in which the image wascaptured in its negative form. In both the earlier essay on photography (‘AShort History of Photography’) and the later essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’, Benjamin explains the possibility ofsuch an other understanding in the past by reference to what he terms the‘optical unconscious’. In 1931, Benjamin describes the appearance of suchan 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 humanunconscious [an die Stelle eines vom Menschen mit Bewußtsein durch- wirkten Raums ein unbewußt durchwirkter tritt ]. For example, it is readilyaccepted that one can give an account, if only in general terms, of theact of walking; for certain, one knows nothing more about its dis-position in the fraction of a second of ‘stepping out’ [von ihrer Haltungim Sekundenbruchteil des ‘Ausschreitens ’]. Photography, with its devicesof slow motion and enlargement, opens it up. One comes to know thisoptical unconscious first through photography, just as one comes to knowthe instinctual unconsciousness through psychoanalysis. (‘Photography’GS 2.1: 371/SW 4: 510–12)15

To uncover what is hidden is again a matter of stepping into the place ofsomething else. Here, a space interwoven with the unconscious takes theplace of a space interwoven with consciousness. To know this step, and,above all, to know this step for the first time, is the achievement of photo-graphy’s technical ability. Thus photography, and its instrument, the camera,

become the means of knowing that this technical means of reproduction hasstepped into the place of non-technical or manual reproduction. This step (by which the significance of photography is grasped – and itssignificance is that it has made this step) is, in effect, only knowable throughphotography. Since what takes place in this step can only be revealed bythe camera, photography becomes the example of the means by which it isknown as a technology. Only by stepping into the place of the auratic, thespace of conscious, meditative understanding, does the technical become

known in its technicality. But, the step by which it achieves this knowledgeis only recognizable because it has already stepped into the place of theauratic.16 Already being there is a fundamental principle of Benjamin’sunderstanding of history. But, equally important is the necessity that what is there becomes recognizable in its hiddenness – like the absenceof people in Atget’s photographs of Paris streets. It is the significance ofthis hiddenness that remains hidden until the future. Photography in the‘Reproducibility’ essay is an example of such a history as Benjamin’s refer-

ences to the existence of exhibitionability prior to its appearance indicate.The advent of photography, then, represents the moment when technologyis seen to exhibit a tendency already present but undeveloped in auratic art.This is why, within the terms of Benjamin’s history of the work of art, therecould never have been a debate about whether or not photography is an artunless art had already recognized this tendency. Without this tendency,photography would simply have had no relation to art and art could nothave, 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 fulfils a ‘prognostic requirement’ (the requirementthat exhibition value attains absolute emphasis).17 At the same time, for this

prognostic requirement to have value, what it predicts cannot be the causeof that prediction. If it were, then the processes of photography would havebeen deducible from painting before such a technology came into existencerather than afterwards. For the advent of these processes to become part of ahistory, a requirement of such a history is that their existence should alreadybe distinct from the fact of their pastness. Here, what is at stake in Benjamin’sunderstanding of history is this difference. Hence, Benjamin’s emphasis inConvolute N of the Arcades Project on recognizability (Erkennbarkeit ) andreadability (Lesbarkeit ).18 The necessity of this emphasis results directly fromthe question first opened in the ‘Reproducibility’ essay under the name ofexhibitionability or Ausstellbarkeit , the question of a technology that stepsinto the place of art as if it were a pure means, exhibiting only its ownexhibitionability in order to discover itself and establish itself as anotherpole for art. This is why the development of Benjamin’s understanding ofhistory cannot be separated from the history of the work of art, since it is inthat history that the possibility of deviation is first 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 themeans of history so produced. Before taking up this sense in which the historical is an effect of itstechnical production, an aspect of Benjamin’s understanding of photographyneeds to be clarified, an aspect that is central to establishing the other pole ofart. As indicated in the citation with which this paper begins, photographyprovides 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 aprint is produced, suggests a variability in what can be developed from thisimage. As a result, in the future, the image can reflect a significance otherthan what is discerned in it during the time or age of its capture, despitethe fact that every print made from its negative is the same as another. Asalready pointed out, this fact explains Benjamin’s translation of cliché as Bild (even after he initially acknowledges the role of the photographic plate inthe first sentence of the fragment). Here, the negative is simply the inversion

of the developed image, it is not different in kind, yet its necessary presencedoes signal the place of an inversion within this account of photography’stransformation 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 whatBenjamin’s account of reproducibility rests upon – rather than the subjector object recorded by photography – and, since this process, as a technicalprocess, can only produce multiple images by virtue of the negative, theclaim that ‘the question of an authentic print has no sense’ rests upon adifference 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. Doesthis then mean that technology, despite Benjamin’s claims to the contrary

when he compares photography to history, must keep the image separatefrom the negative it reproduces in order to support a history other than thehistory of auratic art?19 Another way to pose this question would be: whenphotography becomes an image of history, why must the negative recede?Indeed, why is it that this inversion (which separates image and negativebut which also creates the possibility of the comparison of photography tohistory) does not carry over into the dialectical image, despite this beingnamed a dialectical image?20

What is at stake in this history is not just an interpretation of technologyas exemplified by photography but rather a relation that, nominally, takesthe form of an inversion as Benjamin moves from a visual technology tohistory. Despite no explicit reflection on this inversion by Benjamin, itspresence can be traced in a phrase and a word that link, on the one hand,the ‘Reproducibility’ essay and its account of exhibitionability, and, onthe other, both the theses presented in ‘On the Concept of History’ andConvolute N of the Arcades Project . When Benjamin first speaks of thedifference made by photography in the ‘Reproducibility’ essay, he states

that the most important artistic tasks have ‘now devolved solely uponthe eye looking into a lens’ (GS 1.2: 475/SW 4: 253). Within Benjamin’saccount, this ‘looking eye’, this ‘blickende Auge ’, reduces the interventionof the human subject to a mere act of looking as the role of the hand inthe formation of art is superseded.21 Yet, even here, the eye still looks. Ithas no choice. The technology requires its involvement. The camera, afterall, 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, dasblickende Auge inverts into Augenblick but also with this inversion thelooking eye takes on the defining property of the technical instrumentit looks into: the camera and the chronologically definable time of theexposure that allows the image to be held fast and subsequently recognizedas an image, its Belichtungsdauer . Here, the Augenblick operates as the inter-ruption of the ‘looking eye’, interrupting its look with another looking, aninterruption measured by the temporal brevity of the glance or look of the

eye. In the Augenblick of Benjamin’s theses on history, this looking thatinterrupts in the moment of its glance steps into the place of what Benjamindefines as the technical condition (die technische Beschaffenheit [Y10, 2]) ofphotography. Just as ‘the political significance of photography [is] containedin nuce’ in this condition, so, in this moment, the historical significance ofthe image is also grasped by this condition in both the theses of history andConvolute N of the Arcades Project – and never more so than when these works figure the occurrence of this image in the limited and interruptiveduration of a flash of lightning.22 Here, the phrase in nuce should not be put




aside since it would also reinforce this temporal condition if the Germansense of Nu is also heard.

The temporal factor that coordinates the photograph and the technicalcondition of its creation (Y10, 2) can now be discerned in the appearanceof the image through which Benjamin founds his understanding of history.It is this condition that gives recognizability to such an image, that allowsit to move from what is merely a looking on (the looking into the lensof the ‘Reproducibility’ essay) to a look whose duration, however short,is given significance by this condition (through its recognizability andreadability, its coming to light – zum Vorschein kommen ). That this comingto 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 stakein Benjamin’s understanding is the technical condition through which hishistorical materialism is reproduced: history as the reproduction of itselfas image. While the condition of this history can be coordinated with thereproducibility of the work of art after aura (and Benjamin’s allusion to thepolitical significance of Atget’s photographs of Paris streets already points tothis relation), this coordination also takes the form of an inversion. Where

the historical image, the dialectical image occurs, it announces itself in aflash of light just as the shutter of the camera announces the arrival of animage to the photographic plate or negative on which it is recorded inversely:darkness as light, light as darkness. But besides this coordination bycomparison (which can only transform photography into a phenomenologyof history), there is another inversion, one in which photography, or rather,its formation functions as the cliché of history. This inversion, already indicated in the shift from blickende Auge to

Augenblick , is given a local habitation in the lightning flash whose signi-ficance is not its blinding effect but its minimal temporal duration. Only insuch a duration does history and the dialectical image occur for Benjaminbut, in this case, what happens in this duration of the lightning is not thereception of light, as in photography and the camera, but its emission.Reception only occurs when, like the photographic plate, the historicalsubject receives this flash by recognizing and reading what is received asan image. Here again, the place of the cliché , 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 arisesin its deviation from those forms of history Benjamin would resist if notovercome, namely, historicism, universal history, progress, a traditionsubject to conformism (the geographical poles rather than the magnetic poleof Benjamin’s historical project).23 But, the condition of this deviation is theplacement of the image in its inverted form in its other pole. (In the termsof the ‘Reproducibility’ essay, the relation of cult value to exhibition valueis 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 itappears but at the same time is already within that history.

In the passage previously cited from Convolute Y (10, 2) – whereBenjamin traces the political significance of the photograph to its chrono-logical definability – the recognition of such an image occurs through whathe names the differential of time, the difference that time makes. But, foran image to appear according to this differential, it must also be filled withtime, for Benjamin the time of the now. An early fragment from the ArcadesProject 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 whichalone the dialectical image is real . . . Real time enters the dialecticalimage . . . in its smallest form [Gestalt ] . . . All in all, the force of time[Zeitmoment ] in the dialectical image lets itself be discovered [läßt sich . . .ermitteln ] only by means of the confrontation with another concept. Thisconcept 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 thatneeds something other than itself if it is to be itself rather than a timelesshistory to which it cannot belong. In its least form this time is the conditionof the dialectical image. But in this case, what is referred to as time cannotbe 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 givendefinition and, as Benjamin states, confrontation is the means by whichthis definition arises when the dialectical image comes up against the ‘now

of recognizability’. This ‘now’ is also the moment, the Augenblick in whichthe looking of the eye is figured as a look.24 The inversion that relates thelooking eye to the Augenblick is now revealed as the moment of figurationsince, in this moment, seeing becomes what can only be said (in the sensethat the instant is always over in order to be an instant and therefore cannotbe seen but only spoken of).25 Yet, when Benjamin describes this movement,it is not a particular figuration or a particular inversion that is at work butfiguration itself. In Benjamin’s own words, it is the image as an image that

produces this arrest, the image in its figurality:The image is that in which what-has-been [das Gewesene ] steps together[zusammentritt ] in a flash 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 figural [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 withthe now is figured 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), thisstepping is also understood as a momentary halting or interruption ofprogression 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 thehistorical materialist ‘recognizes the sign of a messianic arrest [Stillstellung ]of happening’ (GS 1.2: 703/SW 4: 396). Not only is the image understoodas a structure, but this structure brings the work of placing (Stellung ) to ahalt, in effect, defines the work of stellen so that what emerges is a place inplace of a time that has no time of its own, the place of a structure. It is inthis place that what is genuinely historical steps for Benjamin, but in orderfor this stepping to be recognized as historical, history (time that has notime) must step along with the means of its recognition. If these did notstep together, then, this history in which happening is arrested would notbe differentiated from the merely representational. Its Augenblick wouldtherefore not exhibit its presentation as structure or form (das Gebilde ), that

is, as the means of its presentation. For this history – the genuinely historicalin Benjamin – to attain a critical force with respect to historical progressand continuity it has no other choice but to confront the foundation oftheir means of representation. All else would be, as Benjamin puts it, in theservice of the victor who has not ceased to be victorious (Thesis VI). Yet, when Benjamin defines further the concept against which the dialecticalimage lets itself be known in a confrontation, the concept of the ‘now ofrecognizability’, 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 inthe now of its recognizability – bears to the highest degree the imprint ofthe perilous critical moment, which lies at the foundation of all reading [deskritischen, gefährlichen Moments, welcher allem Lesen zugrunde liegt ]’ (N3,1). In another entry to this same Convolute, in which what is stated in thisentry is repeated almost word for word, Benjamin does insert, however, onemore phrase between this passage and the passage just cited. The phrasereads: ‘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 dialecticalimage. This encounter takes on the form of that confrontation Benjaminascribes to the relation between art and photography (see Y2a, 6 discussedabove). But why should encountering language reveal the same structurethat 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 hasto 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 redefined

as ‘not temporal in nature but figural [bildlich ]’. If the nature of this relationis not temporal but bildlich , then, the dialectical image can also be redefinedaccording to its own exhibitional structure as das bildliche Bild , as the imagerevealed in its image-likeness, its bildlichkeit . In this case, the dialectical would be exhibited as what it already is and the means of this exhibitionis language since, as Benjamin asserts, it is only there that one encountersdialectical images. As such, language becomes the handle by which thedialectical image is recognized as an image that arrests its own dialecticalmovement. Thus, the two concepts that encounter one another in thisgenuinely historical image are the linguistic and the dialectical. The truehistorian, as described by Benjamin in the same fragment with which thisessay begins (the fragment in which history, text and photography are set incomparison to one another), is the one able to read this image, but such ahistorian, 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 developeravailable 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 atstake as the condition of this reading, since what was never written is whatcould only be looked at and what is read belongs to writing. But what canonly be looked at possesses no means of recognition, no definable chronology,no duration in which it can be present – just as time has no time in whichto be present hence the bursting by which Benjamin describes its movementout 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 isreadable in this moment can only be read in this moment. As Thesis V states,‘what flashes up at the moment [ Augenblick ] of its recognizability . . . is neverseen again’ (GS 1.2: 695/SW 4: 390).30 Its function in this case is never tobecome an image for the past since the significance of such an image wouldalways be tied to the here and now of its event in that past – an understandingthat is in effect auratic (according to the terms in which the aura is defined inthe ‘Reproducibility’ essay). Instead, by making it ‘never seen again’ Benjamin

ensures that every image appearing in the ‘now of recognizability’ arreststhe means by which historicism, continuous progress, universal history alllay claim to an authentic account of history – as if by this claim the imageassured the eternal value of such histories, the image as timeless truth. Againstthis, Benjamin writes that ‘the eternal, in any case, is far more the ruffle ona dress than some idea’ (N3, 2).31 With this inversion of the relation betweenthe eternal and the image – the image is no longer an image for the eternalbut rather the eternal is now in it – and with the disappearance of the imagefrom 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, forBenjamin, these images ‘first come to readability only at a defined 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 defined timein which they can be read. But if what is read is their truth, then, what canonly be read is that they will never be seen again. This is the truth that is thedeath 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 sameeffect – history in the age of its reproducibility. There is no authentic imageof time since no image, as photography so clearly illustrates, takes place intime, 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 ofthis recession, that is, every image is the recession in which history takes on aform. In this, they do not vary – and this is also why the interest of Benjamin’sconcept of history does not, in the end, lie in his claims on behalf of historicalmaterialism. This concept treats the temporal condition of history, a conditionthat 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 cliché from

which the image is developed. Its force is this exemplariness, which is to sayits 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 historyunderstood 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 Kafka’s Messiah, does not come later than it should.32

(But then, who is to say that the lateness of Kafka’s Messiah would notallow the Messiah to arrive on time, unnoticed? An arrival that would notmatter.) This understanding of history has appointed its time – now – asif it were a time appointed for it (as if time could ever be late or even ontime). But, to defer this moment to the future is to ensure that history, inits least form, will show itself on time if not in time. As such, it will show inthe moment of its appointment, the moment of its only possible recognitionas 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 otherthan the chronological definability of its event. But to make the example oftime’s not-coming matter, to make the time that has no time short enoughto be recognized as history, is this not still the task of technology? Even inthe time of an Augenblick , when the looking of the eye is splintered into thelook of messianic time? And is such technology not the reproducible imageof history reproduced as the end of modernity? And is this not in the guiseof something different from what was previously signified, and so on, adinfinitum , until the entire past is brought into the present? Im Nu-ce ?



3

‘NOW’: WALTER BENJAMIN ONHISTORICAL 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 foundedupon political time directed towards happiness. Any theory of history – ofhistorical cognition and of historical action – therefore will have to takethis time of the affect as its starting point. The fact that pathemata , affects,passions were already to an extent discredited within political theory duringBenjamin’s times must have been attributed by him to the disappearanceof their genuine political dimension. Within prevailing historiography thepolitical impulse was replaced by the rational calculation of an abstractcognition 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 Benjamin’s second thesis, ‘On the Concept of History’. Thethesis demonstrates that cognitive acts, determined by the microstructureof 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 itsnon-actualized possibility. ‘There is happiness such as could arouse envy inus’ – this is how Benjamin begins his argument, making envy the seal ofauthenticity in which happiness manifests itself – ‘there is happiness suchas 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 Benjamin’s 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 residein an event that could become the subject of objective cognition but ratherin a possibility, which proves to be a possibility only in the miss and whichonly 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 impossiblyhave 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 stillopen. For Benjamin, envy is not kindled by the happiness of someone else,but rather by one’s own happiness that was possible and not seized. Envyis therefore without object like the intention of Lucifer’s knowledge, anintention which aims towards the good. This good, happiness, maintainsitself as if according to the platonic formula epékeina tes ousías , beyond therecognizable essences in the realm of their mere possibility. It is the otherthat could have been, and it preserves in what became the actuality thepossibility of its otherness. Happiness is a contingent possibility of that which has been (desGewesenen ), a possibility that preserves itself for another time; that is,first 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 ofcognition of that which cannot be held, what cannot be grasped as givenreality and cannot be registered as possession. Cognition is essentially amanifestation 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. Ifhappiness existed as a possession or property, its cognition would be neithernecessary nor possible any longer. Happiness is only cognizable in its pure– that is, missed, deferred and unseized – possibility. And only as such apossibility does it offer itself to a future cognition. Each such cognition,however, not only has an ethical dimension, directed towards happiness, it isfurthermore 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 possiblehappiness 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 first of all possibilities thatare not actualized, that have not entered the series of historical events andhave not become components of historical tradition. In one of the notes onBaudelaire, 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 yetbecome history, that which yet can become history’, because its possibilities,and that is possibilities of happiness, have not yet been actualized. Historyis only possible because of the possibilities that were missed. The true historicity of historical objects lies in their irrealis. Theirun-reality is the store-place of the historically possible. For their irrealisindicates a direction through which that which could have been is referredto 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 couldhave 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 idealpossible in general and for all times but a possible always for a particularfuture, that is, for precisely the one singular future that recognizes itself init as missed. It is we who could have talked to people but didn’t; 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 possibilityof our happiness, of ourselves, which was therefore an absolutely singular,irreplaceable and unrepeatable possibility. And it is only us for and in whomthis missed possibility lives on as missed and demands fulfilment in everymoment. If possibilities are only ever possibilities for someone, then they are inten-tions. We have been meant by our life’s possibilities, be they conscious orunconscious, 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 ofhappiness that we cherish is thoroughly coloured by the time to whichthe 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 ofpossibilities and of the temporal space they open up, when he continues:

The past carries with it a hidden index by which it is referred toredemption. Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress

us as well? In the voices we hear, isn’t there an echo of now silent ones?Don’t the women we court have sisters they no longer recognize? If so,then there is a secret agreement between past generations and the presentone. Then our coming was expected on earth. Then, like every generationthat preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, apower 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 (Einslösung ) of possibilities, which are opened with every lifeand are missed in every life. If the concept of redemption points towards atheology – and it does so without doubt and a fortiori in the context of thefirst thesis, which mentions the ‘little hunchback’ of theology – then thisis not straightforwardly Judaeo-Christian theology, but rather a theologyof the missed or the distorted – hunchbacked – possibilities, a theology ofmissed, distorted or hunchbacked time. Each possibility that was missedin the past remains a possibility for the future, precisely because it hasnot found fulfilment. For the past to have a future merely means that the




past’s possibilities have not yet found their fulfilment, that they continue tohave 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 objectsof 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 ofthe unactualized, the unfinished, failed, thwarted, which leaps beyond itsparticular Now and demands from another Now its settlement, correctionand fulfilment.

The possible is a surplus over the factual. As such, the possible is time: excessover 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 fulfil this possibility. Time – historical time – isnothing but the capability of the possible to find its satisfaction in an actual. As a standing-out ( Ausstand ) and exposition of that actual in which a merepossible could find its fulfilment, in which the possible as intention couldfind its goal, time is the claim of the unfinished and failed, of the brokenand thwarted for its completion and rescue in happiness. Time is always the

time of the unfinished and itself unfinished time, time that has not reachedits end. It is the time of that which is not yet and perhaps never will be. Itis therefore the dimension of the possible to claim to become actual. ForBenjamin, the addressee of this claim is not an instance that precedes thisclaim – it is not an already constituted subject that perceives such a claim,united in itself and in control of itself. The claim’s addressee is rather funda-mentally a function of this claim, ‘thoroughly coloured by the time’, and ofthe 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 issaid here is that we are first of all and primarily the ones that were expectedby 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 poweris the intentional correlate of the claim that calls upon us from the missedpossibilities of the past, not to miss them a second time but to perceive themin every sense: cognizingly to seize and to actualize them. In this force, thosepossibilities and the time in which they survive search for the telos of their

intentions. Messianic power is therefore nothing other than the implicithypothesis of the missed possible that there has to be an instance to correctthe 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 ofthis claim. It is not ‘ours’, something we can have at our disposal by our ownmeans, but it is the power which we have been ‘endowed with’ by others, itis 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 itto 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 poweris, in short, the postulate of fulfilability and, in this sense, of redeemabilitythat is immanent in each missed opportunity and distinguishes it as a possi-bility. Regardless of whether this power of fulfilment and redemption of thepossible is ever actually proven or not; regardless also of whether there hasever been a single case where this ‘messianic power’ was indeed active in theactualization 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 itdid not reach its goal, did not stay. The possible – possible happiness – isthat which demands actualization – actual happiness – and in which thetelos of this demand remains inscribed, even if there has never been and willnever be this actualization. ‘We’ – independent of whether ‘we’ presentlyexist or not – are the intentional complement destined to fulfil the postulateof realizability of this possiblity, in so far as it is possibility. The messianicpower that ‘we’ have been ‘endowed with’ by all that is past is weak becauseit is not an ability that springs from ourselves but it is the vanishing-pointof missed possibilities and of their demand for fulfilment. But it is a weak

power also because it has to become extinguished in each future by whichit is not perceived and actualized. Thesis V thus apodictically but consist-ently pronounces the finiteness of this messianic power: it is an irretrievable‘image of the past which threatens to disappear in every present that doesnot recognize itself as intended in that image’ (GS 1.2: 695/SW 4: 391). Theweak ‘messianic power’ is therefore the expectation of others towards us,the undischarged remains of possibility that are transferred from formergenerations 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 givenas time and passes with it. The ‘weak messianic power’ in us is time as merepossibility of happiness. By determining the relationship of the past to the respective present– towards us – as an essentially linguistic relationship: as an agreementbetween former generations and ours, as ‘echo of now silent voices that welend our ear to’, as the ‘claim’ of the unused possibility that we ‘could havetalked to’ certain people (GS 1.2: 693–4/SW 4: 390), Benjamin explains

historical time, if only implicitly, as a time made out of language. Historypresents itself as the afterlife of unused linguistic possibilities, whichdemand their redemption by other languages and finally 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 messianicpower’ to transform the missed possibilities into fulfilled ones. Awaiting(Erwartung ) is to be understood as a-wording (Erwortung ); languages asthe 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 theTranslator’ 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 IIis a theology of wilted possibilities and thus an essentially wilted, dwarfedand hunchbacked theology. To be more precise, it is a theory that therecould only be an unfinished 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 historicalcognition and historical action. If theology assumes the necessity, constancyand certainty of a God and historiography assumes that there already hasbeen history and there will be history in the future, then both of themassume essentially unhistorical concepts of deity and history. Historicism’sconcept of history is thus the simple counterpart to the concept of God ofsubstantialist theology. As the latter relies on the constancy of God, so doesthe former on the positivity of historical facts. The historicity of such facts,however, does not have its origin in their steadiness (Ständigkeit ), much lesstheir standing on their own, their autonomy (Selbständigkeit ). Historical isthat which only can be recognized as historical from its contingent possi-

bility to yet have been different and to yet become different, and thus fromits after-history. Historical is only ever that which it is not yet – the alwaysother, open possibility. Only that can become historical that is not yethistorical. This however also means: as it is, namely as a possibility givenand subject to actualization, in principle, this possibility is equally exposedto the danger of being missed. In so far as it is mere possibility, in so far as itis 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 thespace of their possibilities, ensue solely from the dimension of their capacityto be missed. They are insubstantial, singular, finite. Even if facts havethe structure of referring and furthermore of intention and tendency (andBenjamin 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 stillconstitutively designed for their expiration: expiring either in the redemption,

fulfilment and resolution of their intention or expiring in the miss of thisredemption. The historical is historical only because it manifests itself inthe span between these two possibilities of intention, these two possibilitiesof possibility: that the possibility expires in its fulfilment, or that it passesaway if it is not seized. Thus it follows that each possibility is a possibility ofits actualization only if it is at the same time the possibility of the missingof this possibility. Only those possibilities are historical possibilities that canalways also not be seized. They are fleeting possibilities, not possibilities thatas a substantial stock in the archive of potentialities could be grasped at any




time. Because there is no reservoir fixed for all time, in which the treasuresof 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 theactual. Any continuum between them would de-potentialize the possibleand 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 isthe possible historical. As a fleeting, non-archivable, contingent possibility,as one that is just now given and has already gone – and thus as alwayssingular, as the solitarily leaping out of every pre-stabilized formation – itconcerns the one who would have to lapse into lethargy in the face of theautomatism of the actualities unfolding homogeneously out of possibilities,and demands of him his grasping intervention: a grasping without whichthere would be no history, but a grasping which would not exist withoutthe corresponding possibility that it fails to appear or is unsuccessful. Onlybecause 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, canhe view history not as a mechanical series of events but as act. Only becausehe does not view historical possibilities as constant and freely availableresources for series of realization does he have to view each historical act asthe always singular answer to an always singular possibility. Only becausehis 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 oftheir continued unfulfilment. The redemption to which the past in its‘hidden index’ is referred is redemption only because it can be missed. WhenBenjamin talks about a ‘weak messianic power’ and highlights the wordweak by use of italics (one of the few such words in his ‘Theses’) he does notdo so because there would be for him also a strong messianic power or evenone that would overcome with certainty any conceivable opposition, and not

because a power in general would under certain circumstances be reducedto a weaker one. ‘Weak ’ denotes not so much the quantum of this power inrelation to a larger one – be it a demanded one, or even an ideal one – butrather the susceptibility, on principle, to its failure. There is a messianic power only where it can fail: anything that may becalled messianic power is therefore a weak one. To imagine that it couldbe strengthened through vigour or that it could be sufficient to possess itis equally nonsensical. It is enough to perceive and activate it – nothingelse 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 hasbeen 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 realizeits possibilities of happiness, then all historical existence has an irreducible– and irreducibly weak – messianic structure. When Benjamin first touchesupon the referentiality to redemption in historical existence in Thesis II,the reason he does not talk about ‘the Messiah’ as a historically determinedreligious figure is that each singular historical moment, of whatever epochor religious observance, has to be structured with reference to the messianicimperative if it is to fall into the domain of historical existence at all. Ifthe ‘index’ of a ‘messianic power’, which ‘we have been endowed with likeevery generation that preceded us’, marks every historical possibility, thenmessianic referentiality is the structure of the possible and of the historicaltime in which it lives on. Benjamin attributes weaknesses to this structuralmessianicity not in order to note an accidental defect, which, under idealcircumstances, could be remedied, but in order to emphasize a structuralelement of this messianicity, through which it, in turn, is referred to itspossible failure. The possibility of happiness is only indicated together withthe 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, itsorphaning (Verwaisung ); no index that would not have to reach the bordersof its indexicality and become an ex-index; no messianicity that does notemerge from its non-messianicity. The weakness of the ‘messianic power’lies in its structural finitude. The Messiah, who is supposed to rescue themissed possibilities of history into actual happiness, can himself be missed.

Any Messiah – and each moment in which he should be able to enter, eachNow – is essentially finite. That is to say, he can only be Messiah becausethere is a possibility of his not being Messiah.

In early drafts of his Arcades Project , which are dated to 1927, Benjamintook up the Kantian metaphor of the ‘Copernican turn’ and considered itin relation to the ‘historical perception’: it was thought that a ‘fixed pointhad 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 Kant’s – intended to indicate the condi-tions of the synthesis under which that which until now appeared as a ‘fixedpoint’ can only be brought to a ‘dialectical fixation’ (ho, 2). This fixingin the synthesis between what-has-been and the present that Benjamincalled dialectic does not assume a definite past – in that respect it followsthe Kantian turn; nor however, does it assume a fixed 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. Inthe realm of ‘historical perception’ neither object nor subject and its forms

of cognition can be substantial. Because both can only become effective asgenuinely historical functions, the theorist of history will have to free himselfnot only from the traditional realism of the constancy of objects but alsofrom the transcendentalism of the forms of the perception of these objects.Kant had a fixed continuity of time in the a priori form of perception: acontinuity of time which cannot be historical because as a mere form it hasto be established prior to any historical content. For Kant, history moves intime, it does not constitute time and does not form specific historical timesthat are distinguishable from time’s empty form. The ‘Copernican turnin historical perception’ that Benjamin wants to bring about is thus morethan a transcendentalist turn. For this Copernican turn, what-has-been nolonger offers any fixed point, nor can ‘historical perception’ be consideredas substantial quantity or as a continuum founded upon transcendentalforms. History can be missed. That means, however, that it, and thereforealso the happiness to which it refers, are only ever to be experienced throughthe danger of being missed; and that means, furthermore, that history isonly possible at the risk of not being history. What is gained, therefore, is

the concept of a radically finite history: history is finite if – in each of itsmoments – it could as well not be; if at each moment it has to be producedanew; if it is only in view (Hinblick ) from the moment of its rescue fromdisappearance. This is what the following passage in Thesis V claims: ‘Thetrue image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image whichflashes 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 itreally was’. It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up at a momentof danger. Historical materialism wishes to hold fast that image of thepast which unexpectedly appears to the historical subject at a moment ofdanger. The danger threatens both the content [Bestand ] of the traditionand those who inherit it . . . Every age must strive anew to wrest traditionaway 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 historicalaction because – as practical, ethical forms of mindful remembering(Eingedenken ) – they both point towards the same goal, namely the seizurein the present of the missed possibilities of happiness of the past. The dangerthat the reign of unhappiness (Unglück ) might continue illustrates on theone hand that the telos of history could be missed; on the other hand, inthis danger the principled deficiency appears which makes it possible thathistory can be missed. This deficiency, namely, rests on there being no stable




form that historical cognition could entrust itself to, and no reliable courseon 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 norhappiness, which is striven for in the former, is reliable; only the existenceof unhappiness is reliable. World-historical unhappiness manifests itself as acontinuum of catastrophes. Happiness, however, is never given as a state, itis never embedded in a continuing course of events, but is, at best, offeredas 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 realmof domination, where permanence of forms can only be secured throughthe suppression of other possibilities – that is, possibilities of happiness– that rebel against such domination. The danger that threatens historicalcognition as well as the politics of happiness therefore originates in the lastinstance from the forms that are to guarantee the rule of a certain realityover an infinity of possibilities of happiness. If, however, this threat doesnot only originate from the interest of the current ruling class, but ratherfrom the most enduring instrument of its domination (i.e., from a particularform), 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 continuumof points of time is progress, the equally uniform, steady and inexorablestriving towards a pre-given ideal of political life. At the base of the socialand political conformism that threatens historical cognition, and thushistory itself, lies the transcendental conformism of the form of perceptionof ‘time’, through which time is represented as the homogeneous continuumof punctual events. The first and decisive step towards historical cognition

that does not join forces with the suppression of possibilities of happinesshas to be a step out of the transcendental conformism of the continuumof 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 linearand homogeneous process whose form always remains the same and whosecontents, assimilated to the persistent form, are indifferent. Together withthe continuum the conformity of each Now with every other Now of thetime series has to be broken as well. The possibility of this breaking through,

however, must be grounded in the very possibility (Ermöglichung ) of thecontinuum itself and thus in relations of discrete Nows that preceded theirhomogenization. The political critique of social conformism, the historical critique ofthe automatism of progress and the philosophical critique of the timecontinuum join together in the critique of the structural conformity ofall forms of experience. All three critiques have to retrace, by means ofpolitical intervention, historical cognition and philosophical analysis, theconformisms and their underlying forms to the constitutive movement,




and they have to push the constitutive elements of these forms to crisis, todiremption and to the possibility of another configuration. Only in this way

can the political outrage over the ruling injustice, the historical melancholyover the incessant sameness in progress and the philosophical dissatisfaction with already constituted forms become productive. Benjamin’s critique ofprogress – an element of his philosophy of history that currently receiveslittle respect even amongst his admirers – is only adequately understood ifit is grasped as a critique of time as a transcendental form of perception andthus of the empty form of experience that progresses in it. And so he writesin Thesis XIII:

Progress as pictured in the minds of Social Democrats was, first of all, theprogress of humankind itself (and not just advances in men’s ability andknowledge). Secondly, it was incompletable [unabschliessbar ], in keeping with the infinite perceptibility of humankind. Thirdly, it was consideredas inevitable – something that automatically pursued a straight or spiralcourse. 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 humankind’s historical progress cannot be sundered from the conceptof its progression through a homogeneous, empty time. A critique of theconcept of such a progression must underline any criticism of the conceptof progress itself. (GS 1.2: 700–1/SW 4: 394–95)

The critique of conformism, a conformism that is at each moment on thepoint of overpowering this critique, thus has to be founded in a critique ofthe form of the homogeneous and empty time, which, as the mere form

of experience, lies at the foundation of each conformism. Any critique ofhistorical cognition and historical action has to be initially a critique of thetranscendental conformism of the continuum of time.

Benjamin’s conviction that a ‘Copernican turn in historical perception’must be brought about emerges thus from the insight that history wouldnot be history if it merely proceeded in ‘time’ as a stable form of perception,rather than creating its form in the first place. It will therefore have to beproven that time as a continuum of form can only be generated through a

discontinuous historical cognition that is not fixed in any form. Accordingto Benjamin’s ultra-Copernican turn there is time only by virtue of history:the latter does not run its course in the former, but time is ‘fixed’ in historyalways in different ways, the forms of which are not given beforehand. If,according to Benjamin’s formulation, that which has been (das Gewesene )experiences its ‘dialectic fixation’ in synthesis with cognition, then, together with that which has been, the time-form in general experiences its ‘dialecticfixation’. The time-form is owed to a synthesis and, thus, is not itself the originof this synthesis. The reflections collected in the theses ‘On the Concept of




History’ contain only cursory indications of the structure of the genuinelygenerative historical synthesis, and the relevant notes from the Convolutes

of the Arcades Project are often prone to misunderstanding. In order to grasphow Benjamin understood the genesis of the empty time continuum, it isuseful to consult the text in which for the first time he explicitly expresseshis critique of the idea of progress and argues for a concept of history thatabandons the merely quantitative concept of time. In his dissertation ‘Onthe Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism’, which he submittedafter giving up his original plan for a thesis on the concept of history inKant, as early as 1919, Benjamin, taking up Friedrich Schlegel’s remarksagainst the ‘ideology of progress’, contrasts the ‘continuum of forms’, whichis supposed to make up the history of art, against any ‘progressing intoemptiness’, that is, against any empty, homogeneous continuum. This isdone in the passage where Benjamin mentions twice ‘romantic messianism’and thus the tendency that he, in a letter to Ernst Schoen immediately afterthe 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 configuration of messianism andcritique 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 conceptof time in the dissertation on Romanticism acquires a precision whichbenefits the understanding of the later theses. For there, Benjamin writes:

The temporal infinity in which the process [of poetic forms] takes place. . . is likewise a medial and qualitative infinity. For this reason progred-ibility is not at all what is understood by the modern term ‘progress’; itis not some merely relative connection of cultural stages to one another.

Like the entire life of mankind, it is an infinite process of fulfilment, nota mere becoming. (GS 1.1: 92 / SW 1: 168)

What is said here is that the historical process is not a ‘progressing intoemptiness’ 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 ateach moment determined and substantially fulfilled. Calling a ‘temporalinfinity’ ‘medial’ links it with that ‘medium of reflection’ in which Benjamin’s

text brings together the paradoxes of self-positing. Reflection is a mediumfor the transcendental I, for only in this reflection does it reach the ‘point ofindifference’ of its positing and its knowledge of it. Reflection, however, isa medium not only as the common middle of act and cognition, but ratheras that element in which they are distinguishably and unmediatedly one.The reflection is medial as self-affection. The interpretation of the infinityof time and thus of time itself as ‘medial’, that is, as having sprung from thereflective medium of self-affection, however, cites the Kantian thought of anoriginal creation of time from pure self-affection. The connection between




the original creation of time and the reflective medium can be illustrated with a quote from Schlegel’s Athenäum-Fragmente and its commentary by

Benjamin. Schlegel writes: ‘The essence of the poetic feeling perhaps lies inthe fact that one can affect oneself entirely out of oneself.’ And Benjamin:‘That means: The point of indifference of reflection, where the latter springsfrom the Nothing, is the poetic feeling’ (GS 1.1: 63 SW 1:150). If the ‘pointof indifference of reflection’, and with it its medium, is self-affection, thenthe ‘medial’ time, which Benjamin associates with ‘Romantic messianism’,is in turn, nothing other than this: ‘an affecting entirely out of oneself’. TheSchlegelian poetics of self-affection, however, is derived, as Benjamin musthave realized, from Kant’s doctrine on time as the ‘way the mind is affectedby its own activity . . . and hence by itself’.2 By extending self-affection tohistory, albeit first of all the history of artistic forms, Benjamin pronouncesself-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 itof 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 whicha 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 thantime, is in its deepest layer, as the happening of becoming definite throughitself, mere medium. Benjamin never dissociated himself from the Kantian theory of timeconstitution. The more determined, however, was his critique of the neo-Kantian ideology of progress of the social democracy of the nineteenthand early twentieth centuries.4 This ideology of progress is based on the

assumption that time arises not only out of a manifoldness of alwayssingular auto-affections of the faculty of understanding – for this couldonly 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 conditionedby a faculty identical in its unvarying duration. In this case, however, sucha 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 ofall historical differences. To be experienced as succession, a succession ofself-affections must be a constant, directed and inevitable affection betweendifferent and diverse self-affections. But there is nothing in the structure ofthese affections (even if they are, as for Kant, merely affections of the facultyof understanding) that can work towards constancy, strict orientation andinevitability, there is also nothing in that structure from which a continuousand 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 historicaltime, for only under the condition of an at least possible correspondence canconnections between those moments, and therefore history, be experienced.The non-homogeneous, unsteady relation, which alone Benjamin for thatreason can accept as historical, has to be a relation between moments of apossible but not automatically self-realizing history; a relation not preformed,not vouched for by any transcendental schema; a relation that is neitherfounded in the sameness of self-affection nor regulated through linearityor the privileging of a certain moment or series of moments. Neverthelessit 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 thatdoes not automatically fulfil itself. In order for a moment to touch anothermoment, for a Now-point to enter into a configuration with another Now-point, and in order for a historical time to arise out of this configuration,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 aformer one, if it recognizes itself as the one intended in the other and onlyin this intention of the other. For Benjamin, the self is not historical thatenters 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 pathof progress. Beyond mechanical consequences, directions and consistencies,and also beyond self-assigned ideals and programmes for the future, the selfis only historical where it experiences itself affected, determined or intended

through another person or something other. History is not a connectionof causes, it is a connection of affect and intention. This connection is themedium, in which one affection recognizes itself in the other – but does notrecognize how it is in the other, rather recognizes how it is ‘meant’ by theother, 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’ tofulfil the demand for happiness of the previous one. History is structured

messianically, for it is the medium of the possibilities of happiness of formertimes and is therein the medium of the possibility of happiness of happinessof 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 kairós , thehappy moment – crystallizes. This moment has to be medium for itself asother.

In order to fix the relation of reference of one moment to another, a relation,decisive for history, that is difficult 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 representsthe (intentional) object of a prophecy. This concept is the (complement)correlate to that of a history that enters flash-like into appearance’ (GS 1.3: 1235). If the prophecy intends the present as messianic, then the onlypresent is the one that fulfils 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 – isits ‘flash-like’ appearance, which would traumatically blind any unpreparedfaculty of cognition, recognizable as the appearance of a present. Theflash of the historical moment can only be endured and only be capturedif it was preceded by an expectation. That is why Benjamin describes theconcept of the present as the intentional object of a prophecy, as correlateor complement to the shock-like appearance of this object. Expectation isnever a claim without also being a protective measure, never an opening without also being a means of fixing. 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 thatby which it had been expected in the past. This turning to the past, whichgives 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, doesnot make claims on the future, but is present alone as that upon which thepast 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 intentionalobject 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 thepresent 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 thatit contracts and replaces the past’s time in its own time. It also means thatthe past ‘stands in’ (einsteht ) in the present, that it comes to the fulfilment ofits intentions and to a standstill. When Benjamin writes about a present ‘thatis 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), withthe French instant , and interprets the present as the Einstand and pausing ofthe movement of historical time in the fulfilment of it intention. The Nowitself is intentionless, for it is the Now only as that which is intended by thepast prophecy. It does not pass over, but stands still – and breaks off thecourse of history. Therefore it can be said: ‘The classless society is not thefinal goal of the progress of history, but its frequently miscarried, ultimatelyachieved 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, historyhas come to a standstill, for only in this standstill – an epoche – with the

relation between at least two disparate Now-points, has the minimal formof historical time been reached and with its fulfilment it has, simultaneously,stepped out of any further historical course. When history occurs, it is only in its fixation to a moment and furthermoreto an image. Whatever occurs, stands still. History does not have a course,it pauses. If the time-form of historical happening is the present – namelythe past contracted to and fulfilled in the present – then the present is nevera transition in a series of other presents and yet other ones, but always asingular moment in which the possibilities and demands of the past arecontracted and fixed; the present is not the time-form of waiting for a betteror simply different future, not the state of waiting that preceded the state ofredemption, but the standstill where one no longer waits, a standstill into which even waiting itself is drawn and in which the demand associated withthe waiting has fallen silent. ‘Present’ is that which is not embedded in theempty course of an always identical continuum, but that which leaps out of itas 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 directitself to every moment, because it does not have to be fulfilled in any oneof them, but could be fulfilled in each. The present can only be expected, itcannot be anticipated. It is not something that happens ‘to’ the historical objects, and theseobjects do not ‘have’ something historical (outside themselves and as acontingent attribute) that dresses them in opportunistic colours; rather they

are what they are only through the happening of their history (and thusnot theirs , any more, not ours any more). Nothing happens other than thehappening itself: this is true for the events as well as for their cognition.History, this eminent happening, however, occurs only where a state ofaffairs finds its intentional correlate in its cognition and cognition findsits intentional correlate in the political act, and thus what did not happenmoves towards the happening, or at least the possibility of happening. Sinceit 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 anyexterior determination and thus any measure of its movement, appear in no way other than as motionless. Benjamin clarifies this relation of the happening of history to its pausingin Thesis XVII, which, together with Thesis II, are the most importantones. He states that, in contrast to historicism whose procedures additivelymuster the mass of facts ‘to fill the homogeneous, empty time’, the basis ofa materialist historiography is a ‘constructive principle’. He continues:




Thinking involves not only the movement of thoughts, but their arrestas well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a constellation saturated with

tensions, it gives that constellation a shock, by which thinking crystallizesinto a monad . . . In this structure he [the historical materialist] recognizesthe sign of a messianic arrest of happening, or (to put it differently) arevolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cog-nizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous courseof history. (GS 1.2: 702–3/SW 4: 396)

It would lead to triviality, and further to confusion, to understand thispassage such that an arrest follows a movement, for then the arrest itself would still lie in the succession of the movement and its originally claimedcontrast would be negated. Movement and arrest, and therefore continuumand interruption, stand in a relation other than one of opposition. Wherearrest still belongs to movement, movement has to rest in an indissolublesubstratum of persistence. Benjamin’s reflection is aimed at precisely thatgesture of thought through which this substratum is lifted out of theappearance of the mere flowing. The urgency of this reflection can bedemonstrated by a simple thought: if the arrest of movement – both of

thoughts and of historical events – can neither intervene in this movementfrom outside (since then it would not be an historical intervention) nor be amere 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; ithas 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 themovement, it therefore has to be the movement of the movement. Thus, thegesture 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 movementof events itself. He continues the train of thought of Thesis XVII:

[The historical materialist blasts] a specific life out of the era, a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of his method, the lifework ispreserved and sublated [aufgehoben ] in the work, the era in the lifework,and the entire course of history in the era. The nourishing fruit of whatis 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 ofhistory brings to light is ‘the time’, that is, as the last words of the thesisemphasize, time ‘in its inside’. By virtue of the arrest the genuinely historicalthought preserves in its objects that which makes these objects possible andthe preservation and continuation of which makes these objects contributethemselves – and these objects are not merely works, they are the courseof 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 eraand 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 itintrinsically 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, intoa sempiternitas or aeternitas , that covers up finitude. Only in its Einstand – in the instant – is time the ‘preserved’ and ‘sublated’ happening of a timethat protects against the empty formalism of a mere form of perception andagainst the absolutism of a substantial eternity. It is always again anew andin different ways the time that stands in, in each instant , in each present, ineach Now: a nunc stans that indicates within the historical objects their truehistory and only thus relates history to objects : not oppositionals of the ideaof positioning or propositional subjects, but instants , Einstände 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 ofits seed. When Benjamin talks about time with the unusual word ‘standingin’ (einstehen ), then that means that time ‘stands’ ‘in’ for time – for the timeof what-has-been as well as for any time: defends it, preserves it, represents

it and fixates it as time in its movement. Without the ‘insisting’ of time, which is another sense of its einstehen , there would not be the course oftime. Without instant there would be no moment. Time stands in (steht ein )because its discrete moments stand together in a unity and because timestands into the inside, into the nucleus of time in the historical course, andsets it free. The Einstand of time is mere time.5

If the historian and the politician – and everyone acts like a historianand a politician in their own history – are concerned with the rescue and

fulfilment of possibilities of happiness, then this is not a rescue in the faceof time, but a rescue of time, redemption is not redemption from time, buta redemption of time. Happiness would not be to free oneself from time butto free time in oneself.

In the First Critique, Kant noted on the principle of permanence ofsubstance: ‘All appearances are in time . . . Hence time, in which allvariation by appearance is to be thought, endures and does not vary’. The

fact that time ‘endures’ qualifies it, according to Kant, ‘as belonging to thesubstratum of everything real, i.e. of everything belonging to the existenceof things’.6 If for him thus – in an enormous overthrow of what was called,until Kant, ‘substance’ – this substance is now nothing other than timeand therefore neither an idea nor a supratemporal being resting in itself, itstill remains form, and that is an empty one, and remains continuum, andtherefore homogeneous. The insisting of the historical course in the Nowthat Benjamin has in mind is a persistence as well; however, it is not thepersistence of the form of a homogeneous course, but that relation – that




restraint [Verhaltung ] – in which a constellation of heterogeneous momentsis 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 timeas in something that endures, is thus transformed in a second even moreradical overthrow into the theorem of the immanence of time accordingto which time is persisting in the changing appearances. Only its pausingin a particular appearance – a work, a lifework, an era – disposes time tostand out from the homogeneous course and to meet with another time with which it is not homogeneous. The figure formed by the two instancesof time is no comprehensive or even universal empty form into which yetother instances could be joined, it is the strict relation connecting these twoalone with each other. Since the critique of epistemology in his preface to theTrauerspiel book Benjamin calls this relation, probably following Mallarmé,a ‘constellation’ (GS 1.1: 215/ OT , p. 34). The constellation, which is notso much a placing-together (Zusammen-Stellung ) as a standing-in together(Zusammen-Einstand ), is as much the result of the relation of the instancesas these instances are the result of it. A moment, a Now, a present is alwaysthe constellation of at least two presents, moments: Now – that is the Now

of the correspondence of such presents or moments, a correspondence thatcannot be guaranteed by any pre-stabilized form. Only as a formation fromunsecured co-instances can history be the object of a construction. What issaid 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 itmore precisely: the setting free of a particular time nucleus is tied to thetime of its recognizability. That is the structure of the ‘true image of thepast’, which Thesis V supposes: ‘The past can be seized only as an image

that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again. . . For it is an irretrievable image of the past which threatens to disappearin any present that does not recognize itself as intended in that image’ (GS 1.2: 695/SW 4: 390–91). The central theme of these sentences is withoutdoubt the uniqueness of each chance for historical insight and therefore alsothe untenability of the historicist credo that Benjamin finds summarized inGottfried Keller’s 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 itselfto cognition and a time in which this time becomes accessible to cognition.‘The true image of the past flits by ’ – that means: there is only ever onesingle point where one time and the other touch each other in such a waythat there is Einstand – that is, standing together, constellation – betweenthem, an Einstand in which the time of that which is recognized and thetime of cognition, the past and the present arise. Without their touchingin the Einstand of the constellation there is neither an image of the pastnor 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 ofa 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, neitherthe instance of cognition nor the instance demanding cognition, can beabsent if there is to be time. There is time only if the time for which it, andonly it, is there seizes it. Benjamin portrays this minimal structure of historical time in one of thevery important notes to an epistemological critique from the Convolutes ofthe Arcades Project :

What distinguishes images from the ‘essences’ of phenomenology is theirhistorical index. (Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenom-enology abstractly through ‘historicity’.) . . . For the historical index ofthe images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it saysabove all that they attain legibility only at a particular time. And indeedthis acceding ‘to legibility’ constitutes a specific critical point of themovement in their inside. Every present is determined by those imagesthat 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. (Thispoint of bursting, and nothing else, is the death of the intentio , whichthus coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time oftruth.) It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or whatis present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what hasbeen comes together flash-like with the Now to form a constellation. Inother words, image is dialectics at a standstill. (N3, 1)7

This very complex note that starts with one of the rare but significant refer-ences to Heidegger to be found in the Arcades Project serves to identify the‘image’ in contrast to the phenomenological ‘essences’, even though notHeidegger’s Being and Time but Benjamin’s own Trauerspiel book is thelikely precedent. Benjamin reproaches Heidegger’s notion of ‘historicity’as being an attempt to save history ‘abstractly’ – and therefore, ahistor-ically and uncritically – for phenomenology, while only such a concept ofhistory 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 whichit becomes recognizable. Benjamin thus also undertakes, as he suggests, tosave history for phenomenology, but, in contrast to Heidegger, concretelyand critically through the concepts of ‘image ’ and ‘historical index ’. Thisindex, 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 towardsthe former’s cognition. This index, thus, is a twofold one: it stands in fortwo times; it is critical: it marks the point at which an internal crisis dividestime 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 theirdisjunction. 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 iseach Now the ‘Now of a particular recognizability’. It would be quite simplyunrecognizable, unperceivable, it would not be what it is intended to be, ifit lacked the complement of a second Now, a distinct one and yet one thatis united with it, it would lack the chance to become encircled as the Nowthat it is. There is no Now that could qualify as being temporal or evenhistorical if it lacked all tension to another, distinct Now. But neither wouldthere be a Now if it were separated by an impermeable barrier from the otherNow and were untouchable by that other Now, in which it is supposed tobe recognized. In order to be Now and one Now, it has to be one that takesitself apart into two. This is brought about by the critical point of movementat the inside of time. This ‘critical point’, or more precisely, the crisis of theNow-point, is what ‘rescues’ time and the historical phenomena in whichit contracts itself: as Benjamin notes, phenomena ‘are rescued through theexhibition 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 thesame time the ‘nucleus’, the time nucleus of the phenomenon, time out of

which the phenomenon forms itself. The crisis in the Now that disperses andmoves it, that turns it into a movement of the Now in the Now, is – as theabsolute medium – historical time itself. The identity of ‘leap’ and ‘nucleus’ of the Now and thus the temporalizingdirection [Zeitigungssinn ] of its crisis can also be deciphered in another notefrom the Convolutes of the Arcades Project : ‘The present determines where,in the object from the past, that object’s fore-history and after-history divergeso 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 betweenfore- and after-history, this nucleus lies between object and cognition, andis that in which the two touch each other, not in a positive third, but in thegap between them. About truth Benjamin thus says that it is not merelybound to a temporal function of cognition, as Marxism claims, but to ‘anucleus 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 morea ruffle on a dress than some idea’ (N3, 2). The nucleus of time, which isplaced ‘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 simultaneityof the non-simultaneous, if it is understood as the being-at-the-same-time ofpositive Now-points, can in no way bring about the nucleus of time – andthus time as time – but, in the collapse of the entire temporal expanse, hasto lead to the destruction of time, the at-the-same-time must not determineitself 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 bothrift and leap over the rift (Übersprung ): the difference between Now and

Now has to preserve each instant as discrete and has to refer them strictlyto each other as the difference between precisely these discrete points. Whatis at-the-same-time is only that which is not-at-the-same-time between therecognized and the one who recognizes and within each of them and thusthat in them which – as nucleus of a differential time – resists its erasure.Time namely would be erased as soon as different Now-points contractedinto a single one or were assimilated into the continuum of an alwaysidentical line; time would also be erased as soon as the difference betweendiscrete Nows extinguished any relation between them. The possibility notonly of historical cognition but of historical time as well thus has to be basedon a third that is neither identity nor inability to relate, but distinctionand relation at the same time. This possibility, is, for Benjamin, based ina 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 irreduciblehistorical happening, which the historian has to bring to experience.

In the leap of time (Zeit-Sprung ), in the origin of time (Zeit-Ursprung ), atleast 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 asone – it is ‘critical’ movement; in it movement and standstill stand together– it is what Benjamin, using Gottfried Keller’s words, calls ‘petrifiedunrest’ (J50, 5);8 in it, finally, the dialectical movement between has-beenand present, object and cognition, stands still – the leap is ‘dialectics at astandstill’ and as such, for Benjamin, ‘image’. Because the ‘image’ is the

constellation in which one Now meets precisely the other one in which itbecomes recognizable, the image alone is the place of historical time, beinghistorical time in contrast to time as a mere flux. The ‘image is dialecticsat a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purelytemporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the Now isdialectical: it is not progression but image, suddenly emergent’ (N2a, 3). ForBenjamin, the image is the historical relation kat’ exochen , for it brings aboutand holds on to the discontinuity of appearances, the leap within them.

It appears at that moment when nothing but the medium – the middleand the element – and thus the irreducibly dia-chronical and a-chronicalbetween and in the phenomena is preserved. It is historical time as the crisisin the Now – which only opens space for the times and sets free all times as‘nucleus’ of time. Benjamin’s claim that ‘every present is determined by the images thatare synchronistic with it’ will have to be made more precise with regard tothe critical point in their movement: this synchrony can only be situated inthe critical separation, that is, in an asynchronic difference as the common




medium of the ‘synchronistic’ images. Benjamin can therefore compare theprocess 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 fission.If, however, only the fission of the time nucleus sets free its historical forces,then this nucleus with its forces, paradoxically, is situated in the fission. Nowis Now always in the leap to another Now and is thus always a Now of thecrisis of the Now. In its crisis the Now does not just split, it also becomesrecognizable as Now only in its crisis: only by virtue of the fissure of theNow 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 fulfilled in the leap to another Now, thegoal of its intention – and it is not only fulfilled, but due to the doubling ofthe Now it is charged to ‘bursting-point’. Thesis XIV states: ‘History is thesubject of a construction whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, buttime filled by the presence of the Now [ Jetztzeit ]’ (GS 1.2: 701/SW 4: 395),and this statement is specified by a note from the Convolutes of the ArcadesProject , namely that the truth is not only fulfilled with time, but fulfilled‘to the bursting-point’ and thus overfilled because it is charged with anotherthan its own time. Fulfilment – the Paulinian pleroma – is the pregnancy

of a truth that cannot stay with itself and thus in the bursting becomes theorigin – the ‘birth’, as Benjamin puts it – of the ‘time of truth, of authentichistorical time’. This bursting, and nothing else, is the ‘death of the intentio , which thus coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time oftruth’ (N3, 1). With all these formulations, Benjamin takes up again the insights fromhis critique of epistemology in the preface to The Origin of German TragicDrama , which are dedicated to truth as the ‘death of the intention’ and

where origin is characterized as that which ‘springs from becoming andpassing’ (GS 1.1: 216, 226/OT , pp. 36, 45).9 The ‘rhythm’ of the originalis there characterized as being open uniquely to a ‘double insight: on theone hand, it needs to be recognized as a process of restoration and re-establishment, but, on the other hand, and precisely because of this, assomething 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. 45–6). 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, ifit does not demonstrate uniqueness, if the repeated moment is not itself, andtherefore still unfinished, incomplete and open for further repetitions. TheNow has precisely this structure of the origin (Ursprung ), which Benjamincalls dialectic. It is thus the ‘Now of recognizability’ both as that which hasbeen reaching its recognizability in the present, and as the present Now in which that which has been becomes recognizable. Both the ability of thething to be known and the ability of the historian to know it have a share inthe recognizability as well as in the Now. The one, however, is not restored,




re-established or repeated in the other without remaining unfinished andincomplete ‘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 canonly occur in the happening and thus only as incomplete, as present, andcannot 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 overfill each otherto the point of bursting and remain in the bursting. Now is its leap. Or,to use a mathematical metaphor that Benjamin repeatedly employs: Nowis the ‘time differential’ (Q o, 21).10 If the Now, however, establishes in theleap and the differential the immanence of historical time in phenomena,then the path of the historian and of the politician which leads to the Nowhas to correspond to the structure of this Now and be transcendence in theimmanence of time. The Kantian theorem of innertimeliness (Innerzeitigkeit ), namely thatall appearances are in time, is overthrown in Benjamin’s theorem of theimmanence of time; time stands in (steht ein ) in the appearances, that is,in the ‘Now of recognizability’ of the appearances. This theorem is mademore 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 leapbetween 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 timeof 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, whichtransports the time of the Now into one that has been and identifies it as therepetition 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 andovercharged to the point of bursting. The repetition is not a replica, it is theexplosion of that which is repeated. For it there are given no historical dataanalogous 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 onlyever 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 thetwo Nows, but rather if it opens up each single Now to the other that corre-sponds to it. Fashion ‘is a tiger’s leap into the past’. Such a leap, however,takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands. Thesame leap in the open air of history is the dialectical leap Marx understoodas 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). Thissentence is misunderstood if one interprets ‘origin’ as starting-point and themovement 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 first time, historical time at

all. Any revolution that, unlike the bourgeois revolution, did not take placein the arena of the ruling class, would be such a leap. Not a former Nowinto which a present Now leaps, but the leap itself is the revolution. Becausethe Now that has been as well as the present Now are Now only by virtueof 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, originalcrisis (Ur-Krisis ) – can it reach what Benjamin in the fragment ‘Aus einerkleinen Rede über Proust, an meinem vierzigsten Gerburstag gehalten’ calls‘original past [Urvergangenheit ]’ (GS 2.3: 1064), that is: a past which was notthere before the remembrance of it. In this sense, the Now is the origin ofthe historical. And in this sense it is messianic: the rescue of that which wasnot there before the rescue.

With the notion ‘Now of recognizability’, which is fundamental for hisphilosophy of history, Benjamin insists on the transcendental status of thatto which it refers. He is not concerned with the Now of cognition, but with the Now which, ahead of every actual cognition, fixes 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 communicationbut communicability , the centre of his studies on historical time is theNow of recognizability . Thus no decision has been made on whether thereis actual historical cognition and a corresponding politics. Neither has itbeen decided whether there is indeed a Now of cognition. The object ofBenjamin’s analyses is not this Now as it actually – now – is, but ratherhow 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 muchdoes it say about the conditions it needs to fulfil in order to become real asgenuine historical cognition. Each actual Now is Now and actual only if itcorresponds to the constitution which has been prescribed by this structureof possibility of the Now – by Now ability ( Jetztbarkeit ). Historical cognitionis cognition and historical only if it fulfils the conditions put forward bythe structure of recognizability : in all other cases it is not historical, thatis, 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 aperçus that Benjamin noted during his workon the Arcades Project and provisionally summarized in the theses ‘On theConcept of History’ are both diagnostic and propaedeutic and in both respectscritical. Written immediately after the Hitler–Stalin pact, which Benjamin,according to his friend Soma Morgenstern, saw as the total discrediting ofthe communists11 as well as of the social democratic movement, these notesgive an explanation for the powerlessness of social democratic politics withrespect to National Socialism: social democracy was powerless because it




supported an ideal of a community of work and communication, an idealthat 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 mechanizeshistory as an automatic progression and neutralizes the subject of historyto a homogeneous mankind that heads for an ideal of universal consent,Benjamin objects as follows (and this is what constitutes the argument’spropaedeutic nature): the subject of history cannot be mankind, but only aclass, that is, the class of the oppressed, of those deprived of their rights andof the exploited (even if they exploit themselves); and history cannot be anautomatic process in an already constituted form of time, but can alone bethat movement whose form is not set in advance, i.e. not directed towardspregiven 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. Itcannot happen if it merely follows a predestined form and goal. Therefore,neither a form nor the goals of history can be regarded as historically neutraland established once and for all. The transcendental conformism of thesocial democratic ideology represents such a fixing of form and goal, whichin principle, i.e in its ideal of a consensual homogeneous mankind, joined

forces with Nazism and the entire tradition of oppression that preceded it. Inthis conformism, however, it is not just one particular class that is exploitedand oppressed, one that defines itself throughout history in diverse ways andthus not only as proletarian; in it, anything that diverges from the form ofthe 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 therebe history and not merely a tradition of oppression; the question that, sinceanyone can become the victim of such oppression we must all ask ourselves,

and that Benjamin had to ask himself most pressingly at that moment whenhe saw himself and all those who were close to him fall victim not just tooppression but to extermination; the question is simply and necessarily this: what is oppressed and what is exploited in the construction of a homogeneouscourse of history and of a similarly homogeneous mankind? In Benjamin’s writing the answer is as clear as it is often obscured by his readers, namely inthe following insight: in this construction the fact of its constructedness, inthe 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 itscreation, i.e. exploited, driven out of the result and oppressed. If history isthus to be possible, then it is only possible as a history of all such oppressedthat has no place in any form and yet is indispensable for its constitution.It is indispensable and a minimal condition for history, however, that ithappens; that it is not fixed in unvarying forms, but on the contrary thatit happens each time in unpredictable ways, and that it happens betweenat least two moments that were not previously coordinated. History is theun-preformable event in which one Now meets another corresponding Now.




History – this is Benjamin’s finding – is thus founded as happening in thepossibility of a Now for a second Now, a possibility that can carry the logical

and epistemological title ‘Now of recognizability’. Wherever this minimalstructure of history is ignored and assimilated to a mere progressive formbetween equally valid points in time, the formal conditions are in place forthe catastrophes of the progress to homogenization carried out by GermanNational 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 thispossibility is not secured and these forms are not made more precise,any reflection on the philosophy of history has to suspect that history inBenjamin’s strict and emphatic sense cannot be realized and the progressin the destruction of historical possibilities is still underway. Neither thissuspicion – one could equally justifiably say concern, doubt, horror or evendespair – nor the desire, longing or the hope that such history may exist canbe external to the possibility of history and thus its structure. The desirefor genuine history as well as the horror that it could be impossible haveto 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 ofhistory will have to be clarified, they also have to be clarified with regard totheir possible failing and thus with regard to a category – an allocategory– which has been regarded within transcendental philosophy, dialecticsand phenomenology only as an exclusionary criterion, rather than as astructural threat, one that endangers the constitution of its subject domainas well as its procedure. Philosophy of history can no longer be transcen-dental philosophy and content itself with exploring the irreducible forms of

history’s constitution – as happening and as cognition of this happening. Inthese forms it also has to address their possible failure, the de-constitution ofeven the irreducible in the register of forms, and thus address that which inhistory, were it to succeed, yet remains open to that which does not enter anyforms but accompanies each form as that which is its exterior and other. Theanalysis must not direct itself towards a transcendental, and not towardsanything 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 itselfand 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 thehappening 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 opento form, that which colours every possible form as the unexecutable in it,can be called attranscendental: as ante-transcendental, i.e. preceding everytranscendental; as ad-transcendental, i.e. infinitely 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 whichthreatens to disappear in any present that does not recognize itself asintended in that image’ (GS 1.2: 695/SW 4: 391), Benjamin characterizeshistory 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 theunrepeatability 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 isnot seized. Not only does every time therefore have a virtually correspondingtime, in which it is recognized, and this means recognized as intending thelatter; 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 ThesisVI: ‘Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it “the wayit really was”. It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a momentof danger’ (GS 1.2: 695/SW 4: 391). The moment of remembrance is themoment 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 ifseized, of being conformistically assimilated to the good of the powerful.In both cases there is a threat to that which has been missed – that whichis past – that the slim chance to be transformed into happiness slips away.For whatever can enter remembrance is a promesse de bonheur which inremembering searches out the door to fulfilment. Since the claim only everposes itself a single time, the one who could remember is threatened withthe 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 theone who has been ‘endowed with a weak messianic power’. That which doesnot enter remembrance has missed the possibility of finding redemption inremembering: there is no longer a messianic time for it, if the one that wasmeant in it does not recognize itself as the one that was meant. If remembering only flashes up in a moment of danger, it is the danger ofdisappearing ‘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 beunderstood as being a mere external threat. On the contrary, danger belongsto 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 cognitionout 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 missedand that which demands completion all over again, and at the risk of missing,together with the claims of the past, their historical possibilities and thushistory in general. In order to determine more pronouncedly the relation




between the moment of remembering and the moment of danger, Benjaminthus 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 fanningthe spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly 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 heremembers the danger of not being able to remember, the danger of not beingable 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 ideathat even the dead could be killed and could stop asserting their claims uponthe living, will stand up against this cessation; only the one who remembersthe possibility that the past could become silent for him will help to bring upits claim towards language; only the one who is aware of the danger that therecould be could be no history can write history. Thus, only because history isin danger of becoming impossible does remembering set in: for it is not onlythe remembering of a loss, an omission or a failure that lies in the past, it hasto 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 longerbeing equipped with the ability to recognize and the ability for the Now.

That is what is remembered by the one who ‘remembers’, who remembers atthe ‘moment of danger’; is ‘imbued’ with that which never has been, is neversupposed to be and yet threatens. One ‘remembers’ Nothing. In each remembering the not-remembering is remembered: but it is notco-remembered as if it were a second object beside the initial one of the Nowthat has been; it is not remembered as a mere alternative to the image of thepast. In the possible impossibility of remembering the making possible ofthe 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 leapcan fail to succeed. There is no messianic claim that could not be missedand could fail to find its Messiah. That is, no messianic structure of historythat did not arise only out of the possibility that there could also not be amessianic structure of history. A ‘Now of recognizability ’ is only ever onethat can be devoid of any cognition and can be not Now.

The minimal messianism Benjamin sketches in Thesis II – namelythat 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 sixththesis, to the internal endangering of its structure. This is rendered moreprecisely as something that could be called a-messianism: the notion thatthis ‘weak messianic power’ ‘inhabits’ only those who are imbued with thepossibility 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 theMessiah. 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 onlythe coming of the Messiah can give rise to time and can thus in no wayby subjected to the form of a continuous and homogeneous course oftime, 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 atime that is distorted, however slightly, against any linear course. Andonly 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, thedistortion of the messianic ability itself, which Benjamin calls messianic‘power’, lies in its being exposed to the inability and thus the impossibilityof perceiving itself, acting and fulfilling itself as the possibility, ability andpower. Because ‘messianic power’ is not a transhistorical substantial abilitythat realizes itself in history from case to case, but an ability out of whichalone history could arise, it is a force that opens history without substantialand without historical assurances. It is only effective under the condition

that it remains exposed to its own impotence (i.e. under the condition thatit includes even this impotence into itself. It is a ‘weak ’ power because it isthe 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 thatpower cannot be messianic that rescues only itself; messianic is only thepower that rescues even its own failing. A Messiah is only he who rescueseven the impossibility of a Messiah. He can only come in such a way thathe might also not come, and come as someone other than the Messiah. And

his coming – this future expected by all pasts, that Benjamin touches uponin his theses – this coming can only be possible out of that which not onlyholds back all coming but also threatens it with the possibility of being forever impossible. The future of the Messiah would not arise out of the wealthof his possibilities, not even out of the single possibility that something likehistory and thus world, freedom and happiness could be experienced; it would arise from the complete loss of all possibilities of the future, out ofthe impossibility of its coming, and out of that alone. This impossibility of

the coming, the impossibility of the future would be that which comes. Inthis coming of something that does not come – and could not come andtherefore can not come – only therein would the coming be even in its mostextreme possibility: that it fails to appear; only therein future itself and thustime 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 thusmessianic Now of recognizability, the Now that constitutes history in themoment of its disappearance and with its disappearance: the Now of itsNot.




Among Kafka’s 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

Benjamindoes not cite this passage, although it can be assumed he knew it. Howeverdistant it may be from the manifest content of the theses on history, itdraws out the lines that become visible in Benjamin’s reflections. For whenBenjamin notes that the past can only find its Messiah in the ‘moment ofdanger’ and thus ties the messianic possibility to the possibility of its impos-sibility, then Kafka’s remark brings this possibility into the structure of themessianic future itself. He fixes it in a paradoxical distortion of time. If theMessiah 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, andthus it is the arrival of his failing to appear. The Messiah who only comesafter his coming is not only the split and twofold Messiah that Jewishtradition knows under the names of the suffering and dying Messiah ben Joseph and the triumphant Messiah ben David. The one who comes afterhis coming, the Messiah that comes after himself and as another thanhimself, is the Messiah who is not necessary, who does not rescue and who isno 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 thenon-messianic, this messianic without the messianic – this a-messianic – isthe last and final crisis of which the structure of the messianic is capable. Itis 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 BENJAMIN’S

DESTRUCTIVE

LAND-SURVEYING OF HISTORY STEPHANIE POLSKY

When is drawing a line a means of escape? When is freedom no longer theobject, but simply ‘a way out , “right, or left, in any direction” so long as itis 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 finds himselfin the middle of a charter of events already in progress. Events whichbeseech him to take on a their course as much as his own. Perhaps this wasthe case with Kafka’s character K. from The Castle who, when he arrived atthe inn one snowy night, seemed to surface from nowhere, only to pick upan official telephone and impulsively identify himself as the land-surveyor.Through this single gesture he was instantly and yet unwittingly part of theculture 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 inBerlin, that he responded by wilfully cutting himself off from Germany andalternatively identifying himself as the land-surveyor of European culture.His experience is similar to Kafka’s K., in so far as there is no precedent forBenjamin’s role; he enters the village of cultural criticism without author-ization. Like K. he must spend his time both devising his function andcourting higher-ups, and above all biding his time – always from a strategicdistance. 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 onan absurd course of contestation, misrecognition and postponement of his job description. The crucial factor with Benjamin, like K. before him, willbe an ability to obscure his points of entry, in such a way that he makes ananti-genealogy for his intellectual and personal motivations. This sort of approach requires a fair bit of meandering around one’s os-tensible goal. And indeed, what critics find so maddening about Benjamin isthe seemingly endless meandering of his thought, whose outcomes moreovercan be readily described as Kafkaesque.2 In a somewhat reactionary stance




many critics seem to approach Benjamin’s 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 ofmind was quite possibly the most advantageous intellectual practice for aman in Benjamin’s situation. Here is a man who finds himself dropped in themiddle of a modernist ethical scheme whose political programme institutesa 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 hevariously inhabits societies for which there is a termination scheme imposedupon those who are believed to fail compliance with these human regulationprogrammes. Indeed, for our purposes in mapping Benjamin’s political and cultural whereabouts, it is crucial to bear in mind that his coordinates are alwaysalready joined in a constellation of protofascism, not beginning in 1933 butrather in 1892, the year of his birth. He is in the unique position to claimthat 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

Nazi’s determination to rub out figures like Benjamin from the historicalrecord failed, but others less obviously succeeded in blurring his conceptualproject so far as to obscure it in our readings of his work. One of the greater elements of that project, which remains somewhatobscured in current readings of Benjamin, is his interest in deploying writing as politics. It is widely known that Benjamin was a great admirerof Kafka’s literary approach. What is less known is the degree to which herelied upon Kafka’s 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 upona political modus operandi within Kafka’s writing, and therein provide greatassistance in an attempt to lay the groundwork for a topographical histori-ography – as opposed to a biography – of Benjamin’s life. This topographicalexercise has its beginnings in a rather conspicuous assumption, one thatDeleuze and Guattari will come to associate with Kafka, and I later withBenjamin. Simply put, the assumption is that ‘there is no ideology, and

indeed there never has been’.

3

Thus it becomes evident to all parties thatit 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 ‘fit’, but rather a geography extending outward composed ofpoliticized gestures. Ideology or fit would imply that these are solid config-urations, when in fact they are, simply put, a matter of flows. Initially, K. will complain to the teacher, ‘I don’t fit 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 areconstantly negotiating for the same territory and in so doing rhythmically

take on the characteristics of each other. In Deleuze and Guattari’s words,‘they form a rhizome’.5

A rhizome is not a matter of fit, but rather a concern of mutual trans-formation. K. soon realized after making this assertion that he would needto rethink his approach and in so doing enter into mutual relations withboth Barnabas, a Castle functionary, and Frieda, a peasant, both of whomhave intimate contact with the Castle. There is no room for imitation inthese relationships. Nor is any identification made between his and theirposition. Instead, K.’s presence works to shift the ground of Barnabas andFrieda’s 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.’stotal absorption into Castle law. They function as blocks to encourage hiscontinued strategy of building an adjacent relationship to the Castle: a wayout 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 finds on

his way to the Castle extend his capability to deterritorialize its significance while dodging an understanding of it as a discrete signifier.

K.’s task eventually reveals itself not to be to get to the Castle, but ratherto get around it. This approach is fundamentally related to Benjamin’sproject of a consistent realignment of our approach toward history. Real-lifefigures such as Asja Lacis, Gershom Scholem, Theodor Adorno and BertoltBrecht play similar roles to Kafka’s characters Frieda and Barnabas, in sofar as they act as pressuring forces that periodically ‘harden’ or ‘solidify’ a

contemporary position around Benjamin with regard to the entity of statepolitics. Through a series of intense encounters with these individuals,Benjamin is able to at once determine a political position for himself, and atthe same time extend his professional viability by occupying an ostensibleposition within a particular political milieu. Indeed, he manages to operatequite convincingly within these milieux, using the reflective 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 rhetoricalprowess to get him by. This is not to say that Benjamin operates as a politicalcharlatan, 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 thecase that through contact with the figures 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 thesubjects. That is how he manages to carve out a provisional place within allthese ideological camps. One example of this happened during his visit to




Moscow in 1926. Here Benjamin employs Asja Lacis as his guide throughthe 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 extentthe possibility of tackling these subjects depends on my contact with her’(MD , p. 18). This situation of seeming political dependency on Lacis doesnot appear to trouble Benjamin. On the contrary, he is quite happy for thesesorts of majoritarian Politics with a capital ‘P’ to flow over him, and for themto remain a point of contingency indefinitely. This is the case so long as hemaintains 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 toCentral Park.6 Indeed, when recalling his writings, we confront anotherterritory altogether. A territory transversed by a series of long-distancecalls, signals coming in from a Europe that has long since been levelled,a summons that perhaps may even travel beyond the zone of Benjamin’spersonal finitude. There is no history of Benjamin’s discursive impact inthis century that does not have a past like that, an unworked-throughdialling route beginning and in some ways ending along a Berlin-basedcircuit. We must take care not to undermine the significance of the disap-

pearance of Berlin and indeed of Europe as the fundamental aporia withinthe Benjaminian project. Benjamin does not wish to be emancipated fromthe scene of Europe’s devastation, but instead wishes to come to its defence,to argue for its continued recognition as a place beyond the realm offascism, to argue for its future, its worthwhile position in the world, despiteHitler’s appropriation of the place, and against the ever-encroaching forcesof Americanism on one side and Stalinism on the other. What Deleuze andGuattari characterize as ‘diabolical powers knocking on the door ’.7 If need be,

Benjamin would prefer to greet these diabolical powers on the commonground of a European corpus, and by extension on the territory of hissingular body as he understands it to be fundamentally European. With this attitude in mind, it should come as no surprise that the nomadicBenjamin of the 1930s was wary of joining Adorno and Horkheimer in New York. He took out his insurance policy with Kafka roughly 20 years beforethat, and had read the fine print carefully. When Kafka, in the openinglines 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 nota territorial defect on the part of Kafka: one made by a man who couldbarely convince himself ever to leave Prague. Rather it reads for Benjaminas a substantive prediction of what America was to become in the first halfof the twentieth century: a burgeoning imperial power poised to unseat thecultural domination of Europe, whose popular stance was one of hostilitytowards so-called ‘European intellectualism’ (read Marxism). Kafka is ironically positive about this throughout Amerika , convincedthat 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 Deleuzeand Guattari observe that:

In America, the most terrible work conditions don’t inspire any critiquein K. but simply make him more afraid of being excluded from the hotel. Although familiar with the Czech socialist and anarchist movement,Kafka doesn’t follow in their path. Passing a workers’ march, Kafkashows 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, officials, professional politicians, all themodern satraps for whom [he] is preparing the way to power’.9

Populism such as this exacts its control through different, though no lessbeguiling, 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 apparatusin ways that somehow naturalize the process of infringement. Benjaminfirst started reading Kafka’s work in 1927,10 and it may have been Amerika

that first convinced Benjamin that he and Kafka had a similar outlook on

state violence, as something that is not altogether unpalatable to the averagecitizen. It is most probably ‘In the Penal Colony’, however, that awakenedBenjamin to the fact that writing had some definite part in carrying out itsoutcomes. Kafka had difficulty getting this story published. In a letter to his publisher Wolff, who had initially rejected it as ‘too repulsive’, Kafka replied: ‘By wayof 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 timein 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 codeand permitted infringements upon a private citizen’s basic rights of privacy.Fear of denunciation, arbitrary scapegoating and bureaucratic restrictionbegan to form part of everyday life in Prague. These conditions were shortlyto arrive in Berlin. The official assures the visitor that ‘Our sentence doesnot sound severe. The Harrow will write whatever commandment the man

has disobeyed onto his body. This condemned man, for instance . . . willhave written on his body: honour thy superiors’.12 This is the same sentencethat is rendered in numbers on the bodies accounted for by the NationalSocialist regime. The sheer number of prescriptions written onto the bodiesof those it holds responsibility for allows for a certain mobility, that is, itallows the regime to mobilize through the various doctrinal significationsthese bodies communicate and display on their surfaces. The proliferation ofmessages therein get transported ‘off the backs of’ citizens. Such corporealbranding allows National Socialism to spread in numbers through bodies




in a way concurrent with its aggressive annexation strategies. In this wayNational Socialism assumes the character of a molecular flow. Deleuze and

Guattari stress that under Nazi protocol ‘the number is no longer a means ofcounting or measuring, but of moving: it is the number itself which movesthrough space’.13 And therein results a proliferation of conflicting and oftencontradictory messages from the regime onto bodies as they move throughthe 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 ofNationalist Socialist policy to countries like France and Denmark. It wasauthored by, among others, Otto von Verschuer, whom Giorgio Agambendescribes as one of the key persons responsible for the medical politics of theNazi Party. As von Verschuer inscribes it:

This politics begins first of all with the establishment of a budget toaccount for the living wealth of a people and proposes to assume thecare of the ‘biological’ body of the nation. While Helferich estimated theGerman 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, becomessomething that authorizes the state to rank them in terms of viability. Inorder for a body to remain viable it must carry on (it) the mandate of certaindiscursive economics. Any resistance to the assumption of such messages isunderstood as something that is bad for state business. Therein, anytimebare life resists its discursive politicization, a flow of potential state wealthescapes and in so doing reduces national worth. The state struggles to

maintain and increase the quality of its ‘living’ wealth through rhetoricallyand materially promoting various biological improvement campaigns. Thisprocess of enforcing the state’s rhetorical health policy is by no means astable system, and fluctuations are a constant reminder to the state that itmust bear down upon or even eliminate bodies that do not comply suffi-ciently with such corporeal reform strategies.

In keeping with the theme of flows in our discussion, it is significant tonote 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 fluctuations must, however, remain in check, and the state attemptsto do this through various tracing techniques which include a combinationof statistics, biological determinism and binary logic. These epistemologicalpractices reinforce the overall notion of what Deleuze and Guattari referto as a ‘pretraced destiny, whatever name is given to it – divine, anagogic,historical, economic, structural, hereditary or syntagmatic’.16 Deleuze andGuattari 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 ormap of the state’s operations which temporarily removes blockages and

allows long disused connections to function again. However, a more likelyscenario to take place from within this overcoded structure is that the traceitself becomes intense and in so doing takes on a diagrammatic, as opposedto ‘grammatic’, character trait. That is to say, it no longer subtends thesolidified grammar of the state but rather forms out of that grammar a mapof its utterances in such a way that it begins to assemble a radical parabasis tothe state’s discursive logic, loosening the foundation of its signifiers along the way. Deleuze and Guattari illustrate how this might happen:

Accounting and bureaucracy proceed by tracings: they can begin toburgeon 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, challengingthe hegemony of the signifier.18

In this instance the trace might expose the rhetorical signifier of life in theNazi 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 exploitthe living wealth by choosing to annihilate its own servants rather thanterminate its own process. This is the moment at which the messages ofNational Socialism stop resonating in a state apparatus and causes themto interact with the war machine. The overall effect being that a line ofdestruction takes just so many bodies both docile and resistant with it in amassive 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 considerationof ‘Franz Kafka on the Tenth Anniversary of the Author’s Death’. In it heidentifies Kafka as someone uniquely able to put the writing on the wall– to document violence, and moreover protofascism, portraying them bothas a routine effect of the machinery of modernization. Kafka’s 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. Kafka’s writing raisedthe tenor of bureaucracy to a political programmatics, making his ownline of flight contingent on being wedged permanently in the bureaucraticapparatus of the office. Benjamin writes: ‘the citizen of the modern state,confronted by an unfathomable bureaucratic apparatus whose operations arecontrolled by agencies obscure even to the executive bodies, not to mentionthe people affected by them. (It is well known that one level of meaning inthe novels, especially in The Trial , is located here.)’ (SW 3: 325). Deleuze andGuattari concur with Benjamin and offer further that




If Kafka is the greatest theorist of bureaucracy, it is because he showshow, at a certain level (but at which one? it is not localisable), the barriers

between offices cease to be a definitive ‘dividing line’ and are immersedin a molecular medium (milieu ) that dissolves them and simultan-eously makes the office manager proliferate into microfigures impossibleto recognize or identify, discernible only when they are centralizable:another regime, coexistent with the separation and totalisation of therigid segments.19

In Kafka’s world the office manager becomes something of an inadvertentrhizomatic figure. Like the trace, he is able to break free of the overcodedbureaucratic environment and burgeon his appearance in such a way as tobecome his own boss, a general manager unto himself: one who starts tohave an hallucinatory perception of his own power. He becomes paranoidand begins to mutate the bureaucratic codes to his own ends, imaginingother ways they could appear or be understood. In keeping himself within that nebulous milieu, Kafka exposed himselfto these figures on a day-to-day basis and was then able to appreciate thatthese protofascist managers were at heart over-industrious bureaucrats

who took the rigidity of totalitarianism, sped it up, causing it to become amolecular flow which consequentially poured into all segments of society.Bureaucracy still very much exists under National Socialism, but instead offunctioning sensibly, manageably on a mass level as in other totalitarian stateapparatuses, it becomes something cellular and therein capable of travellinganywhere it wishes within the body politic. The fact that violence in thesebureaucracies took a superior, classificatory tone, bespeaks the magnitude ofnetworks of penetration it encompassed. The modern citizen could hardly

say where the violence began and the law ended; only that the law seemedto exist both nowhere and everywhere within protofascistic societies andtherein it was understood as a kind of mythic entity. Benjamin’s ‘Critique ofViolence’ shares the modern citizen’s preoccupation with ‘violence outsidethe law’ (SW 1: 252) which finds its cohort examples in the description ofK.’s offices 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

defines the relation of the law described in Kafka’s Trial as the ‘Nothingof revelation’, intending by this expression to name ‘a stage of life in whichrevelation appears to be without meaning in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity but no significance. A state in which the wealth ofmeaning is lost, and what is in process of appearing (for revelation is such aprocess) still does not disappear, even though it is reduced to the zero pointof its own content, so to speak’ (CS , p. 142). According to Scholem, a lawthat finds itself in such a condition is not absent but rather appears in theform 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 cannotdecipher it’ (CS , p. 127). Benjamin finds Scholem’s understanding of a

law being in force without significance objectionable based on his opinionthat, as Agamben puts it, ‘a law that has lost its content ceases to exist andbecomes indistinguishable from life’.20 ‘Whether the pupils have lost It [theirScripture] or whether they are unable to decipher it comes down to thesame thing, because without the key that belongs to it, the Scripture is notScripture 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 Scholem’s formulation of ‘being in force withoutsignificance’ as a faultless description of ‘the ban’ (the term Agamben usedto describe the relationship between bare life and the form of law), that ourage cannot master, something which is directly akin to the status of the lawin Kafka’s novel.21 He gleans further from Scholem’s comments, that:

For life under a law that is a force without signifying resembles life inthe state of exception, in which the most innocent gesture or the smallestforgetfulness can have the most extreme consequences. And it is exactlythis 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 knockon the door can mark the start of uncontrollable trials . . . in Kafka’svillage the empty potentiality of law is so much in force as to becomeindistinguishable from life . . . The existence and the very body of JosephK. ultimately coincide with the Trial , they become the Trial .22

Moreover, Agamben contends this transformation of the body into lawpersists so long as:

Law is maintained as pure form in a state of virtual exception, [and] it letsbare 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 realstate of exception is confronted by life that, in a symmetrical but inversegesture, 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 Benjamin’s formulationof an asignifying law outstrips the virtual limitations of Scholem’s config-uration of that same principle and emerges as the real life threshold of thisnew era of biopolitics. For in a biopolitical era, bare life is compelled to foldback 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 comesdown on the side of Benjamin’s formulation as the definition of the law




which best described the political parameter of the status of the law in thispresent era.

Moreover Benjamin grasped, better than most critics of his time, how thiscondition of life under a law that is for all intents and purposes asignifying,influenced writers like Kafka to transform themselves and their characters inresponse to tremendous pressures exerted on the organic body and ‘assumethe 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 isdistorted; the big animal, half lamb, half kitten, for which ‘the butcher’sknife’ might be ‘a release’ is distorted. These figures are connected by along series of figures 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 virtualexception 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 theiraberrant 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 significance has come to an end. For the Messiah willonly be able to enter after the door of the law has been closed.’24 Persisting inthis state of distortion helps these abysmal creatures to elude what Agambencalls ‘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 figure likeBenjamin faces. ‘Only at this juncture of reality do the terms distinguishedand 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 arguethat the cusp of this dimension has already emerged within protofascistBerlin, through an era in which, as Agamben would have it,

That state of exception turned into rule signals law’s fulfilment and its

becoming indistinguishable from the life over which it ought to order.Confronted with this imperfect nihilism that would let nothing subsistindefinitely in the form of a being in force without significance, Benjaminproposes a messianic nihilism that nullifies even the Nothing and lets nolaw remain in force beyond its own content.27

Prior to the arrival of this nullification, the existence and body of WalterBenjamin are left to coincide with National Socialism, destined to contend with its influence, 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 Socialismcame to envelope. Under such an exceptional rule of law his existence, his

very body, coincided with National Socialism to such a profound extent itbegan not just to resemble, or imitate the effects of National Socialism onhis person but actually to manifest them rhizomatically. His body, thus written over with a force of law that was at once asignifying and profoundlyconsequential, meant that for Walter Benjamin one’s only form of agency was to become a point on a point of view on the events which followed inits immanent wake, to become National Socialism’s reporter.

It was Leibniz:

Who subjected the points of view to exclusive rules such that each openeditself onto the others only in so far as they converged. Nietzsche, contraryto Leibniz, argued that the point of view is opened onto a divergence which it affirms. In other words each point of view becomes the means ofgoing all the way to the end of the other, by following the entire distance.In Nietzsche’s scheme divergence is no longer a principle of exclusion, anddisjunction 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, pointof view on a point of view, displacement of perspective, differentiationof difference, and not through the identity of contraries’.29 The violencethat Benjamin defines in the ‘Critique of Violence’ as divine moves alongon a similarly disjunctive principle. Following in line from Agamben’sarguments, it is ‘situated in a zone in which it is no longer possible todistinguish between exception and rule’.30 As such divine violence functions

as ‘a dissolution of the link between violence and the law’.31

Benjamin cansay that divine violence neither posits nor conserves violence, but deposesit. ‘Divine violence shows the connection between the two [positing andpreserving violence] and even more between violence and the law – thesingle real content of the law’.32 For Benjamin divine violence with itscharacteristic mode of incompossibility emerges in the modern age as thestate’s most powerful agent for communication and perpetuation of law withsignification, namely the law of dictatorial power.

In the last paragraph of ‘Critique of Violence’, Benjamin asserts that ‘thecritique of violence is the philosophy of its history – the “philosophy” of thishistory, 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 shortview:

A gaze directed only at what is close at hand can at most perceive adialectical rising and falling in the lawmaking and law-preserving forms




of violence. The law governing their oscillation rests on the circumstancesthat 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 bringupon ‘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 suchan operation would be revolutionary violence, what Benjamin refers to as‘unalloyed’ violence, implying that it is a pure form of violence, perhapsrelated, in some sub- or superhistorical sense, to law in its pure form. ForBenjamin, use of such violence is possible. What is ‘less possible and also lessurgent for humankind, however, is to decide when unalloyed violence hasbeen realized in particular cases’ (SW 1: 252). That the appearance of thisunalloyed violence persists as an uncertainty is largely due to the fact thatit remains invisible to the judgement of mankind. Furthermore, Benjaminargues, ‘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 thepower of redress.

What I am pointing the way toward is Benjamin’s final materialistdocument, The Theses for a Philosophy of History, which essentially promotesa rhizomatic approach to history; a situation where the future and past areconstantly in the process of becoming each other. Undoubtedly some transhis-torical material is always getting into the works of those becomings: whatBenjamin refers to as the messianic. History then emerges as something farbeyond the reach of mimetic historicism, the trace getting pre-empted by thecode, history emerging as the ‘capture of a code, the code’s surplus value, an

increase in valence, a genuine becoming’33

porosity. In this essay, Benjaminis influenced by Nietzsche’s ‘Of the Use and Abuse of History’, quoting himas saying, ‘We need history, but our need for it differs from that of the jadedidlers in the garden of knowledge’ (SW 4: 394). Thus Benjamin is telling usthat he is striving for an operative history, rather than a nostalgic one. Ratherthan looking to ‘enslaved ancestors’, Benjamin wished to direct our focus totheir ‘liberated grandchildren’(SW 4: 394). This is an ‘untimely’ view of historyin 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 betweenvarious moments in history. But no state of affairs having causal signi-ficance is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously,as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands ofyears. The historian who proceeds from this consideration ceases to tellthe 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 specific earlier



Down the K. Hole 81

one. Thus, he establishes a conception of the present as now-time shotthrough with splinters of Messianic time. (SW 4: 397)

For Nietzsche the historical formulation is slightly different; he opposeshistoricism not to the eternal but to the subhistorical or superhistorical: theUntimely, which is another name for becoming:

The unhistorical is like an atmosphere within which life can germinateand with the destruction of which it must vanish. It is true thatonly by imposing limits on this unhistorical element by thinking,reflecting, comparing, distinguishing, drawing conclusions, only throughthe appearance within that encompassing cloud of a vivid flash of light– thus only through the power of employing the past for the purposes oflife and of gain, and introducing into history that which has been doneand is gone – did man become man: but with an excess of history managain ceases to exist, and without that envelope of the unhistorical he would never have begun or dared to begin. What deed would man becapable of if he had not first entered into that vaporous region of theunhistorical?34

Benjamin relates Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘unhistorical’ to the sign ofa messianic cessation of happening which enables the materialist histori-ographer effectively to blast ‘a specific life out of the era, a specific work outof the lifework. As a result of this method, the lifework is both preserved andsublated in the work, the era in the lifework, and the entire course of historyin the era’ (SW 4: 396). Thus making history as well as biography dependenton a series of breaks and constant realignments, a vehicle of its own changing

significance over time. One way actively to effect these sorts of ruptures ofhistory, both social and personal, is to develop a reliance on short-termmemory, therein allowing for the replay of events in their singularity, asopposed to contiguity, in relation to all other surrounding happenings. Thispractice undermines historicism in so far as short-term memory eliminatesthe drive to focus on the totalized account of what happened. In line withDeleuze and Guattari’s thinking on the subject, even the molar categoriesof history and biography can be deterritorialized through use of the faculty

of short-term memory. Qualitatively speaking, ‘short-term memory is of therhizome or diagram type and long-term memory is aborescent and centralised(imprint, engram, tracing or photography)’. With those distinctions in mindit would appear that short-term memory has some distinct traits which makeit amenable as an agent of deteriorialization. Deleuze and Guattari charac-terize short-term memory as being ‘in no way subject to a law of contiguityor immediacy to its object’. What is more, short-term memory ‘can act at adistance, come or return a long time after, but always under conditions ofdiscontinuity, rupture or multiplicity’. These attributes, which Deleuze and




Guattari associate with short-term memory, are common to both Nietzsche’s‘unhistorical’ and Benjamin’s ‘monadology’ when it comes to defining a

spatial relation to events in history. This is also true of short-term memory’sapproach to time, which is one of disjointed recurrence as opposed toseamless continuum. Moreover, it extends to the very conceptualization ofhow to write history and to the idea of history of itself, which is at a certainlevel profoundly integrated with the idea of memory. Deleuze and Guattari would argue for a charting of history in which ‘one writes using short-termmemory and thus using short-term ideas, even if one reads or rereads usinglong-term memory for long-term concepts’. Through this approach historyis not the present, which becomes static through its recording, but history asa functionary of short-term memory which ‘includes memory as a process’.Historical memory then ‘merges not with the instant but instead with thenervous temporal and collective rhizome’. This approach does not signalthe elimination of long-term memory, but rather effects an alteration inthe way it organizes material. Long-term memory (civilization, family, race,society) traces and translates, but what it translates continues to act in, froma 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’, Benjamincountenances revolutionary life as one where, ‘each thought, each day, each lifelies here as on a laboratory table. And as if it were metal from which an unknownsubstance is by every means to be extracted, it must endure experimentationto the point of exhaustion’ (SW 2: 28). Adopting such a comportment forhimself, Benjamin spews out before him a political field (similar to Foucault’s‘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 orthe Russian bureaucracy or the machinery of Fascism’.37 Foucault points outthat one of the features of heterotopias is their capability to juxtapose ‘in asingle real place several spaces, several sites that are themselves incompatible’.38

These are the spaces Benjamin wishes to excavate, to find their mineral as wellas molecular contents, to locate their technical enplacements and to discoverbeyond 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 configure themselves according to a logic offorces: ‘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 instancethe thinking of politicized spaces, ‘involves not only the flow of thoughts, buttheir arrest as well’ (SW 4: 396). For Benjamin this blockage presents us with atremendous opportunity: ‘a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressedpast’ (SW 4: 396). Therein thinking is always rhizomatic, a becoming encoun-tering a blockage, encountering another becoming.



Down the K. Hole 83

Benjamin’s thought approaches politics as though it were ‘an experimentalmachine, 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, thatit 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 Benjamin’s enforcedtransience by those political formations meant that he conducted manyof 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 throughvarious cultural formations that were not strictly speaking authorized for hisperusal. Basically, then, Benjamin’s work might be viewed as a trespass, akind of unauthorized intervention taking place at the crossroads of varioushistorical formations paving the road to a universally adopted totalitari-anism; one, I might add, that would dwarf the German war-machine offascism according to Benjamin’s estimations. It is my opinion that we haveyet to pick up on Benjamin’s signal in this regard. In a political discussion in1938 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 historyno less deep than Fascist powers’.41 Surely these depths will rise up again andrequire our most sober attentiveness. We can begin to chart these historicaluprisings by examining Benjamin’s preoccupation with combinations, whatBenjamin referred to as ‘an awakening combination, at once a modernsurface and an archaic depth, “signal” and “oracle”!’42

I mentioned earlier Benjamin’s vision of what it means to become amaterialist historiographer; it is to become a critical thinker who is able to

grasp ‘the constellation into which his own era has entered, along with avery specific earlier one’ (SW 4: 397). Hence Benjamin’s historical preoc-cupations with series: events that join up in places never thought of, neverconcerned to be closely situated. The topographical map he gives to historyis similar to the one Deleuze and Guattari describe as ‘the most strikingtopography in Kafka’s work: two diametrically opposed points bizarrelyreveal themselves to be in contact’.43 For Benjamin’s part, he chooses toexpose these sorts of alignments in history along the fault-lines of political

objective. Thus, his approach to historical formation resembles something ofa geological study, a plate tectonics of the will of nations. Benjamin’s earlyconcepts of the ruin and porosity in Naples suggest that he was conductinga kind of archaeological dig into history to recover its lost features. Thushis approach surveys history on the level of the matrixial and molecular,beginning with the Trauerspiel and carrying right the way through to hisTheses on the Philosophy of History . This happens well in advance of Deleuzeand Guattari’s combined use of the molar and the molecular as a means ofassembling their views about the epochal events of history. This statement is




not meant to inaugurate some stratified competition of philosophical might,but rather to demonstrate how molecules of Benjamin’s thought have lodged

themselves into Deleuze and Guattari’s battle-plan on the Signifier.It is important to recognize that Benjamin’s is a tactical approach muchmore subtle than any taxonomic history standing alone. His interest liesin the potential of historical adjacencies; he is reticent about registeringdivisions since he does not accept that they materially exist. ‘The historicalmaterialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called “Once upon atime” in historicism’s bordello’ (SW 4: 396). An historical materialist cannotdo without the notion of a present which is not in transition but in whichtime stands still and has come to a stop. Historical materialism suppliesa unique experience with the past. The historical materialist remains incontrol of his powers, and thus is ‘man enough to blast open the continuumof history’ (SW 4: 396). Benjamin is acting at the elemental level to re-mapthe coordinates of historical understanding. This is in line with Deleuzeand Guattari’s assertion that ‘what distinguishes the map from the tracingis that it is entirely orientated toward an experimentation with the real’.44

Such an experimental approach enables Benjamin, in the role of history’sland-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 beapproached as a map, a territory mapped onto himself, following Deleuzeand Guattari’s interpretation of the map as ‘open and connectable to alldimensions’ as well as ‘detachable, reversible’ and ‘susceptible to constantmodification’. Moreover, they assert that as opposed to a trace, ‘the mapcan be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by anindividual 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 asa meditation’. Since Benjamin’s project inherently occupies most of thesepotential locations, there is a great cause for it to manifest itself here alongsimilar lines of formation. What is not made manifest in Benjamin’s bodyof work is the proverbial ‘map drawn on a wall’.45

The absence of this map raises both a crucial omission and a crucialopportunity in the survey of Benjamin’s 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 theyare inscribed too much they run the risk of being overcoded. On the otherhand, too subtle a survey of them would leave them vulnerable to obscurity,or, worse still, open to endless bouts of aestheticization. What is required isnot a tracing out of these areas, but rather a mapping technique that couldrelate them through diagrammatic extension, one aimed at composing aseries 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 forsubverting 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 Guattari’s views onhistory, as something associated with long-term memory, something that‘blocks desire, makes mere carbon copies of it, fixes it within a stratum,cuts it off from all of its connections’.46 When asked if they feel there is anypotential for it to become a deterritorializing tool their response is tongue-in-cheek, playing up a Jewish sense of humour: ‘But, what, then can wehope for? It is an impasse. Nonetheless, we can realize that even an impasseis good if it forms part of rhizome’.47 Benjamin quotes Kafka as having oncesaid ‘there is an infinite amount of hope – only not for us’ (SW 3: 327).Most people thought he was expressing desperation. Deleuze and Guattariread 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 leadsto laughter starting with The Trial . Everything is political starting with theletters to Felice’.48 It is that way with A Thousand Plateaus , as well as theirbook 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 ofhistory to appear. A history that challenges memory, challenges the narrativeform and challenges the regime of signification that reigns over the majorityof historic enterprises. This approach, moreover, could bring an alternativepractice of history into being to serve a linguistic enterprise. What I am proposing is a ‘minor’ approach to history that would meetthe criteria of Deleuze and Guattari’s for a minor literature. Namely, thatthe events are ‘affected by a high coefficient of deterritorialisation . . . that

everything in them is political’ in so far as each individual happeningis ‘connected immediately to politics’ and that every event ‘takes on acollective value . . . another possible community and to forge the means foranother consciousness and another sensibility’.49 History as a ‘thing that nolonger forms anything but a sequence of intensive states, a ladder or circuitfor intensities that one can make race around in one sense or another, fromhigh to low, or from low to high. The [Event] is the race itself; it has becomebecoming.’50 This mode of history has the potential to become something

deterritorializing that would have no particular fidelity to a place, or forthat matter in a signifying placement. It would produce events that forma rhizome with their surrounding accounts. Deleuze has already suggestedthat events might be further along than words in their potential to deterri-torialize. In his volume on Leibniz, The Fold, he offers Borges’ ‘The Gardenof Forking Paths’ as being an example of such a deterritorialized becomingfor the historical event, wherein history acts as a series of bifurcations or‘as a point in the neighbourhood of series’ divergences’.51 Deleuze describesBorges as ‘one of Leibniz’s disciples’ who nonetheless takes a divergence




from this pathway to become compossible with the ‘Chinese philosopher-architect Ts’ui Pen, the inventor of the “garden of bifurcating paths”, a

baroque labyrinth whose infinite series diverge or converge, forming a webof time embracing all possibilities’.52 Remarking on Ts’ui Pen’s work, Deleuzeobserves that ‘all outcomes are produced, each being the point of departurefor other bifurcations’.53 A similar pattern of bifurcation is responsible forestablishing the individual in so far as Deleuze posits ‘the real definition ofthe individual as an ad hoc mixture of concentration, accumulation, coincidence of a certain number of converging preindividual singularities .’54

Therein the category of historical event no longer slavishly respondsto the commands of the symbolic meaning, but instead proliferates thosecommands into infinity, creating a series of transformations of meaningbased on an intimate connection with somebody who is able to import themin line with their own unique zone of expression, dispersing them within hisown mimetic idiom. Rather than contextualize the writings, minor histories are meant tospeed the narrative, but not toward any particular outcome. Instead, theyare meant to indicate something gestural, as opposed to symbolic, for theindividual. Benjamin describes Kafka’s work as something that ‘constitutes

a code of gestures which surely had no definite symbolic meaning for theauthor from the outset; rather, the author tried to derive such a meaningfrom 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. Thesehappenings then are not ‘linked’ but instead form a constellation of littledramas. Benjamin, in describing how gesture functions in Kafka’s 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 shiftinghappenings, 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 flits by. Thepast can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the moment of itsrecognizability, and is never seen again’ (SW 4: 390). This is very much the work of the topographical historiographer: to seize upon moments that areflitting 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 signpostfor instants yet to come which share the same fleeting appearance. A ‘minor’ history is able to get involved in the proliferation of these

instants, merging them into a collective rhizome, rather than isolatingthem and forcing their attenuation. Building up such a mimetic dossieron Benjamin is a perilous assignment, requiring recovering tactics of adifferent order than the archiving tendency of the trace can offer. This is why a minor approach is necessary, one that refuses to entertain any desiresto house Benjamin, to remember him, to replace him as displaced figure,



Down the K. Hole 87

to mollify him. Instead these composites hope to speed his signalleddeparture, 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 . Theconstruction of convergent series. And finally Disjunction . The distri-bution of a divergent series. These three tactics together equal anaffirmation of mobility and of duration. Divergence however acts asthe ‘teeth’ that interlock the sequences, which are subdivisible in theirrespective series.55

It is this quality of divergence that also allows one to affirm distance overlocatedness, 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 whichit affirms; another town corresponds to each point of view, each pointof view is another town, the towns are linked only by their distance

and resonate only through the divergence of their series, their housesand their streets. There is always another town within the town. Eachterm becomes the means of going all the way to the end of the other, byfollowing the entire distance.56

It is in this sort of town that the flight of a minor history can commencefrom end to end, term to term, series to series, convergence to divergenceand 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: asomewhat horrifying prospect for anyone setting out. Benjamin’s journeyis ‘a prodigious operation which translates this horror into a topography ofobstacles (where to go? how to arrive? Berlin, Moscow, Paris?)’.57 The surveyorhas no choice but to journey onward, as he is compelled by forces beyondhis 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 century’s courseof understanding, through twentieth-century communication tactics whichcould potentially act as line of flight, a means of distribution of a particularthesis; one requiring the transformation of the event of thought and ofhistory 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 unappeasableattachment to an ungrievable loss – seems to have a peculiar resonancetoday. It might indeed be tempting to see in the very stubbornness of theattachment – the ‘loyalty to things’ – a certain ethical dimension: the refusalto perform the mourning work of renunciation through symbolic mediationmight seem to involve an encrypting of alterity within the interiority ofthe subject, which would as such divest itself of its illusory sufficiency orself-containment. Freud’s ‘open wound’1 would be the site of an originary

extimacy as the subject’s own opening to an infinite responsibility. Buriedalive within the vault of a self fractured by the persistence of what cannotbe metabolized, the lost object would seem to assert its continued claim onthose still alive. Melancholia would articulate this claim. Its tenacity wouldbe the measure of the incommensurability of a loss whose persistence pointsboth to the infinite need for and to the final impossibility of all restitution.

The issue proves to be somewhat more complicated. Simply to invertFreud’s infamous hierarchy between ‘normal’, normalizing mourning and

pathological melancholia would be to ignore that the antithesis betweenmourning and melancholia finds an echo within the structure of melan-cholia itself, which displays its own internal conceptual self-division. Thevery history of the concept of melancholia shows a systematic oscillationbetween denigration and overvaluation – a split which suggests that whatever the resonance of the concept today it should not be a questionsimply of privileging melancholia as somehow most responsible to thehistorical demands of an epoch devastated by the cumulative horror of itslosses. Typically stigmatized in the medical tradition from Stoicism through



The Sickness of Tradition 89

Scholasticism (where, not coincidentally, its perils were typically coded asfeminine), valorized in the Renaissance and Romantic tradition (where its

benefits were correspondingly coded as masculine), melancholia has fromthe beginning been burdened with a double valency. Linked, on the onehand, to paralysing pathology (the ‘noonday demon’ of the Middle Ages),and, on the other, to ecstatic creativity (the ‘divine mania’ of Ficino orTasso), the concept of melancholia is itself fissured by a crucial ambiguity.2

The aporia is not simply that the emphasis on the opacity of the lostobject deflects 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 observethe righteous grandiosity of the melancholic’s self-lacerations, was thus ledto draw the conceptual link between melancholia and a certain narcissism.More precisely: the preoccupation with an originary loss (‘as such’) logicallypreceding the loss of any determinate object could function equally as apre-emptive denial of loss which would mask the real inaccessibility of itsobject by determining it in advance as lost – thus negatively appropriable inits 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 wouldthus be a way of staging a dispossession of that which was never one’s ownto lose in the first place – and thus, precisely by occluding structural lackas determinate loss, would exemplify the strictly perverse effort to assert arelation with the non-relational. (Which is not to say that the assumptionof ‘lack’ – in general – cannot equally function pre-emptively by dissolvingthe singularity of contingent losses.) Trauma would itself in this way bemobilized 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 doingultimately to hypostatize what is unreal (or phantasmatic) as a new reality.3

The example of Baudelaire may briefly clarify this recuperative logic of gainthrough loss. The strange coalescence of emptiness and plenitude explored inso many poems – Andromache, for example, ‘bent in ecstasy’ near the emptytomb of Hector (‘Le Cygne’) – points to the paradox that grief can provideits own most potent form of consolation. Lack yields its own fulfilment in

the allegorical personifications whereby the poet’s preoccupation with hisown grief – ‘ma Douleur ’: capitalized, humanized, hypostatized – comes tofill the vacuum left by the absent object. In ‘Recueillement’ death itself ispre-empted by the intensity of the living sorrow which the poet cherisheslike a mother her ailing child. The language of grief in this way comes toeclipse the loss which occasioned it and – another familiar Baudelaireangesture – 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. Nietzsche’s 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 Hegel’s beautiful soul – embrace the present in thegratification of its own despair. There is nothing neutral about the drift tocompensatory gratification. The sublime abstraction which finds power indisempowerment 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 essentiallegacy of trauma – the signature of its inherent historicity – but which isequally, by that very token, its most generative power. The occlusion of thetraumatic past cuts off any relation to a radically (perhaps catastrophically)different future. The structure of melancholia in this way begins to bleed into that offetishism – the compensatory construction of imaginary unities in responseto a traumatic loss (‘castration’) which structurally can be neither fullyacknowledged nor denied.5 Perversion not only names the simultaneityof recognition and disavowal: it hints at the deeper paradox that the veryrecognition is the disavowal. There is no acknowledgement of trauma whichin its claim to adequacy (a claim implicit in the very protestation of inad-

equacy) does not efface the loss it would concede. Despite appearances, thecelebrated ‘Je sais bien . . . mais quand même’ structure outlined by OctaveMannoni in no way neutralizes by partitioning the contradiction it wouldannounce.6 The fetishistic split which maintains the contradiction betweenknowledge and belief – traumatic loss, on the one hand, redemptive totality,on the other – provides no protective containment of its antitheses, butrather implicates both within a contaminating porosity and oscillation ofone term into the other.

Could such a perverse simultaneity of acknowledgement and disavowalbe the condition of historicity? Far from indicating a simple deviation fromsome norm of repression (together with its counterpart of enlightenment),fetishism might rather indicate the subject’s irreducible split between twocontradictory imperatives – an antinomy which itself marks the ambivalentlegacy of every trauma. If every relation to history is always at some level anon-relation to another history – a missed encounter with the other’s lackand as such a traumatic relation to the other’s trauma – history itself would

be defined by the recursive or reflexive pressure of a loss recognizable only inits own effacement. Could perversion be the mark of the subject’s impossiblerelationship to a loss which is ultimately not its own to acknowledge in thefirst place – but so too, equally, the index of a certain promise? The issue is all the more pressing at a time when the very proliferationof memorials, the manic drive to museify, threatens to spell the erasure ofmemory. It is less a question here of disavowing such disavowal (in the name,for example, of a demystified 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 anamnesticproject is directed?

SURROGATE MEMORIES IN THE AGE OF MASS MONUMENTS

We could begin, for example, by reconsidering the frequently remarkedpeculiarity of the contemporary memory industry;7 the recent discomfortover the cruelly labelled ‘Shoah-biz’ is here symptomatic. At issue is thedramatically inverse ratio between the current proliferation of memorialinstitutions and the experience of direct memory: a ratio which expressesitself temporally, as the distance between the current spate of mnemonicproducts and the tangible experiences they reference; spatially, as the gapbetween these products and the subjects who consume them; cognitively,as the epistemic gap between the intensification of memorials and thenumbing boredom and distraction these so frequently occasion. Rather thandeploring 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: thatour drive to remember is directed towards memories that essentially are notour own to remember, or that we perpetually seek our memories elsewhere– in objects, in places, even in a frenzied theorizing about memory? Thelogic of this expropriation needs to be considered. The current lamentthat 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 Plato’s denunciation of writing inthe Phaedrus ) – only circles around the problem. Slavoj Žižek has elaboratedthe amusing and suggestive notion of ‘interpassivity’: you come home from work, flop in front of the television, tune into the sitcom, and are suddenlyconfronted by this eruption of canned laughter.8 Žižek’s point is that thisonslaught of prefabricated response does not simply function, as one might

think, as a tyrannical reminder to start laughing – the notorious superegoicinjunction to enjoy – but that it actually does our laughing for us. And thisnot only as one more labour-saving device on a par with the remote controland the popcorn machine, but rather so as to mark the inescapable conditionof self-dispossession which spells our inscription in a symbolic order.

Such a dispossession was already noted by Adorno and Horkheimer whenin the Dialectic of Enlightenment they observe how the commodified pieceof music ‘hears for the listener’. It was noted by Heidegger in Sein und Zeit in describing the stubborn condition of Abständigkeit – ‘distantiality’ or




of self-dissension: the consumerist chain of surrogacy which defines theexperience or rather non-experience of das Man (‘we take pleasure and enjoy

ourselves as they enjoy themselves, we read, see, and judge literature the waythey see and judge’, and so on).9 Where Žižek’s Lacanian formulation differsfrom, and just possibly explodes, the residual mandarism lurking in bothHeidegger and Adorno’s earlier renderings is that this surrogacy, rather thanconstituting a limit on an authenticity predicated (mutatis mutandis ) on theself-proximity of a subject, becomes the condition for an ‘abyssal’ freedom in which the decentred subject finds itself overwritten by a signifying networkthat 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? WhatPierre Nora identifies as the need for a ‘lieu de memoire ’ can be interpreteddoubly:10 at once the situatedness of memory, memory’s inherent drive toembodiment, and its inevitable displacement in a place or situation whichusurps it. The lament that memorials take the place of memory assumes tooquickly that memory itself is not from the start defined as expropriation. Theidea 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 certaininterpretation of) Hegelian Er-innerung or internalization. It may indeedexplain what Hegel could not have possibly meant, but nonetheless almostsaid, when he determined in the Phenomenology the für sich (substance-as-subject) as what presents itself für uns . What appears ‘for us’ is not only afunction of our conceptual mediations but may reveal the impossibility ofevery standpoint from which to mediate; the very ‘we’ who we are appears atonce ‘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 assumesthe subjective attributes of its now reified consumers but inscribes the limitsof the possibility of inscription. If every fetish is a mnemonic registrationof a loss which is simultaneously repudiated (both a victory monumentover and the stigma indelibile of castration, says Freud), then the fetishizedmemorial ambiguously commemorates not the lost object per se but the lossof loss : in staging the coincidence of memory with its own evacuation the

memorial performs an impossible mourning rite for mourning itself andthereby demonstrates our irreducible eviction from our own experience. It ismourning as such which is now, ‘impossibly’, being mourned.

BETWEEN MELANCHOLIA AND FETISHISM

The entwined destinies of melancholia and fetishism thus begin toemerge. This may seem surprising: are not the two attitudes opposed? Is




not the immediate, banal contrast between the determined misery of theformer and the voluptuous determination of the latter decisive? A grain of

Nietzschean suspicion might go some way here: the defiant exhibitionismof the melancholic reveals a streak of luxurious enjoyment matched onlyby the severity of the fetishist’s commitment to a jouissance which in its workmanlike assiduity displays a discipline and focus verging on theascetic. Both loss and jouissance present themselves here as symmetricallyand reciprocally traumatic. If castration names the trauma of our symbolicmediation, the encounter with the Real brings the equally devastatingtrauma of an unmediated proximity – the ‘hard kernel’ which marks atonce the limit and the possibility of experience. The fantasy of loss canitself function as a defence against the trauma of enjoyment, just as jouissance itself can be reinflected as a defence against the trauma of castration. Just as obsessional rituals can defend against the ‘real’ death threateningto engulf the subject on the battlefield of enjoyment, so too even ‘littledeaths’ can be reconstructed as so many miniaturized defences against thesymbolic mortifications on the plane of language. The operative antithesisin 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. Themanifest opposition between the experiences of lack and excess is thusultimately less decisive than the structures of fantasy which pre-emptivelysustain them.

One might then proceed to schematize the various parallels. Bothmelancholia and fetishism involve a doubling or ‘splitting’ of the self in theface of a loss, the intractability of which structurally prohibits the recog-

nition it thereby, as prohibition, demands. In the terms of ‘Mourning andMelancholia’ the topological ‘cleavage between the critical faculty of the egoand the ego as altered by identification’ (SE 14: 249) reflects the ambiguityof a loss which is simultaneously accepted (by way of metabolizing identi-fication) and disavowed (by way of literalizing incorporation) – a permanent‘open wound’ which ambiguously commemorates the original instanceof traumatic wounding in so far as it at once drains away every interiorplenitude of the subject and (the catch) reifies the resultant void of sub-

jectivity as a last, stubborn surd of positivity, thereby reconfirming orsustaining narcissism in the very injury which would deface it. A lackcongeals, which in its hypertrophy pre-empts the very possibility of thesubstitution which it at the same time renders necessary. This bringsmelancholia virtually to coincide with fetishism, where the epistemic splitbetween the affirmation and the denial of lack inevitably reproduces thevery antithesis it seeks to neutralize: the split both retraces and effaces thecastration which it is designed to regulate, in that it functions simultaneouslyboth as catastrophic fissure and as stabilizing partition.11 The Ichspaltung in




this way not only creates the very possibility of forming fetishist attachmentsbut in itself functions as the ultimate fetish.

Various other parallels flow directly from this. The paradoxical relationto loss in each case leads directly to an intensified attachment to things whose prosthetic role is neither countenanced nor entirely denied. Thus theapparent literalism of fetishist desire, the refusal of symbolic mediation,the irreplaceable ‘thisness’ or singularity of the fetish object, and thussimilarly the peculiar tenacity of melancholia. The ‘cathectic loyalty’12

to the lost object in this latter instance not only does not preclude butrequires the secret construction of a substitute – the remnant of the objectincorporated within the empty interior of the subject – which functionsas a screen memory the very opacity of which remains both refractoryand infinitely tantalizing. (It is ultimately memory itself which gets deter-mined as the ultimate fetish-object: the veil.) Thus the familiar paradoxesof recuperation: mourning itself becomes a fetishistic proxy for an object whose loss is overshadowed by the clamorous grief it occasions, and inthis way furtively stages substitution precisely by insisting on the latter’simpossibility.

Substitution in each case structurally requires the construction of a part-

object whose fragmentation both prolongs and occludes the traumatic woundit commemorates. The fetishistic passion for the inanimate – to objects, tobody-parts, and even to the whole body itself now refashioned as its ownsynecdoche of itself (the erect body posing as substitute for its own absentmember)13 – displays a chiasmic exchange between unity and fragmentation whereby the subject finds vitality in the mortification which most shatters itand 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 andas such blocks the syntagmatic completion which it simultaneously incitesand enables – and in this way erodes the opposition between unity and frag-mentation, an opposition which is in turn elaborated as the oppositionbetween jouissance (oriented toward the viscosity of life-substance) andthe dead letter of the law. In enunciating the law of enjoyment as his veryown private law – posited without the detour of symbolic mediation – thepervert effectively elides the structural gap which is the essential condition

of the law as such, and in this way, and through the various literalisms ofhis practice, flaunts the law precisely in usurping as exclusive occupant thesite of the law’s own enunciation.

Melancholia displays a similar logic. The incorporation of the objectrequires the latter’s abbreviation as a frozen attribute and thereby inflictsupon 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 lostobject itself which is being whipped by the subject’s most intimate self-




flagellations. The refusal to admit the object’s lack involves the concessionof that very lack and exacerbation of the latter’s mortifying dismemberment.

Reduced to a part-object within the hollow crypt of subjectivity, the objectpersists as living corpse, at once congealed remains and extruding surplus, whose death accretes like so much cellular efflorescence.

FROM REPETITION TO RUPTURE

Time here undergoes its own peculiar shattering: a fissure erupts withinthe continuum of experience. The melancholic fixation on the past mayexplode the nostalgia to which it simultaneously seems committed, justas the perverse temporality of suspense or ‘lingering’ may undermine itsown implicit consecration of an embalmed or reified present. This mayseem surprising: how might fixation yield a form of rupture? At the level offantasy, 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 assumptionof trauma which evaporates impending catastrophe by insisting on the

latter’s absolute anteriority: no contingency remains; death is installed asalways already accomplished; the sacrifice is over before it begins. Thisis Kierkegaard’s definition of recollection as an aesthetic ideology, and itequally determines the flight from time in infinite resignation: one lives inthe present as if the worst has already happened. ‘Recollection has the greatadvantage in that it begins with the loss; the reason it is safe and secure isthat it has nothing to lose’, writes Kierkegaard of the lover who mourns hisbeloved in advance, an old man by the second date.14 In a similar fashion the

knight of infinite resignation jumpstarts the dreadful moment of decision,rushes too eagerly up the mountain so as to bypass the night of Abraham’sunbearable decision, and thus effectively overleaps time itself so as to winthe payback of an otherworldly compensation: loss is staved off as alwaysalready in the past.

Fetishism displays the same temporal logic in reverse: loss is warded offas always already in the future. Thus Freud’s emphasis on the ritualizedsuspense which defines the temporality of perversion: traumatic belatedness

is perpetually siphoned off to the next moment; perpetual foreplay seeks torecapture, immobilize and thereby retroactively construct the moment before the traumatic encounter – to forestall disaster by deferring it to a chronicallyreceding horizon. I turn back the clock so as to forever relive the very lastflicker of an imaginary innocent anticipation: the worst is forever in abeyance,I am permanently on this side of danger – I reassure myself with the fantasyof a permanent not-yet.15 This is Lessing’s explanation of the strange beautyof the Laocoön sculpture: the sculptor has captured the pregnant moment just before the full horror strikes – the father’s mouth open but not yet




screaming, the serpent’s venom not quite completely penetrated, the agonynot quite yet at its climax: the gaze fixes on the penultimate moment so as

to block the revelation of the monstrous void. Penultimacy – incompletionas such – becomes a defence against a mortifying conclusion. Melancholia and fetishism would thus seem to collude to produce theillusion of an intact present – solitary, sufficient, immune from past orfuture threat. Indeed they come to coincide: postponement of a deathforever pending consummates itself in the pre-emptive fantasy of a deathalways already accomplished. Thus, in Proust, the blink of an eye fromchronic prematurity to chronic, irreversal senescence, from the phantasm ofthe blank page to the phantasm of the bal de morts , from perpetual virginityto premature, perpetual mummification – and into the no less reassuringfantasy 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 presentfrom a reassuring stasis? To negotiate the switching station between the tooearly and the too late, between fetishistic ‘before’ and melancholic ‘after’,so as to change the terms of both postponement and its obverse? HereBenjamin’s reflections on history may prove compelling.

BENJAMIN’S 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 Adornoat 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 vulgarMarxism: thus the ‘lack of mediation’ notoriously discerned in Benjamin’svarious attempts at linkage – from base to superstructure, from sidewalk sizeto flânerie , from wine tax to ‘L’âme 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 ofbourgeois psychology’ (C , p. 497). Vulgar Marxism would in this case conspire with vulgar psychoanalysis (Jung) in its reduction of the social imaginaryto a dreaming collectivity which in its abstract homogeneity dissolves theexplosive ambivalence – the blend of ‘desire and fear’ – which signals at oncethe traumatic burden of the dialectic, the fissure of uncontainable negativity,but, so too, equally, its ‘objective liberating power’ (C , pp. 495–6).

Implicit in Adorno’s repeated accusation of magical thinking is thesuggestion that Benjamin has succumbed to more than one kind of fetish:




to elide the dialectic is to veil the social conditions of production as theongoing ‘hell’ which defines the modern age (C , p. 496). Benjamin’s

legendary ‘Medusa gaze’ (C , p. 500) would on this reading functionapotropaically to deflect and mask a devastation whose pressure remainsall the more unassailable in being reproduced. Benjamin’s ‘superstitiousenumeration’ (C , p. 583) of partial objects would in this sense plaster overthe ultimate catastrophe fissuring history as a whole – the dissonance ofirremediable class oppression – and as such blunt any demand for totalsocial change. Although Adorno does not invoke these terms, the logic ofpre-emptive fragmentation discerned here comes close to the psychoanalyticmodel. 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 asvictory monument over and traumatic reminder – stigma indelebile – ofthe loss it commemorates.17 Marx’s celebrated analysis of the fetish, which Adorno does invoke, is in this respect not dissimilar. The animation ofthings both reflects and veils the mortification of persons and therebyprovides the compensatory phantasm of unity in the face of an irredeemablyfractured social world. The commodity occludes the alienated labour it

congeals and consecrates, and thereby commemorates a loss – of bodilyand social integrity – ungrievable under existent relations of production. Inboth cases the fetish assumes an ideological role: by providing the consolingimage of totality it pacifies any desire for a different world, and this preciselyby freezing time at the moment before the catastrophic insight.

Underpinning Adorno’s charge of positivism is the suspicion of an ideali-zation that naturalizes what it seeks to mobilize and thereby negates the verynegativity it seeks to honour. Benjamin’s projection of a utopian horizon

for the scraps of actually existing culture occludes the ‘hell’ of a historyeternalized as second nature, and thereby mollifies the demand for radicalsocial change. ‘Chaque époque rêve la suivante’ (GS 5.1: 46). Benjamin’srepeated recycling of Michelet is for Adorno symptomatic in that it elidesthe radical caesura between catastrophe and its antithesis, and thus absorbsutopia within the mythic continuum of the ever-same (C , p. 495). Theattempt to read redemptive content directly from the bits and pieces ofphenomenal history presupposes a synecdochal reduction to immanence

– the part stands in for the whole and thus blocks its possibility – which inits elision of the dialectic of fragmentation (loss) and totality (redemption)inevitably stifles the last, dwindling possibility of change. The dialecticalimage betrays utopia precisely by anticipating or imagining it, and in thisflagrant violation of the theological ban on graven images18 would fetish-istically disavow the alterity it would thereby acknowledge. The problem with Benjamin’s micrological patchwork is thus, on this reading, not in factfragmentation but just the opposite: Adorno’s less obvious and more painfulreproach is that in renouncing the dialectical continuity – durchdialektisieren




– of conceptual mediation19 Benjamin only reinstates a kind of identityphilosophy all the more oppressive for going unnamed. If Benjamin abstains

from theoretical totalization, this is only in the end so as to smuggle in aseries of imaginary continuities – within and between the epochs and withinthe body politic as such – which in their very inconspicuousness assume anapologetic form. Underlying the ostentatious disaggregation of Benjamin’s so-called ‘sur-realist method’ is there a faith in unity all the more magical for beingunspoken? Fragmentation as such can provide the most perfect alibi for itsown denial; preoccupation with the rubble heap can serve to cloak a deeperdevastation. Benjamin’s position would from this perspective slide inexorablyinto that of the pervert whose loyalty to the scattered ‘things’ only prolongsa commitment to imaginary unities – the phantasm of the revolutionarycollective, 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 sensesatisfy more than one agenda). However irritating, Adorno’s harangue bringsinto perfect focus an ineluctable antinomy at the heart of Benjamin’s project.

CUTTING THROUGH HISTORICISM

. . . the exact point where historical materialism cuts through [durchschlägt]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 everhappened is to be taken as lost for history’ (GS 1.2: 694 SW 4:390). Howto distinguish the prodigious contraction of messianic Rettung from acapacious historicism regulated by the consoling teleology of universalhistory?20 If the ‘tiger’s leap into the past’ (GS 1.2: 701 SW 4:395) assumes asits ‘truly problematic’ condition the determination to ‘give nothing up’ (N3,3) – Origen’s heretical doctrine of apokatasis is always hovering (cf. GS 2.2:458 SW 3:157) – this flows explicitly from a theological conviction regarding

‘the indestructibility of the highest life in all things’ (N1a, 5). Do the frozen cut-ups of Benjamin’s ‘montage’ method secretly prolongthe historicism they interrupt? The question reverberates well beyond theunfinished monster which is the Passagen-Werk . Adorno had no particularreason to restrict his criticism, nor to reduce it to the notorious terms he did(arcades, balconies, etc.). If Adorno’s suspicion has any pertinence it shouldapply equally to Benjamin’s entire set-up – from the early Trauerspielbuch to the final Theses on History , the very texts Adorno thought he loved thebest – 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 syncopatedcontinuum of the history of the victors. Nor is it simply a question ofBenjamin’s seemingly limitless capacity to blur antitheses – the exquisiteoscillation of virtually every item on the menu between subversion andsubvention. Does the scavenging operation of, for example, Baudelaire’schiffonier disrupt or merely reproduce the consumerist compulsion ofcapitalist modernity?21 Does the lingering hesitancy of the flâneur obstructthe traffic flow (as the transit authorities feared) or, by fostering the illusionof 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 ofprivate consolation? Do the obsessional arrangements of the collector defythe functionality of capital or furnish it with the alibi of aesthetic disinter-estedness?23 Is the melancholic fidelity to the dead decisively distinguishedfrom 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 perhapsitself 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 triumphalprocession of the victors or merely invert it (thereby buttressing it, etc.) byreproducing the crystalline abstraction of alienated labour? The question

is not entirely well-posed, but does have the merit of focusing attention fora moment on the profound congruity between, for example, the essays onmass culture and the various reflections on history.25 Photography presentseach time the privileged metaphor and model of temporal contraction: ‘toseize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’ (GS 1.2: 695SW 4:391) is to experience a synchronization of past and present which canbe understood in the strictest sense as traumatic: the posthumous shockinflicted 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. ‘Wherethinking suddenly stops in a constellation saturated with tensions it givesthat constellation a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad’ (GS 1.3:703 SW 4:396). Benjamin does more here than extend Freud’s or Proust’scelebrated analogy between the deferred action of the photograph andthe structural belatedness of experience. In pointing to the coincidence oftrauma with its own abreaction – the lightning flash retroactively inflicts theshock 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 firstplace, to synchronize their watches, had to affirm 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 confines of thedream: the dream or phantasm not only gropes numbly towards the nextenthralling episode but in so doing (Adorno ignores this part) turns withstealth and cunning towards its own overcoming (cf. AP , p. 13)

Fetishism informs not only the content of the Passagen-Werk , and not justthe form of its peculiar windowshop appearance. One might set aside the(by now) tiresome speculations regarding the mimicry at work here: is thePassagen-Werk itself a kind of literary arcade, a collection, a site of flânerie ,a department store, a museum, a cluttered interieur , a sad inventory; isBenjamin a shopper, a ragpicker, a brooder, a thief? A deeper and moreintractable ambiguity informs the project: is it a ruin, a heap, a sketch, ascaffold, a constructivist construction? Is its posthumous, unfinished qualityprovisional, accidental, structural: what is the measure of its incompletion?Is its unfinishedness that of the collection (forever structurally just one itemshort – completion both its presupposition and its logical undoing), and if

so what sustains this logic of perpetual penultimacy? Is the fragmentationpre-emptive, the serial production of a lack generated so as to maintain thefiction of totality, and as such a kind of fetishism in reverse?

Liminal experiences pervade the Arcades Project and define its most familiarlandmarks – from Metro entrances to railway stations to the twilight zone ofthe arcades themselves – and Benjamin repeatedly invokes the ‘magic of thethreshold’ as paradigmatic both of nineteenth-century urban experience andof the work that commemorates it; the various spatial and optical ambigu-

ities generated architecturally by glass and iron – inside and outside, nearand distant, past and future – correlate with the deep existential ambiguitiesbetween human and non-human, animate and inanimate, living and dead.The very porosity of these distinctions in the dream-world of Baudelaire’sParis speaks to the unease and fascination generated by the ambiguous time-space of capitalist modernity itself – the birth-pangs of commodity culture asit pervades the interstices of the big city – and acquires layered political andhistorical 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 Baudelaire’smodernity (that is to say, his modernity tout court ), Benjamin insists onthe provisional or penultimate status of the various nineteenth-centuryinnovations: ‘all these products are on the point of entering the market ascommodities. But they hover on the threshold [ Alle diese Produkte sind imBegriff, 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 fascism’s 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 final congealing of capitalist social relations,the flickering of possibilities rendered legible only from the perspective of anirredeemably damaged present day. ‘Hope in the past’ is just this counter-factual construction of an anterior future – the retrospective awakening ofa blocked possibility, the ‘perpetually ringing alarm clock’ (cf. Surrealismessay) which rings all the more stridently for having been set too late. This defines the peculiar temporality of Benjamin’s messianism – therescuing 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 aday too late – not judgement day but always the day after that, the day whenhe is no longer necessary, or no longer possible, or both. Arguably, too, bythis token, ‘hope in the past’ is the eruption of what Kafka equally describesas ‘hope, an infinite amount, but not for us’.



6

TREMBLING CONTOURS:KIERKEGAARD–BENJAMIN–

BRECHT

RAINER NÄGELE

The configuration indicated in the title – Benjamin between Kierkegaardand Brecht – is not one that imposes itself self-evidently. Not only does thereseem to be an unbridgeable abyss between Kierkegaard and Brecht, but alsoa glaring asymmetry between Benjamin’s very intense relation to Brecht onthe 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 configurationand sequence of the three names: Kierkegaard – Benjamin – Brecht, thename ‘Benjamin’ would then take the place of the abyss that separates thetwo incommensurable names Kierkegaard and Brecht – and perhaps, at thesame time, it is the impossible bridge – but, no doubt, a shaky and tremblingbridge. Benjamin’s essay on Brecht’s 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 isthe levelling of the orchestra. The abyss that separates the actors from theaudience like the dead from the living, the abyss whose silence increasesthe sublime in the drama, and whose resounding increases the intoxicationin the opera, this abyss, that bears the traces of its sacred origin mostindelibly 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 conjurationto exorcise it forever. And indeed, at the end of the sentence, the abysshas disappeared or, more precisely, it has lost its function, ist funktionslos geworden . With the word funktionslos we enter into a different sphere anda different age: emerging from the world where depth and height, abyssand the sublime (Erhabenheit) , the living and dead structure a world ofmetaphysics and of intoxication, we enter suddenly into a technologicalworld of functions and utter sobriety. It is the world of Brecht’s epic theatre,so Benjamin tells us. And in telling it and in the way he tells it, it is as if inthese initial sentences he were drawing in one bold line the movement and



Trembling Contours: Kierkegaard–Benjamin–Brecht 103

transformation of his own thinking and his style: from the dense and evenesoteric metaphysical writings of the teens and early twenties to the stark

and sober style of such essays as ‘Der Autor als Produzent’, ‘Das Kunstwerkim Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ – and, ‘Was ist dasepische Theater?’ It is of course not that simple. The essays on Karl Kraus (1931) and onKafka (1934), written in a rather different style and register, go hand inhand with the seemingly so different tones of ‘Was ist das epische Theater?’(1931) and ‘Der Autor als Produzent’ (1934). And the more Benjamin, inthe last five years of his life, launches into his major project on the Parisianarcades and the nineteenth century in the recognizability of the Now ofthe early twentieth century, the more Benjamin notices and recognizes, inanother Now of recognizability, the foundational return of his early essayon language ‘Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen’and his book on the baroque drama of mourning. No doubt, there were changes in Benjamin’s mode of thought andpresentation, radical ones that even such a close friend and sensitive readeras Gretel Karplus, with whom Benjamin shared in the thirties perhaps themost 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.Benjamin’s reaction to this confession indicates a deep consternation:

When you write of my second outline, that ‘one would never recognize init the hand of WB’, I would call this a somewhat rude remark [so nenneich das doch ein wenig geradezu gesagt ] and you transgress with this remarkcertainly 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. Atthe 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 todaysitting for hours at the school desk in Haubinda and practice. Today mydesk stands in the Bibliothèque Nationale – and I have taken up again thelesson to write – temporarily – in such a way on a higher level.4

In not recognizing WB’s hand, Gretel Karplus has transgressed a limit, a

border line – and such limits were explicitly a constitutive part in the closefriendship between Benjamin and his Felizitas, as he called and addressedher; she has transgressed the limit of an accord and almost, if not quite, asthe denegation indicates, the limit of friendship. In a sense, in not recognizing WB’s hand, Gretel Karplus has mutilatedher 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 twohands, 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 thesignature and mark of the writer himself. Benjamin was among other things

also a graphologist who occasionally earned some extra money from rarebooks with his graphological expertise. As a 14-year-old, Benjamin tried literally to learn to write with his lefthand, and he now tries again to learn to write in such a way ‘on a higherlevel’, as he puts it. The line drawn from the school desk of the 14-year-oldin Haubinda to the desk of the Bibliothèque Nationale, where the 37-year-old Benjamin exercises his new style of writing with the left on the left ismore than a shift from the literal, physical hand to a figurative hand: it isat the same time – and this is at the centre of Benjamin’s whole project asa physiognomic project – the inseparable interrelation, the Verschränkung ,of the literal and the figurative, the suspension of their clear separation in ahovering sphere of trembling contours that promise a new physics beyondmetaphysics, something Benjamin will call a materialist doctrine of ideas oralso an anthropological materialism. But I have jumped far ahead. We must return and patiently follow thetraits of the two-handed writing of Benjamin. Benjamin’s 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 asymptom of another transformation that the writer can only ascertain afterthe fact, as Benjamin writes to Werner Kraft on 25 May 1935:

The Saturnine tempo of the matter has its deepest ground in a processof complete turning around [Umwälzung ], that a mass of thoughtsand images, dating back to a long past time of my more immediate

metaphysical, even theological thinking, had to undergo in order tonourish with its full force my present condition. This process took placesilently; I myself knew so little of it that I was immensely astonished, when – due to an external occasion – the plan for the work was writtenin just a few days.5

Benjamin diagnoses the transformation as an Umwälzung , which literallymeans 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 ofrevolution. Benjamin speaks of the rolling over of a mass of thoughts andimages originating in a metaphysical and even theological thinking. Heseems thus to confirm a radical revolution of his early metaphysical andtheological thinking. But it is first of all a revolution in the literal senseof the word, which after all originates in astronomy: something rolls over,turns around, yet it remains in its substance. The mass of thoughts andimages 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 relationmight 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 thenew condition. Only a few days later, Benjamin restates the transformation in a letter to Adorno in a slightly shifted image. He first detects with some astonishmentthe striking analogies between his new project on the Parisian arcades andthe book on the baroque drama of mourning, and he comments: ‘You mustallow me to see in this circumstance an especially significant confirmationof the refounding process [des Umschmelzungsprozesses ], that leads the wholemass of originally metaphysically motivated thoughts towards an aggregatestate, in which the world of dialectical images is secured against all objec-tions that metaphysics provoke’.6 The Umwälzung has now become anUmschmelzung , a refounding, a transformation of the mass into a differentaggregate state. The images and thoughts originating in metaphysical andtheological thinking are melted in order to reemerge as dialectical images,that now seem immune against interventions and objections, the Einrede , ofmetaphysics – or against metaphysics, the phrase can be read in both direc-tions. And yet, this transformation finds its substantiation and confirmation

precisely in the clearly emerging analogies with the earlier work.Umwälzung and Umschmelzung : the first 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 Benjamin’s work on theParisian arcades. If one turns over a stone, in the forest for example, thathas 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 behindbut 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 tasksof the anthropological materialst and physiognomist. The second processof melting and refounding transforms the aggregate state of the substancein a procedure that evokes the traditions of alchemy. But alchemy itself istransformed in this process and reemerges as construction: ‘This much iscertain: the constructive element has the same significance for this book asthe philosopher’s stone for alchemy’.7

It is in the middle of this process of Umwälzung and Umschmelzung in the

early 1930s that Benjamin enters into a complex configuration with Brecht.It is one of the most enigmatic configurations in Benjamin’s life. While it istempting to see in Brecht the secular, materialist, sober counterfigure to themetaphysical and theological sides of Benjamin, and while Brecht certainlyliked to project this image of his role, there is something deeply enigmatic,deeply troubling like a cloudy kernel in Benjamin’s relationship to Brecht.

Benjamin’s three closest friends – Adorno, Scholem and Gretel Karplus– were in agreement about one thing: their fear of Brecht’s influence onBenjamin. There was apparently something in Brecht’s 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 keptsending him, Gretel Karplus addressed this affective level in a letter full ofconcern to Benjamin. And Benjamin responded for once on the same levelin a long letter of June 1934 (GB 4: 440f.). In contrast to his letters to Scholem, where Benjamin vigorously defendshis interest in Brecht’s work and its affinity with his own mode of thoughton political and ideological grounds, the letter to Gretel Karplus approachesthe cloudy kernel of the relationship. Benjamin recognizes first a pattern ofrepetition: ‘What you say about [Brecht’s] influence on me recalls for me asignificant 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 atthe beginning of the First World War, and a little later the somewhat dubiousSimon Guttmann, whose influence was the object of a passionate oppositionon the part of Benjamin’s wife. Her opposition culminated in the reproachthat Benjamin was under some kind of hypnotic influence. Benjamin makesno attempt at refuting such a suggestion, but instead attempts to analysethe 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 asserta pole that is opposite my original being’. It is no longer a simple questionof ideology, but one that concerns both existence (Dasein ) and being (Sein ).Benjamin’s concept of ‘thinking in other people’s heads’, his mimetic abilityto occupy the most extreme opposite positions, finds here its most radicalexpression. The repetitive pattern of Benjamin’s excentric circles of friendshipopens up to a Haltung , a posture, that involves an existential positioning ofone’s innermost being in the extremes. It is the most radical ex-position of

one’s existence. Benjamin is well aware of the protest of his friends: ‘Theserelations have always provoked a more or less violent protest in those closestto me, as does now the relationship to B[recht]’. Benjamin can only pleadfor an understanding of the incomprehensible: ‘In such a case, I can do littlemore than ask my friends to trust me, that these ties [Bindungen ], whosedangers are obvious, will reveal their fruitfulness’. And, once more, Benjamininvokes the necessity of moving and of positioning himself in extremes – butalso 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 tomove side by side things and thoughts that are considered irreconcilable,assumes its face only through the danger. A danger that generally appearsalso 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 figure of a readability ofphysiognomic 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 arefounding of images and thoughts that originated in and were motivatedby metaphysical and theological thinking. But how do ‘metaphysical’ and‘theological’ images become dialectical images? And what happens tometaphysics and theology in this process? For one thing is clear: it is nota question of simply discarding them. It is here that a closer reading ofBenjamin’s essay on Brecht’s epic theatre might give us some clues. A theatrical abyss, the orchestra, has lost its function. What was itsfunction? To separate the stage from the audience like the dead from theliving, Benjamin says. The comparison with that radical separation of the world of the dead and the world of the living points at the representativefunction of the separating abyss: the physical separation represents ametaphysical separation between the physical space of the stage and whatit represents and signifies, the separation between a phenomenal world ofappearance 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 representsanother world. The stage is a stage, one might say. Yet it is still elevated,Benjamin points out, thus still indicating a difference. But the elevationis no longer the elevation of the sublime, no longer Erhabenheit, but thepurely physical elevation, an Erhebung of a podium or a platform. And, asif to underline the flatness of this platform, Benjamin states dryly: Das istdie Lage , this is the situation, here we have to install ourselves. Das ist dieLage . The sentence itself sounds flat in its factual assertiveness. As Marx

says of the ultimate condition of the proletarian revolution: the conditionsthemselves, the situation itself – not any arbitrary wilfulness and decision– must call out [die Verhältnisse selbst rufen ]: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! 9 Andyet, this Lage that according to Benjamin categorically demands of us toinstall us here, resonates with one of Benjamin’s earliest and most densely written texts, his essay on two poems of Hölderlin. There, in the middle ofa 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. Hölderlin’s world, he writes, is ‘die Erstreckung des Raumes, der gebreitete Plan’, theextension or expansion of space, the expanded plain. This flat plain ofHölderlin’s world becomes ‘die Wahrheit der Lage als Ordnungsbegriff derhölderlinschen Welt’, the truth of the situation as the conceptual order ofHölderlin’s world (GS 2.1: 114). The Wahrheit der Lage , the truth of thesituation, the situation as a space of truth rests literally in the fact that theLage is gelegen , opportune, and thus a Gelegenheit , an opportunity for truth.‘Es sei alles gelegen dir’, says Hölderlin’s poem, and thus the poet walks on




that which is true like on carpet: ‘Geht auf Wahrem dein Fuß nicht, wie aufTeppichen?’10 And this is what Benjamin calls die Wahrheit der Lage. There

seems to be an abyss between this Wahrheit der Lage in Hölderlin’s poemand the Lage that is the stage of Brecht’s epic theatre. Yet the line that archesover the abyss from Lage to Lage is perhaps opportune enough to form thebow that Benjamin hoped for in order to be able to shoot the ultimate arrowof 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 thearrow speeds off, is of course uncertain. But while my other projects havesoon come to the end where I took leave from them, this project willoccupy 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 politicaland the mystical.11

The two ends of the bow, that Benjamin characterizes here as politicaland mystical, reaching from Lage to Lage , are both situated in a plain, in asurface which, according to Benjamin, is the condition of readability: ‘Lesbarist nur in der Fläche [E]rscheinendes ’, ‘Readable is only what appears in the

surface’ (GS 6.1: 32). It might seem that the essay on Brecht’s epic theatre only handles thepolitical end of the bow. Yet we must not overhear the resonances of theLage , as flat and sober as it might be in the form of a podium. Benjamin’sfirst step is to redefine the function of the podium: it is not simply anelevated space from which political messages are sent to the audience, butit 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, thedirector and the actors. Each of these elements assumes a new function inthe epic theatre: the stage becomes for the audience an exposition spaceinstead of a space of illusion, the audience is no longer a hypnotized massbut an assembly of interested individuals, the text loses its central signi-ficance for the theatre and becomes an experimental sketch that has to proveitself and its potentials in the performance. Thus Benjamin moves througheach of the elements and characterizes the functional changes in its relation

with the others. For, like Marx, Benjamin locates the materialist ground notin reified things, but in relations, in Verhältnisse . Almost as a by-product of these changes in the theatrical relations, anotherrelation is put into question and confronted with the challenge of a radicalchange: that of theory and praxis, or, in Benjamin’s words of theory andexistence (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 theexemplary 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 specific situation, its Lage , it thus has no relationshipany more to the Wahrheit der Lage , the only firm ground – as changing andvolatile as it might be – for theory, and, one might add, for art. For already inhis book on the baroque mourning play, Benjamin criticizes what he considersto be the ‘abyss’ of Nietzsche’s aestheticism: ‘The abyss of aestheticism opensup’, Benjamin writes, ‘where art takes up the centre of existence [Dasein ] insuch 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 [seinDasein ] as its eternal pre-position [als ihren ewigen Vorwurf]’ (GS 1.1: 281–2).Dasein as Vorwurf , as pre-position, as pre-disposition of art and theory, cannotbe reduced to a reified, naively understood ‘reality’, although it is real enoughas that which pre-positions and pre-disposes the structures of our relations inour sphere of living, the possible movements in our environment, the horizonof our space of freedom to the degree that we have such a space. The task oftheory would then be to articulate these structures and their disposition. To dothat, 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 Buber’s journal Die Kreatur (GB 3: 231–2). All theory, Benjamin insists, will be kept away from this report,in order to let something else speak, what Benjamin calls das Kreatürliche .Kreatur , which was also the title of Buber’s journal, and das Kreatürliche arelocated at a curious intersection of theology and materialism. Kreatur embracesanimals and human beings as creatures (of god, theolo-gically) and as bodiesand flesh subjugated and exposed to the sufferings of the body and the flesh,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 toBuber as it is to Brecht. Paul Celan, in his Meridian speech will talk of GeorgBüchner 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 itspeak, theory has to be silenced for a while. How does it speak? Its language isdetermined by the dispositions of Dasein , and these, for Benjamin, are radicallynew 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 changedenvironment. When the Kreatur enters the stage of the epic theatre – and Brecht indeedoften speaks of Kreatur – it speaks less in resounding speeches than ingestures, and when it resounds it might be the sound of the mute Kattrin inMother Courage , drumming on the roof to awaken the city. That is how ‘thestone speaks’: Der Stein spricht , is the title of the scene. But more than thesound of the drum, it is the slowly diminishing rhythm of the gestures of thedrumming Kattrin that makes up the language of the creature.




In another short, apodictic sentence, that corresponds to the apodictic Dasist 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 andmovements of the body in its environment and in relation to other posturesand movements in that space, it also encompasses the settings and posturesof words and sentences. The apodictic brevity of the two Benjaminiansentences is itself a gesture. Brecht’s first explicit discussion of what Gestus and gestisch is demonstrates it in Luther’s translation of a biblical sentence.

Das epische Theater ist gestisch : the apodictic character of the gestureof this sentence is not only due to its sharp brevity, but it gains its stronggestural character because it abruptly interrupts the previous paragraph andits discussion of the inadequacy of the critical vocabulary in face of thisnew kind of theatre. It cuts off, so to speak, the language of an inadequateaesthetic theory in Babylonian exile, it cuts itself off from it in order toopen another space and another language. It interrupts abruptly, but not without an ironic hidden gesture waving back to the last sentence of theprevious paragraph. The conventional critical language and its aestheticsare all the more inadequate, that last sentence says, because they are fixated

on the poetic and literary text, whereas the epic theatre concentrates on theconstruction of the new stage and allows itself all liberty in regard to thepoetic text, literally ‘allows itself a free hand in regard to the poetic text’ (derDichtung gegenüber sich freie Hand läßt ). The hand is there, free and readynow for the gesture. But in the gesture, more precisely in the gestural space of the epictheatre, the hand is no more free than the word in the sentence; it is partof a structure, the gestural space of the epic theatre is structured like a

language. But Benjamin ascribes a certain privilege to this other language ofthe gestural, that is not only another language besides the verbal language,but also a language underlying the spoken and written language, a kind ofunderground, and also, perhaps, underlying it, its subject, its immediateVorwurf . Gestures, Benjamin says, are the privileged material of the epictheatre; and they are a better material than other expressions and statementsof people for two reasons. They are less deceptive and, secondly, each gesturecan be framed with a specific beginning and end.

Why should gestures be less deceptive? The assertion seems to comedangerously close to the naive assumption that gestures are somehow more‘natural’ and therefore more spontaneous than words. But that is not whatBenjamin writes. First of all it is not a simple opposition of deceptive or trueutterance, it is a matter of degree. Gestures are less deceptive than otherexpressions, which in Benjamin’s formulation are ‘thoroughly deceptive’(durchaus trügerisch ). If gestures are somewhat less deceptive it is to thedegree that they can be less easily dissimulated, not because they are morenatural, but the difficulty of dissimulating them increases to the degree in




which they are unobtrusive and habitual. The more unobtrusive, the morehabitual, the more mechanical they are, the less consciousness, which in

Benjamin’s as in Freud’s experience is the primary agent of deception, caninterfere. Such gestures are like the hand in Dr Strangelove that constantlyrises up to the Hitler salute against the will of its subject. But gestures aremore than revelations of an individual subject’s hidden intentions: they are witnesses of an interest in the most literal sense of that word. They testifyto 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 sphereof interests. Their movements reveal the patterns of the network of pathwayspossible or impossible in a given social and cultural setting. While the relative distance of gestures to the controlling consciousnessthus allows them to be witnesses of the sphere of interests, the possibilityto frame them in terms of a clear beginning and ending turns them intomeans to dissect what Benjamin calls the complexity (Vielschichtigkeit ) andopaqueness (Undurchschaubarkeit ) of people’s actions. Gestures are the epictheatre’s equivalent to the Aristotelian plot, the muqo~, with a beginning, amiddle, and an end. As such, they interrupt the constant flow and currentof life and events which, of course, have no fixable beginning or end. Every

beginning in our experience has something before, and every end somethingafter it. The gesture, frozen in a fixed beginning and a fixed end, functionsas a caesura in the flow of actions and events, just as Hölderlin’s caesurainterrupts the torrential stream of representations (Vorstellungen ). While theinterruption of the current of Vorstellungen uncovers the Vorstellung itself ,according to Hölderlin, the interruption of the action in the epic theatreuncovers and discovers, according to Benjamin, states of affair, conditionsor situations (Zustände ).

This functioning of the gesture as a caesura would demand a furtherextensive 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 alsoof Kierkegaard. The latter seems to have disappeared with the abyss of theorchestra in the epic theatre. To find him again, to find him at all willnot be easy on this stage and podium. But then, even in his own writings,Kierkegaard is often quite evasive, hidden behind pseudonyms, if indeedhe 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 Benjamin’sessay – and evidently I am suspecting something of that order – it wouldmost likely be found at that end of the bow of Benjamin’s writing that hecalled the ‘mystical’ end, where the transformations of the earlier moredirectly metaphysical and theological elements are taking place in a kind ofalchemistic melting process. It is of course that end of the bow that in thisparticular essay is particularly unobtrusive; but then it is the unobtrusivethat is invested with a special revelatory quality. We have already noted




a subtle resonance of Hölderlin in the Lage that offers a first precariousground over the aesthetic abyss of the conventional theatre. With the

acknowledgment of the crucial function of the caesura in the epic theatre,the Hölderlinian resonance emerges with full force; and this is more thana literary game of allusions, because it touches at the centre of the problemof (re-)presentation, of Vorstellung and Darstellung . The caesura, as wehave seen, interrupts, according to Hölderlin, the torrential stream of (re-)presentations, of Vorstellungen in order to allow the Vorstellung itself toemerge. In an analogous way, the gesture, as a framed entity with a fixedbeginning and a fixed end, interrupts the changing scenes of the theatrical(re-)presentation – in German also called a Vorstellung – in order to allow theemergence of the underlying Lage , the situation, the conditions that shapethe structure of the gestural space. What precisely is the status of a Vorstellung ? This is the question thatHölderlin poses in a fragmentary text of philosophical letters, written severalyears before the remarks on the Sophoclean tragedies, probably in 1797.‘Why is it’, the interlocutor of the fragmentary dialogue asks, ‘that humansmust represent to themselves the relationship between themselves and their world?’ (Warum sie den Zusammenhang zwischen sich und ihrer Welt gerade

vorstellen . . . müssen ).12 The gerade gives a special turn to the question inthe sense of ‘why is it specifically in the form of Vorstellung ’ that this takesplace? This form of Vorstellung is further differentiated into two modes:‘why must they [i.e. humans] form an idea or an image of the relationshipbetween themselves and their world’ (warum sie sich eine Idee oder ein Bildmachen müssen ). These are the two modes of (re-)presentation: sensualrepresentation in the form of images, and representation as thought in theform of ideas. But precisely these two alternatives are inadequate for the

representation of the sphere that constitutes the space of interaction betweenhuman subjects and their world, because this sphere, which constitutes the‘Geschik ’ that structures the human world, a word that encompasses fate, butalso the subjective ability and hability to act in the appropriate way, as wellas the objective suitability, the Schicklichkeit , to act in a way that is adequateand suitable to the situation – this sphere of Geschik , the interlocutor says– and the main voice of the essay agrees – ‘can, strictly speaking, neither beadequately thought nor does it actually lie before our senses’ (das sich genau

betrachtet weder recht denken ließe noch auch vor den Sinnen liege ). The sphereof the human world, of the world of human interaction, is a sphere thatalways already transcends the purely empirical state and yet it is not a worldof pure thought. Thus a different mode of representation needs to be found. And it is that mode that Hölderlin’s fragment tries to articulate. And this is precisely the question and task that Brecht’s epic theatreconfronts. As committed as this theatre is to a strictly materialist view andinterpretation of the world undercutting all idealist transfigurations, it isyet 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 calledVerhältnisse . And it is the sphere of Verhältnisse , of relations that can neitherbe adequately represented in a purely empirical mode, nor purely in abstractthought. Thus the epic theatre works with constellations of scenic images,filmic images, texts, slogans, songs – and above all interruptions. The same problem of (re-)presentation leads Benjamin to the constructionof the dialectical image, which is neither an empirical pictorial repres-entation of the world, nor an abstract thought or idea, but a kind ofDenkbild , a thinking image, that has its place in language, because it isstructured like a language. Benjamin’s essay on Brecht’s epic theatre is oneof 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 toshoot the arrow of the dialectical image. And it is here that we finally encounter – not Kierkegaard, but an echo ofKierkegaard – in a moment where the sober text literally begins to tremble. Ithappens in a long paragraph whose movement almost emblematically drawsthe 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). Thisparagraph thus performs the inverse movement of the first sentences of theessay: from the metaphysical abyss to the functions of technology there,from the height of technology to the Platonic ideas here. The movement ofthis line passes through Caspar Neher’s stage decorations, which, according

to Benjamin, are actually less decorations than posters. Benjamin alsocalls them ‘projections’: Nehers Projektionen , a word that already suggestsboth the technology of optical projections on the stage and somethingapproaching the fantasmatic, and even the fantomatic. (Brecht himself talksof filmic projections on the stage as taking over the role of Hamlet’s ghost,or of ghosts generally in the older theatre.) Neher’s projections in their soberfunction as posters, Plakate , are in Benjamin’s 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 andthrough these posters, a curious doubling takes place, when for examplein Mahagonny Jakob der Vielfra b , the character who eats himself to death,sits in front of another Jakob der Vielfra b , drawn by Caspar Neher. Thepictured Vielfra b is not an illustration of the ‘real’ Vielfra b , says Brecht– and Benjamin quotes him – but he takes a stand in relation to the ‘real’one. At this point, for the first time in the essay, Benjamin’s gesture indicatesa certain distancing from Brecht, or at least takes a step further. So far sogood, he writes, after having quoted Brecht’s statement about the double




Vielfra b , ‘but’, he continues, ‘who guarantees [wer steht mir dafür ] that theVielfra b played on the stage [der gespielte Vielfra b ] has the advantage of

reality over the pictured one [vor dem gezeichneten die Wirklichkeit voraushat ]?’ Benjamin undermines Brecht’s simple opposition of a ‘real’ and a‘pictured’ Vielfra b . Instead he confronts two representations: one played,the other drawn. At this point, the status of the real is suspended. ‘Nothinghinders us’, Benjamin says, ‘to have the played figure sitting in front of thereal one, that is to let the pictured figure be more real than the played one’.Once the status of reality as a firm ground and difference to the fictional hasbeen suspended in the double representation, another space and structureenter into play; another scene opens up on the stage of the epic theatre. Oncethe real is movable and can move from the foreground into the background,the play in the foreground assumes a kind of fantomatic aura: ‘many ofthe players’, Benjamin writes, ‘appear as emissaries of the greater powers[als Mandatare der grö b eren Mächte ] that remain in the background’. Asin medieval and baroque allegories, the figures on the stage figure anotherreality, 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 Platonicideas’.13 Thus Neher’s projections become something very paradoxical, whatBenjamin calls ‘materialist ideas’. But to the degree that these projectionsare visible they assume themselves a strange intermediary place: althoughbeing materialist ideas, they can become visible only by tearing themselvesoff from their status as ideas, for even materialist ideas are outside the realmof 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 [dasZittern ihrer Umrisse ] still betrays from what much more intimate proximitythey have themselves torn away in order to become visible’. A trembling atthe edges indicates the effect of another scene. And in this trembling in Benjamin’s text, the effect of another figure canbe read: the effect of an ever so brief intersection, an ever so brief crossing ofpaths between Benjamin and Kierkegaard, after which their paths will movein opposite directions. But what legitimates such a reading? To simply base

it on the word Zittern that evokes the title of the German translation Furchtund Zittern , would certainly seem far-fetched – although, as we will see, itis not all that far-fetched in Benjamin’s unconscious. Yet the trembling inBenjamin’s text is the echo of another trembling that Kierkegaard evokes inhis text as the signal and effect of another sphere, and it is as unobtrusive asthe trembling of Caspar Neher’s posters. Kierkegaard describes the figure ofthe ‘knights of infinity’ (Unendelighedens Riddere – Ritter der Unendlichkeit,in the German translation).14 These knights are completely inconspicuousin this world, they even have in Kierkegaard’s description ‘a striking




resemblance to bourgeois philistinism’ (p. 38), such a knight ‘makes onethink of him as a pen-pusher who has lost his soul to Italian bookkeeping,

so punctilious is he’ (p. 39). But like Kafka’s betters at horse races, whoimmediately recognize in the gait of the lawyer Bucephalus the gait of ahorse, Kierkegaard, or rather Johannes de Silentio, is a keen observer ofmovements and gestures. And it is in this particular gaze and attentivenessthat the brief encounter and intersection between Benjamin and Brecht ispossible.

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, butonly an ever so slight wavering, when they touch ground again, indicatesthat other sphere from which they return:

The knights of infinity are ballet dancers and have elevation. They makethe upward movement and come down again, and this, too, is not anunhappy diversion and is not unlovely to see. But every time they comedown, they are unable to assume the posture immediately, they waver for amoment [de vakle et Øjeblik ], and this wavering shows that they are aliensin 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 Germantranslation of 1923) signals that these figures come from elsewhere, justas the trembling of the contours signals that also the figures on the stageof the epic theatre are emissaries of ‘greater powers’. The small, yet signi-ficant difference, as I have already indicated, is the spatial structure of therelationship between the spheres: vertical in Kierkegaard’s text, horizontal

in Benjamin’s text. It is the difference of two kinds of ‘invisibility’: theinvisibility of a metaphysical and theological transcendence in Kierkegaard,and the structuring invisibility of determining relations in Benjamin andBrecht. Benjamin does not mention the name Kierkegaard in this text. The constel-lation of his trembling contours with the wavering posture of Kierkegaard’sdancer thus might still seem an all too thin thread for establishing a relation.Indeed Benjamin’s text seems to move immediately into a very different

direction, evoking affinities with the Chinese theatre. But precisely in thismove, the text begins again to resonate with echoes from Kierkegaard. FirstBenjamin displaces the accent from the general structures that might leadto certain expected effects to an emphasis on the ‘incommensurable andsingular’ (aufs Inkommensurable, Einzelne ); and here, suddenly, the figure ofthe ballet dancer appears: someone who writes for the epic theatre, Benjaminsays, ‘has a relationship to the plot [verhält sich zur Fabel ] as the ballet masterto his pupil [wie der Balletmeister zu seiner Elevin ]. It is his first task to loosenthe joints to the limits of the possible’ (GS 2.2: 525). Not only in the figure




of the dancer, but in the homophony of a curiously displaced word, theecho of Kierkegaard can be heard. Kierkegaard’s ‘elevation’ of the dancer

(Elevation in the Danish text, Elevation in the German translation of 1923)reappears in Benjamin’s Elevin . It seems that Kierkegaard can appear in Benjamin’s texts only in strangedisplacements. But he does appear, against Benjamin’s intention, with acurious insistence and in curious slips of the pen. Eight years after this firstversion, Benjamin rewrote his essay on the epic theatre for publication inthe journal Ma b und Wert in 1939. In this version he refers to Brecht’s playFurcht und Elend des Dritten Reichs , but the title is disfigured and appearsas Furcht und Zittern des Dritten Reichs (GS 2.3: 1387). Benjamin is ratherembarrassed about this lapsus and, on 6 August 1939, he writes an apolo-getic letter to Margarete Steffin – only to produce another lapsus : ‘In punctoEssai bin ich reumütig, was den Titel von Brechts Stück angeht (es gab da eineunentschuldbare Kollision mit Kierkegaards “Furcht und Sitte”) ’. (‘Concerningthe essay, I regret what happened to the title of Brecht’s piece [there was aninexcusable collusion with Kierkegaard’s Fear and Manners ]’: GS 2.3: 1386).The Zittern has turned into a Sitte , a custom, a habit, manners, perhaps evena haunting mannerism through which the ghost of Kierkegaard invades

Benjamin’s 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 inBenjamin’s version of the chess automaton (GS 1.3: 693 ).15 The hunchback,that also plays a significant role in Benjamin’s Kafka essay, is the figure ofthe 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 Benjamin’s allegory, but the puppet plays all the better –even, and perhaps especially, on the sober stage and podium of Brecht’s epictheatre, where Kierkegaard’s ghost as a revenant of the ghost of Hamlet’sfather insists with Benjamin on that intermediary status of a Vorstellung atthe edge of the visible and invisible. The displaced encounter between Benjamin and Kierkegaard takes placeon the site where the theological and political are at the same time in themost extreme opposition and in the most intimate interpenetration. It is

the infinitely small point of a metabol Vh

, an Umschlag , a sudden shift andturning around from the one to the other without any mediation. And here,in the rejection of mediation, Benjamin comes closest to Kierkegaard, whenhe tries to explain the paradoxical event of the reversal, the metabolhV ofthe extremes. It is also the point of the transition from theory to praxis andto being-there.

This transition [Benjamin says] is humanly possible only in a paradoxicalevent: This is humanly possible only in two ways: in a religious or a




political viewpoint. I do not concede a difference of these two viewpointsin 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 thepresupposition that each view of the action proceeds without consid-eration and radically in its own sense.16



7

THE SUBJECT OF HISTORY: THETEMPORALITY OF PARATAXIS INBENJAMIN’S HISTORIOGRAPHY

DIMITRIS VARDOULAKIS

1

Focusing on the subject of Walter Benjamin’s notion of history inevitably

conjures up the image of the chess-playing automaton of Thesis I of ‘On theConcept of History’. In the writing of history, the subject figures both asthe hidden chess-player inside the mechanism, and as the puppet that movesthe pieces on the chessboard outside. There is a mechanism that can poten-tially be propelled indefinitely, but its operation at each time is determinedby the definite stamina of the player crouched in the dark, suffocatingcompartment. On the board, the continuation of the game is related tothe hidden player, while the puppet’s jerky movements are incidental to the

game’s duration. Thus the image of the Turk, as the automaton was known,provides a complex temporality: in terms of movement, the machine can goon for ever, while the man only as long as he can cope; whereas in terms ofthe game, its perpetuation is dependent on the calculating man, while thepuppet is incidental. Thus the complexity of time is created by the juxta-position – the parataxis – of man and puppet. Thereby, the subject becomesan integral part of the act performed by the automaton, but the medium ofthat act is time itself. As the image of the automaton is refracted through Benjamin’s writingsthe subject as historian and as the subject that appears within written history will assume a clearer outline. The coordinates for such an outline canonly be provided by Benjamin’s writings themselves, and first of all by theunfinished Arcades Project to which the Theses were conceived in part as amethodological grid. The fact that the Arcades Project to remain unfinishedis be a problematic element in such an investigation, and one that Benjaminis well aware of: ‘Outline the history of The Arcades Project [die Geschichteder Passagenarbeit ] in terms of its development. Its properly problematic



The Subject of History 119

component: the refusal to renounce anything that would demonstrate thematerialist presentation of history as imagistic in a higher sense than in

the traditional presentation’ (N3, 3). Benjamin is not referring simply tothe book that was published posthumously as volume 5 of his GesammelteSchriften . Benjamin is also referring to the work ( Arbeit ) of collecting in filesa huge volume of material – the enormous list or parataxis of copied citationsand written notes. If this material is regarded as constituting the objects ofhistory, then those objects are given through their relation to the subject inthe unfolding of time. And since both the object and the subject are giventhrough forms of parataxis, then parataxis becomes the concept that canyield forms of temporality that determine the subject of history. Parataxis, as the refusal to give anything up, has at least two conceptualaspects: First, to the extent that the parataxis of notes aspires to present aspecific place (Paris) in a specific period (the nineteenth century), what therefusal announces is the totality of everything that makes up that specificity. Yet this totality was to remain incomplete. A single specific moment isimpossible to grasp in its totality, let alone the ‘complete specificity’ of a whole era. The second conceptual aspect is to be discerned in the criterionfor collection: the materialist historiography. To the extent that materialism,

as understood by Benjamin, is a transformative critique, a writing in whichthe 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 aspectsof parataxis show that the subject of history – the historian who writes thehistory and the subjects for whom the history is written – can only be giventhrough this process of destruction whereby a complete specificity is made

incomplete and an incomplete infinity is made complete. The interplaybetween completeness and incompleteness introduced by parataxis yieldsforms of temporality that are in each case disruptive. This disruption is themanner in which the complete gives itself up to the incomplete, and viceversa. To introduce the notions or concepts of completeness and incompletenessin historiography is to view the writing of history through the prism ofuniversal history. ‘Universal history’ is not an arbitrary choice of term. There

are two reasons why universal history is crucial. First, universal history at itsmost basic introduces the issue of a comprehensive inventory of the courseof history. Universal history is a form of list-making, the writing-down ofparataxis. The list has a vital connection to a philosophy of language andhence 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 theone hand, from the perspective of the development of different narrativeforms, it is important that the earliest examples of different genres utilizelists in crucial ways: thus, Homer in his epic poem of the Trojan war is not




frugal with space in recording each city’s 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 inhis travels; and it should not be forgotten that the earliest European scriptthat has been deciphered, the Minoan Linear B, has been preserved as claytablets recording the goods produced and stored at the Cretan palaces. Thefact that decisively different narrative forms use the same apparatus, onlyproves, as Longinus recognized, that the list is a fertile topos for stylisticsto turn into a philosophy of language thereby addressing both the humanand the object.1 On the other hand, the thinkers of the modern era wereequally aware of this: Montaigne’s use of the list as the only way to recordhis own experience is a telling example, even if somewhat timid compared with the compulsive list-making of a Rabelais or the lists that comprise LaPopelinière’s ‘perfect history’.2 It is not a coincidence that Foucault startshis history of ‘words and things’ from the seventeenth to the nineteenthcentury with extrapolating on the way that a list records not only the objectsperceived as well as the reflection upon these objects, but also the épistème that is sedimented between the individual listed items and which comprisesthe 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 sothat their relation to history can be examined. The second reason that universal history ‘is crucial is derived fromBenjamin’s writings. It is not only that the huge list’ known as the ArcadesProject can be viewed as a type of universal history. In addition, ‘universalhistory’ is a term employed by Benjamin himself. Although Benjamin refersto it only once in the Theses, that reference in Thesis XVII is of extremeimportance 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 authenticconcept of universal history [Universalgeschichte ] is a messianic concept’(N18, 3). This assertion is significant enough for Benjamin to jot downa 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 andincompleteness entwine and unfold, is a necessary condition of Benjaminian

history. However, it is not a sufficient condition of history. The stress in thelast citation from the preparatory notes is on the ‘only’: universal historycan be actualized only with the coming of a Messiah, on Judgement Day.Moreover, Benjamin warns: ‘Universal history in the present-day sense isnever more than a kind of Esperanto. (It expresses the hope of the humanrace 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 qualification which will be shown to be of significance forBenjamin – is nothing but wishful daydreaming. If humanity could ever




think of pinning its hopes on a universal language such as Esperanto, thehistorical actuality in which Benjamin was writing the Theses (Nazism, the

Hitler–Stalin pact, etc.) would beg to differ. Yet, if hope and its language – or the language of hope, the spero in theEsperanto – are halted by a pervasive impossibility, Benjamin can still insistthat such an impossibility is annexed to a possibility. It is a regulative impos-sibility. This impossibility could be made productive, so long as it remainedregulative. In other words, the aporia about the insufficient necessity ofparataxis and messianic temporality for history may yet provide a methodo-logical reorientation or reversal. After all, as the essay on The Elective Affinities affirms, hope is for the hopeless, and the hopeless in Benjamin’snotion of historiography are the oppressed, in whose name the history thatinsists on recording the minor detail is constructed. The hopeless are thesubjects of written history. The reversal, then, that will reconfigure universalhistory has to be performed by/through the subject of history. Yet the haplesshistorian 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 thepast – although what is ultimately of the most importance is the way that

the subjects of written history are related to the figure of the historian. Whathas to be avoided is to place the oppressed and the historian in a hierarchicalstructure, 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 atthe end to indicate what kind of struggle they avoid, what is the nature oftheir alliance – their complicity. For the moment, the investigation shouldproceed with the oppressed by asking the question: Who are the oppressed? Who are the hopeless? An answer will reveal that according to Benjaminthere is no one identifiable 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 figure in ahistorical narrative? The latter question will lead back to the historian. It may appear self-evident who the oppressed have been. To assumethat 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 cruxof Benjamin’s thought. When Benjamin transcribed Horkheimer’s letter inConvolute N of the Arcades Project , he appended the corrective that historyis 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 identifies the suffering as therealm of particularity that tends to be viewed as completed. However, thissuffering cannot be grasped in toto and thus always remains incomplete. At the same time, the promise of happiness that the oppressed hope to becarried out in the future remains incomplete, since the future cannot beforeclosed, it is always open to possibilities. Yet these possibilities are alwaysalready circumscribed by the past, they are dependent upon the past andthus complete. This chiasmus between completeness and incompletenessunfolds in remembrance (Eingedenken ) and, in Benjamin’s sense, yieldshistory. Thus, at the heart of history, at the chiasmus of Eingedenken , thereis an aporia: the hopeless and the oppressed are not merely discovered in thepast – they also solicit the discovering of that past. History does not exist without them, no less than they do not exist without history. This twofoldmovement is crucial. The response offered to Horkheimer makes it clearthat 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 securedthrough a conception of time that does justice to such a reality. There is anegative part to Benjamin’s assertion, when he denies that history is science.This is the rejection of historicism. Although the attack on historicismpermeates Benjamin’s thought on history, from the Arcades Project , tothe Theses, to several published works of the same period such as theFuchs essay, as well as the preparatory notes for the Theses – although,

then, the assault on historicism is unrelenting, historicism remains a termnever adequately defined by Benjamin. Historicism would indicate at leastthree distinguishable conceptions of history. First, there is the teleologicalhistory, one that asserts that enlightened man will head towards a cosmo-politan ideal, as Kant argues, or one that poses freedom as an end whoseattainment in the present would signal history’s end, according to Hegel.Second, historicism also includes the attempts to identify independenthistorical disciplines, a history of art, a history of politics, of economy, of

technology and so on. The problem with autonomous historical inquiries isthat they either presuppose a rupture between that discipline and society, orthey extrapolate inadequate relations between the two, as for instance thepsychologism of the Warburg school.4 Third, historicism finally includesthe practice of adding up facts, while insisting in Rankeian fashion on theself-evidence of these facts – what Benjamin calls ‘the strongest narcoticof the century’ (N3, 4). What these different types of historicism have incommon is a conception of time as continuous. They presuppose a linearchronological development, which is always dependent on empathy with the




rulers who determine that linearity. Conversely, historical materialism has toblast apart the historical continuum. Time has to come to a standstill. The

dialectical image activates the ‘emergency brakes’ of history. Therefore, whothe hopeless are cannot be secured by their being conceived as originatingfrom within a chronological continuum. This would merely be tautological,trying to secure history from within history itself. To say that ultimately ‘theslain are really slain’ is nothing other than reverting to historicism. Had Horkheimer been presented with the problem of who the hopelessare in this way, he might have retorted that the tautology cuts both ways:does not dialectical rigour demand that continuity and discontinuity, asits opposite, mutate to each other? Therefore, Benjamin himself would notovercome historicism, if he merely imposed a different form – discontinuity– to the already existent material. This line of argument misconstruesBenjamin’s rejection of the presupposition of a temporal continuum. Thecall to blast apart the historical continuum presupposed by historicism isnot a call to hypostatize discontinuity. Discontinuity cannot be equated with a generic narrative that identifies a specific group of people as hopeless.This would not make sense, if, as already intimated, the hopeless bothmake 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 methodologicalprocedure (cf. N1a, 8). And, when Benjamin talks about the historiographyin a positive manner, he does not refer to the narration of history, but to itsconstruction: ‘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 filled

with ‘now-time’ ( Jetztzeit ). What underlies historiography is an operationof temporal discontinuity. Thus, the philosophy of history has turned intoa philosophy of time. This is the inevitable conclusion, if discontinuity isnot to be reduced to content, and if history and historiography are not tobe locked in a vicious circle. Further, viewing discontinuity as a temporalcategory, rather than merely a stylistic mannerism, accords with the devel-opment of Benjamin’s thought. As Andrew Benjamin has shown in tracingthe meaning of the caesura in Benjamin’s work, the caesura in the early

critical writings, such as the dissertation and the Goethe essay, is that whichstages the contact between particular and absolute. But this interruption works on a formal level and it can be reduced neither to content, nor tosomething transcendental that legitimates that content. The relationalityof the elements of this structure makes possible judgements about the truthcontent (Wahrheitsgehalt ) of the artwork. The notion of temporal discon-tinuity in Benjamin’s thinking on history transposes the formal structure ofthe caesura from art to time. Time as the absolute is ‘that which allows forinterruption; but equally what is evidenced by that interruption’.5




The extrapolation of the Absolute in relation to time does not only harkback to Benjamin’s early writing. It also recalls the extrapolation earlier

of the oppressed in relation to history. With the oppressed it was shownthat a chiasmus takes place between history and those for whom history is written. The temporal caesura repeats the chiasmic structure. The fullnessof time makes incompletion possible, but it is also made by incompleteness.This chiasmus does not indicate that the complete and the incomplete, theparticular and the absolute, the oppressed and messianic temporality are thesame thing. Rather, the point is that the terms of those conjunctions aregiven within the same structure that has arisen out of Benjamin’s philosophyof 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 constructiveprinciple of history. The paratactically presented information in histori-ography and the messianic temporality can only be necessary conditionsof history. The additional constructive principle indicates that they have astructural connection. This is what makes possible the mutual transform-ability of the complete and the incomplete, as Benjamin wrote in reply toHorkheimer. It makes possible the little gate of particularity ‘through whichthe 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 theabsolute consupponible and codeterminable. The Messiah is not a religiousconcept; rather, the Messiah is the regulative impossibility that allows forinterruption 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 theformal structure of the constructive principle of history. This formulationalready discloses at least three points: first, the subjectivity of the hopeless

does not conform to historicism’s forms of selfhood, such as its identi-fication with a Geist or with an autonomous individual I. Second, if the earlyBenjamin’s structural argument about criticism is indeed transportable tothe later philosophy of time, then the hopeless will occupy a position akinto that of the material content; and to the extent that the material contentis always in a process of ruination, the same process of disintegration ofsubjectivity will be expected to take place in history.6 Simultaneously, andthis is the third point, specifying the particularity of subjectivity as other

than a ‘fact’ of historicism discloses the limit of the question ‘who are thehopeless?’. For it can only provide an answer in the negative. A positivearticulation requires the hopeless to figure in a different question: ‘how arethey to be presented?’ This in effect asks for the way that the subject figuresin, as well as configures, the chiasmic relations between the complete andthe incomplete. In other words, what sort of figure of the subject can makepossible Benjamin’s philosophy of time? What is the nature of this subjectiveact that allows for figuration?




3

To start answering these questions requires to focus on the historian and

the methodology of historiography. The crucial passage in this respect isThesis XVII. This thesis is important enough to be quoted in full here,even though only the first half will be treated in the present section, and thesecond at the end:

Historicism rightly culminates [ gipfelt ] in universal history. It may be thatmaterialist historiography stands out [abhebt sich ] in method more clearlyagainst universal history than from any other kind. Universal history has

no theoretical armature. Its technique [Verfahren ] is additive: it mustersthe mass of facts in order to fill the homogeneous and empty time.Materialist historiography, on the other hand, is based on a constructiveprinciple. Thinking involves not only the movement of thoughts, buttheir arrest [Stillstellung ] as well. Where thinking suddenly comes toa 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 amessianic arrest of happening [Stillstellung des Geschehens ] or, to put itdifferently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. Heperceives the monad in order to blast a specific era out of the course ofhistory [Verlauf der Geschichte ]; thus he blasts a specific life out of the era,a specific work out of the lifework. The product of his technique [DerErtrag seines Verfahrens ] is that the lifework is both preserved and sublated[aufbewahrt ist und aufgehoben ] in the work, the era in the lifework, andthe entire course of history [der gesamte Geschichtesverlauf ] in the era. Thenourishing fruit of what is historically understood contains time in itsinterior as a precious but tasteless seed. (SW 4: 396/GS 1.2: 702–3)

On the one hand, Thesis XVII offers a formulation about the method ofhistoriography. There are two techniques contrasted, universal history andmaterialist historiography. On the other hand, in order to expand on thelatter, Benjamin refers to the historian. The materialist historian is basedon 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 thispassage. And a complexity emerges from the very beginning in the contrastbetween 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 thatreally separates it from universal history, taken to mean precisely the aimof representing the entirety of ‘facts’? The problem will not be solved easily




with reference to the precious seed, time. For the very next thesis statesthat messianic or now-time ‘comprises the entire history of mankind in a

tremendous abbreviation’ (SW 4: 396/GS 1.2: 703). Prima facie a momentthat comprises ‘the entire history of mankind’ may not appear all thatdifferent from the project of a universal history, namely to add up all the‘facts’. Thesis XVII may indicate why Benjamin relates elsewhere universalhistory to the messianic (e.g. N18, 3), but universal history is thereby, ifanything, even more elusive. A closer look at the term ‘universal history’ iscalled for, yet it should be kept in mind that Thesis XVII explicitly addressthe historiographic method. ‘Universal history’ will become a fruitfulconcept only if it is viewed in relation to writing, and thus in connectionto narrativity. This is not to say that there is a specific kind of historicalnarrative – this has been rejected already. There still is, nonetheless, amethod and a technique of writing history. The issue of what can be recorded in written history – the historicalobject in general, which includes the oppressed – revolves around thenotion of universal history. The reason is that universal history can presentmost clearly the difference in technique between historical materialism andhistoricism. What does Benjamin mean by the term ‘universal history’? The

assertion in Thesis XVII that historicism culminates in universal history isnot a straightforward identification of historicism and universal history. Ifthe metaphors in the verbs of the first two sentences are heeded, then what isconjured 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 twistin Benjamin’s 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 – inThesis XVII – makes it all the more enticing given that Benjamin refers toit consistently in the preparatory notes. There, Benjamin strategically drawsa qualitative distinction between the ‘present-day sense’ of universal historyand a more authentic sense. After repeating the call for the ‘destructiveenergies’ of materialism to blast apart the temporal continuum, Benjamin

observes that this would serve as the precondition to attack ‘the three mostimportant positions of historicism’. Benjamin continues by immediatelyidentifying universal history as the first such position: ‘The first attack mustbe aimed at the idea of universal history. Now that the nature of peoplesis obscured by their current structural features as much as by their currentstructural relations to one another, the notion that the history of humanityis 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 qualifyingparenthesis:

(The idea of a universal history stands and falls with the idea of auniversal 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 – universalhistory was not wholly inconceivable. By contrast, universal history aspractised since the nineteenth century can never have been more than akind of Esperanto.)

The universal history of historicism – the universal history in the ‘present-day sense’ – is that of nineteenth-century positivism. Conversely, universalhistory is still relevant to a Leibnizian monadology, a monadology recon-figured in Benjamin’s philosophy of time as the monad or the dialecticalimage which, according to Thesis XVII, crystallizes thinking into aconstellation in order to make it possible for the historian to approach theobject. 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 reformulatedas how the subjectivity of the historian is to be construed in relation tothe writing of the historical object. Universal history coalesces three terms– the subject, the narrative and the historical object – under the rubric ofcompleteness. The endeavour to record the ‘entire course of history’ recalls what was called at the beginning the paratactic presentation of the specific. A parataxis of ‘things’ is by definition 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 theyrepeat the same part of speech. This simplicity is deceptive. The historicist fault is to be deceived by this simple grammar. ‘Historicismcontents itself with establishing a causal nexus among various moments inhistory’ (SW 4: 397/GS 1.2: 704). The story that this causal connectingpresents is precisely an adding up of facts, an unreflective universal history.The positivist historiographic methodology can be likened to a vast collection

of index cards, each card representing a ‘fact’. The historian merely arrangesthe cards in a way that ‘makes sense’ utilizing the causal methodology ofthe natural sciences.8 Such a historian can never question the rhetoricalstructure of the narrative, because its language is all along assumed to bereferential – to be scientific. But this is nothing but the wishful thinkingof an Esperanto. Just as positivism’s ‘facts’ rely on a metaphysics thatpronounces an unproblematic relation between those facts and their inter-polations, so also Esperanto relies on a simplified grammar which assumesthe unproblematic relation between the name and its referent. And, just as




positivism was blind to the grammar of its metaphysics, so was Esperantoblind to the metaphysics of its grammar. This configuration of language’s

formal properties vis-à-vis its referential power and the metaphysics under-lying it prescribes a narrative dogmatism. It presupposes a grammar whichmakes language purely referential. This corresponds to the grammar of the pure language that Benjaminextrapolated as early as 1916 in ‘On Language as Such and on the Languageof Man’. It is the recognition from within a philosophy of language thatuniversal history not only presupposes a pre-Babel language in which everysentence 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. Inother words, it requires a narrative devoid of all ambiguity and essentiallyself-referential. In ‘On Language as Such’ Benjamin identified the essentialproperty of such a language: it is ‘both creative and the finished creation;it is word and name’ (SW : 1: 68/GS 2.1: 148). Thus, it is a completelyself-enclosed language, the completed language of God which Benjamindistinguishes sharply from the human language of names. Just as a purelanguage is non-human, so also a completely self-referential narrative isimpossible for the historian. To the extent that this grammar is presup-

posed in a way that makes an ontological commitment, then it can onlyposit itself. Starting from the infinity of pure language, it is impossible toreach the particularity of the naming of human language. In this sense, thegrammar of positivism turns out to be no grammar at all, but merely a sol-ipsistic onomatopoeia. The movement from the infinite to the finite is alwayscurtailed, never fulfilled. No wonder that the ‘second fortified position ofhistoricism’, which Benjamin attends to straight after the parenthesis thatdistinguishes between nineteenth-century universal history and authentic

universal history, is ‘the idea that history is something that can be narrated[sich erzählen lasse ]’ (SW 4: 406/GS 1.3: 1240). There is no technique ofpresenting a linear narrative that will lay a claim to present the facts asthey really are, no matter how many ‘facts’ are enumerated. For these facts,derived as they are from an infinite grammar, will always remain incom-plete. Thus, for the historian, there can never be an essentially historicalnarrative.

4

This is not to say that historiography is impossible. Rather, historiographyis to be viewed from the vantage point of a philosophy of time. If incom-pleteness and infinity are to be retained, then they cannot be constructedas positivism’s pure language. Only then will the qualitative differencebetween the ‘present-day’ universal history, and the universal history as apossibility – or at least as that notion of history that allows for a conception




of the possibility of history. For a genuine historiography, Benjamin insiststhat time cannot be conceived as an accumulation of constitutive moments.

Only by overcoming the historical continuum will the grammar of timeassume a regulative function. After having singled out the universal historyof positivism as the first historicist position to be attacked, Benjamincontinues his attack on the second bastion of historicism by elaboratingon 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: 1240–41). Just like linear time, so also the linear narrative must beblasted apart. The mention of epic narrative, as it comes immediately afterBenjamin’s discussion of universal history, points to the Leskov essay. ‘TheStoryteller’ can be read as an argument about how the temporality of story-telling (Erzählung ) can produce a notion of particularity as the temporalground of the infinite.9 Storytelling presupposes a rich notion of experience,attainable through a slow-paced life. Thus, the audience can achieve theultimate state of relaxation, that is boredom, so that the story can be retainedin memory (Gedächtins ). Immediacy also figures as the literal presence ofthe narrator whose purpose is to provide practical advice and counsel. Therighteous man, as the subject who has the know-how and moral rectitude, is

the subject to which storytelling aspires. With death, the immediacy of thetelling 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 theinfinite. 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 historicalobject – can be allowed to figure in historiography. The story describes thedeath of a young girl’s betrothed in a mine collapse and the subsequent redis-covery of his corpse many years later. What catches Benjamin’s attention isthe paragraph that bridges the gap between the two distant times. Thisparagraph is the parataxis of historical events: ‘In the meantime the city ofLisbon 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 first paragraph ofthe section that follows, section XII, Benjamin elaborates on the meaningthat death assumes in the narrative form of storytelling. This is conductedin terms of historiography, and in such as way that it points directly to theTheses:

An examination of a given epic form is concerned with the relationshipof this form to historiography . . . The chronicler is the history-teller[Geschichts–Erzähler ]. If we think back to the passage from Hebel, which




has the tone of a chronicle throughout, it will take no effort to gauge thedifference between one who writes history (the historian) and one who

narrates it (the chronicler). The historian’s task is to explain in one way oranother the events with which he deals; under no circumstances can hecontent himself with simply displaying them as models of the course of the world [Weltlaufs ]. But this is precisely what the chronicler does, especiallyin his classical avatars, the chroniclers of the Middle Ages, the precursorsof today’s history. By basing their historical tales [Geschichtserzälungen ] ona divine – and inscrutable – plan of salvation, at the very outset they havelifted the burden of demonstrable explanation from their shoulders. Itsplace is taken by interpretation, which is concerned not with an accurateconcatenation of definitive events [Verkettung von bestimmten Ereignissen ],but with the way these are embedded in the great inscrutable course of the world. (SW 3: 152–3/GS 2.2: 451–2)

Every epic form, that is every linear narrative, is intricately connectedto historiography. But this is not to say that every narrative is properlyhistorical. However, even if the chronicle is still not history, nonetheless itstill aspires to history in a manner that presents its objects as inscrutable.

What this manner precludes is a conception of historiography as a chain ofindependent events – there is no ‘concatenation of definitive events’, that is,there is no causal narration in the manner practised by positivism. Such acollection of independent facts can never be fitted into ‘the great inscrutablecourse of the world’. In contrast to positivism, storytelling makes possiblea different form of infinity, and hence a different notion of totality. Thedifference arises from the immediacy of the presence of the storyteller andthe rich experience of storytelling. This is an experience of particularity,

an immediate specificity. Whereas the pure language of positivism presup-posed an infinite and self-referential grammar, the storyteller starts with theimmediacy of the multicoloured (bunte ) world view (SW 3: 153/GS 2.2: 452). And, whereas positivism is trapped in that infinite grammar, the storyteller,because he starts with particularity, still has access to infinitude. This isBenjamin’s 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 hasever happened should be regarded as lost to history. Of course, only aredeemed mankind is granted the fullness [vollauf ] of its past – which isto say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all itsmoments. (SW 4: 390/GS 1.2: 694)

The demand of the universal history is clear in the chronicle: nothing isto be lost for history. The chronicler can entertain this refusal to let thething disappear, because his narrative – the Geschichtserzälung – is one of




immediacy. The chronicle then, in the language of Thesis XVII, stands atthe summit of materialist historiography.

Pointing the road to infinitude from the standpoint of finitude is boththe strength of storytelling and the chronicle, as well as the reason thatthey are not genuine history. For they pose a bad notion of infinitude.Storytelling has no definite end. In the manner of Scheherazade, the end ofa story is only the beginning of a new one (SW 3: 154/GS 2: 453). Equally,the chronicle’s notion of totality is an impossible one: it is the totality of the Judgement Day (der jüngste Tag ) (SW 4: 390/GS 1.2: 694). The last day isalso the first ( jüngste ), and thus completion gives way to incompletion ina 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 historicalobject and of a universal history, then this remains outside the possibilitiesof historiography. The summit that the chronicle represents is separatedfrom the mountain of historical materialism as if by a bed of clouds. Theclouds may always be moving and the demarcation between the two maynever be a fixed line. But it is a demarcation nevertheless, because for thematerialist 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 becomesan issue. This is the region of the particular. Storytelling departs from theparticular. Thus, its technique makes immediacy possible. The failure ofstorytelling only shows that potentiality alone is not enough for Benjaminto guarantee historiography. What is also needed is an act – the very act thatthe chronicler lacks because he refuses to distinguish between events. This isthe act of explaining, which according to the Leskov essay distinguishes thehistorian from the chronicler.

Earlier in ‘The Storyteller’, in section VII, Benjamin uses anotherexample which not only includes death and parataxis, but also prefigureshis distinction between the historian and the storyteller. This story fromHerodotus tells of the Egyptian king Psammenitus, who has been defeatedin battle, lost his kingdom and, to add insult to injury, he is made to attendthe victors’ triumphal procession. Psammenitus remains unmoved at hisdaughter and son passing by – he may not even have recognized them sincehe stood with ‘his eyes fixed to the ground’ (SW 3: 148/GS 2.2: 445). But he

was deeply moved at the sight of his old manservant, which prompted himto beat his head and wail. Herodotus, Benjamin argues, is a real storytellerbecause of the complete lack of explanation. The story is presented in a drymanner, and does not ‘expend itself’ – it reaches a point of incompletionfrom which it will not budge. Nevertheless Benjamin moves on by offeringfour different explanations:

Montaigne referred to this Egyptian king and asked himself why hemourned only when he caught sight of his servant. Montaigne answers:




‘Since he was already over-full of grief, it took only the smallest increasefor 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 hisown fate.’ Or: ‘We are moved by much on the stage that does not moveus in real life; to the king, this servant is only an actor.’ Or: ‘Great griefis pent up and breaks forth only with relaxation; seeing this servant wasthe relaxation.’ (SW 3: 148/GS 2.2: 446)

These explanations are acts of judgement. The historian differs fromthe chronicler in that he makes judgements. But here judgement is notunderstood as any arbitrary ascription of value on a given object. Rather, judgement is the act that intervenes in what is possible. The judgementhalts the infinity of potentiality, it intervenes in the perpetual pendulum ofcompleteness and incompleteness. More emphatically, it is the interruptionof the movement between infinite and finite.

5

Interruption is the act of the technique of materialist historiography andthat which makes possible a conception of the infinite and the finite, of thecomplete and the incomplete. However, if interruption is also to be linkedto judgement, the parataxis of judgements with which Benjamin responds toHerodotus’ story does not seem to fix the problem of a bad infinity. For theymay appear as individual judgements, pointing towards a notion of infinityas an aggregate of similar judgements – a dialogue between independent andindividual ‘points of view’. However, infinity and the finite 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 ‘TheStoryteller’ can be presented only when it is distinguished from the tem-porality of each judgement on its own. The first judgement, which Benjamin copies from Montaigne, emphat-ically asserts the immediacy of experience. It was at the point that theking was filled up with grief that he had a visceral reaction – as if hisbody could not help it. This is the temporality of specificity. Conversely,

the invocation of fate in the second judgement installs a temporality thateschews specificity, the temporality that knows only of the decisions of thegods and effaces human freedom and ethical responsibility. The image ofthe world as a theatre in the third explanation partly repeats the temporalityof fate: the actors act according to a script that cannot be altered. However,here the exclusion of the king from the infinite play on the stage makes itpossible that the king could stop being indifferent at the drama and react.The king’s reaction is provoked by the eternity of the stage-action. The finalexplanation, with its proverbial nature, has the structure of a storytelling




narrative: it offers wisdom. Thus it has the temporality of an immediacythat is directed towards an eternity. None of these construals of time offers

a genuine possibility of interruption, since neither can offer an interruptionof the relation between the infinite and the finite that does not privilege oneof the two terms. The argument here is that for Benjamin none of these judgements ontheir own in the parataxis could have been a genuine judgement. The poss-ibility of judgement in this passage depends entirely on the figure of the kingPsammenitus and the way that he intervenes – interrupts – the parataxis of judgements. As already noted, in Benjamin’s retelling of the story, the kingstood with ‘his eyes fixed to the ground’ during the parade, hardly noticinghis own children. To this parataxis – for parataxis in Greek means preciselyplacing side by side, like a parade – of individual catastrophes the kingremains impervious, like the bored and distracted spectator of a play. Hiseyes look at his son, but there is hardly a recognition. Until, that is, he actshimself. 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 ofhim 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 ofhistory may fix his gaze on the entire course of humankind’s 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 himfrom the auditorium where he previously sat indifferent into the centre-stageof the narration where he has to assume his responsibility. This fixing ofthe 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 madepossible. It is very important that Benjamin has changed Herodotus’ story ina very crucial respect. While Benjamin claims that Herodotus offers noex-planation, in matter of fact paragraph 14 of Book 3 concludes withthe Persian king sending a messenger to inquire why Psammenitus criedover the old man but not over his own children. And Herodotus recordsPsammenitus’ 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 belongsin a community with the self. Judgement is not merely a private affair – it isnot an opinion about one’s own ‘house’ (he oikia ). Rather, judgement takesplace on the communal, and hence on the political, space. Just as judgementis distinguished from private opinion, on the same grounds recognitionis distinguished from mere looking: recognition involves the political. Inrecognition, self and other become complicit. In this instant of judgement,




the king recognizes in the manner that the historian judges. His tears are thehistorian’s judgement. The complicity that is established between the king

and this hetairon is the complicity that also pertains between the historianand 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 objectof history. This chiasmus corresponds to the chiasmus identified earlier inpursuing the question of who the subject of history is. It will be recalledthat 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 interruptionof the temporal continuum. These chiastic relations were shown to be thestructural principle of historiography. The correspondence of Psammenitus’gaze to the earlier chiasmoi discloses the essential quality of the principleof historiography: it is the act of judgement. The most general answer as tohow the subject figures in history is: through this instantaneous act. Theact that is performed in such a way that the parataxis is recognized. If itis recognized as parataxis, then the historian’s gaze cannot be fixed 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 therelation between completeness and incompleteness to the infinity of time.

6

If this infinity of time is consistently pursued, the conclusion can only bethat a subjective judgement is no longer possible. What this means is that a

subject’s judgement can never attain a self-consistent truth. The subjectiveact is never occlusive. No matter how many individual acts of judgementare possible, they can only be secondary to the possibility of judging assuch. This signals the destruction of the subject. The subject cannot fixitself on a stable position from which to pronounce a judgement. The actof judgement destroys the singular individual, because the subject is nowdissolved into the I and the hetairon , the I and the object that looks back atit forming a community that is complicit in judging. The standstill of this

judgement is not that of standing on a fixed 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 historyand materialist historiography. The ascent (abheben ) from historicism tomaterialism is mediated by universal history. However, by performing a kindof leap, universal history in the form of the chronicle has been shown to bealso at the summit of materialism. Benjamin insists in Thesis XVII thatthis up-and-down movement is not enough: ‘Thinking involves not only




the movement of thoughts, but their arrest [Stillstellung ] as well.’ But thisStillstellung is not something exhausted within the figure of the historian:

He [the materialist historian] perceives the monad in order to blast aspecific era out of the course of history; thus he blasts a specific life out ofthe era, a specific work out of the lifework. The product of his techniqueis 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. Butthe product is not up to the historian on his own. Rather, the product isgiven through his technique . In the aufheben of Benjaminian sublation theabheben from historicism to universal history to historical materialism ishalted by erasing the subject from the sublating. The individual I is no more,because historiography can methodologically entertain ‘the entire course ofhistory’ only through the complicity of the historian with the hopeless. Theprocess of sublation, in Benjamin’s sense, is to disperse the historian in thehetairon , the hetairon in the historian’s writing, and then both, as subject of

written history, to history’s infinite unfolding. This destruction of the subject does not mean that the practice of historydoes not matter. It does not say that the construction of history destroys thehistorian as such. Rather, it indicates that destruction is constitutive of historiog-raphy. There is no psychological communication between the historian and thehistorical object – no empathy that mediates their relation. The relation is giventhrough time. On the one hand this is a full time, one that allows for the entirecourse 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 parataxisrupturing its relation to the whole of history. The subject is occupying theposition at this point of tension between relationality and nonrelation, betweenthe 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 mannerin 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 specificity or as a transcendental other. What is constructed isa political community, and the possibility of a materialist historiography aspolitical praxis. In the dialectical reversibility between completeness and incom-pleteness, the finite and the infinite, ‘politics attains primacy over history’ (K1,2). The destruction of the individual subject announces the political in thecomplicity 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 precludesany sharp definition of one independently of the other. They can only be

independent in their interdependency. Thus, what matters in the operationof the chess-playing automaton is not who controls the game of chess.11

Asking this question will inevitably conflate the movement of the piecesand the game itself. In relation to the movement of the pieces, what mattersis the cooperation between the hidden chess-player and the puppet. And inrelation of the game itself, both the player and the puppet as independententities are secondary compared to the move – the act – on the board. Thisboard is the historian’s writing page which, however, is not blank. The blackand white pieces are already poised in a parataxis without which histori-ography is impossible. But historiography is equally impossible without theempty squares that form the space between the pieces. Those squares canbe filled to infinity with different moves, but in each case are occupied by asingle piece, which is the product of a single move – a single judgement ofthe complicit man and puppet.



8

TRADITION AS INJUNCTION: BENJAMIN AND THE CRITIQUE OF

HISTORICISMS

PHILIPPE SIMAY*

Most commentaries on Benjamin’s conception of history have focused on thecritique of positivism and of the philosophy of progress, which are commontraits of vulgar Marxism, conservative historicism and social-democraticevolutionism. Several of Benjamin’s texts present themselves indeed as adisavowal 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 theidea of progress’ as quickly as possible. Hence, the necessity of an inversion,properly revolutionary, announced in Zentralpark : ‘the concept of progressmust 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, willfind its allegoric translation in the figure 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 theexistence of a progress as well as of a causality and purpose in history, and will develop a conception based on discontinuity, privileging the gaps oftime.

This reading is correct, but it does not fully account for the complexity ofthe theoretical device deployed in the Theses. Against the idea of progress,it would have been enough to mobilize a conception of time centred on thepresent; there was no need to displace the question of history to the field

of tradition, or to bind the latter to the recollection of a forgotten or badlytransmitted past, which waits to be redeemed. This displacement is all themore intriguing since Benjamin considers the discontinuity of traditionas the cornerstone of the Theses, but also as their ‘fundamental aporia’. Why then did Benjamin put tradition at the centre of his conception ofhistory? Because only tradition allows him to think in ethical terms of therelationship which the present maintains with its own anteriority. And it isprecisely in the name of this anteriority that Benjamin contests not just one,

*Trans. Carlo Salzani.




but two forms of historicism: the first, which is well known, postulates theexistence of a historical evolution; but also a conception of time apparently

close to Benjamin’s – discontinuous, retrospective, entirely devoted to thepresent – which however swims with the current, because it considers thepast as a reserve of moments and things freely exploitable. If this secondside has gone relatively unnoticed, it is due mostly to the mixture of thedifferent characterizations of the concept of tradition which Benjamindeveloped throughout his work. In this chapter I intend to go back over theroute which leads Benjamin to think the tradition in the present, to inventother 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 showthat tradition is not at all a principle of continuity, or something that can bemastered, but rather the sudden appearance of an ethical injunction.

TRADITION IN THE PRESENT

Let us start from the commonly accepted idea that Benjamin diagnosed arupture of tradition. Modernity would designate the moment from which

tradition cannot reach us any more, and in which the past ceased to holdany authority in order to make room for an uncertain present. From the veryfirst texts up to the great essays of the 1930s, Benjamin’s thought is indeedmarked by the feeling that the continuity between the generations has disap-peared for good. Thus, in ‘Experience and Poverty’, he observes, not withoutbitterness:

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 onegeneration 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 peopleby giving them the benefit of their experience? (GS 2.1: 214/SW 2: 731)

Incontestably, Benjamin diagnoses a crisis of the transmission: what thepast used to entrust to us under the sign of continuity is no longer obviousor self-evident, and we do not know anymore what or how to transmit. On

the other hand, it is difficult to know to which conception of tradition hisremarks relate. Is tradition a reality with clear contours, or is it a nominalentity to be used in a descriptive way – as it is the case with many thinkersof ‘modernity’? In other words, is tradition something transmissible, or is ita repetitive concept within the history of representations? The whole interestof Benjamin’s reflection on tradition resides in the first place in the rejectionof this alternative. Few philosophers have questioned with the intensity ofBenjamin the protean notion of ‘tradition’. In ‘The Storyteller’, Benjaminproposes 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 acknowledgmentof 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 betteron the anthropological aspects of the text.Reading the essay, we notice right away two points: first of all, Benjamin

is not interested in the story as a product, but, rather, as an activity. Whatinterests him is the pragmatics of narrative communication: the fact of tellingstories, 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 illustriousrepresentative of the anonymous storytellers whose common trait is thefact of never having written their stories. What matters to Benjamin here isthe fact that the story is transmitted orally, by mouth. ‘The Storyteller’ is areflection on the oral transmission: on its destiny, of course, but first of all onits functioning. Very explicitly, the essay blames writing for the relegation ofthe oral transmission to the domain of the archaic. As it is known, writingallowed for the storing and filing of information in a more massive waythat memory could do. It presented itself at the same time as a means ofrelieving the individual memory and as the possibility of its exteriorization, whereas oral transmission depends on the fluctuant capacities of memory,

writing, changing support, introduces the exactitude of all that is fixed anddefinitive. We better understand why, by comparison, Benjamin defines storytellingas a ‘craft’ form of communication. In fact, the story depends on the capacityof the storyteller to listen and repeat a certain amount of information. Now,the cognitive capacities of memory are limited and inevitably give way tooblivion, deformation, but also innovation. From one generation to the next,stories change without their modification being detected by the listeners.

Everybody, on the contrary, agrees on the fact that the stories are told withexactitude. The thing is that, as Marcel Mauss emphasized, for want of anobjective referent, it is impossible to verify if a story corresponds to its originalform. Thus, we cannot but take the storyteller’s word for it. The storytelleris certainly aware of his limits. Therefore, for Benjamin, the storyteller doesnot pursue in the least exactitude, but only fidelity. The story ‘does not aimto 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 thehandprints of the potter cling to a clay vessel’ (GS 2.2: 447/SW 3: 149). Farfrom considering the story a definite sum of information, the storytellerrefuses to consider the past as a closed chapter, as if it had been consumedfor good. He knows well that for his listeners the past extends a long wayback, and that it invests every new experience with its authority. So that,to the identical reproduction of writing, which reveres the past as past, thestoryteller 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 narrativecommunication. If the story presents itself as an ancestral account, it

nevertheless takes form in the present: there is in it a part of invention, ofrecreation. To make his account transmissible, the storyteller must actualize what has been bequeathed to him according to the expectations of hislisteners; otherwise the listeners will pay no attention to him. He alwaysperforms a critical evaluation of the past from the starting-point of its owncontext of reception. This inventory work, properly hermeneutic, allowshim to make actual what is not actual any longer. The story is thus ananswer found in the past to a question formulated in the present. But, as itis in the past that the present finds its answer, it inscribes itself within theframework of a continuity – a retrospective continuity, since it is the criticalrecovery of the past, not the past itself, that has here a power of filiation.For Benjamin, wisdom designates precisely this capacity of narration tomake past experiences actual and, vice versa, to make novel experiencescustomary, relating them with things different from themselves in orderto create filiation and establish an intergenerational continuity. In fact,the account, at the same time as resumption and as variable, possesses asingular power of implication. On the one hand, the storyteller is always

concerned with describing the source from which his message comes andhis supposed competence ensues. He is authoritative just inasmuch as he isable to mobilize in the narrative act the lineage of storytellers within whichhe inscribes himself. On the other hand, he invites his listeners to inscribethemselves too within this continuity. ‘A man listening to a story is in thecompany of the storyteller’ (GS 2.2: 456/SW 3: 156), says Benjamin. Hereinscribes dialectically in his own person the whole of past and presentgenerations. Thanks to his account, the past is constantly actualized and

the present is interpreted within the language of tradition. Precisely for thisreason, the storyteller is not simply the representative of a past tradition: he fabricates tradition.

These analyses on the narrative pragmatics introduce a novel approach tothe traditional phenomena. Displacing the attention to an anthropologicalground, they disclose the way in which tradition is constituted in time. Theyinvite 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 cumulativeconception of tradition. Actually, it is with the substantialist conception that Benjamin first

breaks off. This conception, which identifies tradition with a thing orgroup of things, is the most ancient and the most widespread. It originatesin the Roman law where it designates the transfer of material goods from apossessor to a purchaser. By extension, it eventually came to designate onlythe 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 prioritraditional. They become traditional only from the moment in which

they are transmitted. It is transmission that ‘traditionizes’ its objects. Theimportant thing to reflect 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 specific quality whichconfers on them the privilege of being transmitted, that is because they donot have an essence. Benjamin redoubles his critique of substantialism in acritique of essentialism . He insists on showing that the content of tradition,far from resembling an immutable truth, alters with time. Antiquity andcontinuity are thus not the essential attributes of tradition. Tradition, eventhough it has an identity within time, does not have an essence. What isbeing discredited here are all those representations that assimilate tradition with an intangible deposit and, therefore, also the institutions which claimto be the tradition’s 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 cumulativedimension, purely quantitative, which would explicate the continuity of

tradition within time. Whether it is assimilated to a concatenation ofprejudices by the French Enlightenment, or to a sedimented wisdom bythe English counterrevolutionaries, tradition is, in both cases, assimilatedto a continuum. It is against this conception that Benjamin will deployhis most radical arguments. They can be found already, in a form indeedhighly speculative, in the epistemo-critical prologue of the Trauerspiel book.His questioning the notion of origin did in fact lead him to doubt thepossibility 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 isnot intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being,but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becomingand disappearance’ (GS 1.1: 226/OT , p. 45). Since origin is that whichrecurs as absolutely primary at any instant of its historical deployment, anyform of linear transmission cannot but betray it. Tradition as a continuumruins all that it transmits; it crystallizes the past considering every one of

its moments as bygone. In ‘The Storyteller’, Benjamin rather concentrateson the prospective aspect of this continuum. The double movement ofreception and bequeathing indicates well that the active locus of tradition isnot to be found in the past, as the traditionalists like to repeat, but ratherin the present. The authentic movement of tradition does not go from thepast to the present but, inversely, from the present to the past. Benjaminthus turns inside out, like a glove, the prospective conception of tradition.The constitution of tradition happens always afterwards, in a properlyretrospective way. Therefore, it is not possible to consider tradition as a




continuum. A fragment of the Passagen-Werk confirms the purely nominalnature of tradition’s continuity: ‘It may be that the continuity of tradition

is mere semblance. But then precisely the persistence of this semblance ofpersistence provides it with continuity’ (N19, 1). In other words, continuityis not in the least an attribute of tradition. It is a simple appearance, but soold and so commonly shared that eventually it came to don the appearanceof an essential characteristic.

If the storyteller has been able to maintain for a long time the appearance ofa continuity of tradition keeping together the generations within the web of hisaccount, his time has passed now. For Benjamin, this is not simply because theconditions of existence of the storyteller have disappeared, but above all becausehe becomes aware of the ethical and political stakes which go together with theuses of tradition. This is the reason that he rejects the recourse to any form ofcontinuity: the one, prospective, from which originates the classic historicism,and the one, retrospective, from which proceed the historiographies influencedby the narrative model and its hermeneutics of temporality. It would be wrongto think that Benjamin rejects only the prospective conception of the continuumas 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 aninstrument at the service of the dominant class. Certainly, this instrument hashistorically changed its face. Tradition is no longer the code in whose name theheterodox practices are condemned and repressed. It is now an instrument ofconformity, susceptible to modelling the idle masses awaiting for a reassuringvision of the world. Where mercantile society produces in excess, fragments andsecularizes, 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 pacification and control is today well known. The historians EricHobsbawm and Terence Ranger have established that, at the time of the Englishindustrial revolution, a great number of traditions were invented, without, for allthat, lacking effectiveness. ‘The peculiarity of “invented” traditions’, emphasizesHobsbawm, ‘is that the continuity with it is largely factitious. In short, they areresponses 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 andthe breaches where contestation risks always taking place; it turns out to be apowerful instrument of legitimation of the institutions and an effective means toevade social antagonisms. It is precisely this that Benjamin had anticipated, halfa century before and in a clearly more critical perspective:

The enshrinement or apologia is meant to cover up the revolutionarymoments in the occurrence of history. At heart, it seeks the establishmentof 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 wheretradition 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 thanits retrospective reconstruction, and the instrumental uses which follow.This point shows well that Benjamin’s critique does not deal solely andnot even mainly, with the philosophies of progress. Thinking the traditionin the present and as discontinuity must hinder any instrumental formof transmission and reception of the past. What remains to be done isto establish a different relationship with the past, to find how it can betransmitted 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 presentin 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 Benjamin’s conception of history. She has the meritof having seen in destructivity the modus operandi of a new system of his-toricity characteristic of modernity. Unfortunately, her analysis leavesaside the connections which link destructivity to the question of tradition.For her, Benjamin’s destructivity comes directly from the tradition’s lossof authority and from the rupture which followed. She points out the

ambivalence of modernity, divided between the desire to keep the past andthe desire to destroy it. We think on the contrary that what is at stake forBenjamin 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 arequestions which are peculiarly Arendtian, and which she confounds withthose of Benjamin. What Benjamin questions are the normative forms oftransmission, not tradition itself. Rescuing tradition from a certain formof thinking, transmitting and utilizing it is, on the contrary, a constant

preoccupation in Benjamin’s thought. It is this that determines his wholereflection on destructivity.In ‘The Destructive Character’, a quasi-autobiographical text of 1931

which Arendt omits to mention, Benjamin articulates the practice ofdestructivity with a more general reflection on the sense of tradition:

The destructive character stands in the front line of traditionalists. Somepeople pass things down to posterity, by making them untouchableand 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 anda 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 anassertion raises a certain number of paradoxes: how can one transmit whatone 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 comparethe two modes of transmission as if each was autonomous. On the otherhand, the contradiction disappears if we do not consider destructivity as anautonomous practice, but as a response to the aporias of the conservativeapproach. It is therefore important not to dissociate Benjamin’s considerationson 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 first

vocation is rather of a critical nature. Its first task is to reveal. Attackingthe conservative mode, destructivity casts light on that dark part whichtradition strives to mask behind a normative continuity. It unveils itsviolence. This violence pertains to the process of transmission itself, whichmanages to retain the past only at the expense of its appropriation andreification: it mortifies and strikes to make it powerless in order to keeponly the material content. Once transmitted, the past becomes then theobject 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,that’s because of another violence, more insidious, which anticipates andfounds it. Violence for violence then, destruction of what is destructive: suchare the elements of a strategy which consists in turning tradition againstitself. This permits the wrenching of moments of the past from the processof transmission, to restore to them the force of which they were deprivedby 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 rescuesthat which the linear transmission keeps betraying. The study of threeauthors – Kafka, Kraus and Fuchs – allows Benjamin to bring to light thesethree functions of destructivity.

Within the tradition of destructive characters who inspire Benjamin,Kafka incontestably holds the first place. For Benjamin, as for manyintellectuals of his generation, Kafka’s work embodies the disarray of the sonsfacing the secularized Judaism of the fathers, the authoritarian guarantorsof a tradition fallen into abeyance. Kafka’s texts evoke this atrophied,




incomprehensible tradition, in which he cannot recognize himself becauseit 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 rejectand denounce the legacy of tradition. In his long letter of 12 June 1938,Benjamin exposes to Scholem the destructive device from which Kafkaunveils the arbitrariness and violence of tradition:

Kafka’s real genius was that he tried something entirely new: he sacrificedtruth for the sake of clinging to transmissibility, to its haggadic element.Kafka’s writings are by their nature parables. But that is their miseryand their beauty, that they had to become more than parables. They donot modestly lie at the feet of doctrine, as Haggadah lies at the feet ofHalakhah. When they have crouched down, they unexpectedly raise amighty paw against it. (C , p. 565)

Exporting into the literary field the form of the Jewish parable, Kafka freedthe latter from its legal reference. Far from submitting to the law which itis 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 secretmeaning, but all the parables which would allow accession to it are illusoryreferences, for they generate so many interpretations that it is impossibleto retain even one of them. Through an excess of transmissibility, theydissolve the truth content of tradition. Consequently it is no longer possibleto consider tradition as the preservation of an ancestral knowledge; traditionis but a collection of indecipherable prescriptions, debris of a law which inthe past was a living thing but now is exerted only as an unjustified power

of sanction.The destructivity of the Kafka parable has thus mainly a heuristicfunction. This is its force but also its weakness: if, on the one hand, it unveilsthe moribund and tyrannical nature of tradition, on the other hand it doesnot destroy it. Because at all costs it clings onto the pure transmissibility ofthe account, the narrator has sacrificed its content. There is nothing moreto say. He lacks above all that which would allow consideration of the debrisof tradition as the fragments of a rescued world, and not as simple products

of decomposition. Because of this Kafka’s work bears the marks of failure. What the Kafka parable lacks – the faculty of seizing hold of the past inorder to return it in a different form – Benjamin will find in Karl Kraus, inthe modern practice of citation. Contrary to its ordinary use, citation does nothave solely an illustrative function. It also possesses a perturbing, disorderingforce. The citation does not merely unveil the false peace instituted by anynormative 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 strivesto unify, the citation works in undermining it: it dissociates, singularizes,




fragments until it empties the text of its own substance. The destructivityof citation does not consist merely in extracting fragments of thought out of

texts, but also, and maybe principally, in subtracting them from the courseof their exposition in time, in breaking with the process of transmission thatinscribes them within a unique reading and a unique usage.

Here comes to light the restoring function of citation: its destructivityemancipates, frees from the discursive order, that is, at the same time fromthe texts and from the contexts of their reception. It is, says Benjamin, ‘theonly power in which hope still resides that something might survive thisage – because it was wrenched from it’ (GS 2.1: 365/SW 2: 455). Whatconservation neutralizes, destructivity restores. Diverting these fragments ofthought from their primary significations and destinations, citation opens upfor them a different destiny. It makes its own content exploitable and hencetransmissible. It then regains its critical intensity and its subversive power.

Wrenching things from the continuity of tradition – this is, for thedestructive 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 arthistory. In his collections, things, far away from the world which saw their

creation, gain a novel signification. Like the one who cites, who recuperatesapparently insignificant fragments of texts, the authentic collector – likePachinger or Fuchs – becomes attached to any kind of object independentlyof its commercial value or its cultural recognition. He destroys the codesof the art market. For ‘the fetish of the art market’, Benjamin remindsus, ‘is the master’s name. From a historical point of view, Fuchs’s greatestachievement may be that he cleared the way for art history to be freed fromthe fetish of the master’s 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 ofconsidering them for themselves. As Benjamin says, ‘the collector’s truepassion, very misunderstood, is always anarchic, destructive. For this is hisdialectic: to tie the fidelity towards the thing, towards the singularity thatit conceals, with a subversive and obstinate protestation against the typical,the classifiable’ (GS 3: 216). For the collector, the only understandingof things lies in the acknowledgment of their uniqueness and in therejection of their normativity. Arendt acutely spotted, behind the collector’s

apparent irreverence, the blow dealt to tradition: ‘Therefore, while traditiondiscriminates, the collector levels all differences. Against tradition thecollector pits the criterion of genuineness’.2 But, according to Benjamin,for the collector it is less a question of levelling all differences than ofquestioning the classificatory logic of tradition, the legitimacy of criteria by which it isolates and transmits cultural contents. In the essay on Fuchs, thecollector appears as opposing all the normative processes of transmissionand reception. Beside the official art history, which conserves from the pastonly the masterpieces, his collection lets a subterranean history appear; it




gives a right of inclusion to those anonymous objects never considered bythe dominant class; it does justice to the ignored objects. An infinite task,

in which the collector would exhaust himself, if he proceeded otherwisethan by accumulation. If the collector nurses the dream of offering a placeto the objects, of ‘gathering everything up’, following the example of theragpicker, he tries first of all to make his collection transmissible. That is why Benjamin recognizes that ‘a collector’s attitude toward his possessionsstems from an owner’s feeling of responsibility toward his property. Thus itis, in the highest sense, the attitude of an heir, and the most distinguishedtrait 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 filiation, for even when his pieces are dispersed, they stillremain things which are inherited and which one tries in one’s turn totransmit. Through his essays on Kafka, Kraus and Fuchs, Benjamin thus discoveredthat, wrenching phenomena from the continuum of tradition, we renewthe relationship that the present maintains with them, we make themtransmissible again. Moreover, Benjamin has made destructivity the motiveforce of a writing capable of restoring the past’s force of contestation. First

of all by recovering for his own benefit the subversive usage of the citation:‘quotations in my work’, Benjamin says, ‘are like wayside robbers who leapout, 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 byactualizing it, that is, translating it into his own language and accordinglyto his own expectations. In this perspective, the dialectical reinscription

within an actual context of reception clears away the disturbing strangenessof past vestiges in order to turn them to the patrimony of the present.Citations are no more those autonomous and rebel fragments, but, wrappedup in a mass of commentaries, the instruments of opportune retrospectivefiliations. As Benjamin emphasizes, ‘reconstruction’ within identification ishomogeneous. ‘ “Construction” presupposes “destruction” ’ (N7, 6). To thetraditionalizing effects of commentary, Benjamin thus opposes the citationas 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 ofthe past in a relation of simultaneity. Montage is this construction (differentfrom any recomposition under the form of a whole or of a sequence) in which the fragments come into connection in order to form a constellationintelligible to the present, because no kind of continuity exists betweenthem and it.

Thanks to the practice of citation and montage, Benjamin becomes awareof 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 tocite integrally every one of its moments, he can nevertheless wrench some

of them from the homogeneous and empty time in which various forms ofhistoricism put them. It is these forms of historicism that the Theses willcontest 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 characterizationof tradition had already taken place. It is they that, for a large part, willconstitute what Benjamin calls ‘tradition as discontinuity’. The expressionappears in the preparatory notes to the Theses, but curiously not in thedefinitive text. Benjamin opts for another formulation, entirely different:the ‘tradition of the oppressed’. Do these two formulations refer to differenttraditions? No, the distinction is but nominal. For Benjamin, there is justone tradition, but it goes together with diverging representations whosemajority come from an instrumental usage. However, this distinction is notgratuitous. It points out that Benjamin’s conception of tradition is deployed

on several fronts and confronts different adversaries. Some of them are wellknown: Theses X–XII take charge of the critique of vulgar Marxism and ofsocial democracy, both adhering to a naive philosophy of progress; ThesesIII–VII deal with historicism and, more exactly, with the relationshipbetween the sense of the past and writing of history. It is on the latter Thesesthat we wish to focus here.

They present themselves first as an attack against certain representatives,official or unofficial, 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 ofthe epochs ‘in the eyes of God’; against the idea of a teleology indifferentto the historic moments, Droysen sticks to the singularity of facts. In orderto rediscover the historical facts in their integrity, the historian must, asFustel de Coulanges prescribes, ‘study directly and uniquely the texts in themost minute details, believe only what they demonstrate, separate resolutelyfrom the history of the past the modern ideas introduced by a false method’.3

These prejudices towards the temporal distance favoured by the scientificapproach will lead Dilthey to advocate empathy as a comprehensive methodconsisting in bracketing the historicity of the historian and of the objectbeing studied in order to re-experience it. Now, for Benjamin, the historicistschool remains prisoner at the same time of the philosophies of history andof 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 thematerialist historian who wants to cite everything, it retains the past only asthe 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 thepast conferring on all the same importance. Its relativism and its positivism– which also originate in a purely additive logic – institute a temporalityincapable of seizing the content of the events. The method of empathy onlyreinforces this fault, because for Benjamin it is evident that the past allowsitself to be seized only by being robbed, but also it can only be understoodin the light of the present, within their mutual recognition. ‘For it is anirretrievable image of the past which threatens to disappear in any presentthat does not recognize itself as intended in that image’ (GS 1.2: 695/SW 4: 391). If Benjamin’s critique of empathy consisted only in the condemnation ofthe positivism of the historicist school, in reminding us that it is not possibleto abolish the temporal distance or that the past cannot be comprehendedbut in the light of the present, then it would not present anything original.In fact, that critique had been already advanced by Heidegger. For theauthor of Being and Time , Dilthey’s hermeneutics remained a prisoner ofthe aporias of a foundation of knowledge of a Cartesian type. Dilthey tried

in vain to force on the human sciences and on the historical consciencea model of methodical knowledge incompatible with the experience ofhistoricity. Now, it is because we are thoroughly historical beings that noknowledge or positive foundation of the human sciences can transcend theseconditions. Gadamer will prolong this analysis in Truth and Method , byrehabilitating the work of the history of effect (Wirkungsgeschichte ), whichthought it was able do without empathy. Not only the transmitted contentsundergo modifications with time, but history affects us too.4 With this

argument, Gadamer intends to overstep the objectivizing conception ofDilthey’s hermeneutic. Understanding is an event which draws us into thegame of tradition, and ‘understanding is to be thought less as a subjectiveact than as a participating in an event of tradition, a process of transmissionin which past and present are constantly mediated’.5 It is this experienceof temporality which phenomenology puts in the heart of the hermeneuticproject – 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 totradition. In many aspects, Benjamin’s position seems close to Heidegger andGadamer’s: a critique of positivism, a rehabilitation of the anteriority oftradition, the retrospective viewpoint, etc. Nevertheless, Benjamin, who was acquainted with Heidegger’s thought, makes a point of differentiatinghimself 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 specifies that ‘Heidegger seeks in




vain to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly through “historicity” ’(N3, 1). Benjamin’s disinterest towards historicity does not implicate just

Heidegger, but the whole phenomenological approach from Husserl toGadamer, whose conclusions Benjamin had assuredly anticipated. Benjaminpoints out that the acceptance of the temporal distance does not constitutean alternative less questionable than the one of empathy. Because of this, ina quite significative way, Benjamin does not draw a distinction between thehermeneutics of historicism and that of phenomenology, in which, althoughaccording to different methods, the questioning of the sense of transmissionis almost absent. Benjamin’s critique places itself far upstream from themethodological or even ontological questions of understanding; it is insteaddirected towards the ethical and political legitimacy of the hermeneuticproject. Thus, whereas Gadamer is concerned mainly to define the inventory work to which the modern conscience submits tradition according to itsown expectations, Benjamin, twenty years before, questions the origin ofsuch a legacy: before we can know how we have to inherit, we must askfrom whom we inherit. Bringing to light the ‘tradition of the oppressors’,Benjamin does not merely question the identification with the victors of thehistory from which empathy derives; but, far more broadly, the possibility

of a hermeneutics which, no matter what it considers the work of history tobe, is nonetheless dependent upon the cultural contents transmitted by thedominant class. This is precisely the meaning of Thesis VII:

All rulers are the heirs of prior conquerors . . . Whoever has emergedvictorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in whichcurrent rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According totraditional practice, the spoils are carried in the procession. They are

called ‘cultural treasures’ . . . There is no document of culture which is notat the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a documentis never free of barbarism, so barbarism taints the manner in which it wastransmitted from one hand to another. (GS 1.2: 696/SW 4: 391–2)

Here the attack is addressed no longer only against the historians who wentinto the service of the powerful, but against all those who, consciously ornot, take part in a kind of transmission whose modalities are defined by

the dominant class. The victors are those who, having the possibility oftransmitting, decide what will have the right to exist in history, but also themodalities according to which we will have to relate to it. The ‘triumphalprocession’ that Benjamin evokes designates the process of transmissionitself. For Benjamin it is the process of transmission of the works that is tobe blamed, not the works themselves. For it is only as documents of culturethat they become documents of barbarism. This process neutralizes thecontestation contained in the works assigning them a place and a usage inthe mausoleum of culture. The Benjaminian notion of the victor must thus




be broadened: with the manifest oppressors side also the conservatives, whocontemplate the past only under its patrimonial form.

Therefore, Gadamer’s hermeneutician is not so different from thehistorian who identifies with the victor. Both take part in the samehypocrisy which consists in remaining insensible to the nonfulfilment ofthe past and to the laments contained in it by transforming them intoheritage. It is proper here to remember that, for Gadamer, understandingthe tradition means first of all finding in the past a legacy accepted withreservations. This appropriation of the tradition is only possible if wepostulate that the past has ceased to send signals to the present and that we do not expect anything more from it. Gadamer, moreover, willinglyconfirms this. According to him:

Tradition’s essence implicates the unreflected restitution of the transmittedpast. In order to form an explicit conscience of the hermeneutic task ofappropriating tradition, tradition itself must have become problematical. . . With the emergence of the historical conscience, which implicatesthe present’s gaining a fundamental distance from the whole of thetransmitted 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 outdistancefrom tradition: on the one hand the past presents itself a priori as a ‘text to bedeciphered’, 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 underany 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 thetradition from which it claims to derive its authority; assimilating tradition to alegacy, hermeneutics reduces it to a sum of items, it makes it an alienable goodthat can be mastered: an instrument in the hands of the dominant class.

If, in Benjamin, ‘the tradition as discontinuity’ makes way to the ‘traditionof the oppressed’, it is because this is inseparable from the recollection ofa past of suffering, absent in Gadamer. Benjamin’s critique of the schemes

of historicity thus also includes a certain mode of thinking tradition in thepresent. For Benjamin, the present cannot be that margin of exteriorityfrom which we redefine tradition in order to make it more easily a principleof conformity to anything whatsoever. The notion of tradition of thevanquished commits us to think of the ethic relationship that the presentmaintains with its own anteriority: if the present turns towards the past, it isnot in order to interpret it or to find in it its benefit, but first of all in orderto be questioned by it. The past is not written in a foreign language. What itsays 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 thatpreceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a poweron 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 presentdisinvestment which will have no obligation whatsoever towards the past,and that will ignore the injustice from which it originates. The presentcannot elude the injunctions that the past addresses to it; it must do justiceto it, rescue it by answering its call. Some have said that Benjamin’s rescuingexposes the image of the past to a radical process of historicization. It isexactly the opposite: the historicization of the past is precisely the strategyof the victors. But for the one who detects behind the rewriting of historythe presence of a different tradition, the rescuing of the past in the presentmeans wrenching it from the normative process of transmission, citing it torestore 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 depriveit of its arbitrariness. Tradition will not be able to become a product, andthe reconstructions which constitute it, although efficient, are not, for that,less illegitimate. Otherwise there would be no difference between traditionand the institution which represents it. Having said this, Benjamin is perfectly conscious of the difficulties thathis 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 historyof the oppressed is a discontinuity. The task of history is to get hold ofthe tradition of the oppressed’ (GS 1.3: 1236). We easily make out thenature of this aporia: if the tradition of the oppressed is discontinuous andconstitutes itself only subsequently, what distinguishes it from a simplereconstruction, from a reversed filiation where the son invents his ownfather, according to the interests of the moment? Vice versa, if there is noreal 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 allthe vanquished’? Because it is not able to keep together the retrospectivecharacter and the certainty of being the authentic addressee of thetradition, Benjamin’s conception becomes as arbitrary and opportunist asthat of his adversaries.

For Benjamin, the key to this aporia lies in the notion of the dialecticalimage. With it, he postulates the existence of a correspondence between thepresent instant and a moment from the past.




Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic withit: 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 pastcasts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what ispast; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialecticsat a standstill. (N3,1)

The dialectical image forms a constellation where the past and the presentfind, in a dialectic movement, their historical correspondence without thenecessity of going through the mediation of the temporal continuity. This way, Benjamin manages to keep together the idea of discontinuity and theone of a true relationship with the vanquished. We can regret that the critics’ main concern has been to find out whether materialism or theology will remove this aporia in interpretation, without exploring other tracks. We wish, as a conclusion, to interrogate abit 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 itcharacterizes also the tradition of the oppressed as such. The conclusion isgenerally that the tradition of the oppressed is the reverse of the one of theoppressors, which makes it similar to the linear model, with the exceptionthat it will be punctuated with interruptions. Now, the tradition of theoppressed is not structurally identical with the one of the victors: thediscontinuity of the tradition which characterizes the former is differentfrom 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 thecontinuum of the victors. Nor is it linked to the retrospective character oftradition, but to the fact that it is not something which can be possessedand transmitted from hand to hand. Actually, in so far as this tradition isneither a deposit nor a sum of items – an inheritance susceptible to beingalienated – it is impossible to establish in advance or retrospectively thechain 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 senseof the term – series than to an addition of segments. The linear model, with its axial, sinusoidal, segmentary logics, has to be substituted by aradial model: diffusionist, disseminating, rhizomatic, even if these words,foreign to a Benjaminian vocabulary, still spatialize too much the modeof action of the tradition. We could here reverse René Char’s sentenceaccording to which ‘our heritance is not preceded by any testament’,for Benjamin, unlike Arendt,7 does not lament here the rupture of acontinuum, but rather affirms that the tradition of the oppressed points




to a testament without inheritance, without heirs, which belongs to no oneand which no one can master.

Therefore, it must be admitted that this tradition is not transmitted, inthe proper sense of the term. It is conveyed by different linear traditions,inscribed within the reverse or the lining of a process of transmissionthat is foreign to it. Therefore, it becomes transmissible as soon as it is wrenched from the continuum. The citation, the collection, the montageare the privileged modes of this transmissibility: breaking up the historicalcontinuity, they rescue from oblivion all that the powerful occludes orrejects, the scrap of the triumphant history which can constitute the materialof 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 inevery direction and addresses those who want to listen. All who remainattentive to the way in which the past enjoins the present can become at anymoment the authentic addressees of tradition. There is thus no contradictionbetween the retrospective character of tradition and the fact of being itslegitimate addressee.

Nonetheless, it remains to be clarified what is implied in this ethicalinjunction. It is not enough to recognize oneself among the victims of

the past in order to be its legitimate heir, otherwise anyone could claimit for him/herself. Without its theological guarantee, the recognition of acorrespondence between the past and the present is not in itself sufficient todismiss the risk of arbitrariness. The oppressed class is not a priori innocent,it can exploit the past to its own profit, with the same empathy and thesame historicism as the oppressors, even though in a minor mode. Moreover,today’s ‘victors’ do not recognize themselves any longer among those ofyesterday: they have understood that the strategy of playing the victim

clearly pays off better. It would be thus erroneous to think that in Benjaminoppression stems solely from a sociohistorical condition. It rather stemsfrom, as we saw, a certain mode of transmission. The oppressed becomesoppressor 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. Thepresent generation cannot be the heir of yesterday’s vanquished if it does not wrench tradition from the hands of its actual administrators, if it ignoresthe 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. Becomingan heir means honouring the demands of justice and liberation that the pastpushes forward to the present. Thus the oppressed class is not a priori theheir of the tradition of the vanquished: it becomes the heir only inasmuchas it is the avenging class, that is, inasmuch as it fulfils hic et nunc a promiseincessantly betrayed and incessantly deferred. As long as this event doesnot take place, we are always at risk of opportunism. That’s why ‘only aredeemed 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 fulfilled that we could tell what this tradition wasand to whom it belonged. In the meantime the way we relate to traditionconstitutes 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 rectification of the past injustice. It offersno guarantee. But it has the advantage of staying clear of all historicismsand of their instrumental constructions of time. Benjamin’s message issubtle but of great importance: it reminds us that considering tradition asthe transmission of a content which the past entrusts to us under the sign ofcontinuity or, on the contrary, as a reconstruction of the past in the present,leads to a misunderstanding of its essential character. What is expressed inthe tradition is not an unmodifiable and intangible core which, from afar,gives form to the present. Nor is it the game of infinite recompositionsaccording to the exigencies of actuality. The action proper to the tradition isnot 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 theconformism that wants to seize it’ means, on the contrary, to prevent whatfreezes 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 ofthe tradition the very fact of it becoming tradition: ‘The danger threatensboth 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: thefirst comes from the monolithism in which it can freeze; the second fromthe 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 acceptsthe contestation which derives from it, then to be within the tradition doesnot mean to be guardians of a truth or a normative knowledge which in thepresent finds 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 itat any instant.



9

BOREDOM AND DISTRACTION:

THE MOODS OF MODERNITY

ANDREW BENJAMIN

OPENING

History, once freed from the hold of dates, involves bodily presence. Thepresence of those bodies is positioned within a nexus of operations. If thatnexus 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 WalterBenjamin is a conception of historical subjectivity presented in terms ofmoods. The project here is the formulation of that implicit presence. Thisnecessitates not just the recovery of this direction of thought, but the attemptto plot possible interconnections of historical time and the complexity oflived experience. What is essential is that their occurrence be understoodas integral to the formulation of modernity. Subjectivity cannot simply beassumed. Its modern configuration is essential.

History, in Benjamin’s 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 final developmentof a philosophy of history. The theses or notes contain certain allusions tosubjectivity. And yet, subjectivity is not incorporated as a condition ofhistory. Precluding a concern with subjectivity would seem to leave out animportant element through which experience and hence the subject’s beingin the world takes place. This condition does not pertain to the psychic

dimension of subjectivity. The organization of experience – experience asorganized – takes place in terms of moods. Boredom and distraction, to citebut two, are not conditions of a subject. On the contrary, they are conditionsof the world. And yet, they are neither arbitrary conditions, nor are theyhistorically random. Moods, it will be contended, are inextricably boundup with the modern. This occurs both in terms of what would count as adescription of the modern and equally in terms of what will be describedas modernity’s self-theorization. It should be added immediately that anyone 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 inevitabilityof a form of conflict. Conflict can be defined, at the outset, as designatingdiffering and incompatible constructions of the present – constructionsenjoining specific tasks – that occur at the same point in chronologicaltime.2 This is the context within which a conception of mood needs to belocated. Highlighting the centrality of moods has to be seen as a way of thinkingthrough a relationship between bodily presence and the operation ofhistorical time. (An operation thought beyond any conflation, let aloneidentification, of historical time and chronology.) To the extent thatboredom functions as a mode determining experience, there will be animportant distinction between the factual boredom of a given individualand the world that continues to present itself as boring. In the secondinstance boredom will have a greater scope precisely because it is notsubject-dependent. (This form of boredom is not more authentic. Ratherit identifies a different locus of intervention and thus enjoins a differentpolitics.) However, there is the subject’s boredom. There is the subject’s

distraction; distracted by the world, though distracted nonetheless. If thereis a critique of experience that takes as its object an overcoming of the holdof Kant’s ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ as the organization of experience’spossibility, then, it will be conjectured that it takes place not just throughthe addition of moods but in relation to the complexity of subjectivitythat the interconnection of moods and historical time creates.3 The ‘tran-scendental aesthetic’ need not refuse the hold of history per se , what itrefuses is a conception of history in which the detail of the ‘now’ of its

happening demands specific attention. Moreover, it will be the identifi-cation of that ‘now’ that allows for the advent of inventions and innovationsenjoining their own philosophical and political response. Interruption andinnovation demand more than simple incorporation. They allow for formsof transformation. This is an argument advanced by Benjamin in relationto the interruption within the presence and the practice of art broughtabout by the emergence of reproducibility. (Clearly reproducibility, whilecentral to Benjamin’s position, can be read as a transformative figure. 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 thiscontext it will also be the case that interruption as a potentiality need notbe identified with reproduction tout court .) Positioning the importance of moods necessitates noting the way thetechniques of art’s production are connected to the relationship between theadvent of the new and the recognition – thus experience – of the demandsmade by it. The ‘new’ therefore is not just a different image, let aloneanother 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: 500–1)

What has to be read within this formulation is a state of affairs that is morecomplex than first appears. Complexity arises precisely because the recog-nition of a demand is a position that can always be created retrospectivelyby the advent of a new art form. (Development is neither deterministicnor teleological.) The presence of the new – the identification of the newas the new – can be grounded in the twofold movement of locating limitsand then defining their having been overcome. There is an inbuilt fragilityto this position since technological reproduction – reproducibility, if onlyin this context, being the mark of the new – cannot preclude attempts toexplicate its presence within concepts and categories that are inappropriate.(Fragility will re-emerge as an important motif.) However, what counts asappropriate is not defined by the positing of an essential quality to art, butrather is present in terms of the particularity of the art form itself. After all,

Benjamin’s formulation pertained to ‘a new form’ – ‘einer neuen Kunstform ’ –and not a new content. Particularity is as much concerned with the mediumas 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’ ofperception. An example here is photography. The photograph breaks thelink between art and what Benjamin calls a work’s ‘cult value’. Two points need to be made concerning this break. This first is that itoccurs 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 otherhand, precisely because what is important is not the photographic content per se , but the condition of its production and the implications of thoseconditions, it will always be possible that a given content will have a greateraffinity to cult value than to its break with that value. The presence of theface in a portrait, for example, will bring into play considerations that arealready 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 theface 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 – eventhough only ever played out on the level of content – marks the need for aform of intervention. The site of intervention is this ambivalence – the causeof politics.4 In addition, though this is the argument to be developed, ambi-valence will come to define not just art work but mood itself. The ontologyof art work will be defining the configuration 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 specific location in Benjamin’s work will provide a point of departure. The moods of distraction and boredom willbe central. Working through these organizing moods will demand a consid-eration of Convolute D of Benjamin’s The Arcades Project (a Convolute whose title is ‘Boredom, Eternal Return’). A prelude is, of course, necessary.It will be provided by Benjamin’s famous engagement with architecturein ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’.That engagement is presented in terms of ‘distraction’ (Zerstreuung ). Theargument to be developed is that ‘distraction’ is an organizing mood ofmodernity. Benjamin’s concern is to situate the emergence of distraction within the context of art’s reception. However, were it to be situated, inaddition, in relation to the emergence of art, remembering that Benjaminlimits his analysis to reception, then a further argument would be necessary. What would need to be underlined is that distraction, as a mode ofreception, 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 developmentsare themselves part of the process of secularization.6 With the abeyance ofritual, differing subject positions arise. In this context therefore the linkbetween art and the secular entails the ineliminability of distraction as amode of reception. Distraction involves fragility. It is never absolute. Thesubject is drawn across positions. Edges fray. Distraction is a form of ambi-valence, one that presages another possibility. (Distraction and ambivalenceare 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 hazethrough which ‘I’ see. As the haze settles – perhaps the ‘brouillard desvilles ’ (D1, 4) – its presence as a felt condition has vanished. In the grip of

boredom, inured to the situation in which ‘I’ come to find myself, even myboredom – 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 – isthe ‘there is’. Hence – what little interest there is . How then does this ‘thereis’ provide a way into the mood and thus into the subject’s distraction, ‘my’being distracted? The question therefore is what happens to the ‘my’ withinthe opening up of distraction – in its encounter with the ‘there is’? Withinthe 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 defining 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 haveto be addressed. Addressing it will indicate in what way a conception of theinterplay of moods and subjectivity can be given a distinctly modern ori-entation rather than being simply assumed. That orientation will arise fromhaving located the relationship between moods and subjectivity beyondthe hold of the opposition defined in terms of the individual as opposed tothe mass. ‘I’ will take another quality. The state of ‘my being be me’ willhave 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 specific argumentarising in the context of a general engagement with art’s technical structure.Distraction is a result of a fundamental shift in those structures. Strategically,the term is deployed as part of Benjamin’s critique of Duhamel’s Scènes dela vie future .7 The strategy of that critique is the attempt to reposition

distraction; winning the term back for a different critical project. WhatBenjamin refuses to accept is Duhamel’s argument that the masses ‘seek’distraction, as opposed to the singular spectator as the one on whom artmakes a demand. This ‘commonplace’ is insufficient. The inadequacy is notsimply philosophical. Its occurrence is linked to the demands made by themedium of film. This medium does not become an end in itself – rather itgenerates other concepts and categories through which art’s work is to beunderstood. In Benjamin’s analysis the distinction between ‘distraction’ and

contemplation is central. He repositions the terms in the following way: ‘aman who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it . . . In contrastthe 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 distinctionis architecture. ‘Architecture’, he argues, ‘has always offered the prototypeof an art work that is received in a state of distraction and through thecollective [das Kollektivum ]’ (SW 4: 268/GS 1.2: 504). The unpacking of thisposition 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 wasintimated above, what is at play here is the question of what happens tothe 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 thenproduced, 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, whichconcedes no more than the possibility of art having a history, does notentail that art has an essential quality. Indeed, art cannot be essentialized




since what takes place is the practice and history of discontinuities – thecontinuity of the discontinuous – which are present both formally and

technically. This presence will have differential effects both on subjectivityand relatedly on conditions of reception. What arises from the centrality attributed to architecture is the possibility,

for Benjamin, of distinguishing between two modes of art’s reception. Thefirst is the ‘tactile’ and the second the ‘optical’. The first 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 figures. The individual– as opposed to the mass – does not have a position. A transformation hasoccurred. Indeed, if there is to be a conception of the individual, then it willhave 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 reworkedconception of the ‘mass’. This conception is presented by Benjamin in theopening lines of section XV of the essay – the ‘masses are a matrix’ – addingthat it is in regard to this matrix that ‘all habitual behaviour [alles gewohnteVerhalten ] 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 reconfiguration of the relationshipbetween subject and object. There is a shift in the comportment towardsthe art object; because its occurrence is internal to art, such a move has tobe understood as concerning art’s mode of formal presentation. The objectof art comes to be repositioned. (Thereby underlining the proposition thatobjects only ever have discontinuities as histories.) Therefore, the disclosureof art does not open beyond itself, precisely because the unity that bears thename ‘art’ is already the site of divergent activities and histories. Questions

of reception and production will always need to have been refracted throughthis setting. The mode of reception demarcated by the ‘tactile’, a mode that will alsopredominate in relation to the optical – and which defines reception in termsof ‘perception’ (Wahrnehmung ) – is structured by ‘habit’. That architecture whose concern is with dwelling – Wohnen – should be defined in relation tohabit – Gewohnheit – is an important opening move and yet on its own is notsufficient. What matters is the subject of habit and, as will be noted, habit’s

implicit temporal structure. Learning to live comes through habit. Withinthe terms given by this setting the mass becomes the site of distraction.The mass is distracted. The film positions the mass as mass. And yet, thefilm brings with it a real possibility. Benjamin writes that the film ‘makesthe cult value recede into the background not only because it encouragesan evaluating attitude in the audience, but also because, at the movies, theevaluating attitude requires no ‘attention’ ( Aufmerksamkeit ) (SW 4: 269/GS 1.2: 505). It is, of course, ‘attention’ that, for Benjamin, is the term thatdefines art as a relation between an individual and the singular work. The




‘evaluating attitude’ is a concern neither of the individual nor of the massunderstood as no more than an abstraction grounded in the individual. The

use of this term therefore announces a distancing of the opposition betweenthe individual and the mass. Moreover, what is distanced in addition isthe ‘all or nothing’ response to the operation of art’s work. The distancingmeans that a type of ambivalence has been introduced. While the film, as with architecture, is received in a state of distraction, film as a medium– film in terms of what Benjamin identifies earlier in the essay in regards toits ‘technical structure’, not simply in regards to its content – brings with itthe capacity to reposition the hold of distraction. This does not occur on thelevel of the individual as opposed to the mass, nor the mass in opposition tothe individual. (The mistake made by Duhamel was not just the retentionof the opposition mass/individual as an either/or, but the failure to recognizethat the technique of reproducibility meant that the terms themselves had tobe rethought.)

The adoption of what is described as an ‘evaluating attitude’ by the massoccurs because of the work’s operation. Distraction endures as both subjectand object. The state of distraction can become an object without thisleading to a position of pure overcoming. The audience is an ‘examiner’

(ein Examinator ), even though a distracted one. What this points to isnot a critique of ideology as though truth were simply counterposed tothe ideological. Rather, what is in play is the implicit recognition thatcountering the hold of distraction is to work with what it was that engen-dered the determining role of habit. (The examples of film and architectureare the most appropriate in this instance since they indicate ways in whichmood and modernity are interconnected.) Undoing habit means deploying what made its recognition possible in the first place. Namely, that habit is

lived out within a specific temporal framework. Continuity brings with itthe possibility that clings – perhaps on the underside – to ambivalence.There is an important temporality to this structure, one that is also at workin the implications found in the description of the masses as a ‘matrix’.

In regards to this conception of temporality what arises is a positioningdefined as much by partiality – partial occurrences, the state of being notquite there, etc. – as it is by the necessity for forms of activity. The truth of thehold exerted by moods is found neither in the mood having been completely

overcome, nor in the refusal of activity. Activity, not voluntarism, needs tobe understood as the type of deliberative calculation identified by Benjaminas the ‘evaluating attitude’. When Benjamin finishes the essay with theevocation of criticality and distraction, the suggestion should be read asthe claim that one arises in the context of the other. Arising, not becauseof distance, nor from absolute differentiation – a differentiation that wouldhave to be thought within the posited divide between truth and ideologythat his explicit project has already distanced – but arising in the contextof what is occasioned by particular art works. Film has an ambivalence.




However, its technical structure enables that movement in which a type ofpartiality occurs, a seeing that is neither simple contemplation nor complete

absorption; the latter being that absorption in which either the subject orthe object would have vanished. The move is from the individual to themass. The seeing in question is as much a seeing in time, as it is a seeingthrough time in the sense of a seeing without end. Occurring concurrentlyis a restructuring of time that stems the hold of eternal recurrence – whichfor Benjamin is the temporality of ‘mythic doom’ – by the introduction of what he identifies elsewhere as the ‘now of recognizability’. However, twoquestions 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 furthersince 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 theindividuals who comprise it – a lesson presented with exacting concision inFritz Lang’s film Fury – leaves the opposition in play, even if enigmatically.8

Once the mass is understood as a matrix – thus a network – it becomespossible 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 Heidegger’s‘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 individualas that which is both dispersed across, though also articulated within, thismatrix.10 Presence involves a network. Equally, central to the constructionof the mass individual is the structure of ambivalence. The co-presence ofdistraction and criticality are central to that construction. What becomesimportant therefore is the extent to which the mass individual becomes a

site of conflicting forces. Positioning is neither absolute nor complete. As will be noted, Benjamin’s account of the construction of subjectivity andintersubjectivity in terms of the move from play to habit is integral to anaccount of why ambivalence is constitutive. Only through ambivalence doesa cessation of what can be described as always-the-same become a possibility. Ambivalence is marked by a potentiality within which interruption will haveconditions 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 barbarismare intertwined. If history is the history of victors, this accounts for whyundoing the hold of historicism is, in part, overcoming ‘empathy with thevictor’. The subjectivity of the mass individual does not stand opposed tothe mass. The site of the mass, as already a locus of differential relations ofcomplex and incompatible determinations all balancing the distinct waysin which power operates, means that the mass individual is neither the onenor 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 thisquestion will, in the end, necessitate returning to the relationship between

the ‘there is’ and the ‘my’. In the move from ‘my boredom’ to boredom’s‘there is’ quality, a different question emerges: Who is bored? This is thequestion addressed to the mass individual.

BOREDOM

Convolute D of Benjamin’s the Arcades Project – ‘die Langeweile, ewigeWiederkehr ’ (Boredom and Eternal Return) – does not have an intentionalstructure. This must be necessarily the case. Nonetheless, the move fromthe thematic of ‘boredom’ to Nietzsche takes place via the intermediacy ofBlanqui. In regards to the latter, Benjamin cites specific passages from hisL’Eternité 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 anystraightforward sense, but rather from what he develops, using as its basis acitation from Karl Löwith’s 1935 study of Nietzsche. A quotation in whichthe central section of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science ) concerning

‘eternal recurrence’ is, indeed, repeated. The whole project therefore isnot just selective in terms of the tendentious nature of the quotation, butits selectivity would be compounded if the proper names were allowed todominate. The Convolute is about the mood of boredom and the reality ofboredom’s already present structural location within certain conceptionsof historical time. Again, mood meets time. The centrality of that connectionprovides the way in and moreover allows the proper names to be positionedbeyond the hold or the accuracy of either citation or interpretation. Viewed

in this light, the interpretive question then has to concern the Convolute’sactual project. Even though the elements of the Convolute would in the end need tobe detailed – a move in which the identification of boredom is caughtbetween the weather, the sameness of grey, somnambulism, etc. – the philo-sophical dimension of boredom is presented with its greatest acuity in thefollowing:

We are bored when we don’t know what we are waiting for [woraufwir warten ]. That we do know or think we know is nearly always theexpression of our superficiality or inattention. Boredom is the threshold[die Schwelle ] of great deeds. Now it would be important to know: Whatis the dialectical antithesis to boredom? (D2, 7)

The force of this final question resides in part in the answer not beingfound in any attempt to identify the content of ‘what we are waiting for’.This reinforces the centrality of Benjamin’s formalism in the sense that




what matters is the structure of an awaiting rather than filling in thatstructure with specific 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 takenup is boredom as a ‘threshold’. A threshold is of course as much a line ordivision as it is the site allowing for equivocation – hence it functions as thelocus of ambivalence, par excellence . What this means is that the crossingof a threshold – a crossing in which futurity is introduced as made possibleby the present’s potentiality – has to be thought beyond a conception ofthe future that is already pictured. An already present picture would meanthat the future had already been given in advance by its conflation with apre-existing and thus already identifiable image. (There is an importantconnection 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 blanketsthe ‘all’ leading to a form of sameness. Equally, dust settles on the rooms andis attracted even by the brightest and most intricate of clothes. Dust is the‘stifler of perspective’. Perhaps, dust’s potential lies in its capacity to absorbblood. As such, and despite the continuity of its always being the same,dust can absorb the passage of time, part of which is history’s 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 evidentapproval de Chirico – ‘Only here is it possible to paint. The streets havesuch gradations of grey’ (D1a, 7). With this formulation – with the grey, itsdepth, even depth within the subtle ‘solche Skalen von Grau ’ – there is thefirst 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 Benjamin’sactual writings that are fundamental, equal emphasis should also be givento the nature as well as to the content of his quotations. He cites a longpassage from Rodenberg’s book on Paris. The passage concerns a visit witha ‘millionaire’ (Benjamin’s term). Entering the house, despite the glitter –understood as the play of surfaces, Schein without beauty – Rodenberg notesthat ‘Something like suppressed boredom lay in the air [Etwas wie heimlicheLangeweile lag in der Luft ]’. In the room were a series of brightly coloured

parrots. They, for Rodenberg, ‘all seemed to suffer from homesickness [allescheinen an Heimweh zu kranken ]’ (D2, 3). While a lot could be made ofthe repetitive force of terms involving ‘heim ’, what is of significance in thepassage lies elsewhere. Namely, that in order to come to an understandingof boredom as a mood it is essential to recognize that it is not undone bythe introduction of colour. While the parrots were at a distance, holdingto a type of separation, boredom still prevailed. It should be rememberedthat this is not Benjamin writing but Rodenberg. However, the extractfrom Rodenberg’s text works precisely because it captures the problem of




boredom in terms of what was identified earlier as the ‘there is’ quality ofmoods. Once ‘there is’ boredom, then it is not countered by that which

seems to stand against its phenomenal presence, hence Benjamin’s interestin the dandy, the one who despite colour and due to the insistent presenceof a form of singularity compounds boredom. The dandy is, of course, onlythe individual within a structured opposition between mass and individual.The dandy is not the mass individual. Donning a new garb – history as theplay of no more than surfaces – becomes a conception of the new in whichits conflation with novelty defines its presence. To utilize another quotationdeployed by Benjamin, ‘Monotony feeds on the new [La monotonie se nourritde 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 termsof the ‘new’. What could be more boring? And yet, the constancy of thenew is hardly news. Hence there needs to be another understanding of thetemporality of moods. A given mood is not countered by its juxtaposition with its phenomenal opposite. Nor, moreover, is it undone by the mereassertion of the new. (The question of the new and the posited overcomingof 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 thepositing of boredom’s having been overcome has to define both – the newand boredom – in relation to the individual. However, it is essential to beprecise, the individual in question is the one given within the oppositionindividual/mass. What this does is to define boredom as the province of theindividual. At the same time, therefore, it elides any possible concern withboredom’s ‘there is’ quality. Once that quality is denied, then a differentpolitics opens up; rather than the mass individual and thus a commitment

to a form of mass action, the political would be defined by the individual’scentrality and orchestrated in terms of the happiness or the well-being of theindividual. (The political distinction is between a conception of the politicallinked to individual needs and aspirations – a version of liberalism – and onedefined 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? Benjamin’s response

to this question necessitates that this awaiting be distinguished from anawaiting in which the image of the future determines both what is to occuras well as its having occurred. What cannot be expected – even though itis too often expected – is victory to come through continuity. This recallsthe passage cited earlier in which Benjamin dismisses as a form of binaryopposition boredom linked to not knowing what is awaited as one pole, andthe superficiality or lack of attention inherent in the claim that we can givea form to that which is awaited as the other. (The latter point is, despitemoments of real equivocation, an inherent part of Benjamin’s critique of a




version of utopian thinking.) Awaiting transforms time. Benjamin writesthat the one who waits ‘takes in time and renders it upon in altered form

[in veränderter Gestalt ] – that of expectation’ (D3, 4). Expectation and theone awaiting – die Erwartung and der Wartende – become figures. Equally,this holds open the possibility of another formulation of moods. It may betherefore – though this is still a conjecture – that what counters boredomas a mood is not just action but the possibility of a counter-mood: a moodnot just as a disposition, but as that which organizes experience. Awaitingand expectation – as necessitating the transformation of time – a transfor-mation in which the future becomes a condition of the present, rather thanthe present being a series of empty moments awaiting a future, would meanthat there is another mood. This possibility does more than tie moods andtime together. They become linked to a possibility and thus to a form ofpotentiality.

Potentiality inheres in one of the most striking presentations of thethreshold 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 thenarrating of the dream. Doing so, however, necessitates ‘at one stroke’ (miteinem Griff ) turning ‘the lining of time to the other side’ (nach außen zukehren ). This ‘other side’ – time’s other side, a side revealed or turned outin an instant by an action, is the narrating of the dream as the overcomingof boredom. What is significant here is twofold. In the first instance thispossibility 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 Au b enseite ] ofunconscious events’ (D2a, 2). Crossing the threshold therefore will involvemore than simple movement. Secondly, the ‘fabric’ – one side of whichis 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 ofnarration whose conditions of possibility are themselves already possible.The possibility lies in the construction of boredom itself. Rather thanexisting as a discrete entity, it exists as bound up with its opposite. Theovercoming 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, asthough all that was involved amounted to choice. Benjamin’s formulationsshould not be taken as literal. Rather, narrating the dream that would bethe movement across the threshold – the movement on from boredom




– needs to be thought in relation to the structure of temporality markedout 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 counteredby the presentation of images of the future. Boredom works as a thresholdprecisely 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 conceptionof the present that is reducible to the moment thought within the passage ofchronological time. Rather, the present moment is the event happening asthe ‘now of recognizability’. The coat turning with a rapidity within whichboth the grey and the colour in an instance – the instance as ‘standstill’– become the opening where ‘great deeds’ will occur. The grey and thelustrous are brought into play. Their juxtaposition will have become anopening. An opening that appears within the repetition of habit, thoughequally it appears within repetition as habit. (Occurring within thesesettings 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 ofboth novelty on the one hand and on the other the repetition of a givencontent that cannot be represented within the temporality of eternal return,

takes on the form of a caesura.13 Repetition has to be understood in relationto a founding interruption; the interruption that founds. As will be seen thisis the opening up of habit. In writing about children’s toys Benjamin produces one of his mostimportant reflections on habit. While the position arises from within thecontext 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 first is that for Benjamin it is through the rhythms of

play that ‘we’ ‘first gain possession of ourselves’. ‘We’ gain is prior to thoseother stages – such as love – in which there is an entry ‘into the life andoften alien rhythm of another human being’ (SW 2: 120/GS 3.1: 131). Notonly is there a conception of subjectivity announced in this formulation; ofequal significance is the related additional aspect that both subjectivity asa construction and then its enactment in the realm of others is articulatedin terms of repetition. Play, for Benjamin, is presided over by the ‘law ofrepetition’. 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 adult’s version will contain important differences, however) repetition – through, and as,play – allows for what frightens (or has frightened) to be incorporated andtherefore mastered. Equally, the reiteration of the disturbing enables it tobe lived with. With its repetition what had initially frightened becomesparody. In Benjamin’s argument, the adult articulates this position in termsof storytelling while the child repeats the event in all its details. ‘An adultrelieves his heart from its terrors and doubles happiness by turning it intoa 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 typeof transformation. What is fundamental is its nature. The ‘essence’ (Wesen )

of play resides in its being ‘the transformation of a shattering experience into habit [der erschütterndsten Erfahrung in Gewohnheit ]’. Play allows an ori-ginating event to be accommodated. Living with it, becomes the registrationof play within habit and thus within dwelling. (This is the link betweenGewohnheit and Wohnen .) Habit, now as the living out of a certain structureof activity, contains within it an element that cannot be mastered even bythe demand that habit has to be lived out continually. It harbours that trans-formative moment that is its own construction. Habit contains therefore notthe capacity to revert to play but the fundamental doubling that brings twoincompatible elements (unassimilable both as an occurrence and as image)– into a type of constellation; a constellation containing both the experiencethat shatters and its transformation. This complexity has to be run backthrough 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 continualencounter with a particular conception of the founding of subjectivity.

Founding involves a dislocation that locates. The re-presentation – thusreiteration – of this positioning occurs as habit. The possession that ‘we’have of ‘ourselves’ prior to any encounter with the other is of a site thatis not simply doubled but constructed within and as ambivalence. Whatenters into relations with the other, therefore, is this doubled entity who canlove – and therefore be surprised – because that transformative potential isthere from the start. However, precisely because it is given by a foundingambiguity, even love will not transform absolutely. (Love’s end is, after

all, an insistent possibility.) Nonetheless, love is only possible because ofan original ambivalence. However, this original condition is not to beunderstood as epistemological. Ambivalence is not relativism. Even though within the precise structures of Benjamin’s own formulation it may not havebeen presented in these terms, ambivalence needs to be understood as anontological condition. As such, it is another description of what has alreadybeen identified as the many in one. In other words, the mass individual isthe locus of ambivalence; the potentiality of the masses lies therein. The

realization of that potential, however, should not be interpreted as a movefrom 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 measureof the extent to which it has become possible to perform new tasks ofapperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to evade suchtasks, art will tackle the most difficult and important tasks where it is ableto mobilize the masses. (SW 4: 268–9/GS 1.2: 505)




Mobilization, the clear instance of which is in film, 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 becomesproduction. For this very reason ambivalence brings with it an inevitablefragility. There is an instability. Art that ‘mobilizes the masses’ is not a conception of art that transformsthe life of an individual. The art in question creates the mass. It demandsthe mass and makes demands of it. The mass individual is the subject ofmodernity whose potential for collective action and thus acts of solidarityis grounded in the structure of ambivalence. Integral to that structure isthe awaiting linked to boredom. Accompanying both is the potentiality forinterruption. In general terms, interruption comes about. An interruptionthat will be an occasioning. Precisely because interruption has to be thoughtbeyond the hold of the temporality of fashion – the positing of the completelynew – there will always be fragility. Fragility, however, marks as much theinevitability of contestation as it does its possible recuperation. Subjectivityand 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 iton, it brings with it, because it recapitulates it, the very set-up that is itselfgiven by boredom’s ‘there is’ quality. Boredom’s 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 whichthe ‘straining after effects’ encounter their possibility. In other words, thedialectical antithesis to boredom is experimentation; experimentation bothas mood and as act. However, there cannot be any naivety concerning ex-

perimentation. It occurs at the time of the commodity. Moreover, itsoccurrence cannot be disassociated from the temporality of commodityproduction, though equally with a complacency in which continuity bothas 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 affirmation of experi-mentation – an affirmation in the face of the inescapable possibility for itsrecuperation. That affirmation is the project of criticism. Equally, it is the

project of politics. If images of the future are forbidden, the imaging of thefuture involves the continual encounter in the present – an encounter that works equally to construct the present – with what there is. Subjectivity’sincorporation in to the ‘there is’ gives to the subject a capacity for action. It ishowever not the action of a hero, but the cunning of the mass individual.



10

WALTER BENJAMIN’SINTERIOR HISTORY

CHARLES RICE

‘Against the armature of glass and iron, upholstery offers resistance withits textiles’ (I3, 1). In this single line, embedded within the voluminous textof Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project , arcade and domestic interior cometogether. This coming together is, however, arranged around a point ofresistance. Arcades offer a structural armature and a hardness of materialfinish that upholstery and textiles resist in their stuffing and covering. Arcades figure the wedded advance of technology and commerce, theemblem of the modernizing city; upholstery and textiles figure the domesticinterior as a site of refuge from the city and its new, alienating formsof experience. Yet this resistance heightens their mutual entanglement.Benjamin writes of arcades themselves as kinds of interiors in the city, spacesthat reorganize relations between inside and outside: ‘Arcades are houses orpassages having no outside – like the dream’ (L1a, 1). And: ‘The arcades, which originally were designed to serve commercial ends, become dwellingplaces in Fourier’ ( AP , p. 17).

This chapter will think Benjamin’s historical work on the nineteenthcentury through the concept of the interior, considering it as part of thehistorical terrain he worked over, and as a figure for an organization of thisterrain, an organization which produced the Arcades Project , a document which has largely been seen as incomplete, a provisional organizationfor a complete conception of a materialist history of Paris, capital of thenineteenth century. In producing what might be called a history of discontinuity, Benjamin

recognized a productive instability in the concept of the interior, and in itsassociated concepts such as dwelling and domesticity:

The difficulty in reflecting on dwelling: on the one hand, there is somethingage-old – perhaps eternal – to be recognized here, the image of that abodeof the human being in the maternal womb; on the other hand, this motifof primal history notwithstanding, we must understand dwelling in itsmost extreme form as a condition of nineteenth-century existence. (I4, 4)




At one level, the interior’s 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 inthe interior is the opportunity that it offers for an awakening to the realityof present conditions. Conceptually, the interior offers the space to organizerevolutionary thinking: a space where collected fragments of the nineteenthcentury could be sifted and interpreted like objects of an archaic past. Suchan 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 ofBenjamin’s thinking. The clash of the eternal and the historically new, andthe lightning flash of knowledge that this could produce, was Benjamin’spreoccupation (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 terrainthrough a concept and a cultural form that is entangled with historicalinterpretation in complex ways.

1 THE SHORT HISTORICAL LIFE OF THE BOURGEOISDOMESTIC INTERIOR

Benjamin’s difficulty in reflecting on dwelling is the difficulty in capturingthe eternal conception of dwelling as a precise historical condition of thenineteenth century. This is where the arcades become indispensible inthinking 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 oldfrom the perspective of the twentieth century – dwelling appears to standoutside of time, unfolding eternally and naturally within the interior. Yet we might also think of the resistance offered by the interior’s upholsteryand textiles as a necessary response to the emergence of the arcades, and theeffects of the modernizing city that they imply. In other words, we can thinkof 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. Theinterior is born, matures and dies out within the space of a century. As such, Benjamin’s account of the bourgeois domestic interior givenin his two exposés (of 1935 and 1939) for the intended publication Paris,Capital of the Nineteenth Century , are focused on drawing out the interior’semergence and liquidation within the span of that century. The exposé of1939 is structured in three main parts, each of which is summarized belowunder the text that begins each part: ‘Under the reign of Louis Philippe, theprivate individual makes his entry into history. For the private individual,



Walter Benjamin’s Interior History 173

places of dwelling are for the first time opposed to places of work. Theformer come to constitute the interior. Its complement is the office’ ( AP ,

p. 19). The interior’s emergence is identified with a new sort of division inthe urban and social fabric of nineteenth-century Paris. For the bourgeoisie,dwelling becomes divided from work, and in this division the conditions forthe emergence of the domestic interior are made possible. This interior is aspace of immaterial, illusory experience produced from insistently materialeffects. These effects are produced through the collection, consisting ofobjects whose ‘commodity character’ has been divested through theirpresence in the interior. The particular affect of the interior emerges out of adouble play between the material nature of the collection and the expansiveillusion that the collection supports in bringing the distant in space and timeclose to hand. ‘The interior is not just the universe of the private individual; it is also hisétui’ ( AP , p. 20). This ability to dream away with objects is only possibleto the extent that the interior is a completely enclosed environment.Benjamin writes of the interior encasing the inhabitant along with theinhabitant’s objects. The surfaces of this encasing register the impressionof both inhabitant and objects alike. These traces of occupation, of a life,

are registered as a compensation for the alienation which is at the coreof a contemporary urban experience. Yet private life is also produced asa life that can be detected and followed up through the traces that formit. Here Benjamin locates the birth of the detective novel, a genre of theprivate par excellence . The other side of this liberation into the privateis the mortification produced by the interior as encasing. Following thetraces registered in the interior leads to something akin to the uncoveringof a dead body.1

‘The liquidation of the interior took place during the last years of thenineteenth century, in the work of Jugendstil, but it had been comingfor a long time’ ( AP , p. 20). The interior confuses distinctions betweenthe animate and the inanimate, the living and the dead. The Jugendstilartist/architect begins to assume the role of total designer, taking up thetectonic elements of new constructional forms, and naturalizing them witha 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 theinterior presents itself as the last moment of a bourgeois private life madepossible there. In just two pages of text, we have a crystallization of the short historicallife of the bourgeois domestic interior. But, as Benjamin himself recognized,it is a short historical life that has engendered a sense of timelessness. In hisseminal Illustrated History of Interior Decoration , Mario Praz has associatedthis timelessness with the idea of a progressively developing history of the




interior. Introducing this idea, he cites Benjamin’s exposé in detail, em-phasizing how it illuminates the relationship between the interior, its

decoration and the ‘character’ of an inhabitant. Yet this relationship loses itshistorical specificity and becomes generalized. In witnessing the destructionof 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 thereis 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 astool or a tree stump on which to rest from his labours; and if his spirit isfreed a while from his woes, he will linger another moment and decoratehis room.2

Praz does not grasp how Benjamin’s account of the liquidation of theinterior, which Praz translates as its ‘consummation’,3 carries a force relativeto the political context of interwar Europe. For Benjamin, the liquidationof the interior presages a cultural necessity to overcome the sort of thinking

that would essentialize the experience of dwelling in the interior, that wouldmake it something timeless and essential to identity. In the essay ‘Experienceand 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, ‘You’ve got no businesshere’. And in fact you have no business in that room, for there is nospot 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 fire. A neat phrase by Brecht helps usout here: ‘Erase the traces!’ is the refrain in the first poem of his Lesebuch für Städtebewohner [Reader for City-Dwellers ] . . . This has now beenachieved 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 fromthe foregoing’, Scheerbart declared a good twenty years ago, ‘that we cansurely talk about a “culture of glass”. The new glass-milieu will transform

humanity utterly. And now it remains only to be wished that the newglass-culture will not encounter too many enemies’. (SW 2: 734)

Benjamin writes of the need to overcome experience (Erfahrung ), and theconnections to tradition that it implies, by overcoming the way in whichthe interior resists the revolutionary aspects of an architecture of glass. Thisovercoming was a political necessity, a necessity in not re-establishing aconnection to tradition and timeless values from the rubble of its destructionbut instead in accepting destruction, and the poverty of experience which




it produces, as a way of moving beyond a culture organized upon such anappeal to tradition. It is Praz’s traditional historical work that produces a

sleep of historical consciousness that would be, in Benjamin’s terms, polit-ically dangerous. In taking on this problematic relation between the eternal and the histor-ically specific, Benjamin opens the possibility for thinking critically aboutthe interior’s relation to history. Rather than the interior being the exclusiveobject of its own history, where the tendency towards the timeless andthe eternal is amplified,4 the specific conditions of the bourgeois domesticinterior’s historical emergence provide a way of structuring a thinking thatrecognizes 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 whichemerges 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 Benjamin’sthinking on historical time.5

Initially, the Convolutes of the Arcades Project can be considered the polaropposites of the exposés. Where the exposés are pithy, the Convolutes comeacross as unstructured; the line of thought travelling between the com-

mentaries and quotations that they contain is often obscure. At one level thishas to do with the fact that the Convolutes were the notes to an historicalnarrative on the nineteenth century that was never finished, a narrative for which the exposés offer a synopsis. Yet much of Benjamin’s thinking hasbeen explored through the convolute material, which has been treated ina way that casts his thinking in terms of what the Arcades Project could orshould 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 comparedto the materials used in building a house, the outline of which has just beenmarked in the ground or whose foundations are just being dug’. He describesthe exposés as:

Outlines of the plan . . . The five or six sections of each exposé should havecorresponded to the same number of chapters in the book, or, to continuethe analogy, to the five or six floors of the projected house. Next to thefoundations we find neatly piled excerpts, which would have been used




to construct the walls; Benjamin’s own thoughts would have provided themortar to hold the building together.6

The metaphor is architectural, one of structural coherence from which animage of completion can be projected. Yet in incomplete form, Tiedemannremarks upon the oppressive weight of the excerpts. As editor of theoriginal German edition of the Arcades Project , he mentions the temptationto publish only Benjamin’s comments. But the necessity of including theexcerpts, 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 edifice, one which the readershould construct through his or her own reading of it. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, the editors and translators of theEnglish version, invoke a more structurally complex metaphor in describingits ordering. The Arcades Project is ‘the blueprint of an unimaginably massiveand labyrinthine architecture – a dream city, in effect’.7 They comment thatthis might describe the project as research rather than the finished 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 combiningof quoted fragments and Benjamin’s own commentaries as a deliberatemontaging:

[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 ofrecent 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, sucha nonexistent text can still be described as having an overall philosophicalconception, bringing together an earlier, theological stage in Benjamin’sintellectual development, and a second Marxist phase. This conception she

describes as ‘a dialectics of seeing’.

10

To aid in making manifest an overallsense of order in the project, Buck-Morss develops several organizationaldiagrams or displays that aim to give several forms of overview for theproject. She explains that there is no narrative continuity in the project,but there is a conceptual coherence. Her own analysis of the project aims toshow its ‘coherent and persistent philosophical design’.11

Metaphors and diagrams of structure and organization drive theseanalyses. Yet we might return again to Benjamin’s aphorism which openedthis 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 filling 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 withthe structuring provided by architecture. In contrast to the act of building,and following up Benjamin’s 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 impressionof those objects. Benjamin’s own commentary can be thought of as themoulding of this soft surface around the collected quotations, the takingof their impression, their being enfolded softly rather than fixed rigidly with mortar, and, as such, allowing their positioning to be provisional inboth time and space. This supple sense of the upholstered surface linksto the idiosyncratic subjectivity of the collector, rather than the idealizingsubjectivity of the master-builder. After all, as Benjamin notes in the exposéof 1939, architecture’s attempt to control the interior through Jugendstil’stotalizing art leads to the literal downfall of the artist/architect. Ibsen’smaster-builder Solness plunges from the height of his tower ( AP , p. 20). This brings us closer to the interior’s opening up of a specific sort of

ordering. Pierre Missac’s understanding of the Arcades Project approachesthis idea when he writes of an ‘internal composition’ in some of Benjamin’s writings:

Although Benjamin does not provide any illumination on the subject, what seems to result is a deepening of the composition, an interiorizationof the dialectic (in the object dealt with, not in the writing subject), whichalso indicates an advance in Benjamin’s thinking and a concealing of his

intentions.12

Missac then calls to mind a fragment from Benjamin’s One-Way Street entitled ‘Interior Decoration’:

The tractatus is an Arabic form. Its exterior is undifferentiated andunobtrusive, like the façades of Arabian buildings, whose articulationbegins only in the courtyard. So, too, the articulated structure of the

tractatus is invisible from the outside, revealing itself only from within. Ifit is formed by chapters, they have not verbal headings but numbers. Thesurface of its deliberations is not enlivened with pictures, but covered withunbroken, proliferating arabesques. In the ornamental density of thispresentation, the distinction between thematic and excursive expositionsis abolished. (SW 1: 462)

Taking the interior as a mode of organization for Benjamin’s thinkingis 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 isthe interior’s 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 insidespace and an interior that covers and resists the architecture of this insidespace through upholstery. In other words, the domestic interior emergesas not simply the inside space of domestic architecture. There is also anew linguistic emergence at stake from the beginning of the nineteenthcentury. For the first time, the interior comes to mean in English: ‘Theinside 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 atheatre, a “set” consisting of the inside of a building or room’.13 A sense ofthe interior being doubled between the imagistic and the spatial in thislinguistic emergence goes hand-in-hand with an idea of the interior inpublication. Important folios of interiors, including Charles Percier andPierre Fontaine’s Receuil de décorations intérieurs of 1801, and ThomasHope’s Household Furniture and Interior Decoration of 1807, contextu-alize the newly emergent domestic interior as a specific site of decorativeendeavour. These publications are emblematic of attempts by architects to

claim influence over the interior, yet through the nineteenth century theinterior develops as a site of intense contestation between architects andnewly emergent professionals known as interior decorators.14 Ultimately itis the ‘victory’ of the Jugendstil architect/artist that liquidates the interior,or, more specifically, that liquidates the conceptual and actual separabilityof the interior from architecture. The antagonism between architectureand the interior is where Benjamin begins his ‘convoluted’ account of theinterior. The bourgeois domestic interior may have a short historical life,

but it is never simply finished.

3 THE CONVOLUTIONS OF THE INTERIOR

To the extent that we can say there is a beginning to Convolute I, ‘TheInterior, the Trace’, it is one where furniture, which is movable, begins totake on aspects of architecture’s immovability. Architecture and furniture

enter into battle: ‘You see beds and armoires bristling with battlements’ (I1,1). Architecture itself becomes interiorized. The interior becomes biggerthan architecture, enfolding it in a kind of dream space where scale shifts.Considering furniture as the movable – as opposed to architecture as theimmovable – allows Benjamin a more immediate access to the dreamworldof the nineteenth century. Immediately after the quotations on architecture’srelation to furniture through fortification, Benjamin offers this comment:‘The importance of movable property, as compared with immovableproperty. 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 thebanal 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 bourgeoisinteriors, where the faraway and exotic are brought together in an instant-aneous and total effect. More comments and quotations are devoted to thequalities of exotic, dreamlike interiors, until the idea of furniture as forti-fication surfaces again, this time with a more pointed comment about spatialarrangements of furniture that mark out a defensible space in the interior.Benjamin quotes architectural critic Adolf Behne on the diagonal placementof carpets and furniture:

The deeper explanation for all this is, again, the unconscious retentionof a posture of struggle and defense . . . Just as the knight, suspecting anattack, positions himself crosswise to guard both left and right, so thepeace-loving burgher, several centuries later, orders his art objects in sucha way that each one, if only by standing out from all the rest, has a walland moat surrounding it. (I2, 3)

This defensive posture in the interior leads on to the idea that interiorsprovide ‘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 fromTheodor Adorno on the relation between environment and the inwardness

of thought in Kierkegaard. This passage leads Benjamin to more considerednotes that can be seen to underpin the exposés’ comments on the interior,these comments having to do with ‘the difficulty in reflecting on dwelling’(I4, 4) – the reference to dwelling that was mentioned at the beginning ofthe chapter. At this point the theme of the trace emerges more strongly:‘Plush – the material in which traces are left especially easily’ (I5, 2). Heincludes 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, itshows as much how Benjamin’s thinking moves in the interior as it does theinterior’s historical contours. The interior offers a space of immersion for histhinking, and, in turn, the trajectories of his thinking can be traced out, inthe sense of a detection of his thinking. To postulate that such traces belongto a diagram or structure of thinking is to impose a system of thought– indeed, systematic thought – over an idiosyncratic gathering together offragments. Rather, the convolute registers as a plane of immanence, a surface




gathering but also being formed and deformed through the impressionsmade 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 theseimpressions to be divined? This question might be approached by thinkingthrough the relation between the Convolutes and the exposés. The exposéscan 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 theConvolutes and exposés mimics the interior’s historical emergence as both aspatial and representational condition. In this doubled condition, an imageis not simply transparent to a space. So too with the exposés and Convolutes;yet we might think of the trajectory of Benjamin’s thinking being traced outbetween them. In this traced line, a dialectical image is formed, allowing

the fragments wrested from their temporal and associational embeddednessto deliver the force of an argument to a present context of reception. Here isBenjamin on the dialectical image:

What distinguishes images from the ‘essences’ of phenomenology is theirhistorical index . . . These images are to be thought of entirely apart fromthe 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 legibilityonly at a particular time. And indeed, this acceding ‘to legibility’ consti-tutes a specific critical point in the movement at their interior. (N3, 1)

The dialectical image, formed through the trace between Convolutes andexposés, is the trace between the nineteenth century as archaic past andBenjamin’s temporal present. It carries a force that produces an awakeningto the problems of the present. Specifically for the interior as a cultural

form, this awakening had to do with its abandonment as a space of retreatand immersion. It is in the crystallization of a concept of modern dwellingas rootless, open and on the move that the bourgeois domestic interior isdelivered of its regressive resistance, being delivered instead into a differentkind of resistance, one of revolutionary thinking, where the radical potentialfor dwelling of a glass architecture is illuminated. The force of Benjamin’s interiorized thinking breaks the interior apart.This breaking apart, only possible through an immersion within theinterior, renders the eternal sense of dwelling radically historical. But this




radical historicity renders the broken fragments archaic. An image of theinterior – the interior as image – arises with most clarity at the moment of

its historical passing. The intention concealed within the interior was thecritical 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 thereception of Sigfried Giedion’s book Building in France, Building in Iron,Building in Ferro-Concrete published a year before, and admired Giedion’sintellectual capacity in uncovering ‘the tradition by observing the present’.1

Two things strike us in this short phrase: Firstly, the word ‘uncover’ endowsthe historian with skills of a person who rescues what is beneath the dirtif not the time passed as is the case with an archaeologist.2 Secondly, forBenjamin, ‘vision’ is central to the historian’s search for that which shouldbe rescued. But what is this vision equipped with? Is it the historian’sintellect, the breadth of knowledge and information accumulated throughobservation and collection of facts and figures? Or is it a world-view, ‘the

philosophy of history’, as Benjamin believed to be the case? Following Benjamin’s discourse on history, this essay presents ‘autonomy’as a strategic position to underline the importance of the disciplinaryhistory of architecture for historiography. Rethinking the idea of autonomyis necessary because in the present situation ‘design’ is informed by motivesprevalent in all cultural production activities, leaving no room for a creativeengagement with the culture of building, that which is architectural inarchitecture. The extraphenomenal, which is nurtured by the physicality of

building, is indeed the content of architecture’s autonomy. This entails theargument for a doubling which is informed, firstly, by themes developedthrough the work of architects, critics, and historians. Secondly, such anargument demands a reinterpretation of the thematic of the culture ofbuilding through the techniques that prevailed in any particular historicalperiod. The conjunction between technique and autonomy should not betaken as discursive by definition; rather, it involves investigating the strategiesby 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 historyof 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 andthe aesthetic of abstract painting.

2 THE GHOST OF HISTORY

My wing is ready for flight,I would like to turn back.If I stayed everliving time,I would have little luck.

Gerhard Scholem’s poem stimulated Walter Benjamin’s insightful reading ofa Paul Klee painting entitled Angelus Novus . This is how Benjamin picturedthe angel of history: eyes wide open, and wings spread, the angel’s face isturned 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 isblowing from Paradise’. The storm propels the angel forward, into the futureto which the angel’s back is turned. According to Benjamin, this storm is‘what we call progress’ (SW 4: 392).3

What Benjamin’s reading of the Angelus Novus involves can be describedin the following words: Once the storm of progress is associated with themyth of ‘paradise’, the task of the historian turns to deconstruction of the

‘chain of events’, and uncovering the catastrophe. A distinction shouldbe made between natural catastrophe, such as flood and earthquake, andthe historical catastrophe. The temporality entailed in history necessitatesdistinguishing the ruins of the past from the wreckage that is left by thestorm of progress. The ruin is not just the effect of time; rather, it involvesthe decay of material and of course a sense of aesthetic appreciation that isbound 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 specificityof time is experienced in the absence of a unity that would set the subtext fordurability and meanings assigned or expected from every action includingthe act of design and production of architecture. In the Renaissance, forexample, or even in the first decades of the last century, architecture playeda crucial role in housing and gathering communities that were connectedto the various institutions of the society. In contrast, the architects’ goodintentions today cannot escape the forces of commodification of values andtechniques that want to turn every edifice into a spectacular ornament. In




this situation, any relation to the past is subject to temporality, as the stormof progress moves from one catastrophic situation to another. According to

Françoise Choay, ‘the historic monument has a different relationship to livingmemory and to the passage of time’. On the one hand, she continues:

It is simply constituted as an object of knowledge and integrated intoa linear conception of time: in this case its cognitive value relegates itirrevocably to the past, or . . . to the history of art in particular; on theother 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 witnessesthe decay of our competence to build, then, how should architecturearticulate the architectonic of that ‘witnessing?’ Choay’s idea of ‘the decayof competence to build’ alludes to the disappearance of that totality whichprevailed in premodern era. The artistic representation of that totality wasindeed the content of what architects and builders would create under thename of place. But does that decay also banish the vision of competence tobuild?6

The place is experienced through technique. But techniques are not justan assembly of tools: besides doing what they are invented for, techniquesset up a particular movement and rhythm the temporality of which coord-inates the body’s action and its relation to a place.7 Those who lived throughthe modern times had access to technologies that launched the first attackon the spirit of the place, the experience of which was based on naturaltime. The present experience of time, framed by the advent of electronicnetworking, 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 potentialitiesof the body. Electronic technologies, if one relies on Jean-François Lyotard’saccount in The Postmodern Condition , are changing the balance between thenatural, the body and the built-form. Computer technologies have changedour communication system. They have also shaken the situation where onecould have space for self-contemplation. Privacy, the microspace, is invaded,if not taken over by the global flow of information and goods. We eat,

wear, watch and even dream about things that have the least relation to ourimmediate place. Involuntary memory of a bygone place is the only thingleft to the present generation, and the next generation of architects mighthave even less chance to imagine and contemplate a memory that wouldevoke any aspects of ‘the competence to build’. This discussion entails two assumptions; firstly, that progress is registeredin an understanding of time that orchestrates one’s experience of the naturaltime. Progress progresses, but its flow does not suggest that history unfoldsaccording to a pre-planned linear path. Secondly, the juxtaposition between




the natural and the ruins of modernity – the piled wreckage of the past – isessential 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 ithad once signified, since the inscriptions are illegible or written in the deadlanguage’. And he concludes: ‘beneath the historical present, however, liethe spectres, the phantoms, waiting to reappear and upset it’.8 What doesthis statement, which addresses something central to Benjamin’s vision ofhistory, entail for architecture? The question necessitates two considerations: First, to differentiate historyfrom historiography, and second, to underline the specificity of architec-ture’s relation to history. The difference between history and historiographyis obvious, but needs to be reiterated mainly because of Benjamin’s uniqueintellectual cause. The title of Werckmeister’s essay, mentioned in note 3,anticipates the author’s detailed account of Benjamin’s various rewritingsof what finally would be formulated as the angel of history. The ‘transfig-uration of the revolutionary into the historian’, the subtitle of Werckmeister’sessay, summarizes the tale of Benjamin’s intellectual life, which was closelyconnected to the broader praxis of the Left in 1930s. In the available

four versions of Benjamin’s text the reader notes a modification at work which not only demonstrates Benjamin’s disappointment with the fate of‘revolution’ in those days, but also unfolds the process of distillation of theconcept of angel from all religious connotations except one: that the angel,like a superman, represents the image of a gifted revolutionary figure whocould read more into the rubble of history than anybody else. In giving upthe idea of progress as the ultimate engine of political revolution, Benjaminturned the revolutionary and constructive aspects of Marx’s understanding

of history into the act of historiography. While historicism is content with‘establishing a causal connection between various moments in history’, andperpetuates ‘the eternal image of the past’, materialistic historiography,according to Benjamin, ‘is based on a constructive principle. Thinkinginvolves 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 flow of time, then, one way to halt thiscontinuum 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 thepast, 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 thetransformation of which was of great interest to Benjamin. In his journey toMoscow, 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 withhistory, and architecture was conceived not only as a constructive form,

tecktonica , but an agent of historical reconstruction. Rodchenko, accordingto Hubertus Gassner, called the constructivists’ objects ‘comrades’.10 Thesearchitects 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 tooverpower nature. Rather, following the Marx of the 1884 manuscript,constructivists attempted, as Susan Buck-Morss reminds us, ‘to liquidate thedistinction between artist and worker, not by the subservience of aestheticpleasure to industrial instrumentality, but by the interpretation of activities, which provided images suggestive of a reconciliation with nature, whereinsensual (aesthetic) pleasure was understood as the goal, transcending merephysical need’.11 This observation warrants the following question: Wasnot the work of constructivists unleashing the fear Giedion noticed restingbeneath 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, concealedbehind facades, the basis of our present existence is taking place’.12 WhileGiedion was making rather radical remarks in connection to Le Corbusier’s

early architecture, Russian constructivists, instead, were weaving the anti-cipatory potentialities of technology into the collective practice, and thusgrafting the collective experience of those revolutionary moments into thelinguistic potentialities of architecture. The experience of the Russian constructivists is one instance whichhighlights the implication of Benjamin’s 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 tothe politics of a dictatorial state.13 This observation necessitates the followingdistinction; although the culture of building (architecture’s interiority) runsthrough many historical periods, its thematic remains autonomous fromthe politics of any state except when the state apparatus attempts to controlthe language of architecture; or when an architect, or a group of architects,chooses to inflict the autonomy of architecture with extradisciplinaryvalues.

Are there other moments to discuss architecture’s specific relation tohistory? If Werckmeister’s reading of the motives involved in Benjamin’srewriting of the thesis of history is correct, then, ‘transfiguration’ connotesBenjamin’s turn from the realism of revolutionary praxis to historiography(theory) of that practice. An argument could be made that even if thisturn were central to Benjamin’s thesis of history, any discussion of archi-tectural history entails a reversal of that turn, signifying the move fromhistoriography as a theoretical thesis into the writing of the actuality ofarchitecture’s project. The shift is implied in Benjamin’s essay on the work




of art. According to him, ‘buildings have accompanied human existencesince primeval times. Many art forms have come into being and passed

away . . . Architecture has never had fallow periods. Its history is longer thanthat of any other art, and its effect ought to be recognized in any attempt toaccount for the relationship of the masses to the work of art’ (SW 4: 268). What is the implication of Benjamin’s statement for architectural history? In the first place, the anthropological dimension of Benjamin’s remarkneeds to be addressed. That architecture is inconceivable apart from theeveryday life of the masses does not necessarily suggest that architecturemirrors the social and technological development of its context. Architectureenjoys a degree of autonomy, which paradoxically assures its bond to variouslayers of the social environment. Architecture progresses by readjustingthe conventions intrinsic to the art of building, that is, architecture’s dis-ciplinary history. James Ackerman is correct in discussing architecture as aconvention equal to what we expect of language: once its elements are estab-lished ‘it maintains an astonishing constancy through time’.14 This duration,building’s companionship with masses, however, is fragile; otherwise the wreckage of the past would have no meaning. The loss of aura, discussedby 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 senseout of progress.15 Benjamin’s ‘anthropological materialism’, instead, drawsits conclusions from a ‘bodily collectivity’ that is traceable in the sphereof images, and the bodily self-consciousness stimulated by technologicaldevelopment.16 The historical intertextuality, if not the confrontation,between modernity and the idealist conventions of humanism underlinesthe import of psychoanalysis17 (unconsciousness) for the anthropological side

of Benjamin’s belief that ‘architecture has never been idle’.That Benjamin’s discourse was a critique of the romantic yearning for aunified state of art, that his aspiration for technology was not aligned withthe instrumental logic and the total affirmation of technology, does thatimplicate his concept of the loss of aura with a psychological dimension.Similar to the dream world construed by Freud, the wreckage of progressrelates to history without having any actual presence. Again, this distinctionunderlines the difference between historical ruins and architecture’s relation

to history. The physical presence of the ruin stimulates a romantic relationto the past, sustaining a totalized image of a bygone time. The work of archi-tecture, instead, maintains a complex relation with history; this complexitycould become reductive and simplistic when architecture is forced to simulatehistorical forms, as was the case with the 1970s postmodern historicism. Benjamin’s reflections on architecture in the ‘work of art’ essay entail aradical understanding of architecture’s relation to history.18 As the storm ofprogress blows, architecture maintains its companionship with the massesthrough Verwindung , which is discussed by Gianni Vattimo. Accepting




Benjamin’s characterization of the loss of aura, this Italian thinker conceivesthe attainability of a tectonic dialogue between conventions and the ‘excess’

offered by technical development, through radicalization of the processof the secularization of values.19 And according to Beatrice Hanssen, ‘forBenjamin secularisation announced the fall away from religious, historicaltime into an inauthentic, excessive preoccupation with space and spatial-ization – a predicament for which, once again, the natural sciences wereto be held partly responsible’.20 This suggests that architecture does not re-present an ossified image of the past. History, rather, is presented throughthe inevitable doubling that takes place between the intrinsic laws of the artof building and the actuality of the present experienced in both technicaland 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 thatinvolves construing the act of construction. While the former sense of timeforces architecture to internalize the latest available techniques, the latteris experienced in the drive for technification of architecture and confron-tation of this process with the essentiality of the tectonic for the linguisticautonomy of architecture.

Once this doubling is established, what needs to be added is therecognition of two moments when the ghost of history has hauntedarchitecture.22 Architecture’s departure from the classical wisdom in theeighteenth century, and later with the discovery and invention of industrialmaterial and techniques in the mid-nineteenth century, both these historicalmoments had critical repercussions on contemporary architecture.23 In thefirst moment, architecture enjoyed a temporary state of autonomy, oneparadoxical result of which was its deeper entanglement with the institutions

of capitalism discussed by Manfredo Tafuri. In the second moment, theontological bond between the body, landscape, and the craft of architecture was shaken, and the initial steps were taken towards the disappearance ofthe competence to build. The latter development, whose impact on archi-tecture is not yet finalized, set the pretext for Kenneth Frampton’s discourseon ‘critical history’. The degree to which these two contemporary historiansare relevant to the present situation opens a discussion that cannot takeplace here.24 What needs to be said is that these two historical ruptures are

the theoretical underpinning of the import of historical unconsciousnessfor architectural historiography even today.25 Once this is established, thediscourse of the autonomy of architecture should be understood at twolevels: first in reference to architecture’s confrontation with techniques developed outside of architecture’s disciplinary history; and second, in theextent to which the autonomy of architecture is considered as a phenomenondifferentiating architectural historiography from other histories. The matrixof these two discourses sustains the praxis that upholds ‘autonomy’ as astrategic position for the present situation of architectural practice.




3 THE GHOST OF THE ARCHITECT

To say that the historian’s vision is overcast by the apparition of an archi-

tect’s work necessitates a discussion that, in the first place, involves the taskof the historian, and in the second, demands specifying the subject matterof architectural history. The point is not to picture the architect as a giftedseer, but to underline the importance of the work itself. How the projectaddresses the interiority of architecture, and in doing so interjects a criticalhorizon into the historian’s discourse? The autonomy of architecture’s interiority has always been understood inreference to architecture’s dialogue with institutions, among which the most

influential are land, capital and technology. These three factors are essentialfor differentiating architecture from other artistic activities. Paradoxically,it can be claimed that the very realization of architecture’s project is boundto the investment of capital, land and technology. Architecture cannot beconstructive and transform the built environment effectively without thesefactors. This is not to deny the fact that utopian projects could also informthe 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 fromvisual arts, painting and sculpture in particular. Hence the importanceof asking an old question: what is architectural in architecture? And, howis architecture’s particularity approached in the historian’s text? That thediscipline of architectural history is a young one and was born out of thebone of art history says nothing new. What is important in reiterating thisold story, however, involves an argument to address architectural history inreference to the formative themes of architecture’s disciplinary history; asubject dismissed by art history in most cases. Before the mechanical reproduction of art, the symbolic content of theartwork was detrimental in differentiating artistic creativities from eachother. In the Renaissance, for example, the homology between arts wasdiscussed in reference to simulacra – the symbolic association made betweeneveryday life and the divine world of Christianity. Although the symboliccontent, the aura of the artwork discussed by Benjamin, disappeared whenmodern 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 discussesarchitecture in terms of habit and the tactile, rather than the optical. Eventransformation taking place in the optical realm is considered effective when it is changed into habit. That which bonds architecture in premodernsocieties with painting and sculpture is indeed the work’s symbolic contentand not the technique specific to each artistic activity. Still, after the birthof art history in the nineteenth century, the perceived homologies betweendifferent artistic productions was formulated in terms of style, understood




either as a subjective choice or expression of the will of the time. In neitherperiod did the technique specific 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 métier of painting or buildingrespectively. That the mediums of the work for painters is surface and paint,and those of architects the tectonic articulation of material and techniqueare obvious and need no further discussion in this place. What must beadded is how the proponents of contemporary art history have approachedthese issues. In 1888 Heinrich Wölfflin,26 the father of contemporary art history,introduced the term ‘painterly’ to discuss baroque art and architecture. Tohim the concept of the painterly was qualified to make a distinction betweenRenaissance and baroque art. For reasons that are outside our considerationhere, Wölfflin argued that the art of building in baroque abandoned itscharacteristic nature and looked for effects that belonged to another art,and thus it became painterly. His discourse set criteria for periodization. Theinterrelationship between different arts, he exhorted, was theological, thoughhe argued that those homologies are motivated by the technique of one oranother 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 specificity of the work and ended in over-generalization. Benjamin identifies Wölfflin’s failurein a dualism formulated in the following words: ‘a flat, universalising historyof the art of “all cultures and times”, on the one hand, and an academicaesthetic, on the other hand – without, however, being able to overcome itentirely’ (SW 2: 666). The problems with Wölfflin’s argument are two: first,

he casts his own interpretative tool, ‘painterly’, as a phenomenon shared bythe artists and architects of the period under consideration. He mixes thetime invested in the work with those of the historian. Second, his analysisremains formalistic, even though his line of argumentation charges the ideaof painterly with a sense of aura.

What is missing in Wölfflin’s all-encompassing whole is the essentialityof the work and how its material content is tied closely to historical circum-stances. In his remarks on Wölfflin’s methodology, Benjamin’s argument

is suggestive of a historical vision, which, in the first place, underlinesthe significance of the work. But not every work: only ‘those whose life ismost deeply embedded in their material content’, which over the course oftheir ‘historical duration these material contents present themselves to theresearcher all the more clearly the more they have disappeared from the world’ (SW 2: 669). In the second place, which concerns the appropriationof the work, Benjamin emphasizes architecture’s particularity apprehendedas an objective entity whose structures effect the imaginative being of theviewer. At both levels, the ‘image’ is crucial in Benjamin’s remarks on the




ways the work presents itself to the historian. This prompts a discussionthat concerns the essentiality of the tectonic for architecture but also the

poetics (image-laden quality) of construction: a subject that triggered debatebetween Alois Riegl and Semperians.27

Riegl, an Austrian art historian, challenged the idea of autonomy impliedin Wölfflin’s remarks on the formal properties of art, and underlined thebeholder’s role in the internal unity of painting and its ‘necessity’ for theevolution 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 lessconcerned for the subjective process of creation, or a materialistic interestin matter-of-factness. Kunstwollen , artistic volition, was for Riegl a gestaltof continuous flow of thought that would make a reciprocal dialogue withsociotechnological transformations.29 Riegl’s importance, however, lay inhis argument that stylistic changes are driven by the perceptual world. When Benjamin made his famous statement that, ‘just as the entire modeof existence of human collective changes over long historical periods, so toodoes their mode of perception’ (SW 4: 255), the major historical example heprovided was from the late Roman art industry whose birth, according toRiegl, coincided with a sense of perception different from the classical one.

Obviously Benjamin had read Riegl’s Late Roman Art Industry ; nevertheless,he criticized Riegl for not discussing the social sources of the alleged newperception (SW 2: 255). What was intriguing to Benjamin was the contem-poraneity that would catch up with Riegl’s writing a decade later throughexpressionism. This opens an opportunity to make a similar claim: Riegl wasnot just reformulating Wölfflin’s ideas; it was rather the contemporaneity ofSemper’s position on history and style that haunted Riegl’s discourse. Semper and Riegl agreed on one point: that techniques, skills and forms

developed in the applied and decorative arts are important for major artisticproduction beyond territorial constraint. Their difference, however, pointsto the art historian’s concern for surface and image, and the tectonic forSemper. This is how Alina Payne articulates the ways these two importantfigures of the late nineteenth century read fabrication and surface:

For Riegl the carpet was not an example of fabrication, of manipulationby the hand, tied into an anthropological explication of the development

of shelter-making as it had been for Semper. Instead, he looked at thecarpet as a decorative, painting-like surface, displaying a will-to-form thatreached all artistic production and manifested itself in the predilection fora particular range of decorative motifs.30

The difference is obvious: abstraction in Riegl’s position unfolds a newhorizon in discussing the work of painting. Abstraction figures itself, inthe first 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 Rieglexemplifies the ‘masterly command of the transition from the individual

object to the cultural and intellectual [ geistig ] function’ (SW 2: 668). Inthe second place, abstraction is recognized as a cognitive tool to periodizehistory. In contemplating the developmental process of art from the hapticto the optical, Riegl failed to recognize the import of modern institutions forany production activity. His main focus was directed towards a discussionof architecture that is not a self-reflecting object, but includes the spectator.Semper, instead, chides the ‘thing’ character of the artefact whose aestheticis not seen as an autonomous entity perceived by the beholder; rather it isrevealed through the embellishment of material and purpose (ur-form). Thesurface of the carpet has no life of its own; it is woven into the technique offabrication, even if the latter is not visible as is the case with the carpet, orimplied as understood in Semper’s formulation of the relationship betweenthe art-form and the core-form. Furthermore, contrary to Riegl, Semper’stheorization of architecture does not end in a closed system; once theparticularity of architecture is recognized in the tectonic, the autonomyof 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 architect’s understanding of the dis-ciplinary history of architecture differs from those which have prevailed inart history. Also mention should be made to the specificity of the suggested‘openness’ in Semper’s theory: he not only theorized architecture beyondthe 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 historybased on the prevailed techniques of making does, paradoxically, subjectarchitecture to the nihilism of modernity. This is one reason why the tectonichas become of interest to most contemporary historians who attempt toformulate the thematic of critical practice. Paradoxically, those who wantto theorize at present architecture along with the spectacle generated bycomputer technologies appropriate Semper’s ideas too.31

The suggested ‘openness’ and ‘closure’ is not exclusive to Semper: many

modernists who wanted to avoid making a one-to-one correspondencebetween the spirit of time and architecture also sought to rethink archi-tecture’s interiority according to the demands of time.32 This much is clearfrom Charles Garnier, the architect of the Opera House in Paris, whodiscusses architecture not only within history but also in its engagement inthe construction of history. In his words, ‘architects who build monumentsmust consider themselves to be the writers of future history; they mustindicate in their works the characteristics of the time in which they create;finally 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 topicalityof a particular theme at a given historical junction understood by architects;and secondly, how is architecture the object of knowledge awaiting to beunbounded by the historian. This argument necessitates a discussion thatconcerns the idea of time and its role in mapping the task of the architec-tural historian. In two instances, Benjamin’s text on history is suggestive of images thatprompt a standstill understanding of time. The first instance is marked bythe angel’s reception of the wind of progress: a move that pushes the angelinto ‘the future to which his back is turned’. The angel looks at and contem-plates that which is left behind by the storm. The angel’s body and directionof his gaze indeed ‘block’ the movement of the time-forward; the time ofcontemplation is not presented in its apartness from the past, but the pastis infused, or recognized, in the now of the present. The second moment isnoticed in the image when Benjamin makes an analogy between the waysfashion evokes the costumes of the past with ‘a tiger’s 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 latter’s 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 partof the critique of the concept of progress’.34 Here Peter Osborne makes acritical distinction between the figure of angel and that of a historian. Whilethe historical avant-garde has demonstrated special concern for the ‘new’,that which is located behind the back of the angel (the future), the historianattempts to save the historical specificity, opening a different horizon of

activity by the critique of progress. And Andrew Benjamin argues thatcriticism should not concern itself with the factuality of history, but ‘withthe temporality that such facts display and within which such a facts areable to be displayed. History cannot be thought other than as a philosophyof time’.35 Both images presented in Benjamin’s text ask the historian toexplode the continuum of history.36 A task, which could only be fulfilledthrough the ‘dialectical image’, a construction whose principle is the act ofmontage.37

Thus the task of the historian is to dismantle the work and to demon-strate how architecture’s interiority was seen in a particular time. The taskalso necessitates the challenge of the work’s claim for standing up to thedemands of the time of its construction. Adhering to the ethics of truth tomaterial and construction, Garnier could suggest that an architect shouldface the demand of the time; but the historian should instead question thearchitect’s very claim for the work’s ability to arrest the spirit of its time,and the unity that the work claims to hold. According to Benjamin, ‘theproducts 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 ofbarbarism’ (SW 3: 267). One implication of Benjamin’s statement can beformulated in the following words: by dismantling the work, the historianends 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 Benjamin’s remarks on history suggests, against thenetwork of intentions that create the condition for the work’s production.Only in this way, Carlo Ginzburg reminds us, ‘will it be possible to takeinto account, against the tendency of the relativists to ignore the one or theother, power relationships as well as what is irreducible to them’.38 Secondly,attention should be given to how the work ‘translates’ material and techniqueinto tectonic figuration. The tectonic as theorized by Semper allows decon-struction of all kinds of unities and continuities essential for the humanistdiscourse on architecture. By distancing his theory of architecture fromthe theological aspects of Riegl’s ideas implied in Kunstwollen , the tectonicformulates what is intrinsic to the art of building (architecture’s interiority)

with factors extraneous to architecture. What the tectonic means to archi-tecture could be associated with the impact of the mechanical reproductionof the artwork and the loss of aura. This suggests a passage from poesis totechne ,39 an opening that necessitates a critical dialogue between architectureand modernity. Another implication of Benjamin’s observation concernsthe durability of the work: that architecture survives its time through theculture of building rather the intentions of the architect, or because of thephysical strength of building.

In leaving the architect’s intentions behind, it remains to establishanother aspect of the task-awaiting historian: what is the particularityof the work, a building that invites criticism? And, given the disjunctionbetween autonomy and historicity, is it not, then, the particularity of a workthat opens itself up as historical? To make an opening to these questions,a distinction should be made between the work of a connoisseur and thatof the historian. The former’s task is limited to recognizing the presenceof the hand of the genius in the work and issues relevant to style. Before

the rise of art history, most discussions concerning architectural historyaimed at characterizing the particularity of the work in association witha ‘style-determined’ period, and/or the artist’s skills in demonstrating theessentiality of mimesis for the work.40 The historian instead cuts throughthe work and produces knowledge. And yet, the knowledge one receivesfrom architecture would not become constructive if it does not stand ashistorical. If ‘historical’ does not concern style, then what does it stand for?In the first place, ‘historical’ concerns the question of modernity in its manymanifestations, including ‘criticism as a negative court of judgement’,41 but




more importantly, in regard to Benjamin’s 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 toBeatrice Hanssen, destroys ‘the shrine to the arcane secret it was believed tohold, but also it sundered art’s links to the divine place (topos ) on which thetemple or shrine were formerly built’.42 On the other, Benjamin’s discourseon technology is consequential for any discussion concerning the ‘destiny’of architecture in modernity. What it is essential to point out here is thatsince the modernization of production activity, the techniques inherent toarchitecture were inflicted by technologies developed outside of the cultureof building. Furthermore, the knowledge of architectural praxis which was handed down from one architect to another, as the métier of building,and the fact that in premodern societies a particular building could nothave been finished in the life-span of a single architect, frame a historicalsituation that could not continue (for many reasons that should not bediscussed here) in modernity. The importance of tectonics is obvious again,but it needs to be qualified not in association with the architect but withthe work of the historian. The distinction made by Benjamin between thehistory of art work and art criticism from human history opens a discussion

concerning the specificity of architectural historiography.43

Wölfflin argued that ‘all paintings owe more to other paintings than theyowe to direct observation’.44 This statement suggests that the knowledgethat unfolds in critique should address the ways a given work of architecturerelates to architecture’s interiority. The parallelism drawn between critiqueand the thematic of architecture’s interiority qualifies the historian withhistorical knowledge of architecture in the first place. What critique furtherunfolds is the historian’s 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 whichthe work of the historian addresses the dialogical relationship between truthand criticism underscores ‘a process that first makes what is to be knowninto that as which it is known’ (SW 1: 148). That which is known is thedisciplinary 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 andpresent it as historical. What does the argument presented in this essay entail for architecturalhistoriography? 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; thearchitect’s metanarratives, but also the body of work, that is, the culture ofbuilding whose themes and strategies differentiate architectural praxis fromother 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 architect’s attempt to present a totalizedpicture of diverse stories involved in the work’s realization. This demandsinflicting the historicality of the work with the problematic of the presentarchitectural praxis, that is, the technification of architecture,45 and the levelof abstraction involved in the process of design as architects utilize telecom-munication technologies. Finally, the future that a project assigns to itselfshould be regarded as the architectonic realization of a past whose traces canbe recovered by the fleeting moments of the present. In this reconstructionarchitecture loses its autonomy and becomes a fragment in the constellationof 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 criticalrole 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 linesand circles. One seems to be either looking down the line from the heightof 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 hasgone before. Historians oblige us by compiling chronicles and chronologiesof events or occasionally painting a grand canvas of rises and falls. Timemoves on inexorably, either off to the horizon or in an endless spinning ofthe eternal return of the same.

We do not live time in some special nonrepresentational way, where theflowing-off of the moment is given in pure immediacy. Rather, we livetime through our representations of it, in the newspaper, on the television,according to the clock, following the prompting of the palm-pilot. Time isnot simply a flow or a river for us, but is rather broken into chunks, hours,minutes, days, weeks of holidays, quarters of a game, seconds downloadingimages, years watching our children grow. It is not one event after another,

but it is measurable and publicly standardized and, while punctuated, thereis a memory of a past and an expectation of the future that hangs on ourclock and calendar. The messianic, however, is a name for a not-yet, a futurethat exceeds the present, that interrupts it and our own expectations for afuture. 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 inBenjamin’s work than the messianic. In this volume alone, there will beseveral serious discussions of it, and the bibliography on that topic wouldrun to dozens if not scores of important essays – by scholars, by critics, byphilosophers.1 This discussion will not serve as a literature review, but willoffer a specific angle of enquiry. For a few years I have explored a group oftwentieth-century Jewish thinkers who developed a parallel interpretationof the messianic: Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber,




Gershom Scholem, Ernst Bloch, as well as Emmanuel Levinas and JacquesDerrida. Scholars do not lavish the same fascination on the messianic in

their works as they do on the messianic in Benjamin’s. One could ask: Whatis the attraction to this theme as found in Benjamin, a Jewish thinker whorarely reflects on Jewish texts and traditions? Does Benjamin represent aformal messianic (Derrida’s messianicity ) or a lapsed-Jewish messianic? Have we written to excess on this topic due to a fascination with the residue ofabandoned and defunct Jewish tradition? My task, however, is not primarily a metadiscussion of the Benjaminscholarship, but rather to look at the way that the messianic transforms thedivision of time into lines and circles. Thus, you might have expected meto write about Thesis B: ‘For the Jews, however, the future was nonethelessnot turned to homogeneous nor empty time. Because in it every second wasthe narrow gate through which the Messiah could enter’, or perhaps ThesisII: ‘Because like every generation before us, we have been endowed with aweak messianic power, to which the past has a claim’. Instead, I will focuson 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 circleas calendar has been transformed in our time. Moreover, I believe that a

layering of circles upon circles, or circles within circles, begins to disruptthe narrativity of the circle itself. That superpositioning of circles or thatimpositioning of circles will allow us to see a specific relation to Benjamin’sown 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 greatrevolution introduced a new calendar. [ii] The day, with which a calendar

begins, functions as a historical time-lapse camera. And it is basicallythe same day that always returns in the form of festival days, the days ofremembrance [Eingedenkens ]. [iii] The calendar, therefore, does not counttime like clocks. They are the monuments of a historical consciousness,and for a hundred years in Europe not even the slightest trace of themappears. (Thesis XV, GS 1.2: 701–2/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 timeand making of a given year a circle from a linear narrative. Calendars are thecircles. To change a society we would have to change the calendar, to changethe 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 takea step to the side to see how Rosenzweig interpreted calendars in his The Starof Redemption, a work that was familiar to and respected by Benjamin. Othershave explored the relation between the two thinkers, but I will focus instead onthe 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 explanationis the Jewish calendar, but not because it is lunar and so has a complicatedintercalation formula. No, its demand is that we think about time notmerely linearly, but more importantly, not merely circularly.

Rosenzweig develops an account of eternity that requires eternity not tobe a flight from time, but an insertion of eternality into temporality. Ourlived time must itself become changed, and become in that sense messianic.

We live time socially and experience time with the breaks and units thatsociety 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 themost basic units in our lives arise from the regular repetitions of sociallyconstructed bits of time: the hour, the week and the year as marked on ourcalendars. Constructions that are not merely time-lines, that measure thepassing away of time, but allow for the circling back of time. The revolutionin 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 contrastbegins, 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, buta 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 middleindeed many middle moments between its beginning and its end. Withbeginning, middle, and end it can become that which the mere sequenceof individual and ever new moments never can, a recoiling circle. Initself 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 newmoment relieves the old one. Rather, there begins ‘again an’ hour. Thisre-commencement, however, would not be possible for the hour if it weremerely 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 strikingof the bells establishes the hour, not the ticking of the pendulum. For thehour is a wholly human institution. (322–3/290)3

For Rosenzweig, the hour allows for a specific form of repetition: whereit is not simply the same thing over and over again, but when the unit isborn from a holding together of beginning, middle and end. They are heldtogether 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. Notthe incessant flow of one thing after another (tick-tock), but the chiming

signals the flow that is contained within a narrative of the hour. What comesafter an hour? Another one with another narrative. But what comes after theinstant? Some other instant with no repetition, no recurrence. Rosenzweigdoes not replace the random flow of events with a synoptic vision of the whole. Rather, in moving into the next hour, we are cast back on thebeginning to live through it again. When we hear the chime, we think, ‘itis starting again’. Time has passed, but it is a new hour. In an even bolder manner, the week structures our experience of timebecause on the seventh day we stop our work. Here the end bears a specificmark of reflection, of completion. Rosenzweig accepts Hermann Cohen’sreading 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 weekis the true ‘hour’ of all the times of the common human life, posited forpeople 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 doesthe 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-vidual’s time, not mine, yours or his secret time: it is everyone’s time. Day, week, year belong to everyone in common, are grounded in the world’sorbit of the earth which patiently bears them all and in the law of laboron earth which is common to all. The clock’s chiming of the hour is forevery ear. (324–5/291)

Here two further claims are bound up with the recycling circle: the socialdimension of lived time and the invocation of eternity. They are not haphaz-ardly linked, however. For Rosenzweig the key to interpreting eternity isto see it as a social reality, a world to come, a way for individuals and thecommunity to be bound together in institutions and practices. The univer-sality of the lived time of a calendar, particularly when the Sabbath requiresall 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 publicrhythm 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 onthis page, and so the common time now is an image, a pre-experience, ofthe 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 throughthe distended experience of living in time. Not so much a circle, then, as akind 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 upof the year depends on reading a different portion of the Torah scroll (the

first five 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 ofone year, run through the whole of the Torah, the spiritual year is pacedout, and the paces of this course are the Sabbaths. By and large, everySabbath is like every other, but the change in the portions of Scripturedistinguishes each from each, and this lets us know that there is not alast portion, but that they are only individual parts of a higher order, ofthe year. For in the year the individual parts first again fuse into a whole.The Sabbath bestows existence [Dasein ] on the year. This existence mustbe recreated week by week. The spiritual year must always completelybegin in the weekly portions of the running week. It knows, so to speak,only what is found in this week’s portion, but it will become a year firstthrough that, so that each week is only a fleeting moment. It is first in thecourse 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 weeklyportions, one Sabbath is just like the other makes them the cornerstonesof 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 finishes and it begins again. But a year isa longer story than a week, and the Jewish year is told with a sequence ofholidays, 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 therepetition 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 portionsof Torah read, week by week, that make a year of the scroll. And at the endof the year, the scroll must be re-rolled. The rolling and re-rolling of theTorah is the image of this circle of Jewish reading. Thus rolling the scrollis the time that is the performance of eternity. It always begins again, even

when it has just finished. The year is the diagetic time, just long enough totell the story of the Torah. The time it takes to read through the scroll is themeasure of the year. But what of the text read? The portions do not lead up to the presenttime. This is not a New York Times bestseller that explains how the USA gotinto Iraq. The story told is the ‘history’ of the world up to the Patriarchsand Matriarchs, and then up through the birth of the nation (drawn forththrough the waters), the giving of the law, the wandering in the desert andpreparation 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 tolddoes not lead continuously into the time of the editing of the Torah, or tothe time of its first public reading under Ezra. Surely this account of the history of the world up through the birthof the Israelite nation works as a kind of history because it is unwillingto collapse the distance between its listeners/readers and the events beingtold. But it is not merely that we now perceive a gap between us modernsand this ancient text: the text itself is built on a gap of time. A gap that isnot bridged by the story. Rosenzweig managed to read Jewish holidays asfollowing that sequence creation–revelation–redemption, showing that thecycling in our calendar has within it a cycle of a history of past events, eventsheld in their pastness. This cycle is experienced as weeks of portions of anearlier story – itself rolled up in a scroll. The way to experience eternity isnot by a collapse of this historical gap. Rather, each year the exodus fromEgypt repeats, and each year it seems to be not about us, the readers; (it hasits 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 stationon the cycle of our year has its own story, law, genealogy, etc., has its ownbit 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 JuliusCaesar). Always the same text at the same season, whatever is happeningto 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, eventhough there is no connection from past to present.

But perhaps we have not quite grasped the Torah’s own temporality. Forthe events that happen there are not governed by necessity but by freedom,and told by a specific kind of discontinuity. Hardly a chronicle, the Torah’ssequence follows enigmatic construction principles. The beginning, middleand 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 theyare 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 readingis fixed, our own lives are not governed by a necessity.

The Hegelian historiography that Rosenzweig rebelled against was oneof world-historical necessity. When Rosenzweig says the Jews are eternal,or rather have eternal life implanted within them, he is saying, at least, thatthey 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 thesame portion, a portion which always has its own discontinuities withinit and its sense of contingency. That reading alerts us to see our presentmoment 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 evenPresident Bush, we persist in seeing our own time as bound to a templatethat resists a reduction to necessity. Messianic hope arises from a Torahportion promising change and justice – and it does not stop short of criti-cizing the practices and ideas of its narrated time. Indeed, one can consultbiblical historians who recognize the concerns of the redactors, and see theTorah text itself criticizing the prevalent ideas and practices at the time ofits editing or its first public reading. The Torah portion messianically breaksthe 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 specific sort because of its mapping onto the Torahreading. The Torah’s 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 Torah’s text. It follows the patterns of its writtenscroll, but what it tells of is fraught with interruptions and even messianicshards. At the outside is the time of our year, marked out by the portionsof the scroll. The outer circle is the time of reading, not continuous, but setapart to mark the change of the weeks that as units are alike. The relationof the inner and outer circles is one of mutual disruption, but performed bythe community.

However, there are two other forms of calendar, and it is in confrontingthese that we may find insight into the specificity 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 toplace and from government to government; but as long as each one is

celebrated, it is filled with human joy in the living worldly present andthe hope for a still better, still richer, in short a growing life in the future.For us, the few remembrance days of our people’s history we have, becausethey are past, have become permanently fixed. (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 itsset of holidays, holidays which do not change. Victoria’s 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 riseson 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 toour nation, to our peoples, fashioning a certain resistance to the flowing off oftime. But the sequence does not follow a single text, is not marked off by thesequence within the Torah scroll. And when the Jews add events, they becomeutterly fixed, and so do not breathe with the sense of adding and droppingof holidays that show the way that secular communities live in the flowing oftime, even that their communities are destined to flow along and disappear.The retention of the memory is clearly linked to an identifying process. It isnot the simple task of the positivist historian, but it is a more unambiguoussense of joining one’s fate in order to become stronger in the future. The third calendar, however, makes everything messier. For Rosenzweighas a strong interpretation of the need for both Judaism and Christianity. Judaism stays within its own circle, a fire burning at the centre of the star,and Christianity goes forth as rays of light. This mission of Christianity isto convert the world to the truth of God’s will, to bring the other nationsinto a community of redemption. This mission requires Rosenzweig toarticulate both the truth and the limitations of the pagan world. For

Rosenzweig, Christianity is always on the way, always converting paganaspects of the nations, but never consummated. Thus the world is not reallysplit between pagans, Christians and Jews, but only between Jews and theothers. The others are at once pagan and Christian, for becoming Christianis the history of the world. But the conversion transpires in three dimensions(borrowing heavily from Schelling). A Petrine church converts the bodyand 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 andHegel as church fathers. So to be Christian in the age of this last church is tolive in a culture that in its very secularity has become Christian (cf. Liberté,Egalité, Fraternité – which Rosenzweig derives from the Johanine church).The rediscovery of the Eastern church and the emancipation of the Jews arehallmarks of this church. Love of the neighbour and the hurrying of thekingdom 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 tothe task of redemption. The church in its expansion takes its laws from thepeoples it approaches, and so in this vast secularization, it Christianizes byrecasting institutions that were content to fight the flowing on of time (aspagan temporality does) into institutions that bend time into the cycle ofeternity. In order to do that Christian calendars must be more than the circles ofthe Jewish reading of scripture. They cannot close within themselves, but




must open to the pagan national calendars. And so they do according toRosenzweig 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 intothe 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 thatit is pursuing, by throwing its transfiguring light on the branches of thenational 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.(410–11/369)

So Rosenzweig recognizes that the church must baptize the nationalholidays of the second calendar. It elevates the temporal markers of the pastinto part of an eternal cycle – that is, it lets them gain a place in the cycleof the holidays, a cycle that marks out Christian time as that time that leadsfrom Creation through revelation in Christ to redemption, which is awaitedas a universal community of redeemed institutions. That cycle appropriatesthe 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 penitentialand prayer days annually or for the great occasions of the people’s life.Festivals of thanksgiving, celebrations of declarations of war and ofarmistices – it must join in everywhere. But it also has its own history;thus the Lutheran Church celebrates its Feast of the Reformation, andthe 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 nationalcalendar. That is, not the central points of the Christian calendar (Christmas,Easter, Pentecost, as well as the year of Sundays), but the holidays of thespecific church itself. The Protestant churches celebrate their founding,their new beginning. The Roman Catholic Church celebrates the loyalty toits tradition and its theology of the body of Christ. Indeed for Rosenzweig,

elsewhere, the procession of Corpus Christi becomes emblematic of theexpanding of the church outside the church into the city – as the processioncomes forth from the church. But here we have the intercalating of bothchurch holidays and national holidays – because the basic structure of thecircle of Christian holidays requires this addition. The national and churchevents are now preserved as commemorated in the yearly cycles.

And the Roman Church most of all has not renounced directly the interweaving 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 Marymirror the existence of the church itself. And it does this specifically even

more in the saints’ days, which in its limitless capacity to change, adaptand grow, makes possible a completely intimate bond between it and thelocal, the class, and the personal interests of the world, and so it insertsthis temporal and worldly always again into the eternal circle, which evenin these festivals that change with time and place, the eternal way ofredemption through place and time has already for a long time no longerremained 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, whosecalendar is almost overloaded with saints’ days. Here we see the temporalexpression of the mission of Christianity: its way takes the pagan seriously,takes it up into itself and does not merely assimilate it, but more importantlychanges itself. While the Jewish calendar can only integrate a new event byfixing it, and so preserves the notion of a cycling but immutable eternity,the Christian calendar is expanded and transformed as the outward motionof the eternal way one encounters new events. Thus the Christian calendar

becomes a spiral, expanding outward each year. It takes in more of time andallows its messianic futurity to shine on it. Such a spiralling out is neither aline, nor a circle. It is also neither the dialectic moved by necessity, nor thebittersweet remembrance of all that must eventually fade away. Rather, theChristian 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 fixed inner circle, the spiral does notdisrupt itself as radically as the two circles of Jewish reading.

Or does it? We have so little further discussion by Rosenzweig of the spiralitself that we are left with the general sensation of outward motion. The newconstitution or victory in battle reciprocally coordinates with the traditionalChristian 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 renewingcontext 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 beconfronted 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 theinstability 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 outon the spiral (as being added from the last time around), as being intrinsicallybecoming and not achieved. And so the unwinding of the spiral reveals the samelack of necessity that we found in the circles within circles. A similar sense of thedemand of the messianic to pull it further out, but to whatever comes next.




Let me draw to a close this account of Rosenzweig’s calendars. A calendarrepeats and, in so far as it organizes itself, it structures our experience of our

own time through the remembrance of previous events. A pagan calendaris bound exclusively to the events of one’s nation or people, and recalls thekey events in the season in which they occurred, building identity acrosstemporal gaps. The Jewish calendar breaks the simple linearity (woundaround a wheel), into a complex machine of wheels within wheels. Bygenerating the present time through the reading of a scroll, Jewish timestands apart from the events of present time and even of the recent past. Itstakes its sense of temporality on the complex narrativity of the Torah itself.The discontinuities and challenges of the Torah’s text become a model forexperiencing present time, a model not of necessity, but of a messianic calland interruption. The Christian calendar, on the other hand, opens up intoa spiral, intercalating the pagan/national/church events into the funda-mental cycle of Christian holidays. The historical is integrated and alters theChristian year, but the identity of the Christian is plotted against the priornon-Christian aspect, and so split in two at each moment. The messianicin the Jewish calendar is the interruptions and the call to justice; in theChristian 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 BENJAMIN’S THESIS XV

If we now return to our text, Thesis XV, we are faced with a series of keyquestions for interpreting Benjamin’s work.

[i] The consciousness of exploding the continuum of history is character-istic of the revolutionary classes in the moment of their action. The greatrevolution introduced a new calendar. [ii] The day, with which a calendarbegins, functions as a historical time-lapse camera. And it is basicallythe same day that always returns in the form of festival days, the days ofremembrance [Eingedenkens ]. [iii] The calendar, therefore, does not counttime 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: 701–2/SW 4: 395) We begin, easily enough, with the revolutionary sentiment. We can seethat a revolution would require a new calendar, not merely the insertion ofa new holiday in the old calendar. For the change of calendar is a changein historical consciousness, and altering an old calendar will preserve thesense of history from the old regime. Not a matter of simply putting ina new holiday of emancipation, a revolutionary change of calendar is arefashioning 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 Marx’s 18thBrumaire , in this gesture. But what I have labelled the second section, ‘[ii] The day, with whicha calendar begins, functions as an historical time-lapse camera. And it isbasically the same day that always returns in the form of festival days, thedays of remembrance [Eingedenkens ]’, requires quite a different reading. Thesense of repetition here is much more focused. Festivals bring the same dayback again, and again. That is, the day remembered becomes the presentmoment. Calendars are a special time-machine. Indeed, from the basicstructure of repetition we can move back one sentence to the time-lapsecamera. For there is a first day in each calendar: New Year’s Day. Thus wehave two cycles to confront: First, the cycle of the year we are living. It istracked along a set of holidays, and begins on New Year’s Day. But thereis a second cycle, which begins with the event of founding a calendar. Thusfor a Christian calendar, Christmas is the beginning of the liturgical year(advent leads up to it). For a Jewish calendar, there is New Year’s Day as aday 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 monthone’. And the history begins from that point and follows its path, which isplotted around the year we are living. Near the beginning of the Jewish Yearis a holiday called ‘Simchat Torah’ (Rejoicing in the Torah), and it is the daythat the end of the scroll is read, the scroll is re-rolled to the beginning, andthe 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 thediagetic time that we have in the Jewish calendar (lasting one year), but italso holds history in consciousness through that diagesis. What is interestingto 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 donot 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 thenotion of the repetition of a specific day. Moreover, it is the strong sense ofremembrance (Eingedenken ) that appears here. We are not merely recallingthe past, representing it, but rather returning to it, or holding ourselves inthat moment.

The complexity of remembrance is caught in an early fragment fromthe Passagen-Werk where there is a battle against the presumption of everyepoch, culture, movement, etc., that holds itself as the most modern and ata 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 notdepend 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 moveus. The things, so placed before us, endure no mediating constructionfrom ‘major connections’ – This is also the sight of major past things– Chartres Cathedral, the temple of Paestum – in truth they are receivedin 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 nearnessis to be observed, calendrically, against epochs. (I°, 2)

Anecdotes make the characters come into our world. And so the greatmonuments must be entered in our world, and not seen as a time-machinethat 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, thepast is not some hoary ancient event, but becomes part of our celebrationsand accounting of time. The distant epochs are lived again. Christmas is

not an event two thousand years ago, but rather happens each year with thebirth of new babies in the dark of midwinter. What he calls Eingedenken inThesis XV here is vergegenwärtigen – a making-present. The calendar drawsthe past near: ‘[iii] The calendar, therefore, does not count time like clocks.They are the monuments of an historical consciousness, and for a hundredyears in Europe not even the slightest trace of them appears’. The calendar isnot like a clock, for Benjamin, but we can readily see that it is very much likea 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, bringsit near, it produces our past, that is the past that is alive for us. Calendarsare monumental: public, fixed 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 Baudelairefrom 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 anearlier life’ (GS 1.2: 638/SW 4: 333–4). We will return to correspondences (aterm of Baudelaire’s), but here we see a notion of festival days that connectsnot to historical events, but to prehistorical ones, events that have a hold onus not because of their historical connection to us, but because they formour categories of temporal existence. Like the visit to ancient sites, they area way for a past that exceeds the continuum of historical memory to intrudeinto our time.




And calendars are also punctuated, in the way that Rosenzweig noted.Benjamin later comments:

Chronology, which subordinates duration to uniformity, still cannotforgo letting heterogeneous exceptional fragments occur within it. Tohave united the recognition of a quality with the measure of a quantityis 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, theholidays. There quantity and quality merge, by breaking up, in a regular way, the monotony of the standard units. The calendar is public, orderly, butsomehow heterogeneous. Rosenzweig’s clock’s chiming, weekly Sabbaths andseasonal festivals all serve Benjamin by opening a space where the historicalcontinuum 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 conflict with the Rosenzweigian account: for Rosenzweigheld that the calendars are still doing their thing. That people live their own

time through the calendar. Surely we still have calendars! But Benjamin’spoint is more severe: the past does not live in the calendar anymore. Themodern culture has dispensed with the religious dimension of the calendarparticularly. That recent past, for Benjamin, is the time of the industrial andconsumerist transformation of Europe. Rosenzweig may have an accuratepicture of how the Jewish liturgical calendar is supposed to function, andby extension other calendars, too, but the culture of Europe has abandonedthat manner of experiencing time and remembering history. Benjamin here

appears as the critic not of Rosenzweig’s theory of calendars and memory,but of the world which has moved away, beyond, below such means ofremembering. Perhaps we can, with the help of Rosenzweig’s three calendars, see just what is now lost. That is, the Jewish eternal calendar might still suit thesmall set of traditional Jews, who are eager to live outside of world-politicaltime. But it is hard to live through the 1930s and not conclude that thatcalendar has become defunct, even for the religious Jews, and of course,

Benjamin’s world is filled with liberal and post-liberal Jews, for whom thereligious calendar holds no promise. Judgement Day is no longer New Year’sDay for his world.

The key question is whether the enlarging spiral of Christianity as itopens out to the secular world functions with its calendar. Does the spreadof 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 onemore pagan tale of war and conquest? While Rosenzweig offers true insightinto the development of modern culture, as a Jew looking at the secular-




ization of Christianity, Benjamin offers quite another prospect. In an earlyessay 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 subsequentholiday. Irresistibly the festival permeates every work day. Porosity is thelaw of this life, inexhaustibly to be discovered anew. A grain of Sunday ishidden in every week day and how much week day is in this Sunday! (GS 4.1: 311/SW 1: 417)

Benjamin finds a special kind of secularization, where the Christian goesover into the pagan and the pagan infiltrates the Christian. This has,quite obviously, a similarity to Rosenzweig’s account of the spiral, but forBenjamin the weekly calendar cannot hold out against the modern realityof Naples. While the holy is diffused into the profane, the Sunday also isreleased from its purity. Life pulses across the lines of a calendar, and ingeneral the festival becomes not merely the telos of each day (‘live for the weekend’), but actually dissolved into the everyday. The saints’ days ofRosenzweig’s calendar are marshalled by Benjamin to exhaust the week’s

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 Europenot even the slightest trace of them appears’. The Theses are written after more than a decade of research into theemergence of the modern as a process of developing consumerism, ad-vertising, mass production and mass marketing, all explored in the context ofthe Passagen of Paris. It would be absurd to draw up a one-line description ofthe 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 Rosenzweig’s sense of an expanding spiral. The expanse of capitalism,the colonization of desire, the impossibility of just social relations – these alllead Benjamin toward a profound desire for a messianic interruption.

But if we step aside from the profound critique that Benjamin would offerto Rosenzweig’s spiralling Christianity, we might still see how the calendarcasts an important shadow for Benjamin. I do not wish to overemphasizehere 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 arrestingtemporality but punctuating it and allowing us to live messianically. Thatthe calendar might have served that function for the Jews is not Benjamin’sconcern. Rather, he struggles with a mode of remembering that can allowthat 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 daysgrand and meaningful is the encounter with an earlier life’ (GS 1.2: 638/SW 4: 333–4). Baudelaire’s correspondences are between archaic monuments,temples, hieroglyphs, etc., not simultaneous links. They are not quitehistory, but rather the recollection of juxtapositions from the archaic pastto the present. In Baudelaire, moreover, they remain suspended. Benjaminnotices that the correspondences also fail, that the modern world corrodesthe possibility for a linking to the prehistory. But Baudelaire’s writingevokes the no longer accessible correspondence. If Rosenzweig’s calendar canenvision the disruption of two historical sequences, the interruption of themessianic then and now, then Baudelaire offers Benjamin a way of markingthe jumps from then to now that do not quite connect, that have beencorroded by the emergence of modern society. But Baudelaire still strives tocapture the correspondence in art, even the failed correspondence.

Benjamin’s historical work produces a new possibility for a remembering,drawing on Baudelaire as well as Rosenzweig. The acts of remembrancecan 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. WhileRosenzweig had hoped to resuscitate the Jewish community in Germany atthe end of the First World War, Benjamin despairs of that community andindeed 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 structuringof interruption that Rosenzweig discovered can become a way, even a task,for the historian.

Benjamin collected a set of theoretical reflections in a folder entitled

‘Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress’. These reflections are roughlycontemporaneous with the Theses, and while they are also among the mostcommented-upon texts in his writings, we can attend to the specific relationto the calendar, and specifically to the circles within circles of the Jewishcalendar. 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 beginto see how the dialectical images might be conceived.

The historical index of the images says not only that they belong to adeterminate time, it says, above all, that they first become legible in adeterminate time. And indeed this ‘to be legible’ is reached in a deter-minate critical point in the motion into its interior. Every present isdetermined through these images, those that are synchronic with it: everynow is the now of a determinate knowability. In it the truth is loaded withtime to the point of exploding. (This explosion, is nothing other thanthe death of the intention, which coincides therefore with the birth ofgenuine historical time, the time of truth.) (N3, 1)




The primary insight is that there is a moment of our present at which aspecific 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 newinterpretations and new possibilities. The present then offers a specific setof possible readings, possibilities that exceed any account of intentionalityin the original events, artworks, institutions, etc. The now is constitutedin relation to new versions of the past. But the key, for Benjamin, is that thetwo do not collapse.

It is not that what is past throws its light on what is present, or that whatis present throws its light on what is past, rather the image is that in whichthe past and the present meet in a lightning flash in a constellation. In other words: image is the dialectic at a standstill. While the relation of the presentto the past is a purely temporal one, the relation of the gone to the now isa dialectical one: its nature is not temporal but imaged. Only dialecticalimages 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 specificconjunction 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 thepast). The two moments interrupt each other. This rhythm is structured sothat the past and present are related without becoming identified. It is notthat the present is assimilated to the past, a mythic repetition of what hasalready happened where ‘the past throws its light on what is present ’. Forthe past’s 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 find itself transported into the past, where ‘thepresent throws its light on what is past’. At each now there is a new readingof 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 presentmeet, but now only in a flash, without the hour’s beginning, middle andend. The juxtaposition is not, as in Rosenzweig, a figure (Gestalt ), but rathera constellation, a set of discrete stars. The flash prevents any dialectic that

has its own necessary motor, its own ongoing, progressive zigzag throughsuffering and reconciliation. To interrupt the dialectic is to catch dialectic ata standstill – a relation of past and present that borrows no dynamic inherentconnectivity. Which is not to say that it is merely a positing of two pointsin time. From the present to the past is temporal : looking back measures atime that is elapsed, a gap from here to there. But the past is related to thepresent through its legibility in the now. The gone is not merely directedtoward a future which now occurs, but is rather itself bound up with thenow 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 presentlooks back in a simply temporal way. History has become these dialectical

images ,

in contrast to the archaic images .

The latter would be the imagesthat do not measure the distance that time marks, but merely repeat anon-temporal myth – obliterating time, change and the discontinuity thatgoverns the signifying of the past. But the historian engages, then, in a specific kind of remnant of thecalendar. And while Rosenzweig could find eternity entering time and, indeed,the messianic interrupting in a social practice, for Benjamin modernity hasdebased the calendar, leaving the historian the task of framing the dialecticalimages, 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 strongforce, which could force the future with a social movement or revolution, thehistorian struggles to redeem the past, and in redeeming the past to unstickthe present from its seemingly necessary future.

Our final question, however, then turns to the relation of the messianicas a theological category and its reactivation as a historiographic practice.The fascination for the scholars of Benjamin has lain in the question of howtheological 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, atleast well-explored. Benjamin is emphatic about being theological. But hesurely is not pious, nor engaged in Rosenzweig’s renaissance. If we put himin the context of Buber, Scholem and Rosenzweig, he shares a passion abouttheology 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 suggestthat the ghost, the spectre of theology has a great appeal for us. For manyof us, religious renaissance is beyond our range. Such a holiday calendar has

become impossible. It is like an artefact of a vanished civilization. Exceptthat the calendars still lurk behind our deformed working calendar. The actof remembrance that binds our events with those of the past, dialecticallyand with the needed standstill, is lacking in our calendar. But we yearn forit, with Yom Ha Shoah (Holocaust Day), and with 9/11 – we want to beable to remember in that messianic way, where the press forward of timeis 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 critiqueof lines and simple circles. Benjamin remembers those holiday circles in themidst of framing his own dialectics of points. They offer a dialectic of pastand present that opens the future more radically than the simple circles offate and the liberal myth of progress. They charge the present with some gapfrom the past, exploding the continuum of history and, if they are no longerpotent, re-examining them alerts Benjamin and his readers to a messianicdialectical relation with the past. The messianic charge from the spinningof the circles is now dispersed into the dialectical images.



13

NON-MESSIANIC POLITICALTHEOLOGY IN BENJAMIN’S ‘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 Benjamin’s thought with contemporary political events. His reflections on the collapse of theEuropean Left in the face of fascism as well as the Hitler–Stalin pact aremodulated through a persistent fascination with, and enquiry into, political

theology. His thoughts on social democracy and communism are thus shapedby a deeper meditation upon the possible relationship between historicalmaterialism and theology. However, the character of this relationship in the‘On Concept of History’ is usually framed in terms of the question of thepresent and immediate future of revolutionary action, framed as the choicebetween catastrophe and the messianic end of history. However, anotherunderstanding of the future is also possible, one that complicates this choiceby 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 first thesis establishes a complicated scenario regarding the relationshipbetween historical materialism and theology. Thesis I is about the famouschess-playing automaton who could ‘respond to every move of a chess-player with a counter-move’ and always win. The puppet with the hookah madethe moves on a table under which, concealed by mirrors, sat a ‘hunchbackeddwarf ’ who controlled the puppet. There are many enigmatic features to thisscenario – Benjamin had already played with the theme of the hidden dwarf

who controlled illusion in ‘Rastelli’s Story’ (SW 3: 96) – but the terms of theanalogy that he goes on to draw are fairly clear. He imagines a ‘philosophicalcounterpart to this apparatus’ in which the puppet is historical materialismand the dwarf theology ‘which today, as we know, is small and ugly and hasto 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 historicalmaterialism and theology intimated in ‘philosophical counterpart’ to the




chess-playing automaton is usually sought in the discussion of the messianicin Thesis XVIII with which the ‘On Concept of History’ ends. The evoca-

tions of messianic time, and the notion of a messianic break betweenpresent and future in Thesis XVIII are prepared in Theses XV–XVII which reflect on breaks and the revolutionary. The last five theses certainlyprovide an astonishing vision of revolutionary political theology, but itis one whose power emerges from a contrast with the political theologyexplored in Theses VIII–XIII. These theses are more diagnostic, analysingthe catastrophe confronting the angel of history and the limits of the socialdemocratic response to it. Theses VIII–XIII begin by evoking the understanding of the ‘traditionof the oppressed’ that the Ausnahmezustand (state of emergency) is not theexception but the rule and end with a critique of social democracy. Socialdemocracy is criticized not only for its concept of progress – against whichis poised the philosophy of history as a revolutionary, messianic break – butalso for its political and economic conformism. The attempt to achievedemocratic reform of the state apparatus that characterized social democraticpolitical action during the Weimar Republic is dismissed by Benjamin ascontributing to the eventual success of fascism, but underlying both the

concept of progress and the practice of reformism was a more fundamentallimitation regarding the concept of work and through it of the relationshipto nature. Of this relationship and its concomitant faith in the developmentof 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 themiddle theses of the ‘Concept of History’ is framed by references to two

central concepts of non-Marxist political theology – Carl Schmitt’s ‘stateof emergency’ and Max Weber’s ‘Protestant ethic’. Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) may indeed be said tohave provoked, or at least provided a locus for the reinvention of politicaltheology in the early twentieth century.1 It was important not only forprovoking the alternative formulation of political theology developed bySchmitt, but also in fundamentally changing Benjamin’s own views on thepolitical theology of capitalism. The importance of Weber’s thesis for the

development of Benjamin’s 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: 288–91). ‘Capitalism as Religion’ is remarkable in many ways, not least for itsprovocative radicalization of Max Weber’s ‘Protestant ethic’ thesis. Thefragment is pivotal in the development of Benjamin’s thought, closinga period of reflection on social and political theory that began in 1916and opening up avenues of enquiry that were to occupy him up to, andincluding, ‘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 (1928–40) were all responses to questionsprovoked by this fragment, and thus indirectly by the political theologyof Weber. It marks an important turn in the development of Benjamin’spolitical theology whose consequences still inform the ‘On Concept ofHistory’. ‘Capitalism as Religion’ closed a phase of social, political and religiousreflection that was rooted in Benjamin’s principled opposition to the First World War and his exile in Switzerland. Benjamin’s focus on issues of politicaltheology, notably the critique of theocracy, was indebted to a diverse range ofinfluences ranging from the ‘new thinking’ represented by a group of writers working in the philosophy and sociology of religion comprising FlorensChristian Rang, Eugen Rosenstock and Franz Rosenzweig to the CatholicDadaism of Hugo Ball, the neo-Marxism of Ernst Bloch and above all theutopian science fiction of Paul Scheerbart. While only fragments from thisperiod have survived – the major work, Die wahre Politiker , inspired by theideas of Scheerbart being lost – it is nevertheless possible to trace an outlineof the main concerns of Benjamin’s political theology from what remains.

This will provide the context for understanding his interpretation of Weber’sThe Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and also the reason for itsshattering impact on his thought. The overall direction of Benjamin’s early political theology is evident ina series of five numbered reflections from 1919–20, the first, ‘World andTime’, giving the editor’s title to the entire collection. The first reflection onrevelation and its relationship to the end of history introduces the overallproblem of the place of the divine in the secular or temporal sphere. The

exploration of this problem begins with a critique of the political theologyof Catholicism. Benjamin criticizes ‘Catholicism’ for its ecclesiastical organ-ization or ‘the (false, secular) theocracy’ (SW 1: 226). The establishment ofthe 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 fulfilment)’ (SW 1: 226). Here Benjamin adoptsthe position of the adversaries of the church criticized by Augustine in theCity of God , the foundational text of ecclesiology.

Benjamin radicalizes his opposition by applying his critique of theocracyto any form of legally regulated social organization. The implications of thisstep become evident in the Critique of Violence (published, like the original1905 essay by Weber in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik in 1921) where ‘divine violence’ is held to be destructive of all law. In thistext Benjamin focuses on the destructive, revolutionary aspect of divineviolence, whereas in ‘World and Time’ he pays more attention to the slowself-destruction of theocracy. Benjamin claims that ‘where divine powerenters the world it breathes destruction’ whether in its revolutionary or its




organized forms since ‘in this world nothing constant and no organisationcan 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 atlength by Benjamin, it is evidently a forceful if underdeveloped critique ofany 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 hisown ‘definition of politics’ as ‘the fulfilment 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 fulfilment of sinful or ‘unimproved’humanity – but the consequences Benjamin draws are radically opposed.He fills out his definition of politics with a reflection on the Mosaic laws.For him, the Ten Commandments are not theocratic – ‘profane legislationdecreed by religion’ – but rather ‘legislation governing the realm of the bodyin the broadest sense . . . they determine the location and method of direct divine intervention’ (SW 1: 226). It is on the border of this intervention thatBenjamin locates ‘the zone of politics, of the profane, of a bodily realm thatis without law in a religious sense’ (SW 1: 226). The distinction between thedivine and the profane legislations of the body – the latter being political

but without law – presents severe problems to Benjamin, both within ‘Worldand Time’ itself, but more intensely after reading Weber, whose thesisprecisely breaks down the distinction between the religious and the seculargovernance of the body. The fourth of the series of reflections in ‘World and Time’ begins tounravel 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 anddemonic powers’ (SW 1: 227), that is, the ‘zone of politics’ already stands

in a relation to the divine. This is exemplified in the Critique of Violence bythe institution of the police as ‘a nowhere tangible, all-pervasive, ghostlypresence in the life of civilized states’ ruling in the interstices betweensovereign and executive power. This position might be consistent withBenjamin’s critique of theocracy whose object is precisely such illegitimatemediations of the divine in the secular or profane realm.

Yet the problem of how to detect, criticize or overcome this theocratictendency is avoided. Benjamin instead insists on the immediacy of revelation:

‘The divine manifests itself in only in revolutionary force. Only in thecommunity [Gemeinschaft ], nowhere in “social organisations” does thedivine manifest itself either with force or without’ (SW 1: 227). Such acriterion for the separation of divine and profane is not itself immune totheocratic abuse – for every theocracy legitimates its organization by theclaim of divine manifestation to the community it serves/dominates. Thisholds not only for ecclesiastical but also for political theocracies, as when,in the Critique of Violence , Benjamin identifies the divine community withthe 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 createthe working-class community (‘proletarian class-consciousness’) capable ofthe general strike.

It is then not surprising that in ‘World and Time’ Benjamin straightawayqualifies the appeal to immediate community by transferring the manifesta-tions of the divine from the sphere of political action to those of perceptionand the word: ‘Such manifestations are to be sought not in the sphere ofthe social but in perception oriented toward revelation and, first and last,in language, sacred language above all’ (SW 1: 227). Here certain forms ofreligious and literary expression are preferred to political action as directmanifestations of the divine, but this qualification only provokes furtherproblems. All theocracies will claim theoretical legitimation of their claimsover the ‘community’ on the basis of privileged knowledge or capacity ofexpression. By locating revelation in perception and the word, Benjaminopens the possibility of a theoretical, religious and aesthetic avant-garde, whose prescriptions, if applied to social action, could only lapse backinto theocratic legislations. He accordingly concludes the reflections with

problems for further reflection: ‘The question of “manifestation” is central’(SW 1: 227) in other words, the question of whether revelation can ever beimmediate, or whether it is always already mediated and organized. The last word of ‘World and Time’ is the claim ‘that there is no essentialdistinction between religion and religious denomination, but the later conceptis narrow and in most cases peripheral’ (SW 1: 227). With this Benjaminmasks the essentially Protestant inclination of his critique of theocracy andits debt to the ‘new thinking’. The severe qualification of the claims of the

church over the individual believer and the separation of church and statein Protestant ecclesiology pointed (in theory) to the critique of theocracymounted by Benjamin. His interpretation of the Ten Commandments isProtestant in distinguishing between an area of direct divine governance ofthe body and a separate ‘zone of politics’ that is the site for politics as ‘thefulfilment of an improved humanity’ (SW 1: 226). However, this under-standing of the separation of the divine and the secular was to be severelychallenged by Weber’s thesis which shows the attenuation, if not collapse, of

any theoretical transcendence through the routine practice of Protestantism. Benjamin approached the reading of Weber’s Protestant Ethic and theSpirit of Capitalism from the standpoint of his critique of theocracy, butfound that Weber’s thesis challenged the very grounds of his critique, andthus the social and political theory that he was in the process of devel-oping. Benjamin read Weber’s text in the context of the 1919–20 editionof Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion and was thus aware of thebroader implications of the thesis and of Weber’s organizing concept of theeconomic ethic. The specific analysis of the economic ethic of capitalism




led Weber to analyse the relationship between the ‘spirit’ of capitalism andCalvinist Protestantism in terms of Goethe’s concept of ‘elective affinity’

(Wahlverwandschaft ). Weber analysed the elective affinity between Protestantism and capitalismin terms of the partial translation/mutation of a rigorous religious doctrineinto everyday economic behaviour. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit ofCapitalism (especially in the remarkable footnotes) Weber described howthe rigorously transcendent doctrine of predestination was translated intothe secular concept of the ‘vocation’. The anxieties provoked in the earlygeneration of Protestants by the inscrutability of the divine will in its choiceof the elect and its relation to earthly business and social concerns led theCalvinist spiritual advisers to elaborate as series of casuistic responses that, Weber showed, crystallized into an economic ethic. In Benjamin’s 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 andthe political. From Benjamin’s viewpoint, what was even more striking about Weber’s 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 bymeans of a decentralized economic ethic tangible only in its effects.

The opening sentence of Benjamin’s response to Weber recapitulatesone of Weber’s theses: that the economic ethic of capitalism ‘serves essen-tially to allay the same anxieties, torments and disturbances to which theso-called religions offered answers’ (SW 1: 288). However, prompted bythe Protestant ethic Benjamin drew an even more radical conclusion fromthis than Weber’s own cautious claims for an ‘elective affinity’ betweenProtestantism 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 proposesto transform Weber’s elective affinity into an identity – Protestantism andcapitalism are not mutually related, but are identical. Such an interpretationof Goethe’s concept as a veiled identity was developed by Benjamin in hisessay Goethe’s Elective Affinities (see SW 1: 346 and 350–51), written at thesame time as ‘Capitalism as Religion’. While Weber, in the concluding linesof his essay, regarded capitalism as having cast off its religious origins and tohave relegated its elective affinity with religion to its past, Benjamin believed

it to have itself become a religion. More is at stake in Benjamin’s difference with Weber than the inter-pretation of one of Goethe’s aesthetic concepts. By unifying capitalism andreligion Benjamin is acknowledging the dissolution of the separation ofthe divine and the secular. This dissolution, moreover, is more serious eventhan the theocratic organization of the divine represented by Catholicism,since with ‘capitalism as religion’ the divine invades not only the ‘zone ofthe political’ but also the realm of the body. The implication is that oneof the organizing distinctions of Benjamin’s political thought has broken




down before the realization that capitalism – a form of social and politicalorganization – is religion and that, consequently, it fulfils the definition

of theocracy. The secularization thesis is here inverted: it is is not that thesecular takes over the space vacated by the religious, but that the religiousbecomes identified with the secular. Benjamin surveys the implications of The Protestant Ethic and the Spiritof Capitalism for his social and political theory through two routes: acritique of Weber’s account of the genesis of capitalism and a descriptionof the structural characteristics of capitalism as religion. The basic claimis that ‘the Christianity of the Reformation period did not favour thegrowth of capitalism; instead it transformed itself into capitalism’ (SW 1:290). This is of course opposed to Weber, who saw the elective affinitybetween capitalism and Protestantism as one of a number of factors forthe development of modern capitalism. Additional important factors for Weber included the bureaucratization of political administration, the rise ofstanding armies and military discipline and changes in broader economicorganization. Benjamin, however, insists that ‘Capitalism has developed asa parasite of Christianity . . . until it reached the point where Christianity’shistory is essentially that of its parasite – that is to say, of capitalism’ (SW

1: 289). The questions raised in these genetic claims and their reductionof elective affinity to identity are clarified by Benjamin’s structural view ofcapitalist religion. Benjamin claims that there are three aspects of the ‘religious structure ofcapitalism’ (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 notatonement’ (SW 1: 288). In the first place, Benjamin claims that capitalismis a religious practice, or ‘cult’ rather than a church: ‘capitalism has no

specific body of dogma, no theology’ (SW 1: 288). It is not a theocracy inthe sense of the Catholic Church that distributes salvation according to atheologically legitimated system of sacraments. Nevertheless, capitalism is‘perhaps the most extreme [cultic religion] that ever existed’ (SW 1: 288) inthat its claims are total: ‘things have meaning only in their relationship tothe cult’ (SW 1: 288), or, in the language of historical materialism, exchangevalue dominates use value. Another aspect of the total character of thecult 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 Weber’s secularization thesis byhis third structural claim, that capitalism is a religion that creates guilt/debt(Schuld ). Benjamin devotes most attention to the third claim, pushing Weber’sview of the ‘iron cage’ of modern bureaucratic capitalism to its limitthrough reflections on Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. Central to his argumentis the expansive character of capitalism, here interpreted not only on aglobal but even on a cosmic scale. Benjamin understands capitalism as not




only creating guilt/debt through its reduction of all value to money or themeasure of exchange value, but also as universalizing guilt/debt to implicate

even God in universal despair: ‘Capitalism is entirely without precedent, inthat it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its completedestruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair itself becomesa 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 ‘incorporatedinto human existence’ or has become totally immanent: for Benjamin thismoment marks the end of the epoch of the ‘human’ and the beginning ofthe superhuman.

Benjamin’s observation that Nietzsche’s superman is ‘the first to recognizethe religion of capitalism and to bring it to fulfilment’ (SW 1: 289) offersan important clue to his understanding of the cultic nature of capitalismas religion. For Nietzsche, the superman is the one capable of willing theeternal return rather than suffer it as the greatest weight. Consequently,it can be assumed that the cultic ritual of capitalism for Benjamin isrepetition. The suffering of this repetition (as in Weber’s prediction ofthe millennial future of the ‘iron cage’) as a burden is contrasted with itsaffirmation that effects a transformation, creating something new in an

affirmed repetition. Thus Benjamin can claim that Nietzsche’s supermanis both the affirmation and destruction of capitalism as religion. On theone hand, ‘the paradigm of capitalist religious thought is magnificentlyformulated in Nietzsche’s philosophy’, while on the other ‘the idea of thesuperman transposes the apocalyptic “leap” not into conversion, atonement,purification and penance, but into an apparently steady, though in the finalanalysis explosive and discontinuous intensification’ (SW 1: 289). Benjaminsees a similar outcome in Marx, namely that a capitalism that is affirmed

as capitalism already becomes something else: ‘Marx is a similar case: thecapitalism that refuses to change course becomes socialism by means of thesimple and compound interest that are functions of Schuld ’ (SW 1: 289).So with Freud, the intensification of repetition qualitatively transformsinherited guilt/debt. Benjamin’s readings of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud in terms of theiralleged views on the self-overcoming of capitalism rest on a logic dependenton the fourth appropriately concealed feature of capitalism as religion. This

concerns the demonic character of capitalism – the fact that the secret of itsdestruction is hidden. Benjamin claims that capitalism’s ‘God is hidden fromit and may be addressed only when his guilt is at its zenith’ – the secret of thedivinity of capitalism lies in its ‘immaturity’ (SW 1: 129). Capitalism extendsits measure of value ‘to the point where the universe has been taken over bythat despair that is actually its secret hope’ (SW 1: 289). When there is onlyrepetition then the affirmation of it creates a novelty and thus breaks theimmanence of repetition. It is at this zenith of immanence that divinity canbe affirmed and become again transcendent. For Benjamin this may consist




in the Nietzschean superman affirming eternal return, or the proletariatrealizing itself as the ‘subject’–’object’ of history at its stage of maximum

reification (to use the language of Georg Lukács’ contemporary History andClass Consciousness ). The catastrophic or nihilistic logic described by Benjamin marked adesperate response to his interpretation and intensification of Weber’sProtestant ethic thesis. In the face of such total theocratic immanence,intensification might appear to provide the only avenue of transcendence. Itis a reading that is far from faithful to Weber, although it brings out someinteresting implications of the Protestant ethic thesis. But it was an interpre-tation largely governed by the early development of Benjamin’s social andpolitical thought. His early critique of theocracy related the divine to organi-zational structures such as church or state and not to broader social andeconomic organization. Weber’s Protestant ethic, however, forced Benjaminto entertain the prospect of a broader social and economic diffusion oftheocratic structures. Benjamin took literally Weber’s citation of SebastianBrandt’s ironic comment on Luther – who in leaving the monastery left us allmonks. Capitalism, far from being an agent of secularization, might itself bea 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 supportedby Benjamin interrupting his explicit work on social and political theoryand turning to other interests. But the thesis of ‘capitalism as religion’ wasnot abandoned, nor the possibility for a non-theocratic politics, nor theactive nihilism of revolution as catastrophe. The Origin of German TragicDrama 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 evidenceof the tormented negotiation of the removal of God from the world.However, by identifying the organizing principle of the mourning playas repetition and the stylistic mode as allegorical, Benjamin was able tofind an exit from despair in the intensified repetition of repetition thatdeprives meaninglessness itself of meaning. The allegorical nihilism thatstrips transcendence of any significance and makes all meaning immanent

to itself breaks down when its immanence or ‘transitoriness’ ‘is notsignified or allegorically presented, so much as its own significance asallegory’ (OT , p. 233). With this, the Protestant contemplation of thevanity of a world without God ‘faithlessly leaps forward to the idea ofresurrection’ (OT , p. 232). In the contemporaneous One Way Street Benjamin intimated anotherline of social and political argument that contrasted with the catastrophicrevolution 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 throughthe emergence of a new technological relation between nature and thehuman:

Men as species completed their development thousands of years ago; butmankind as a species is just beginning his. In technology, a physis is beingorganised through which mankind’s contact with the cosmos takes a new anddifferent form from that which it had in nations and families. (SW 1: 487)

The technological physis or ‘zone of the political’ reorganized the relationshipof humanity to the cosmos in a different way to the catastrophic nihilismof the Übermensch . Instead of poising social and political action upon thesingle decision at the zenith of catastrophe, the technological body was in astate of continuous emergence. Yet the energies in terms of speed and powerreleased by its development could become destructive if abused. Benjaminends One Way Street with the transcendent energies released by technology

ready to realize themselves in a new covenant between man and the cosmosor annihilate themselves in warfare. The sense of an imminent crisis requiring a decision that emergedfrom the reading of Weber is similar to that arrived at by Carl Schmitt inhis Political Theology .2 The proximity between Benjamin and Schmitt’sthought, exemplified by the letter to Schmitt when Benjamin sent him acopy of The Origin of German Tragic Drama (‘You will quickly notice howmuch 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 theearly 1920s. The first three chapters of Schmitt’s Political Theology (thereare four) – ‘Definition of Sovereignty’ ‘The Problem of Sovereignty as theProblem of the Legal Form and of the Decision’ and ‘Political Theology’– originally appeared as ‘Sociology of the Concept of Sovereignty’ in acollection of essays in memory of Weber, Erinnerungsgabe für Max Weber .3

Schmitt argues here and elsewhere, that the state completes the Reformation– taking over from the church the power of absolute decision.

Schmitt’s rigorous and implacable analysis of the transformation ofchurch into absolute state as the outcome of the Reformation is not only afundamental criticism of Weber’s thesis but also a strange complement toBenjamin’s argument in ‘Capitalism as Religion’. For Benjamin, religion was identified with capitalism, while for Schmitt the state is identified withcapitalism. Benjamin would experiment with Schmitt’s thesis in The Originof German Tragic Drama , but in the figure of the mad sovereign would showthe identification 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 theocraticand technocratic strands of his political theology. The project tries to explain why the utopian social and political potential of technology intimated in theParisian 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 ofcommodity production. The themes of ‘Capitalism as Religion’ are ubiquitousthroughout the Arcades Project , as are its four structural principles. First of all, Parisian high capitalism is analysed in terms of the cult of theexchange of commodities. Second, the cult of exchange is characterized astotal immanence, or the eternal return of the same, with the entire universeand the eternity of the future reduced to the status of exchange value (acondition exemplified for Benjamin by Grandeville’s illustrations). Third,it is a system that creates guilt/debt, analysed in terms of Baudelaire’sallegorical melancholy, and finally it possesses a guilty secret that is itsself-overcoming whether as self-destruction or as its transformation intosocialism. The main conceptual difference between ‘Capitalism as Religion’

and the Arcades Project consists in the role given to technology as a sourceof transcendence: a difference that removes the latter work from the sphereof political theology since transcendence is no longer thought in terms ofdivinity but in terms of energy. In the light of this analysis of the tensions within the development ofBenjamin’s political theology it is possible to return to the ‘On Concept ofHistory’. The future of political theology is not only restricted to a messianicinterruption of previous history but also to an intensification of its previous

development. The theological potentials in capitalism – which after all forBenjamin is a political theology – can be intensified or realized in non-capitalist directions. Thus in Thesis XI Benjamin can find in Fourier’s‘surprising sound’ fantasies of the power of technology and co-operativelabour a complement to the ‘corrupted conception of labour’ or Protestantethic that had been embraced by social democracy. Perhaps these hints in the Theses of a future not governed by the choicebetween catastrophe and messianic interruption should be explored further.

The Fourier comments, for example, point to a trail that leads back throughthe Arcades Project to Benjamin’s early political philosophy, his ‘politics’,inspired by Scheerbart. In Convolute W on Fourier he wrote:

Fourier’s conception of the propagation of the phalansteries through‘explosions’ may be compared to two articles of my ‘politics’: the ideaof 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 themoon) 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 find carried out, entirely in the spirit of Fourier’s conceptions, the moral

mobilisation of nature . . . Mickey Mouse shows how right Marx was to seein Fourier, above all else, a great humorist. The cracking open of naturalteleology proceeds in accordance with the plan of humour’ (W8a, 5). Inplace of the Protestant ethic embraced by social democracy emerges a notionof technology that releases rather than contains energy. Perhaps the most extra-ordinary development of the cosmo–political–technological development of the political theology of the ‘On Concept ofHistory’ is a fragment on Scheerbart from 1940. With it Benjamin returnsto the original inspiration of his political theology, a reading of Scheerbartin 1914 shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. He recognizesin Scheerbart almost ‘the twin brother of Fourier’ both of whom are ableto mock current humanity in the name of a faith in ‘the humanity of thefuture’ (SW 4: 387). The emergence of this humanity is related to thedevelopment of a liberatory technology: an idea which as seen marks adevelopment of political theology. Benjamin notes that this non-messianicpossibility 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 wereessential: first people should discard the base and primitive idea that thetask was to ‘exploit’ the forces of nature; second, they should be true to theconviction that technology, by liberating human beings, would fraternallyliberate the whole of creation’ (SW 4:386). With the latter idea of a cosmicliberation achieved through technology the Benjamin of 1940 returns to theutopian insight of the Benjamin of 1916 who wrote ‘On Language as Suchand on the Language of Man’.

The presence of a non-messianic political theology in the ‘On Conceptof History’ does not replace the messianic, but situates it in a more complexconfiguration. The middle and the final theses perhaps should be seen asposing an alternative within the alternative to catastrophe. Decision, in thiscase, would not be simply between the alternatives of a catastrophic or themessianic end of history, but between the end of history and its radical andimmanent transformation.



Notes

CHAPTER 1

1 See, for example, Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration 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 flown, just asthe hymns are words from which belief has gone. The tables of the gods provide nospiritual 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 theSpirit (1807), trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 455. ‘Nomatter how excellent we find the statues of the Greek gods . . . it is no help; we bowthe 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. Bürger, ‘Walter Benjamin: Contribution à une théorie de la culture-

contemporaine’, Revue d’Esthétique , new series 1 (1981): 27; R. Rochlitz, ‘WalterBenjamin: Une Dialectique de l’image’, Critique 39 (1983): 287–319.

4 See C. Perret, Walter Benjamin sans destin (Paris: La Différence, 1992), pp. 97–9. 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 transformingof course – the intimidating and dogmatic liturgy of the old rituals of display, theold monstrances (ostensions ) of images. This fundamental aspect would need a specificanalysis devoted to it.

6 Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35:1–14. 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 Kunstgeschichteheute , ed. A.-M. Bonner and G. Kopp-Schmidt (Munich: Beck, 1995), pp. 127–36.

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. 3–31.

9 See G. Didi-Huberman, ‘D’un Ressentiment en mal d’esthétique’ (1993), in L’Artcontemporain en question (Paris: Galerie nationale de Jeu de Paume, 1994), pp. 65–88;and its sequel, ‘Post-scriptum: Du ressentiment à la Kunstpolitik ’, Lignes 22 (1994):

21–62.10 Dante, Divine Comedy, Paradise 331.103–5. ‘Qual è colui che forse di Croazia/viene a

veder la Veronica nostra, / che per l’antica fame non sen sazia.’11 See J. Lacan, ‘Subversion du sujet et dialectique du desir dans l’inconscient freudian’

(1960), in Ecrits (Paris: Le Seuil, 1966), pp. 793–827.12 G. Bataille, ‘Méthode de méditation’ (1947), Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard,

1973), 5:201 [my translation].13 On the notion of memory event, see M. Moscovici, Il est arrivé quelque chose: Approches

de l’événement 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’ [mytranslation].

15 [My translation]. See G. Didi-Huberman, Devant l’ image: Question posée aux fins d’une

histoire de l’art (Paris: Minuit, 1990), pp. 65–103.16 We should note the convergence of this model with the meta-psychological model of a

Freudian theory of memory as detailed by Pierre Fédida, especially in ‘Passé anachro-nique et présent réminiscent’, L’Ecrit du temps 10 (1986): 23–45.

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 thedialectic in Bataille and Eisenstein, see G. Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance informe,ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris: Macula, 1995), 201–383. On the useof the dialectic in Mondrian, see Y.-A. Bois, ‘L’Iconoclaste’, in Piet Mondrian (Milan:Leonardo Arte, 1994), pp. 338–43.

18 This formula is commented on in Perret, Walter Benjamin sans detin , pp. 112–17.19 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), inparticular. pp. 125–52.

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 derbildenden Kunst’, Logos 21 (1932): 103–19. And even if Dürer 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 usa definitive interpretation, would itself be greatly in need of such an interpretation. [mytranslation].

22 Regarding Mondrian, for example, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn has recently proved tobe unfair and almost naive in criticizing Bois’ interpretation because it drops thetheosophical paradigm. Lebensztejn makes the criticism with as much vehemence asif Bois were speaking of Masaccio’s Trinity while spurning the Christian dogma thatprovided its iconographical programme. J.-C. Lebensztejn, review of the exhibition

Piet Mondrian: 1872–1944 [La Haye, Washington, New York], Cahiers du Muséenational d’art moderne 52 (1995): 139–40. Far from ignoring the role of Theosophy inMondrian’s art, Bois says it ‘plays the role of a detonator, and it is very probable thatMondrian would have remained a talented provincial landscape artist if he had notcome into contact with it’. Bois, ‘L’Iconoclaste’, p. 329 [my translation]. Lebensztejnpretends to ignore the obvious fact that the philosophical or religious commitment ofa twentieth-century artist cannot be compared with an iconographical programme ofthe quattrocento. It is the very notion of programme that is in the question here – anotion whose deconstruction abstract art has obviously completed, along with thedeconstruction of the entire traditional iconographical approach.

Nonetheless, without articulating it clearly, Lebensztejn is getting to the heartof the problem, which concerns the logical and temporal structure to be drawn fromthe relations in play – ambiguous, critical relations – between idealism and materialengagement (plastic engagement as such), between the discourse of meanings laidclaim to and the formal labour actually performed. It is probable that Bois has notyet completely articulated that structure in writing that ‘it is the materiality of thepainting itself that [in Mondrian] guarantees the efficacy of his “struggle againstmatter” ’ (‘L’Iconoclaste’, p. 330 [my translation]). Significantly, it is at that momentin his analysis that Bois comes closest to the question of the dialectic. A remarkableanalysis 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 matérieldu symbolisme’, in L’Eclatement de l’impressionisme (Saint-Germain-en-Laye: Muséedépartmental du Pieuré, 1982), pp. 19–28.

In Ad Reinhardt as well, the ‘ecstatic’, ‘auratic’ and ‘religious’ references arenot lacking: ‘Sacred space, separate, sacred against profane . . . Contemplative act,continuous absorbed attention, kind of sanctity . . . Transcendent, transpersonal,transfigurative, transparent . . . Detached territory, pure region, timeless, absolute . . .Painting “began” by making sacred the things it decorated? Form fixed by tradition,mandala, ritual, tanka, Xian, 4 evangelists . . . Gate, door image of opening, possibilityof transcendence . . . Product of past. Religious aura’. A. Reinhardt, Art-as-Art: TheSelected Writings , ed. B. Rose [New York: Viking Press, 1975], pp. 192–3).

But, as we also know, these references belong to the same system as the deep-seatedirreligiosity of what is an essentially ironic and critical artist. See J.-P. Criquei, ‘De visu

(le regard du critique)’, Cahiers de Musée national d’art moderne 37 (1991): 89–91. 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 relationcontained, precisely, in the word almost (Y.-A. Bois, ‘The Limit of Almost’, in AdReinhardt [Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art; New York: Museum ofModern Art, 1991], pp. 11–33). But in the almost – what linguists call a ‘derealizingmodifier’, which tends solely to attenuate the information of the word to which itis applied (see O. Ducot, ‘Les Modificateurs déréalisants’, Journal of Pragmatics 24[1995]: 145–65) – the structural necessity fails to express itself as such: the terms of therelation remain unresolved, in a ‘lesser’ and not critical state. Only the Benjaminian

hypothesis of the dialectical image succeeds, I believe, in expressing that necessity, thattrue ‘power of ambiguity’. See Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons , pp. 149–52.

23 C. Greenberg, ‘Review of Exhibitions of Hedda Sterne and Adolph Gottlieb’ (1947), inThe Collected Essays and Criticism , ed. J. O’Brian (Chicago, IL: University of ChicagoPress, 1986), 2: 189. Greenberg adds: ‘But as long as this symbolism serves to stimulateambitious and serious painting, differences of “ideology” may be left aside for the timebeing. The test is in the art, not in the program’.

24 B. Newman, ‘Response to Celement Greenberg’ (1947), in Barnett Newman: SelectedWritings and Interviews , ed. J.P. O’Neill (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), p. 162.Subsequent quotations in this paragraph are from pp. 162–4.

25 T.B. Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971), pp. 15–16.26 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, 1944–1949 (New York: PaceWildenstein, 1994), pp. 7–31.

27 On the importance of the origin motif in Newman’s writings, see J.-C. Lebensztejn,‘Homme nouveau, art radical ’, Critique 48 (1991): 329–35.

28 Newman, ‘The Plasmic Image’ (1945), in Selected Writings , pp. 138–55, 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 alsoidem, ‘The First Man Was an Artist’ (1947), in Selected Writings pp. 156–60.

29 See Newman, ‘The New Sense of Fate’ (1947–48), in Selected Writings , pp. 164–9. Inthese pages, the motifs of archaic art, tragedy, and the destruction of Hiroshima areall tied together.

30 Newman, ‘The Plasmic Image’, pp. 138–55; and, ‘The Sublime is Now’ (1948), inSelected Writings , pp. 171–3. On the aesthetics of the sublime and Newman, see

Jean-François Lyotard, L’Inhumain: Causeries sur le temps (Paris: Galilée, 1988),pp. 98–118.

31 See Hess, Barnett Newman ; B. Richardson, ‘Barnett Newman: Drawing His Way intoPainting’, in Barnett Newman: The Complete Drawings, 1944–1969 (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. 174–5.34 Ibid., p. 174.

35 I take a certain liberty in using conceptual distinctions elaborated in some of my earlierstudies.

36 Newman, ‘Ohio, 1949’, p. 175.37 I have commented on this definition in Ce que nous voyons , pp. 103–23.38 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 quenous voyons , pp. 63–84) or, 20 years later, James Turrell in the Arizona desert. G. Didi-Huberman, ‘L’Homme qui marchait dans la couleur’, Artstudio 16 (1990): 6–17.

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 Newman’sgraphic production in general, see also A. Pacquement, ‘Le Parcours des dessins’, andB. Rose, ‘Barnett Newman: Les Oeuvres sur papier’, both in Barnett Newman: lesdessins. 1944–1969 (Paris: Musée national d’art moderne/Centre Georges Pompidou,1980), pp. 7–10 and pp. 12–29.

41 Rose, ‘Barnett Newman’, p. 26.42 See Hess, Barnett Newman , pp. 55–85; 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 ,

55–6; and especially Y.-A. Bois, ‘Perceiving Newman’ (1988), in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 190–92.

45 See Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons , pp. 103–23.46 H. Damisch, ‘Stratégies, 1950–1960’ (1977), in Fenêtre jaune cadmium, ou les dessous

de la peinture (Paris: Le Seuil, 1984), p. 166. And he adds, ‘as if the effect of depth inpainting could be reduced to a procedure, an arbitrary formula’ [my translation]. Forhis discussion of a ‘specific 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 mattersis the scale.’

48 [Retrait: Both the removal of the adhesive strip and the mark or trace left once it hasbeen removed. – trans.]

49 J. Clay, ‘Pollock, Mondrian, Seurat: La profondeur plate’, L’Atelier de Jackson Pollock (Paris: Macula, 1978; 1994), pp. 15–28. Let us recall here the decisive theoreticalrole played by the staff of the journal Macula , in 1976–79, regarding the questions ofsurface and depth. See especially C. Bonnefoi, ‘A Propos de la destruction de l’entitéde surface’, Macula 3.4 (1978): 163–6; and, ‘Sur l’apparition de visible’, Macula 5.6(1979): 194–228.

50 Here I arrive, by other paths, at what Pierre Fédida, speaking of Paul Cézanne,Giacometti and André du Boucher, magnificently called ‘the indistinct breath of theimage’ [my translation]. See P. Fédida, Le Site de l’ étranger: La situation psychanalytique (Paris: PUF, 1995), pp. 187–220.

We could, moreover, continue the excellent analyses of Bois on Mondrian(‘L’Iconoclaste’, pp. 313–77) by working with the hypothesis that Newman’s charac-teristic stumping at the edges, his elaborations on the frame, and his interruptions inthe 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), inSelected Writing , p. 251: ‘Instead of using outlines, instead of making shapes or settingoff 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. 310–11.53 See Hess, Barnett Newman , pp. 55–6; 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 ‘nonfigurativity’. See D. Payot,‘Tout uniment’, in L’Art moderne et la question de sacré , ed. J.-J. Nillès (Paris: Le Cerf,1993), pp. 163–89.

54 See Bois, ‘Perceiving Newman’, pp. 193–6 and 203.55 Newman, ‘Frontiers of Space’, p. 250.56 Newman, ‘The Plasmic Image’, p. 145; and idem, ‘The Sublime is Now’, pp. 171–5.

57 Newman, ‘Interview with Lane Slate’ (1963), in Selected Writings , pp. 251 and xiii (inanother version corrected by Newman himself).

58 In Lebensztejn’s very apt expression in ‘Homme nouveau, art radical’, p. 327 [mytranslation].

59 On the notion of the ‘subjectile ’, see J. Clay, ‘Onguents, fards, pollens’, in BonjourMonsieur Manet (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1983), pp. 6–24; G. Didi-Huberman, La Peinture incarnée (Paris: Minuit, 1985), pp. 25–62; and J. Derrida,‘Forcener le subjectile’, Natonin Artaud: Dessins et portraits (Paris: Gallimard, 1986),pp. 55–108.

60 Fundamental in this respect is the reflection found in Newman, ‘The Fourteen

Stations of the Cross, 1958–1966’ (1966), in Selected Writings , p. 189: ‘It is as I workthat the work itself begins to have an effect on me. Just as I affect the canvas, so doesthe canvas affect me.’

61 In particular, this is the lesson of Gilles Deleuze’s remarkable analysis of the work ofSamuel Beckett. See G. Deleuze, ‘L’Epuisé’, afterword to S. Beckett, Quad et autres

pièces pour la télévision , trans. E. Fournier (Paris: Minuit, 1992), pp. 55–106.62 ‘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 maybe. 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. 224–47, 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 Benjamin’s thought, an importance convincingly and extensively exploredby 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 Cadava’sstudy that this essay can be written, and, it is as a contribution to Cadava’s study thatthis reflection on photography’s relation to place within Benjamin’s writing is intended

while opening the question of the consequences for history of the technical and the, attimes, conflicted role photography performs within that writing.

2 Only the eye, Benjamin argues, can keep up with speech, something the hand cannotdo: ‘since the eye perceives more quickly than the hand can draw, the process ofpictorial 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: 471–508/SW 4: 251–83). In many cases,the translation of this and other works from this edition has been modified in order

to provide a more accurate reflection of Benjamin’s language. Where these modifica-tions occur, the German words or phrases have been inserted parenthetically into thetranslation.

4 In the collection of Atget’s photographs Benjamin was familiar with, Lichtbilder (Parisand Leipzig: Henri Joquières, 1930), none of the explicit street scenes (where the focusof the image is on the street rather than a building or something along or in the street)exhibit human figures (see plates 5, 6, 9, 68 in this edition). However, this is not ex-clusively true for all of Atget’s photographs of such scenes. In some, the ghostlypresence of figures who left the frame before the end of the exposure can be seen, inothers, there are figures who remain throughout the exposure. These exceptions do

not necessarily contradict the observations Benjamin makes after seeing only the 1930volume. Little is known of Atget’s intentions in these photographs – whether or not thepresence of such figures is incidental to these intentions.

5 The verb treten recurs eight times and frequently, as here, to express when somethingappears for the first 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 complètes (Paris: Pléiade, 1976), 2:618.

7 On the definition of art as a movement from one pole to another see, ‘Reproducibility’,GS 1.2: 482–83/SW 4: 257.

8 It is in this sense that Susan Blood, in an incisive reading of Baudelaire and Benjaminon photography, remarks: ‘not only is the photograph an object upon which Benjaminmay construct a history; photography also becomes the figure 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: ‘inprinciple the work of art has always been reproducible’ (GS 1.2: 474/SW 4: 252); and ina note on Raphael’s Sistine Madonna Benjamin speaks of ‘the primary exhibition valueof Raphael’s painting’ (GS 1.2: 483n11/SW 4: 274n15). The divide between cult andaura 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 isreinforced when Benjamin speaks of the anticipation of one form within another: ‘Justas the illustrated newspaper virtually lay hidden within lithography, so the sound film

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 flits by. The

past can be held fast only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recogniz-ability, and is never seen again’ (GS 1.2: 695/SW 4: 390). The verb festhalten , usedhere to describe the holding of the true image of the past, is also used in Benjamin’stranslation of Monglond. There it describes what the photographic plate does to thepast.

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, ‘Benjamin’s Modernity’, in

The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin , ed. David S. Ferris (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2004), pp. 97-114; repr. in Andrew Benjamin, Style and Time: Essays onthe 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 marksaround ‘ Ausschreiten ’, the replacement of photography by camera, and the addition oftwo 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 TechnicalReproducibility’ (GS 1.2: 500/SW 4: 266). This property of photography is also statedearlier in the third version (‘photography can bring out aspects of the original thatare 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 slowmotion, 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 onlybe treated here at the risk of repeating the problematic it brings to light as an example,see Cadava, Words of Light , pp. 98–100.

16 In the first version of the ‘Reproducibility’ essay (a version in which treten occurs less

frequently than the third), there is one instance when Benjamin, describing the meansby which an art becomes founded on a new practice, writes ‘stepped’: ‘An die Stelleihrer Fundierung aufs Ritual ist ihre Fundierung auf eine andere Praxis getreten:nämlich ihre Fundierung auf Politik’ (GS 1.2: 442).

17 On this requirement, see GS 1.2: 473/SW 4: 251–2.18 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 sentencesof the ‘Reproducibility’ essay: ‘To an ever increasing degree, the work reproducedbecomes 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 reproducibilitythat it reproduces itself in and through this image. Here, what would be the negativein 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 ofHistory’ 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 becomesa sign. On this development, Benjamin cites Valéry: ‘Just as water, gas, and electricityare 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 disappearat a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign’ (GS 1.2: 475/SW 4: 253).

22 The flash is referred to three times in ‘On the Concept of History’ (Theses V, VI, andVII); in Convolute N of the Arcades Project it recurs five 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 Projectdoes Benjamin speak of an overcoming or Überwindung : ‘The overcoming of theconcept of “progress” and the overcoming of the concept of “period of decline” are oneand the same thing’ (N2, 5). Yet, such overcoming, as Benjamin attests to, is not theend of these concepts – an insight that ensures the reproducibility of what Benjamincalls 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 therelation of the eye to the image in photography. The image that the eye looking intothe lens sees can be read as the look of that eye – the image as the Augenblick of dasblickende 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 areseen.

25 Seeing becomes this despite Benjamin’s methodological intention expressed in

Convolute N: ‘Method of this project: literary montage. I have nothing to say. Only toshow’ (N1a, 8).

26 In an entry from Convolute N which can be read as a virtual draft (but with slightvariations) for the entry just cited from the Arcades Project also states this comingtogether in the form of a stepping: zusammentreten (N2a, 3).

27 That progression and continuity define a temporal relation between what-has-been andthe now is also made explicit in N2a, 3.

28 This phrase was also evoked at the end of the Benjamin’s 1933 text ‘On the MimeticFaculty’. In this context, Benjamin states that ‘such reading is the most ancient readingprior 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 flash,similarity appears’ (GS 2.1: 213/SW 2: 722). If it is through the same flash that thedialectical image appears or comes to light – the light of this flash – then what couldbe 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 Benjaminspeaks of ‘the present as now-time shot through [eingespringt ] with splinters ofmessianic time’ (GS 1.2: 704/SW 4: 397; Thesis A).

30 Without reference to this aspect of the dialectical image, Sylviane Agacinski speaksof the photographic image in these terms: ‘In stopping time, in fixing 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. 87–8).

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 thisimage. For a searching and provocative reading of this relation, see Andrew Benjamin,‘Being Roman Now: The Time of Fashion. A Commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “Onthe 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 hasmessianicity, see Werner Hamacher, ‘“Now”: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time’ in

the next chapter of this volume, p. 67–8.

CHAPTER 3

The translations of Walter Benjamin’s works have occasionally been modified inkeeping 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 67–8. 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 messianictime. And that was a good thing to do. Disaster sets in with the social democracyelevating this idea to an ‘ideal’. In Neo-Kantian theory, the ideal was defined as an‘infinite task’. And this theory was the basic philosophy of the Social Democratic



Notes 235

Party – from Schmidt and Stadler to Natorp and Vorländer. Once the classlesssociety had been defined as an infinite task the empty homogeneous time wastransformed 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 thatdid not carry with it its revolutionary chance – it just needs to be defined as aspecific one, namely as the chance of an entirely new solution in the face of anentirely new task’ (GS 1.3: 1231).

It will not be necessary to point out that the social democratic ideals, which Benjaminblames for the passivity of the working class in the face of National Socialism, werepromulgated as regulative ideas in social philosophy – in particular in Germany – evenafter the Second World War. They still dominate the discussion today.

5 In particular when reading Thesis XVII and its emphatic talk about arrest andmonad, one should keep in mind that probably as early as 1913, but no later than

1917, Benjamin had read Husserl’s essay ‘Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft’ fromthe journal Logos (which was published during 1910–11), and got to know the firstmajor attempt of a philosophical critique of historicism and at the same time ofpsychologism and scientific objectivism (see the letter to Franz Sachs, 11 July 1913 andthe one to Gershom Scholem, 23 December 1917, which was important for Benjamin’sdissertation plans on the philosophy of history [GB 1: 141–4 and 406–11]). On thedecisive p. 50 of his Logos essay Husserl summarizes in a few sentences some of his mostimportant thoughts from his 1905 lectures on the ‘phenomenology of internal timeconsciousness’, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins , which – edited byEdith Stein – were published for the first time in 1928 by Martin Heidegger. There are

indications that Benjamin knew Husserl’s lectures when he started making plans forthe historico-critical introduction to his Arcades Project , from which the ‘Theses’ lateremerged. In the Logos essay the psychic is said to be ‘an experience [Erlebnis ] viewedin reflection, appearing as self through itself, in an absolute flow, as Now [and thusenters] into a “monadic” unity of consciousness’. Husserl complemented the motivesof absolute reflection, of the Now and of the monadic unity – which will play a mostimportant role in Benjamin’s work – by characterizing this ‘monadic’ unity and thelimitless flow of phenomena as ‘a continuous intentional line, which is, as it were, theindex of the all-penetrating unity’. This intentional line – the index – is for Husserlthe ‘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 talksabout is, as in the lectures, the time of the internal time consciousness, in contrastto the ‘objective’ or ‘transcendental’ time which can be measured by chronometers).The fact that at this point many more convergences between Husserl and Benjamin’smotives accumulate can hardly be a coincidence. Nor can it be a coincidence thatBenjamin’s attacks in the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ are directed at theconcept of ‘empathy’, which is central in the Logos essay and is also central to theearlier works of Moritz Geiger, a pupil of Husserl’s, with whom Benjamin studied inMunich. At this point, I can go only briefly into the relevant convergence betweenHusserl’s lectures on internal time-consciousness and Benjamin’s notes from the late1930s: they are mainly found in the conceptions of the ‘image’ and of the ‘protentionof re-remembering’. Husserl writes in section 24: ‘Each remembrance contains inten-tions of expectation, whose fulfilment leads to the present’. And: ‘The re-rememberingis not expectation, but it does have a horizon directed towards the future, the futureof 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 Benjamin’s massive criticism of his philosophy of historical time




– which can be assumed to be the criticism of the philosophy of Being and Time andnot just that of Heidegger’s early Marbach lecture – leaving no doubt that Heidegger’sphilosophy of historical time is seen as the only serious philosophical competition

to Benjamin’s planned work. In a letter to Gershom Scholem Benjamin announcesthat in his introduction to the Arcades Project , which would be a critique of historicalknowledge, ‘je trouverai sur mon chemin Heidegger et j’attends quelque scintillementde l’entre-choc de nos deux manières, tres différentes, d’envisager l’histoire’ (letter dated20 January 1930, GB 3: 503). It would be misleading to assume Heidegger’s ‘influence’on Benjamin’s later conception of time and history. This is not just because of thevulgar idea of an influxus physicus could not do justice to the complexity of both trainsof thought but also because that would leave aside the ‘influence’ that St Paul, SørenKierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Edmund Husserl have exerted on both authors.The ‘influence’ is particularly apparent in the conceptions of fulfilment, the fulfilled

time and the moment. The distinction between that which is past and that whichhas been (Vergangenem und Gewesenem ), which Benjamin tries to respect in some ofhis notes, may have been taken from Being and Time and not from Dolf Sternberger’sdissertation Der verstandene Tod . It speaks in favour of the deep impression Heidegger’sbook exerted on Benjamin, perhaps even the threat that he may have felt it posed, thathe, together with Brecht, thought of organizing a ‘critical community of reading’ forthe ‘shattering’ of Being and Time – as mentioned in a letter to Gershom Scholem on25 July 1930 (GB 3). A detailed account of Benjamin’s relation to Heidegger, whichoscillated between fascination and abhorrence, would have to begin with Benjamin’sengagement with Heidegger’s habilitation thesis on Duns Scotus’ theory of categories

and meaning (Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre ). Such an account could dig deeper intothe problems of the work of both authors than the admirers of the one and the despisersof the other would like.

8 Keller’s verses cited by Benjamin evoke the reflecting shield that paralyses the Gorgon.In ‘Verlornes Recht, verlornes Glück’, which peculiarly crosses the positions of Medusaand shield, it is said of a sailor: ‘War wie ein Medusenschild / Der erstarrten UnruhBild.’

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 GermanTragic 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 infinitesimal and, as an emphatic concept of happening, is here brought up byBenjamin against Hegel’s discovery of the dialectical ‘thought-time’ (Denkzeit ) – andthus against Hegel’s dialectic as well as at another place against Heidegger’s 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 anotherplace (N1, 2) in the sense of a deviation or digression (albeit a minimal one) away fromthe ‘grand lines’, and thus, once again, from the linear continuum of tradition. In thenote relating to Hegel, the concept of the ‘Now of recognizability’ is also brought intoplay. 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. Theirrelation can be formally characterized such that it is only the time differential thatopens 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 samehappening, it can be said: the Now is differential.

The concept of the ‘Now of recognizability’, which gives its title to an extendedand important reflection in the context of the theses ‘On the Concept of History’ (GS 1.3: 1237–8/SW 4: 405), finds its most significant exposition in a text dated by RolfTiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser 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 (Kant’s in particular, it seems) with the constitution of things in theNow 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 oftruth 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 thepoint 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 characterizedas a time of pure mediality in the sense of the essay on language from 1916, Benjaminon the one hand opposes – over a period of 20 years – the denial or levelling of timein theories of validity and within the Kantian and neo-Kantian epistemology. On theother 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 historicalcognition 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 ofthe 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 accordingto the measure of this possibility, in so far as it is mere possibility. As mere possibilityit 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 thatflashes up. The image of what has been . . . must be caught in this way, flashing up inthe 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 4:183–4). As incomplete as this sentence is, it is clear at the same time: only that whichis unrescuable is rescued – and even in its rescue it remains unrescuable. This can onlymean: the Now of recognizability is the crisis, in which alone the crisis can be rescuedand 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, 1971–1982 , ed. Itta Shedletzky (Munich: Beck, 1999),pp. 299 and 300–1.

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 Françoise 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 Benjamin’s 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. 57–8. 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. 218–19.11 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. 131.13 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus , p. 389.14 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. 12–13.17 Ibid., p. 12.18 Ibid., p. 15.19 Ibid., p. 214.20 Agamben, Homo Sacer , p. 50.21 Ibid., p. 53.22 Ibid., pp. 52–3.23 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. 63–4.35 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus , p. 16.36 Ibid., p. 12.37 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka , p. 12.38 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16 (1986): 25.39 Reda Bensmaïa, ‘Foreword: The Kafka Effect’, in Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka ,

p. xi.40 Ibid.41 Irving Wohlfarth, ‘No-man’s Land: On Walter Benjamin’s Destructive Character’, in

Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy , eds Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (Manchester:Clinamen, 2000), p. 164.

42 Ibid.43 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka , p. 73.44 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus , p. 12.45 All quotations in this paragraph are from A Thousand Plateaus , p. 12.46 Ibid., p. 18.47 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka , p. 4.



Notes 239

48 Ibid., p. 42.49 Ibid., pp. 16–17.50 Ibid., pp. 21–2.

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 ofMinnesota Press, 1993); Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1989); and, Giulia Schiesari, The Gendering ofMelancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), together with the inaugural work byRaymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (New

York: Basic Books, 1964). 3 See Agamben, Stanzas . 4 Cf. Jean Starobinski, La Mélancolie 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: 271–8. 6 Cf. Octave Mannoni, ‘ “Je sais bien . . . mais quand même”: la croyance’, in Clefs pour

l’ imaginaire ou l’autre scène (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. 249–60.

8 Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1989). 9 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1927), section 27.10 Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de memoire , 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).11 The oscillation is reflected in the contrast between the description in the Abri b , where

the ego structurally assumes the unstable condition of fragmentation and supplementaryaccretion 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 termsof 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, incompleteattempts at detachment from reality. The disavowal is always supplemented by anacknowledgement; two contrary and independent attitudes always arise and resultin the situation of there being a splitting of the ego. Once more the issue dependson 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 anovelty, 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, bymaking 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 maynormally be an articulation present. If we throw a crystal to the floor, it breaks; butnot into haphazard pieces. It comes apart along its lines of cleave into fragments

whose boundaries, though they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal’sstructure.

12 Cf. Freud, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, SE 23: 241.13 Cf. Freud, ‘Medusa’s Head’, SE 18: 273.14 Søren 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 wasable 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 girldies tomorrow, it will make no essential difference; he will throw himself downagain, his eyes will fill with tears again, he will repeat the poet’s words again.

What a curious dialectic! He longs for the girl, he has to do violence to himselfto keep from hanging around her all day long, and yet in the very first momenthe became an old man in regard to the entire relationship . . . Recollection has thegreat advantage in that it begins with the loss; the reason it is safe and secure is

that it has nothing to lose. Nietzsche’s analysis of the ‘it was’ – the fantasy of the spectator before thepageant of ever-completed history – is rigorously parallel. Nietzsche, ‘On the

Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life’, Untimely Meditations andBeyond Good and Evil §277: ‘The everlasting pitiful “too late!” – The melancholyof everything finished ! . . .’

15 Again, Nietzsche demonstrates the profound complicity between the ‘too early’ andthe ‘too late’ – at the level of fantasy:

The problem of those who wait – It requires luck and much that is incalculable if ahigher 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, andin every corner of the earth there are people waiting who hardly know to whatextent they are waiting but even less that they are waiting in vain. Sometimes theawakening call, that chance event which gives ‘permission’ to act, comes but toolate – when the best part of youth and the strength to act has already been used upin 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 Adorno–Benjamin entanglement in terms of the theological

Bilderstreit or ‘iconoclastic controversy’ see Rebecca Comay, ‘Materialist Mutationsof the Bilderverbot ’, in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), Walter Benjamin and Art (London:Continuum, 2004), pp. 32–59.

19 ‘Motifs are assembled without being developed’ (C , p. 580). Note how the charge moreor less resumes Lukács’ own earlier opposition between narration and description in‘Narrate or Describe?’, in Writer and Critic and Other Essays (London: Merlin, 1978),pp. 110–48.



Notes 241

20 See Irving Wohlfarth’s suggestive essay ‘Et Cetera? L’historien comme chiffonier’, inHeinz Wismann (ed.), Walter Benjamin et Paris (Paris: Cerf, 1986), pp. 559–610.

21 Cf. Wohlfarth, ‘Et Cetera?’

22 Cf. Susan Buck-Morss, ‘The Flâneur, the Sandwichman, and the Whore: The Politicsof Loitering’, New German Critique 39 (1986): 99–141.

23 Cf. Max Pensky, ‘Tactics of Remembrance: Proust, Surrealism, and the Origin ofthe Passagenwerk ’, in Michael P. Steinberg (ed.), Walter Benjamin and the Demands ofHistory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 164–89.

24 Cf. Benjamin’s citation of Flaubert in the Theses on History (GS 1.2: 696): ‘Peu de gensdevineront combien il a fallu être triste pour ressusciter Carthage . . .’

25 See in particular Eduardo Cadava’s exemplary remarks on the conjunction of these twotexts – 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 factthat Benjamin, with the exception of his review of Adorno’s book on Kierkegaardhad nothing to say about Kierkegaard: ‘Leider hat er sich über Kierkegaard ander-norts [except in the review of Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard] nicht geäubert. Da b

er ihn gleichwohl verarbeitet, lä bt zumal seine Geschichtsphilosophie vermuten. Inihr scheint er geradezu darauf aus zu sein, Kierkegaards theologische Intention ausihren idealistischen Fesseln zu lösen’. Michael Theunissen and Wilfried Greve (eds),Materialien zur Philosophie Søren Kierkegaards (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1979),p. 80.

2 I am referring mainly to the first version of 1931: ‘Was ist das epische Theater?’ (GS 2.2: 519–31). Translations, if not otherwise indicated, are my own.

3 ‘Worum es heute im Theater geht, lä bt sich genauer mit Beziehung auf die Bühneals auf das Drama bestimmen. Es geht um die Verschüttung 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 inder Oper den Rausch steigert, dieser Abgrund, der unter allen Elementen der Bühnedie Spuren ihres sakralen Ursprungs am unverwischbarsten trägt, ist funktionslosgeworden’.

4 ‘Wenn Du nämlich von meinem “zweiten Entwurf ” schreibst “darin würde man niedie Hand WB’s erkennen”, so nenne ich das doch ein wenig geradezu gesagt und Dugehst dabei bestimmt über die Grenze hinaus, an der Du – gewib meiner Freundschaftnicht – aber meiner Zustimmung sicher bist. [. . .] Der WB hat – und das ist bei einemSchriftsteller nicht selbstverständlich – darin aber sieht er seine Aufgabe und seinbestes Recht – zwei Hände. Ich hatte es mir mit vierzehn Jahren eines Tages in den

Kopf gesetzt, ich müsse links schreiben lernen. Und ich sehe mich heut noch Stundenund Stunden an meinem Schulpult in Haubinda sitzen und üben. Heute steht meinPult in der Bibliothèque Nationale – den Lehrgang so zu schreiben habe ich da aufeiner höhern Stufe – auf Zeit! – wieder aufgenommen.’ (Letter to Gretel Karplus, 1September 1935, GB 5: 151).

5 ‘Das saturnische Tempo der Sache hatte seinen tiefsten Grund in dem Prozeß einervollkommenen Umwälzung, den eine aus der weit zurückliegenden Zeit meinesunmittelbar metaphysischen, ja theologischen Denkens stammende Gedanken- undBildermasse durchmachen mubte, um mit ihrer ganzen Kraft meine gegenwärtigeVerfassung zu nähren. Dieser Prozeb ging im stillen vor sich; ich selber habe so wenig




von ihm gewubt, da b ich ungeheuer erstaunt war, als – einem äußerlichen Anstobzufolge – der Plan des Werkes vor kurzem in ganz wenigen Tagen niedergeschrieben

wurde’. (letter to Werner Kraft, 25 May 1935, GB 5: 88–9).

6 ‘Sie müssen mir erlauben in diesem Umstand eine besonders bedeutsame Bestätigungdes Umschmelzungsprozesses zu sehen, der die ganze, ursprüngliche metaphysischbewegte Gedankenmasse einem Aggregatzustand entgegengeführt hat, in dem die

Welt der dialektischen Bilder gegen alle Einreden gesichert ist, welche die Metaphysikprovoziert’. (Letter to Adorno, 31 May 1935, GB 5: 98).

7 ‘ So viel ist sicher: das konstruktive Moment bedeutet für dieses Buch was für 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 für mich gespielt haben, hören Sieeinmal mündlich von mir. Genug, da b sie so verlief, daß ich das Buch bis heute nochnicht gelesen habe. Ihr Geschenk eröffnet mir einen unvermuteten – gewib den fürmich gangbaren – Weg zu Laclos’. (You gave me great pleasure yesterday. I will tell youthe story of the role the Liaisons dangereuses have played for me sometime orally. Sufficeit that it had the effect that I have not read the book to this date. Your present opensup 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 Hölderlin, ‘Blödigkeit’, vv. 5 and 2, in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe , ed.

Michael Knaupp (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1992), 1: 443.11 ‘Ob ich den Bogen jemals so werde spannen können, daß der Pfeil abschnellt, ist

natürlich dahingestellt. Während aber meine sonstigen Arbeiten recht bald denTerminus gefunden hatten, an dem ich von ihnen schied, werde ich es mit dieser längerzu tun haben. Warum, deutet das Bild vom Bogen an: hier habe ich es mit zwei Endenzugleich zu tun, nämlich dem politischen und dem mystischen’ (GB 4: 513–4).

12 Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe , 2: 53.13 Again we might hear an echo from Marx’s ‘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 revolutionärenBühne’, p. 279). But it is from that background of the stage from where the ghostthat haunts Europe emerges and from which a trembling emanates through Franceand Europe: ‘nicht nur Frankreich, ganz Europa zitterte vor dem Junierdbeben’ (ibid.,p. 280).

14 Danish quotations from Søren Kierkegaard, Frygt og Baeven, Samlede Vaerker , ed. PeterP. Rohde (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1962), 5: 39; German quotations from the editionof 1923 that was available to Benjamin: Søren Kierkegaard, Furcht und Zittern / DieWiederholung , trans. H.C. Ketels, H. Gottsched and Chr. Schrempf, (Jena: EugenDiedrichs, 1923), p. 37; English quotations from the Princeton edition: S. Kierkegaard,Fear and Trembling. Repetition , in Kierkegaard’s Writings, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hongand 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 möglich: in religiöser oder politischer

Observanz. Einen Unterschied dieser beiden Observanzen in ihrer Quintessenzgestehe ich nicht zu. Ebensowenig jedoch eine Vermittlung. Ich spreche hier voneiner Identität, die sich allein im paradoxen Umschlagen des einen in das andere (in

welcher Richtung immer) und unter der unerläßlichen Voraussetzung erweist, da b jede Betrachtung der Aktion rücksichtslos genug, und radikal in ihrem eignen Sinneverfährt’. (Letter to Scholem, 29 May 1926, GB 3: 158–9).



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 theconclusion of Montaigne’s Essays and it consists of an inventory of the author’sbodily and habitual attitudes. On this famous essay, see Jean Starobinski, ‘TheBody’s Moment’, trans. John A. Gallucci, Yale French Studies 64 (1983): 273–305; onRabelais’ lists, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World , trans. Hélène Iswolky(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), passim and ‘Forms of Time andof the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes towards a Historical Poetics’, in The DialogicImagination , trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University ofTexas Press, 1988), pp. 167–206; on the use of lists in La Popelinière’s ‘perfect history’

see Zachary Sayre Schiffman, On the Threshold of Modernity: Relativism in the FrenchRenaissance (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. xvi–xxvi. (The French title is Les Mots et les choses[1966]).

4 For Benjamin’s attitude to Warburg vis-à-vis the independence of disciplines, or, asBenjamin also called it, ‘cultural history’, see Howard Caygill, ‘Walter Benjamin’sConcept of Cultural History’, in David S. Ferris (ed.), The Cambridge Companionto Walter Benjamin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 83–9.

Another article on the relation between Benjamin and the Warburg school that

deserves mention is Beatrice Hanssen’s ‘Portrait of Melancholy (Benjamin, Warburg,Panofsky)’, in Gerhard Richter (ed.), Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in ContemporaryLiterary and Cultural Studies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002),pp. 169–88. Although Hanssen does not address explicitly the issue of the independenceof disciplines, her reading is still valuable for the investigation of the subject of historyin showing that what distinguishes Benjamin’s method from Warburg’s method is thatfor the former there is a ‘disappearance of the human’ (p. 186).

5 Andrew Benjamin, ‘Benjamin’s Modernity’, in Ferris (ed.), Cambridge Companion toWalter 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 philologistis, according to the essay on the Elective Affinities , the chemist who investigates theashes of the pyre – i.e. the material content of the work of art, or the historical pileof catastrophes. The constructive principle of historical materialism presupposesdestruction (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 CarlBecker, Detachment and the Writing of History: Essays and Letters , ed. Phil Snyder(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958), pp. 24–5.

9 ‘The Storyteller’ is of course much more complex. The argument unfolds partlyas a contrast between storytelling and the novel. See Timothy Bahti’s ‘Death and

Authority: Benjamin’s “The Storyteller”’, in Allegories of History: Literary Historiographyafter Hegel (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 226–54 for anincisive reading of the difference between the two genres in terms of the temporalityof the end and of ending.

10 Herodotus with an English Translation , trans. A.D. Godley (Cambridge, MA.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1957), 2: 21.

11 The inadequacy of the question is indicated by the indecision as to who really is incontrol. Thus Jürgen Habermas discerns Benjamin’s failed notion of history in that




materialism cannot be fitted into theology, if the dwarf representing theology is takento be in control (‘Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique’, inGary Smith (ed.), On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections [Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 1988], pp. 113–14). Conversely, Bahti emphasizes Benjamin’sassertion that the puppet takes the chess-player into its service, and correctly showsthat this reversal of control presents a chiasmus between the two terms (Bahti, ‘Historyas Rhetorical Enactment: Walter Benjamin’s Theses “On the Concept of History” ’, in

Allegories of History , pp. 200–1). However, in relation to subjectivity Bahti’s readingrequires a further step: the subject is not presented in the reversal of control betweenman and puppet, but rather in the process of reversibility that the relation betweenman and puppet makes possible. Ian Balfour perceives this process of reversibilitybut concludes from this that ‘the puppet and dwarf . . . have to combine forces, andit is the cooperation of the two that guarantees victory in the chess game of history’

(‘Reversal, Quotation (Benjamin’s History)’, MLN 106 [1991]: 627). This image of analliance between the man and the puppet may be construed as purporting that theyare independent entities. Reversibility must emphasize instead the complicity betweenman 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 l’ancienne France, t. III,

La monarchie Franque (Brussels: Ed. Culture et civilisation, 1964), p. ii. 4 See on this point Jean Grondin, Introduction à H-G Gadamer (Paris: Le Cerf, 1999). 5 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen

Hermeneutik , in Gesammelte Werke (Tübingen, J.C.B Mohr, 1990), 1: 295 / Truthand Method , rev. trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York:Continuum, 1989), p. 290.

6 Gadamer, ‘Vorwort zur 2. Auflage’, 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 bothHeidegger and Benjamin locate boredom as a condition of the modern and thus as oneof 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 philosophicalproject. For Heidegger’s most sustained engagement with boredom see his TheFundamental 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 PresentHope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism (London: Routledge, 1997).

3 Benjamin’s relation to Kant is a topic of research in its own right. In general termshowever, Kant positions Space and Time as providing the conditions of possibility forexperience. 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 – bydefinition – 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 ofepistemology. What this means is that ambivalence is an aspect that is constitutiveof subjectivity itself. Within the prevailing presence of ambivalence, knowledge isessential.

5 The heritage in which the technology of art is discussed usually oscillates betweentwo predetermined positions. In the first instance the term ‘technology’ assumes amonolithic quality and is thus not able to be used effectively to account for differentand conflicting practices that stem from the same technological source. While inthe second techniques, as a domain of practice, are linked to a humanist conceptionof 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 pursuedis what could be described as the development of an ontology of techniques. This isof course a project to come. However it is one that can be located within a mode ofthinking 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 MassOrnament , trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1995). One of Kracauer’s formulations opens up the question of who sees and thus thenature 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 thatthere is no room left between them even for the slightest contemplation’ (p. 326). Thetemporality of this movement – one marked by the elimination of any possible inter-vention – is implicitly challenged by Benjamin’s notion of distraction. The audience’sstate of absorption retains a partiality precisely because of the ineliminability of thepotential for criticality.

8 For a detailed investigation of the complex politics of Fury see Anton Kaes, ‘A Strangerin the House: Fritz Lang’s Fury and the Cinema of Exile’, New German Critique (2003), 89: 33–58.

9 An obvious site in which it would be possible to begin to identify this development is

in Freud’s ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, in The Standard Edition ofthe Complete Psychoanalytical Works of Sigmund Freud , trans. James Strachey (London:Hogarth Press, 1973), 17: 65–143. The value of Freud’s work is the way it complicatesany straightforward distinction between the individual and the group. What is inter-esting with Benjamin however is the possibility of introducing not the constraint ofthe ego-ideal, but a relationship between distraction and criticality that links theirpresence to a founding ambivalence. The ambivalence means that the critical will havea relation to formal presence, rather than the projection of one content as opposed toanother. While it cannot be undertaken here, the question of ambivalence as a motifin 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 ofeveryday Dasein is the they-self which we distinguish from the authentic self – thatis from the self which has been taken hold of in its own way. As the they-self, theparticular Dasein has been dispersed into the they, and must first find itself’. MartinHeidegger, 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 ofthe 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 inthis 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: Benjamin’s “Critique

of Violence” ’, in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds), Walter Benjamin’sPhilosophy. Destruction and Experience (Manchester: Clinamen, 2000), pp. 108–37.

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 ofengagement.

CHAPTER 10 1 An earlier conception of the bourgeois domestic interior emphasizes this aspect of

mortification: ‘The bourgeois interior of the 1860s to the 1890s – with its giganticsideboards distended with carvings, the sunless corners where potted palms sit, thebalcony embattled behind its balustrade, and the long corridors with their singinggas flames – fittingly houses only the corpse. “On this sofa the aunt cannot but bemurdered.” The soulless luxury of the furnishings becomes true comfort only in thepresence 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. 17–8. 3 Ibid., p. 25. 4 For a more detailed account of how Benjamin’s 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): 275–87.

5 While Benjamin’s notational thinking on the interior is not confined 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 Benjamin’s 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 Décor: The Domestic Interior 1620–1920 (New York:

Viking, 1984), pp. 10–11.

15 Gilles Deleuze and Félix 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 exposés in Benjamin’s conception of The Arcades Project , see Missac, Walter Benjamin’s Passages , pp. 139–45.



Notes 247

CHAPTER 11

1 The letter is published in Sokratis Georgiadis’s 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 Benjamin’s 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 “bringingto light” ’. McLaughlin, ‘Virtual Paris: Benjamin’s Arcade Project’, in ed. GerhardRichter (ed.), Benjamin’s Ghosts (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002),p. 212.

2 The intention is not to revive the eighteenth-century archaeological approach to thepast, 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: HeinrichHübsch’s Critique of Neoclassicism and the Beginnings of Historicism in German

Architectural History’, Oxford Art Journal 5 (1983): 3–13. 3 I am paraphrasing Walter Benjamin’s remarks mainly because he refers to the angel

as a male person. For the history and a comprehensive account of Benjamin’s ‘thesison history’ see O.K. Werckmeister, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, or theTransfiguration of the Revolutionary into the Historian’, Critical Review 10 (1996):239–67.

4 On the concept of ruin in Walter Benjamin’s discourse see Beatrice Hanssen, Walter

Benjamin’s Other History (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1998), Ch. 4,pp. 96–81. For transitoriness in reference to fashion and ‘time’ in Walter Benjamin’sdiscourse on history, see Andrew Benjamin, ‘Being Roman Now: The Time ofFashion: A Commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

XIV’, Thesis Eleven 75 (2003): 39-53. 5 Françoise Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2001), p. 13. Choay pursues the development of the idea of themonument from its anthropological dimension in pre-Renaissance time through

Alberti’s discourse on monument as a work of art, to the nineteenth century when thepurpose of the Latin monumentum gave way to the historic monument.

6 I am using ‘image’ in interchange with the phenomenon of building as discussed byFritz Brethaupt. According to him, ‘within the phenomenon there is something non-phenomenal that does not appear, and within the event there is something that doesnot take place’. And he continues, ‘history comes into play by delaying the appearanceof this nucleus within the phenomenon’ (‘History as the Delayed Disintegration ofPhenomena’ in Richter, Benjamin’s Ghosts , p. 191).

7 According to Wolfgang Schivelbusch, ‘Pre-industrial traffic is mimetic of naturalphenomena . . . Only during a transitional period did the travellers who transferred fromthe 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 19thCentury (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), p. 15. See also SigfiredGiedion, Mechanisation Takes Command , (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

8 Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 19.9 ‘The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image that

flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again’ (SW 4: 390).10 Hubertus Gassner, ‘The Constructivists: Modernism on the way to Modernization’,

in The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915–1932 (New York:Guggenheim Museum, 1992), p. 318.




11 Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in the Eastand West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 119.

12 Giedion, Building in France , p. 87. Giedion’s statement in part stimulated Walter

Benjamin to invest in technology as the source of new collective needs. After receivinga copy of Giedion’s book Benjamin admired him in a letter using the following words:‘I am studying in your book . . . the differences between radical conviction and radicalknowledge that refresh the heart. You possess the latter, and therefore you are ableto illustrate, or rather to uncover, the tradition by observing the present’ (quoted inBuilding in France , p. 53). In Convolute N of the Arcades Project Benjamin returns toGiedion criticizing his inclination for historicism: ‘just as Giedion teaches us to readoff the basic features of today’s architecture in the buildings erected around 1850, we,in turn, would recognize today’s life, today’s form, in the life and in the apparentlysecondary, lost forms of that epoch’ (N1, 11). Here is Detlef Mertin’s interpretation

of the Benjamin’s cited statement: ‘In reworking Giedion’s dualism into a dialecticbetween physiological processes and phantasmagoric dreams, Benjamin pointed to theimmanence of truth within the expression of bodily labours and the physiognomy ofhistorical event’ (‘Walter Benjamin’s Glimpses of the Unconscious: New Architectureand New Optics’, History of Photography , 22 (1998): 118.

13 On this subject see Buck-Morss, Dreamworld , especially Ch. 2, ‘On Time’,pp. 42–96.

14 James S. Ackerman, Origins, Imitation, Conventions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,2002), p. 249.

15 One is reminded of David Wattkin’s 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 claimsbased on Benjamin’s remarks in ‘Experience and Poverty’ (SW 2: 731–6).

17 For the complex ‘influence’ of Freud’s work on Benjamin, see Laurence A. Rickels,‘Suicitation: Benjamin and Freud’, in Benjamin’s Ghosts , pp. 142–53.

18 For a brief and concise documentation of Benajmin’s attraction to the work of modernarchitects, specially Le Corbusier and Scheerbart, see Detlef Mertins, ‘The Enticingand 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 UniversityPress, 1988), pp. 79–89.

20 Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History , p. 54.21 I am benefiting from Andrew Benjamin’s reflections on ‘Time and Task: Benjamin

and Heidegger Showing the Present’, in Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 26–55.

22 For Walter Benjamin, revolution, ‘a moment of danger’, offers the historian the oppor-tunity ‘to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up’ (SW 4: 391).

23 The work of two historians amongst others comes to mind: Manfredo Tafuri andKenneth Frampton. For Tafuri, architecture’s ideology unfolds itself in a stressfulsearch 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 througharchitecture. See Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1976). Important to Frampton’s discussion of modern archi-tecture are dichotomies such as tradition and innovation, métier and technology, butalso site and material. Frampton reads these dichotomies through Walter Benjamin’sideas on the loss of aura and Martin Heidegger’s discourse on dwelling. What these



Notes 249

readings entail is the loss of the unity between architecture and place, and the historicalimpossibility of retaining such a unity even through mechanical reproduction of theobject. Thus Frampton’s quest for modern architecture where the ‘inflection of a

chosen tectonic penetrates into the inner most recesses of the structure, not as atotalizing 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 Briefly, what makes these two figures important, however, is the difference involved intheir emphasis on architectural praxis. While Tafuri expands one’s understanding of theproblematic of the project of modernity, exploring the work of architects who attemptto retain architecture’s 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 thatof the architect. The latter, he believed, should design and build, regardless of the histo-rian’s attempt to disclose the immanent gap between form and meaning in modernity.Frampton’s methodology, on the other hand, enjoys a strategic doubling: in analysinga building, Frampton tries to understand, as much as possible, how the architect hadsought an architectonic solution for the given situation.

25 This is not the rule: the classificatory means employed by historians who are influencedby post-structuralist theories is different: instead of discussing the work in referenceto 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). Hisvision of history differs from that of Kenneth Frampton and Manfredo Tafuri. WhileFrampton sees modernity as an incomplete project, for Tafuri it represents a historicalproject with its own modalities of closure.

26 On Wölfflin 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: YaleUniversity Press, 1982), pp. 98-110.

27 On this subject see Harry Francis Mallgrave, ‘Epilogue, The Semper Legacy: Semperand Riegl’, in Gottfried Semper (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp.355–81. Also Debra Schafter, The Order of Ornament, The Structure of Style: The

Theoretical Foundations of Modern Art and Architecture (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2003), especially pp. 32–59.

28 Alois Riegl, ‘The Dutch Group Portrait’, October , 74 (1995): 3–35. AnalysingRembrandt’s (The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp), Riegl argued that:

The picture accordingly contains a double unity through subordination: first,between Tulp and the seven surgeons, all of whom subordinate themseleves to himas the lecturer, and, second, between the crowning surgeon and the beholder, thelatter subordinated to the former and indirectly through him to Tulp in turn.

Such a perception of the beholder and painting remains, according to Rigel, ‘closelydependent upon the works of his direct predecessors . . . and one becomes convincedthat Rembrandt, too, was primarily merely an executor of the artistic volition of hispeople and his time’ (p. 4).

29 According to Margaret Iversen, ‘for Riegl, different stylistic types, understood as expressionof a varying Kunstwollen , are read as different ideals of perception or as different ways ofregarding the mind’s 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 RelationshipBetween the Arts from Wölfflin to Le Corbusier’, in Karen Koehler (ed.), The BuiltSurface (Burlington: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 54–72.




31 See for example, Bernard Cache, ‘Digital Semper’, in Anymore (Cambridge, MA:MIT Press, 2000), pp. 190–97. And Neil Leach (ed.), Digital Tectonics (London:

Wiley–Academy, 2004).

32 A point of view which has nurtured some historians, Manfredo Tafuri and KennethFrampton in particular, to theorize history according to the problematic relation ofarchitecture to capital, technique, land and institutions of capitalism. An argumentcould be made that there are other historians who were also inspired by architects. Theobvious examples could be Zevi’s inspiration from Frank L. Wright, or Le Corbusier’sinfluence on Giedion. In these two latter cases, the issue was not reconstruction of thehistory, but construction of a future based on a normative practice. While one soughtto perpetuate the Zeitgeist , the other opted for a holistic practice inspired by Wright.

33 Quoted in Ann-Marie Sankovitch, ‘Structure/Ornament and the Modern Figurationof Architecture’, The Art Bulletin 80 (1998): 715.

34 Peter Osborne, ‘Small-scale Victories, Large-scale Defeats: Walter Benjamin’s Politicsof Time’, in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds), Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy:Destruction and Experience (Manchester: Clinamen, 2000), p. 88.

35 Andrew Benjamin, ‘Benjamin’s Modernity’, in David S. Ferris (ed.), The CambridgeCompanion to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),p. 149. Discussing interruption in Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities andrhe Arcades Project , Andrew Benjamin associates the very understanding of modernity

with Benjamin’s discourse on the ‘caesura’, an essential concept for understandingmodernity’s departure from the past and thus the interruption of historical continuumso important for historicism.

36 Reflecting on the July revolution Walter Benjamin makes insightful reflections differ-entiating calendar from clock. Against the transient nature of the time registered bythe clock, the calendar suggests a notion of present in ‘which time stands still’, and thisis also the time in which a historical materialist ‘is writing history’ (SW 4: 395).

37 ‘When historical references are called “natural” in uncritical affirmation, identifyingthe 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 tomystify’. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1989), p. 68. For Peter Osborne’s critique of Buck-Morss’s reading of the ‘dialecticalimages’, see ‘Small-scale Victories’, in Benjamin and Osborne (eds), Walter Benjamin’s

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 beunderstood within the conventions of images’ (‘Benjamin’s Modernity’, p. 111).

38 Carlo Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric, and Proof (London: University Press of NewEngland, 1999), p. 24.

39 According to Andrew Benjamin, this passage is historical. Noting the differencebetween time and the object, he writes: ‘Poesis involves a different relationship than theone at work in art defined as techne . Indeed, it is because the relationship is formulatedin this way that the temporal considerations at work in the latter – the conceptionof the work of art determined by techne – are such that they open up as historical’(‘Benjamin’s 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 Conceptof Criticism’, SW 1: 152.

42 Here Beatrice Hanssen suggests a contrast between Martin Heidegger’s essay on the work of art where the Greek Temple is praised in terms of its poetry, and WalterBenjamin, for whom ‘the ancient temple no longer had any place. From now on, itcould exist only as a ruin’. Hanssen, Benjamin’s 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’, ArchitecturalTheory Review 7 (2002): 1–14.

46 Here I am benefiting 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 UniversityPress, 1996), pp. 62–87.

CHAPTER 12

Translations from the German texts by Benjamin and Rosenzweig are mine, althoughI have provided reference to the available English translations.

1 Most helpful have been: Rebecca Comay, ‘Benjamin’s Endgame’, in Walter Benjamin’sPhilosophy: Destruction and Experience , ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne(Manchester: Clinamen, 1994), pp. 251–91. Irving Wohlfarth ‘On the MessianicStructure of Walter Benjamin’s Last Reflections’, in Glyph 5 (1978): 148–212, and themore recent Eric Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 2003).

2 Stéphane Moses, ‘Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig’, in Gary Smith (ed.),

Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,1989), pp. 228–46.

3 References are to Franz Rosenzweig, first the German, then the equivalent English.Der Stern der Erlösung , in Franz Rosenzweig: Der Mensch und sein Werk: GesammelteSchriften , 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 für Max Weber , ed.Melchior Palyi (Munich: Duncker and Humblot, 1923).



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CONTRIBUTORS

Andrew Benjamin has taught philosophy and architectural theory inboth Europe and the USA. He is Professor of Critical Theory in Designand Architecture, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, in theUniversity of Technology, Sydney, and Adjunct Professor of Critical Theoryat Monash University. His previous books include: The Plural Event (1993),Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism (1997); Philosophy’s 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 culturalhistory. 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. Shehas 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 études en sciencessociales, Paris. He is the author of numerous books in French. His booksin English translation include: Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration (1995); Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography ofthe Salpêtriére (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 atthe University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of Theory and theEvasion of History (1993) and Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity (2000); and the editor of Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions (1996) andThe Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin (2004). He is currentlycompleting 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, Universityof Toronto, in the field of modern Jewish philosophy. He taught at StLouis University and Princeton University, and has published widely onethics, continental philosophy, and Jewish thought. His first major projectaddressed ethics and Jewish thought, including two books: Correlationsin Rosenzweig and Levinas (1992) and Why Ethics? Signs of Responsibilities




(2000). His ongoing project focuses on ethics and laws, and he is completinga 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 UniversityBerlin, Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, the University of Amsterdam and the Ecole normale supérieure. His publications include:Pleroma: Reading in Hegel (1998); Premises: Studies in Philosophy andLiterature from Kant to Celan (1996, 1999) and Maser (1998).

Gevork Hartoonian is Associate Professor of Architecture at the Universityof Canberra. He has taught at many US universities, including ColumbiaUniversity and the Pratt Institute. He is the author of Modernity and its Other (1997), and Ontology of Construction (1994). His most recent publicationsinclude, ‘Modernism’, the entry essay for the Encyclopaedia of 20th Century Architecture (2004); ‘Gottfried Semper: The Structure of Theatricality’, Art Criticism (2003); ‘Beyond Historicism: Manfredo Tafuri’s Flight’, Art

Criticism (2002) and ‘Frank Gehry: Roofing, Wrapping, and Wrapping theRoof’, Journal of Architecture , (2002).

Rainer Nägele 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, Hölderlin, Brecht, Artaud and others.His publications include: Reading after Freud (1987); Theatre, Theory,

Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity (1991); Echoes ofTranslation: Reading between Texts (1997) and Literalische Vexierbilder: DreiVersuche zu einer Figur (2001).

Stephanie Polsky has recently received her doctorate in the history ofideas from Goldsmiths College, University of London, for her thesis‘Walter Benjamin’s Transit: A Destructive Tour of Modernity’. She haslectured widely on Benjamin at various institutions including Goldsmiths,

Camberwell College of Arts, Central St Martins and the London College ofPrinting. She currently lectures in the department of Creative Critical andCommunication Studies at Greenwich University. Her most recent work hasfocused 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 emergenceof the bourgeois domestic interior, the theoretical issues surrounding its



inhabitation, and the contemporary mediatization of the interior and thecity. He is coeditor, with Barbara Penner, of Constructing the Interior , a

special issue of The Journal of Architecture (2004), and his work is alsopublished in Archis , Architectural Design , Architectural Theory Review andCritical Quarterly .

Philippe Simay is Directeur de programme at the Collège internationalde Philosophie and associate researcher at the Laboratoire d’anthropologiesociale of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). Hisresearch interests are architecture, theory of modernity, constitution ofanthropological knowledge. He has published several articles on thesesubjects and has edited two books: La Ville dévoilée: Benjamin et la modernitéurbaine (2005), and La Ville en état de choc: Simmel, Kracauer, Benjamin (2005).

Dimitris Vardoulakis teaches at the Victorian College of the Arts andis research assistant at Monash University. Publications include articles inGreek and in English, recently in the International Journal of PhilosophicalStudies , Angelaki and Modern Greek Studies , as well as translations into Greek

of short stories, poetry and a novel, Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (2001). Heis coeditor of the journal Colloquy and coeditor, with Leslie Hill and BrianNelson of After Maurice Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy (2005).

Contributors 255



Index

Ackerman, James 187, 250n. Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund 71,

72, 91–2, 96–8, 100, 105, 179,240n.

Agacinski, Sylviane 234n. Agamben, Giorgio 74, 77–9, 89 Alberti, Leon Battista 247n. Arendt, Hannah 143–4, 146, 153 Aristotle 111 Atget, Eugène 20–2, 27–8, 30, 33,

232n. Augustine 217

Bahti, Timothy 243n., 244n.Bakhtin, Mikhail 243n.Balfour, Ian 244n.Ball, Hugo 217Baudelaire, Charles 4, 6, 25, 89,

100, 209–12, 232n.Bataille, Georges 7, 8, 227n., 228n.

Becker, Carl 243n.Beckett, Samuel 231n.Behne, Adolf 179Belting, H. 231n.Benjamin, Andrew 123, 193,

232n., 234n., 247n., 248n.,250n.

Benjamin, Dora 106Benjamin, Walter ‘A Short Presentation on

Proust, Held on my FortiethBirthday’ 62

The Arcades Project 8, 17, 19,20–2, 25–8, 31–7, 45–6, 48,49, 57–63, 96–8, 100, 103,105, 118–22, 126, 141–3,147, 149, 152–3, 159, 164–8,

171–81, 208–9, 212–13, 217,225–6, 228n., 231n., 233n.,234n., 235–6n., 243n.

‘The Author as Producer’ 103

‘Berlin Childhood around1900’ 226

‘Capitalism and Religion’ 216,220–5

‘Central Park’ 4, 137, 237n. The Concept of Criticism in

German Romanticism 49–50,143, 194, 195, 250n.

‘Critique of Violence’ 76, 79–80,217–18, 219

‘The DestructiveCharacter’ 143–4

‘Eduard Fuchs, Collector andHistorian’ 122, 146–7, 193–4,236n.

‘Experience and Poverty’ 138,

174–5, 248n. ‘Franz Kafka’ 75–8, 86, 103,116, 147

‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ 121,123, 220, 243n., 250n.

‘Karl Kraus’ 103, 145–6, 147 ‘Little History of

Photography’ 4, 12, 29–30 ‘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 inBaudelaire’ 3, 4, 6, 39,209–12



‘On the Concept of History’ 1,7, 24, 26, 28, 32, 35–7,

38–48, 52–7, 60–7, 80–4, 86,98–9, 116, 118–20, 122–7,130–1, 134–6, 137, 148–55,156, 183, 185, 186, 193, 197–8, 207–14, 215, 233n., 234n.,235n., 236n., 237n., 241n.,247n., 248n., 250n.

‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ 234n. One-Way Street 147, 177, 217,

223–4, 246n. The Origin of German Tragic

Drama 4, 56, 57, 60, 83, 98,103, 105, 109, 141, 143, 217,223–4, 236n.

‘Paralipomena to “On theConcept of History”’ 19, 24–5, 27–9, 36, 52–3, 120, 122–3,

126, 129–30, 134, 148, 151,152, 234–5n., 236n., 243n.

‘Praise of the Puppet: CriticalComments on Max vonBoehns’ Puppen undPuppenspiele ’ 146

‘Rastelli’s Story’ 215 ‘The Rigorous Study of

Art: On the First volumeof KunstwissenschaftlicheForschung ’ 190–2

‘The Storyteller’ 98, 129–34,138–42

‘Surrealism’ 101 ‘The Task of the

Translator’ 42–3

‘Toys and Play: MarginalNotes on a Monumental Work’ 168–9

‘Two Poems by FriedrichHölderlin’ 107–8

‘What is Epic Theatre’ 102–3,107–17

‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological

Reproducibility’ 3, 12,17, 20–5, 28–33, 36, 103,

157–64, 169, 186–7, 189, 191,232n., 233n. ‘World and Time’ 217–19, 223Bensmaia, Reda 238n.Bergdol, Barry 247n.Blanqui, Luis-Auguste 164Bloch, Ernst 198, 217Blood, Susan 232n.Brodersen, Momme 238n.Bois, Yve-Alain 15, 228–9n.,

230n., 231n.Bonnefoi, C. 230n.Borges, Jorge Luis 85Brandt, Sebastian 223Brecht, Bertolt 71, 83, 102, 105–

17, 117, 236n.Brethaupt, Fritz 247n.

Buber, Martin 109, 197, 214Büchner, Georg 109Buck-Morss, Susan 176, 186,

228n., 241n., 248n, 250n.Bürger, Peter 227n.Bush, George W. 203

Cache, Bernard 250n.

Cadava, Eduardo 231n., 233n.,241n.Caygill, Howard 243n.Celan, Paul 45, 109Cézanne, Paul 230n.Char, René 153Chirico, Giorgio de 165Choay, Françoise 184, 247n.

Clay, Jean 14, 229n., 231n.Cohen, Hermann 197, 200Colquhoun, Alan 249n.Comay, Rebecca 240n., 251n.Criquei, J.–P. 229n.

Damisch, Hubert 14, 230n.Dante 6, 227n.Danto, Arthur 227n.

Index 257




Deleuze, Gilles 70–6, 79, 80, 81–7,227n., 231n., 246n.

Derrida, Jacques 160, 162, 231n.Didi-Huberman, Georges 227n.,228n., 229n., 230n., 231n.

Dilthey, Wilhelm 148, 149Droysen, Johann Gustav 148du Boucher, André 230n.Ducot, O. 229n.Duhamel, Georges 160, 162Duschamp, Marcel 9

Eiland, Howard 176Einstein, Carl 8Eisenstein, Sergei Mikhailovich 8,

226n.

Félida, Pierre 228n., 230n.Ficino, Marsilio 89

Flaubert, Gustave 241n.Foucault, Michel 82, 120Fountaine, Pierre 178Fourier, Charles 171, 225–6Frampton, Kenneth 188, 248–9n.

250n.Freud, Sigmund 8, 16, 88–9, 92,

95, 99, 111, 114, 187, 221–2,

239–40n., 248n.Fuchs, Eduard 144, 146Fustel de Coulanges, Numa

Denis 148

Gadamer, Hans–Georg 149–51Garnier, Charles 192–3Gassner, Hubertus 186

Gauguin, Paul 228–9n.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-IsidoreGerard) 225

Greenberg, Clement 9, 12, 229n.Grondin, Jean 244n.Guattari, Félix 70–6, 80, 81–5,

246n.Guttmann, Simon 106

Hamacher, Werner 246n.Habermas, Jürgen 243n.Hanssen, Beatrice 188, 195, 243n.,

247n., 250n.Harootunian, Harry 185, 186, 251n.Hebel, Johann Peter 129Hegel, Georg Wilhelm

Friedrich 7–8, 90, 92, 122, 202,204, 227n., 236n., 237n.

Heidegger, Martin 57, 91, 149,163, 235–6n., 237n., 244n.,

245n., 248n., 250n.Heinle, Christoph Friedrich 106Herodotus 119, 131–3Hess, Thomas 10, 229n., 230n.,

231n.Hitler, Adolf 62, 72, 111, 120, 215Hobsbawn, Eric 142Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 36

Hölderlin, Friedrich 107–8, 111–12Homer 119Hope, Thomas 178Horkheimer, Max 72, 91–2, 121–3Husserl, 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, 67–8, 144–5,

234n., 237n.



Kandinsky, Wassily 9Kant, Immanuel 1, 45–6, 49–50,

52, 55–6, 61, 69–78, 82–3, 85–6, 101, 122, 157, 234n., 235n.,236n., 237n., 244–5n.

Karplus (Adorno), Gretel 103, 105–6Keller, Gottfried 56, 59, 236n.Kierkegaard, Søren 95, 102, 111,

113–17, 179, 236n., 240n., 241n.King, Martin Luther, Jr 204Klee, Paul 183Klibansky, Raymond 239n.Kracauer, Siegfried 245n.Kraft, Werner 104Kraus, Karl 61, 144, 145Kraus, Rosalind 227n.Kristeva, Julia 239n.

La Popelinière, Lancelot Voisin

de 120, 243n.Lacan, Jacques 92Lacis, Asjia 72Leach, Neil 250n.Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard

Jeanneret-Gris) 186, 248n., 250n.Lebensztejn, Jean-Claude 228n.,

229n., 231n.

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 79, 85Leskov, Nikolai 129, 139Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 95Levinas, Emmanuel 198Longinus 120Löwith, Karl 164Lukács, Georg 223, 240n.Luther, Martin 110, 223

Lyotard, Jean-François 184Malevich, Kazimir 6, 9Mallarmé, Stéphane 56Mallgrave, Harry Francis 249n.Mannoni, Octave 90Marx, Karl 8, 30–1, 58, 61, 96,

97, 107, 108, 113, 184, 185, 186,208, 221–2, 226, 234n., 242n.

Masaccio 228n.Mauss, Marcel 139

McCole, John 248n.McLaughlin, Kevin 176, 247n.Meltzer, Françoise 237n.Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 14Mertins, Detlef 248n.Michelet, Jules 97Missac, Pierre 177, 180Mondrian, Piet 5, 6, 8, 9, 12, 14,

228n., 230n.Monglond, André 19, 24–5, 28–9,

232n., 233n.Montaigne, Michel de 120, 132Morgenstern, Soma 62Moscovici, M. 227n.

Neher, Gaspar 113–4Newman, Barnett 5, 6, 6–7, 9–18,

229–31n.Nietzsche, Friedrich 79, 81, 87, 89,

93, 109, 264, 221–2, 223, 236n.,240n., 246n.

Nora, Pierre 92

Osborne, Peter 193, 250n.

Panofky, Erwin 5, 6, 16, 227n.,228n., 239n., 243n.Payne, Alina 191Payot, D. 231n.Pen, Ts’ui 85–6Pensky, Max 241n.Percier, Charles 178Perret, C. 227n., 228n.

Plato 113, 114Pliny the Elder 5Podro, Michael 249n.Pollock, Jackson 9, 14Praz, Mario 173–5Proust, Marcel 3, 4, 62, 69, 99

Rabelais, Francois 120Rang, Florence Christian 217

Index 259




Ranger, Terence 142Ranke, Leopold von 122, 148

Raphael 232nR i h dt Ad 5 6 9 229

Semper, Gottfried 191–2, 194Shakespeare, William 185

Shankovitch Ann Marie 250nSt dl A t 235

Documents

Benjamin and History