Vries Benjamin Derrida Certeau

Anti-Babel: The 'Mystical Postulate' in Benjamin, de Certeau and DerridaAuthor(s): Hent de VriesSource: MLN, Vol. 107, No. 3, German Issue (Apr., 1992), pp. 441-477Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2904942 .Accessed: 24/06/2013 19:25

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Anti-Babel: The 'Mystical Postulate' in Benjamin,

de Certeau and Derrida

Hent de Vries

In May 1916, Walter Benjamin, in response to Martin Buber's request for a contribution to the journal Der Jude, wrote that the spirit of Jewish tradition was one of the most important and persistent themes in his thought.' Benjamin had met Buber earlier in 1914 when he had invited him to give a lecture for the 'Freie Stu- dentenschaft' in Berlin, but his relation to him had from the very start been marked by a certain reservation which became even more evident after the outbreak of the war. It must have come as no surprise, then, that his response to Buber's invitation was negative. In a letter of July 1916 Benjamin denounced in no uncertain terms the political orientation of Buber's Der Jude, most impor- tantly because of the enthusiasm of so many of its contributors for the Erlebnis of the war and, more indirectly, because of its interpretation of Zionism.2 Moreover, the letter marks the end of his earlier interest and engagement in the movement of Gustav Wyneken, and it inaugurates the unmistakable skepticism with re-

1 W. Benjamin, Briefe, Hg. und mit Anmerkungen versehen von G. Scholem und Th. W. Adorno (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1966, 1978),-125. 2 Cf. G. Scholem, Walter Benjamin-Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1975), 41.

MLN, 107, (1992): 441-477 ? 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press


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gard to the mainstream of the German social democracy that characterizes so many of his later texts, most notably "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" and the final theses "Uber den Begriff der Geschichte."

In the early letter to Buber, Benjamin formulated his critique in terms that indicate the main preoccupation and major premises of his first independent views on language and contain in nuce his views on the relationship between this conception of language and the question of politics. One passage stands out as the paradoxical formulation of the intricate connection or even unity that would exist between word and effective action. And it is precisely with this paradoxical formulation that Benjamin-by postulating an immediate, magical, secret and yet salutary power of the mute, 'mystical' foundation of language-seeks to explain why the word cannot be reduced to a mere instrumental means of action:

Mein Begriff sachlichen und zugleich hochpolitischen Stils und Schreibens ist: hinzufihren auf das dem Wort versagte; nur wo diese Sphare des Wortlosen in unsagbarer reiner Macht sich erschliesst, kann der magische Funken zwischen Wort und bewegender Tat ubersprin- gen (...). Nur die intensive Richtung der Worte in den Kern des in- nersten Verstummens hinein gelangt zur wahren Wirkung.3

[My concept of an appropriate and at the same time highly political style of writing is to lead up to the ineffable: only there where this wordless realm discloses itself in [its] inexpressible pure force [power, violence] can the magic flash between word and moving action leap across [from one side to the other] (.. .) Only the intensive destination of the words in the direction of the heart of the most inner silencing achieves the true effect.]

Buber did not respond to the letter and no further cooperation developed. In retrospect, however, these sentences can be read as the programmatic statement of a lifelong concentration on the 'essence' of language, an essence in which knowledge, right (as well as morality) and art, following a Kantian tripartition of the faculties of human reason, are 'founded' in a curious way. This program, which began, as Benjamin explained in a letter to Ernst Schoen in December 1917, as a desperate inquiry into the linguistic conditions of the categorical imperative ("verzweifeltes Nachdenken uber die sprachlichen Grundlagen des kategorischen Imperativs"4), distinguishes

3 Benjamin, Briefe, 127. 4 Ibid, 165.


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itself by its peculiar 'linguistic turn,' not only from the modern critical project but also from any objective or absolute idealism. Hamann shows the way here, not Kant let alone Hegel or Schelling. Moreover, Benjamin's early reflections betray a fascination with language in which the early German Romantic writings, the modern French lyric, and more indirectly (i.e., mediated through the studies of Gershom Scholem), the tradition of Jewish mysticism or Cabbala, enter into a singular configuration. In this article, I will focus on just one aspect of this configuration that in a remarkable way seems to determine or found all others: the so-called 'mystical' element. It has often been noted that this 'mystical' moment in Benjamin's writing reveals a religious or theological desire to re- store a lost or broken totality and identity.5 In what is to follow, I will ask what remains of this critique in light of other possible readings of this quasi-theological figure. For that purpose, it will be necessary to make a long detour through some of the more recent discussions of the so-called 'mystical postulate,' most notably in the works of Michel de Certeau and Jacques Derrida.

In Derrida's most recent writings,6 the reading of the early work of Walter Benjamin plays an increasingly important role, or so it seems. In a text entitled "Des tours de Babel" (1985) as well as in several scattered remarks throughout the conversations in L'oreille de l'autre (1982), Derrida engages in a detailed discussion of Ben- jamin's conceptions of language as formulated in "Uber die Sprache uberhaupt und fiber die Sprache des Menschen" (1916), as well as in "Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers" (1923). And in the lecture "Force de loi: la 'fondation mystique de l'autorite,'" the same line of investigation is further pursued in a reading of Ben- jamin's thoughts in the essay "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" (1921).

However, it is clear from the outset that these analyses are not only undertaken to explore a remarkable resemblance or even af- finity between Benjamin's earliest 'program' and the 'task' of deconstruction. For in these readings, Derrida also gives voice to a

5 Cf. B. Witte, Walter Benjamin-Der Intellektuelle als Kritiker. Untersuchungen zu seinem Friihwerk (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlerische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1976), 123 and W. Fuld, Walter Benjamin, Zwischen den Stuhlen, Eine Biographie (Munchen, Wien: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1979), 75: "die Rickerkenntnis des Ursprungs, die erneute verinnerlichte Versenkung in den Kern der Identitat, dcas ist, was Benjamin unter 'Philosophie' verstand."

6 I will not comment here on the remarks on Benjamin in "+ R (par dessus le marche)," published in La verite en peinture. J. Derrida, La verite en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), 200ff.


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profound uneasiness that, in the itinerary that is followed from the first to the second major reading (from "Des tours de Babel," that is, to "Force de loi"), is expressed in increasingly candid terms. The reasons for this ambivalence vis-a-vis Benjamin's early texts seems clear enough. For, in spite of certain striking similarities with respect to the problem of linguistic representation in general and of juridico-political representation in particular, there is, at first glance, an equally notable difference between the two authors. Benjamin's 'metaphysical' assumption of a 'divine' pure origin of language before its 'fall' as well as his appeal to an ultimate-quasi- eschatological-overcoming of language's ambiguities by a 'divine violence' are the main reasons which cause Derrida to distance himself from this thought and the politics it would seem to imply. For Benjamin's critique of a 'bourgeois' conception of language as representation as well as of the parliamentarism-of the democracy as representation-characteristic of the Weimar Republic, would, unfortunately, not only be 'revolutionary' in the sense of being at once 'Marxist' and 'messianic.' The desire for a past origin, for immediate forms of a non-communicative, i.e., no longer mediated, 'communication' (or Verstindigung) that would mark the forms of cooperation prefigured by the 'general proletarian strike,' would be 'reactionary' as well. In contradistinction to this ambivalence, Derrida's deconstruction of the axioms of Benjamin's essays could thus be expected to prepare a different, more differentiated or, rather, more differential account of the functioning of the 'mystical postulate' at the intersection of language and politics. And yet, things are more complicated here. For the risk that worries Derrida in Benjamin's texts continues to haunt the deconstructive reading as well. The difference between the two texts is therefore a difference within the limits of a certain-inevitable, necessary- repetition; i.e., within a certain displacement of an ineluctable relation to an 'abyss' that 'is' the condition of all language, of politics and the law; a 'mystical abyss,' moreover, in which 'God' or, the 'divine force' and 'the worst' are never far away (from the reader or 'actor,' that is, and from each other).

Before discussing Derrida's reading of Benjamin, I will make two brief detours. I will begin by retracing some of the steps taken by Michel de Certeau in order to approach and circumscribe the elu- sive subject of 'mysticism.' Secondly, I will briefly pause at Derrida's quasi-transcendental analysis of de Certeau's discussion of the so- called 'mystical postulate.' Both detours shed some light on the


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premises of Derrida's approach, as well as, more indirectly, on the implications of Benjamin's early reflections on language, politics and the law.

I. The Originary Affirmation of Mysticism

"Mysticism," Michel de Certeau writes, "is the anti-Babel. It is the search for a common language, after language has been shattered. It is the invention of a 'language of the angels' because that of man has been disseminated."7 With these words, de Certeau, in La fable mystique (an interdisciplinary study of some of the major character- istics of the mysticism of the 16th and 17th centuries, of which only the first volume was completed and published in 1982), describes mystical discourse as a "historical trope" for a "loss,"8 as a response to the disintegration of a culture in which objects of meaning and even God himself seemed to have vanished completely. And yet, de Certeau continues, mysticism does not respond to this loss by sub- stituting for it new doctrines or institutions. Instead, it discovers a new mode of treating the disintegrated tradition of theological, scriptural and patristic knowledge; that is, it uses or experiences the same language otherwise. De Certeau relates that procedure to that of negative theology: "it is as though the function of mysticism were to bring a religious episteme to a closure and erase itself at the same time."9 The interplay of this closure and erasure can be easily explained. For in the fragmented and virtually eclipsed language of tradition, the common ground or the very preliminaries of the communication of its contents which had-so far-been taken for granted first need to be established and reestablished permanently: "mystical discourse has itself to produce the conditions of its functioning"10 as well as of its continuation or conservation. Mysticism, then, de Certeau claims, would begin with a singular original and reiterated affirmation, a singular 'act,' an "I will," a volo, in which- or through which-time and again an empty 'space' is created, invented or instituted, a 'space,' that is, hospitable to the new modus

7 M. de Certeau, Heterologies, Discourse on the Other, transl. by B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 88, cf. M. de Certeau, La fable mystique, 1, XVIe-XVIIe siecle, (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 216. Cf. L. Giard, "Biobib- liographie", in: "Michel de Certeau", Cahiers pour un temps (Paris 1987), 245 ff.

de Certeau, Heterologies, 80. 9 Ibid., 37. 10 de Certeau, La fable mystique, 225-226.


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loquendi or, which amounts to the same thing, a new modus agendi. It is this volo that, in the mystic text, functions as the linguistic and practical a priori that was formerly constituted by the abstract cor- pus of theological learning and its institutional infrastructure. The volo would be that without which no-new-speech is possible. Mysticism in this sense should thus no longer be explained in terms of an apologetics that seeks to bring its addressees to reorient their will and to accept certain assertions or predicates with respect to the divine being, the literal and figural meaning of the Scriptures, etc. Instead of being its mere effect, the mystic volo would, rather, be in the silent ground of any such discourse, its secret point of departure, the force which would make it function at all.

At the same time, however, de Certeau makes it clear that this 'mystical ground' presupposed by all utterance would also make all-new--discourse impossible. For not only does it haunt the very rupture that initiates with an ethical demand that no language or practice can ever hope to satisfy;"1 its force-(the 'act' of) its invention-is also betrayed from the very moment it is pronounced, reflected or narrated in the futile attempt to justify, to preserve or to renew it.

Up to a certain extent, de Certeau stresses, the mystic discourse of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by introducing the volo, anticipates the pragmatic modality of what, since Austin's How to Do Things with Words, has come to be known as the performative speech act. Instead of reaffirming a historically transmitted doctrinal cor- pus of constatives pertaining to the existence and the essential at- tributes of a divine reality, the mystic authors would have expressed a new way of experiencing language in general. More specifically, mystic speech, instead of postulating a reality or knowledge that would precede the utterance, would resemble that performative classified by speech act theory as a promise.12 Its pri- mary function would be an illocutionary one. And yet, de Certeau leaves no doubt that the volo is not a performative-or promise-in the well-defined sense most speech act theorists have in mind. To be sure, the mystic volo is not a constative, but it precisely lacks the social or conventional contexts which are commonly considered to render the performative speech act 'successful' or not. On the contrary, the volo presupposes and entails the elimination or destruc-

1 Ibid., 229, 230. 12 Ibid., 237.


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tion of all such circumstances and it thereby reveals the limit of all performatives. And it is for that very reason that the mystic volo no longer allows, let alone guarantees the translation-or "metamor- phosis"-of the linguistic utterance in a social contract.13 The volo is less a "vouloir dire," to recite the well-known formula from Der- rida's La voix et le phenomene that de Certeau reiterates at this point, but "a willing from which a saying is born or can be born."14 The volo would thus be ab-solute in the very etymological sense of the word, i.e., it would absolve itself from all objects and ends. How- ever, this circumstance would by no means entitle us to associate the volo with a purely negative 'act.' Rather, the volo 'is' an irreducible and infinite gesture of unconditional affirmation. With an oblique reference to Spinoza's famous phrase omnis determinatio est negatio, de Certeau explains why this must be so: whereas "knowledge de-limits its contents according to a procedure which is es- sentially that of the 'no,' i.e., the labor of distinction ('this is not that'), the mystical postulate poses the illimitable [gesture] of a 'yes.' "15 And it is such a 'yes' that has to be presupposed-and thereby 'postulated'-in every distinct 'yes' and 'no,' by their opposition as much as by the dialectical sublation of their posited posi- tivity and negativity. This pre-positional 'yes,' de Certeau suggests, therefore manifests itself only in the modality of the future per- fect. The 'yes' has, in a way, always already taken place. It has always already been given, although it never gives 'itself,' 'as such,' that is to say, 'in all purity.' We could never hope to grasp it in and for itself, because every constative utterance that we would want to use in order to circumscribe its nature would already presuppose or engage its purported 'object' or 'subject,' and this before even a word had been spoken. Moreover, the 'yes' would be irreducible to an occurrence or phrase that a definite article ('the') might stabilize in a certain unity or number: 'yes' would be everywhere and no- where, one and multiple. Consequently, no transcendental or linguistic meta-discourse would ever be able to distance itself from it, turn its back on it, return to it, let alone reflect and speculate on its intent or meaning.16 For, since the volo would be the affirmation of a beginning or opening rather than of anything determinate, the mystic 'speech' would imply a certain "non-vouloir." The volo would

13 Ibid., 238. 14 Ibid., 240. 15 Ibid., 239. 16 Cf. J. Derrida, Psyche. Inventions de l'autre (Paris: Galilee, 1987), 640.


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pertain to everything and nothing, to everyone and nobody. It would 'construct' the 'space' in which what is positively given or that which is negative could be experienced and said at all (i.e., posited, negated or even denegated).

In de Certeau's analysis, then, the volo would be no longer think- able as the fulfillable intention of a subject constituted and identifiable prior to the volo. The volo would no longer be the willing or saying of something determinate. In its very ab-soluteness, it would precisely be a nihil volo, emptied out to the point of becoming almost interchangeable with Heidegger's interpretation of the non- vouloir of Meister Eckart's Geldzenheit as a releasement or 'letting- be.'17 Not unlike Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, where it is said that it is precisely not "how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists" ("Nicht wie die Welt ist, ist das Mystische, sondern dass sie ist."), the mystic writings would "display a passion for what is" rather than for what it is that 'is.'

Mysticism then, in de Certeau's sense, would entail an originary opening up of all language. But, at the same time, it would imply its "circoncision."18 Like the infinite detours of negative theology, it would-paradoxically-only signify through the fact that it re- moves (and withdraws itself from) language's very signifyingness.19 Mystic speech would thus disappear in what it discloses: accord- ingly, it would only say by unsaying, write by 'unwriting.' And the alterity that it, in so doing, reveals and conceals, would have no identity or name independent of this movement. In de Certeau's words:

The other that organizes the [mystic] text is not the (t)exterior [un hors- texte]. It is not an (imaginary) object distinguishable from the movement by which it (Es) is traced. To set it apart, in isolation from the texts that exhaust themselves in the effort to say it, would be to (...) identify it with the residue of alterity of already constituted systems of rationality, or to equate the question asked under the figure of the limit with a particular religious representation (.. .) It would be tantamount to positing, behind the documents, the presence of a what-ever, an ineffability that could be twisted to any end.... 20

17 de Certeau, La fable mystique, 228, 229, 232 and 27. 18 Ibid., 185 ff. 19 Ibid., 189. 20 de Certeau, Heterologies, 81-82, cf. La fable mystique, 27.


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Instead of attempting to define its purported 'object,' to under- stand mysticism would therefore mean: to formalize the different aspects of its writing, of its 'style' or 'tracing,' of an infinitely reiterated (i.e., repeated, altered and even annihilated) invisible step (or pas).21 And it is only around this essential indeterminacy that all mystic speech would be centered and receive its peculiar force: a force, de Certeau claims, that is nothing else than the echo in language of the divine anger and violence that Jacob Bohme and others postulate at the origin of everything that exists, at the very beginning of history.22

This connection brings me to the second detour. For it is precisely the mutual implication of an originary violence and the functioning of language (as well as of law and politics) that will interest Derrida in his analysis of the 'mystical postulate' in de Certeau, as well as in Benjamin.

In his reading of de Certeau's La fable mystique, Derrida tries to establish the peculiar logic that governs de Certeau's 'reconstruc- tion' of the originary affirmation in (and of) the mystic text and asks what it presupposes as well as what it seeks to exclude. Such an analysis, Derrida advances, could be termed "quasi-transcendental" or "quasi-ontological,"23 formulations that do not signal any lack of rigor but, on the contrary, expose the narrative, fictional or, more precisely, fabulous features of the 'mystical postulate' and thereby attempt to subtract it from the metaphysics of the-modern, subjective-will that would still haunt de Certeau's analysis, notably in the identification of the originary affirmation with an 'I' that would have already enough 'determination' to say of itself, in the first person singular: "I will" (i.e., volo).24

For, as is suggested by de Certeau's own descriptions, the silent presupposition of all utterance, the affirmation of mystic speech which engages even the most negative predication, is strictly speaking neither an 'act' of'speech' nor, to be sure, an 'act,' pronounceable in the present by a conscious 'I' that would have enough self- presence to express, to put into words, what it intends. Rather, the general direction de Certeau's analyses take would seem to imply that the volo only "resembles" what could at best be called an "abso-

21 de Certeau, La fable mystique, 28. 22 Ibid., 231, cf. Derrida, Psyche, 205. 23 Derrida, Psyche, 641. 24 Ibid., 645.


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lute performative."25 The volo resembles an absolute performative because it 'is' neither 'performative' nor 'absolute' in any generally accepted or intelligible sense of these terms. More precisely, one would have to admit that the originary affirmation 'is' not at all. For, although it opens the 'happening' of any event (and in that sense, perhaps, even precedes the very Ereignis of Being), it 'is' 'as such'-in 'itself--neither an event nor any other determinable presence (or coming into presence). No fundamental ontology, no transcendental inquiry into the subjective, theoretical and practical conditions of this affirmation, let alone any ontic, empirical discourse, could ever adequately describe its singular occurrence. And since the 'yes' can never become a theme or subject of any possible (hypo)thesis, the very introduction of this figure can therefore, strictly speaking, never have the epistemic qualities of a so-called 'postulate.' The modality of its manifestation as well as its philosophical articulation could only be that of a "quasiment": its 'logos' is that of a "fable."26

It is in the context of this analysis, which was published under the title "Nombre de Oui" ("A Number of Yes") in 1987, four years before the discussion of the 'mystical postulate' in "Zur Kritik der Gewalt," that Derrida reminds us of a revealing passage in a text that de Certeau does not mention and that is by now generally regarded as one of the important sources of some of Benjamin's early thoughts:27 Franz Rosenzweig's Der Stern der Erlisung (1921). Derrida gives the following quote from its first book:

Das Ja ist der Anfang. Das Nein kann nicht der Anfang sein; denn es konnte nur ein Nein des Nichts sein. (. . .) Und weil dies Nichtnichts ja nicht selbstandig gegeben ist-so umschreibt die Bejahung des Nicht- nichts als innere Grenze die Unendlichkeit alles dessen, was nicht Nichts ist. Es wird ein Unendliches bejaht: Gottes unendliches Wesen, seine unendliche Tatsachlichkeit, seine Physis. Das ist die Kraft des Ja, dass es uiberall haftet, dass unbegrenzte Moglichkeiten von Wirklichkeit in ihm liegen. Es ist das Urwort der Sprache, eins von denen, durch die-nicht etwa Satze, sondern erst einmal uberhaupt satzbildende Worte, die

25 Ibid., 647. 26 Ibid., 648. 27 Cf. S. Moses, "Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig", in: Deutsche Viertel-

jahrschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 1982, Heft 4, 622-640, U. Hortian, "Zeit und Geschichte bei Franz Rosenzweig und Walter Benjamin", in: W. Schmied-Kowarzik, ed., Der Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), Bd. II (Freiburg, Munchen: Alber, 1988), 815-827.


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Worte als Satzteile, moglich werden. Ja ist kein Satzteil, aber ebenso- wenig das kurzschriftliche Sigel eines Satzes, obwohl es als solches ver- wendet werden kann, sondern es ist der stille Begleiter aller Satzteile, die Bestatigung, das 'Sic,' das 'Amen' hinter jedem Wort. Es gibtjedem Wort im Satz sein Recht auf Dasein, es stellt ihm den Sitz hin, auf dem es sich niederlassen mag, es 'setzt.' Das erste Ja in Gott begriindet in alle Unendlichkeit das gottliche Wesen. Und dies erste Ja ist "im Anfang."28

[Yea is the beginning. Nay cannot be the beginning; for it could only be a Nay of the Nought. ( . .) This non-Nought is, however, not indepen- dently given, for nothing at all is given except for the Nought. There- fore the affirmation of the non-Nought circumscribes as inner limit the infinity of all that is not Nought. An infinity is affirmed: God's infinite essence, his infinite actuality, his Physics. Such is the power of Yea that it adheres everywhere ... It is the archi-word of language, one of those which first makes possible, not sentences, but any kind of sentence- forming words at all, words as parts of the sentence. Yea is not part of a sentence, but neither is it a shorthand symbol for a sentence, although it can be employed as such. Rather it is the silent accompanist of all parts of a sentence, the confirmation, the 'sic!', the 'Amen' behind every word. It gives every word in the sentence the right to exist, it supplies the seat on which it may take its place, it 'posits.' The first Yea in God establishes the divine essence for all infinity. And the first Yea is 'in the beginning.'29]

Derrida comments only on those elements of this passage that are illustrative of de Certeau's remarks on the 'mystical postulate': the fact that, according to Rosenzweig, the originary 'yes' is both a word and something apparently beyond or, rather, before every determinate language, before even the pronunciation of any particular 'yes.' As the inaudible companion of all speech (as well as of all writing, for that matter), the 'yes' would thus have a transcendental status similar to that of the 'I think' (Ich denke) that, as Kant posited, accompanies (begleitet) all our representations (Vorstellun- gen). As the hidden ground or source of all language, the 'yes' would both belong and not belong to what it makes possible or calls

28 F. Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlosung, Gesammelte Schriften II (The Hague: Mar- tinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1976), 28-29, cf. Derrida, Psyche, 643-644 and the reference to the 'originary word' (Urwort) in Rosenzweig, in J. Derrida, Ulysse gramophone. Deux mots pour Joyce (Paris: Galilee, 1987), 122n.

29 F. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. W. W. Hallo (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 26-27, cited in "A Number of Yes," trans. B. Holmes, Qui parle, vol. 2, no. 2 (Fall 1988), 120-33, 125.


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into being.30 It would be to this singular postulation that the quo- tation from Rosenzweig's Der Stern der Erlosung would point in an oblique manner.

However, Derrida goes on to further refine this analysis that has been prepared by the distinctions made in de Certeau's La fable mystique. For the 'yes,' he continues, is not only a quasi- transcendental or quasi-ontological notion in the sense described above, it is also a quasi-analytical notion: that is, it cannot be reduced to one, simple element, structure or event. It is marked in advance by the "fatality" of a doubling or repetition that implies the inevitable-necessary-possibility of its betrayal and perversion. Not only is the 'yes' strictly speaking never first-as if it were just another primum intelligibele or principium-it also calls for another 'yes.' For, as a promise, no affirmation can stand alone: it envelops at least one more 'yes' that has to come in order to remember and reconfirm it. And it is precisely this reiteration which brings with it an inescapable menace or risk. As a consequence, the fabulous 'yes' is contaminated a priori by the possibility of a forgetting that could also be signaled by its mere mechanical repetition or parody.31 There is nothing-no good conscience, no sincere engagement, no effective political strategy-that could ever claim to be able to prevent this from happening. And it is due to this disturbing circumstance that no originary affirmation allows a distinction between a 'space,' in which the 'yes, yes' would echo a divine voice or force, and a Nietzschean one, in which this 'yes' would be parodied.32 For

30 Cf. Derrida, Psyche, 644. 31 Derrida, Psychg, 649. 32 But is that really what de Certeau implies when he asks (without answering) the

question: "Cet espace est-il divin ou nietzscheen?" (Lafable mystique, 240, cf. Derrida, Psyche, 642)? In the same context de Certeau insists on the fact that all mystic speech has, for essential reasons, to remain a celebration of 'madness': "une pratique spi- rituelle du 'diabolique'" (La fable mystique, 242). Not unlike Derrida, in his analysis of the concept (and the condition of the possibility) of 'prayer', in "Comment ne pas parler? Denegations," in Psyche, de Certeau makes it clear that the volo, even though it inaugurates an 'ethical' moment and opposes language's insincerity, can (and must) not once and for all undo its capacity to lie. On the contrary: "le volo n'in- staure pas, a la maniere du cogito cartesien, un champ pour des propositions claires et distinctes (.. .) Bien loin de constituer un 'propre', il entraine une metaphorisa- tion generale du language au nom de quelque chose qui n'en releve pas et qui va s'y tracer. Au lieu de supposer qu'il y a quelque part du mensonge et qu'a le depister et le deloger on peut restaurer une verite (et une innocence?) du language, le prealable mystique pose un acte qui conduit a utiliser le language tout entier comme menteur. A partir du volo, tout enonce 'ment' par rapport a ce qui se dit dans le dire." (La fable mystique, 241).


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the same reason, one might wonder, Derrida asks, whether Rosen- zweig "still speaks as aJew, or as the already over-Christianized Jew he has been accused of being, when he calls upon us to heed the originary yes in certain texts whose status remains by nature uncertain, texts which waver-like everything saying (the) yes-the theological, the philosophical (transcendental or ontological) and the song of praise or the hymn."33 And this indecision is, perhaps, less an accidental-i.e., biographical or psychological-trait than a structural uncertainty. For in order for any alliance or engagement or faith to become what it is, it is necessary for the 'first' pronounced or ineffable 'yes' to be erased and reiterated in a 'second' 'yes' that is more than a mere natural, logical or programmed effect of the 'first.' This forgetfulness and betrayal are "the condition itself of fidelity," for only thanks to this "danger,"34 the 'second' 'yes' can claim to have made a genuine step beyond the 'first' and thereby, in its turn, be a new, unique and, in that sense, 'first' affirmation.

Could the reading of this singular 'logic of affirmation' which, simultaneously, is also a 'logic of iterability,' be of any help in understanding some of Benjamin's most enigmatic phrases, for example, the intriguing passage, to be discussed below (cf. II) in which 'God' is identified as both the 'origin' and the 'addressee' of the essence of human language as it reveals itself in the name? Is this what Benjamin 'intended' or 'had in mind'? Or is this, perhaps, how we should read him in order to 'make sense' of his often puzzling formulations? Can these two questions themselves ever be rigorously separated? Could, in short, the quasi-transcendental interpretation of de Certeau35 (and Rosenzweig, for that matter) shed light on the dilemma that from the very beginning has par- alyzed the reception of Benjamin's work, to wit: the question whether the development of his thought should be regarded as an exercise in Jewish philosophy-as the reinterpretation of tradi- tional religious notions in light of a distinctively modern experience-or, on the contrary, as a progressive evolution toward a his-

33 Derrida, "A Number of Yes", 124-125, Psyche, 643. 34 Derrida, Psychi, 649. 35 At one point de Certeau mentions Benjamin and refers, in the context of an

excursion on angels, to the short text entitled "Agesilaus Santander" (written in 1933), cf. La fable mystique, 315, but the parallel here remains to be articulated in detail.


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torical materialism in which the messianic motifs would be trans- figured into mere tropes of a disruptive moment?36 That the very pertinence of the distinction between a 'serious' adoption of a theological vocabulary, oh the one hand, and its 'mere citation' or 'al- legorization' on the other, would be hardly sustainable, has, perhaps, not found sufficient attention in this perennial debate in Benjamin scholarship. And it is here that Derrida's analysis of the

36 Theodor W. Adorno, one of the first and most perceptive readers of Benjamin, would have denied the parallel between Benjamin's notion of 'theology' and the 'Urja' in Rosenzweig. In an unpublished letter of March 8, 1955 to Dr. Achim von Borries (at that time a student in Ziirich), Adorno, asked to support a reedition of Der Stern der Erlosung and provoked to comment on the possible resonances between Rosenzweig's work and Benjamin's Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels responded as follows (I cite the crucial passage from the letter that Dr. A. von Borries was so kind to send me in 1986): "R. geh6rt auf die andere Seite und hat sein ganzes Leben lang etwas vom jiidischen Konsistorialrat behalten. Zwischen dem Klima seines Buches und dem Benjamins liegt eben doch der Abgrund, der den Konformismus von einem wirklich radikalen Denken trennt, und das ist keineswegs eine Sache der blossen politischen Gesinnung, sondern bezieht sich auf das Innerste der Meta- physik selber." With this lapidary characterization presented in a familiar apodictic manner, Adorno, far from denying the obvious metaphysical and 'theological' or Jewish moments in Benjamin's work, confidently restored the line of demarcation between what would seem to be two distinct 'uses' of tradition: its appropriation and prolongation in conformity to preexisting codes of interpretation versus its radical rethinking, reversal or inversion-i.e. profanisation-in light of new, incommensurable constellations of modern experience. Benjamin's work, Adorno notes elsewhere, would only save theology through its radical secularization ("Sdkularisierung der Theologie um ihrer Rettung willen", Th. W. Adorno, iber Walter Benjamin, Hrsg. und mit Anmerkungen versehen von R. Tiedemann (Frankfurt/M: Surhkamp, 1970), 41). And this transformation would primarily serve a critical objective: "Sein Essayismus ist die Behandlung profaner Texte, als waren es heilige. Keineswegs hat er an theologische Relikte sich geklammert oder, wie die religidsen Sozialisten, die Profanitat auf einen religiosen Sinn bezogen. Vielmehr erwarte er einzig von der radikalen, schutzlosen Profanisierung die Chance furs theologische Erbe, das in jener sich verschwendet." (ibid., 19). Benjamin's would thus place the theological figures in a new configuration in which their semantic intent or content would be suspended or bracketted. In that same vein, Scholem associated Benjamin's (later) work with "eine materialistische Theorie der Offenbarung (. . .), deren Gegenstand in der Theorie selbst nicht mehr vorkommt." (Scholem, Judaica II [Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp] 222).

Adorno's claim implies that Rosenzweig's 'new thought' (Das neue Denken is the title of one of Rosenzweig's most important essays), would in fact be nothing but a 'clerical' attempt to reconcile an ideal-supposedly ahistorical-paradigm (Judaism) with its imperfect, empirical realization (in the history of the missionary Christian church). And yet, a more careful reading of the Stern that cannot be attempted here would find that things are more complicated. For Rosenzweig considered his book less a Jewish or religious book than a "system of philosophy" that should be distinguished from what was understood under the term "philosophy of religion" ("Re- ligionsphilosophie"). For the most detailed account of these questions to date, cf. S. Moses, Systeme et Revelation. La philosophie de Franz Rosenzweig Preface d'Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Seuil, 1982).


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'mystical postulate' in de Certeau as well as his demonstration of the impossibility of establishing a rigorous distinction between 'the theological' and 'the non-(or a-)theological' might enable us to find a way out of this last, and most persistent, binary opposition. In order to further explore this possibility, I will now turn to two mystic 'fables' that Derrida discusses in order to exemplify the singular 'performativity' of the 'postulate' of originary affirmation in his reading of Benjamin's early thoughts on language, in "Des tours de Babel," (cf. II) as well as of Benjamin's critique of 'violence' in "Force of Law: the 'Mystical Foundation of Authority' " (cf. III). In these texts the basic assumption of the said dilemma and of the debate it has provoked show themselves to be highly questionable.

II. 'In the Beginning-No Beginning': The Originary Catastrophe and the Gift of Language

In the essay "Uber Sprache iiberhaupt und uiber die Sprache des Menschen," written in 1916 (two years before Rosenzweig's Stern) in response to discussions with Scholem, Benjamin develops his ideas with the help of an exegesis of some of the most important categories of the first chapters of Genesis ("in immanenter Beziehung auf das Judentum und mit Beziehung auf die ersten Kapitel der Gene- sis.")37 It is here, Benjamin suggests, that we can best learn how to speak of the essence of language, of the divine word and its human reflex in the (proper) name; and it is here that one a little later finds the paradigm of the 'fall' of this originary language into a conventional means for 'communication,' as is narrated by the story about the original sin and the expulsion from paradise which is reaffirmed and amplified by the episode of the failed project of building the tower of Babel as well as the confusion of tongues that ensued (in Paradise, of course, there was only one language (GS II.1, 152)). To be sure, the reading that Benjamin proposes here is less a contribution to Bible scholarship in any linguistic or histori- cist sense than the attempt to formulate the prolegomena to any future 'metaphysics' that would aspire to capture the 'essence' of language. And Benjamin leaves no doubt that such a 'metaphysics' could only be established in close cooperation (or connection, in-

37 Benjamin, Briefe, 128.


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nigste Verbindung) with the inquiries commonly attributed to the philosophy of religion (Religionsphilosophie).38

Benjamin's reading focuses on a second strain in the biblical story of the creation (Genesis, 2:19-20) where all attention is not so much centered around the creation-ex nihilo-of all things through the divine Word (as in Genesis 1), but where, instead, all emphasis is put on the origin of human history in a paradisaical situation. It is in this context that it is related that all living crea- tures were made from the material of the earth and that it was precisely the gift (Gabe, GS II.1, 148) of language which elevated man over the rest of (a mute) nature. And it is here that the adamitic giving of names is thought as the process in which the divine creation completes (vollendet, GS, II.1, 144)-supplements and re- deems-itself.39 This passage of Genesis, Benjamin infers, would demonstrate that at the beginning of every genuine 'metaphysics' of language it has to be postulated (vorausgesetzt) that language is ultimately an inexplicable and mystical reality; a reality, that is, that cannot be seen or described in and for itself but only in (or through) the detours of its unfolding ("eine letzte nur in ihrer Entfal- tung zu betrachtende, unerkldrliche und mystische Wirklichkeit" (GS II.1, 147). For, it is in the giving of the names, in the necessary translation of one language into the other(s) (GS II.1, 151), that language comes into its own. The essence of language has no human addressee, no object and no means. In it, in the name, the spiritual essence of man addresses itself to God himself, thereby dividing and diffusing itself and its indeterminate referent, God ("im Namen teilt das geistige Wesen des Menschen sich Gott mit" GS II.1, 144).

In Benjamin's essay this 'metaphysics' is set apart from two con- fusing alternative theories of language. Most interestingly, Ben- jamin is quick to criticize a naive "mystic" (GS II.1, 150) theory of language according to which the word would be simply identical with the essence of the thing. For, originally, the thing has neither word nor name. Its mute, nameless language is at best a "resid-

38 W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Werkausgabe (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1980) vol. II.1, 146. All further references will be given by volume and page number in the body of the text.

39 Cf. GS 1I.1, 155: "Sprachlosigkeit: das ist das grosse Leid der Natur (und um ihrer Erlosung willen ist Leben und Sprache des Menschen in der Natur." It is no accident then that the "Erkenntniskritische Vorrede" to the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, published in 1928, calls Adam, not Plato, the father of philosophy (GS 1.1, 217).


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uum" (Residuum, GS II.1, 157) of the divine word through which it has been created. It has to wait for the "higher" human language to be named and redeemed, not in one "spontaneous" act, but in an infinitely differentiated process of translation and elevation whose movement finds its ultimate destination as well as its "unity" (Ein- heit, ibid.) and 'objective guarantee' (cf. GS II.1, 151), again, in God himself. And yet, Benjamin indirectly concedes that this translation is hardly a process that takes place in a homogeneous and contin- uous space. For, if, as he notes, the things of nature "have no proper names, except in God" (GS II.1, 155) whereas, by contrast, they remain overdetermined or 'overnamed' (iiberbenannt, GS II.1, 155) in the language of man, it is difficult to see how a genuine 'restitution' of the relationship between word, name and thing can be more than a regulative idea. And this ultimate essential discrepancy between the divine word and human language is already grounded at the very beginning where the latter is said to be a reflex (Reflex, GS II.1, 149) of the first. The diversification or mul- tiplication of human language would be characterized by an 'infinity' which, in comparison to the absolute and creative force of the divine word, remains always "limited" and divisible or "analytic" (ibid.). And at the point where it, as its most profound image (tiefste Abbild), participates most intensely in the infinity of the divine word-to wit: in the (human) proper name-it does in fact not allow any knowledge.

Although the discrepancy between the divine and the human word is thus given, in a sense, with the event of-appellative- language as such, Benjamin seeks to illustrate this difference by relating it to a postulated, fictive or fabulous turning point in the genesis of all things: to the moment of originary sin, that is, which he identifies with the very emergence and fall of the human word ("Der Siindenfall ist die Geburtsstunde des menschlichen Wortes," GS II.1, 153), i.e., with a seemingly irreversible process in which language becomes a mere means (Mittel) and in which the word and the name thus degenerate into mere mediatory signs (Zeichen). It is here, in the original catastrophe of language, that we discover the roots of the second-"bourgeois"-theory of language that Ben- jamin condemns explicitly: the theory, namely, which holds that language 'communicates' a semantic content that would be separa- ble or even distinguishable from the 'communicability' of language as such. It is in this decisive event then that, together with all conceptual 'abstraction' (Abstraktion), also the mythical origin of law


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and right-and that means: of all judgment (Urteil)-should be located (GS II.1, 153-154). And from here, Benjamin infers, it will be just one more step (nur noch ein Schritt, GS II.1, 154) to the plurality of tongues. As the linguistic and collective repetition of the first, moral and individual fall that inaugurated an originary and universal debt, the episode of Babel-the postlapsarian lapse into the plurality of tongues-further amplifies the ruin of the adamitic language that marks the fall into history (rather than any catastrophe in history).40

This fall (of human language) into history is a departure from the "pure" and "immanent" "magic" (GS II.1, 153) of the name: in other words, it is the emergence of a general use of language in which the name can no longer live without being 'affected' or 'hurt.' And this occurs at the moment where language commences to 'communicate' something (etwas) outside of itself. And it is this moment that is prefigured by the story of Adam's fall. Interestingly enough, the original dispersion within (as well as between) language(s) thus touches upon a moral paradox. For, Benjamin stresses, it is precisely the knowledge of good and evil promised by the snake which is "without a name" (namenlos) and thereby null and void (nichtig, GS II.1, 152). In a sense, this knowledge, Ben- jamin continues, is the only evil that existed in paradise. Not the illegitimate usurpation of a divine prerogative-the knowledge of good and evil-causes Adam's fall, but, rather, the quest(ion) of this knowledge itself. For, unlike the purity and adequacy of the immanent 'magic' that, in essence, defines the language of names in paradise, the knowledge attributed to the tree of life is external; it is not the creative prolongation of creation that characterized the pure giving of names, but the mere mimesis (Nachahmung, GS II. 1, 153) of the "actuality" (Aktualitit, GS II.1, 149) of the divine word. The language of names thus loses itself in a necessary repetition- and translation-of a divine force, in which it finds its origin and to which it aspires.41

40 S. Moses argues that the idea of a mythic fall of language does not have a parallel in Rosenzweig's Stern. Unlike Benjamin, Rosenzweig would not identify the notion of revelation (Offenbarung) with the originary language before its perversion into a means of communication. On the contrary, for Rosenzweig communication and dialogue would be the actual form itself of the revelation, i.e. the opening up of the pagan self (cf. Moses, "Benjamin und Rosenzweig," 629, 634). 41 In "Die Aufgabe des Jbersetzers" (1923) Benjamin will start out from the


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More than being the mere background and contrast of the promised "pure speech" (Zephaniah 3:9) (or the "gift of tongues" (Acts 2:4), for that matter) and more than being a mere diabolic parody of the temple which, situated on a hill (Jerusalem), touches the heavens,42 the story of the tower of Babel narrated in Genesis 11:1-9 would in this reading exemplify the structural, internal limits of all translation. By relating how the Shem-literally: the 'names'-attempted to give (or make) themselves a name, one name, how they tried to impose themselves on others by univer- salizing their idiom and how, finally, this endeavor was ob- structed-or 'deconstructed'-by God himself, the fable of 'Babel' would be "an epigraph for all discussions of translation."43 For the story narrates how God opposes his-untranslatable-proper name to that of the Shem and thereby enforces upon them the irrevocable multiplicity of languages. God being here both a proper name and the index-the name-for the untranslatability of every proper name. With the confusion of tongues (and 'confusion' is the signification that resonates in the name of the tower chosen by God, 'Babel,' a word that, as Voltaire recalls in the Dic- tionnaire philosophique cited by Derrida, also means: 'father' ('Ba') and 'God' ('Bel')), God 'destines' the Shem, the names, to master an irredeemable "destinerrance," "clandestination" or "deschematiza- tion,"44 neologisms that evoke the erring as well as the relative illegitimacy of their intended address and-in the case of "desche- matization"-not only this dissemination but also a 'deschematiza-

premises of this early 'metaphysics' of language. There he stresses that language's invisible unity or ground can only be restituted due to the fact that each language intends a pure essence which none of them is capable of expressing all by itself (that "in ihrerjeder als ganzerjeweils eines und zwar dasselbe gemeint ist, dass dennoch keiner einzelnen von ihnen, sondern nur der Alheit ihrer einander erganzenden Intentionen erreichbar ist: die reine Sprache" (GS, IV.I, 13)). Paradoxically, this translation demanded by and aspiring to the 'pure language' can, in so far as it is a process of redemptive integration and 'return' to the origin, only be a movement of self-effacement ("In dieser reinen Sprache, die nichts mehr meint und nichts mehr ausdriickt, sondern als ausdruckloses und schopferisches Wort das in allen Sprachen Gemeinte ist, trifft endlich alle Mitteilung, aller Sinn und alle Intention auf eine Schicht, in der sie zu erlischen bestimmt sind." (GS IV.1, 19, cf. 15-16)).

42 Cf. N. Frye, The Great Code, The Bible and Literature (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publisher, 1983), 158, 230.

43 Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. by Chr. V. McDonald (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 100.

44 Cf. Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlisung, 328: "Dass die Welt unerlost ist, nichts lehrt es deutlicher als die Vielzahl der Sprachen."


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tion,' 'de-Shemitizing' and 'derouting' from the path (chemin) taken.45

The Babelian multiplicity within language, the difference between different languages or dialects, is preceded and predeter- mined by a division and 'migration' of language within one language and even within one single word, for example, a proper name or a poetic inscription.46 Thus, when God is said to declare war on the 'names,' the very pronunciation of the proper name par excellence ('God,' 'I am who I am'), is from its very first revelation part of-and partitioned by-an economy of violence. God himself is divided by the division, the double bind, the deconstruction and dissemination that his name orders.47 In order to make this clear, Derrida refers here and elsewhere-in La carte postale, L'oreille de 'autre and Ulysse Gramophone-to a Babelian motif that runs through Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, the greatest challenge to all prob- lems of translation: the idiomatic expression "And he war" which, due to the fact that it condenses an irreducible linguistic duplicity of the English and German connotations of the word "war" evokes not only the polemos but also the irrecuperable 'past.'

Like the originary affirmation discussed above, the figure, myth or allegory of Babel as examined by Derrida in "Des tours de Ba- bel" is doubled or, rather, pluralized up to the point of no return. The story of Babel is read as the parable of the deconstruction of many, or all, linguistic, conceptual or historico-political edifices; a deconstruction that, as the very title ("Des tours .. .") suggests, can only be narrated in-and gives way to-endless 'detours.' But the name 'Babel' would not just stand for the deconstruction of a given structure. It would also indicate the modality of the giving-of language, of 'being'-as such: "There is," Derrida writes, "Babel everywhere";48 there is-es gibt-Babel at any given moment, at any moment that gives rise to something determinate like a structure, an edifice or also its deconstruction. The task of the work of

45 Cf. Derrida, Psyche, 137 and the translator's note in The Ear of the Other, 103. 46 Cf. J. Derrida, Schibboleth. Pour Paul Celan (Paris: Galilee, 1986), 52, 54. 47 Derrida, Psyche, 137. 48 Derrida, The Ear of the Other, 149. Although Benjamin's "lber Sprache iiber-

haupt und uber die Sprache des Menschen" explicitly speaks of Babel as well as of the gift of language that it entails, it is on the "Aufgabe des lbersetzers" that Derrida focuses in order to explore this motif of the 'there is' (il y a, es gibt) of language as it pervades Benjamin's understanding of the impossible task (Aufgabe) and the "double postulation" of translation. Cf. J. Derrida, D'un ton apocalyptique adopts naguere en philosophie (Paris: Galilee, 1983), 10, cf. 71.


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'reconciliation' and 'restitution' of the essence of language would thus respond to a debt that, Derrida notes, can never be acquitted49 and imposes the double bind of a law that both commands and interdicts translation and that therefore, for essential reasons, remains unfulfillable.50 It is precisely this structural inadequation between different genres of discourse, or even within one discourse as such, that explains why figures, myths and metaphors are necessary. 'Babel,' in a sense, would be the myth of the myth, the metaphor of the metaphor.51

What 'Babel' thus stands for is nothing less than the paradoxical 'logics' of 'iterability,' of the incessant movement of repetition and alteration that marks all linguistic utterance: in short of the "gen- eralized singularity"52 of all language and experience. With reference to Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, Derrida recalls the primal-"Babelian"-scene as being that of an ab-solute 'performative' gesture, a 'Get Geist,' i.e., as the most characteristic trait of the spirit that, because of the 'fact' that it 'is' irreducible to any constative and unforeseen by any history, remains without a proper beginning and marks itself at most by an invisible, incomparable 'step': "In the beginning-no [or: a step of a] beginning" ("Au commencement-pas de commencement"53). And this would be precisely what Benjamin's metaphysics of language, in spite of its undeniable 'anti-Babelian' stance, gives us to think: language's essence would consist, in the 'communication of communication,' in the giving of the sign, rather than in any function of 'signification.' It is this feature of language, as well as the task of translation it determines or prescribes, which "opens," in Derrida's view, the way to the "performative dimension of utterances,"54 before any explicit discussion of the so-called 'speech acts.'

It would be hard to deny that there is also an anti-Babelian stance to be found in Derrida's text. Not only does the notion of a "re-

49 Derrida, Psyche, 211. 50 Ibid. 210. 51 Cf. Derrida, Psyche, 203. 52 Derrida, The Ear of the Other, 104. 53 J. Derrida, De l'esprit. Heidegger et la question (Paris: Galilee, 1987), 116n. 54 Derrida, Psychg, 215. On this singular displacement of the notion of the 'performative', cf. W. Hamacher's remarks on the 'imperformative' and 'afformative' in: "Afformativ, Streik. Entsetzung der Reprasentation in Benjamin's 'Zur Kritik der Gewalt' ", in: Chr. Hart-Nibbrig, Hg. Was heisst Darstellen? (Frankfurt/M: Suhr- kamp, 1991).


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vealing catastrophe" which would be the unthinkable "condition of everything"-an originary being "lost" that is the consequence of an "initial disaster," "close to the beginning,"55-play an important role in La carte postale, The letters that compose the first part of this text, entitled 'Envois,' set the scene for the 'Babelization'56 of the postal service and also testify to an ineradicable desire of the author of the sendings to finally overcome the distance between addressor and addressee and thus "to erase all the traits of language, coming back to the most simple."57 And it is only between these two limits that a quasi-apocalyptic displacement of the structure of linguistic 'communication' is advanced: "we are not angels, my angel, I means messengers of whatever, but more and more angelic."58

But the way in which this 'fall' and this 'desire' are 'thematized' reveal some striking differences with Benjamin's 'metaphysics' of language. First of all, the original language of which Derrida speaks here was, in a more explicit sense than Benjamin suggests, never there, it never existed in its purported purity, not even as an idea, not even, perhaps, as a 'postulate.' For Derrida leaves no doubt that there cannot be one unique, secret or sacred-divine- name or language of names. If there were a single, singular name, exempted from the differential realm of language and of all experience, then this name would name nothing and nobody, it would not be a name, properly speaking, but an "absolute voca- tive,"59 i.e., 'a pure performative,' which, precisely because of its purity would perform 'nothing.'

In a more radical sense still than by Benjamin, the translation that follows in the wake of 'Babel' is thus not secondary or derived with respect to any purported originary language: in Derrida's view, its task is without any identifiable beginning, end or 'exit.'60 If a concise definition of deconstruction were possible at all, it would therefore contain at least this: the affirmation that there is always already "plus d'une langue-more than one language, no more of

55J. Derrida, La carte postale. De Socrate a Freud et au-deld (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 16 and 23. Cf. for the motif of 'Babel', ibid., 13, 154, 155, 179.

56J. Derrida, Ulysse gramophone, 62, cf. 66-67, 77-78. 57 Derrida, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, Translated with an

Introduction by A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 114. 58 Derrida, The Postcard, 43. 59 Cf. G. Bennington, "Derridabase," in: G. Bennington and J. Derrida, Derrida

(Paris: Seuil, 1991), 102. 60 Derrida, D'un ton apocalyptique, 9-10, 18.


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one language,"61 not even the language of names; the affirmation, that is, that the pure essence of language (Benjamin's reine Sprache) is in itself-in its very idea-in advance, multiple ("more than one language, no more of one language").

III. "In the Beginning There Will Have Been Force": The Mystical Postulate, Justice and the Law

Derrida's analysis of Benjamin's "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" in "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority,'" can be said to politicize the earlier readings by inscribing, by translating, their re- flection on language in a more specific inquiry into the nature- i.e., the foundation, conservation as well as 'destruction'-of the historico-juridical realm. This most recent discussion is framed in a lecture which was first delivered at a colloquium on "Deconstruc- tion and the Possibility of Justice" that took place in October 1989, and then reiterated at a colloquium on "Nazism and the 'Final Solution': Probing the Limits of Representation," in April 1990. These outer circumstances need to be emphasized; they are essential for the internal structure of the proposed Benjamin interpretation 'itself.' The latter remains incomprehensible if one does not take into account that Derrida's explicitly stated interest is here the fact that Benjamin "is considered and considered himself to be, in a certain fashion, Jewish."62 It is nothing less than the "enigma" of this "signature" that Derrida in "Force of Law" sets out to decipher, especially in the second part of the lecture. And yet, much more than the by now familiar analysis of the paradoxes of the proper name is at stake here.63 More specifically, the proper name-of

61 Cf. J. Derrida, Memoiresfor Paul de Man, Trans. C. Lindsay,J. Culler, E. Cadava (New York: Columbia UP 1986), 14-15, cited in A Derrida Reader, Between the Blinds, Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by P. Kamuf (New York: Columbia UP 1991), 241.

62 J. Derrida, "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority,' "in: Cardozo Law Review, Vol. 11:919 (1990) 921-1045, 973n.

63 It would be interesting, but beyond the scope of the present article, to inves- tigate the problematic of the secret-proper-name that haunts both Benjamin's writing and that of Derrida, most explicitly in his recent "Circonfession" (in: Ben- nington and Derrida, Derrida). For it is this problematic ofthe name that gives access to the question of the (in)voluntary allegiance to, for example, the Jewish tradition. In Schibboleth, Derrida speaks of an affirmation of Judaism that would obey the formal scheme that can be discovered in the temporality of the date. The said


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God and indirectly, Derrida suggests, of Benjamin himself-is related in this text to the general problem of the law in its relation to the state, to parliamentary liberal democracy as well as to the general proletarian strike. In exploring these themes, Benjamin's "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" would be "inscribed," Derrida writes, "in a Ju- daic perspective that opposes just, divine (Jewish) violence that would destroy the law to mythical violence (of the Greek tradition) that would install and conserve the law."64 And it is this very opposition between a force that founds a juridico-political order and the one that preserves it, but also the demarcation between these two and the one that finally would suspend them both, which Derr- ida will put into question. More precisely, he argues, these conceptual dichotomies, like the ones set up by early essays on language, can be said to be ruined by Benjamin's own text. The least one could say, therefore, is that Benjamin's critique of the violence of the law is highly ambiguous: "at once" 'mystical,' in the overdetermined sense that interests Derrida here, and "hypercritical."65 However, based on a philosophy of the fall of history into language-into the law-this text would be marked in the final analysis by an "archeo-teleological, indeed archeo-eschatological perspective that deciphers the history of droit as a decay (Verfall) since its origin."66 And yet, in its very critique of this derailment (or Verfallsprozess GS II.1, 192), "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" would blur most of the familiar distinctions thereby no longer allowing the reader to decide whether the text "grafts" a Jewish mysticism onto a "post-Sorelian neo-Marxism" or vice versa; whether its radical critique just mentions or also intentionally uses the vocabulary that

affirmation would be an engagement that is neither the awareness or acceptance of a matter of fact (let alone a mere fact of life) nor, conversely, a purely arbitrary decision taken in vacuum, outside of any context. To affirm would be to assume a singular responsibility that has always already preceded the 'I' who says 'yes' (or who repeats the supposed original 'yes' by reiterating 'yes, yes'). Strictly speaking, the nature of being Jewish, as discussed in Celan's short prose piece Gesprdch im Gebirg, would be to have precisely no nature or essence. The proper name of the Jew would, like the s(ch)ibboleth, be a name that, in a given constellation, only can turn out to be unpronounceable. The Postcard speaks of this difficult-and, in a sense, deadly- (non)allegiance of Celan (and Benjamin) to the Jewish tradition with the extremely lurid figure of a "rojudeo-suicide" (The Postcard, 197). Cf. on Benjamin's understanding of the affirmation (the Bejahung) of the Jewish identity, the letter of Oc- tober 1912, published in GS 11.3, 837.

64 Derrida, "Force of Law," 973n. 65 Ibid., 979. 66 Ibid., 1015.


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recalls the idiom of the so-called conservative revolution commonly associated with the name of Carl Schmitt and others. Moreover, it would seem as if Benjamin's fascination with a-pure, non- violent-force also echoes or, rather, anticipates the preoccupation with a Being that-as such-would remain irreducible to (and, in essence, incorruptible by) the realm of empirical or ontic beings; that is, as if the proletarian and divine 'violence' cannot prevent itself from resembling or prefiguring that other-and politically more fatal or lethal-'destruction' that Derrida from his earliest writings on has problematized in Heidegger's thought of Being, in Sein und Zeit and elsewhere. For although, Derrida acknowledges,

Heideggerian Destruktion cannot be confused with the concept of De- struction that was also at the center of Benjamin's thought, one may well ask what such an obsessive thematic might signify and what it is prepar- ing or anticipating between the two wars, all the more so in that, in every case, this destruction also sought to be the condition of an authentic tradition and memory, and of the reference to an originary language.67

What is certain, however, is the fact that Benjamin's singular configuration of heterogenous mystic, messianic and theological as well as Marxist and reactionary tropes seems to announce "a new historical epoch," more precisely, "the beginning of a true history that has been rid of myth."68 And it is only this purported end of history (at least as we know it) that, following this same line of thought, would allow the return to the language of 'names' and of 'appellation' that, Benjamin postulates, would have preceded the fall. Like the translation that aspires to reconstitute the pure language (the reine Sprache), the destruction (Vernichtung) of the violence of history in general and the state in particular is identified as a singular-paradoxical-task or Aufgabe.69 For the task of the critique of the violence of the law as well as of the history it presup-

67 Derrida, "Force of Law," 977 note. In this text Derrida only hints at the disturbing analogy between the sovereignty of the 'divine violence' and Heidegger's understanding of the Walten and Gewalt. The possible analogy is crucial given the final words of Benjamin's essay which read: "Die gottliche Gewalt (...) mag die waltende heissen" (GS II, 1, 203). Here, however, Derrida only briefly refers to Heidegger's claim that 'justice' (e.g. in Heraclitus' notion of Dike) also meant Eris, conflict, polemos and thereby injustice, adikia (cf. "Force of Law," 927). 68 Derrida, "Force of Law," 975.

69 Cf. GS II, 1, 194, 199. Benjamin also speaks of the "zarte Aufgabe," i.e., "jenseits aller Rechtsordnung und also Gewalt" that would characterize the secrecy and delicacy of diplomacy (cf. ibid., 195).


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poses or enforces would consist in nothing less than the abandon- ing-the giving up-of the law and of history as such (or at least as we know it).70 It is this conviction that explains Benjamin's "rejec- tion of every contemporary political tendency"71 from the early remarks on Zionism in January 1913, in the correspondence with Ludwig Strauss,72 in which politics is associated with the pursuit of the lesser evil, up to the so-called 'Theological-Political Fragment' from 1921, in which the messianic-divine-realm (the Reich Gottes) is sharply distinguished from any realization of a profane, historical and political telos, and in which, following the major contributions of Ernst Bloch's Geist der Utopie, it is concluded that the theodicy can only have a religious meaning (cf. GS II.1, 203).

Derrida's whole text is centered around the analysis of the paradox or even double bind that characterizes Benjamin's conception of the Aufgabe of a destruction of the historico-political realm of the law. On the one hand, postulating a 'mystical' ground of authority by suggesting, as Benjamin does, that the positing of the law is in itself an unjustified-mythical-violence, seems to make it very simple to propose a critique of any given law. No new law can found itself by appealing to existing generally, let alone universally accepted laws that precede it. In Derrida's words: every law, every system of rights (or the lack thereof, for that matter) is in essence "deconstructible, whether because it is founded, constructed on interpretable and transformable textual strata (. . .), or because its ultimate foundation is by definition unfounded."73 And yet, this same circumstance-which is, Derrida is quick to add, certainly a "stroke of luck for politics, for all historical progress"74-explains why it is also very difficult and always, in a sense, illegitimate, if not unjust, to criticize a given imposition of the law. For since no social authority can be deduced or criticized and overturned for good

70 Or, as the aphorism from Zentralpark puts it: "Die Rettung halt sich an den kleinen Sprung in der kontinuierlichen Katastrophe." (GS 1.2, 683). 71 Benjamin, Briefe, 219.

72 Cf. GS 11.3, 842: "Im tiefsten Sinne ist Politik die Wahl des kleinsten Obels. Niemals erscheint in ihr die Idee, stets die Partei." One should, of course, not confuse this critique of a political Zionism with Benjamin's sincere interest in the task of a "Kultur-Zionismus" (ibid., 838, cf. 843) which is never an end in itself but rather the supreme bearer of the spiritual idea ("vornehmster Trager und Repra- sentant des Geistigen" (ibid., 839)). The early "Dialog fiber die Religiositat der Gegenwart" (1913) relates this task to that of the "Literaten", the "Geknechteten" of our epoch (GS II.1, 28).

73 Derrida, "Force of Law," 943. 74 Ibid., 943-945.


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reasons without leading to infinite regress or to the arbitrary violence of a certain idiolect,75 every successful revolutionary moment, every 'felicitous' performative act that founds or destructs a law will at the same time invent or institute a new law or right that-in a retrospective projection, apres coup, after its own coup de force-seeks to legitimate the violence with which a preexisting order was overcome. Therefore, the law is always already constructed: that is, it accompanies itself with a legitimating 'fiction' or 'myth,' for example, as in Hegel's Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, with the claim that its authority is precisely not historically determined (or constructed) but, on the contrary, eternal, absolute and therefore divine.76 And yet, this 'fiction' or 'fable,' Derrida contends, does not imply any relativistic or pragmatistic understanding of the conventionality of the law. For the very singularity of this founding and conserving 'performance' consists precisely in the fact that it precedes and constitutes all historically and socially determined conventions.

On what grounds then could anyone claim to be justified in criticizing this violence of the law if, by definition, the force of its grounding and preservation escapes not only the jurisdiction of all given right but also-paradoxically-exceeds the legality that it by its own right has called into being? How could one accuse a force that founds the realm of legitimation while itself remaining without any objective legitimation? This impasse would, Derrida claims, define the perilous moment of every political earthquake as well as of every genuine juridical or ethico-political judgment and decision:

These moments, supposing that we can isolate them, are terrifying moments. Because of the sufferings that rarely fail to accompany them, no doubt, but just as much because they are in themselves, and in their very violence uninterpretable or indecipherable. That is what I am calling 'mystique.' (.. .) This moment of suspense, the epokhe, this founding or revolutionary moment of law is, in law, an instance of non-law. But it is also the whole history of law. This moment never takes place and never

75 Cf. J. F. Lyotard, Le differend (Paris: Minuit, 1983), No. 203. 76 "Oberhaupt ... ist es schlechthin wesentlich, dass die Verfassung, obgleich in der Zeit hervorgegangen, nicht als ein Gemachtes angesehen werde; denn sie ist vielmehr das schlechthin an und fur sich Seiende, das darum als das Gottliche und Beharrende, und als fiber der Sphare dessen, was gemacht wird, zu betrachten ist," Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, par. 273 Anmerkung, ed. J. Hoffmeister (Ham- burg: Meiner, 1955), 239.


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takes place in a presence. It is the moment in which the formation of law remains suspended in the void or over the abyss, suspended by the pure performative act that would not have to answer to or before anyone. The supposed subject of this pure performative act would (...) be before a law not yet determined.77

It is at this point that Derrida recalls the uncanny and tragic- comic scene described in Kafka's parable Vor dem Gesetz, in which the man of the land cannot enter the law "because it is transcendent in the very measure that it is he who must found it."78 The theological figure of the transcendence of the law seems to be a figure for an absolute 'performativity' that is pure in the measure that it precedes any given context or convention and, in that sense, never really takes place or, at least, never arrives at having a minimal onto(theo)logical or empirical presence:

the inaccessible transcendence of the law before which and 'prior' to which 'man' stands fast only 'appears' infinitely transcendent and thus theological to the extent that, so near him, it depends only on him, on the performative act by which he institutes it: the law is transcendent, violent and non-violent because it depends only on who is before it- and so prior to it-on who produces it, founds it, authorizes it in an absolute performative whose presence always escapes him. The law is transcendent and theological, and so always to come, always promised, because it is immanent, finite and so already past.79

And yet, Derrida goes on to make it clear that the founding moment is never immune to the possibility of a certain perversion and therefore never pure, i.e., strictly speaking, never founda- tional as such. Every performative, it is said in La carte postale, is in essence, from its very inception on a "perverformative."80 Simi- larly, every retrospective projection of a 'fictive' legitimation and subsequent conservation of the law-the very necessity to con- stantly recall and repeat the act with which it was founded- inscribes a peculiar drifting movement into its purported pure and single origin. For when the founding violence, as Derrida writes, "must envelop the violence of conservation (. . .) and cannot break

77 Derrida, "Force of Law," 991. 78 Ibid., 993. 79 Ibid. 80 Derrida, The Postcard, 136.


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with it,"81 something Benjamin does not seem to take into consid- eration, then the very iterability of the law excludes in advance the very possibility of the sudden emergence of "pure and great founders, initiators, lawmakers."82 Benjamin's demarcation between, on the one hand, the founding or positing violence at the beginning (and, subsequently, within) the cycle of mythical forms and interpretations of positive right and, on the other hand, the non-violent 'violence' that brings about the demise of, or 'de-posits,' this dialectic which marks all existing socio-political history, would for the same reason be untenable.83 And since the manifestation of the violence that Benjamin describes as 'ethical' (sittlich) is to a certain extent an extrapolation and radicalization of the genuine 're- volt,' of the real revolutionary violence of the general, proletarian strike which destructs all right, one can easily see what the conse- quences of this 'deconstruction' are. Following the 'logic' of iterability, as explained in Limited Inc, the mere possibility of decay and petrification, betrayal and parody that 'endangers' every act of preservation or commemoration, also implies that all law has the structure of a ruin even before it is 'constructed' (or 'destructed'). And the same could be said of any judgment or decision. And yet, paradoxically, it is only this inescapable possibility-and therefore necessity84-of the ruination of the law which can account for the fact that the law can make itself felt, feared or even loved and that, consequently, an act can take place at all.

For Benjamin, however, the critique of the violent instauration and conservation of the law can only be based on the postulation of an (at least) equally violent yet incommensurate annihilation of the sphere of law. The human-and, Benjamin adds, mythic-writing and rewriting of the law can only be confronted by the-divine- 'unwriting,' not just of this or that prescription but of the law in its very generality. This 'violence' above and beyond the founding and

81 Derrida, "Force of Law," 997. 82 Ibid., 1007/1009. 83 It is against this supposition that Derrida repeats the formal structure of an

argument that had also governed his deconstruction of Heidegger's demarcation of 'vulgar' and 'authentic' temporality in Sein und Zeit, in "Ousia et gramme" (in Mar- ges-de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972).

84 Derrida's "Signature, event, context" identifies the "risk" and the "exposure to infelicity" of all speech acts as a structural feature not just of a speech act but as the "necessary possibility" and, in that sense, as the "law" of any mark. (cf. J. Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988), 15).


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conserving violence is associated by Benjamin with the power and wrath of God, with, as Derrida formulates, "a wholly other 'mystical foundation of authority.' "85 And it is only this non-violent violence which, Benjamin thinks, would interrupt the representational power of language-its present state as being just a technical means to an end, a vehicle for communication and information-and that thereby recalls and restores its original destination of being a pure manifestation of "appellation, nomination, the giving or the appeal of presence in the name."86

At the end of "Zur Kritik der Gewalt," the recourse to a non- violent divine force, thus, reconfirms the privilege or, rather, in- evitability of a theological figure that the early essay "Ober Sprache iiberhaupt und fiber die Sprache des Menschen" had posited as the very origin and essence of language. There is a correspondence and mutual implication between the mystic abyss from which language emerges (or to which it, in the originary split or dissemination, always remains exposed) and the 'destinal violence' through which history as violence is suspended. Derrida insists on this cor- relation of two virtual extremes or limits between which the drama of language and history takes place: "Who signs? It is God, the Wholly Other, as always, it is the divine violence that always will have preceded but also will have given the first names."87 God signs first and last, 'He' opens and seals the event of language.

This structural analogy between the event that takes place at the very origin of language and that which happens in the destruction of the law, can also be articulated in other respects. For both vio- lences attempt to overcome a fundamental arbitrariness or undecidability (Unentscheidbarkeit). Derrida points out that Benjamin establishes this analogy explicitly by comparing the impossibility to come to a real, let alone just decision within the order of right to the situation in which the emerging human language can be nothing but a means for communication and, by the same token, for an indiscriminate 'babbling' (Geschwdtz, cf. GS II.1, 154). The fact that the mythical founding violence is forgotten and perverted by the intrusion of the conserving violence, blurs the crucial distinctions and corrupts the legitimacy or, rather, justice, of decisions. The possibility to decide would only reside in the double manifestation

85 Derrida, "Force of Law," 1021-1023. 86 Ibid. 973-975n. 87 Ibid., 1037.


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of the divine violence that once opened the event of language and that now cannot but destroy the mythological order of right that was the consequence of language's fall, thereby inaugurating a new 'historical' epoch, an era that is marked by a justice (Gerechtigkeit) beyond the order of law and right, beyond their very generality or even universality. Only the sudden, striking force of divine violence would guarantee-or, perhaps, simply stand for-the "irreducible singularity of each situation."88 And yet, it is precisely that singularity which explains why the divine violence can only mani- fest itself in incommensurable, incomparable 'effects' that preclude any conceptual determination, that we can neither affirm nor deny on rational grounds and which for that reason, again, retain a certain undecidability.

The same paradox appears if one realizes that the pure violence of God and that of the general proletarian strike can never completely escape the contamination of the dialectic-the come-and- go, the "Auf und Ab" (GS II.1, 202)-of the mythological foundation of right and its historical conservation. Neither the divine nor the proletarian violence can hope to situate itself comfortably beyond the fundamental undecidability that it-now and then, for a moment only-seems to interrupt. Neither of them can force a decision or enforce ajudgment without, at the same time, exposing itself to a reiteration and thereby a (possible) perversion which reinscribes the non-violent violence in the order from which it appeared to break away.89 And for analogous reasons, Benjamin's

88 Ibid., 1023. 89 In a seemingly different context, Jean-Francois Lyotard, as if he were provid-

ing in passing just one more reading of "Zur Kritik der Gewalt," insists that for essential reasons neither the genre of 'myth' nor that of 'divine right' (here: droit), nor that of 'deliberative consensus', nor that of proletarian 'communism,' could ever hope to forge an autoreferential narration, an ultimate redemption, a 'free linking' of heterogeneous 'phrases,' let alone a 'destruction' of all so-called 'genres of discourse.' For all these different names stand for irreconcilable ways of instituting the 'litigations' for irresolvable 'differends' that are given with the Ereignis of language as such (whether before or after the 'fall', whether its phrases are silent or not, human or not). Between all phrases-and no phrase is first or last-an 'abyss of Not-Being' opens up. And yet, Lyotard refuses 'to grant a 'mystical' profundity' to this abyss that, to give just one example, drives constatives and moral imperatives apart. And if, for example, the tradition called Cabbala can be said to do more justice to the occurence, the happening, the 'taking place'-the Arrive-t-il?--of the Ereignis of 'Being' or, rather, of the 'There is's' than, say, the mythical narratives, this cannot serve a sufficient reason to simply make the 'dispersion' of which it testifies into a new first principle. The very idea of an original or originary splitting would always already presuppose the idea of a lost totality and thereby risk to diffuse a

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