Professional Documents
Culture Documents
History
Andrew Benjamin,
Editor
Continuum
WALTER BENJAMIN AND HISTORY
WALTER BENJAMIN STUDIES SERIES
A series devoted to the writings of Walter Benjamin – each volume will focus
on a theme central to contemporary work on Benjamin. The series aims to
set new standards for scholarship on Benjamin for students and researchers
in Philosophy, Cultural Studies and Literary Studies.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
ISBN:HB: 0–8264–6745–8
PB: 0–8264–6746–6
Notes 227
Contributors 253
Index 256
Acknowledgements
Werner Hamacher’s chapter was first published in Heidrun Friese (ed.), The
Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought, (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2001), while the German text appeared as ‘ “Jetzt”:
Benjamin zur historischen Zeit’, in Benjamin Studies 1.1 (2002).
OT The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London:
Verso, 1998).
Looking at someone carries the implicit expectation that our look will be
returned by the object of our gaze. When this expectation is met (which, in the
case of thought processes, can apply equally to the look of the mind’s eye and
to a glance pure and simple), there is an experience of the aura to the fullest
extent . . . Experience of the aura thus rests on the transposition of a response
common in human relationships to the relationships between the inanimate or
natural object and man. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked
at, looks at us in turn. To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to
invest it with the ability to meet our gaze. The experience corresponds to the
discoveries of the mémoire involontaire. (These discoveries, incidentally, are
unique: they are lost to the memory that seeks to retain them. Thus they lend
support to a concept of the aura that comprises the ‘unique apparition of a
distance’. This designation has the advantage of clarifying the cult nature of
the phenomenon. The essentially distant is the inapproachable: inapproach-
ability is in fact a primary quality of the cult image.) Proust’s great familiarity
with the problem of the aura requires no emphasis.
Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ [1939], SW 4: 338
(trans. modified 1939)
drawn its consequences for the very production of artistic objects.1 But such
reflections on reproducibility, on the ‘loss of originality’ and of ‘origin’,
have proceeded as if foregrounding these notions must inevitably make the
‘archaic’ and outdated question of the aura, linked as it was to the world of
‘cult images’, fall away and hence disappear.
But falling away is not the same as disappearing. Fortunately, we no
longer have to bow to our knees before statues of gods – I note in passing
that Hegel already registered this fact at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, and that others had done so before him.2 But we bow our knees,
if only in fantasy, before many other things that hang over us or hold us
down, that ‘look at’ us or leave us stunned. As we know, Benjamin speaks
of the ‘decline of the aura’ in the modern age, but for him, ‘decline’ does
not mean disappearance. Rather, it means (as in the Latin declinare) moving
downward, inclining, deviating, or inflecting in a new way. Benjamin’s
exegetes have sometimes wondered whether his position on the aura was not
contradictory, or whether one ought not to oppose his ‘early thoughts’ on
the question to his ‘mature’ views, his (quasi-Marxist) philosophy about the
destruction of the aura to his (quasi-messianic) thinking on its restoration.3
To that, we must first reply that the notion of aura is diffused throughout
Benjamin’s oeuvre. Its incorporation into his oeuvre was a response to a
transhistorical and profoundly dialectical experience; therefore, the question
of whether the aura has been ‘liquidated’ or not proves to be a quintessentially
false question.4 We must further explain that while the aura in Benjamin
names an originary anthropological quality in the image, the origin for him
does not in any way designate something remaining ‘upstream’ from things,
as the source of the river is upstream from it. For Benjamin, the origin names
‘that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance’, not
the source but ‘a whirlpool in the river of becoming [that] pulls the emerging
matter into its own rhythm’ (OT, p. 46, trans. modified).
Hence decline itself is part of the ‘origin’ so understood, not the bygone
– albeit founding – past, but the precarious, churning rhythm, the dynamic
two-way flow of a historicity that asks, without respite, even to our own
present, ‘to be recognized as a restoration, a restitution, and as something
that by that very fact is uncompleted, always open’ (OT, p. 46, trans.
modified). The ‘beauty that rises from the bed of ages’ – as Benjamin writes
with reference to Proust and the mémoire involontaire – is never outdated or
liquidated; reality never ceases to ‘sear the image’; remembrance continues to
offer itself as a ‘relic secularized’. And since silence is fundamentally auratic
in its manifestation – as Benjamin writes of Baudelaire – modern or even
postmodern man, the man of ‘technological reproducibility’, is obliged, in
the midst of the noisy labyrinth of mediations, information and reproduc-
tions, sometimes to impose silence and submit to the uncanniness of what
comes back to him as aura, as thirst-inducing apparition (SW 2: 510; SW 4:
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 the
protocols of dogmatic intimidation within which the liturgy has most often
brought forth its images – it is now supposed in artists’ studios in the secular
era of technological reproducibility.5 Let us say, to dialecticize, that the decline
of the aura supposes – implies, slips underneath, enfolds in its fashion – the
aura as an originary phenomenon of the image. It is, to be faithful to Benjamin
in the productive instability of his exploratory vocabulary, an ‘uncompleted’
and ‘always open’ phenomenon. The aura and its decline are thus part of the
same system (and have undoubtedly always been so in every age of the aura’s
history: we need only read Pliny the Elder, who was already complaining
about the decline of the aura in the age of reproducibility of antique busts).6
But the aura persists, resists its decline precisely as supposition.
What is a supposition? It is the simple act – not so simple in reality
– of placing below (ova supponere: placing eggs to be incubated). It means
submitting a question by substituting certain parameters of what is believed
to be the response. It means producing a hypothesis – also ‘underneath’
– which then becomes capable of offering not only the principal ‘subject’
of a work of art, but also its deepest ‘principle’.7 Can we, then, suppose the
aura in the visual objects that twentieth-century art, from Piet Mondrian
to Barnett Newman to Ad Reinhardt, for example, offers to our view? We
can at least try. We are prepared to admit that the construction of such a
supposition remains awkward – cumbersome, heavy with the past in one
sense, too facile, even dubious, in another.
In the first place, it is cumbersome for any discourse of specificity: isn’t the
aura, which designated that dimension of ‘other presence’ literally required
by the age-old world of cult images, condemned to obsolescence as soon as
a visual object is in itself its own ‘subject’? 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 of
any comprehension of the visual arts?8 To that we must reply that there
are other ways of understanding ‘subject matter’ – the ‘subject’ as ‘matter’
– than the way proposed by Panofskian iconology. Moreover, our sup-
position is cumbersome only for those historical or aesthetic discourses
closed upon their own axioms. In fact, discourses of specificity usually
present themselves as (pseudo)axiomatic, and the consequence of their
closure – their tone of certainty, has often been to pronounce supposedly
definitive death-sentences. The modernist will say, for example, that ‘the
aura is dead’, the postmodernist, that ‘modernism is dead’; and so on.
But the supposition of the aura is not satisfied with any sentence of death
(historical death, death in the name of a meaning of history), inasmuch as
that supposition is linked to a question of memory and not of history in the
usual sense, in short, to a question of living on (survivance, Aby Warburg’s
Nachleben). It is within the order of reminiscence, it seems to me, that
Benjamin raised the question of the aura, as Warburg had raised that of the
6 Walter Benjamin and History
these two orders may lie – our second hypothesis – in the dynamic of labour,
in the process of making art. We must seek to understand how a Newman
painting supposes – implies, slips underneath, enfolds in its fashion – the
question of the aura. How it manoeuvres the ‘image-making substance’ in
order to impose itself on the gaze, to foment desire. How it thus becomes
‘that of which our eyes will never have their fill’.
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 completely
different from a picture, a figurative illustration. The image is first of all a
crystal 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 is
present its light on what is past; rather, an image is that in which the
Then and the Now come into a constellation like a flash of lightning. In
other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the
present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of
the Then to the Now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly
emergent. Only dialectical images are genuine images. (N2a, 3)
This 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 and
memory, and especially the pictorial materiality inherent in the adventure
of abstract art and its notoriously idealist references. Nearly all the great
artists, from Wassily Kandinsky to Jackson Pollock, from Malevich to
Reinhardt, from Mondrian to Newman, from Marcel Duchamp to Alberto
Giacometti, have too quickly irritated or delighted their interpreters by their
use, sometimes light-hearted, sometimes profound, of ‘spirituality’, ‘original
art’, orthodox theology, Theosophy, even alchemy . . . And most historians
spontaneously forget that a philosophical, religious, or ideological claim on
the part of an artist does not in any way constitute an interpretive key to
his oeuvre, but rather requires a separate and joint interpretation – that is,
a dialectically articulated interpretation – of the aesthetic interpretation as
such.21 Whether they are ‘materialists’, or ‘idealists’ – and in general they
never ask themselves the question in those terms – whether they claim to
be ‘avant-garde’ or ‘nostalgic’, artists make their artworks in an order of
plastic reality, formal labour, which must be interpreted for what it offers.
This means it must be understood in its capacity as a heuristic opening, and
not in terms of an axiomatic reduction to its own ‘programmes’. That is
another reason art history is related to Traumdeutung. Let us note that artists’
writings, parallel to artworks themselves, very often manifest the same critical
ambiguity supposed in the relation Benjamin called the ‘dialectical image’.22
From this perspective, the case of Newman seems to me exemplary and of
flawless clarity. We know that in 1947 Newman’s artworks and declarations led
Clement Greenberg to form a suspicious judgement, typical of what I have called
the 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 directed
precisely at Newman’s use of certain words stemming from philosophical and
religious traditions: ‘intangible reality’, ‘uniqueness’, ‘ecstasy’, ‘transcendental
experience’, ‘symbolical or metaphysical content’. And Greenberg found such
uses ‘archaic’, he said, permeated by ‘something half-baked and revivalist in a
familiar American way’, something he found excessive and pointless for artistic
activity as such, pointless, in short, for its ‘specificity’.23
Newman gave a vehement response to these arguments: according to
him, they stemmed from an ‘unintentional distortion based on a misunder-
standing’.24 What misunderstanding? That of imagining, in an extremely
traditional frame of mind all in all, that the relation between certain words
(coming from an age-old tradition) and a certain pictorial tradition must
inevitably be expressed in terms of a ‘programme’, that is, in iconographical
terms. Newman refuses the idea that the use of the word ‘mystical’ corre-
sponds to a ‘principle’ for him or to an a priori, that is, to his assumption
of a pre-existing belief. He refuses to be seen as a ‘programme-maker’,
10 Walter Benjamin and History
In the end, what is the origin (origin as whirlpool) if not the wrenching
implementation of that critical ambiguity that Benjamin implicitly charac-
terized with the notion of dialectical image? What does it mean to originate
in the whirlpool of an artistic practice, if not to appeal to a certain memory
of the Then in order to decompose the present – that is, the immediate
past, the recent past, the still dominant past – in a determined rejection of
all ‘revivalist’ nostalgia? Interpretations that spontaneously use the temporal
categories of 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 critical
memory – of the Jewish tradition among other things – permitted Newman
to create the collisions and destructions he was seeking in order to originate
his pictorial practice in what he saw as the sclerotic present of abstraction.
In short, the critique of the present – the appeal to categories such as
‘primitive art’ or ‘the sublime’ – also included a critique of all nostalgia.
Newman was laying claim to the Now to the utmost degree. I believe that,
without betraying Newman, we could paraphrase his famous title of 1948,
‘The Sublime is Now’ by saying that, for him, the supposition of artistic time
implies the dialectical and critical proposition that the origin is now. It is from
within the reminiscent Now that the origin appears, in conformity with a
fundamental anachronism that modernist criticism has as yet been unable
to take on. ‘The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real
and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without
the nostalgic glasses of history.’32
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 of
the drawing’s support while the ink is being spread; and second, because
the saturated zones of black, far from being uniformly compact, reveal a
disintegration in the brushstroke, a loss of adhesiveness that makes the
gesture itself visible, and with it, a fraying of the brush-hairs. These are the
marks, the voluntary traces of the procedure, which the pictorial version of
Onement I will push to the extreme, decisively asserting the incompleteness
of the painting.44
Phenomenologically speaking, the auratic distance invoked by Benjamin
can be interpreted as the depth that Erwin Straus, then Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, constituted as the fundamental sensorial paradigm of ‘distance’
and place, a concept far from any ‘spatial depth’ that could be objectified
by measurement or by perspective.45 If in Onement I Newman breaks
definitively with any objectifiable depth of space, he reconnects, it seems to
me, with the ‘physical sensation’ of a depth of place. In that sense, Hubert
Damisch was quite right, evoking Newman – but also Pollock – to challenge
the ‘so-called rejection of the so-called convention of depth’.46 Like all great
American painting of the period, 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 of
closeness, given the restricted dimensions of the drawing.47 But, as Benjamin
says, ‘however close the apparition’, a distance suddenly irrupts within it.
It irrupts here in the reserve, in the retrait 48 contrived (and not drawn,
outlined, or situated) by Newman. In that sense, it places us squarely before
a kind of dialectic of place – close/distant, in front of/inside, tactile/optical,
appearing/disappearing, open/closed, hollowed out/ saturated – which
confers on the image its most fundamental auratic quality. It is an inchoate
rhythm of black and white, a ‘physical sensation of time’ that gives to the
image-making substance the critical ambiguity that Jean Clay, speaking of
Pollock and Mondrian, so aptly named ‘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 a
third characteristic, which returns to the most archaic and ‘physical’, the
most material sense of the word aura. This meaning is that of breath, of
the air that surrounds us as a subtle, moving, absolute place, the air that
permeates us and makes us breathe. When in Onement I Newman reveals
the reserve of the support by stripping off the zip the way one might pull a
gag off someone’s mouth, he creates not so much a spatial form as a rush of
air. When his brush heavy with ink presses on the paper, it does not so much
draw as exhale its pigmentary matter; when he lifts it slightly off the support,
The Supposition of the Aura 15
When I was a young kid studying French, I studied with a man, Jean-
Baptiste Zacharie, who used to teach French by saying, ‘Moi, je suis
le sujet, I’m the subject; vous êtes l’objet, you are the object; et voici le
verbe’, and he’d give you a gentle slap on the face. The empty canvas
is a grammatical object – a predicate. I am the subject who paints it.
The process of painting is the verb. The finished painting is the entire
sentence, and that’s what I’m involved in . . . I’m the subject. I’m also the
verb 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, both
the dimension of the object and that of the verb – both the product and the
process – focus attention on the subjective instance incarnated by the artist
himself. Newman is attempting, here as elsewhere, to formulate the paradox
of an ‘abstract art where the subject takes precedence’,58 an art that asserts
the subject (as Surrealism did) but, by being ‘abstract’, supposes such an
assertion without thematizing it, without signifying it – simply by bringing
all its attention to bear on the effective, dynamic, and even affective relation
between the matter and the support, or what the French language designates
so well with the term subjectile.59
Newman’s claim to an effectivity and an affectivity in his practice of
abstraction thus forced him twice to modify the usual notion of subject
matter: 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 on
the procedural relation that, in the act of painting, unites the words
‘subject’ and ‘matter’. His ‘grammatical’ definition of painting amounts to
conceiving artistic labour dialectically, in terms of a three-way relationship
among subject, matter and subjectile, as a kind of Borromean knot where
any pressure exerted on one term structurally modifies the position of the
others. Hence, in Onement I, the operation carried out on the subjectile – the
central reserve, the removal of the masking strip, and the ‘respiration’ of
The Supposition of the Aura 17
the brush in the case of the drawing; the interruption of this same process
in the case of the painting, where Newman left his colour test as it was,
on the adhesive strip affixed vertically to the centre of the painting – that
experimental operation or supposition transforms the usual effectivity of the
matter as it is normally deposited on the canvas by the brush. In the same
way, the suspension of that operation, its ‘critical ambiguity’, transforms
the usual position of the subject facing his work in progress. We could say,
paraphrasing Jacques Lacan, that the zip in Onement I functions as a ‘unary
trace’ (trait unaire) in Newman’s work: in a single stroke, it has transformed
everything, has literally invented the ‘subject’ of his painting.60
We can then understand that the subjective position of the painter, far
from being reducible to some affective abandon (as we too often imagine
with respect to Abstract Expressionism), is to be deduced from an effective
choice, that is, a procedural choice. Conversely, this relationship illumi-
nates the very notion of procedural choice (as we too often imagine it with
respect to Minimalism, for example) from the angle of a subject position.
There is no procedural ‘negotiation’ without a displacement, a ‘rapture’ of a
subject, just as there is no ‘rapture’ of a subject without the procedural and
even logical ‘negotiation’ of a heuristic working rule.61 To say this, to note
this in Onement I, is again, I believe, to speak of the aura. It is to detect in
the ‘supposition of the aura’ something that Newman’s art teaches us even
beyond what Benjamin may have said about the aura. The most beautiful
gift that an ‘auratic’ work like Newman’s can make to the notion of the aura
is to modify it, to transform it, to displace it.
We know that, for Benjamin, the aura as ‘apparition of a distance,
however close it may be’ was opposed to the trace, which was 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 are
in fact often – as the example of the veronica forcefully attests – objects made
in such a way that people will believe they were not ‘made by the hand of
man’.63 In them the aura imposes itself, as I said, to the degree that the image-
making procedure remains secret, miraculous, beyond reach. With Onement
I, in contrast – as with a number of twentieth-century artworks – the aura
comes into being, is supposed, through the gaze’s proximity to a procedural
trace as simple as it is productive, as effective as it is ambiguous. In this type
of artwork, trace and aura are no longer separated; as a result, we can even
recognize the work as an unprecedented combination, which I shall call for
the occasion an auratic trace. In this case, the procedural effectivity – and
the hand does not always intervene directly in the procedure, as we see in the
retrait of the central zip in Onement I – produces the ‘apparition of distance’
and, so to speak, succeeds in making us touch depth. In this contact, it is our
relation to human labour that is implicated, transformed and renewed.
That may be why the twentieth-century artist succeeds in giving us the
gift of artworks that ‘look at us’, beyond any objective relation, beyond
18 Walter Benjamin and History
In one of the fragments belonging to the posthumous text ‘On the Concept of
History’, a fragment entitled ‘The Dialectical Image’, Walter Benjamin borrows
a comparison made by André Monglond in the introduction to his 1930
study Le Préromantisme français. While speaking of the ability of a literary text
to present a meaning inconceivable at the time of its conception, Monglond
compares this effect to a photographic plate from which an image may be
developed at a later date. In the 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 literary
texts: the past has left in them images which can be compared to those held fast
by a light sensitive plate’ (GS 1.3: 1238/SW 4: 405). The comparison is called
upon to exemplify an understanding of history in terms of the process used to
produce a photographic print. In Benjamin’s account, the comparison, however,
is not so straightforward as the opening phrase of this sentence indicates: ‘if one
looks upon history as a text’. As a consequence of this conditional phrase, history
is understood by reference to what photography is said to do more than any
20 Walter Benjamin and History
other art: preserve the past for the present by means of the image. But, equally
compelling as this conditional opening is the sequence of comparisons it sets
up. Including the opening phrase, three comparisons are made in this sentence.
The 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 the
initial subject of this whole sequence: history. In effect, the logic enacted by these
comparisons takes the form of a syllogism that can be expressed as follows: if
history is comparable to a text and a text is comparable to a photographic plate,
then, history is comparable to the same photographic plate. Yet, throughout
this sequence it cannot be forgotten that, first, the premise is conditional, and
second, what is at stake in these comparisons is another relation, the relation
between a looking (betrachten) and a saying (sagen), between a history looked
at as a text and a history that can be spoken about because of this looking – in
other words, a history that can be read. As will be seen later in passages from the
Arcades Project, it is the attainment of such a relation that is at stake in the dialec-
tical image. But what is at stake in this relation is that history should mean, be
of value, possess worth – as the verb used by Benjamin in the phrase connecting
this looking and saying indicates: gelten. What then decides that such a history
is meaningful (that is, has significance in the present – since history has no other
time in which to be meaningful) is that what can be looked upon belongs to
language. Yet, if history is to attain value in this way, why is it that a visual mode,
photo-graphy, is the chosen means of recognizing this value? Does this mean
that Benjamin’s understanding of history is only conceivable after the advent of
photography, a history that is then a reflection of the modernity announced by
photography? Or does photography effect a change in the structure of history in
the same way that Benjamin claims it does for the work of art in his essay ‘The
Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’, a claim that locates the
significance of art as a function of the technological?1
Only with the advent of photography does it become possible to look at what
was actually present to the past, since the moment of the photographic image is
also the moment captured in the image. No painting can make this claim; as
Benjamin argues, its means of production, so dependent on the hand, forbids
it from doing so.2 Since photography is what allows the past to be captured for
the 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 belongs
to the domain of art – it now makes an historical claim.
Benjamin expresses such a claim, in the course of ‘The Work of Art
in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’ when he relates the work of
the Parisian photographer, Eugène Atget, to the withdrawal of the auratic
presence of the human subject in early photography:
But where the human being withdraws from the photographic image,
there the superiority of exhibition value to cult value steps [tritt] for
The Shortness of History, or Photography in Nuce 21
the first time. To have given this development its local habitation is the
incomparable significance of Atget, who, around 1900, captured Paris
streets devoid of their human aspect. It has been justly said that he
recorded them like the scene of a crime. A crime scene, also, is devoid
of the human; its record occurs on account of its evidence. With Atget,
photographic records begin to be evidence in the historical process
[Prozeß ]. This brings out their hidden political significance [Das macht
ihre verborgene politische Bedeutung aus]. (GS 1.2: 485/SW 4: 258)3
The absence of the human subject from the street scenes recorded by Atget
becomes, for Benjamin, the sign of an incomparable but also superior signi-
ficance. This significance, concentrated in the exhibition value of the image,
is named the political by the end of these sentences. Photography not only
allows the political to appear, but does so by bringing it out of concealment.
The political is therefore what resides, first of all, concealed in the photo-
graph as image. But, by what means does this concealment occur? Is it a
natural attribute of the photographic image? Despite the attraction of such a
claim (which presumes an essential effect for photography), the example of
Atget indicates that this ability of photography to bring out the political does
not reside in the technical process of photography – as if, by its nature, photo-
graphy excluded the presence of a human subject. Rather, Benjamin derives
the political aspect of these photographs by means of comparison: they are
like the record of a crime scene, a record from which the human subject is
excluded in favour of the objects that remain in such a scene. The political
significance of Atget’s photographs is understood strictly in accordance to
this analogy. In fact, it is the analogy which brings out this significance
rather than some aspect of photography as a medium. Atget’s photographs
thus achieve the importance Benjamin attaches to them because of a choice
to capture street scenes of Paris undisguised by any human presence.4 As a
result, Atget’s photographic images become the record of a street from which
the organizing actions of a human subject have been excluded rather than the
record of photography’s technical ability. This demonstration of exhibition
value is not an attribute of the medium but a framing within the medium.
This is why Benjamin will state that Atget has only given this exhibitional
aspect of photography what he calls a ‘local habitation’, an ‘abode’ or a ‘place’
(seine Stätte). Yet, despite this limitation, the example reveals the crucial place
the technical will hold as a means of understanding history. The question will
be to account for the technical in terms of the historical since it is through the
recognition of the former in the latter that the political significance of history
is to be recognized (or, to recall a verb Benjamin uses in the passage just cited
as well as elsewhere in the ‘Reproducibility’ essay, it is a question of how the
technical ‘steps’ into the place of history).5
In an entry to Convolute Y of the Arcades Project, Benjamin locates
this technical aspect in relation to history in the following manner: ‘The
22 Walter Benjamin and History
claims its significance through a historical relation to the present). The image
is 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 an
absolute emphasis. It is at this point that exhibition value is recognized not
for exhibiting something – such as a building or street in a photograph – but
rather for exhibiting exhibitionality in general. What is exhibited in this case
is the means of exhibition: photography, exhibition as technique.
Benjamin emphatically bases his understanding of the change in the
function of art on such a means. This can be read in the ‘Reproducibility’
essay when he asserts the difference that the camera makes: ‘For the first
time, photography freed the hand from the most important artistic tasks
in the process of pictorial [bildlicher] reproduction, tasks that now devolved
solely upon the eye looking into a lens [welcher nunmehr dem ins Objektiv
blickenden Auge allein zufielen]’ (GS 1.2: 474–75/SW 4: 253). This freeing
of the hand, enabled by photography, has all the character of an event (‘for
the first time’ and a few a pages later this becomes ‘the first time in world
history’ [GS 1.2: 481/SW 4: 256]). But, what does not change is that art
is functional even when it displays itself as technical. A technical art is,
in this respect, no different from an auratic art: they are both claimed by
function.
This shared aspect can be readily seen if the sentence in which Benjamin
speaks of the new function of art is cited in full. This sentence describes this
functionality as occurring both in the absolute emphasis on exhibition value
and in the absolute emphasis on its cult value:
Just as the work of art in prehistoric times, through the absolute emphasis
that rested on its cult value, first became an instrument of magic which
was only later recognized as a work of art, so today, through the absolute
emphasis that rests on its exhibition value, the work of art becomes a form
[Gebilde] with entirely [ganz] new functions. (GS 1.2: 484/SW 4: 257)
image to the extent that photography becomes both the means of producing
the exhibitional image (that is, the work of art) and the image through
which the production of such a value is recognized.8 The camera doubles
as a technological instrument whose formation (also Gebilde) permits the
recognition of the technological. Since, as Benjamin claims, the appearance
of absolute exhibition value in an art whose mode of production is techno-
logical is not simply an event in a series of events but the moment in which
a confrontation between history and art takes place, then such recognition
is understood as also being brought on by history – that is, history has a
role in the appearance of the technological. How history fulfils this role is
directly related to its structuring which, as Benjamin makes clear in the
course of the ‘Reproducibility’ essay, is a movement between two poles: cult
and exhibition. Despite the fact that Benjamin grants absolute emphasis to
these poles at different times, the latter pole is not excluded from the former
when under the sway of auratic, cult value.9 This is why Benjamin can speak
of exhibition value as if it had always been there, hidden within the art of
aura and cult value, waiting for the mode of existence most adequate to its
meaning. In recognizing photography as that mode, Benjamin does not just
recognize an example of exhibition value, but also recognizes a history in
which technology and reproducibility are inevitable for art. Photography
thus becomes the means to develop, in the technical, photographic sense
of the word, the history in which its confrontation with the past of art is
already set by history.
In the second sentence of the fragment, ‘The Dialectical Image’ (discussed
at the beginning of this chapter), Benjamin grants photography just such
a role. And again he refers to André Monglond’s comparison between
photography 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 the
image to come to light in all its details’ (GS 1.3: 1238/SW 4: 405). Much of
Benjamin’s understanding of history, as it is expressed in the posthumous
text, ‘On the Concept of History’, is condensed here. Above all the sense that
what is properly historical only reveals itself to a future generation capable
of recognizing it, that is, a generation possessing developers strong enough
to fix an image never seen before – and never to be seen again, as Benjamin
will later insist.10 Within the ‘Reproducibility’ essay, photography, as the
future of art, fulfils this role. Photography does this not merely because it
brings out exhibition value, but also because at the same time it brings out
the auratic. Only from the perspective of the exhibitional is it possible to
recognize the auratic – otherwise art is essentially and unchangeably auratic
even to the point of being incapable of any other determination. In this case,
the auratic could not be a value attached to the work of art. By the same
logic, if it were not something attached, exhibitionality would have no mode
of existence. More importantly, nor would the technological be an essential
The Shortness of History, or Photography in Nuce 25
pole of art. What is therefore at stake for art in Benjamin is not just a history
that allows the confrontation of these two poles to be recognized as history,
but the recognition of this history through technology. Technology is both
part of this history and the means by which this history and its part in this
history is recognized.
The sentence Benjamin cites from Monglond reflects the crucial role
of the image in securing this recognition. However, this emphasis on the
image in Benjamin’s translation is not exactly what Monglond says. As
Benjamin knew, since he cites the passage in French in Convolute N of
the Arcades Project, Monglond writes: ‘Seul l’avenir possède des révélateurs
assez actifs pour fouiller parfaitement de tels clichés’ (N15a, 1) [Only the
future possesses developers active enough to search out perfectly such
negatives]. Benjamin translates this sentence as follows: ‘Nur die Zukunft
hat Entwickler zur Verfügung, die stark genug sind, um das Bild mit allen
Details zum Vorschein kommen zu lassen’ (GS 1.3: 1238) [Only the future
has developers at its disposal that are strong enough to allow the image to
come to appearance in all its details]. Where Monglond uses the French
word for a negative, cliché, Benjamin substitutes image, Bild. From one
perspective, there would be no difference here. After all, a negative is an
image even if it is a reversal of how the world is seen. Yet, Benjamin’s substi-
tution does pose the question of why it occurs at all and of what effect this
change has on the relation between photography and his understanding of
history, a relation so resolutely focused on the image.
Before discussing this substitution of Bild for cliché, two other changes of
emphasis in Benjamin’s translation should be noted: where Monglond says
perfectly (parfaitement), Benjamin writes in all its details (mit allen Details);
where Monglond describes the activities of these developers as searching out
(fouiller), Benjamin says that such developers allow the unperceived image
to come to light, that is, to come to appearance or sight (das Bild mit allen
Details zum Vorschein kommen lassen). Within the example of photography,
what these changes clarify is an emphasis on the image produced, even
to the point of subsuming the negative into that image. For Benjamin,
the negative is already an image waiting for all its details to be brought to
light. As a result, the negative is understood from the perspective of what it
produces – to use a Marxist-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 becomes
a merely technical aspect of an image that has subsumed the process
of its production into itself as technology is recognized less as a means of
producing an image (Baudelaire’s servant) than a determination of the
image. In this respect, photography is a mode of appearance of the image,
a mode that, quite literally, places the image in its appearance before us: der
Vorschein. As a result, in photography, the image is seen as coming into its
own as image. This result, perhaps only distantly hinted at when Monglond
26 Walter Benjamin and History
of that project while attributing its cause to time.14 Benjamin writes: ‘What
for others are deviations are, for me, the data which determine my course.
– On the differentials of time (which, for others, disturb the “main lines” of
inquiry), I base my reckoning’ (N1, 2). In the language Benjamin uses here,
the difference time makes would disturb the hope of returning through the
image to the moment captured in the negative. Yet, as the sentence preceding
the one just cited indicates, the difference registered by this disturbance does
not arise independently of the attempt to achieve such a return. Benjamin
writes: ‘Comparison of other people’s attempts to the undertaking of a sea
voyage in which the ships are drawn off course by the magnetic North Pole.
Discover this North Pole’ (N1, 2). To discover this North Pole – Benjamin’s
emphasis – is, according to his example, to discover the source of deviation,
the source of what makes any intention of arriving at the North Pole go
astray. But, it is only in such an intention that this deviation is exhibited for
Benjamin – in the same way that what is developed from the photographic
image utilizes the same process and produces the same image as any other
time, yet what appears in this image is no longer understood as the image
present to the lens in the time of its capture. Although, in the fragment
on the dialectical image, Benjamin attributes this difference to the future
existence of a developer strong enough to bring out the image in all its details
and although it is the privilege of the future (and therefore the passage of
time) to possess such a developer, time is not such a developer. Time does not
produce the image that becomes available to the future. However, time as a
differential is what makes production of this image possible for this future,
since such a time is marked by the occurrence of two events – a condition
that is equally true for photography since every negative and every print is
conceived, technically speaking, on the basis of time, the defined time of its
exposure, the opening and closing of the shutter.
In an entry to Convolute Y of the Arcades Project, Benjamin recounts a
transformation of visual forms that explicitly points to time as a technical
condition to which photography owes its significance:
the case of Atget, it was their status as evidence – their exclusion of human
presence – that allowed their ‘hidden political significance’ and therefore
their relation to ‘the historical process’ to be brought out. Here, it is not
a question of what is or is not in the photograph. Rather, the emphasis
falls upon the chronological definability that arises from the techno-
logical condition of any photograph: the fact that a photograph can only
exist because of a defined time. By claiming that the significance of this
defined time is political, Benjamin is also claiming that the technological
already contains the possibility of this significance – in nuce. Consequently,
history in Benjamin becomes the exhibition of this hidden significance in
technology – in effect, developing technology as the example of what it
already is. For history to develop the political significance of technology is
then for history to develop the means by which it also attains significance. If
history does not attain this, time, as Benjamin describes it in Thesis XVII of
‘On the Concept of History’ will remain ‘a precious but tasteless seed in its
interior’ (GS 1.2: 703/SW 4: 396). Precious because, without it, no history as
such is conceivable; tasteless because time, in its chronological 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 to
the past that is also a deviation from that past – in the sense that the past
occurs in the form of an image not yet developed in all its details. For
this significance to appear, an account of such images in terms of their
exhibitionability is necessary. While photography offers an account of such
exhibitionability for the first time, this account runs the risk of remaining,
as Benjamin notes with respect to Atget’s photographs of Paris streets, a local
habitation. As such, it does not reside within the means of photography, it
is not, as already pointed out above, a property of its technology. By what
means, then, does technology produce historical understanding, by what
means does it step into the place of this understanding?
In the ‘Reproducibility’ essay, technology takes such a step when it appears
with an absolute emphasis on exhibition value. This emphasis, Benjamin
claims, first emerges within photography. As Benjamin describes it, the
moment this first emergence depends upon is a moment that occurs within
the photographic process, namely, the moment when what is captured in the
image and the image are defined by the same duration of time: their chrono-
logical definability. This definition takes the form of the negative. Although
Benjamin, unlike Monglond, does not retain the negative when he makes
the analogy between photography and history in the fragment entitled
‘The Dialectical Image’ (preferring instead to treat the negative as ein Bild,
The Shortness of History, or Photography in Nuce 29
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 he
states that ‘from the photographic plate, for example, a multiplicity of prints
is possible [ist eine Vielheit von Abzügen möglich]; the question of an authentic
print 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 the
ability to exhibit what is present in the negative – not with respect to what
is depicted in the negative (that is again merely a local habitation, not a
property of technology), but with respect to its purpose: to produce reproduc-
tions that have no priority in relation to one another and therefore no claim
to authenticity since each is as authentic as the other. Here, the prints allow
a negative to come to light, but again it is a negative whose property may
only be recognized through its development into those prints. Monglond’s
text, hidden behind Benjamin’s translation, reminds us that photography, in
the stage that Benjamin refers to it as a medium of reproducibility, is only
such a medium because of the cliché or negative that permits it to possess
exhibition value. In other words, multiplicity is the effect of a difference
signalled by the image in its negation. The absolute emphasis on exhibition
value of photography, the means by which technology takes its first historical
step, overwrites this difference. By turning from this difference, Benjamin
brings to light in all its details the invariability of the image produced from
the negative. This emphasis on the absolute exhibition value of the photo-
graphic image is by no means an emphasis on the significance of an image,
but rather an emphasis on the technological existence of such an image. Such
an emphasis cannot yield a history other than the repetition of this process.
But what is important to remember, and the ‘Reproducibility’ essay does this
most clearly, is that the absolute emphasis on exhibition value is what estab-
lishes the two poles and therefore the possibility of recognizing deviation
within the auratic (the recognition that the auratic is already in a certain
respect exhibitional). However, once established, this exhibitional pole, in
order to become historical truth, rather than truth, is set against itself. To be
historical, it must be the place in which a deviation steps – and steps in the
name of history as something hidden.
If the presentation of photography as the image of history is maintained
as Benjamin describes it in the fragment, ‘The Dialectical Image’, then the
image produced from the negative can bring out what could not have been
seen, but remains hidden in the historical moment in which the image was
captured in its negative form. In both the earlier essay on photography (‘A
Short History of Photography’) and the later essay, ‘The Work of Art in the
Age of its Technical Reproducibility’, Benjamin explains the possibility of
such an other understanding in the past by reference to what he terms the
‘optical unconscious’. In 1931, Benjamin describes the appearance of such
an effect as follows:
30 Walter Benjamin and History
It is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye:
other above all in the sense that in the place of a space interwoven
with human consciousness steps a space interwoven with the human
unconscious [an die Stelle eines vom Menschen mit Bewußtsein durch-
wirkten Raums ein unbewußt durchwirkter tritt]. For example, it is readily
accepted that one can give an account, if only in general terms, of the
act of walking; for certain, one knows nothing more about its dis-
position in the fraction of a second of ‘stepping out’ [von ihrer Haltung
im Sekundenbruchteil des ‘Ausschreitens’]. Photography, with its devices
of slow motion and enlargement, opens it up. One comes to know this
optical unconscious first through photography, just as one comes to know
the instinctual unconsciousness through psychoanalysis. (‘Photography’
GS 2.1: 371/SW 4: 510–12)15
aside since it would also reinforce this temporal condition if the German
sense of Nu is also heard.
The temporal factor that coordinates the photograph and the technical
condition of its creation (Y10, 2) can now be discerned in the appearance
of the image through which Benjamin founds his understanding of history.
It is this condition that gives recognizability to such an image, that allows
it to move from what is merely a looking on (the looking into the lens
of the ‘Reproducibility’ essay) to a look whose duration, however short,
is given significance by this condition (through its recognizability and
readability, its coming to light – zum Vorschein kommen). That this coming
to light takes the form (Gebilde) of the technical condition of exhibition-
ability (through which the work of art takes on ‘entirely new functions’)
in the ‘Reproducibility’ essay reveals the extent to which what is at stake
in Benjamin’s understanding is the technical condition through which his
historical materialism is reproduced: history as the reproduction of itself
as image. While the condition of this history can be coordinated with the
reproducibility of the work of art after aura (and Benjamin’s allusion to the
political significance of Atget’s photographs of Paris streets already points to
this relation), this coordination also takes the form of an inversion. Where
the historical image, the dialectical image occurs, it announces itself in a
flash of light just as the shutter of the camera announces the arrival of an
image to the photographic plate or negative on which it is recorded inversely:
darkness as light, light as darkness. But besides this coordination by
comparison (which can only transform photography into a phenomenology
of history), there is another inversion, one in which photography, or rather,
its formation functions as the 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 in
such a duration does history and the dialectical image occur for Benjamin
but, in this case, what happens in this duration of the lightning is not the
reception of light, as in photography and the camera, but its emission.
Reception only occurs when, like the photographic plate, the historical
subject receives this flash by recognizing and reading what is received as
an 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 arises
in its deviation from those forms of history Benjamin would resist if not
overcome, namely, historicism, universal history, progress, a tradition
subject to conformism (the geographical poles rather than the magnetic pole
of Benjamin’s historical project).23 But, the condition of this deviation is the
placement of the image in its inverted form in its other pole. (In the terms
of the ‘Reproducibility’ essay, the relation of cult value to exhibition value
is the inversion of its relation in photography). The dialectical image is in
34 Walter Benjamin and History
this sense strictly dialectical, it is the inverse of the history out of which it
appears but at the same time is already within that history.
In the passage previously cited from Convolute Y (10, 2) – where
Benjamin traces the political significance of the photograph to its chrono-
logical definability – the recognition of such an image occurs through what
he names the differential of time, the difference that time makes. But, for
an image to appear according to this differential, it must also be filled with
time, for Benjamin the time of the now. An early fragment from the Arcades
Project addresses how this is to be understood. According to this fragment,
the dialectical image contains time in its smallest, its least form:
Time in its least form enters the dialectical image. A form that can only
be discovered in confrontation. A time without time for itself. A time that
needs something other than itself if it is to be itself rather than a timeless
history to which it cannot belong. In its least form this time is the condition
of the dialectical image. But in this case, what is referred to as time cannot
be time at all, at least not in the sense that confuses history with time. Yet,
in order to intervene, this time is given an image. As an image it is given
definition and, as Benjamin states, confrontation is the means by which
this definition arises when the dialectical image comes up against the ‘now
of recognizability’. This ‘now’ is also the moment, the Augenblick in which
the looking of the eye is figured as a look.24 The inversion that relates the
looking eye to the Augenblick is now revealed as the moment of figuration
since, in this moment, seeing becomes what can only be said (in the sense
that the instant is always over in order to be an instant and therefore cannot
be seen but only spoken of).25 Yet, when Benjamin describes this movement,
it is not a particular figuration or a particular inversion that is at work but
figuration itself. In Benjamin’s own words, it is the image as an image that
produces this arrest, the image in its figurality:
the place in which its interruptive force may again take place. This is why, for
Benjamin, 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 time
in which they can be read. But if what is read is their truth, then, what can
only be read is that they will never be seen again. This is the truth that is the
death of intentional history: history as progress, universal history, and so on.
This, in the end, is the content of the truth exhibited in the dialectical image:
never to be seen again. In this aspect, every image so produced has the same
effect – history in the age of its reproducibility. There is no authentic image
of time since no image, as photography so clearly illustrates, takes place in
time, but only because of a time that recedes as the condition of its recog-
nition. Within this understanding of time, every image is thus the record of
this recession, that is, every image is the recession in which history takes on a
form. In this, they do not vary – and this is also why the interest of Benjamin’s
concept of history does not, in the end, lie in his claims on behalf of historical
materialism. This concept treats the temporal condition of history, a condition
that assures the reproducibility of history in the image. It is not, in this case,
an example of history but the example of time as the unvarying cliché from
which the image is developed. Its force is this exemplariness, which is to say
its citability – an aspect reinforced by the presentation of the Arcades Project
as well as the theses on history, both are pre-eminently citable as well as pre-
eminently readable as citations.
In this citability, Benjamin remains the most telling example of a history
understood as example, a history that can and would only be shown
(‘method of this project . . . nothing to say . . . only to show’?). This under-
standing, unlike 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 not
allow the Messiah to arrive on time, unnoticed? An arrival that would not
matter.) This understanding of history has appointed its time – now – as
if it were a time appointed for it (as if time could ever be late or even on
time). But, to defer this moment to the future is to ensure that history, in
its least form, will show itself on time if not in time. As such, it will show in
the moment of its appointment, the moment of its only possible recognition
as history. Only then does it arrive as das bildliche Bild. Only then does it
arrive in the shortness of a history that has no time to call its own other
than the chronological definability of its event. But to make the example of
time’s not-coming matter, to make the time that has no time short enough
to be recognized as history, is this not still the task of technology? Even in
the time of an Augenblick, when the looking of the eye is splintered into the
look of messianic time? And is such technology not the reproducible image
of history reproduced as the end of modernity? And is this not in the guise
of something different from what was previously signified, and so on, ad
infinitum, until the entire past is brought into the present? Im Nu-ce?
3
‘NOW’: WALTER BENJAMIN ON
HISTORICAL TIME
WERNER HAMACHER*
What Walter Benjamin uncovers in his theses ‘On the Concept of History’
is the temporal structure of the political affect. Historical time is founded
upon political time directed towards happiness. Any theory of history – of
historical cognition and of historical action – therefore will have to take
this time of the affect as its starting point. The fact that pathemata, affects,
passions were already to an extent discredited within political theory during
Benjamin’s times must have been attributed by him to the disappearance
of their genuine political dimension. Within prevailing historiography the
political impulse was replaced by the rational calculation of an abstract
cognition of the object. Thus, in order to clarify the force of political affects,
it had to be shown that such affects are also decisive for objective cognition.
This occurs in Benjamin’s second thesis, ‘On the Concept of History’. The
thesis demonstrates that cognitive acts, determined by the microstructure
of the affective time, are political operations. The cognition at stake here,
however, is the cognition of happiness. Happiness is never experienced in
a present without this present relating to that which has been (Gewesenes).
It is not, however, experienced on a past reality, but on the irrealis of its
non-actualized possibility. ‘There is happiness such as could arouse envy in
us’ – this is how Benjamin begins his argument, making envy the seal of
authenticity in which happiness manifests itself – ‘there is happiness such
as could arouse envy in us only in the air we have breathed, among people
we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us’
(GS 1.2: 693/SW 4: 389). The kind of happiness that alone can prove itself
– and, according to 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 reside
in an event that could become the subject of objective cognition but rather
in a possibility, which proves to be a possibility only in the miss and which
only by virtue of this miss preserves itself as a possibility for the future.
Happiness is the possible in its miss: it is the possible that could impossibly
have been realized at the time, it is the possible that springs from an im-
*Trans. N. Rosenthal.
‘Now’: Walter Benjamin and Historical Time 39
arouse envy in us only in the air we have breathed, among people we could
have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us’ (GS 1.2:
693/SW 4: 389). The possible stored in un-reality is not an abstract or ideal
possible in general and for all times but a possible always for a particular
future, that is, for precisely the one singular future that recognizes itself in
it as missed. It is we who could have talked to people but 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 possibility
of our happiness, of ourselves, which was therefore an absolutely singular,
irreplaceable and unrepeatable possibility. And it is only us for and in whom
this missed possibility lives on as missed and demands fulfilment in every
moment.
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 or
unconscious, seized or missed. Possibilities are not abstractly categorical,
relating to objects, conditions and actions in general, but are always poss-
ibilities only for those who could seize them, and belong to the existential
structure of their existence. Therefore, Thesis II remarks: ‘the image of
happiness that we cherish is thoroughly coloured by the time to which
the course of our own existence has assigned us’ (GS 1.2: 693/SW 4: 389).
Benjamin is only drawing the conclusion from the intentional structure of
possibilities and of the temporal space they open up, when he continues:
past’s possibilities have not yet found their fulfilment, that they continue to
have an effect as intentions and demand their realization from those who
feel addressed by them. When past things survive, then it is not lived-out
(abgelebte) facts that survive, facts that could be recorded as positive objects
of knowledge; rather what survives are the unactualized possibilities of that
which is past. There is historical time only in so far as there is an excess of
the unactualized, the unfinished, failed, thwarted, which leaps beyond its
particular Now and demands from another Now its settlement, correction
and fulfilment.
The possible is a surplus over the factual. As such, the possible is time: excess
over anything that can become a positive given; excess over that which is;
remainder that itself is not. Every possibility, and a fortiori every missed possi-
bility, survives as the time to fulfil this possibility. Time – historical time – is
nothing 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 mere
possible could find its fulfilment, in which the possible as intention could
find its goal, time is the claim of the unfinished and failed, of the broken
and thwarted for its completion and rescue in happiness. Time is always the
time of the unfinished and itself unfinished time, time that has not reached
its end. It is the time of that which is not yet and perhaps never will be. It
is therefore the dimension of the possible to claim to become actual. For
Benjamin, the addressee of this claim is not an instance that precedes this
claim – it is not an already constituted subject that perceives such a claim,
united in itself and in control of itself. The claim’s addressee is rather funda-
mentally a function of this claim, ‘thoroughly coloured by the time’, and of
the possibilities that assert their demands towards this claim, not only in its
time but as its time. Therefore, ‘our coming was expected on earth’. What is
said here is that we are first of all and primarily the ones that were expected
by the missed possibilities of the past. Only qua expected have we been given
‘a weak messianic power’ (GS 1.2: 693/SW 4: 390). This messianic power
is the intentional correlate of the claim that calls upon us from the missed
possibilities of the past, not to miss them a second time but to perceive them
in every sense: cognizingly to seize and to actualize them. In this force, those
possibilities and the time in which they survive search for the telos of their
intentions. Messianic power is therefore nothing other than the implicit
hypothesis of the missed possible that there has to be an instance to correct
the miss, to do the undone, to regain the wasted and actualize the has-been-
possible. This power therefore is not one that is our own, independent of
this claim. It is not ‘ours’, something we can have at our disposal by our own
means, but it is the power which we have been ‘endowed with’ by others, it
is the power of the claim itself and of the expectation that the claim is met.
This power is never messianic in the sense that we ourselves are enabled by it
to direct the hope for our own redemption towards the future or, to be more
42 Walter Benjamin and History
precise, to future generations, but only in the entirely different sense that
we have been ‘endowed with’ it by former generations, even by all former
generations, as the compliance with their expectations. The messianic power
is, in short, the postulate of fulfilability and, in this sense, of redeemability
that is immanent in each missed opportunity and distinguishes it as a possi-
bility. Regardless of whether this power of fulfilment and redemption of the
possible is ever actually proven or not; regardless also of whether there has
ever been a single case where this ‘messianic power’ was indeed active in the
actualization of the possible. It is, as this power, given, and we have been
‘endowed with’ it by the simple givenness of what has been and, because it
did not reach its goal, did not stay. The possible – possible happiness – is
that which demands actualization – actual happiness – and in which the
telos of this demand remains inscribed, even if there has never been and will
never be this actualization. ‘We’ – independent of whether ‘we’ presently
exist or not – are the intentional complement destined to fulfil the postulate
of realizability of this possiblity, in so far as it is possibility. The messianic
power that ‘we’ have been ‘endowed with’ by all that is past is weak because
it is not an ability that springs from ourselves but it is the vanishing-point
of missed possibilities and of their demand for fulfilment. But it is a weak
power also because it has to become extinguished in each future by which
it is not perceived and actualized. Thesis V thus apodictically but consist-
ently pronounces the finiteness of this messianic power: it is an irretrievable
‘image of the past which threatens to disappear in every present that does
not recognize itself as intended in that image’ (GS 1.2: 695/SW 4: 391). The
weak ‘messianic power’ is therefore the expectation of others towards us,
the undischarged remains of possibility that are transferred from former
generations to the future ones. It is the rest of time that remains in order to
meet those demands – a rest that is not as substantial existence but is given
as time and passes with it. The ‘weak messianic power’ in us is time as mere
possibility of happiness.
By determining the relationship of the past to the respective present
– towards us – as an essentially linguistic relationship: as an agreement
between former generations and ours, as ‘echo of now silent voices that we
lend our ear to’, as the ‘claim’ of the unused possibility that we ‘could have
talked to’ certain people (GS 1.2: 693–4/SW 4: 390), Benjamin explains
historical time, if only implicitly, as a time made out of language. History
presents itself as the afterlife of unused linguistic possibilities, which
demand their redemption by other languages and 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 messianic
power’ to transform the missed possibilities into fulfilled ones. Awaiting
(Erwartung) is to be understood as a-wording (Erwortung); languages as
the demand of a language that did not become one, for there to be one.
‘Now’: Walter Benjamin and Historical Time 43
And similarly history, which for Benjamin ever since his ‘The Task of the
Translator’ is bound up inextricably with language and even identical with
its history and with it language.
The theology of language and history that Benjamin outlines in Thesis II
is a theology of wilted possibilities and thus an essentially wilted, dwarfed
and hunchbacked theology. To be more precise, it is a theory that there
could only be an 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 historical
cognition and historical action. If theology assumes the necessity, constancy
and certainty of a God and historiography assumes that there already has
been history and there will be history in the future, then both of them
assume essentially unhistorical concepts of deity and history. Historicism’s
concept of history is thus the simple counterpart to the concept of God of
substantialist theology. As the latter relies on the constancy of God, so does
the former on the positivity of historical facts. The historicity of such facts,
however, does not have its origin in their steadiness (Ständigkeit), much less
their standing on their own, their autonomy (Selbständigkeit). Historical is
that which only can be recognized as historical from its contingent possi-
bility to yet have been different and to yet become different, and thus from
its after-history. Historical is only ever that which it is not yet – the always
other, open possibility. Only that can become historical that is not yet
historical. This however also means: as it is, namely as a possibility given
and subject to actualization, in principle, this possibility is equally exposed
to the danger of being missed. In so far as it is mere possibility, in so far as it
is not grounded in a substantial actuality, historicity is always also the possi-
bility of becoming impossible and expiring. Facts would last if they existed
as facts outside any intentional relation; only possibilities can be missed;
historical facts, which constitute themselves as having-been only within the
space of their possibilities, ensue solely from the dimension of their capacity
to be missed. They are insubstantial, singular, finite. Even if facts have
the structure of referring and furthermore of intention and tendency (and
Benjamin suggests that they do have this very structure: ‘The past carries
with it a hidden index by which it is referred to redemption’), they are still
constitutively designed for their expiration: expiring either in the redemption,
fulfilment and resolution of their intention or expiring in the miss of this
redemption. The historical is historical only because it manifests itself in
the span between these two possibilities of intention, these two possibilities
of possibility: that the possibility expires in its fulfilment, or that it passes
away if it is not seized. Thus it follows that each possibility is a possibility of
its actualization only if it is at the same time the possibility of the missing
of this possibility. Only those possibilities are historical possibilities that can
always also not be seized. They are fleeting possibilities, not possibilities that
as a substantial stock in the archive of potentialities could be grasped at any
44 Walter Benjamin and History
time. Because there is no reservoir fixed for all time, in which the treasures
of possibility for ever accumulate, but only a reservoir whose stock dissolves
with every missed chance, history is no progression where given possibilities,
one by one, one out of the other, are actualized, so that in the end all possi-
bilities will have been exhausted and all possible actualities established.
Where there is history, there is no continuum between the possible and the
actual. Any continuum between them would de-potentialize the possible
and turn it into an in principle calculable necessity. Only where its possi-
bility is contingent possibility – namely one that can be another possibility,
the possibility of something other or even no possibility at all – only there is
the possible historical. As a fleeting, non-archivable, contingent possibility,
as one that is just now given and has already gone – and thus as always
singular, as the solitarily leaping out of every pre-stabilized formation – it
concerns the one who would have to lapse into lethargy in the face of the
automatism of the actualities unfolding homogeneously out of possibilities,
and demands of him his grasping intervention: a grasping without which
there would be no history, but a grasping which would not exist without
the corresponding possibility that it fails to appear or is unsuccessful. Only
because Benjamin thinks of history from the point of view of its possibilities,
from the point of view of its possibility of being other or of not being, can
he view history not as a mechanical series of events but as act. Only because
he does not view historical possibilities as constant and freely available
resources for series of realization does he have to view each historical act as
the always singular answer to an always singular possibility. Only because
his answer can be missed can it also succeed.
force of history; but nothing else is necessary either.1 If that which has
been and each present that can become past carries with it a ‘hidden index’
through which it is referred to a ‘weak messianic power’ that would realize
its possibilities of happiness, then all historical existence has an irreducible
– and irreducibly weak – messianic structure. When Benjamin first touches
upon the referentiality to redemption in historical existence in Thesis II,
the reason he does not talk about ‘the Messiah’ as a historically determined
religious figure is that each singular historical moment, of whatever epoch
or religious observance, has to be structured with reference to the messianic
imperative if it is to fall into the domain of historical existence at all. If
the ‘index’ of a ‘messianic power’, which ‘we have been endowed with like
every generation that preceded us’, marks every historical possibility, then
messianic referentiality is the structure of the possible and of the historical
time in which it lives on. Benjamin attributes weaknesses to this structural
messianicity not in order to note an accidental defect, which, under ideal
circumstances, could be remedied, but in order to emphasize a structural
element of this messianicity, through which it, in turn, is referred to its
possible failure. The possibility of happiness is only indicated together with
the corresponding possibility of its failure. The messianic index is crossed
a priori by its reference to a possible failure and thus a possible impossi-
bility. There is, in short, no referring (Verweisung) to a ‘messianic power’
that should not at the same time indicate, as Paul Celan used the word, its
orphaning (Verwaisung); no index that would not have to reach the borders
of its indexicality and become an ex-index; no messianicity that does not
emerge from its non-messianicity. The weakness of the ‘messianic power’
lies in its structural finitude. The Messiah, who is supposed to rescue the
missed possibilities of history into actual happiness, can himself be missed.
Any Messiah – and each moment in which he should be able to enter, each
Now – is essentially finite. That is to say, he can only be Messiah because
there is a possibility of his not being Messiah.
In early drafts of his Arcades Project, which are dated to 1927, Benjamin
took up the Kantian metaphor of the ‘Copernican turn’ and considered it
in relation to the ‘historical perception’: it was thought that a ‘fixed point
had been found in “what has been”, and one saw the present engaged in
tentatively approaching the forces of cognition to this solid ground’ (ho, 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 ‘fixed
point’ can only be brought to a ‘dialectical fixation’ (ho, 2). This fixing
in the synthesis between what-has-been and the present that Benjamin
called dialectic does not assume a definite past – in that respect it follows
the Kantian turn; nor however, does it assume a fixed instrumentation of
the cognitive apparatus that could pre-form its results – in that respect it
46 Walter Benjamin and History
Articulating the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it
really was’. It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up at a moment
of danger. Historical materialism wishes to hold fast that image of the
past which unexpectedly appears to the historical subject at a moment of
danger. The danger threatens both the content [Bestand] of the tradition
and those who inherit it . . . Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition
away from the conformism that is working to overpower it. (GS 1.2:
695/SW 4: 391)
form that historical cognition could entrust itself to, and no reliable course
on which history heads for its goal. History has to be won over and again,
at each singular moment, ever again in a singular way. Neither history nor
happiness, which is striven for in the former, is reliable; only the existence
of unhappiness is reliable. World-historical unhappiness manifests itself as a
continuum of catastrophes. Happiness, however, is never given as a state, it
is never embedded in a continuing course of events, but is, at best, offered
as a possibility and assigned as the goal of longing, of desire and of demand.
There is no form of happiness. The domain of forms belongs to the realm
of domination, where permanence of forms can only be secured through
the suppression of other possibilities – that is, possibilities of happiness
– that rebel against such domination. The danger that threatens historical
cognition as well as the politics of happiness therefore originates in the last
instance from the forms that are to guarantee the rule of a certain reality
over an infinity of possibilities of happiness. If, however, this threat does
not only originate from the interest of the current ruling class, but rather
from the most enduring instrument of its domination (i.e., from a particular
form), then in the realm of history and historical time this danger ori-
ginates from the time-form of constancy and persistence. This form of time
is the continuum. In this form, one Now-point follows another, uniformly,
in linear succession. The historical form corresponding to this continuum
of points of time is progress, the equally uniform, steady and inexorable
striving towards a pre-given ideal of political life. At the base of the social
and political conformism that threatens historical cognition, and thus
history itself, lies the transcendental conformism of the form of perception
of ‘time’, through which time is represented as the homogeneous continuum
of punctual events. The first and decisive step towards historical cognition
that does not join forces with the suppression of possibilities of happiness
has to be a step out of the transcendental conformism of the continuum
of time and history. Historians and politicians take a stand for the histor-
ically possible and for happiness only if they do not see history as a linear
and homogeneous process whose form always remains the same and whose
contents, assimilated to the persistent form, are indifferent. Together with
the continuum the conformity of each Now with every other Now of the
time series has to be broken as well. The possibility of this breaking through,
however, must be grounded in the very possibility (Ermöglichung) of the
continuum itself and thus in relations of discrete Nows that preceded their
homogenization.
The political critique of social conformism, the historical critique of
the automatism of progress and the philosophical critique of the time
continuum join together in the critique of the structural conformity of
all forms of experience. All three critiques have to retrace, by means of
political intervention, historical cognition and philosophical analysis, the
conformisms and their underlying forms to the constitutive movement,
48 Walter Benjamin and History
and they have to push the constitutive elements of these forms to crisis, to
diremption and to the possibility of another configuration. Only in this way
can the political outrage over the ruling injustice, the historical melancholy
over the incessant sameness in progress and the philosophical dissatisfaction
with already constituted forms become productive. Benjamin’s critique of
progress – an element of his philosophy of history that currently receives
little respect even amongst his admirers – is only adequately understood if
it is grasped as a critique of time as a transcendental form of perception and
thus of the empty form of experience that progresses in it. And so he writes
in Thesis XIII:
Progress as pictured in the minds of Social Democrats was, first of all, the
progress of humankind itself (and not just advances in men’s ability and
knowledge). Secondly, it was incompletable [unabschliessbar], in keeping
with the infinite perceptibility of humankind. Thirdly, it was considered
as inevitable – something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral
course. Each of these predicates is controversial and open to criticism. But
when the chips are down, criticism must penetrate beyond these assump-
tions and focus on something that they have in common. The concept
of humankind’s historical progress cannot be sundered from the concept
of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time. A critique of the
concept of such a progression must underline any criticism of the concept
of progress itself. (GS 1.2: 700–1/SW 4: 394–95)
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’; it
is not some merely relative connection of cultural stages to one another.
Like the entire life of mankind, it is an infinite process of fulfilment, not
a mere becoming. (GS 1.1: 92 / SW 1: 168)
What is said here is that the historical process is not a ‘progressing into
emptiness’ and not a progress within a given empty form of time, but the
‘medial’ process in which a form of time is constituted as ‘qualitative’, as at
each moment determined and substantially fulfilled. Calling a ‘temporal
infinity’ ‘medial’ links it with that ‘medium of reflection’ in which Benjamin’s
text brings together the paradoxes of self-positing. Reflection is a medium
for the transcendental I, for only in this reflection does it reach the ‘point of
indifference’ of its positing and its knowledge of it. Reflection, however, is
a medium not only as the common middle of act and cognition, but rather
as that element in which they are distinguishably and unmediatedly one.
The reflection is medial as self-affection. The interpretation of the infinity
of time and thus of time itself as ‘medial’, that is, as having sprung from the
reflective medium of self-affection, however, cites the Kantian thought of an
original creation of time from pure self-affection. The connection between
50 Walter Benjamin and History
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 in
the fact that one can affect oneself entirely out of oneself.’ And Benjamin:
‘That means: The point of indifference of reflection, where the latter springs
from the Nothing, is the poetic feeling’ (GS 1.1: 63 SW 1:150). If the ‘point
of indifference of reflection’, and with it its medium, is self-affection, then
the ‘medial’ time, which Benjamin associates with ‘Romantic messianism’,
is in turn, nothing other than this: ‘an affecting entirely out of oneself’. The
Schlegelian poetics of self-affection, however, is derived, as Benjamin must
have realized, from Kant’s doctrine on time as the ‘way the mind is affected
by its own activity . . . and hence by itself’.2 By extending self-affection to
history, albeit first of all the history of artistic forms, Benjamin pronounces
self-affection to be the fundamental constitutive mode not merely of time,
but also of history. Before there can be a continuum, be it of time, be it
of history, it has to be produced in the self-touching of the soul. And thus
– Kant himself speaks of a ‘paradox’3 – in a self-touching only from which
a self emerges. With this self-affection – self-affection of something passive,
self-determination of something undetermined – historical time rises as the
medium of all elements that enter into a relation in it. With historical time,
the historical subject appears. This subject, which is nothing other than
time, is in its deepest layer, as the happening of becoming definite through
itself, mere medium.
Benjamin never dissociated himself from the Kantian theory of time
constitution. The more determined, however, was his critique of the neo-
Kantian ideology of progress of the social democracy of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries.4 This ideology of progress is based on the
assumption that time arises not only out of a manifoldness of always
singular auto-affections of the faculty of understanding – for this could
only result in an unsteady aggregate of moments – but also out of self-
affections in successione as a continuous, linear and therefore also geomet-
rically disaffected time. Such a succession can only exist if it is conditioned
by a faculty identical in its unvarying duration. In this case, however, such
a succession could not be experienced as succession and thus not as time.
Only between the contents of the continuum could differences be perceived;
differences that, in turn, would be numerical but not temporal and least of
all historical differences. To be experienced as succession, a succession of
self-affections must be a constant, directed and inevitable affection between
different and diverse self-affections. But there is nothing in the structure of
these affections (even if they are, as for Kant, merely affections of the faculty
of understanding) that can work towards constancy, strict orientation and
inevitability, there is also nothing in that structure from which a continuous
and homogeneous series could emerge from such an affection between self-
affections. Time can only ever be a homogeneous series if the sameness of
‘Now’: Walter Benjamin and Historical Time 51
Thinking involves not only the movement of thoughts, but their arrest
as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a constellation saturated with
tensions, it gives that constellation a shock, by which thinking crystallizes
into a monad . . . In this structure he [the historical materialist] recognizes
the sign of a messianic arrest of happening, or (to put it differently) a
revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cog-
nizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course
of history. (GS 1.2: 702–3/SW 4: 396)
[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 is
preserved and sublated [aufgehoben] in the work, the era in the lifework,
and the entire course of history in the era. The nourishing fruit of what
is historically understood contains time in its interior as a precious but
tasteless seed. (GS 1.2: 703/SW 4: 396)
What the arrest of the movement of work, lifework, era and course of
history brings to light is ‘the time’, that is, as the last words of the thesis
emphasize, time ‘in its inside’. By virtue of the arrest the genuinely historical
thought preserves in its objects that which makes these objects possible and
the preservation and continuation of which makes these objects contribute
themselves – and these objects are not merely works, they are the course
of history itself. The essential object and the decisive yield of thinking, as
‘Now’: Walter Benjamin and Historical Time 55
present time, therefore no time at all that would not be the empty ideality of
a mere succession. Time is thus always the doubled, and only in its doubling
united, moment in which one time recognizes itself in another as ‘meant’
– intended, indicated, demanded, claimed. Neither of its instances, neither
the instance of cognition nor the instance demanding cognition, can be
absent if there is to be time. There is time only if the time for which it, and
only it, is there seizes it.
Benjamin portrays this minimal structure of historical time in one of the
very important notes to an epistemological critique from the Convolutes of
the Arcades Project:
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 not
Heidegger’s Being and Time but Benjamin’s own Trauerspiel book is the
likely 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 of
history could be seen as historical and critical, where what-has-been carries
with it a ‘historical index’, and thus a critical one, for the present in which
it becomes recognizable. Benjamin thus also undertakes, as he suggests, to
save history for phenomenology, but, in contrast to Heidegger, concretely
and critically through the concepts of ‘image’ and ‘historical index’. This
index, which Benjamin also discusses in Thesis II, marks a double time:
the time of what-has-been and the time of the Now that is directed towards
the former’s cognition. This index, thus, is a twofold one: it stands in for
two times; it is critical: it marks the point at which an internal crisis divides
time into a Before and an After, into the time of the past and the time
58 Walter Benjamin and History
points. This leap (Sprung) has to be understood in the twofold sense of both
rift and leap over the rift (Übersprung): the difference between Now and
Now has to preserve each instant as discrete and has to refer them strictly
to each other as the difference between precisely these discrete points. What
is at-the-same-time is only that which is not-at-the-same-time between the
recognized and the one who recognizes and within each of them and thus
that in them which – as nucleus of a differential time – resists its erasure.
Time namely would be erased as soon as different Now-points contracted
into a single one or were assimilated into the continuum of an always
identical line; time would also be erased as soon as the difference between
discrete Nows extinguished any relation between them. The possibility not
only of historical cognition but of historical time as well thus has to be based
on a third that is neither identity nor inability to relate, but distinction
and relation at the same time. This possibility, is, for Benjamin, based in
a leap which is not secured, held or founded, it is based in an original leap
(Ur-sprung) that separates the discrete Nows and – one can say paradox-
ically, or, as Benjamin puts it, ‘dialectically’ – joins them in their separation.
This leap, and nothing else, is the Now, the nucleus of time, the irreducible
historical happening, which the historian has to bring to experience.
In the leap of time (Zeit-Sprung), in the origin of time (Zeit-Ursprung), at
least two different Nows stand together as one. The leap is Einstand of time;
in it, the crisis that separates and the difference that relates stand together as
one – it is ‘critical’ movement; in it movement and standstill stand together
– it is what Benjamin, using Gottfried Keller’s words, calls ‘petrified
unrest’ (J50, 5);8 in it, finally, the dialectical movement between has-been
and present, object and cognition, stands still – the leap is ‘dialectics at a
standstill’ and as such, for Benjamin, ‘image’. Because the ‘image’ is the
constellation in which one Now meets precisely the other one in which it
becomes recognizable, the image alone is the place of historical time, being
historical time in contrast to time as a mere flux. The ‘image is dialectics
at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely
temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the Now is
dialectical: it is not progression but image, suddenly emergent’ (N2a, 3). For
Benjamin, the image is the historical relation kat’ exochen, for it brings about
and holds on to the discontinuity of appearances, the leap within them.
It appears at that moment when nothing but the medium – the middle
and the element – and thus the irreducibly dia-chronical and a-chronical
between and in the phenomena is preserved. It is historical time as the crisis
in the Now – which only opens space for the times and sets free all times as
‘nucleus’ of time.
Benjamin’s claim that ‘every present is determined by the images that
are synchronistic with it’ will have to be made more precise with regard to
the critical point in their movement: this synchrony can only be situated in
the critical separation, that is, in an asynchronic difference as the common
60 Walter Benjamin and History
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 place
in the arena of the ruling class, would be such a leap. Not a former Now
into which a present Now leaps, but the leap itself is the revolution. Because
the Now that has been as well as the present Now are Now only by virtue
of this leap, the one that leaps ahead of both of them is the original leap
(Ur-Sprung). Only as such an original leap (Ur-Sprung) – that is, original
crisis (Ur-Krisis) – can it reach what Benjamin in the fragment ‘Aus einer
kleinen Rede über Proust, an meinem vierzigsten Gerburstag gehalten’ calls
‘original past [Urvergangenheit]’ (GS 2.3: 1064), that is: a past which was not
there before the remembrance of it. In this sense, the Now is the origin of
the historical. And in this sense it is messianic: the rescue of that which was
not there before the rescue.
Messiah is only the one who can also not come and can also not be the
Messiah. The Messiah is only he who, even in his coming, might as well
not come. Only he, who in his not-coming can still come. Because only
the coming of the Messiah can give rise to time and can thus in no way
by subjected to the form of a continuous and homogeneous course of
time, he has to be the one who can come even before he has come, and
who can come after he has already come. The Messiah only comes in a
time that is distorted, however slightly, against any linear course. And
only as distorted in such a way, as an always leaped time (ersprungene Zeit),
can the messianic time come; it can only come as the distortion of time,
distortion of the conditions of experience, distortion of its very possibility.
The deepest distortion of the possibility of messianic time, however, the
distortion of the messianic ability itself, which Benjamin calls messianic
‘power’, lies in its being exposed to the inability and thus the impossibility
of perceiving itself, acting and fulfilling itself as the possibility, ability and
power. Because ‘messianic power’ is not a transhistorical substantial ability
that realizes itself in history from case to case, but an ability out of which
alone history could arise, it is a force that opens history without substantial
and without historical assurances. It is only effective under the condition
that it remains exposed to its own impotence (i.e. under the condition that
it includes even this impotence into itself. It is a ‘weak’ power because it is
the power of weakness, because it is the power out of the missing of power.
This weakness is not in contrast to power, but lies in its centre. For that
power cannot be messianic that rescues only itself; messianic is only the
power that rescues even its own failing. A Messiah is only he who rescues
even the impossibility of a Messiah. He can only come in such a way that
he might also not come, and come as someone other than the Messiah. And
his coming – this future expected by all pasts, that Benjamin touches upon
in his theses – this coming can only be possible out of that which not only
holds back all coming but also threatens it with the possibility of being for
ever impossible. The future of the Messiah would not arise out of the wealth
of his possibilities, not even out of the single possibility that something like
history and thus world, freedom and happiness could be experienced; it
would arise from the complete loss of all possibilities of the future, out of
the impossibility of its coming, and out of that alone. This impossibility of
the coming, the impossibility of the future would be that which comes. In
this coming of something that does not come – and could not come and
therefore can not come – only therein would the coming be even in its most
extreme possibility: that it fails to appear; only therein future itself and thus
time would be rescued. What would be rescued is that there is no rescue.
And this would be the Now of recognizability, the ‘critical ’ and only thus
messianic Now of recognizability, the Now that constitutes history in the
moment of its disappearance and with its disappearance: the Now of its
Not.
68 Walter Benjamin and History
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 Benjamin
does not cite this passage, although it can be assumed he knew it. However
distant it may be from the manifest content of the theses on history, it
draws out the lines that become visible in Benjamin’s reflections. For when
Benjamin notes that the past can only find its Messiah in the ‘moment of
danger’ and thus ties the messianic possibility to the possibility of its impos-
sibility, then Kafka’s remark brings this possibility into the structure of the
messianic future itself. He fi xes it in a paradoxical distortion of time. If the
Messiah only comes the day after his arrival, that is, only after his coming,
then the coming of the Messiah is his coming only in his not-coming, and
thus it is the arrival of his failing to appear. The Messiah who only comes
after his coming is not only the split and twofold Messiah that Jewish
tradition knows under the names of the suffering and dying Messiah ben
Joseph and the triumphant Messiah ben David. The one who comes after
his coming, the Messiah that comes after himself and as another than
himself, is the Messiah who is not necessary, who does not rescue and who is
no Messiah; and more precisely, he is the Messiah of the Not-Messiah. The
Messiah is Messiah of there not being a Messiah. This messianicity of the
non-messianic, this messianic without the messianic – this a-messianic – is
the last and final crisis of which the structure of the messianic is capable. It
is not destroyed by this crisis, but steps into it as into the centre of its force.
In it, even the Nothing of the messianic is rescued.
4
DOWN THE K. HOLE:
WALTER BENJAMIN’S
DESTRUCTIVE
LAND-SURVEYING OF HISTORY
STEPHANIE POLSKY
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 of
mind was quite possibly the most advantageous intellectual practice for a
man in Benjamin’s situation. Here is a man who finds himself dropped in the
middle of a modernist ethical scheme whose political programme institutes
a position of dire scarcity (fascism), or replete abundance (communism),
both of which are founded on a shaky platform of humanism. Benjamin,
as someone wary of those projects, is nonetheless implicated in them, as he
variously inhabits societies for which there is a termination scheme imposed
upon those who are believed to fail compliance with these human regulation
programmes.
Indeed, for our purposes in mapping Benjamin’s political and cultural
whereabouts, it is crucial to bear in mind that his coordinates are always
already joined in a constellation of protofascism, not beginning in 1933 but
rather in 1892, the year of his birth. He is in the unique position to claim
that he was born into a generation of men, German Jews, whose lifetimes
were determined from the start to end in cultural and historical obliteration.
From the outset Benjamin had to confront a possible failure of traces. The
Nazi’s determination to rub out figures like Benjamin from the historical
record failed, but others less obviously succeeded in blurring his conceptual
project so far as to obscure it in our readings of his work.
One of the greater elements of that project, which remains somewhat
obscured in current readings of Benjamin, is his interest in deploying
writing as politics. It is widely known that Benjamin was a great admirer
of Kafka’s literary approach. What is less known is the degree to which he
relied 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 upon
a political modus operandi within Kafka’s writing, and therein provide great
assistance in an attempt to lay the groundwork for a topographical histori-
ography – as opposed to a biography – of Benjamin’s life. This topographical
exercise has its beginnings in a rather conspicuous assumption, one that
Deleuze and Guattari will come to associate with Kafka, and I later with
Benjamin. Simply put, the assumption is that ‘there is no ideology, and
indeed there never has been’.3 Thus it becomes evident to all parties that
it is useless to choose political strategies, outside of your own. Even then,
for the sake of expediency, this position too must be periodically voided.
Therein there are no hard and fast demarcations of belonging, positionality,
or as K. calls it ‘fit’, but rather a geography extending outward composed of
politicized 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 are
constantly 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 need
to rethink his approach and in so doing enter into mutual relations with
both Barnabas, a Castle functionary, and Frieda, a peasant, both of whom
have intimate contact with the Castle. There is no room for imitation in
these relationships. Nor is any identification made between his and their
position. Instead, K.’s presence works to shift the ground of Barnabas and
Frieda’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.’s
total absorption into Castle law. They function as blocks to encourage his
continued strategy of building an adjacent relationship to the Castle: a way
out that does not resemble escape so much as it reassembles the layout of the
whole territory. K. is the land-surveyor after all, and the blocks he 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 rather
to get around it. This approach is fundamentally related to Benjamin’s
project of a consistent realignment of our approach toward history. Real-life
figures such as Asja Lacis, Gershom Scholem, Theodor Adorno and Bertolt
Brecht play similar roles to Kafka’s characters Frieda and Barnabas, in so
far as they act as pressuring forces that periodically ‘harden’ or ‘solidify’ a
contemporary position around Benjamin with regard to the entity of state
politics. Through a series of intense encounters with these individuals,
Benjamin is able to at once determine a political position for himself, and at
the same time extend his professional viability by occupying an ostensible
position within a particular political milieu. Indeed, he manages to operate
quite convincingly within these milieux, using the 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 rhetorical
prowess to get him by. This is not to say that Benjamin operates as a political
charlatan, for at no point does he explicitly identify himself as a Bolshevik,
Zionist, Critical Theorist, or even as a Marxist. Rather it is much more the
case that through contact with the 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 the
subjects. That is how he manages to carve out a provisional place within all
these ideological camps. One example of this happened during his visit to
72 Walter Benjamin and History
Moscow in 1926. Here Benjamin employs Asja Lacis as his guide through
the local terrain of Marxist thinking. Within a matter of days of being there,
he has cause to remark in his diary: ‘once again I realized just to what extent
the possibility of tackling these subjects depends on my contact with her’
(MD, p. 18). This situation of seeming political dependency on Lacis does
not appear to trouble Benjamin. On the contrary, he is quite happy for these
sorts of majoritarian Politics with a capital ‘P’ to flow over him, and for them
to remain a point of contingency indefinitely. This is the case so long as he
maintains loyalty to a more pressing political objective: the task of assem-
bling an intimate minor geography of European protofascistic terrains.
This is perhaps the reason why Walter Benjamin never really made it to
Central Park.6 Indeed, when recalling his writings, we confront another
territory altogether. A territory transversed by a series of long-distance
calls, signals coming in from a Europe that has long since been levelled,
a summons that perhaps may even travel beyond the zone of Benjamin’s
personal finitude. There is no history of Benjamin’s discursive impact in
this century that does not have a past like that, an unworked-through
dialling route beginning and in some ways ending along a Berlin-based
circuit. We must take care not to undermine the significance of the disap-
pearance of Berlin and indeed of Europe as the fundamental aporia within
the Benjaminian project. Benjamin does not wish to be emancipated from
the scene of Europe’s devastation, but instead wishes to come to its defence,
to argue for its continued recognition as a place beyond the realm of
fascism, to argue for its future, its worthwhile position in the world, despite
Hitler’s appropriation of the place, and against the ever-encroaching forces
of Americanism on one side and Stalinism on the other. What Deleuze and
Guattari characterize as ‘diabolical powers knocking on the door’.7 If need be,
Benjamin would prefer to greet these diabolical powers on the common
ground of a European corpus, and by extension on the territory of his
singular body as he understands it to be fundamentally European.
With this attitude in mind, it should come as no surprise that the nomadic
Benjamin of the 1930s was wary of joining Adorno and Horkheimer in New
York. He took out his insurance policy with Kafka roughly 20 years before
that, and had read the fine print carefully. When Kafka, in the opening
lines of ‘The Stoker’ describes the Statue of Liberty as holding aloft a sword,
rather than a torch, Benjamin meticulously takes note of it. This was not
a territorial defect on the part of Kafka: one made by a man who could
barely convince himself ever to leave Prague. Rather it reads for Benjamin
as a substantive prediction of what America was to become in the first half
of the twentieth century: a burgeoning imperial power poised to unseat the
cultural domination of Europe, whose popular stance was one of hostility
towards so-called ‘European intellectualism’ (read Marxism).
Kafka is ironically positive about this throughout Amerika, convinced
that everyone has a place in the circus of American life. Perhaps this is so,
Down the K. Hole 73
In America, the most terrible work conditions don’t inspire any critique
in K. but simply make him more afraid of being excluded from the hotel.
Although familiar with the Czech socialist and anarchist movement,
Kafka doesn’t follow in their path. Passing a workers’ march, Kafka
shows the same indifference as K. in America: ‘They rule the streets,
and therefore they think they rule the world. In fact, they are mistaken.
Behind already are the secretaries, officials, professional politicians, all the
modern satraps for whom [he] is preparing the way to power’.9
Populism such as this exacts its control through different, though no less
beguiling, channels in a technocratic America than it does in a protofascistic
Austro-Hungarian empire, or for that matter in a communist Soviet Union.
All function to diminish the rights of the citizen against the state apparatus
in ways that somehow naturalize the process of infringement. Benjamin
first 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 average
citizen. It is most probably ‘In the Penal Colony’, however, that awakened
Benjamin to the fact that writing had some definite part in carrying out its
outcomes.
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 way
of an explanation, I will merely add that it is not only my latest narrative
which is distressing; our time in general and mine in particular have been
and still are distressing, and mine has even been so for longer than our time
in general’.11 ‘In the Penal Colony’ was written during the First World War,
when wartime sovereign exception had led to a toughening of the penal code
and permitted infringements upon a private citizen’s basic rights of privacy.
Fear of denunciation, arbitrary scapegoating and bureaucratic restriction
began to form part of everyday life in Prague. These conditions were shortly
to arrive in Berlin. The official assures the visitor that ‘Our sentence does
not sound severe. The Harrow will write whatever commandment the man
has disobeyed onto his body. This condemned man, for instance . . . will
have written on his body: honour thy superiors’.12 This is the same sentence
that is rendered in numbers on the bodies accounted for by the National
Socialist regime. The sheer number of prescriptions written onto the bodies
of those it holds responsibility for allows for a certain mobility, that is, it
allows the regime to mobilize through the various doctrinal significations
these bodies communicate and display on their surfaces. The proliferation of
messages therein get transported ‘off the backs of’ citizens. Such corporeal
branding allows National Socialism to spread in numbers through bodies
74 Walter Benjamin and History
This ‘living’ wealth, beyond being a means of accounting for bodies, becomes
something that authorizes the state to rank them in terms of viability. In
order for a body to remain viable it must carry on (it) the mandate of certain
discursive economics. Any resistance to the assumption of such messages is
understood as something that is bad for state business. Therein, anytime
bare life resists its discursive politicization, a flow of potential state wealth
escapes and in so doing reduces national worth. The state struggles to
maintain and increase the quality of its ‘living’ wealth through rhetorically
and materially promoting various biological improvement campaigns. This
process of enforcing the state’s rhetorical health policy is by no means a
stable system, and fluctuations are a constant reminder to the state that it
must 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 to
note that von Verschuer adds to his comments the assertion that ‘Fluctuations
in the biological substance and in the material budget are usually parallel’.15
Such fluctuations must, however, remain in check, and the state attempts
to do this through various tracing techniques which include a combination
of statistics, biological determinism and binary logic. These epistemological
practices reinforce the overall notion of what Deleuze and Guattari refer
to as a ‘pretraced destiny, whatever name is given to it – divine, anagogic,
historical, economic, structural, hereditary or syntagmatic’.16 Deleuze and
Guattari would remind us that the trace always involves an alleged ‘com-
petence’.17 The appearance of state ‘competence’ can be periodically under-
Down the K. Hole 75
mined and this can occur through the introduction of a new diagram or
map of the state’s operations which temporarily removes blockages and
allows long disused connections to function again. However, a more likely
scenario to take place from within this overcoded structure is that the trace
itself becomes intense and in so doing takes on a diagrammatic, as opposed
to ‘grammatic’, character trait. That is to say, it no longer subtends the
solidified grammar of the state but rather forms out of that grammar a map
of its utterances in such a way that it begins to assemble a radical parabasis to
the state’s discursive logic, loosening the foundation of its signifiers along the
way. Deleuze and Guattari illustrate how this might happen:
In this instance the trace might expose the rhetorical signifier of life in the
Nazi state to be something that – in material terms – equates itself with
death, with a death-dealing force. This is a force that goes on to exploit
the living wealth by choosing to annihilate its own servants rather than
terminate its own process. This is the moment at which the messages of
National Socialism stop resonating in a state apparatus and causes them
to interact with the war machine. The overall effect being that a line of
destruction takes just so many bodies both docile and resistant with it in a
massive march toward abolition.
In response to the appearance of this telling trait in National Socialism,
Benjamin is compelled to wage a last critical deterritorialization of literature.
He does so through his essay of 1934, which reissues a critical consideration
of ‘Franz Kafka on the Tenth Anniversary of the Author’s Death’. In it he
identifies Kafka as someone uniquely able to put the writing on the wall
– to document violence, and moreover protofascism, portraying them both
as a routine effect of the machinery of modernization. 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 raised
the tenor of bureaucracy to a political programmatics, making his own
line of flight contingent on being wedged permanently in the bureaucratic
apparatus of the office. Benjamin writes: ‘the citizen of the modern state,
confronted by an unfathomable bureaucratic apparatus whose operations are
controlled by agencies obscure even to the executive bodies, not to mention
the people affected by them. (It is well known that one level of meaning in
the novels, especially in The Trial, is located here.)’ (SW 3: 325). Deleuze and
Guattari concur with Benjamin and offer further that
76 Walter Benjamin and History
not so much those who have lost the Scripture . . . but students who cannot
decipher it’ (CS, p. 127). Benjamin finds Scholem’s understanding of a
law being in force without significance objectionable based on his opinion
that, as Agamben puts it, ‘a law that has lost its content ceases to exist and
becomes indistinguishable from life’.20 ‘Whether the pupils have lost It [their
Scripture] or whether they are unable to decipher it comes down to the
same thing, because without the key that belongs to it, the Scripture is not
Scripture but life, the life as it is lived in the village at the foot of the hill on
which the castle is built’ (CS, p. 135).
Giorgio Agamben credits Scholem’s formulation of ‘being in force without
significance’ as a faultless description of ‘the ban’ (the term Agamben used
to describe the relationship between bare life and the form of law), that our
age cannot master, something which is directly akin to the status of the law
in 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 in
the state of exception, in which the most innocent gesture or the smallest
forgetfulness can have the most extreme consequences. And it is exactly
this kind of life that Kafka describes, in which the law is all the more
persuasive for its total lack of content, and in which a distracted knock
on the door can mark the start of uncontrollable trials . . . in Kafka’s
village the empty potentiality of law is so much in force as to become
indistinguishable from life . . . The existence and the very body of Joseph
K. ultimately coincide with the Trial, they become the Trial.22
which best described the political parameter of the status of the law in this
present era.
Moreover Benjamin grasped, better than most critics of his time, how this
condition of life under a law that is for all intents and purposes asignifying,
influenced writers like Kafka to transform themselves and their characters in
response to tremendous pressures exerted on the organic body and ‘assume
the form things assume in oblivion’, meaning that ‘they are distorted’.
Benjamin goes on to cite a litany of examples of this distortion:
The ‘cares of the family man’, which no one can identify, are distorted;
the bug, of which we know all too well represents Gregor Samsa is
distorted; the big animal, half lamb, half kitten, for which ‘the butcher’s
knife’ might be ‘a release’ is distorted. These figures are connected by a
long series of figures with the prototype of distortion, the hunchback.
(SW 2: 811)
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 subsist
indefinitely in the form of a being in force without significance, Benjamin
proposes a messianic nihilism that nullifies even the Nothing and lets no
law remain in force beyond its own content.27
Prior to the arrival of this nullification, the existence and body of Walter
Benjamin 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 Socialism
came to envelope. Under such an exceptional rule of law his existence, his
very body, coincided with National Socialism to such a profound extent it
began not just to resemble, or imitate the effects of National Socialism on
his person but actually to manifest them rhizomatically. His body, thus
written over with a force of law that was at once asignifying and profoundly
consequential, meant that for Walter Benjamin one’s only form of agency
was to become a point on a point of view on the events which followed in
its immanent wake, to become National Socialism’s reporter.
It was Leibniz:
Who subjected the points of view to exclusive rules such that each opened
itself onto the others only in so far as they converged. Nietzsche, contrary
to Leibniz, argued that the point of view is opened onto a divergence
which it affirms. In other words each point of view becomes the means of
going all the way to the end of the other, by following the entire distance.
In Nietzsche’s scheme divergence is no longer a principle of exclusion, and
disjunction no longer a means of separation.28
The only means to break the cycle of this duration, and in doing so bring
upon ‘a new historical epoch’ is through ‘the suspension of the law’ and
‘the abolition of state power’ (SW 1: 252). The agent necessary to carry such
an operation would be revolutionary violence, what Benjamin refers to as
‘unalloyed’ violence, implying that it is a pure form of violence, perhaps
related, in some sub- or superhistorical sense, to law in its pure form. For
Benjamin, use of such violence is possible. What is ‘less possible and also less
urgent for humankind, however, is to decide when unalloyed violence has
been realized in particular cases’ (SW 1: 252). That the appearance of this
unalloyed violence persists as an uncertainty is largely due to the fact that
it remains invisible to the judgement of mankind. Furthermore, Benjamin
argues, ‘the expiatory power of violence itself is invisible to men’ (SW 1: 252).
This expiatory power of violence relates to history in so far as it grants it the
power of redress.
What I am pointing the way toward is Benjamin’s final materialist
document, The Theses for a Philosophy of History, which essentially promotes
a rhizomatic approach to history; a situation where the future and past are
constantly in the process of becoming each other. Undoubtedly some transhis-
torical material is always getting into the works of those becomings: what
Benjamin refers to as the messianic. History then emerges as something far
beyond the reach of mimetic historicism, the trace getting pre-empted by the
code, history emerging as the ‘capture of a code, the code’s surplus value, an
increase in valence, a genuine becoming’33 porosity. In this essay, Benjamin
is influenced by Nietzsche’s ‘Of the Use and Abuse of History’, quoting him
as saying, ‘We need history, but our need for it differs from that of the jaded
idlers in the garden of knowledge’ (SW 4: 394). Thus Benjamin is telling us
that he is striving for an operative history, rather than a nostalgic one. Rather
than looking to ‘enslaved ancestors’, Benjamin wished to direct our focus to
their ‘liberated grandchildren’(SW 4: 394). This is an ‘untimely’ view of history
in so far as it seeks out futural probabilities for the coming moment, from the
clues embedded within our understanding of the past. For Benjamin:
It is this quality of divergence that also allows one to affirm distance over
locatedness, as a starting-point of view.
In the book Logic of Sense, Deleuze holds that:
It is in this sort of town that the flight of a minor history can commence
from end to end, term to term, series to series, convergence to divergence
and further on from there.
During the course of his lifetime Benjamin faces a scenario of events
where getting through might be just as bad as being disconnected: a
somewhat horrifying prospect for anyone setting out. Benjamin’s journey
is ‘a prodigious operation which translates this horror into a topography of
obstacles (where to go? how to arrive? Berlin, Moscow, Paris?)’.57 The surveyor
has no choice but to journey onward, as he is compelled by forces beyond
his true understanding: diabolical forces that are knocking at the door,
jamming up the signal, confusing the network as to the vital task at hand.
That task comes down to a redirection of the nineteenth century’s course
of understanding, through twentieth-century communication tactics which
could potentially act as line of flight, a means of distribution of a particular
thesis; one requiring the transformation of the event of thought and of
history back into a minor discourse.
5
THE SICKNESS OF TRADITION:
BETWEEN MELANCHOLIA AND
FETISHISM
REBECCA COMAY
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 the
gratification of its own despair. There is nothing neutral about the drift to
compensatory gratification. The sublime abstraction which finds power in
disempowerment threatens to evaporate the object into an aesthetic phantas-
magoria which would adapt the subject to the requirements of the present.
The effacement of negativity would still the repetition which is the essential
legacy of trauma – the signature of its inherent historicity – but which is
equally, by that very token, its most generative power. The occlusion of the
traumatic past cuts off any relation to a radically (perhaps catastrophically)
different future.
The structure of melancholia in this way begins to bleed into that of
fetishism – the compensatory construction of imaginary unities in response
to a traumatic loss (‘castration’) which structurally can be neither fully
acknowledged nor denied.5 Perversion not only names the simultaneity
of recognition and disavowal: it hints at the deeper paradox that the very
recognition is the disavowal. There is no acknowledgement of trauma which
in its claim to adequacy (a claim implicit in the very protestation of inad-
equacy) does not efface the loss it would concede. Despite appearances, the
celebrated ‘Je sais bien . . . mais quand même’ structure outlined by Octave
Mannoni in no way neutralizes by partitioning the contradiction it would
announce.6 The fetishistic split which maintains the contradiction between
knowledge and belief – traumatic loss, on the one hand, redemptive totality,
on the other – provides no protective containment of its antitheses, but
rather implicates both within a contaminating porosity and oscillation of
one term into the other.
Could such a perverse simultaneity of acknowledgement and disavowal
be the condition of historicity? Far from indicating a simple deviation from
some norm of repression (together with its counterpart of enlightenment),
fetishism might rather indicate the subject’s irreducible split between two
contradictory imperatives – an antinomy which itself marks the ambivalent
legacy of every trauma. If every relation to history is always at some level a
non-relation to another history – a missed encounter with the other’s lack
and 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 in
its own effacement. Could perversion be the mark of the subject’s impossible
relationship to a loss which is ultimately not its own to acknowledge in the
first place – but so too, equally, the index of a certain promise?
The issue is all the more pressing at a time when the very proliferation
of memorials, the manic drive to museify, threatens to spell the erasure of
memory. It is less a question here of disavowing such disavowal (in the name,
for example, of a demystified or disenchanted mourning) than to consider
what might be at stake in such a contradiction. How to respond to the claim
The Sickness of Tradition 91
of the dead when every response (starting with the piety of the response
which invokes ‘the dead’ as if they were some kind of self-evident corporate
subject) threatens to escalate the amnesia against which the anamnestic
project is directed?
not the immediate, banal contrast between the determined misery of the
former and the voluptuous determination of the latter decisive? A grain of
Nietzschean suspicion might go some way here: the defiant exhibitionism
of the melancholic reveals a streak of luxurious enjoyment matched only
by the severity of the fetishist’s commitment to a jouissance which in its
workmanlike assiduity displays a discipline and focus verging on the
ascetic. Both loss and jouissance present themselves here as symmetrically
and reciprocally traumatic. If castration names the trauma of our symbolic
mediation, the encounter with the Real brings the equally devastating
trauma of an unmediated proximity – the ‘hard kernel’ which marks at
once the limit and the possibility of experience. The fantasy of loss can
itself function as a defence against the trauma of enjoyment, just as jouis-
sance itself can be reinflected as a defence against the trauma of castration.
Just as obsessional rituals can defend against the ‘real’ death threatening
to engulf the subject on the battlefield of enjoyment, so too even ‘little
deaths’ can be reconstructed as so many miniaturized defences against the
symbolic mortifications on the plane of language. The operative antithesis
in this case would be thus not between symbolic castration and ‘real’
enjoyment per se, but rather between the imaginary overlay each inevitably
acquires in the face of the other: according to this ‘Borromean’ logic, even
‘trauma’ can be mobilized as a fantasmatic defence against trauma. The
manifest opposition between the experiences of lack and excess is thus
ultimately less decisive than the structures of fantasy which pre-emptively
sustain them.
One might then proceed to schematize the various parallels. Both
melancholia and fetishism involve a doubling or ‘splitting’ of the self in the
face of a loss, the intractability of which structurally prohibits the recog-
nition it thereby, as prohibition, demands. In the terms of ‘Mourning and
Melancholia’ the topological ‘cleavage between the critical faculty of the ego
and the ego as altered by identification’ (SE 14: 249) reflects the ambiguity
of 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 instance
of traumatic wounding in so far as it at once drains away every interior
plenitude of the subject and (the catch) reifies the resultant void of sub-
jectivity as a last, stubborn surd of positivity, thereby reconfirming or
sustaining narcissism in the very injury which would deface it. A lack
congeals, which in its hypertrophy pre-empts the very possibility of the
substitution which it at the same time renders necessary. This brings
melancholia virtually to coincide with fetishism, where the epistemic split
between the affirmation and the denial of lack inevitably reproduces the
very antithesis it seeks to neutralize: the split both retraces and effaces the
castration which it is designed to regulate, in that it functions simultaneously
both as catastrophic fissure and as stabilizing partition.11 The Ichspaltung in
94 Walter Benjamin and History
this way not only creates the very possibility of forming fetishist attachments
but in itself functions as the ultimate fetish.
Various other parallels flow directly from this. The paradoxical relation
to loss in each case leads directly to an intensified attachment to things
whose prosthetic role is neither countenanced nor entirely denied. Thus the
apparent literalism of fetishist desire, the refusal of symbolic mediation,
the irreplaceable ‘thisness’ or singularity of the fetish object, and thus
similarly the peculiar tenacity of melancholia. The ‘cathectic loyalty’12
to the lost object in this latter instance not only does not preclude but
requires the secret construction of a substitute – the remnant of the object
incorporated within the empty interior of the subject – which functions
as a screen memory the very opacity of which remains both refractory
and infinitely tantalizing. (It is ultimately memory itself which gets deter-
mined as the ultimate fetish-object: the veil.) Thus the familiar paradoxes
of recuperation: mourning itself becomes a fetishistic proxy for an object
whose loss is overshadowed by the clamorous grief it occasions, and in
this way furtively stages substitution precisely by insisting on the latter’s
impossibility.
Substitution in each case structurally requires the construction of a part-
object whose fragmentation both prolongs and occludes the traumatic wound
it commemorates. The fetishistic passion for the inanimate – to objects, to
body-parts, and even to the whole body itself now refashioned as its own
synecdoche of itself (the erect body posing as substitute for its own absent
member)13 – displays a chiasmic exchange between unity and fragmentation
whereby the subject finds vitality in the mortification which most shatters it
and thereby retrieves a weird, excessive organicity in dismemberment as such.
The supplement thus both denies and reveals the irreparability of the lack to
which it is consecrated – the part-object functions as the whole object and
as such blocks the syntagmatic completion which it simultaneously incites
and enables – and in this way erodes the opposition between unity and frag-
mentation, an opposition which is in turn elaborated as the opposition
between jouissance (oriented toward the viscosity of life-substance) and
the dead letter of the law. In enunciating the law of enjoyment as his very
own private law – posited without the detour of symbolic mediation – the
pervert effectively elides the structural gap which is the essential condition
of the law as such, and in this way, and through the various literalisms of
his practice, flaunts the law precisely in usurping as exclusive occupant the
site of the law’s own enunciation.
Melancholia displays a similar logic. The incorporation of the object
requires the latter’s abbreviation as a frozen attribute and thereby inflicts
upon it a kind of second death – miniaturization reproduces the death
which it simultaneously reduces – a violence which will in turn reverberate
within the sadomasochistic theatre of grief wherein, famously, it is the lost
object itself which is being whipped by the subject’s most intimate self-
The Sickness of Tradition 95
flagellations. The refusal to admit the object’s lack involves the concession
of that very lack and exacerbation of the latter’s mortifying dismemberment.
Reduced to a part-object within the hollow crypt of subjectivity, the object
persists as living corpse, at once congealed remains and extruding surplus,
whose death accretes like so much cellular efflorescence.
screaming, the serpent’s venom not quite completely penetrated, the agony
not quite yet at its climax: the gaze fixes on the penultimate moment so as
to block the revelation of the monstrous void. Penultimacy – incompletion
as such – becomes a defence against a mortifying conclusion.
Melancholia and fetishism would thus seem to collude to produce the
illusion of an intact present – solitary, sufficient, immune from past or
future threat. Indeed they come to coincide: postponement of a death
forever pending consummates itself in the pre-emptive fantasy of a death
always already accomplished. Thus, in Proust, the blink of an eye from
chronic prematurity to chronic, irreversal senescence, from the phantasm of
the blank page to the phantasm of the bal de morts, from perpetual virginity
to premature, perpetual mummification – and into the no less reassuring
fantasy that ‘having already died, I have nothing left to fear from death’.16
What would it mean to ‘traverse the fantasy’ so as to release the present
from a reassuring stasis? To negotiate the switching station between the too
early and the too late, between fetishistic ‘before’ and melancholic ‘after’,
so as to change the terms of both postponement and its obverse? Here
Benjamin’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
metaphysical problematic of part and whole unfurls into the more poignant
‘Benjaminian’ problematic – loss and redemption, death and resurrection
– the political, historical and indeed theological stakes begin to emerge.
The issue here is not just the familiar paradox of capitalist recuperation
– the endless reintegration of every dissonance within the syncopated
continuum of the history of the victors. Nor is it simply a question of
Benjamin’s seemingly limitless capacity to blur antitheses – the exquisite
oscillation of virtually every item on the menu between subversion and
subvention. Does the scavenging operation of, for example, Baudelaire’s
chiffonier disrupt or merely reproduce the consumerist compulsion of
capitalist modernity?21 Does the lingering hesitancy of the flâneur obstruct
the traffic flow (as the transit authorities feared) or, by fostering the illusion
of surplus leisure, secretly reinforce it?22 Does the ‘enigmatic satisfaction’
of the allegorist – the lingering lasciviousness toward the thing-world
– challenge the aesthetic plenitude of the symbolic or supply a brand of
private consolation? Do the obsessional arrangements of the collector defy
the functionality of capital or furnish it with the alibi of aesthetic disinter-
estedness?23 Is the melancholic fidelity to the dead decisively distinguished
from the luxurious despondencies – empathic acedia, ‘left-wing melancholy’
– of the vainglorious victors?24 Such fretful questions (the list continues)
have from the beginning plagued the reception of Benjamin. The symmet-
rical chorus of reproaches – too happy, too sad – circles around, but perhaps
itself shies away from the most intractable aporia.
Does the revolutionary standstill – blasting, freezing, exploding time,
shooting the clocks, pulling the emergency brake, etc. – disrupt the triumphal
procession of the victors or merely invert it (thereby buttressing it, etc.) by
reproducing the crystalline abstraction of alienated labour? The question
is not entirely well-posed, but does have the merit of focusing attention for
a moment on the profound congruity between, for example, the essays on
mass culture and the various reflections on history.25 Photography presents
each time the privileged metaphor and model of temporal contraction: ‘to
seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’ (GS 1.2: 695
SW 4:391) is to experience a synchronization of past and present which can
be understood in the strictest sense as traumatic: the posthumous shock
inflicted on the past under the pressure of a present danger – which is to
say that history is experienced only as and at an irreversible delay. ‘Where
thinking suddenly stops in a constellation saturated with tensions it gives
that constellation a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad’ (GS 1.3:
703 SW 4:396). Benjamin does more here than extend Freud’s or Proust’s
celebrated analogy between the deferred action of the photograph and
the structural belatedness of experience. In pointing to the coincidence of
trauma with its own abreaction – the lightning flash retroactively inflicts the
shock it shockingly discharges – he also points to an irreducible contami-
nation between the messianic rupture and the oppressive viscosity in which
100 Walter Benjamin and History
it intervenes. The revolutionaries who shot all the clocks had, in the first
place, 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 the
dream: the dream or phantasm not only gropes numbly towards the next
enthralling episode but in so doing (Adorno ignores this part) turns with
stealth and cunning towards its own overcoming (cf. AP, p. 13)
Fetishism informs not only the content of the Passagen-Werk, and not just
the form of its peculiar windowshop appearance. One might set aside the
(by now) tiresome speculations regarding the mimicry at work here: is the
Passagen-Werk itself a kind of literary arcade, a collection, a site of flânerie,
a department store, a museum, a cluttered interieur, a sad inventory; is
Benjamin a shopper, a ragpicker, a brooder, a thief? A deeper and more
intractable ambiguity informs the project: is it a ruin, a heap, a sketch, a
scaffold, a constructivist construction? Is its posthumous, unfinished quality
provisional, accidental, structural: what is the measure of its incompletion?
Is its unfinishedness that of the collection (forever structurally just one item
short – completion both its presupposition and its logical undoing), and if
so what sustains this logic of perpetual penultimacy? Is the fragmentation
pre-emptive, the serial production of a lack generated so as to maintain the
fiction of totality, and as such a kind of fetishism in reverse?
Liminal experiences pervade the Arcades Project and define its most familiar
landmarks – from Metro entrances to railway stations to the twilight zone of
the arcades themselves – and Benjamin repeatedly invokes the ‘magic of the
threshold’ as paradigmatic both of nineteenth-century urban experience and
of the work that commemorates it; the various spatial and optical ambigu-
ities generated architecturally by glass and iron – inside and outside, near
and distant, past and future – correlate with the deep existential ambiguities
between human and non-human, animate and inanimate, living and dead.
The very porosity of these distinctions in the dream-world of Baudelaire’s
Paris speaks to the unease and fascination generated by the ambiguous time-
space of capitalist modernity itself – the birth-pangs of commodity culture as
it pervades the interstices of the big city – and acquires layered political and
historical resonance in the aftermath of repeated revolutionary defeat. In the
architectural phantasmagorias of post-1848 Paris, ruin and sketch converge
– monuments to missed opportunities, ciphers of futures foreclosed.
Writing in 1935, and remarking on the preliminary nature of Baudelaire’s
modernity (that is to say, his modernity tout court), Benjamin insists on
the provisional or penultimate status of the various nineteenth-century
innovations: ‘all these products are on the point of entering the market as
commodities. But they hover on the threshold [Alle diese Produkte sind im
Begriff, sich als Ware auf den Markt begeben. Aber sie zoegern auf der Schwelle]’
(AP, p. 13/GS 5.1: 59). There is a sense in which Benjamin himself, on the
The Sickness of Tradition 101
transformation of his own thinking and his style: from the dense and even
esoteric metaphysical writings of the teens and early twenties to the stark
and sober style of such essays as ‘Der Autor als Produzent’, ‘Das Kunstwerk
im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ – and, ‘Was ist das
epische Theater?’
It is of course not that simple. The essays on Karl Kraus (1931) and on
Kafka (1934), written in a rather different style and register, go hand in
hand with the seemingly so different tones of ‘Was ist das epische Theater?’
(1931) and ‘Der Autor als Produzent’ (1934). And the more Benjamin, in
the last five years of his life, launches into his major project on the Parisian
arcades and the nineteenth century in the recognizability of the Now of
the early twentieth century, the more Benjamin notices and recognizes, in
another Now of recognizability, the foundational return of his early essay
on language ‘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 and
presentation, radical ones that even such a close friend and sensitive reader
as Gretel Karplus, with whom Benjamin shared in the thirties perhaps the
most intimate secrets of his thoughts as far as they were communicable,
confessed that she did not recognize his hand in some of his texts any more.
Benjamin’s reaction to this confession indicates a deep consternation:
When you write of my second outline, that ‘one would never recognize in
it the hand of WB’, I would call this a somewhat rude remark [so nenne
ich das doch ein wenig geradezu gesagt] and you transgress with this remark
certainly the borderline where you can be certain – not of my friendship
– but of my agreement . . . WB has – and this is not self-evident for a
writer – but in this he sees his task and his best right – two hands. At
the age of fourteen I decided one day [hatte es . . . mir in den Kopf gesetzt]
that I had to learn to write with my left hand. And I still see myself today
sitting for hours at the school desk in Haubinda and practice. Today my
desk stands in the Bibliothèque Nationale – and I have taken up again the
lesson to write – temporarily – in such a way on a higher level.4
hand, and by a hand that left its signature and mark in the writing as the
signature and mark of the writer himself. Benjamin was among other things
also a graphologist who occasionally earned some extra money from rare
books with his graphological expertise.
As a 14-year-old, Benjamin tried literally to learn to write with his left
hand, and he now tries again to learn to write in such a way ‘on a higher
level’, as he puts it. The line drawn from the school desk of the 14-year-old
in Haubinda to the desk of the Bibliothèque Nationale, where the 37-year-
old Benjamin exercises his new style of writing with the left on the left is
more than a shift from the literal, physical hand to a figurative hand: it is
at the same time – and this is at the centre of Benjamin’s whole project as
a physiognomic project – the inseparable interrelation, the Verschränkung,
of the literal and the figurative, the suspension of their clear separation in a
hovering sphere of trembling contours that promise a new physics beyond
metaphysics, something Benjamin will call a materialist doctrine of ideas or
also an anthropological materialism.
But I have jumped far ahead. We must return and patiently follow the
traits of the two-handed writing of Benjamin. 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 a
symptom of another transformation that the writer can only ascertain after
the fact, as Benjamin writes to Werner Kraft on 25 May 1935:
The Saturnine tempo of the matter has its deepest ground in a process
of complete turning around [Umwälzung], that a mass of thoughts
and images, dating back to a long past time of my more immediate
metaphysical, even theological thinking, had to undergo in order to
nourish with its full force my present condition. This process took place
silently; I myself knew so little of it that I was immensely astonished,
when – due to an external occasion – the plan for the work was written
in just a few days.5
over, but the emphasis on the unmittelbar indicates that a mediated relation
might still continue. At the same time the rolling over seems to invest the
mass with a kind of dynamic force, a Kraft that nourishes and propels the
new condition.
Only a few days later, Benjamin restates the transformation in a letter to
Adorno in a slightly shifted image. He first detects with some astonishment
the striking analogies between his new project on the Parisian arcades and
the book on the baroque drama of mourning, and he comments: ‘You must
allow me to see in this circumstance an especially significant confirmation
of the refounding process [des Umschmelzungsprozesses], that leads the whole
mass of originally metaphysically motivated thoughts towards an aggregate
state, in which the world of dialectical images is secured against all objec-
tions that metaphysics provoke’.6 The Umwälzung has now become an
Umschmelzung, a refounding, a transformation of the mass into a different
aggregate state. The images and thoughts originating in metaphysical and
theological thinking are melted in order to reemerge as dialectical images,
that now seem immune against interventions and objections, the Einrede, of
metaphysics – or against metaphysics, the phrase can be read in both direc-
tions. And yet, this transformation 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 the
Parisian arcades. If one turns over a stone, in the forest for example, that
has rested on the ground for a long time, at the moment of the rolling over,
a rush of countless little creatures will take place that leave nothing behind
but a labyrinth of patterns that might appear like a script on the under-
neath side of the stone. Reading such scripts and traces is one of the tasks
of the anthropological materialst and physiognomist. The second process
of melting and refounding transforms the aggregate state of the substance
in a procedure that evokes the traditions of alchemy. But alchemy itself is
transformed in this process and reemerges as construction: ‘This much is
certain: the constructive element has the same significance for this book as
the 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 is
tempting to see in Brecht the secular, materialist, sober counterfigure to the
metaphysical and theological sides of Benjamin, and while Brecht certainly
liked to project this image of his role, there is something deeply enigmatic,
deeply troubling like a cloudy kernel in 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 on
Benjamin. There was apparently something in Brecht’s ways that evoked
106 Walter Benjamin and History
strong affects in all three of them. But while Adorno more or less ration-
alized his affect with his reduction of Brecht to a ‘vulgar’ Marxist, and
Scholem with his refusal to read the texts of Brecht that Benjamin kept
sending him, Gretel Karplus addressed this affective level in a letter full of
concern to Benjamin. And Benjamin responded for once on the same level
in a long letter of June 1934 (GB 4: 440f.).
In contrast to his letters to Scholem, where Benjamin vigorously defends
his interest in Brecht’s work and its affinity with his own mode of thought
on political and ideological grounds, the letter to Gretel Karplus approaches
the cloudy kernel of the relationship. Benjamin recognizes first a pattern of
repetition: ‘What you say about [Brecht’s] influence on me recalls for me a
significant and ever returning constellation in my life.’ He mentions two prece-
dents: the friend of his youth, the poet C.F. Heinle, who committed suicide at
the beginning of the First World War, and a little later the somewhat dubious
Simon Guttmann, whose influence was the object of a passionate opposition
on the part of Benjamin’s wife. Her opposition culminated in the reproach
that Benjamin was under some kind of hypnotic influence. Benjamin makes
no attempt at refuting such a suggestion, but instead attempts to analyse
the forces involved in such relations: ‘In the economy of my existence, a few
relations, that can be counted, play indeed a role that allow [sic] me to assert
a pole that is opposite my original being’. It is no longer a simple question
of ideology, but one that concerns both existence (Dasein) and being (Sein).
Benjamin’s concept of ‘thinking in other people’s heads’, his mimetic ability
to occupy the most extreme opposite positions, finds here its most radical
expression. The repetitive pattern of Benjamin’s excentric circles of friendship
opens up to a Haltung, a posture, that involves an existential positioning of
one’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: ‘These
relations have always provoked a more or less violent protest in those closest
to me, as does now the relationship to B[recht]’. Benjamin can only plead
for an understanding of the incomprehensible: ‘In such a case, I can do little
more than ask my friends to trust me, that these ties [Bindungen], whose
dangers are obvious, will reveal their fruitfulness’. And, once more, Benjamin
invokes the necessity of moving and of positioning himself in extremes – but
also the liberating potential of such a movement and position:
It is not at all unclear to you that my life as well as my thinking moves [sic]
in extreme positions. The expanse that it [sic] thus asserts, the freedom to
move side by side things and thoughts that are considered irreconcilable,
assumes its face only through the danger. A danger that generally appears
also to my friends only in the form of those ‘dangerous’ relations.
These are, then, literally liaisons dangereuses with all their perverse implica-
tions.8 And yet, the danger appears as a physiognomic force that gives a
Trembling Contours: Kierkegaard–Benjamin–Brecht 107
face to the otherwise faceless; and the face is the figure of a readability of
physiognomic traits. Thus danger is also the condition that the ‘dialectical
image’ appears as a moment of readability.
Dialectical images, we have read, are the result of an Umschmelzung, of a
refounding of images and thoughts that originated in and were motivated
by metaphysical and theological thinking. But how do ‘metaphysical’ and
‘theological’ images become dialectical images? And what happens to
metaphysics and theology in this process? For one thing is clear: it is not
a question of simply discarding them. It is here that a closer reading of
Benjamin’s essay on Brecht’s epic theatre might give us some clues.
A theatrical abyss, the orchestra, has lost its function. What was its
function? To separate the stage from the audience like the dead from the
living, Benjamin says. The comparison with that radical separation of the
world of the dead and the world of the living points at the representative
function of the separating abyss: the physical separation represents a
metaphysical separation between the physical space of the stage and what
it represents and signifies, the separation between a phenomenal world of
appearance and a noumenal world of true being.
What happens when this separation has lost its function? Audience and
stage are now in the same physical space; the stage no longer represents
another world. The stage is a stage, one might say. Yet it is still elevated,
Benjamin points out, thus still indicating a difference. But the elevation
is no longer the elevation of the sublime, no longer Erhabenheit, but the
purely physical elevation, an Erhebung of a podium or a platform. And, as
if to underline the flatness of this platform, Benjamin states dryly: Das ist
die Lage, this is the situation, here we have to install ourselves. Das ist die
Lage. The sentence itself sounds flat in its factual assertiveness. As Marx
says of the ultimate condition of the proletarian revolution: the conditions
themselves, the situation itself – not any arbitrary wilfulness and decision
– must call out [die Verhältnisse selbst rufen]: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! 9 And
yet, this Lage that according to Benjamin categorically demands of us to
install us here, resonates with one of Benjamin’s earliest and most densely
written texts, his essay on two poems of Hölderlin. There, in the middle of
a seemingly well ordered metaphysical world, where gods and mortals move
‘in well distinguished orders and in opposite rhythms’ (GS 2.1: 113) through
the poem, Benjamin invokes the Lage as the space of truth. Hölderlin’s
world, he writes, is ‘die Erstreckung des Raumes, der gebreitete Plan’, the
extension or expansion of space, the expanded plain. This flat plain of
Hölderlin’s world becomes ‘die Wahrheit der Lage als Ordnungsbegriff der
hölderlinschen Welt’, the truth of the situation as the conceptual order of
Hölderlin’s world (GS 2.1: 114). The Wahrheit der Lage, the truth of the
situation, the situation as a space of truth rests literally in the fact that the
Lage is gelegen, opportune, and thus a Gelegenheit, an opportunity for truth.
‘Es sei alles gelegen dir’, says Hölderlin’s poem, and thus the poet walks on
108 Walter Benjamin and History
that which is true like on carpet: ‘Geht auf Wahrem dein Fuß nicht, wie auf
Teppichen?’10 And this is what Benjamin calls die Wahrheit der Lage. There
seems to be an abyss between this Wahrheit der Lage in Hölderlin’s poem
and the Lage that is the stage of Brecht’s epic theatre. Yet the line that arches
over the abyss from Lage to Lage is perhaps opportune enough to form the
bow that Benjamin hoped for in order to be able to shoot the ultimate arrow
of his work, as he writes to Scholem in October 1934:
Whether I will ever be able to stretch the bow in such a way that the
arrow speeds off, is of course uncertain. But while my other projects have
soon come to the end where I took leave from them, this project will
occupy me longer. Why this is so, is indicated by the image of the bow:
here I have to deal with two ends simultaneously, namely the political
and the mystical.11
The two ends of the bow, that Benjamin characterizes here as political
and mystical, reaching from Lage to Lage, are both situated in a plain, in a
surface which, according to Benjamin, is the condition of readability: ‘Lesbar
ist nur in der 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 the
political end of the bow. Yet we must not overhear the resonances of the
Lage, as flat and sober as it might be in the form of a podium. Benjamin’s
first step is to redefine the function of the podium: it is not simply an
elevated space from which political messages are sent to the audience, but
it becomes part of a functional context and what is at stake is the trans-
formation of this functional context by changing the relations of its elements
that include, besides the stage, the audience, the text, the performance, the
director and the actors. Each of these elements assumes a new function in
the epic theatre: the stage becomes for the audience an exposition space
instead of a space of illusion, the audience is no longer a hypnotized mass
but an assembly of interested individuals, the text loses its central signi-
ficance for the theatre and becomes an experimental sketch that has to prove
itself and its potentials in the performance. Thus Benjamin moves through
each of the elements and characterizes the functional changes in its relation
with the others. For, like Marx, Benjamin locates the materialist ground not
in reified things, but in relations, in Verhältnisse.
Almost as a by-product of these changes in the theatrical relations, another
relation is put into question and confronted with the challenge of a radical
change: that of theory and praxis, or, in Benjamin’s words of theory and
existence (Dasein), a word perhaps better translated more literally as ‘being-
there’, in order to avoid the heavy ideological burden of the word ‘existence’.
Benjamin speaks of the professional critics who were unable to recognize the
exemplary staging of Mann ist Mann in Berlin, because of a ‘theory languishing
Trembling Contours: Kierkegaard–Benjamin–Brecht 109
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 relationship
any more to the Wahrheit der Lage, the only firm ground – as changing and
volatile as it might be – for theory, and, one might add, for art. For already in
his book on the baroque mourning play, Benjamin criticizes what he considers
to be the ‘abyss’ of Nietzsche’s aestheticism: ‘The abyss of aestheticism opens
up’, Benjamin writes, ‘where art takes up the centre of existence [Dasein] in
such a way that it makes the human being its appearance instead of recog-
nizing in the human being its ground – not as its creator but his existence [sein
Dasein] as its eternal pre-position [als ihren ewigen Vorwurf ]’ (GS 1.1: 281–2).
Dasein as Vorwurf, as pre-position, as pre-disposition of art and theory, cannot
be reduced to a reified, naively understood ‘reality’, although it is real enough
as that which pre-positions and pre-disposes the structures of our relations in
our sphere of living, the possible movements in our environment, the horizon
of our space of freedom to the degree that we have such a space. The task of
theory would then be to articulate these structures and their disposition. To do
that, theory sometimes must become silent, must at least be kept at a distance,
as Benjamin writes already on 23 February 1927 in a letter to Martin Buber,
proposing a report on his experience in Moscow for 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 are
located at a curious intersection of theology and materialism. Kreatur embraces
animals and human beings as creatures (of god, theolo-gically) and as bodies
and 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 to
Buber as it is to Brecht. Paul Celan, in his Meridian speech will talk of Georg
Büchner as the Dichter der Kreatur. While Kreatur is often thought of as mute
– die stumme Kreatur – Benjamin wants to let it speak. And in order to let it
speak, theory has to be silenced for a while. How does it speak? Its language is
determined by the dispositions of Dasein, and these, for Benjamin, are radically
new in the Moscow of his experience, and thus the language is a ‘very new,
very strange language’ (diese sehr neue, befremdende Sprache), and it resonates
through a ‘resonating mask’ (durch die Schallmaske) of a completely changed
environment.
When the Kreatur enters the stage of the epic theatre – and Brecht indeed
often speaks of Kreatur – it speaks less in resounding speeches than in
gestures, and when it resounds it might be the sound of the mute Kattrin in
Mother Courage, drumming on the roof to awaken the city. That is how ‘the
stone speaks’: Der Stein spricht, is the title of the scene. But more than the
sound of the drum, it is the slowly diminishing rhythm of the gestures of the
drumming Kattrin that makes up the language of the creature.
110 Walter Benjamin and History
which they are unobtrusive and habitual. The more unobtrusive, the more
habitual, the more mechanical they are, the less consciousness, which in
Benjamin’s as in Freud’s experience is the primary agent of deception, can
interfere. Such gestures are like the hand in Dr Strangelove that constantly
rises up to the Hitler salute against the will of its subject. But gestures are
more than revelations of an individual subject’s hidden intentions: they are
witnesses of an interest in the most literal sense of that word. They testify
to a sphere of inter-esse, of a sphere between the subjects and between their
world. Gestures are, so to speak, sedimentations of movements in a sphere
of interests. Their movements reveal the patterns of the network of pathways
possible or impossible in a given social and cultural setting.
While the relative distance of gestures to the controlling consciousness
thus allows them to be witnesses of the sphere of interests, the possibility
to frame them in terms of a clear beginning and ending turns them into
means to dissect what Benjamin calls the complexity (Vielschichtigkeit) and
opaqueness (Undurchschaubarkeit) of people’s actions. Gestures are the epic
theatre’s equivalent to the Aristotelian plot, the mu`q o~, with a beginning, a
middle, and an end. As such, they interrupt the constant flow and current
of life and events which, of course, have no fixable beginning or end. Every
beginning in our experience has something before, and every end something
after it. The gesture, frozen in a fi xed beginning and a fi xed end, functions
as a caesura in the flow of actions and events, just as Hölderlin’s caesura
interrupts the torrential stream of representations (Vorstellungen). While the
interruption of the current of Vorstellungen uncovers the Vorstellung itself,
according to Hölderlin, the interruption of the action in the epic theatre
uncovers and discovers, according to Benjamin, states of affair, conditions
or situations (Zustände).
This functioning of the gesture as a caesura would demand a further
extensive reading and analysis. But it is time for a caesura in this text
whose title promised not only the names of Benjamin and Brecht, but also
of Kierkegaard. The latter seems to have disappeared with the abyss of the
orchestra in the epic theatre. To find him again, to find him at all will
not be easy on this stage and podium. But then, even in his own writings,
Kierkegaard is often quite evasive, hidden behind pseudonyms, if indeed
he can be found there. Pathways to Kierkegaard tend to be circuitous,
demanding most of the time elaborate detours.
If a shade or a trace of Kierkegaard can be suspected at all in Benjamin’s
essay – and evidently I am suspecting something of that order – it would
most likely be found at that end of the bow of Benjamin’s writing that he
called the ‘mystical’ end, where the transformations of the earlier more
directly metaphysical and theological elements are taking place in a kind of
alchemistic melting process. It is of course that end of the bow that in this
particular essay is particularly unobtrusive; but then it is the unobtrusive
that is invested with a special revelatory quality. We have already noted
112 Walter Benjamin and History
Vielfrab, ‘but’, he continues, ‘who guarantees [wer steht mir dafür] that the
Vielfrab played on the stage [der gespielte Vielfrab] has the advantage of
reality over the pictured one [vor dem gezeichneten die Wirklichkeit voraus
hat]?’ Benjamin undermines Brecht’s simple opposition of a ‘real’ and a
‘pictured’ Vielfrab. Instead he confronts two representations: one played,
the other drawn. At this point, the status of the real is suspended. ‘Nothing
hinders us’, Benjamin says, ‘to have the played figure sitting in front of the
real 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 has
been suspended in the double representation, another space and structure
enter into play; another scene opens up on the stage of the epic theatre. Once
the real is movable and can move from the foreground into the background,
the play in the foreground assumes a kind of fantomatic aura: ‘many of
the players’, Benjamin writes, ‘appear as emissaries of the greater powers
[als Mandatare der gröberen Mächte] that remain in the background’. As
in medieval and baroque allegories, the figures on the stage figure another
reality, with the minor spatial difference in this case that the other reality,
the other scene, der andere Schauplatz, as Freud called it, is not a higher,
metaphysical sphere, but horizontally displaced in the background from
where their effects emanate into the foreground, functioning ‘like Platonic
ideas’.13 Thus Neher’s projections become something very paradoxical, what
Benjamin calls ‘materialist ideas’. But to the degree that these projections
are visible they assume themselves a strange intermediary place: although
being materialist ideas, they can become visible only by tearing themselves
off from their status as ideas, for even materialist ideas are outside the realm
of the empirically visible. But how then do we recognize their real status?
Through a minimal effect in the mode of their appearance: ‘as close as they
have moved to the event [on the stage], the trembling of their contours [das
Zittern ihrer Umrisse] still betrays from what much more intimate proximity
they have themselves torn away in order to become visible’. A trembling at
the edges indicates the effect of another scene.
And in this trembling in Benjamin’s text, the effect of another figure can
be read: the effect of an ever so brief intersection, an ever so brief crossing of
paths between Benjamin and Kierkegaard, after which their paths will move
in opposite directions. But what legitimates such a reading? To simply base
it on the word Zittern that evokes the title of the German translation Furcht
und Zittern, would certainly seem far-fetched – although, as we will see, it
is not all that far-fetched in Benjamin’s unconscious. Yet the trembling in
Benjamin’s text is the echo of another trembling that Kierkegaard evokes in
his text as the signal and effect of another sphere, and it is as unobtrusive as
the trembling of Caspar Neher’s posters. Kierkegaard describes the figure of
the ‘knights of infinity’ (Unendelighedens Riddere – Ritter der Unendlichkeit,
in the German translation).14 These knights are completely inconspicuous
in this world, they even have in Kierkegaard’s description ‘a striking
Trembling Contours: Kierkegaard–Benjamin–Brecht 115
The knights of infinity are ballet dancers and have elevation. They make
the upward movement and come down again, and this, too, is not an
unhappy diversion and is not unlovely to see. But every time they come
down, they are unable to assume the posture immediately, they waver for a
moment [de vakle et Øjeblik], and this wavering shows that they are aliens
in the world. It is more or less conspicuous according to their skill, but
even the most skilful of these knights cannot hide this wavering. (p. 41)
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 the
Concept of History’. In the writing of history, the subject figures both as
the hidden chess-player inside the mechanism, and as the puppet that moves
the pieces on the chessboard outside. There is a mechanism that can poten-
tially be propelled indefinitely, but its operation at each time is determined
by the definite stamina of the player crouched in the dark, suffocating
compartment. On the board, the continuation of the game is related to
the hidden player, while the 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 go
on for ever, while the man only as long as he can cope; whereas in terms of
the game, its perpetuation is dependent on the calculating man, while the
puppet is incidental. Thus the complexity of time is created by the juxta-
position – the parataxis – of man and puppet. Thereby, the subject becomes
an integral part of the act performed by the automaton, but the medium of
that act is time itself.
As the image of the automaton is refracted through Benjamin’s writings
the subject as historian and as the subject that appears within written history
will assume a clearer outline. The coordinates for such an outline can
only be provided by Benjamin’s writings themselves, and first of all by the
unfinished Arcades Project to which the Theses were conceived in part as a
methodological grid. The fact that the Arcades Project to remain unfinished
is be a problematic element in such an investigation, and one that Benjamin
is well aware of: ‘Outline the history of The Arcades Project [die Geschichte
der Passagenarbeit] in terms of its development. Its properly problematic
The Subject of History 119
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 in
his travels; and it should not be forgotten that the earliest European script
that has been deciphered, the Minoan Linear B, has been preserved as clay
tablets recording the goods produced and stored at the Cretan palaces. The
fact that decisively different narrative forms use the same apparatus, only
proves, as Longinus recognized, that the list is a fertile topos for stylistics
to turn into a philosophy of language thereby addressing both the human
and the object.1 On the other hand, the thinkers of the modern era were
equally aware of this: Montaigne’s use of the list as the only way to record
his own experience is a telling example, even if somewhat timid compared
with the compulsive list-making of a Rabelais or the lists that comprise La
Popelinière’s ‘perfect history’.2 It is not a coincidence that Foucault starts
his history of ‘words and things’ from the seventeenth to the nineteenth
century with extrapolating on the way that a list records not only the objects
perceived as well as the reflection upon these objects, but also the épistème
that is sedimented between the individual listed items and which comprises
the order, or the grammar, of the list.3 The issues of narrative, subjectivity
and the epistemological status of objects coalesce in the notion of the list so
that their relation to history can be examined.
The second reason that universal history ‘is crucial is derived from
Benjamin’s writings. It is not only that the huge list’ known as the Arcades
Project can be viewed as a type of universal history. In addition, ‘universal
history’ is a term employed by Benjamin himself. Although Benjamin refers
to it only once in the Theses, that reference in Thesis XVII is of extreme
importance for a discussion of the historiographic method. Further, if
‘universal history’ is taken to mean a ‘completed history’, then contra-
puntal to this idea is that universal history is also messianic. ‘The authentic
concept of universal history [Universalgeschichte] is a messianic concept’
(N18, 3). This assertion is significant enough for Benjamin to jot down
a number of times in the preparatory notes for the Theses, for instance:
‘Only in the messianic realm does a universal history exist’ (SW 4: 404/GS
1.3: 1235). Universal history, as the term around which completeness and
incompleteness entwine and unfold, is a necessary condition of Benjaminian
history. However, it is not a sufficient condition of history. The stress in the
last citation from the preparatory notes is on the ‘only’: universal history
can be actualized only with the coming of a Messiah, on Judgement Day.
Moreover, Benjamin warns: ‘Universal history in the present-day sense is
never more than a kind of Esperanto. (It expresses the hope of the human
race no more effectively than the name of that universal language)’ (SW 4:
404/GS 1.3: 1235). The utopian vision of universal history in the ‘present-
day sense’ – a qualification which will be shown to be of significance for
Benjamin – is nothing but wishful daydreaming. If humanity could ever
The Subject of History 121
2
To avoid such a power struggle, it is important that the two notions of the
historical subject are clearly delineated. Only then would it be possible at
the end to indicate what kind of struggle they avoid, what is the nature of
their alliance – their complicity. For the moment, the investigation should
proceed with the oppressed by asking the question: Who are the oppressed?
Who are the hopeless? An answer will reveal that according to Benjamin
there is no one 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 a
historical narrative? The latter question will lead back to the historian.
It may appear self-evident who the oppressed have been. To assume
that there is an obvious way of identifying the oppressed and the hopeless,
namely as those who have suffered injustice, ‘the slain [who] are really slain’,
as Horkheimer put it in a letter of March 1937, would be to miss the crux
of Benjamin’s thought. When Benjamin transcribed Horkheimer’s letter in
Convolute N of the Arcades Project, he appended the corrective that history
is not merely science but also a remembrance (Eingedenken) that can modify
122 Walter Benjamin and History
The extrapolation of the Absolute in relation to time does not only hark
back to Benjamin’s early writing. It also recalls the extrapolation earlier
of the oppressed in relation to history. With the oppressed it was shown
that a chiasmus takes place between history and those for whom history is
written. The temporal caesura repeats the chiasmic structure. The fullness
of time makes incompletion possible, but it is also made by incompleteness.
This chiasmus does not indicate that the complete and the incomplete, the
particular and the absolute, the oppressed and messianic temporality are the
same thing. Rather, the point is that the terms of those conjunctions are
given within the same structure that has arisen out of Benjamin’s philosophy
of time. Thus, what is repeated is not solely the complete in the incomplete,
and so on, as if they were identical. What is repeated is the constructive
principle of history. The paratactically presented information in histori-
ography and the messianic temporality can only be necessary conditions
of history. The additional constructive principle indicates that they have a
structural connection. This is what makes possible the mutual transform-
ability of the complete and the incomplete, as Benjamin wrote in reply to
Horkheimer. It makes possible the little gate of particularity ‘through which
the Messiah might enter’ any second now (SW 4: 397/GS 1.2: 704). In other
words, it is the structural arrangement that makes particularity and the
absolute consupponible and codeterminable. The Messiah is not a religious
concept; rather, the Messiah is the regulative impossibility that allows for
interruption as the temporality that pertains to history.
At this juncture, nothing more can be said about who the hopeless are,
other than that they are whoever occupies the nexus of particularity in the
formal structure of the constructive principle of history. This formulation
already discloses at least three points: 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 early
Benjamin’s structural argument about criticism is indeed transportable to
the later philosophy of time, then the hopeless will occupy a position akin
to that of the material content; and to the extent that the material content
is always in a process of ruination, the same process of disintegration of
subjectivity will be expected to take place in history.6 Simultaneously, and
this is the third point, specifying the particularity of subjectivity as other
than a ‘fact’ of historicism discloses the limit of the question ‘who are the
hopeless?’. For it can only provide an answer in the negative. A positive
articulation requires the hopeless to figure in a different question: ‘how are
they to be presented?’ This in effect asks for the way that the subject figures
in, as well as configures, the chiasmic relations between the complete and
the incomplete. In other words, what sort of figure of the subject can make
possible Benjamin’s philosophy of time? What is the nature of this subjective
act that allows for figuration?
The Subject of History 125
3
To start answering these questions requires to focus on the historian and
the methodology of historiography. The crucial passage in this respect is
Thesis XVII. This thesis is important enough to be quoted in full here,
even though only the first half will be treated in the present section, and the
second at the end:
On the one hand, Thesis XVII offers a formulation about the method of
historiography. There are two techniques contrasted, universal history and
materialist historiography. On the other hand, in order to expand on the
latter, Benjamin refers to the historian. The materialist historian is based
on a constructive principle. Thus, subjectivity is implicated in method. The
latter point will be left unattended for the time being.
Approaching technique means paying attention to the complexities of this
passage. And a complexity emerges from the very beginning in the contrast
between materialist historiography and universal history. For if ‘the entire
course of history’ is something that can be methodologically entertained,
as Benjamin suggests in the penultimate sentence, then what is it that
really separates it from universal history, taken to mean precisely the aim
of representing the entirety of ‘facts’? The problem will not be solved easily
126 Walter Benjamin and History
with reference to the precious seed, time. For the very next thesis states
that messianic or now-time ‘comprises the entire history of mankind in a
tremendous abbreviation’ (SW 4: 396/GS 1.2: 703). Prima facie a moment
that comprises ‘the entire history of mankind’ may not appear all that
different from the project of a universal history, namely to add up all the
‘facts’. Thesis XVII may indicate why Benjamin relates elsewhere universal
history to the messianic (e.g. N18, 3), but universal history is thereby, if
anything, even more elusive. A closer look at the term ‘universal history’ is
called for, yet it should be kept in mind that Thesis XVII explicitly address
the historiographic method. ‘Universal history’ will become a fruitful
concept only if it is viewed in relation to writing, and thus in connection
to narrativity. This is not to say that there is a specific kind of historical
narrative – this has been rejected already. There still is, nonetheless, a
method and a technique of writing history.
The issue of what can be recorded in written history – the historical
object in general, which includes the oppressed – revolves around the
notion of universal history. The reason is that universal history can present
most clearly the difference in technique between historical materialism and
historicism. What does Benjamin mean by the term ‘universal history’? The
assertion in Thesis XVII that historicism culminates in universal history is
not a straightforward identification of historicism and universal history. If
the metaphors in the verbs of the first two sentences are heeded, then what is
conjured is an image of vertical mobility. Universal history is at the summit
(der Gipfel) of historicism.7 And materialist historiography only rises (heben)
even higher. Thus, universal history is not only the meridian of historicism,
but also a median between historicism and materialism. Further, the twist
in 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 – in
Thesis XVII – makes it all the more enticing given that Benjamin refers to
it consistently in the preparatory notes. There, Benjamin strategically draws
a qualitative distinction between the ‘present-day sense’ of universal history
and a more authentic sense. After repeating the call for the ‘destructive
energies’ of materialism to blast apart the temporal continuum, Benjamin
observes that this would serve as the precondition to attack ‘the three most
important positions of historicism’. Benjamin continues by immediately
identifying universal history as the first such position: ‘The first attack must
be aimed at the idea of universal history. Now that the nature of peoples
is obscured by their current structural features as much as by their current
structural relations to one another, the notion that the history of humanity
is composed of peoples is a mere refuge of intellectual laziness’ (SW 4: 406/
GS 1.3: 1240). Universal history is unproblematically a historicist category,
only if the completeness alluded to in it is meant to signify the sum of
The Subject of History 127
people. In other words, only the history that sees the victors as those who
were really victorious and the slain as those who were ‘really slain’.
Yet this is not the whole story; Benjamin immediately opens a qualifying
parenthesis:
(The idea of a universal history stands and falls with the idea of a
universal language. As long as the latter had a basis – whether in theology,
as in the Middle Ages, or in logic, as more recently in Leibniz – universal
history was not wholly inconceivable. By contrast, universal history as
practised since the nineteenth century can never have been more than a
kind of Esperanto.)
4
This is not to say that historiography is impossible. Rather, historiography
is to be viewed from the vantage point of a philosophy of time. If incom-
pleteness and infinity are to be retained, then they cannot be constructed
as positivism’s pure language. Only then will the qualitative difference
between the ‘present-day’ universal history, and the universal history as a
possibility – or at least as that notion of history that allows for a conception
The Subject of History 129
has the tone of a chronicle throughout, it will take no effort to gauge the
difference between one who writes history (the historian) and one who
narrates it (the chronicler). The historian’s task is to explain in one way or
another the events with which he deals; under no circumstances can he
content himself with simply displaying them as models of the course of the
world [Weltlaufs]. But this is precisely what the chronicler does, especially
in his classical avatars, the chroniclers of the Middle Ages, the precursors
of today’s history. By basing their historical tales [Geschichtserzälungen] on
a divine – and inscrutable – plan of salvation, at the very outset they have
lifted the burden of demonstrable explanation from their shoulders. Its
place is taken by interpretation, which is concerned not with an accurate
concatenation of 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)
‘Since he was already over-full of grief, it took only the smallest increase
for it to burst through the dams.’ Thus Montaigne. But one could also
say: ‘The king is not moved by the fate of those of royal blood, for it is his
own fate.’ Or: ‘We are moved by much on the stage that does not move
us in real life; to the king, this servant is only an actor.’ Or: ‘Great grief
is pent up and breaks forth only with relaxation; seeing this servant was
the relaxation.’ (SW 3: 148/GS 2.2: 446)
5
Interruption is the act of the technique of materialist historiography and
that which makes possible a conception of the infinite and the finite, of the
complete and the incomplete. However, if interruption is also to be linked
to judgement, the parataxis of judgements with which Benjamin responds to
Herodotus’ story does not seem to fix the problem of a bad infinity. For they
may appear as individual judgements, pointing towards a notion of infinity
as an aggregate of similar judgements – a dialogue between independent and
individual ‘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 ‘The
Storyteller’ 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 the
king was filled up with grief that he had a visceral reaction – as if his
body could not help it. This is the temporality of specificity. Conversely,
the invocation of fate in the second judgement installs a temporality that
eschews specificity, the temporality that knows only of the decisions of the
gods and effaces human freedom and ethical responsibility. The image of
the world as a theatre in the third explanation partly repeats the temporality
of fate: the actors act according to a script that cannot be altered. However,
here the exclusion of the king from the infinite play on the stage makes it
possible 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 final
explanation, with its proverbial nature, has the structure of a storytelling
The Subject of History 133
the king recognizes in the manner that the historian judges. His tears are the
historian’s judgement. The complicity that is established between the king
and this hetairon is the complicity that also pertains between the historian
and King Psammenitus at that moment.
The act of judgement is the act whereby a spectator becomes simul-
taneously an actor. The historian makes, and is also made by, the object
of history. This chiasmus corresponds to the chiasmus identified earlier in
pursuing the question of who the subject of history is. It will be recalled
that then it was shown that the hopeless make and are made by history;
and also that time, as the absolute, creates and is created by the interruption
of the temporal continuum. These chiastic relations were shown to be the
structural principle of historiography. The correspondence of Psammenitus’
gaze to the earlier chiasmoi discloses the essential quality of the principle
of historiography: it is the act of judgement. The most general answer as to
how the subject figures in history is: through this instantaneous act. The
act that is performed in such a way that the parataxis is recognized. If it
is recognized as parataxis, then the 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 the
relation between completeness and incompleteness to the infinity of time.
6
If this infinity of time is consistently pursued, the conclusion can only be
that a subjective judgement is no longer possible. What this means is that a
subject’s judgement can never attain a self-consistent truth. The subjective
act is never occlusive. No matter how many individual acts of judgement
are possible, they can only be secondary to the possibility of judging as
such. This signals the destruction of the subject. The subject cannot fix
itself on a stable position from which to pronounce a judgement. The act
of judgement destroys the singular individual, because the subject is now
dissolved into the I and the hetairon, the I and the object that looks back at
it forming a community that is complicit in judging. The standstill of this
judgement is not that of standing on a 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 history
and materialist historiography. The ascent (abheben) from historicism to
materialism is mediated by universal history. However, by performing a kind
of leap, universal history in the form of the chronicle has been shown to be
also at the summit of materialism. Benjamin insists in Thesis XVII that
this up-and-down movement is not enough: ‘Thinking involves not only
The Subject of History 135
the movement of thoughts, but their arrest [Stillstellung] as well.’ But this
Stillstellung is not something exhausted within the figure of the historian:
The historian perceives the monad, he recognizes the historical object. But
the product is not up to the historian on his own. Rather, the product is
given through his technique. In the aufheben of Benjaminian sublation the
abheben from historicism to universal history to historical materialism is
halted by erasing the subject from the sublating. The individual I is no more,
because historiography can methodologically entertain ‘the entire course of
history’ only through the complicity of the historian with the hopeless. The
process of sublation, in Benjamin’s sense, is to disperse the historian in the
hetairon, 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 history
does not matter. It does not say that the construction of history destroys the
historian as such. Rather, it indicates that destruction is constitutive of historiog-
raphy. There is no psychological communication between the historian and the
historical object – no empathy that mediates their relation. The relation is given
through time. On the one hand this is a full time, one that allows for the entire
course of history to parade before the historian; on the other hand it is a now-
time, the instant of recognition that concentrates on one object in the parataxis
rupturing its relation to the whole of history. The subject is occupying the
position at this point of tension between relationality and nonrelation, between
the complete and the incomplete. The subject is given through its occupying.
This is another way of saying that the question ‘who are the subjects of history?’
is inadequate. The destruction of the subject demands that only the manner
in which the subject acts – that is, only the judgement – can be questioned.
And, thus, it is a productive destruction, the condition of the possibility of the
historical construction. What is destroyed is history as pure immediacy, under-
stood either as specificity or as a transcendental other. What is constructed is
a political community, and the possibility of a materialist historiography as
political praxis. In the dialectical reversibility between completeness and incom-
pleteness, the finite and the infinite, ‘politics attains primacy over history’ (K1,
2). The destruction of the individual subject announces the political in the
complicity established between the I and its hetairon.
This complicity is captured in the image of the Turk from Thesis I.
To see it, it is crucial to follow the movement of the relation between the
136 Walter Benjamin and History
chess-player and the puppet. The parataxis of man and puppet precludes
any sharp definition of one independently of the other. They can only be
independent in their interdependency. Thus, what matters in the operation
of the chess-playing automaton is not who controls the game of chess.11
Asking this question will inevitably conflate the movement of the pieces
and the game itself. In relation to the movement of the pieces, what matters
is the cooperation between the hidden chess-player and the puppet. And in
relation of the game itself, both the player and the puppet as independent
entities are secondary compared to the move – the act – on the board. This
board is the historian’s writing page which, however, is not blank. The black
and white pieces are already poised in a parataxis without which histori-
ography is impossible. But historiography is equally impossible without the
empty squares that form the space between the pieces. Those squares can
be filled to infinity with different moves, but in each case are occupied by a
single piece, which is the product of a single move – a single judgement of
the complicit man and puppet.
8
TRADITION AS INJUNCTION:
BENJAMIN AND THE CRITIQUE OF
HISTORICISMS
PHILIPPE SIMAY*
but two forms of historicism: the first, which is well known, postulates the
existence of a historical evolution; but also a conception of time apparently
close to Benjamin’s – discontinuous, retrospective, entirely devoted to the
present – which however swims with the current, because it considers the
past as a reserve of moments and things freely exploitable. If this second
side has gone relatively unnoticed, it is due mostly to the mixture of the
different characterizations of the concept of tradition which Benjamin
developed throughout his work. In this chapter I intend to go back over the
route which leads Benjamin to think the tradition in the present, to invent
other modalities of transmission, to reject the instrumental uses of the past,
in order to restore the subversive force contained in it. And in order to show
that tradition is not at all a principle of continuity, or something that can be
mastered, but rather the sudden appearance of an ethical injunction.
Who still meets people who really know how to tell a story? Where do
you still hear words from the dying that last, and that pass from one
generation to the next like a precious ring? Who can still call on a proverb
when he needs one? And who will even attempt to deal with young people
by giving them the benefit of their experience? (GS 2.1: 214/SW 2: 731)
This aspect allows for the seizure of the authentic temporality of narrative
communication. If the story presents itself as an ancestral account, it
nevertheless takes form in the present: there is in it a part of invention, of
recreation. To make his account transmissible, the storyteller must actualize
what has been bequeathed to him according to the expectations of his
listeners; otherwise the listeners will pay no attention to him. He always
performs a critical evaluation of the past from the starting-point of its own
context of reception. This inventory work, properly hermeneutic, allows
him to make actual what is not actual any longer. The story is thus an
answer found in the past to a question formulated in the present. But, as it
is in the past that the present finds its answer, it inscribes itself within the
framework of a continuity – a retrospective continuity, since it is the critical
recovery of the past, not the past itself, that has here a power of filiation.
For Benjamin, wisdom designates precisely this capacity of narration to
make past experiences actual and, vice versa, to make novel experiences
customary, relating them with things different from themselves in order
to create filiation and establish an intergenerational continuity. In fact,
the account, at the same time as resumption and as variable, possesses a
singular power of implication. On the one hand, the storyteller is always
concerned with describing the source from which his message comes and
his supposed competence ensues. He is authoritative just inasmuch as he is
able to mobilize in the narrative act the lineage of storytellers within which
he inscribes himself. On the other hand, he invites his listeners to inscribe
themselves too within this continuity. ‘A man listening to a story is in the
company of the storyteller’ (GS 2.2: 456/SW 3: 156), says Benjamin. He
reinscribes dialectically in his own person the whole of past and present
generations. Thanks to his account, the past is constantly actualized and
the present is interpreted within the language of tradition. Precisely for this
reason, the storyteller is not simply the representative of a past tradition: he
fabricates tradition.
These analyses on the narrative pragmatics introduce a novel approach to
the traditional phenomena. Displacing the attention to an anthropological
ground, they disclose the way in which tradition is constituted in time. They
invite an investigation of its genesis in the present and no longer in the past,
as had been done until then. It is this displacement which leads Benjamin to
reject respectively the substantialist, essentialist, prospective and cumulative
conception of tradition.
Actually, it is with the substantialist conception that Benjamin first
breaks off. This conception, which identifies tradition with a thing or
group of things, is the most ancient and the most widespread. It originates
in the Roman law where it designates the transfer of material goods from a
possessor to a purchaser. By extension, it eventually came to designate only
the thing itself susceptible of being alienated and handed over in person.
Benjamin takes the opposite course of view. For him, not only is tradition
Tradition as Injunction 141
not a thing, but the elements which compose the tradition are not a priori
traditional. They become traditional only from the moment in which
they are transmitted. It is transmission that ‘traditionizes’ its objects. The
important thing to 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 which
confers on them the privilege of being transmitted, that is because they do
not have an essence. Benjamin redoubles his critique of substantialism in a
critique of essentialism. He insists on showing that the content of tradition,
far from resembling an immutable truth, alters with time. Antiquity and
continuity are thus not the essential attributes of tradition. Tradition, even
though it has an identity within time, does not have an essence. What is
being discredited here are all those representations that assimilate tradition
with an intangible deposit and, therefore, also the institutions which claim
to be the 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 cumulative
dimension, purely quantitative, which would explicate the continuity of
tradition within time. Whether it is assimilated to a concatenation of
prejudices by the French Enlightenment, or to a sedimented wisdom by
the English counterrevolutionaries, tradition is, in both cases, assimilated
to a continuum. It is against this conception that Benjamin will deploy
his most radical arguments. They can be found already, in a form indeed
highly speculative, in the epistemo-critical prologue of the Trauerspiel book.
His questioning the notion of origin did in fact lead him to doubt the
possibility of a veritable transmission of the past in a linear and continuous
form. ‘Origin [Ursprung]’, he said, ‘although an entirely historical category,
has, nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis [Entstehung]. The term origin is
not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being,
but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming
and disappearance’ (GS 1.1: 226/OT, p. 45). Since origin is that which
recurs as absolutely primary at any instant of its historical deployment, any
form of linear transmission cannot but betray it. Tradition as a continuum
ruins all that it transmits; it crystallizes the past considering every one of
its moments as bygone. In ‘The Storyteller’, Benjamin rather concentrates
on the prospective aspect of this continuum. The double movement of
reception and bequeathing indicates well that the active locus of tradition is
not to be found in the past, as the traditionalists like to repeat, but rather
in the present. The authentic movement of tradition does not go from the
past to the present but, inversely, from the present to the past. Benjamin
thus turns inside out, like a glove, the prospective conception of tradition.
The constitution of tradition happens always afterwards, in a properly
retrospective way. Therefore, it is not possible to consider tradition as a
142 Walter Benjamin and History
already emerged and played a part in its reception. The places where
tradition breaks off – hence its peaks and crags, which offer footing to
one who would cross over them – it misses (N9a, 5)
practicable and thus liquidating them. The latter are called the destructive.
The destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose
deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and
a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong.
Therefore, the destructive character is reliability itself. (GS 4.1: 396/SW
2: 542)
Kafka’s real genius was that he tried something entirely new: he sacrificed
truth for the sake of clinging to transmissibility, to its haggadic element.
Kafka’s writings are by their nature parables. But that is their misery
and their beauty, that they had to become more than parables. They do
not modestly lie at the feet of doctrine, as Haggadah lies at the feet of
Halakhah. When they have crouched down, they unexpectedly raise a
mighty paw against it. (C, p. 565)
Exporting into the literary field the form of the Jewish parable, Kafka freed
the latter from its legal reference. Far from submitting to the law which it
is supposed to illustrate, the parable turns against it, asserting its autonomy.
Keeping only the transmissibility of the parable, Kafka thus catches out
tradition at its own game: every one of his texts seems to conceal a secret
meaning, but all the parables which would allow accession to it are illusory
references, for they generate so many interpretations that it is impossible
to retain even one of them. Through an excess of transmissibility, they
dissolve the truth content of tradition. Consequently it is no longer possible
to consider tradition as the preservation of an ancestral knowledge; tradition
is but a collection of indecipherable prescriptions, debris of a law which in
the past was a living thing but now is exerted only as an unjustified power
of sanction.
The destructivity of the Kafka parable has thus mainly a heuristic
function. This is its force but also its weakness: if, on the one hand, it unveils
the moribund and tyrannical nature of tradition, on the other hand it does
not destroy it. Because at all costs it clings onto the pure transmissibility of
the account, the narrator has sacrificed its content. There is nothing more
to say. He lacks above all that which would allow consideration of the debris
of tradition as the fragments of a rescued world, and not as simple products
of decomposition. Because of this Kafka’s work bears the marks of failure.
What the Kafka parable lacks – the faculty of seizing hold of the past in
order to return it in a different form – Benjamin will find in Karl Kraus, in
the modern practice of citation. Contrary to its ordinary use, citation does not
have solely an illustrative function. It also possesses a perturbing, disordering
force. The citation does not merely unveil the false peace instituted by any
normative usage; it also possesses the force ‘to purify, to tear from context,
to destroy’ (GS 2.1: 365/SW 2: 455). In opposition to all that the text strives
to unify, the citation works in undermining it: it dissociates, singularizes,
146 Walter Benjamin and History
fragments until it empties the text of its own substance. The destructivity
of citation does not consist merely in extracting fragments of thought out of
texts, but also, and maybe principally, in subtracting them from the course
of their exposition in time, in breaking with the process of transmission that
inscribes them within a unique reading and a unique usage.
Here comes to light the restoring function of citation: its destructivity
emancipates, frees from the discursive order, that is, at the same time from
the texts and from the contexts of their reception. It is, says Benjamin, ‘the
only power in which hope still resides that something might survive this
age – because it was wrenched from it’ (GS 2.1: 365/SW 2: 455). What
conservation neutralizes, destructivity restores. Diverting these fragments of
thought from their primary significations and destinations, citation opens up
for them a different destiny. It makes its own content exploitable and hence
transmissible. It then regains its critical intensity and its subversive power.
Wrenching things from the continuity of tradition – this is, for the
destructive character, the means to make them transmissible. For Benjamin,
no one demonstrates this better than the collector. He too wrenches the
work from its original context and frees it from the continuum of art
history. In his collections, things, far away from the world which saw their
creation, gain a novel signification. Like the one who cites, who recuperates
apparently insignificant fragments of texts, the authentic collector – like
Pachinger or Fuchs – becomes attached to any kind of object independently
of its commercial value or its cultural recognition. He destroys the codes
of the art market. For ‘the fetish of the art market’, Benjamin reminds
us, ‘is the master’s name. From a historical point of view, Fuchs’s greatest
achievement may be that he cleared the way for art history to be freed from
the 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 of
considering them for themselves. As Benjamin says, ‘the collector’s true
passion, very misunderstood, is always anarchic, destructive. For this is his
dialectic: to tie the fidelity towards the thing, towards the singularity that
it conceals, with a subversive and obstinate protestation against the typical,
the classifiable’ (GS 3: 216). For the collector, the only understanding
of things lies in the acknowledgment of their uniqueness and in the
rejection of their normativity. Arendt acutely spotted, behind the collector’s
apparent irreverence, the blow dealt to tradition: ‘Therefore, while tradition
discriminates, the collector levels all differences. Against tradition the
collector pits the criterion of genuineness’.2 But, according to Benjamin,
for the collector it is less a question of levelling all differences than of
questioning the classificatory logic of tradition, the legitimacy of criteria by
which it isolates and transmits cultural contents. In the essay on Fuchs, the
collector appears as opposing all the normative processes of transmission
and reception. Beside the official art history, which conserves from the past
only the masterpieces, his collection lets a subterranean history appear; it
Tradition as Injunction 147
the past has become citable. And if it is not in the power of the historian to
cite integrally every one of its moments, he can nevertheless wrench some
of them from the homogeneous and empty time in which various forms of
historicism put them. It is these forms of historicism that the Theses will
contest in order to restore the true face of the past.
All rulers are the heirs of prior conquerors . . . Whoever has emerged
victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which
current rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to
traditional practice, the spoils are carried in the procession. They are
called ‘cultural treasures’ . . . There is no document of culture which is not
at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document
is never free of barbarism, so barbarism taints the manner in which it was
transmitted from one hand to another. (GS 1.2: 696/SW 4: 391–2)
Here the attack is addressed no longer only against the historians who went
into the service of the powerful, but against all those who, consciously or
not, take part in a kind of transmission whose modalities are defined by
the dominant class. The victors are those who, having the possibility of
transmitting, decide what will have the right to exist in history, but also the
modalities according to which we will have to relate to it. The ‘triumphal
procession’ that Benjamin evokes designates the process of transmission
itself. For Benjamin it is the process of transmission of the works that is to
be blamed, not the works themselves. For it is only as documents of culture
that they become documents of barbarism. This process neutralizes the
contestation contained in the works assigning them a place and a usage in
the mausoleum of culture. The Benjaminian notion of the victor must thus
Tradition as Injunction 151
be broadened: with the manifest oppressors side also the conservatives, who
contemplate the past only under its patrimonial form.
Therefore, Gadamer’s hermeneutician is not so different from the
historian who identifies with the victor. Both take part in the same
hypocrisy which consists in remaining insensible to the nonfulfilment of
the past and to the laments contained in it by transforming them into
heritage. It is proper here to remember that, for Gadamer, understanding
the tradition means first of all finding in the past a legacy accepted with
reservations. This appropriation of the tradition is only possible if we
postulate that the past has ceased to send signals to the present and that
we do not expect anything more from it. Gadamer, moreover, willingly
confirms this. According to him:
Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with
it: each ‘now’ is the now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is
charged to the bursting point with time. . . . It is not that what is past
casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is
past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash
with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics
at a standstill. (N3,1)
The dialectical image forms a constellation where the past and the present
find, in a dialectic movement, their historical correspondence without the
necessity of going through the mediation of the temporal continuity. This
way, Benjamin manages to keep together the idea of discontinuity and the
one of a true relationship with the vanquished.
We can regret that the critics’ main concern has been to find out
whether materialism or theology will remove this aporia in interpretation,
without exploring other tracks. We wish, as a conclusion, to interrogate a
bit more the ‘anthropological’ dimension of the ‘tradition of the oppressed’
and examine once again the Benjaminian concept of discontinuity.
Discontinuity is associated with the idea of breaches, of ruptures, or of
the explosion of the continuum of the tradition of the vanquished, but it
characterizes also the tradition of the oppressed as such. The conclusion is
generally that the tradition of the oppressed is the reverse of the one of the
oppressors, which makes it similar to the linear model, with the exception
that it will be punctuated with interruptions. Now, the tradition of the
oppressed is not structurally identical with the one of the victors: the
discontinuity of the tradition which characterizes the former is different
from the one which affects the latter. The discontinuity of the tradition
of the oppressed is not a rupture, even though it solicits a rupture in the
continuum of the victors. Nor is it linked to the retrospective character of
tradition, but to the fact that it is not something which can be possessed
and transmitted from hand to hand. Actually, in so far as this tradition is
neither a deposit nor a sum of items – an inheritance susceptible to being
alienated – it is impossible to establish in advance or retrospectively the
chain of its successive heirs. It is not simply something whose advance
within space and time we can follow. Discontinuity is thus to be thought
differently: it is more similar to a discrete – in the mathematical sense
of the term – series than to an addition of segments. The linear model,
with its axial, sinusoidal, segmentary logics, has to be substituted by a
radial model: diffusionist, disseminating, rhizomatic, even if these words,
foreign to a Benjaminian vocabulary, still spatialize too much the mode
of action of the tradition. We could here reverse René Char’s sentence
according to which ‘our heritance is not preceded by any testament’,
for Benjamin, unlike Arendt,7 does not lament here the rupture of a
continuum, but rather affirms that the tradition of the oppressed points
154 Walter Benjamin and History
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 was
and to whom it belonged. In the meantime the way we relate to tradition
constitutes nothing less than its condition of possibility.
The tradition of the vanquished is thus neither an ‘authentic’ relationship
with time nor the assurance of a rectification of the past injustice. It offers
no guarantee. But it has the advantage of staying clear of all historicisms
and of their instrumental constructions of time. Benjamin’s message is
subtle but of great importance: it reminds us that considering tradition as
the transmission of a content which the past entrusts to us under the sign of
continuity or, on the contrary, as a reconstruction of the past in the present,
leads to a misunderstanding of its essential character. What is expressed in
the tradition is not an unmodifiable and intangible core which, from afar,
gives form to the present. Nor is it the game of infinite recompositions
according to the exigencies of actuality. The action proper to the tradition is
not to determine the conformity of different attitudes to a code of conduct,
but rather it is the investing of every new decision with the exigency on
whose behalf it claims to speak. In this sense, ‘tradition’ and ‘contestation’
are one and the same. Forgetting this means to open the door to those
who, ready to run it, to administer it, to make it an instrument of control,
enclose tradition within conservatism. ‘To wrench the tradition from the
conformism that wants to seize it’ means, on the contrary, to prevent what
freezes it in a normative system which will decide on the usages of the past.
It is in this sense that Benjamin, in Thesis VI, recognizes in the threat of
the tradition the very fact of it becoming tradition: ‘The danger threatens
both the content of the tradition and those who inherit it. For both, it is
one and the same thing: the danger of becoming a tool of the ruling classes’
(GS 1.2: 695/SW 4: 391). A double menace always weighs on tradition: the
first comes from the monolithism in which it can freeze; the second from
the opportunism in which it can dissolve and lose its instance of convening.
If, in fact, tradition is that modality of relation with the past that accepts
the contestation which derives from it, then to be within the tradition does
not mean to be guardians of a truth or a normative knowledge which in the
present 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 it
at any instant.
9
BOREDOM AND DISTRACTION:
THE MOODS OF MODERNITY
ANDREW BENJAMIN
OPENING
History, once freed from the hold of dates, involves bodily presence. The
presence of those bodies is positioned within a nexus of operations. If that
nexus can be named then it is the locus of moods. Moods are lived out;
equally, however, they are lived through. Implicit in the writings of Walter
Benjamin is a conception of historical subjectivity presented in terms of
moods. The project here is the formulation of that implicit presence. This
necessitates not just the recovery of this direction of thought, but the attempt
to plot possible interconnections of historical time and the complexity of
lived experience. What is essential is that their occurrence be understood
as integral to the formulation of modernity. Subjectivity cannot simply be
assumed. Its modern 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 development
of a philosophy of history. The theses or notes contain certain allusions to
subjectivity. And yet, subjectivity is not incorporated as a condition of
history. Precluding a concern with subjectivity would seem to leave out an
important element through which experience and hence the subject’s being
in the world takes place. This condition does not pertain to the psychic
dimension of subjectivity. The organization of experience – experience as
organized – takes place in terms of moods. Boredom and distraction, to cite
but two, are not conditions of a subject. On the contrary, they are conditions
of the world. And yet, they are neither arbitrary conditions, nor are they
historically random. Moods, it will be contended, are inextricably bound
up with the modern. This occurs both in terms of what would count as a
description of the modern and equally in terms of what will be described
as modernity’s self-theorization. It should be added immediately that any
one instance of this self-theorization is not assumed to be true; indeed this
Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity 157
could not be the case given fundamental distinctions as to how terms such as
‘boredom’ are conceived.1 Rather, part of what marks out the modern is the
presence of this self-theorization, a process bound up with the inevitability
of a form of conflict. Conflict can be defined, at the outset, as designating
differing and incompatible constructions of the present – constructions
enjoining specific tasks – that occur at the same point in chronological
time.2 This is the context within which a conception of mood needs to be
located.
Highlighting the centrality of moods has to be seen as a way of thinking
through a relationship between bodily presence and the operation of
historical time. (An operation thought beyond any conflation, let alone
identification, of historical time and chronology.) To the extent that
boredom functions as a mode determining experience, there will be an
important distinction between the factual boredom of a given individual
and the world that continues to present itself as boring. In the second
instance boredom will have a greater scope precisely because it is not
subject-dependent. (This form of boredom is not more authentic. Rather
it identifies a different locus of intervention and thus enjoins a different
politics.) However, there is the subject’s boredom. There is the subject’s
distraction; distracted by the world, though distracted nonetheless. If there
is a critique of experience that takes as its object an overcoming of the hold
of Kant’s ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ as the organization of experience’s
possibility, then, it will be conjectured that it takes place not just through
the addition of moods but in relation to the complexity of subjectivity
that the interconnection of moods and historical time creates.3 The ‘tran-
scendental aesthetic’ need not refuse the hold of history per se, what it
refuses is a conception of history in which the detail of the ‘now’ of its
happening demands specific attention. Moreover, it will be the identifi-
cation of that ‘now’ that allows for the advent of inventions and innovations
enjoining their own philosophical and political response. Interruption and
innovation demand more than simple incorporation. They allow for forms
of transformation. This is an argument advanced by Benjamin in relation
to the interruption within the presence and the practice of art brought
about by the emergence of reproducibility. (Clearly reproducibility, while
central to 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 this
context it will also be the case that interruption as a potentiality need not
be identified with reproduction tout court.)
Positioning the importance of moods necessitates noting the way the
techniques of art’s production are connected to the relationship between the
advent of the new and the recognition – thus experience – of the demands
made by it. The ‘new’ therefore is not just a different image, let alone
another image. Benjamin argues this point in the following terms:
158 Walter Benjamin and History
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 more
complex than first appears. Complexity arises precisely because the recog-
nition of a demand is a position that can always be created retrospectively
by the advent of a new art form. (Development is neither deterministic
nor teleological.) The presence of the new – the identification of the new
as the new – can be grounded in the twofold movement of locating limits
and then defining their having been overcome. There is an inbuilt fragility
to this position since technological reproduction – reproducibility, if only
in this context, being the mark of the new – cannot preclude attempts to
explicate its presence within concepts and categories that are inappropriate.
(Fragility will re-emerge as an important motif.) However, what counts as
appropriate is not defined by the positing of an essential quality to art, but
rather is present in terms of the particularity of the art form itself. After all,
Benjamin’s formulation pertained to ‘a new form’ – ‘einer neuen Kunstform’ –
and not a new content. Particularity is as much concerned with the medium
as it is with the accompanying effect that forms will have on perception.
They will make up part of a general conception of the ‘what and how’ of
perception. An example here is photography. The photograph breaks the
link between art and what Benjamin calls a work’s ‘cult value’.
Two points need to be made concerning this break. This first is that it
occurs because of the nature of the photograph as opposed to a work whose
particularity is located within ritual and thus as part of cult. On the other
hand, precisely because what is important is not the photographic content
per se, but the condition of its production and the implications of those
conditions, it will always be possible that a given content will have a greater
affinity to cult value than to its break with that value. The presence of the
face in a portrait, for example, will bring into play considerations that are
already incorporated in the oscillation between a set of ‘eternal’ values,
the essentially human, the soul, etc., and the rearticulation of those values
within the ethics and politics of humanism. While the photograph of the
face will allow for such a possibility, the technique resulting in the photo-
graph of the face holds out against it. The presence of these two possibilities,
a presence whose ambivalence will be a constitutive part of the work – even
though only ever played out on the level of content – marks the need for a
form of intervention. The site of intervention is this ambivalence – the cause
of politics.4 In addition, though this is the argument to be developed, ambi-
valence will come to define not just art work but mood itself. The ontology
of art work will be defining the configuration of the moods of modernity.
Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity 159
(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 will
be 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 architecture
in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’.
That engagement is presented in terms of ‘distraction’ (Zerstreuung). The
argument to be developed is that ‘distraction’ is an organizing mood of
modernity. Benjamin’s concern is to situate the emergence of distraction
within the context of art’s reception. However, were it to be situated, in
addition, in relation to the emergence of art, remembering that Benjamin
limits his analysis to reception, then a further argument would be necessary.
What would need to be underlined is that distraction, as a mode of
reception, arises because of the unavoidable link between art and secular-
ization. Art arises because the necessary inscription of objects within ritual
has been checked by developments within ‘art’ itself. These developments
are themselves part of the process of secularization.6 With the abeyance of
ritual, differing subject positions arise. In this context therefore the link
between art and the secular entails the ineliminability of distraction as a
mode of reception. Distraction involves fragility. It is never absolute. The
subject is drawn across positions. Edges fray. Distraction is a form of ambi-
valence, one that presages another possibility. (Distraction and ambivalence
are signs of the secular.)
DISTRACTION
‘I’ am distracted, unable to concentrate, hence adrift. Not noticed, a haze
– perhaps ‘eine Nebelwelt’ (D1, 1) – overtakes me. Of course, it is a haze
through which ‘I’ see. As the haze settles – perhaps the ‘brouillard des
villes’ (D1, 4) – its presence as a felt condition has vanished. In the grip of
boredom, inured to the situation in which ‘I’ come to find myself, even my
boredom – the imposition, its imposing presence – leaves me unmoved.
What little interest there is. The subject, the fetish of a residual humanism,
matters little. What matters – precisely because it matters for the subject – is
the ‘there is’. Hence – what little interest there is. How then does this ‘there
is’ provide a way into the mood and thus into the subject’s distraction, ‘my’
being distracted? The question therefore is what happens to the ‘my’ within
the opening up of distraction – in its encounter with the ‘there is’? Within
the movement, ‘I’ return to myself. Once ‘my’ being as me, ‘my’ being me,
160 Walter Benjamin and History
since what takes place is the practice and history of discontinuities – the
continuity of the discontinuous – which are present both formally and
technically. This presence will have differential effects both on subjectivity
and relatedly on conditions of reception.
What arises from the centrality attributed to architecture is the possibility,
for Benjamin, of distinguishing between two modes of art’s reception. The
first 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 has
occurred. Indeed, if there is to be a conception of the individual, then it will
have to be reworked after having taken up this new position. In other words,
if the individual is to emerge, it will only do so in relation to this reworked
conception of the ‘mass’. This conception is presented by Benjamin in the
opening lines of section XV of the essay – the ‘masses are a matrix’ – adding
that it is in regard to this matrix that ‘all habitual behaviour [alles gewohnte
Verhalten] towards works of art is today emerging newborn’ (SW 4: 267/GS
1.2: 503). The question of the habitual (the customary) is central. Art is
given again – reborn – because of a reconfiguration of the relationship
between subject and object. There is a shift in the comportment towards
the art object; because its occurrence is internal to art, such a move has to
be understood as concerning art’s mode of formal presentation. The object
of art comes to be repositioned. (Thereby underlining the proposition that
objects only ever have discontinuities as histories.) Therefore, the disclosure
of art does not open beyond itself, precisely because the unity that bears the
name ‘art’ is already the site of divergent activities and histories. Questions
of reception and production will always need to have been refracted through
this setting.
The mode of reception demarcated by the ‘tactile’, a mode that will also
predominate in relation to the optical – and which defines reception in terms
of ‘perception’ (Wahrnehmung) – is structured by ‘habit’. That architecture
whose concern is with dwelling – Wohnen – should be defined in relation to
habit – Gewohnheit – is an important opening move and yet on its own is not
sufficient. What matters is the subject of habit and, as will be noted, habit’s
implicit temporal structure. Learning to live comes through habit. Within
the terms given by this setting the mass becomes the site of distraction.
The mass is distracted. The film positions the mass as mass. And yet, the
film brings with it a real possibility. Benjamin writes that the film ‘makes
the cult value recede into the background not only because it encourages
an evaluating attitude in the audience, but also because, at the movies, the
evaluating attitude requires no ‘attention’ (Aufmerksamkeit) (SW 4: 269/GS
1.2: 505). It is, of course, ‘attention’ that, for Benjamin, is the term that
defines art as a relation between an individual and the singular work. The
162 Walter Benjamin and History
in one. What then is the mood of (for) the mass individual? Answering this
question will, in the end, necessitate returning to the relationship between
the ‘there is’ and the ‘my’. In the move from ‘my boredom’ to boredom’s
‘there is’ quality, a different question emerges: Who is bored? This is the
question addressed to the mass individual.
BOREDOM
Convolute D of Benjamin’s the Arcades Project – ‘die Langeweile, ewige
Wiederkehr’ (Boredom and Eternal Return) – does not have an intentional
structure. This must be necessarily the case. Nonetheless, the move from
the thematic of ‘boredom’ to Nietzsche takes place via the intermediacy of
Blanqui. In regards to the latter, Benjamin cites specific passages from his
L’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 any
straightforward sense, but rather from what he develops, using as its basis a
citation from Karl Löwith’s 1935 study of Nietzsche. A quotation in which
the central section of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science) concerning
‘eternal recurrence’ is, indeed, repeated. The whole project therefore is
not just selective in terms of the tendentious nature of the quotation, but
its selectivity would be compounded if the proper names were allowed to
dominate. The Convolute is about the mood of boredom and the reality of
boredom’s already present structural location within certain conceptions
of historical time. Again, mood meets time. The centrality of that connection
provides the way in and moreover allows the proper names to be positioned
beyond the hold or the accuracy of either citation or interpretation. Viewed
in this light, the interpretive question then has to concern the Convolute’s
actual project.
Even though the elements of the Convolute would in the end need to
be detailed – a move in which the identification of boredom is caught
between the weather, the sameness of grey, somnambulism, etc. – the philo-
sophical dimension of boredom is presented with its greatest acuity in the
following:
We are bored when we don’t know what we are waiting for [worauf
wir warten]. That we do know or think we know is nearly always the
expression of our superficiality or inattention. Boredom is the threshold
[die Schwelle] of great deeds. Now it would be important to know: What
is the dialectical antithesis to boredom? (D2, 7)
The force of this final question resides in part in the answer not being
found in any attempt to identify the content of ‘what we are waiting for’.
This reinforces the centrality of Benjamin’s formalism in the sense that
Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity 165
boredom in terms of what was identified earlier as the ‘there is’ quality of
moods. Once ‘there is’ boredom, then it is not countered by that which
seems to stand against its phenomenal presence, hence Benjamin’s interest
in the dandy, the one who despite colour and due to the insistent presence
of a form of singularity compounds boredom. The dandy is, of course, only
the individual within a structured opposition between mass and individual.
The dandy is not the mass individual. Donning a new garb – history as the
play of no more than surfaces – becomes a conception of the new in which
its conflation with novelty defines its presence. To utilize another quotation
deployed by Benjamin, ‘Monotony feeds on the new [La monotonie se nourrit
de neuf ]’ (D5, 6).
Once, therefore, the question of the ‘new’ emerges it can be linked to the
‘threshold’. What matters is that the threshold not be explained in terms
of the ‘new’. What could be more boring? And yet, the constancy of the
new is hardly news. Hence there needs to be another understanding of the
temporality of moods. A given mood is not countered by its juxtaposition
with its phenomenal opposite. Nor, moreover, is it undone by the mere
assertion of the new. (The question of the new and the posited overcoming
of boredom through novelty makes it clear why the Convolute has to deal
in the end with the problem of ‘eternal return’.) Asserting the new and the
positing of boredom’s having been overcome has to define both – the new
and boredom – in relation to the individual. However, it is essential to be
precise, the individual in question is the one given within the opposition
individual/mass. What this does is to define boredom as the province of the
individual. At the same time, therefore, it elides any possible concern with
boredom’s ‘there is’ quality. Once that quality is denied, then a different
politics opens up; rather than the mass individual and thus a commitment
to a form of mass action, the political would be defined by the individual’s
centrality and orchestrated in terms of the happiness or the well-being of the
individual. (The political distinction is between a conception of the political
linked to individual needs and aspirations – a version of liberalism – and one
defined 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 an
awaiting in which the image of the future determines both what is to occur
as well as its having occurred. What cannot be expected – even though it
is too often expected – is victory to come through continuity. This recalls
the passage cited earlier in which Benjamin dismisses as a form of binary
opposition boredom linked to not knowing what is awaited as one pole, and
the superficiality or lack of attention inherent in the claim that we can give
a form to that which is awaited as the other. (The latter point is, despite
moments of real equivocation, an inherent part of Benjamin’s critique of a
Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity 167
the beginning’ (SW 2: 120/GS 3.1: 131). In both instances there is a type
of transformation. What is fundamental is its nature. The ‘essence’ (Wesen)
of play resides in its being ‘the transformation of a shattering experience in
to habit [der erschütterndsten Erfahrung in Gewohnheit]’. Play allows an ori-
ginating event to be accommodated. Living with it, becomes the registration
of play within habit and thus within dwelling. (This is the link between
Gewohnheit and Wohnen.) Habit, now as the living out of a certain structure
of activity, contains within it an element that cannot be mastered even by
the demand that habit has to be lived out continually. It harbours that trans-
formative moment that is its own construction. Habit contains therefore not
the capacity to revert to play but the fundamental doubling that brings two
incompatible elements (unassimilable both as an occurrence and as image)
– into a type of constellation; a constellation containing both the experience
that shatters and its transformation. This complexity has to be run back
through the construction of subjectivity; construction as a process of self-
possession. What will emerge is that in terms of their formal presence one
will mirror the other.
Gained in this act of self-possession is a doubled site. Play is the continual
encounter with a particular conception of the founding of subjectivity.
Founding involves a dislocation that locates. The re-presentation – thus
reiteration – of this positioning occurs as habit. The possession that ‘we’
have of ‘ourselves’ prior to any encounter with the other is of a site that
is not simply doubled but constructed within and as ambivalence. What
enters into relations with the other, therefore, is this doubled entity who can
love – and therefore be surprised – because that transformative potential is
there from the start. However, precisely because it is given by a founding
ambiguity, even love will not transform absolutely. (Love’s end is, after
all, an insistent possibility.) Nonetheless, love is only possible because of
an original ambivalence. However, this original condition is not to be
understood as epistemological. Ambivalence is not relativism. Even though
within the precise structures of Benjamin’s own formulation it may not have
been presented in these terms, ambivalence needs to be understood as an
ontological condition. As such, it is another description of what has already
been identified as the many in one. In other words, the mass individual is
the locus of ambivalence; the potentiality of the masses lies therein. The
realization of that potential, however, should not be interpreted as a move
from an ideological condition – a state of self-deception – towards truth.
Benjamin brings these elements together in the following formulation:
‘Against the armature of glass and iron, upholstery offers resistance with
its textiles’ (I3, 1). In this single line, embedded within the voluminous text
of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, arcade and domestic interior come
together. This coming together is, however, arranged around a point of
resistance. Arcades offer a structural armature and a hardness of material
finish that upholstery and textiles resist in their stuffing and covering.
Arcades figure the wedded advance of technology and commerce, the
emblem of the modernizing city; upholstery and textiles figure the domestic
interior as a site of refuge from the city and its new, alienating forms
of experience. Yet this resistance heightens their mutual entanglement.
Benjamin writes of arcades themselves as kinds of interiors in the city, spaces
that reorganize relations between inside and outside: ‘Arcades are houses or
passages having no outside – like the dream’ (L1a, 1). And: ‘The arcades,
which originally were designed to serve commercial ends, become dwelling
places in Fourier’ (AP, p. 17).
This chapter will think Benjamin’s historical work on the nineteenth
century through the concept of the interior, considering it as part of the
historical terrain he worked over, and as a figure for an organization of this
terrain, an organization which produced the Arcades Project, a document
which has largely been seen as incomplete, a provisional organization
for a complete conception of a materialist history of Paris, capital of the
nineteenth century.
In producing what might be called a history of discontinuity, Benjamin
recognized a productive instability in the concept of the interior, and in its
associated concepts such as dwelling and domesticity:
places of dwelling are for the first time opposed to places of work. The
former 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 in
the urban and social fabric of nineteenth-century Paris. For the bourgeoisie,
dwelling becomes divided from work, and in this division the conditions for
the emergence of the domestic interior are made possible. This interior is a
space of immaterial, illusory experience produced from insistently material
effects. These effects are produced through the collection, consisting of
objects whose ‘commodity character’ has been divested through their
presence in the interior. The particular affect of the interior emerges out of a
double play between the material nature of the collection and the expansive
illusion that the collection supports in bringing the distant in space and time
close to hand.
‘The interior is not just the universe of the private individual; it is also his
étui’ (AP, p. 20). This ability to dream away with objects is only possible
to the extent that the interior is a completely enclosed environment.
Benjamin writes of the interior encasing the inhabitant along with the
inhabitant’s objects. The surfaces of this encasing register the impression
of both inhabitant and objects alike. These traces of occupation, of a life,
are registered as a compensation for the alienation which is at the core
of a contemporary urban experience. Yet private life is also produced as
a life that can be detected and followed up through the traces that form
it. Here Benjamin locates the birth of the detective novel, a genre of the
private par excellence. The other side of this liberation into the private
is the mortification produced by the interior as encasing. Following the
traces registered in the interior leads to something akin to the uncovering
of a dead body.1
‘The liquidation of the interior took place during the last years of the
nineteenth century, in the work of Jugendstil, but it had been coming
for a long time’ (AP, p. 20). The interior confuses distinctions between
the animate and the inanimate, the living and the dead. The Jugendstil
artist/architect begins to assume the role of total designer, taking up the
tectonic elements of new constructional forms, and naturalizing them with
a distinctly animated and vegetal stylistic line. The individuality expressed
within the interior shifts from being that of the inhabitant, mediated
through collected objects, and becomes that of the architect-turned-artist,
whose artistic ‘vision’ constricts the inhabitant. This liquidation of the
interior presents itself as the last moment of a bourgeois private life made
possible there.
In just two pages of text, we have a crystallization of the short historical
life of the bourgeois domestic interior. But, as Benjamin himself recognized,
it is a short historical life that has engendered a sense of timelessness. In his
seminal Illustrated History of Interior Decoration, Mario Praz has associated
this timelessness with the idea of a progressively developing history of the
174 Walter Benjamin and History
The houses will rise again, and men will furnish houses as long as there
is breath in them. Just as our primitive ancestor built a shapeless chair
with hastily chopped branches, so the last man will save from the rubble a
stool or a tree stump on which to rest from his labours; and if his spirit is
freed a while from his woes, he will linger another moment and decorate
his room.2
Praz does not grasp how Benjamin’s account of the liquidation of the
interior, which Praz translates as its ‘consummation’,3 carries a force relative
to the political context of interwar Europe. For Benjamin, the liquidation
of the interior presages a cultural necessity to overcome the sort of thinking
that would essentialize the experience of dwelling in the interior, that would
make it something timeless and essential to identity. In the essay ‘Experience
and Poverty’ Benjamin remarks:
If you enter a bourgeois room of the 1880s, for all the cosiness it radiates,
the strongest impression you receive may well be, ‘You’ve got no business
here’. And in fact you have no business in that room, for there is no
spot on which the owner has not left his mark – the ornaments on the
mantelpiece, the antimacassars on the armchairs, the transparencies in the
windows, the screen in front of the fire. A neat phrase by Brecht helps us
out here: ‘Erase the traces!’ is the refrain in the first poem of his Lesebuch
für Städtebewohner [Reader for City-Dwellers] . . . This has now been
achieved by Scheerbart, with his glass, and the Bauhaus, with its steel.
They have created rooms in which it is hard to leave traces. ‘It follows from
the foregoing’, Scheerbart declared a good twenty years ago, ‘that we can
surely talk about a “culture of glass”. The new glass-milieu will transform
humanity utterly. And now it remains only to be wished that the new
glass-culture will not encounter too many enemies’. (SW 2: 734)
Outlines of the plan . . . The five or six sections of each exposé should have
corresponded to the same number of chapters in the book, or, to continue
the analogy, to the five or six floors of the projected house. Next to the
foundations we find neatly piled excerpts, which would have been used
176 Walter Benjamin and History
to construct the walls; Benjamin’s own thoughts would have provided the
mortar to hold the building together.6
Susan Buck-Morss also confronts the reality of the compositional form of the
Arcades Project, writing of ‘this nonexistent text’.9 Yet for Buck-Morss, such
a nonexistent text can still be described as having an overall philosophical
conception, bringing together an earlier, theological stage in Benjamin’s
intellectual development, and a second Marxist phase. This conception she
describes as ‘a dialectics of seeing’.10 To aid in making manifest an overall
sense of order in the project, Buck-Morss develops several organizational
diagrams or displays that aim to give several forms of overview for the
project. She explains that there is no narrative continuity in the project,
but there is a conceptual coherence. Her own analysis of the project aims to
show its ‘coherent and persistent philosophical design’.11
Metaphors and diagrams of structure and organization drive these
analyses. Yet we might return again to Benjamin’s aphorism which opened
this chapter: ‘Against the armature of glass and iron, upholstery offers
Walter Benjamin’s Interior History 177
The deeper explanation for all this is, again, the unconscious retention
of a posture of struggle and defense . . . Just as the knight, suspecting an
attack, positions himself crosswise to guard both left and right, so the
peace-loving burgher, several centuries later, orders his art objects in such
a way that each one, if only by standing out from all the rest, has a wall
and moat surrounding it. (I2, 3)
This defensive posture in the interior leads on to the idea that interiors
provide ‘the costumes of moods’, the interior itself ‘a stimulus to intox-
ication and dream’ (I2, 6). Benjamin then recalls his second experiment
with hashish.
Comments and quotations on the purity of an interior vision, masquerade,
the interior features of the city, the emergence of genre painting and the
fumeuse as an extinct piece of furniture, culminate in a citation from
Theodor Adorno on the relation between environment and the inwardness
of thought in Kierkegaard. This passage leads Benjamin to more considered
notes that can be seen to underpin the 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 of
the chapter. At this point the theme of the trace emerges more strongly:
‘Plush – the material in which traces are left especially easily’ (I5, 2). He
includes material on how particular people are positioned within interiors,
and then an idea, in a kind of interiorization of the city, of a ‘Multiplication
of traces through the modern administrative apparatus’ (I6a, 4).
While this might be a radically reduced iteration through Convolute I, it
shows as much how Benjamin’s thinking moves in the interior as it does the
interior’s historical contours. The interior offers a space of immersion for his
thinking, and, in turn, the trajectories of his thinking can be traced out, in
the sense of a detection of his thinking. To postulate that such traces belong
to a diagram or structure of thinking is to impose a system of thought
– indeed, systematic thought – over an idiosyncratic gathering together of
fragments. Rather, the convolute registers as a plane of immanence, a surface
180 Walter Benjamin and History
gathering but also being formed and deformed through the impressions
made by the collected quotations: ‘the plane of immanence is ceaselessly
being woven, like a gigantic shuttle’.15
The dialectical image, formed through the trace between Convolutes and
exposés, is the trace between the nineteenth century as archaic past and
Benjamin’s temporal present. It carries a force that produces an awakening
to 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 retreat
and immersion. It is in the crystallization of a concept of modern dwelling
as rootless, open and on the move that the bourgeois domestic interior is
delivered of its regressive resistance, being delivered instead into a different
kind of resistance, one of revolutionary thinking, where the radical potential
for dwelling of a glass architecture is illuminated.
The force of Benjamin’s interiorized thinking breaks the interior apart.
This breaking apart, only possible through an immersion within the
interior, renders the eternal sense of dwelling radically historical. But this
Walter Benjamin’s Interior History 181
this situation, any relation to the past is subject to temporality, as the storm
of progress moves from one catastrophic situation to another. According to
Françoise Choay, ‘the historic monument has a different relationship to living
memory and to the passage of time’. On the one hand, she continues:
If Choay is correct in claiming that the dawn of this new century witnesses
the decay of our competence to build, then, how should architecture
articulate the architectonic of that ‘witnessing?’ Choay’s idea of ‘the decay
of competence to build’ alludes to the disappearance of that totality which
prevailed in premodern era. The artistic representation of that totality was
indeed the content of what architects and builders would create under the
name of place. But does that decay also banish the vision of competence to
build?6
The place is experienced through technique. But techniques are not just
an assembly of tools: besides doing what they are invented for, techniques
set up a particular movement and rhythm the temporality of which coord-
inates the body’s action and its relation to a place.7 Those who lived through
the modern times had access to technologies that launched the first attack
on the spirit of the place, the experience of which was based on natural
time. The present experience of time, framed by the advent of electronic
networking, enjoys a different temporality. Modern industrial techniques
and machines were operating at such a capacity that Karl Marx charac-
terized them as tools extending the performance of the organic potentialities
of the body. Electronic technologies, if one relies on Jean-François Lyotard’s
account in The Postmodern Condition, are changing the balance between the
natural, the body and the built-form. Computer technologies have changed
our communication system. They have also shaken the situation where one
could have space for self-contemplation. Privacy, the microspace, is invaded,
if not taken over by the global flow of information and goods. We eat,
wear, watch and even dream about things that have the least relation to our
immediate place. Involuntary memory of a bygone place is the only thing
left to the present generation, and the next generation of architects might
have even less chance to imagine and contemplate a memory that would
evoke any aspects of ‘the competence to build’.
This discussion entails two assumptions; firstly, that progress is registered
in an understanding of time that orchestrates one’s experience of the natural
time. Progress progresses, but its flow does not suggest that history unfolds
according to a pre-planned linear path. Secondly, the juxtaposition between
What is the Matter with Architectural History? 185
the natural and the ruins of modernity – the piled wreckage of the past – is
essential for understanding that in the landscape of modernity everything is
already history. According to Harry Harootunian, ‘all production immedi-
ately falls into ruin, thereafter to be set in stone without revealing what it
had once signified, since the inscriptions are illegible or written in the dead
language’. And he concludes: ‘beneath the historical present, however, lie
the spectres, the phantoms, waiting to reappear and upset it’.8 What does
this statement, which addresses something central to Benjamin’s vision of
history, entail for architecture?
The question necessitates two considerations: First, to differentiate history
from historiography, and second, to underline the specificity of architec-
ture’s relation to history. The difference between history and historiography
is obvious, but needs to be reiterated mainly because of Benjamin’s unique
intellectual cause. The title of Werckmeister’s essay, mentioned in note 3,
anticipates the author’s detailed account of Benjamin’s various rewritings
of what finally would be formulated as the angel of history. The ‘transfig-
uration of the revolutionary into the historian’, the subtitle of Werckmeister’s
essay, summarizes the tale of Benjamin’s intellectual life, which was closely
connected 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 the
concept of angel from all religious connotations except one: that the angel,
like a superman, represents the image of a gifted revolutionary figure who
could read more into the rubble of history than anybody else. In giving up
the idea of progress as the ultimate engine of political revolution, Benjamin
turned the revolutionary and constructive aspects of Marx’s understanding
of history into the act of historiography. While historicism is content with
‘establishing a causal connection between various moments in history’, and
perpetuates ‘the eternal image of the past’, materialistic historiography,
according to Benjamin, ‘is based on a constructive principle. Thinking
involves not only the movement of thoughts, but their arrest as well’ (SW 4:
396). What is involved in arresting the thought?
If historicism endorses the flow of time, then, one way to halt this
continuum would be to arrest the time.9 When ‘the time is out of joint’, as
Shakespeare puts it in Hamlet, then the present is saturated by the propelling
wreckage of the past. In this standstill situation the present merges with the
past, but the distinction between the old and the new does not disappear.
The redemptive power of the past rather shines out of the surface of the new.
The historian should capture the gaze of that power.
Such was the situation in the Russia of 1920s, a historical period the
transformation of which was of great interest to Benjamin. In his journey to
Moscow, he witnessed how his concept of history was under construction.
The Russian constructivists considered themselves constructors and not
186 Walter Benjamin and History
ways the work presents itself to the historian. This prompts a discussion
that concerns the essentiality of the tectonic for architecture but also the
poetics (image-laden quality) of construction: a subject that triggered debate
between Alois Riegl and Semperians.27
Riegl, an Austrian art historian, challenged the idea of autonomy implied
in Wölfflin’s remarks on the formal properties of art, and underlined the
beholder’s role in the internal unity of painting and its ‘necessity’ for the
evolution of art from the haptic (volumetric) to the optic (spatial).28 Riegl
was also interested in the autonomous nature of the work of art. He was less
concerned for the subjective process of creation, or a materialistic interest
in matter-of-factness. Kunstwollen, artistic volition, was for Riegl a gestalt
of continuous flow of thought that would make a reciprocal dialogue with
sociotechnological transformations.29 Riegl’s importance, however, lay in
his argument that stylistic changes are driven by the perceptual world.
When Benjamin made his famous statement that, ‘just as the entire mode
of existence of human collective changes over long historical periods, so too
does their mode of perception’ (SW 4: 255), the major historical example he
provided was from the late Roman art industry whose birth, according to
Riegl, coincided with a sense of perception different from the classical one.
Obviously Benjamin had read Riegl’s Late Roman Art Industry; nevertheless,
he criticized Riegl for not discussing the social sources of the alleged new
perception (SW 2: 255). What was intriguing to Benjamin was the contem-
poraneity that would catch up with Riegl’s writing a decade later through
expressionism. This opens an opportunity to make a similar claim: Riegl was
not just reformulating Wölfflin’s ideas; it was rather the contemporaneity of
Semper’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 artistic
production beyond territorial constraint. Their difference, however, points
to the art historian’s concern for surface and image, and the tectonic for
Semper. This is how Alina Payne articulates the ways these two important
figures of the late nineteenth century read fabrication and surface:
of the beholder and that of the canvas. Thus according to Benjamin Riegl
exemplifies the ‘masterly command of the transition from the individual
object to the cultural and intellectual [geistig] function’ (SW 2: 668). In
the second place, abstraction is recognized as a cognitive tool to periodize
history. In contemplating the developmental process of art from the haptic
to the optical, Riegl failed to recognize the import of modern institutions for
any production activity. His main focus was directed towards a discussion
of architecture that is not a self-reflecting object, but includes the spectator.
Semper, instead, chides the ‘thing’ character of the artefact whose aesthetic
is not seen as an autonomous entity perceived by the beholder; rather it is
revealed through the embellishment of material and purpose (ur-form). The
surface of the carpet has no life of its own; it is woven into the technique of
fabrication, even if the latter is not visible as is the case with the carpet, or
implied as understood in Semper’s formulation of the relationship between
the art-form and the core-form. Furthermore, contrary to Riegl, Semper’s
theorization of architecture does not end in a closed system; once the
particularity of architecture is recognized in the tectonic, the autonomy
of architecture is located in the matrix of the disciplinary history of archi-
tecture and techniques developing outside of that history, but in close ties
with historical transformation.
The discussion presented here does not attempt to pit Semper against
Riegl. The aim is to show how the architect’s understanding of the dis-
ciplinary history of architecture differs from those which have prevailed in
art history. Also mention should be made to the specificity of the suggested
‘openness’ in Semper’s theory: he not only theorized architecture beyond
the historicity of the nineteenth-century debates on style but, more im-
portantly, his discourse on the tectonic places architecture squarely in
relation to modernization. That architecture should rethink its own history
based on the prevailed techniques of making does, paradoxically, subject
architecture to the nihilism of modernity. This is one reason why the tectonic
has become of interest to most contemporary historians who attempt to
formulate the thematic of critical practice. Paradoxically, those who want
to theorize at present architecture along with the spectacle generated by
computer technologies appropriate 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 correspondence
between the spirit of time and architecture also sought to rethink archi-
tecture’s interiority according to the demands of time.32 This much is clear
from Charles Garnier, the architect of the Opera House in Paris, who
discusses architecture not only within history but also in its engagement in
the construction of history. In his words, ‘architects who build monuments
must consider themselves to be the writers of future history; they must
indicate in their works the characteristics of the time in which they create;
finally they must, through duty and through the love of the truth, inscribe
What is the Matter with Architectural History? 193
of the great geniuses who created them, but also, in one degree or another,
to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries’. And he continues: ‘There
is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of
barbarism’ (SW 3: 267). One implication of Benjamin’s statement can be
formulated in the following words: by dismantling the work, the historian
ends in the construction of a montage of stories, each unfolding the contra-
dictions involved in the process of the design and construction of the work.
How architecture relates to institutions, for instance? As a document, the
work should be read, as Benjamin’s remarks on history suggests, against the
network of intentions that create the condition for the work’s production.
Only in this way, Carlo Ginzburg reminds us, ‘will it be possible to take
into account, against the tendency of the relativists to ignore the one or the
other, power relationships as well as what is irreducible to them’.38 Secondly,
attention should be given to how the work ‘translates’ material and technique
into tectonic figuration. The tectonic as theorized by Semper allows decon-
struction of all kinds of unities and continuities essential for the humanist
discourse on architecture. By distancing his theory of architecture from
the theological aspects of Riegl’s ideas implied in Kunstwollen, the tectonic
formulates 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 reproduction
of the artwork and the loss of aura. This suggests a passage from poesis to
techne,39 an opening that necessitates a critical dialogue between architecture
and modernity. Another implication of Benjamin’s observation concerns
the durability of the work: that architecture survives its time through the
culture of building rather the intentions of the architect, or because of the
physical strength of building.
In leaving the architect’s intentions behind, it remains to establish
another aspect of the task-awaiting historian: what is the particularity
of the work, a building that invites criticism? And, given the disjunction
between autonomy and historicity, is it not, then, the particularity of a work
that opens itself up as historical? To make an opening to these questions,
a distinction should be made between the work of a connoisseur and that
of the historian. The former’s task is limited to recognizing the presence
of the hand of the genius in the work and issues relevant to style. Before
the rise of art history, most discussions concerning architectural history
aimed at characterizing the particularity of the work in association with
a ‘style-determined’ period, and/or the artist’s skills in demonstrating the
essentiality of mimesis for the work.40 The historian instead cuts through
the work and produces knowledge. And yet, the knowledge one receives
from architecture would not become constructive if it does not stand as
historical. If ‘historical’ does not concern style, then what does it stand for?
In the first place, ‘historical’ concerns the question of modernity in its many
manifestations, including ‘criticism as a negative court of judgement’,41 but
What is the Matter with Architectural History? 195
The representation of time too easily divides into the opposition of lines
and circles. One seems to be either looking down the line from the height
of progress (modernity) or up the line, back from the decline of civilization
(ancient) or else one is stuck on the wheel of time, fated to repeat what has
gone before. Historians oblige us by compiling chronicles and chronologies
of events or occasionally painting a grand canvas of rises and falls. Time
moves on inexorably, either off to the horizon or in an endless spinning of
the eternal return of the same.
We do not live time in some special nonrepresentational way, where the
flowing-off of the moment is given in pure immediacy. Rather, we live
time through our representations of it, in the newspaper, on the television,
according to the clock, following the prompting of the palm-pilot. Time is
not simply a flow or a river for us, but is rather broken into chunks, hours,
minutes, days, weeks of holidays, quarters of a game, seconds downloading
images, years watching our children grow. It is not one event after another,
but it is measurable and publicly standardized and, while punctuated, there
is a memory of a past and an expectation of the future that hangs on our
clock and calendar. The messianic, however, is a name for a not-yet, a future
that exceeds the present, that interrupts it and our own expectations for a
future. If we were able to draw time as a line or as a circle, the messianic
would break it apart. It is not the end of the line, a distant, far-off moment,
thousands of years hence, but rather, an interruption now, or almost now.
In the next moment. Today. . .
There is likely no theme more over-exposed and over-theorized in
Benjamin’s work than the messianic. In this volume alone, there will be
several serious discussions of it, and the bibliography on that topic would
run to dozens if not scores of important essays – by scholars, by critics, by
philosophers.1 This discussion will not serve as a literature review, but will
offer a specific angle of enquiry. For a few years I have explored a group of
twentieth-century Jewish thinkers who developed a parallel interpretation
of the messianic: Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber,
198 Walter Benjamin and History
Calendars are a mode of historiography. They count time, but in the return of
an event, year after year, they build our awareness of the past, representing time
and making of a given year a circle from a linear narrative. Calendars are the
circles. To change a society we would have to change the calendar, to change
the representation of the past as lived in a cycling in our present. The full inter-
pretation of this calendar will follow in section two, but for now I wish to take
a step to the side to see how Rosenzweig interpreted calendars in his The Star
of Redemption, a work that was familiar to and respected by Benjamin. Others
have explored the relation between the two thinkers, but I will focus instead on
the way that Rosenzweig thinks calendars work, and relate this to Thesis XV.2
Messianic Epistemology: Thesis XV 199
1 ROSENZWEIG ON CALENDARS
There are three kinds of calendars, according to Rosenzweig, and each offers
a way of living time in a cycle. The three are, as is typical for Rosenzweig:
Jewish, Christian and Pagan. The one that requires the most explanation
is the Jewish calendar, but not because it is lunar and so has a complicated
intercalation formula. No, its demand is that we think about time not
merely linearly, but more importantly, not merely circularly.
Rosenzweig develops an account of eternity that requires eternity not to
be a flight from time, but an insertion of eternality into temporality. Our
lived time must itself become changed, and become in that sense messianic.
We live time socially and experience time with the breaks and units that
society imposes. In the evening we seek shelter and eat; at sunrise we rise.
Of course, the seasons also provide a certain kind of regularity, but the
most basic units in our lives arise from the regular repetitions of socially
constructed bits of time: the hour, the week and the year as marked on our
calendars. Constructions that are not merely time-lines, that measure the
passing away of time, but allow for the circling back of time. The revolution
in time by which the messianic enters, for Rosenzweig, is the bending of
time into a circle that allows the past moment to come again. The contrast
begins, for Rosenzweig, with the hour, and proceeds from the hour to the
week, and thence to the year.
The new we seek must be a nunc stans, not a vanishing moment thus, but
a standing one. Such a standing now is called, in contrast to the moment,
an hour [Stunde]. Because it is standing, the hour can already contain
within itself the multiplicity of old and new, the fullness of moments.
Its end can discharge back into its beginning, because it has a middle
indeed many middle moments between its beginning and its end. With
beginning, middle, and end it can become that which the mere sequence
of individual and ever new moments never can, a recoiling circle. In
itself it can now be full of moments and yet ever equal to itself again.
When an hour is up, there begins not only ‘a new’ hour, much as a new
moment relieves the old one. Rather, there begins ‘again an’ hour. This
re-commencement, however, would not be possible for the hour if it were
merely a sequence of moments – such as it indeed is in its middle. It is
possible only because the hour has beginning and end. Only the striking
of the bells establishes the hour, not the ticking of the pendulum. For the
hour is a wholly human institution. (322–3/290)3
For Rosenzweig, the hour allows for a specific form of repetition: where
it is not simply the same thing over and over again, but when the unit is
born from a holding together of beginning, middle and end. They are held
together through the time of the hour. The diachrony of the moments allows
200 Walter Benjamin and History
for a new one to replace the old one, in the precise sense of repeating. Not
the 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 comes
after an hour? Another one with another narrative. But what comes after the
instant? Some other instant with no repetition, no recurrence. Rosenzweig
does not replace the random flow of events with a synoptic vision of the
whole. Rather, in moving into the next hour, we are cast back on the
beginning to live through it again. When we hear the chime, we think, ‘it
is starting again’. Time has passed, but it is a new hour.
In an even bolder manner, the week structures our experience of time
because on the seventh day we stop our work. Here the end bears a specific
mark of reflection, of completion. Rosenzweig accepts Hermann Cohen’s
reading that emphasizes the social justice dimension of the Sabbath
(depending on reading the Deuteronomy version of the commandment).
Thus the week with its day of rest is the proper sign of human freedom.
Scripture thus explains the sign by its purpose and not its basis. The week
is the true ‘hour’ of all the times of the common human life, posited for
people alone, set free from the orbit of the earth and thus altogether law
for the earth and the changing times of its service . . . But how then does
the power to force eternity to accept the invitation reside in prayer? . . .
Because time which is prepared for the visit of eternity is not the indi-
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’s
orbit of the earth which patiently bears them all and in the law of labor
on earth which is common to all. The clock’s chiming of the hour is for
every ear. (324–5/291)
Here two further claims are bound up with the recycling circle: the social
dimension of lived time and the invocation of eternity. They are not haphaz-
ardly linked, however. For Rosenzweig the key to interpreting eternity is
to see it as a social reality, a world to come, a way for individuals and the
community to be bound together in institutions and practices. The univer-
sality of the lived time of a calendar, particularly when the Sabbath requires
all to rest; not just the masters, but also the servants; not just the men, but
also the women; not just the citizens, but also the resident aliens. This public
rhythm of the week embraces all and so marks the sense of eternity in time.
‘Only at the end of days is everything common’, Rosenzweig comments on
this page, and so the common time now is an image, a pre-experience, of
the messianic time.
So far, we would have, then, a circle that repeats, and a moment of inter-
ruption that allows us to see the repetition, to experience it only through
the distended experience of living in time. Not so much a circle, then, as a
kind of gear, or counter. But in the Jewish tradition there is also a calendar
Messianic Epistemology: Thesis XV 201
for the year, and that calendar is built out of the weeks. The building up
of the year depends on reading a different portion of the Torah scroll (the
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:
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 is
a longer story than a week, and the Jewish year is told with a sequence of
holidays, and even more basically with a course of Sabbaths, each one a
piece of the Torah scroll. Of course, one year is the same as the last, too,
because we read the relevant portions one after the other. The eternity is the
repetition of the Torah, but now the Torah as read in synagogue. It takes
Jews today one year to read the Torah. The narrative is built on the portions
of Torah read, week by week, that make a year of the scroll. And at the end
of the year, the scroll must be re-rolled. The rolling and re-rolling of the
Torah is the image of this circle of Jewish reading. Thus rolling the scroll
is the time that is the performance of eternity. It always begins again, even
when it has just finished. The year is the diagetic time, just long enough to
tell the story of the Torah. The time it takes to read through the scroll is the
measure of the year.
But what of the text read? The portions do not lead up to the present
time. This is not a New York Times bestseller that explains how the USA got
into Iraq. The story told is the ‘history’ of the world up to the Patriarchs
and Matriarchs, and then up through the birth of the nation (drawn forth
through the waters), the giving of the law, the wandering in the desert and
preparation for entering into the promised land. Although the story is the
202 Walter Benjamin and History
story of the Jews, the current readers are not the characters in it. It is set,
even in its textual development, as a history of what happened long ago. The
story told does not connect with the time of its telling. Indeed, the story told
does not lead continuously into the time of the editing of the Torah, or to
the time of its first public reading under Ezra.
Surely this account of the history of the world up through the birth
of the Israelite nation works as a kind of history because it is unwilling
to collapse the distance between its listeners/readers and the events being
told. But it is not merely that we now perceive a gap between us moderns
and this ancient text: the text itself is built on a gap of time. A gap that is
not bridged by the story. Rosenzweig managed to read Jewish holidays as
following that sequence creation–revelation–redemption, showing that the
cycling in our calendar has within it a cycle of a history of past events, events
held in their pastness. This cycle is experienced as weeks of portions of an
earlier story – itself rolled up in a scroll. The way to experience eternity is
not by a collapse of this historical gap. Rather, each year the exodus from
Egypt repeats, and each year it seems to be not about us, the readers; (it has
its internal connection to the plagues and the revelation at Sinai), and yet
we readers participate in eternity by listening to it each year. That it takes a
year to read the scroll, gives it a certain kind of narrativity, that each station
on the cycle of our year has its own story, law, genealogy, etc., has its own
bit of Torah, that seems more perplexing.
The waters part year after year on the same week (of the lunar calendar).
Does it mean the same thing to its readers, year after year? No, of course not.
But Jews do not substitute some other event (for instance, the death of Julius
Caesar). Always the same text at the same season, whatever is happening
to the readers. Whatever has happened since last year. (Because what has
‘happened’ is the congregation has read to the end of Deuteronomy, re-
rolled the scroll.) The weekly portion is the template of Jewish time, even
though there is no connection from past to present.
But perhaps we have not quite grasped the Torah’s own temporality. For
the 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’s
sequence follows enigmatic construction principles. The beginning, middle
and end are themselves neither a haphazard sequence nor a straight narrative
line. What we do see, however, is that people speak and they act, and they
are surprised by events. Perhaps they are even more surprised than we,
because we have read the story just last year. But if our sequence of reading
is fixed, our own lives are not governed by a necessity.
The Hegelian historiography that Rosenzweig rebelled against was one
of world-historical necessity. When Rosenzweig says the Jews are eternal,
or rather have eternal life implanted within them, he is saying, at least, that
they do not participate in the dialectics and the necessities of world-history.
For many people, this has meant that Rosenzweig thinks that Jews and
Messianic Epistemology: Thesis XV 203
Judaism have no history of any sort. But I think I can begin to show how
we might release Rosenzweig from this prison.
Jews experience their eternality, the eternal life, by reading each year the
same portion, a portion which always has its own discontinuities within
it and its sense of contingency. That reading alerts us to see our present
moment as also one that is not fated or governed by the sway of world-
history. Whether we are in Babylon or Spain, under emperors, kings, or even
President Bush, we persist in seeing our own time as bound to a template
that resists a reduction to necessity. Messianic hope arises from a Torah
portion promising change and justice – and it does not stop short of criti-
cizing the practices and ideas of its narrated time. Indeed, one can consult
biblical historians who recognize the concerns of the redactors, and see the
Torah text itself criticizing the prevalent ideas and practices at the time of
its editing or its first public reading. The Torah portion messianically breaks
the spell of our present moment, and so makes us free due to the discon-
tinuity between our own moment and the moment of which we read.
This is a calendar of a specific sort because of its mapping onto the Torah
reading. 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 written
scroll, but what it tells of is fraught with interruptions and even messianic
shards. At the outside is the time of our year, marked out by the portions
of the scroll. The outer circle is the time of reading, not continuous, but set
apart to mark the change of the weeks that as units are alike. The relation
of the inner and outer circles is one of mutual disruption, but performed by
the community.
However, there are two other forms of calendar, and it is in confronting
these that we may 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 to
place and from government to government; but as long as each one is
celebrated, it is filled with human joy in the living worldly present and
the hope for a still better, still richer, in short a growing life in the future.
For us, the few remembrance days of our people’s history we have, because
they 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 its
set 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
204 Walter Benjamin and History
Day is quickly fading from importance as Martin Luther King Jr Day rises
on the scene. But the need to commemorate is linked here to the future, to
allow past events to enhance our present hope. What is past connects us to
our nation, to our peoples, fashioning a certain resistance to the flowing off of
time. But the sequence does not follow a single text, is not marked off by the
sequence within the Torah scroll. And when the Jews add events, they become
utterly fixed, and so do not breathe with the sense of adding and dropping
of holidays that show the way that secular communities live in the flowing of
time, even that their communities are destined to flow along and disappear.
The retention of the memory is clearly linked to an identifying process. It is
not the simple task of the positivist historian, but it is a more unambiguous
sense of joining one’s fate in order to become stronger in the future.
The third calendar, however, makes everything messier. For Rosenzweig
has a strong interpretation of the need for both Judaism and Christianity.
Judaism stays within its own circle, a fire burning at the centre of the star,
and Christianity goes forth as rays of light. This mission of Christianity is
to convert the world to the truth of God’s will, to bring the other nations
into a community of redemption. This mission requires Rosenzweig to
articulate both the truth and the limitations of the pagan world. For
Rosenzweig, Christianity is always on the way, always converting pagan
aspects of the nations, but never consummated. Thus the world is not really
split between pagans, Christians and Jews, but only between Jews and the
others. The others are at once pagan and Christian, for becoming Christian
is the history of the world. But the conversion transpires in three dimensions
(borrowing heavily from Schelling). A Petrine church converts the body
and the polity; a Pauline church converts the soul and the mind; and the
Johannine church converts the culture. The third church is the most recent,
dating to the late eighteenth century, and includes Goethe, Schelling and
Hegel as church fathers. So to be Christian in the age of this last church is to
live in a culture that in its very secularity has become Christian (cf. Liberté,
Egalité, Fraternité – which Rosenzweig derives from the Johanine church).
The rediscovery of the Eastern church and the emancipation of the Jews are
hallmarks of this church. Love of the neighbour and the hurrying of the
kingdom of God are the tasks which have now moved outside the church,
into the streets and the squares, where culture is formed. In a challenging
way, this church does not build or dwell in church buildings, but dissem-
inates throughout the community, recruiting institutions and practices to
the task of redemption. The church in its expansion takes its laws from the
peoples it approaches, and so in this vast secularization, it Christianizes by
recasting institutions that were content to fight the flowing on of time (as
pagan temporality does) into institutions that bend time into the cycle of
eternity.
In order to do that Christian calendars must be more than the circles of
the Jewish reading of scripture. They cannot close within themselves, but
Messianic Epistemology: Thesis XV 205
Now the Church takes hold here and joins the celebration. It grows into
the people and its history, in that it accompanies its days of remem-
brance with its blessing. This is a piece of its mission to the nations that
it is pursuing, by throwing its transfiguring light on the branches of the
national life, it carries out a piece of its work on the way of redemption,
which is never anything else but as the sowing of eternity into the living.
(410–11/369)
The church as an institution asserts its own calendar along with the national
calendar. That is, not the central points of the Christian calendar (Christmas,
Easter, Pentecost, as well as the year of Sundays), but the holidays of the
specific church itself. The Protestant churches celebrate their founding,
their new beginning. The Roman Catholic Church celebrates the loyalty to
its tradition and its theology of the body of Christ. Indeed for Rosenzweig,
elsewhere, the procession of Corpus Christi becomes emblematic of the
expanding of the church outside the church into the city – as the procession
comes forth from the church. But here we have the intercalating of both
church holidays and national holidays – because the basic structure of the
circle of Christian holidays requires this addition. The national and church
events are now preserved as commemorated in the yearly cycles.
And the Roman Church most of all has not renounced directly the inter-
weaving into its own life of a sequence of feasts of the church year. It does
206 Walter Benjamin and History
this generally with the festivals, which in the course of the life of Mary
mirror the existence of the church itself. And it does this specifically even
more in the saints’ days, which in its limitless capacity to change, adapt
and grow, makes possible a completely intimate bond between it and the
local, the class, and the personal interests of the world, and so it inserts
this temporal and worldly always again into the eternal circle, which even
in these festivals that change with time and place, the eternal way of
redemption through place and time has already for a long time no longer
remained a circle, rather it has opened itself into a spiral. (Ibid.)
And Rosenzweig notes that the paradigm is the Roman Catholic Church
(the Petrine church), which so emphatically interweaves local events, whose
calendar is almost overloaded with saints’ days. Here we see the temporal
expression of the mission of Christianity: its way takes the pagan seriously,
takes it up into itself and does not merely assimilate it, but more importantly
changes itself. While the Jewish calendar can only integrate a new event by
fixing it, and so preserves the notion of a cycling but immutable eternity,
the Christian calendar is expanded and transformed as the outward motion
of the eternal way one encounters new events. Thus the Christian calendar
becomes a spiral, expanding outward each year. It takes in more of time and
allows its messianic futurity to shine on it. Such a spiralling out is neither a
line, nor a circle. It is also neither the dialectic moved by necessity, nor the
bittersweet remembrance of all that must eventually fade away. Rather, the
Christian calendar allows for remembrance and change. It is not constructed,
like the Jewish calendar, around the tension of the inner and the outer. And,
perhaps more interestingly, lacking a fixed inner circle, the spiral does not
disrupt itself as radically as the two circles of Jewish reading.
Or does it? We have so little further discussion by Rosenzweig of the spiral
itself that we are left with the general sensation of outward motion. The new
constitution or victory in battle reciprocally coordinates with the traditional
Christian holidays. They are dated by the Christian calendar (itself a transfor-
mation of the Roman): 4 July, or 14 July, or 1 May or, as we all know, 9/11.
These days are dated by the Christian calendar (even in Israel and Brooklyn
where the Jewish calendar is also in place). We remember them in the renewing
context of Christian time. Renewal requires a tension between the old and the
new, and so the next old one, the next pagan institution or pagan nation, to be
confronted by the Christian Western culture, is marked as not-yet Christian.
But the identity of the past is key to negotiating not only that future, but the
instability of the present: for it too is both not-yet Christian and Christian.
When the events enter the calendar, they are marked as one step further out
on the spiral (as being added from the last time around), as being intrinsically
becoming and not achieved. And so the unwinding of the spiral reveals the same
lack of necessity that we found in the circles within circles. A similar sense of the
demand of the messianic to pull it further out, but to whatever comes next.
Messianic Epistemology: Thesis XV 207
2 BENJAMIN’S THESIS XV
If we now return to our text, Thesis XV, we are faced with a series of key
questions for interpreting Benjamin’s work.
our present. Benjamin cites the uprising of the anecdote, because it does not
depend on empathy with the tale told, but allows us to see the reality of the
event in our time. He continues:
The true method for making things present is to place them in our space
(and not us in theirs). That is why only anecdotes have the power to move
us. The things, so placed before us, endure no mediating construction
from ‘major connections’ – This is also the sight of major past things
– Chartres Cathedral, the temple of Paestum – in truth they are received
in our space (no empathy for their builder or priests). We are not trans-
posed in them; they step into our life. – The same technique of nearness
is to be observed, calendrically, against epochs. (I°, 2)
Anecdotes make the characters come into our world. And so the great
monuments must be entered in our world, and not seen as a time-machine
that takes us back to theirs. They retain their life when we go and see them.
But the calendar also functions this way in relation to epochs. That is, the
past is not some hoary ancient event, but becomes part of our celebrations
and accounting of time. The distant epochs are lived again. Christmas is
not an event two thousand years ago, but rather happens each year with the
birth of new babies in the dark of midwinter. What he calls Eingedenken in
Thesis XV here is vergegenwärtigen – a making-present. The calendar draws
the past near: ‘[iii] The calendar, therefore, does not count time like clocks.
They are the monuments of an historical consciousness, and for a hundred
years in Europe not even the slightest trace of them appears’. The calendar is
not like a clock, for Benjamin, but we can readily see that it is very much like
a clock for Rosenzweig. The next hour is a repetition of this hour, and the
hour, as we saw, is not the tick-tock of the clock. The clock, it seems to me,
for Benjamin is the inability of time to cycle, but only to move in an empty
way forwards. Precisely because the calendar brings the past forward, brings
it near, it produces our past, that is the past that is alive for us. Calendars
are monumental: public, 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 Baudelaire
from 1939, Benjamin wrote: ‘Correspondences are the data of remembrance
[Eingedenkens]. These are not historical but rather the data of prehistory.
What makes festival days grand and meaningful is the encounter with an
earlier life’ (GS 1.2: 638/SW 4: 333–4). We will return to correspondences (a
term of Baudelaire’s), but here we see a notion of festival days that connects
not to historical events, but to prehistorical ones, events that have a hold on
us not because of their historical connection to us, but because they form
our categories of temporal existence. Like the visit to ancient sites, they are
a way for a past that exceeds the continuum of historical memory to intrude
into our time.
210 Walter Benjamin and History
And calendars are also punctuated, in the way that Rosenzweig noted.
Benjamin later comments:
Even the practice of marking off time as uniform, in the clock and calendar,
leaves extraneous bits. The heart of the calendar are the empty spaces, the
holidays. There quantity and quality merge, by breaking up, in a regular
way, the monotony of the standard units. The calendar is public, orderly, but
somehow heterogeneous. Rosenzweig’s clock’s chiming, weekly Sabbaths and
seasonal festivals all serve Benjamin by opening a space where the historical
continuum is broken open in a break in the temporal continuum.
But, says, Benjamin, they are no longer to be found in Europe (Thesis XV).
Here is the key conflict with the Rosenzweigian account: for Rosenzweig
held that the calendars are still doing their thing. That people live their own
time through the calendar. Surely we still have calendars! But Benjamin’s
point is more severe: the past does not live in the calendar anymore. The
modern culture has dispensed with the religious dimension of the calendar
particularly. That recent past, for Benjamin, is the time of the industrial and
consumerist transformation of Europe. Rosenzweig may have an accurate
picture of how the Jewish liturgical calendar is supposed to function, and
by extension other calendars, too, but the culture of Europe has abandoned
that manner of experiencing time and remembering history. Benjamin here
appears as the critic not of Rosenzweig’s theory of calendars and memory,
but of the world which has moved away, beyond, below such means of
remembering.
Perhaps we can, with the help of Rosenzweig’s three calendars, see just
what is now lost. That is, the Jewish eternal calendar might still suit the
small set of traditional Jews, who are eager to live outside of world-political
time. But it is hard to live through the 1930s and not conclude that that
calendar has become defunct, even for the religious Jews, and of course,
Benjamin’s world is filled with liberal and post-liberal Jews, for whom the
religious calendar holds no promise. Judgement Day is no longer New Year’s
Day for his world.
The key question is whether the enlarging spiral of Christianity as it
opens out to the secular world functions with its calendar. Does the spread
of Western culture bring about the progress on the way to the messianic, or,
on the contrary, has the spiral lost its bearings and become the spread of one
more pagan tale of war and conquest? While Rosenzweig offers true insight
into the development of modern culture, as a Jew looking at the secular-
Messianic Epistemology: Thesis XV 211
and also about the failure of the calendar. The quotation above claimed:
‘Correspondences are the data of remembrance [Eingedenkens]. These are
not historical but rather the data of prehistory. What makes festival days
grand and meaningful is the encounter with an earlier life’ (GS 1.2: 638/SW
4: 333–4). Baudelaire’s correspondences are between archaic monuments,
temples, hieroglyphs, etc., not simultaneous links. They are not quite
history, but rather the recollection of juxtapositions from the archaic past
to the present. In Baudelaire, moreover, they remain suspended. Benjamin
notices that the correspondences also fail, that the modern world corrodes
the possibility for a linking to the prehistory. But Baudelaire’s writing
evokes the no longer accessible correspondence. If Rosenzweig’s calendar can
envision the disruption of two historical sequences, the interruption of the
messianic then and now, then Baudelaire offers Benjamin a way of marking
the jumps from then to now that do not quite connect, that have been
corroded by the emergence of modern society. But Baudelaire still strives to
capture the correspondence in art, even the failed correspondence.
Benjamin’s historical work produces a new possibility for a remembering,
drawing on Baudelaire as well as Rosenzweig. The acts of remembrance
can be carried further in the work of the historian – a work that is not the
task of an isolated consciousness, but of a socially located interpreter. While
Rosenzweig had hoped to resuscitate the Jewish community in Germany at
the end of the First World War, Benjamin despairs of that community and
indeed of the modern society while living in Paris on the eve of the Second
World War. What is more important for us, however, is how the structuring
of interruption that Rosenzweig discovered can become a way, even a task,
for the historian.
Benjamin collected a set of theoretical reflections in a folder entitled
‘Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress’. These reflections are roughly
contemporaneous with the Theses, and while they are also among the most
commented-upon texts in his writings, we can attend to the specific relation
to the calendar, and specifically to the circles within circles of the Jewish
calendar. If we imagine those circles scattered, so that each circle has disin-
tegrated, neither one held together by the practice of the other, we can begin
to see how the dialectical images might be conceived.
The historical index of the images says not only that they belong to a
determinate time, it says, above all, that they first become legible in a
determinate time. And indeed this ‘to be legible’ is reached in a deter-
minate critical point in the motion into its interior. Every present is
determined through these images, those that are synchronic with it: every
now is the now of a determinate knowability. In it the truth is loaded with
time to the point of exploding. (This explosion, is nothing other than
the death of the intention, which coincides therefore with the birth of
genuine historical time, the time of truth.) (N3, 1)
Messianic Epistemology: Thesis XV 213
It is not that what is past throws its light on what is present, or that what
is present throws its light on what is past, rather the image is that in which
the past and the present meet in a lightning flash in a constellation. In other
words: image is the dialectic at a standstill. While the relation of the present
to the past is a purely temporal one, the relation of the gone to the now is
a dialectical one: its nature is not temporal but imaged. Only dialectical
images are genuinely historical, that means, not archaic images. (N2a, 3)
The two remain apart, and do not illuminate each other (they do not
consummate a correspondence). Rather, they collide in an image, a specific
conjunction of the past and the present. Stripped out of the cycles of litur-
gical calendars, we still have a moment of arrest in the present (and in the
past). The two moments interrupt each other. This rhythm is structured so
that the past and present are related without becoming identified. It is not
that the present is assimilated to the past, a mythic repetition of what has
already happened where ‘the past throws its light on what is present’. For
the 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 ‘the
present throws its light on what is past’. At each now there is a new reading
of a past image, but what is read is not identical or necessarily easily assim-
ilated into the present. Like a calendrical moment, the past and present
meet, but now only in a flash, without the hour’s beginning, middle and
end. The juxtaposition is not, as in Rosenzweig, a figure (Gestalt), but rather
a constellation, a set of discrete stars. The flash prevents any dialectic that
has its own necessary motor, its own ongoing, progressive zigzag through
suffering and reconciliation. To interrupt the dialectic is to catch dialectic at
a standstill – a relation of past and present that borrows no dynamic inherent
connectivity. Which is not to say that it is merely a positing of two points
in time. From the present to the past is temporal: looking back measures a
time that is elapsed, a gap from here to there. But the past is related to the
present through its legibility in the now. The gone is not merely directed
toward a future which now occurs, but is rather itself bound up with the
now of reading in so far as the past is past. Thus the past appears through
214 Walter Benjamin and History
the image, through a dialectical relation with the present; while the present
looks back in a simply temporal way. History has become these dialectical
images, in contrast to the archaic images. The latter would be the images
that do not measure the distance that time marks, but merely repeat a
non-temporal myth – obliterating time, change and the discontinuity that
governs the signifying of the past.
But the historian engages, then, in a specific kind of remnant of the
calendar. And while Rosenzweig could find eternity entering time and, indeed,
the messianic interrupting in a social practice, for Benjamin modernity has
debased the calendar, leaving the historian the task of framing the dialectical
images, of engaging in the danger of a reading doubling of then and now.
Here arises that ‘weak messianic force’ of Thesis II. In contrast to a strong
force, which could force the future with a social movement or revolution, the
historian struggles to redeem the past, and in redeeming the past to unstick
the present from its seemingly necessary future.
Our final question, however, then turns to the relation of the messianic
as a theological category and its reactivation as a historiographic practice.
The fascination for the scholars of Benjamin has lain in the question of how
theological his work is. The texts are familiar – the ink blotter, the midget,
the promise in Thesis B of the straight gate – and, if not overworked, at
least well-explored. Benjamin is emphatic about being theological. But he
surely is not pious, nor engaged in Rosenzweig’s renaissance. If we put him
in the context of Buber, Scholem and Rosenzweig, he shares a passion about
theology and the exigencies of the messianic. But of all four of those, his
work holds a special fascination for us: in our moment of reading. I suggest
that the ghost, the spectre of theology has a great appeal for us. For many
of us, religious renaissance is beyond our range. Such a holiday calendar has
become impossible. It is like an artefact of a vanished civilization. Except
that the calendars still lurk behind our deformed working calendar. The act
of remembrance that binds our events with those of the past, dialectically
and with the needed standstill, is lacking in our calendar. But we yearn for
it, with Yom Ha Shoah (Holocaust Day), and with 9/11 – we want to be
able to remember in that messianic way, where the press forward of time
is arrested by a breakup of history in the past. The triumph of chronology
– of the line – leads us to desire a simple circle. And in such a moment the
practice of the circle within the circle (and the spiral), serves as a critique
of lines and simple circles. Benjamin remembers those holiday circles in the
midst of framing his own dialectics of points. They offer a dialectic of past
and present that opens the future more radically than the simple circles of
fate and the liberal myth of progress. They charge the present with some gap
from the past, exploding the continuum of history and, if they are no longer
potent, re-examining them alerts Benjamin and his readers to a messianic
dialectical relation with the past. The messianic charge from the spinning
of the circles is now dispersed into the dialectical images.
13
NON-MESSIANIC POLITICAL
THEOLOGY IN 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 the
European Left in the face of fascism as well as the Hitler–Stalin pact are
modulated through a persistent fascination with, and enquiry into, political
theology. His thoughts on social democracy and communism are thus shaped
by a deeper meditation upon the possible relationship between historical
materialism and theology. However, the character of this relationship in the
‘On Concept of History’ is usually framed in terms of the question of the
present and immediate future of revolutionary action, framed as the choice
between catastrophe and the messianic end of history. However, another
understanding of the future is also possible, one that complicates this choice
by means of locating political theology in a cosmo-politics dedicated to the
liberation not only of humanity, but also of the whole of creation.
The first thesis establishes a complicated scenario regarding the relationship
between historical materialism and theology. Thesis I is about the famous
chess-playing automaton who could ‘respond to every move of a chess-player
with a counter-move’ and always win. The puppet with the hookah made
the moves on a table under which, concealed by mirrors, sat a ‘hunchbacked
dwarf’ who controlled the puppet. There are many enigmatic features to this
scenario – Benjamin had already played with the theme of the hidden dwarf
who controlled illusion in ‘Rastelli’s Story’ (SW 3: 96) – but the terms of the
analogy that he goes on to draw are fairly clear. He imagines a ‘philosophical
counterpart to this apparatus’ in which the puppet is historical materialism
and the dwarf theology ‘which today, as we know, is small and ugly and has
to be kept out of sight’. Together, historical materialism and theology can
win all the time, political theology thus providing a winning combination.
The nature of the political theology or combination of historical
materialism and theology intimated in ‘philosophical counterpart’ to the
216 Walter Benjamin and History
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 questions
provoked by this fragment, and thus indirectly by the political theology
of Weber. It marks an important turn in the development of Benjamin’s
political theology whose consequences still inform the ‘On Concept of
History’.
‘Capitalism as Religion’ closed a phase of social, political and religious
reflection that was rooted in Benjamin’s principled opposition to the First
World War and his exile in Switzerland. Benjamin’s focus on issues of political
theology, notably the critique of theocracy, was indebted to a diverse range of
influences ranging from the ‘new thinking’ represented by a group of writers
working in the philosophy and sociology of religion comprising Florens
Christian Rang, Eugen Rosenstock and Franz Rosenzweig to the Catholic
Dadaism of Hugo Ball, the neo-Marxism of Ernst Bloch and above all the
utopian science fiction of Paul Scheerbart. While only fragments from this
period have survived – the major work, Die wahre Politiker, inspired by the
ideas of Scheerbart being lost – it is nevertheless possible to trace an outline
of the main concerns of Benjamin’s political theology from what remains.
This will provide the context for understanding his interpretation of Weber’s
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and also the reason for its
shattering impact on his thought.
The overall direction of Benjamin’s early political theology is evident in
a series of five numbered reflections from 1919–20, the first, ‘World and
Time’, giving the editor’s title to the entire collection. The first reflection on
revelation and its relationship to the end of history introduces the overall
problem of the place of the divine in the secular or temporal sphere. The
exploration of this problem begins with a critique of the political theology
of Catholicism. Benjamin criticizes ‘Catholicism’ for its ecclesiastical organ-
ization or ‘the (false, secular) theocracy’ (SW 1: 226). The establishment of
the church is described as ‘the process of the development of anarchy’ since
‘authentic divine power can manifest itself other than destructively only in the
world to come (the world of fulfilment)’ (SW 1: 226). Here Benjamin adopts
the position of the adversaries of the church criticized by Augustine in the
City of God, the foundational text of ecclesiology.
Benjamin radicalizes his opposition by applying his critique of theocracy
to any form of legally regulated social organization. The implications of this
step become evident in the Critique of Violence (published, like the original
1905 essay by Weber in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik
in 1921) where ‘divine violence’ is held to be destructive of all law. In this
text Benjamin focuses on the destructive, revolutionary aspect of divine
violence, whereas in ‘World and Time’ he pays more attention to the slow
self-destruction of theocracy. Benjamin claims that ‘where divine power
enters the world it breathes destruction’ whether in its revolutionary or its
218 Walter Benjamin and History
organized forms since ‘in this world nothing constant and no organisation
can be based on divine power, let alone domination as its supreme principle’
(SW 1: 226). While the basis of this claim is nowhere explicitly defended at
length by Benjamin, it is evidently a forceful if underdeveloped critique of
any attempt to give a transcendental legitimacy to an organizational form,
whether it be church or political party.
Benjamin follows the rejection of Catholic political theology with his
own ‘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 legislation
decreed by religion’ – but rather ‘legislation governing the realm of the body
in the broadest sense . . . they determine the location and method of direct
divine intervention’ (SW 1: 226). It is on the border of this intervention that
Benjamin locates ‘the zone of politics, of the profane, of a bodily realm that
is without law in a religious sense’ (SW 1: 226). The distinction between the
divine and the profane legislations of the body – the latter being political
but without law – presents severe problems to Benjamin, both within ‘World
and Time’ itself, but more intensely after reading Weber, whose thesis
precisely breaks down the distinction between the religious and the secular
governance of the body.
The fourth of the series of reflections in ‘World and Time’ begins to
unravel the distinction between a divine immediacy and the ‘zone of politics’.
First of all, ‘in its present state, the social is a manifestation of spectral and
demonic powers’ (SW 1: 227), that is, the ‘zone of politics’ already stands
in a relation to the divine. This is exemplified in the Critique of Violence by
the institution of the police as ‘a nowhere tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly
presence in the life of civilized states’ ruling in the interstices between
sovereign and executive power. This position might be consistent with
Benjamin’s critique of theocracy whose object is precisely such illegitimate
mediations of the divine in the secular or profane realm.
Yet the problem of how to detect, criticize or overcome this theocratic
tendency is avoided. Benjamin instead insists on the immediacy of revelation:
‘The divine manifests itself in only in revolutionary force. Only in the
community [Gemeinschaft], nowhere in “social organisations” does the
divine manifest itself either with force or without’ (SW 1: 227). Such a
criterion for the separation of divine and profane is not itself immune to
theocratic abuse – for every theocracy legitimates its organization by the
claim of divine manifestation to the community it serves/dominates. This
holds not only for ecclesiastical but also for political theocracies, as when,
in the Critique of Violence, Benjamin identifies the divine community with
the anarchistic ‘proletarian general strike’ in which the proletariat is the
Non-Messianic Political Theology in ‘On the Concept of History’ 219
led Weber to analyse the relationship between the ‘spirit’ of capitalism and
Calvinist Protestantism in terms of Goethe’s concept of ‘elective affinity’
(Wahlverwandschaft).
Weber analysed the elective affinity between Protestantism and capitalism
in terms of the partial translation/mutation of a rigorous religious doctrine
into everyday economic behaviour. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism (especially in the remarkable footnotes) Weber described how
the rigorously transcendent doctrine of predestination was translated into
the secular concept of the ‘vocation’. The anxieties provoked in the early
generation of Protestants by the inscrutability of the divine will in its choice
of the elect and its relation to earthly business and social concerns led the
Calvinist spiritual advisers to elaborate as series of casuistic responses that,
Weber showed, crystallized into an economic ethic. In 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 and
the 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 by
means of a decentralized economic ethic tangible only in its effects.
The opening sentence of Benjamin’s response to Weber recapitulates
one of Weber’s theses: that the economic ethic of capitalism ‘serves essen-
tially to allay the same anxieties, torments and disturbances to which the
so-called religions offered answers’ (SW 1: 288). However, prompted by
the Protestant ethic Benjamin drew an even more radical conclusion from
this than Weber’s own cautious claims for an ‘elective affinity’ between
Protestantism and capitalism. For Benjamin, capitalism is ‘not merely,
as Weber believes, a formation conditioned by religion, but an . . . essen-
tially religious phenomenon’ (SW 1: 289). In effect, Benjamin proposes
to transform Weber’s elective affinity into an identity – Protestantism and
capitalism are not mutually related, but are identical. Such an interpretation
of Goethe’s concept as a veiled identity was developed by Benjamin in his
essay Goethe’s Elective Affinities (see SW 1: 346 and 350–51), written at the
same time as ‘Capitalism as Religion’. While Weber, in the concluding lines
of his essay, regarded capitalism as having cast off its religious origins and to
have relegated its elective 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 and
religion Benjamin is acknowledging the dissolution of the separation of
the divine and the secular. This dissolution, moreover, is more serious even
than the theocratic organization of the divine represented by Catholicism,
since with ‘capitalism as religion’ the divine invades not only the ‘zone of
the political’ but also the realm of the body. The implication is that one
of the organizing distinctions of Benjamin’s political thought has broken
Non-Messianic Political Theology in ‘On the Concept of History’ 221
down before the realization that capitalism – a form of social and political
organization – is religion and that, consequently, it fulfils the definition
of theocracy. The secularization thesis is here inverted: it is is not that the
secular takes over the space vacated by the religious, but that the religious
becomes identified with the secular.
Benjamin surveys the implications of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism for his social and political theory through two routes: a
critique of Weber’s account of the genesis of capitalism and a description
of the structural characteristics of capitalism as religion. The basic claim
is that ‘the Christianity of the Reformation period did not favour the
growth of capitalism; instead it transformed itself into capitalism’ (SW 1:
290). This is of course opposed to Weber, who saw the elective affinity
between capitalism and Protestantism as one of a number of factors for
the development of modern capitalism. Additional important factors for
Weber included the bureaucratization of political administration, the rise of
standing armies and military discipline and changes in broader economic
organization. Benjamin, however, insists that ‘Capitalism has developed as
a parasite of Christianity . . . until it reached the point where Christianity’s
history is essentially that of its parasite – that is to say, of capitalism’ (SW
1: 289). The questions raised in these genetic claims and their reduction
of elective affinity to identity are clarified by Benjamin’s structural view of
capitalist religion.
Benjamin claims that there are three aspects of the ‘religious structure of
capitalism’ (although he adds a fourth, a secret codicil): it is (1) a cult that
(2) makes total claims on its members through (3) creating ‘guilt and not
atonement’ (SW 1: 288). In the first place, Benjamin claims that capitalism
is 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 in
the sense of the Catholic Church that distributes salvation according to a
theologically legitimated system of sacraments. Nevertheless, capitalism is
‘perhaps the most extreme [cultic religion] that ever existed’ (SW 1: 288) in
that its claims are total: ‘things have meaning only in their relationship to
the cult’ (SW 1: 288), or, in the language of historical materialism, exchange
value dominates use value. Another aspect of the total character of the
cult is that it has no weekdays, for ‘there is no day that is not a feast day
. . . each day commands the utter fealty of each worshipper’ (SW 1: 288).
Benjamin sustains this ruthless inversion of Weber’s secularization thesis by
his third structural claim, that capitalism is a religion that creates guilt/debt
(Schuld).
Benjamin devotes most attention to the third claim, pushing Weber’s
view of the ‘iron cage’ of modern bureaucratic capitalism to its limit
through reflections on Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. Central to his argument
is the expansive character of capitalism, here interpreted not only on a
global but even on a cosmic scale. Benjamin understands capitalism as not
222 Walter Benjamin and History
only creating guilt/debt through its reduction of all value to money or the
measure of exchange value, but also as universalizing guilt/debt to implicate
even God in universal despair: ‘Capitalism is entirely without precedent, in
that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete
destruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair itself becomes
a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation’
(SW 1: 289). At this point, God is not dead but has been ‘incorporated
into human existence’ or has become totally immanent: for Benjamin this
moment marks the end of the epoch of the ‘human’ and the beginning of
the superhuman.
Benjamin’s observation that Nietzsche’s superman is ‘the first to recognize
the religion of capitalism and to bring it to fulfilment’ (SW 1: 289) offers
an important clue to his understanding of the cultic nature of capitalism
as religion. For Nietzsche, the superman is the one capable of willing the
eternal return rather than suffer it as the greatest weight. Consequently,
it can be assumed that the cultic ritual of capitalism for Benjamin is
repetition. The suffering of this repetition (as in Weber’s prediction of
the millennial future of the ‘iron cage’) as a burden is contrasted with its
affirmation that effects a transformation, creating something new in an
affirmed repetition. Thus Benjamin can claim that Nietzsche’s superman
is both the affirmation and destruction of capitalism as religion. On the
one hand, ‘the paradigm of capitalist religious thought is magnificently
formulated in Nietzsche’s philosophy’, while on the other ‘the idea of the
superman transposes the apocalyptic “leap” not into conversion, atonement,
purification and penance, but into an apparently steady, though in the final
analysis explosive and discontinuous intensification’ (SW 1: 289). Benjamin
sees a similar outcome in Marx, namely that a capitalism that is affirmed
as capitalism already becomes something else: ‘Marx is a similar case: the
capitalism that refuses to change course becomes socialism by means of the
simple and compound interest that are functions of Schuld ’ (SW 1: 289).
So with Freud, the intensification of repetition qualitatively transforms
inherited guilt/debt.
Benjamin’s readings of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud in terms of their
alleged views on the self-overcoming of capitalism rest on a logic dependent
on the fourth appropriately concealed feature of capitalism as religion. This
concerns the demonic character of capitalism – the fact that the secret of its
destruction is hidden. Benjamin claims that capitalism’s ‘God is hidden from
it and may be addressed only when his guilt is at its zenith’ – the secret of the
divinity of capitalism lies in its ‘immaturity’ (SW 1: 129). Capitalism extends
its measure of value ‘to the point where the universe has been taken over by
that despair that is actually its secret hope’ (SW 1: 289). When there is only
repetition then the affirmation of it creates a novelty and thus breaks the
immanence of repetition. It is at this zenith of immanence that divinity can
be affirmed and become again transcendent. For Benjamin this may consist
Non-Messianic Political Theology in ‘On the Concept of History’ 223
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 see
in Fourier, above all else, a great humorist. The cracking open of natural
teleology proceeds in accordance with the plan of humour’ (W8a, 5). In
place of the Protestant ethic embraced by social democracy emerges a notion
of technology that releases rather than contains energy.
Perhaps the most extra-ordinary development of the cosmo–political–
technological development of the political theology of the ‘On Concept of
History’ is a fragment on Scheerbart from 1940. With it Benjamin returns
to the original inspiration of his political theology, a reading of Scheerbart
in 1914 shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. He recognizes
in Scheerbart almost ‘the twin brother of Fourier’ both of whom are able
to mock current humanity in the name of a faith in ‘the humanity of the
future’ (SW 4: 387). The emergence of this humanity is related to the
development of a liberatory technology: an idea which as seen marks a
development of political theology. Benjamin notes that this non-messianic
possibility of a liberated future invoked by Scheerbart involved ‘a humanity
which had deployed its full range of technology and put it to human use.
To achieve this state of affairs, Scheerbart believed that two conditions were
essential: first people should discard the base and primitive idea that the
task was to ‘exploit’ the forces of nature; second, they should be true to the
conviction that technology, by liberating human beings, would fraternally
liberate the whole of creation’ (SW 4:386). With the latter idea of a cosmic
liberation achieved through technology the Benjamin of 1940 returns to the
utopian insight of the Benjamin of 1916 who wrote ‘On Language as Such
and on the Language of Man’.
The presence of a non-messianic political theology in the ‘On Concept
of History’ does not replace the messianic, but situates it in a more complex
configuration. The middle and the final theses perhaps should be seen as
posing an alternative within the alternative to catastrophe. Decision, in this
case, would not be simply between the alternatives of a catastrophic or the
messianic end of history, but between the end of history and its radical and
immanent transformation.
Notes
CHAPTER 1
1 See, for example, Arthur Danto, The 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 as
the hymns are words from which belief has gone. The tables of the gods provide no
spiritual food and drink, and in his games and festivals man no longer recovers the
joyful consciousness of his unity with the divine.’ G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of the
Spirit (1807), trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 455. ‘No
matter how excellent we find the statues of the Greek gods . . . it is no help; we bow
the knee no longer.’ Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975), 1:103.
3 See R. Tiedemann, Studien zur Philosophie Walter Benjamins (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1973); P. Bürger, ‘Walter Benjamin: Contribution à une théorie de la culture-
contemporaine’, Revue d’Esthétique, new series 1 (1981): 27; R. Rochlitz, ‘Walter
Benjamin: 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 transforming
of course – the intimidating and dogmatic liturgy of the old rituals of display, the
old monstrances (ostensions) of images. This fundamental aspect would need a specific
analysis 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 Kunstgeschichte
heute, 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’Art
contemporain 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
228 Walter Benjamin and History
that comes back, it is the coming back that is the same as what is becoming’ [my
translation].
15 [My translation]. See G. Didi-Huberman, Devant l’ image: Question 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 the
dialectic 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 use
of 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), in
particular. 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 der
bildenden 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 us
a definitive interpretation, would itself be greatly in need of such an interpretation. [my
translation].
22 Regarding Mondrian, for example, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn has recently proved to
be unfair and almost naive in criticizing Bois’ interpretation because it drops the
theosophical paradigm. Lebensztejn makes the criticism with as much vehemence as
if Bois were speaking of Masaccio’s Trinity while spurning the Christian dogma that
provided its iconographical programme. J.-C. Lebensztejn, review of the exhibition
Piet Mondrian: 1872–1944 [La Haye, Washington, New York], Cahiers du Musée
national d’art moderne 52 (1995): 139–40. Far from ignoring the role of Theosophy in
Mondrian’s art, Bois says it ‘plays the role of a detonator, and it is very probable that
Mondrian would have remained a talented provincial landscape artist if he had not
come into contact with it’. Bois, ‘L’Iconoclaste’, p. 329 [my translation]. Lebensztejn
pretends to ignore the obvious fact that the philosophical or religious commitment of
a twentieth-century artist cannot be compared with an iconographical programme of
the quattrocento. It is the very notion of programme that is in the question here – a
notion whose deconstruction abstract art has obviously completed, along with the
deconstruction of the entire traditional iconographical approach.
Nonetheless, without articulating it clearly, Lebensztejn is getting to the heart
of the problem, which concerns the logical and temporal structure to be drawn from
the relations in play – ambiguous, critical relations – between idealism and material
engagement (plastic engagement as such), between the discourse of meanings laid
claim to and the formal labour actually performed. It is probable that Bois has not
yet completely articulated that structure in writing that ‘it is the materiality of the
painting itself that [in Mondrian] guarantees the efficacy of his “struggle against
matter” ’ (‘L’Iconoclaste’, p. 330 [my translation]). Significantly, it is at that moment
in his analysis that Bois comes closest to the question of the dialectic. A remarkable
analysis of this type of dialectical reversal has also been done for the case of Paul
Notes 229
51 See B. Newman, ‘Frontiers of Space: Interview with Dorothy Gees Seckler’ (1962), in
Selected Writing, p. 251: ‘Instead of using outlines, instead of making shapes or setting
off spaces, my drawing declares the space. Instead of working with the remnants of
space, I work with the whole space.’
52 Bois, ‘Perceiving Newman’, p. 195 and pp. 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 (in
another version corrected by Newman himself).
58 In Lebensztejn’s very apt expression in ‘Homme nouveau, art radical’, p. 327 [my
translation].
59 On the notion of the ‘subjectile’, see J. Clay, ‘Onguents, fards, pollens’, in Bonjour
Monsieur Manet (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1983), pp. 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 work
that the work itself begins to have an effect on me. Just as I affect the canvas, so does
the canvas affect me.’
61 In particular, this is the lesson of Gilles Deleuze’s remarkable analysis of the work of
Samuel 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 may
be. With the trace, we grasp the thing; with the aura, the thing becomes our master’
(M16a, 4, my translation).
63 See Didi-Huberman, Devant l’ image, pp. 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 explored
by Eduardo Cadava in Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Indeed, it is only as a consequence of Cadava’s
study that this essay can be written, and, it is as a contribution to Cadava’s study that
this 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, at
times, conflicted role photography performs within that writing.
2 Only the eye, Benjamin argues, can keep up with speech, something the hand cannot
do: ‘since the eye perceives more quickly than the hand can draw, the process of
pictorial reproduction was enormously accelerated’ (GS 1.2: 475/SW 4: 253).
232 Walter Benjamin and History
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 the
translation.
4 In the collection of Atget’s photographs Benjamin was familiar with, Lichtbilder (Paris
and Leipzig: Henri Joquières, 1930), none of the explicit street scenes (where the focus
of the image is on the street rather than a building or something along or in the street)
exhibit human 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 ghostly
presence of figures who left the frame before the end of the exposure can be seen, in
others, there are figures who remain throughout the exposure. These exceptions do
not necessarily contradict the observations Benjamin makes after seeing only the 1930
volume. Little is known of Atget’s intentions in these photographs – whether or not the
presence of such figures is incidental to these intentions.
5 The verb treten recurs eight times and frequently, as here, to express when something
appears 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 Benjamin
on photography, remarks: ‘not only is the photograph an object upon which Benjamin
may 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: ‘in
principle the work of art has always been reproducible’ (GS 1.2: 474/SW 4: 252); and in
a note on Raphael’s Sistine Madonna Benjamin speaks of ‘the primary exhibition value
of Raphael’s painting’ (GS 1.2: 483n11/SW 4: 274n15). The divide between cult and
aura on the one hand, and the exhibitional on the other is not so absolute as to preclude
the presence of exhibitionality already within the history of the auratic. This sense is
reinforced when Benjamin speaks of the anticipation of one form within another: ‘Just
as the illustrated newspaper virtually lay hidden within lithography, so the sound 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, used
here to describe the holding of the true image of the past, is also used in Benjamin’s
translation of Monglond. There it describes what the photographic plate does to the
past.
11 Benjamin uses the technical word for developer here: Entwickler.
12 See Thesis VI: ‘Articulating the past does not mean recognizing it “the way it was”’ (GS
1.2: 695/SW 4: 391).
13 Even historicism is subject to this condition. In Thesis XVI, Benjamin writes,
‘Historicism offers the “eternal” image [Bild ] of the past’ (GS 1.2: 702/SW 4: 396).
14 On the interruptive force of this time, see Andrew Benjamin, ‘Benjamin’s Modernity’, in
The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), pp. 97-114; repr. in Andrew Benjamin, Style and Time: Essays on
the Politics of Appearance (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), Ch. 1.
Notes 233
15 This passage reoccurs, virtually unchanged except for the removal of quotation marks
around ‘Ausschreiten’, the replacement of photography by camera, and the addition of
two examples (picking up a cigarette lighter or a spoon; however, stepping remains the
primary example) in the third version of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical
Reproducibility’ (GS 1.2: 500/SW 4: 266). This property of photography is also stated
earlier in the third version (‘photography can bring out aspects of the original that
are accessible only to the lens (which is adjustable and can easily change viewpoint)
but not to the human eye; or it can use certain processes, such as enlargement or slow
motion, to record images which escape natural optics altogether’ (GS 1.2: 476/SW 4:
254). On the relation of photography to psychoanalysis in Benjamin, which could only
be treated here at the risk of repeating the problematic it brings to light as an example,
see Cadava, Words of Light, pp. 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 means
by which an art becomes founded on a new practice, writes ‘stepped’: ‘An die Stelle
ihrer Fundierung aufs Ritual ist ihre Fundierung auf eine andere Praxis getreten:
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 sentences
of the ‘Reproducibility’ essay: ‘To an ever increasing degree, the work reproduced
becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility’. What is reproduced,
the work, is already the reproduction of itself as a work designed to be reproduced.
Herein lies its principle of reproducibility. The work is the image of a reproducibility
that it reproduces itself in and through this image. Here, what would be the negative
in the photographic sense – the principle of reproducibility – enables but also becomes
what is reproduced as it is subsumed into the reproduced image or work. Such is the
work of art heralded by the advent of photography for Benjamin.
20 The closest Benjamin comes to invoking explicitly an inversion in ‘On the Concept of
History’ is when he speaks in Thesis VII of brushing history against the grain (GS 1.2:
697/SW 4: 392).
21 Within the history inaugurated by this change in the artistic task, the hand will
eventually be reduced to mere gesture but does not disappeare completely, it becomes
a sign. On this development, Benjamin cites Valéry: ‘Just as water, gas, and electricity
are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs with minimal effort, so
we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear
at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign’ (GS 1.2: 475/SW 4: 253).
22 The flash is referred to three times in ‘On the Concept of History’ (Theses V, VI, and
VII); in Convolute N of the Arcades Project it recurs 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 Project
does Benjamin speak of an overcoming or Überwindung: ‘The overcoming of the
concept of “progress” and the overcoming of the concept of “period of decline” are one
and the same thing’ (N2, 5). Yet, such overcoming, as Benjamin attests to, is not the
end of these concepts – an insight that ensures the reproducibility of what Benjamin
calls the dialectical image since such concepts carry with them a ‘secret index’ (GS 1.2:
693/SW 4: 380; Thesis II) to such an image.
24 In this respect, the movement from das blickende Auge to Augenblick repeats the
relation of the eye to the image in photography. The image that the eye looking into
the lens sees can be read as the look of that eye – the image as the Augenblick of das
blickende Auge is already an effect of photography, of technology. Here, what is retained
234 Walter Benjamin and History
in the photographic image is not the look of things but the look in which things are
seen.
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 to
show’ (N1a, 8).
26 In an entry from Convolute N which can be read as a virtual draft (but with slight
variations) for the entry just cited from the Arcades Project also states this coming
together in the form of a stepping: zusammentreten (N2a, 3).
27 That progression and continuity define a temporal relation between what-has-been and
the now is also made explicit in N2a, 3.
28 This phrase was also evoked at the end of the Benjamin’s 1933 text ‘On the Mimetic
Faculty’. In this context, Benjamin states that ‘such reading is the most ancient reading
prior to all languages’ (GS 2.1: 213/SW 2: 722). In this same text, language, as ‘the
nexus of meaning of words or sentences’, is ‘the bearer through which, like a flash,
similarity appears’ (GS 2.1: 213/SW 2: 722). If it is through the same flash that the
dialectical image appears or comes to light – the light of this flash – then what could
be more closely related to similarity than das bildliche Bild?
29 ‘In it [the now of recognizability], truth is charged to the bursting point with time’
(N3, 1). This bursting (zerspringen) can be related to the image in which Benjamin
speaks of ‘the present as now-time shot through [eingespringt] with splinters of
messianic time’ (GS 1.2: 704/SW 4: 397; Thesis A).
30 Without reference to this aspect of the dialectical image, Sylviane Agacinski speaks
of the photographic image in these terms: ‘In stopping time, in fi xing the imprint of
things in a motionless image that the gaze can now explore, any photo offers, forever,
the never seen’ (‘Historical Polemic: The Modernity of Photography’, in Time Passing
[New York: Columbia University Press, 2003], pp. 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 this
image. For a searching and provocative reading of this relation, see Andrew Benjamin,
‘Being Roman Now: The Time of Fashion. A Commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “On
the Concept of History” XIV’, in Style and Time, Ch. 2.
32 On the ‘timeliness’ of the Messiah and on how this assures that only the Messiah has
messianicity, see Werner Hamacher, ‘“Now”: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time’ in
the next chapter of this volume, p. 67–8.
CHAPTER 3
The translations of Walter Benjamin’s works have occasionally been modified in
keeping with the emphasis in the development of the argument.
1 In the notes on Kafka, Benjamin similarly addresses a revolutionary weakness:
‘Revolutionary energy and weakness are for Kafka two sides of one and the same state.
His weakness, his dilettantism, his unpreparedness are revolutionary’ (GS 2.3: 1194).
2 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN:
Hacking, 1996), B 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 messianic
time. And that was a good thing to do. Disaster sets in with the social democracy
elevating this idea to an ‘ideal’. In Neo-Kantian theory, the ideal was 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 classless
society had been defined as an infinite task the empty homogeneous time was
transformed as it were into an anteroom where one could wait more or less calmly
for the onset of the revolutionary situation. There is, in reality, one moment that
did not carry with it its revolutionary chance – it just needs to be defined as a
specific one, namely as the chance of an entirely new solution in the face of an
entirely new task’ (GS 1.3: 1231).
It will not be necessary to point out that the social democratic ideals, which Benjamin
blames for the passivity of the working class in the face of National Socialism, were
promulgated as regulative ideas in social philosophy – in particular in Germany – even
after the Second World War. They still dominate the discussion today.
5 In particular when reading Thesis XVII and its emphatic talk about arrest and
monad, one should keep in mind that probably as early as 1913, but no later than
1917, Benjamin had read Husserl’s essay ‘Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft’ from
the journal Logos (which was published during 1910–11), and got to know the first
major attempt of a philosophical critique of historicism and at the same time of
psychologism and scientific objectivism (see the letter to Franz Sachs, 11 July 1913 and
the one to Gershom Scholem, 23 December 1917, which was important for Benjamin’s
dissertation plans on the philosophy of history [GB 1: 141–4 and 406–11]). On the
decisive p. 50 of his Logos essay Husserl summarizes in a few sentences some of his most
important thoughts from his 1905 lectures on the ‘phenomenology of internal time
consciousness’, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, which – edited by
Edith 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 for
the historico-critical introduction to his Arcades Project, from which the ‘Theses’ later
emerged. In the Logos essay the psychic is said to be ‘an experience [Erlebnis] viewed
in reflection, appearing as self through itself, in an absolute flow, as Now [and thus
enters] into a “monadic” unity of consciousness’. Husserl complemented the motives
of absolute reflection, of the Now and of the monadic unity – which will play a most
important role in Benjamin’s work – by characterizing this ‘monadic’ unity and the
limitless flow of phenomena as ‘a continuous intentional line, which is, as it were, the
index of the all-penetrating unity’. This intentional line – the index – is for Husserl
the ‘line of the beginning and endless immanent “time”, of a time’ – as Husserl stresses
– ‘that is not measured by any chronometer’. (This ‘immanent’ time Husserl talks
about is, as in the lectures, the time of the internal time consciousness, in contrast
to the ‘objective’ or ‘transcendental’ time which can be measured by chronometers).
The fact that at this point many more convergences between Husserl and Benjamin’s
motives accumulate can hardly be a coincidence. Nor can it be a coincidence that
Benjamin’s attacks in the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ are directed at the
concept of ‘empathy’, which is central in the Logos essay and is also central to the
earlier works of Moritz Geiger, a pupil of Husserl’s, with whom Benjamin studied in
Munich. At this point, I can go only briefly into the relevant convergence between
Husserl’s lectures on internal time-consciousness and Benjamin’s notes from the late
1930s: they are mainly found in the conceptions of the ‘image’ and of the ‘protention
of re-remembering’. Husserl writes in section 24: ‘Each remembrance contains inten-
tions of expectation, whose fulfilment leads to the present’. And: ‘The re-remembering
is not expectation, but it does have a horizon directed towards the future, the future
of the re-remembered’ [Martin Heidegger ed.], The Phenomenology of Internal Time-
Consciousness, [The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964].
6 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 225.
7 Heidegger is mentioned several times in the Convolutes of the Arcades Project, but not
even once without Benjamin’s massive criticism of his philosophy of historical time
236 Walter Benjamin and History
– which can be assumed to be the criticism of the philosophy of Being and Time and
not just that of Heidegger’s early Marbach lecture – leaving no doubt that Heidegger’s
philosophy of historical time is seen as the only serious philosophical competition
to Benjamin’s planned work. In a letter to Gershom Scholem Benjamin announces
that in his introduction to the Arcades Project, which would be a critique of historical
knowledge, ‘je trouverai sur mon chemin Heidegger et j’attends quelque scintillement
de l’entre-choc de nos deux manières, tres différentes, d’envisager l’histoire’ (letter dated
20 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 the
vulgar idea of an influxus physicus could not do justice to the complexity of both trains
of thought but also because that would leave aside the ‘influence’ that St Paul, Søren
Kierkegaard, 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 which
has been (Vergangenem und Gewesenem), which Benjamin tries to respect in some of
his notes, may have been taken from Being and Time and not from Dolf Sternberger’s
dissertation Der verstandene Tod. It speaks in favour of the deep impression Heidegger’s
book exerted on Benjamin, perhaps even the threat that he may have felt it posed, that
he, together with Brecht, thought of organizing a ‘critical community of reading’ for
the ‘shattering’ of Being and Time – as mentioned in a letter to Gershom Scholem on
25 July 1930 (GB 3). A detailed account of Benjamin’s relation to Heidegger, which
oscillated between fascination and abhorrence, would have to begin with Benjamin’s
engagement with Heidegger’s habilitation thesis on Duns Scotus’ theory of categories
and meaning (Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre). Such an account could dig deeper into
the problems of the work of both authors than the admirers of the one and the despisers
of the other would like.
8 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 Medusa
and shield, it is said of a sailor: ‘War wie ein Medusenschild / Der erstarrten Unruh
Bild.’
9 In the essay on ‘Eduard Fuchs, der Sammler und der Historiker’ (GS 2.2: 468/SW 3:
288), Benjamin also quotes this passage from the preface to The Origin of German
Tragic Drama in the context of formulations that later on contributed to the theses ‘On
the Concept of History’.
10 The concept is derived from the context of neo-Kantianism and the calculus of
the infinitesimal and, as an emphatic concept of happening, is here brought up by
Benjamin against Hegel’s discovery of the dialectical ‘thought-time’ (Denkzeit) – and
thus 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 another
place (N1, 2) in the sense of a deviation or digression (albeit a minimal one) away from
the ‘grand lines’, and thus, once again, from the linear continuum of tradition. In the
note relating to Hegel, the concept of the ‘Now of recognizability’ is also brought into
play. It does so as complement of the time differential and thus is not a ‘thought time’
(Denkzeit) but an ‘event time’ (Geschehniszeit) – a time of the happening of time. Their
relation can be formally characterized such that it is only the time differential that
opens up the latitude where a Now of recognizability and thus history can happen.
Because ‘time differential’ and ‘Now of recognizability’ are two aspects of the same
happening, it can be said: the Now is differential.
The concept of the ‘Now of recognizability’, which gives its title to an extended
and important 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 Rolf
Tiedemann 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 the
Now of recognizability. The Now of recognizability is the logical time, which has to
be reasoned for in the place of timeless validity. ‘Logical’ time, however, is the time of
truth which in the Now contains ‘in an unbroken way only itself ’. That means however:
the Now of recognizability, which contains itself, is its own medium – it is Now as that
which is recognizable and Now, in which cognition is possible, only because it is the
point of indifference of both. As such, however, it is the medium in which both move.
With this concept of ‘logical’ time, that is, a time of language that can be characterized
as a time of pure mediality in the sense of the essay on language from 1916, Benjamin
on the one hand opposes – over a period of 20 years – the denial or levelling of time
in theories of validity and within the Kantian and neo-Kantian epistemology. On the
other hand, he also opposes the uncritical assimilation of the concept of history to the
concept of time in Hegelian dialectics and Heideggerian phenomenology. With the
‘Now of recognizability’ Benjamin not only achieved a theory of genuine historical
cognition independent of the historical doctrines. With the ‘Now of recognizability’
he also managed to lead the motives of transcendental and dialectical phenomenology
– while remaining loyal to them – to the point where they leap over into the motive of
the possibility of the Now of historical cognition. This is a possibility which does not
just contain the resources of any reality, but also determines those resources according
to the measure of this possibility, in so far as it is mere possibility. As mere possibility
it determines this cognition, however, as a cognition that can be missed.
In a text from Zentralpark, cognition is therefore characterized as missable, and
even unrescuable if it is reachable only under the conditions of mere ‘recognizability’.
This text can be read as a predecessor of Thesis V: ‘The dialectic image is an image that
flashes up. The image of what has been . . . must be caught in this way, flashing up in
the now of recognizability. The redemption enacted in this way, and solely in this way,
is won only against the perception of what is been unrescuably lost’ (GS 1.2: 682/SW 4:
183–4). As incomplete as this sentence is, it is clear at the same time: only that which
is unrescuable is rescued – and even in its rescue it remains unrescuable. This can only
mean: the Now of recognizability is the crisis, in which alone the crisis can be rescued
and not its positive basic data. The crisis – the medium – is messianic.
11 In the letters dated 21 December 1972 and 12 January 1973 to Gershom Scholem, in
Gershom Scholem, Briefe III, 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’.
238 Walter Benjamin and History
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 of
Minnesota Press, 1993); Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1989); and, Giulia Schiesari, The Gendering of
Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), together with the inaugural work by
Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (New
York: Basic Books, 1964).
3 See Agamben, Stanzas.
4 Cf. Jean Starobinski, La 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 Abrib, where
the ego structurally assumes the unstable condition of fragmentation and supplementary
accretion it perceives in the object, and the New Introductory Lectures, in which splitting,
now generalized to the point of a universal topographical structure, is ‘dissected’ in terms
of a crystalline division – temporary and recuperable – along stable, pre-established lines.
Thus, on the one hand, ‘Outline of Psychoanalysis’, SE 23: 204:
Disavowals of this kind occur very often and not only with fetishists; and whenever
we are in a position to study them they turn out to be half-measures, incomplete
attempts at detachment from reality. The disavowal is always supplemented by an
acknowledgement; two contrary and independent attitudes always arise and result
in the situation of there being a splitting of the ego. Once more the issue depends
on which of the two can seize hold of the greater intensity.
Compare, on the other hand, New Introductory Lectures, Lecture XXIII, SE 22:
58 f.:
240 Walter Benjamin and History
So the ego can be split; it splits itself during a number of its functions – tem-
porarily at least. Its parts can come together afterwards. That is not exactly a
novelty, though it may be putting an unusual emphasis on what is generally
known. On the other hand, we are familiar with the notion that pathology, by
making things larger and coarser, can draw attention to normal conditions which
would otherwise have escaped us. Where it points to a breach or a rent, there may
normally be an articulation present. If we throw a crystal to the floor, it breaks; but
not into haphazard pieces. It comes apart along its lines of cleave into fragments
whose boundaries, though they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal’s
structure.
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 was
able to recollect his love. He was essentially through with the entire relationship.
In beginning it, he took such a tremendous step that he leaped over life. If the girl
dies tomorrow, it will make no essential difference; he will throw himself down
again, his eyes will 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 himself
to keep from hanging around her all day long, and yet in the very first moment
he became an old man in regard to the entire relationship . . . Recollection has the
great advantage in that it begins with the loss; the reason it is safe and secure is
that it has nothing to lose.
Nietzsche’s analysis of the ‘it was’ – the fantasy of the spectator before the
pageant of ever-completed history – is rigorously parallel. Nietzsche, ‘On the
Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life’, Untimely Meditations and
Beyond Good and Evil §277: ‘The everlasting pitiful “too late!” – The melancholy
of everything finished! . . .’
15 Again, Nietzsche demonstrates the profound complicity between the ‘too early’ and
the ‘too late’ – at the level of fantasy:
The problem of those who wait – It requires luck and much that is incalculable if a
higher human being in whom there slumbers the solution of a problem is to act
– ‘break out’ one might say – at the right time. Usually it does not happen, and
in every corner of the earth there are people waiting who hardly know to what
extent they are waiting but even less that they are waiting in vain. Sometimes the
awakening call, that chance event which gives ‘permission’ to act, comes but too
late – when the best part of youth and the strength to act has already been used up
in sitting still; and how many a man has discovered to his horror when he ‘rose up’
that his limbs had gone to sleep and his spirit was already too heavy! ‘It is too late’
– he has said to himself, having lost faith in himself and henceforth forever useless.
(Beyond Good and Evil §274)
16 Marcel Proust, A la Recherche du temps perdu.
17 Cf. Freud, ‘Fetishism’, p. 154.
18 For a fuller reading of the Adorno–Benjamin entanglement in terms of the theological
Bilderstreit or ‘iconoclastic controversy’ see Rebecca Comay, ‘Materialist Mutations
of the Bilderverbot’, in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), Walter Benjamin and Art (London:
Continuum, 2004), pp. 32–59.
19 ‘Motifs are assembled without being developed’ (C, p. 580). Note how the charge more
or 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’, in
Heinz 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 Politics
of Loitering’, New German Critique 39 (1986): 99–141.
23 Cf. Max Pensky, ‘Tactics of Remembrance: Proust, Surrealism, and the Origin of
the Passagenwerk’, in Michael P. Steinberg (ed.), Walter Benjamin and the Demands of
History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 164–89.
24 Cf. Benjamin’s citation of Flaubert in the Theses on History (GS 1.2: 696): ‘Peu de gens
devineront combien il a fallu être triste pour ressusciter Carthage . . .’
25 See in particular Eduardo Cadava’s exemplary remarks on the conjunction of these two
texts – and on the essentially photographic nature of historical memory (and vice versa)
– in Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1997).
CHAPTER 6
1 Thus the editors of a German collection of essays on Kierkegaard lament the fact
that Benjamin, with the exception of his review of Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard
had 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. Dab
er ihn gleichwohl verarbeitet, läbt zumal seine Geschichtsphilosophie vermuten. In
ihr scheint er geradezu darauf aus zu sein, Kierkegaards theologische Intention aus
ihren 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, läbt sich genauer mit Beziehung auf die Bühne
als 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 in
der Oper den Rausch steigert, dieser Abgrund, der unter allen Elementen der Bühne
die Spuren ihres sakralen Ursprungs am unverwischbarsten trägt, ist funktionslos
geworden’.
4 ‘Wenn Du nämlich von meinem “zweiten Entwurf ” schreibst “darin würde man nie
die Hand WB’s erkennen”, so nenne ich das doch ein wenig geradezu gesagt und Du
gehst dabei bestimmt über die Grenze hinaus, an der Du – gewib meiner Freundschaft
nicht – aber meiner Zustimmung sicher bist. [. . .] Der WB hat – und das ist bei einem
Schriftsteller nicht selbstverständlich – darin aber sieht er seine Aufgabe und sein
bestes 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 Stunden
und Stunden an meinem Schulpult in Haubinda sitzen und üben. Heute steht mein
Pult in der Bibliothèque Nationale – den Lehrgang so zu schreiben habe ich da auf
einer höhern Stufe – auf Zeit! – wieder aufgenommen.’ (Letter to Gretel Karplus, 1
September 1935, GB 5: 151).
5 ‘Das saturnische Tempo der Sache hatte seinen tiefsten Grund in dem Prozeß einer
vollkommenen Umwälzung, den eine aus der weit zurückliegenden Zeit meines
unmittelbar metaphysischen, ja theologischen Denkens stammende Gedanken- und
Bildermasse durchmachen mubte, um mit ihrer ganzen Kraft meine gegenwärtige
Verfassung zu nähren. Dieser Prozeb ging im stillen vor sich; ich selber habe so wenig
242 Walter Benjamin and History
von ihm gewubt, dab ich ungeheuer erstaunt war, als – einem äußerlichen Anstob
zufolge – 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 Bestätigung
des Umschmelzungsprozesses zu sehen, der die ganze, ursprüngliche metaphysisch
bewegte Gedankenmasse einem Aggregatzustand entgegengeführt hat, in dem die
Welt der dialektischen Bilder gegen alle Einreden gesichert ist, welche die Metaphysik
provoziert’. (Letter to Adorno, 31 May 1935, GB 5: 98).
7 ‘So viel ist sicher: das konstruktive Moment bedeutet 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 Sie
einmal mündlich von mir. Genug, dab sie so verlief, daß ich das Buch bis heute noch
nicht gelesen habe. Ihr Geschenk eröffnet mir einen unvermuteten – gewib den für
mich gangbaren – Weg zu Laclos’. (You gave me great pleasure yesterday. I will tell you
the story of the role the Liaisons dangereuses have played for me sometime orally. Suffice
it that it had the effect that I have not read the book to this date. Your present opens
up an unexpected – and for me possible – way to Laclos.) GB 5: 454.
9 Karl Marx, ‘Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte’, in Politische Schriften, ed.
Hans-Joachim Lieber (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), 1: 275.
10 Friedrich 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 den
Terminus gefunden hatten, an dem ich von ihnen schied, werde ich es mit dieser länger
zu tun haben. Warum, deutet das Bild vom Bogen an: hier habe ich es mit zwei Enden
zugleich 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 revolutionären
Bühne’, p. 279). But it is from that background of the stage from where the ghost
that haunts Europe emerges and from which a trembling emanates through France
and Europe: ‘nicht nur Frankreich, ganz Europa zitterte vor dem Junierdbeben’ (ibid.,
p. 280).
14 Danish quotations from Søren Kierkegaard, Frygt og Baeven, Samlede Vaerker, ed. Peter
P. Rohde (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1962), 5: 39; German quotations from the edition
of 1923 that was available to Benjamin: Søren Kierkegaard, Furcht und Zittern / Die
Wiederholung, trans. H.C. Ketels, H. Gottsched and Chr. Schrempf, (Jena: Eugen
Diedrichs, 1923), p. 37; English quotations from the Princeton edition: S. Kierkegaard,
Fear and Trembling. Repetition, in Kierkegaard’s Writings, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong
and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 4: 41.
15 Kierkegaard was indeed slightly hunchbacked.
16 ‘Dies ist auf menschliche Weise nur zwiefach möglich: in religiöser oder politischer
Observanz. Einen Unterschied dieser beiden Observanzen in ihrer Quintessenz
gestehe ich nicht zu. Ebensowenig jedoch eine Vermittlung. Ich spreche hier von
einer Identität, die sich allein im paradoxen Umschlagen des einen in das andere (in
welcher Richtung immer) und unter der unerläßlichen Voraussetzung erweist, dab
jede Betrachtung der Aktion rücksichtslos genug, und radikal in ihrem eignen Sinne
verfährt’. (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 the
conclusion of Montaigne’s Essays and it consists of an inventory of the author’s
bodily and habitual attitudes. On this famous essay, see Jean Starobinski, ‘The
Body’s Moment’, trans. John A. Gallucci, Yale French Studies 64 (1983): 273–305; on
Rabelais’ lists, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolky
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), passim and ‘Forms of Time and
of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes towards a Historical Poetics’, in The Dialogic
Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of
Texas Press, 1988), pp. 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 French
Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), chs 1 and 2.
3 Michel Foucault, ‘Preface’ to The Order of Things: An Achaeology of the Human Sciences
(London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 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, as
Benjamin also called it, ‘cultural history’, see Howard Caygill, ‘Walter Benjamin’s
Concept of Cultural History’, in David S. Ferris (ed.), The Cambridge Companion
to 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 Contemporary
Literary and Cultural Studies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002),
pp. 169–88. Although Hanssen does not address explicitly the issue of the independence
of disciplines, her reading is still valuable for the investigation of the subject of history
in showing that what distinguishes Benjamin’s method from Warburg’s method is that
for the former there is a ‘disappearance of the human’ (p. 186).
5 Andrew Benjamin, ‘Benjamin’s Modernity’, in Ferris (ed.), Cambridge Companion to
Walter Benjamin, p. 113.
6 ‘The historical method is a philological method’, writes Benjamin in a note from the
Paralipomena titled ‘Dialectical Image’ (SW 4: 405/GS 1.3: 1238). And the philologist
is, according to the essay on the Elective Affinities, the chemist who investigates the
ashes of the pyre – i.e. the material content of the work of art, or the historical pile
of catastrophes. The constructive principle of historical materialism presupposes
destruction (cf. N7, 6).
7 The culmination of historicism equates universal history with the third sense of histor-
icism indicated earlier, the positivism claiming to present the facts as they ‘really were’.
8 The metaphor of the positivist historian as a collector of index cards comes from Carl
Becker, Detachment and the Writing of History: Essays and Letters, ed. Phil Snyder
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958), pp. 24–5.
9 ‘The Storyteller’ is of course much more complex. The argument unfolds partly
as a contrast between storytelling and the novel. See Timothy Bahti’s ‘Death and
Authority: Benjamin’s “The Storyteller”’, in Allegories of History: Literary Historiography
after Hegel (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 226–54 for an
incisive reading of the difference between the two genres in terms of the temporality
of the end and of ending.
10 Herodotus with an English Translation, trans. A.D. Godley (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard
University Press, 1957), 2: 21.
11 The inadequacy of the question is indicated by the indecision as to who really is in
control. Thus Jürgen Habermas discerns Benjamin’s failed notion of history in that
244 Walter Benjamin and History
materialism cannot be fitted into theology, if the dwarf representing theology is taken
to be in control (‘Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique’, in
Gary Smith (ed.), On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections [Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1988], pp. 113–14). Conversely, Bahti emphasizes Benjamin’s
assertion that the puppet takes the chess-player into its service, and correctly shows
that this reversal of control presents a chiasmus between the two terms (Bahti, ‘History
as Rhetorical Enactment: Walter Benjamin’s Theses “On the Concept of History” ’, in
Allegories of History, pp. 200–1). However, in relation to subjectivity Bahti’s reading
requires a further step: the subject is not presented in the reversal of control between
man and puppet, but rather in the process of reversibility that the relation between
man and puppet makes possible. Ian Balfour perceives this process of reversibility
but concludes from this that ‘the puppet and dwarf . . . have to combine forces, and
it is the cooperation of the two that guarantees victory in the chess game of history’
(‘Reversal, Quotation (Benjamin’s History)’, MLN 106 [1991]: 627). This image of an
alliance between the man and the puppet may be construed as purporting that they
are independent entities. Reversibility must emphasize instead the complicity between
man and puppet which undoes any notion of cooperation between individual parties.
CHAPTER 8
I wish to thank heartily Antoine Parzy for his helpful contribution to this work.
1 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 2.
2 Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, 1968), p. 199.
3 D. N. Fustel de Coulanges, Histoire des institutions politiques de 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 / Truth
and 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 both
Heidegger and Benjamin locate boredom as a condition of the modern and thus as one
of the moods of modernity, there is a fundamental difference as to how the conception
of the present is understood and thus in the way that it determines the philosophical
project. For Heidegger’s most sustained engagement with boredom see his The
Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995).
2 I have tried to give a detailed account of this conception of the present in my Present
Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism (London: Routledge, 1997).
3 Benjamin’s relation to Kant is a topic of research in its own right. In general terms
however, Kant positions Space and Time as providing the conditions of possibility for
experience. They are the ‘pure forms of sensible intuition’ (Critique of Pure Reason,
trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], A
Notes 245
39). While experience is essential in terms of its possibility, what is left untreated – by
definition – is the nature of the experience and any strong conception of the experi-
encing subject.
4 Ambivalence is an ontological state, rather than one linked to the relativism of
epistemology. What this means is that ambivalence is an aspect that is constitutive
of subjectivity itself. Within the prevailing presence of ambivalence, knowledge is
essential.
5 The heritage in which the technology of art is discussed usually oscillates between
two predetermined positions. In the first instance the term ‘technology’ assumes a
monolithic quality and is thus not able to be used effectively to account for different
and conflicting practices that stem from the same technological source. While in
the second techniques, as a domain of practice, are linked to a humanist conception
of techne and as such presented in terms of human skill. The hand works with the
machine. As opposed to both of these directions of research what needs to be pursued
is what could be described as the development of an ontology of techniques. This is
of course a project to come. However it is one that can be located within a mode of
thinking that begins with Benjamin.
6 I have tried to provide a more sustained version of this argument in Disclosing Spaces:
On Painting (Manchester: Clinamen, 2004), see in particular Chs. 1 and 3.
7 For other uses of the term ‘distraction’, see for example Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass
Ornament, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1995). One of Kracauer’s formulations opens up the question of who sees and thus the
nature of the subject of distraction. Writing of the interior design of the cinema he
notes that the ‘stimulation of the senses succeed one another with such rapidity that
there is no room left between them even for the slightest contemplation’ (p. 326). The
temporality of this movement – one marked by the elimination of any possible inter-
vention – is implicitly challenged by Benjamin’s notion of distraction. The audience’s
state of absorption retains a partiality precisely because of the ineliminability of the
potential for criticality.
8 For a detailed investigation of the complex politics of Fury see Anton Kaes, ‘A Stranger
in the House: Fritz 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 of
the 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 complicates
any straightforward distinction between the individual and the group. What is inter-
esting with Benjamin however is the possibility of introducing not the constraint of
the ego-ideal, but a relationship between distraction and criticality that links their
presence to a founding ambivalence. The ambivalence means that the critical will have
a relation to formal presence, rather than the projection of one content as opposed to
another. While it cannot be undertaken here, the question of ambivalence as a motif
in psychoanalysis would need to be pursued through section II of Totem and Taboo.
10 While its detail cannot be pursued, here the distinction between ‘authentic’ and
‘inauthentic’ self is formulated in Being and Time in the following terms: ‘The self of
everyday Dasein is the they-self which we distinguish from the authentic self – that
is from the self which has been taken hold of in its own way. As the they-self, the
particular Dasein has been dispersed into the they, and must first find itself ’. Martin
Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1978), p. 167.
11 The iconoclasm involves the need to retain technique and thus abstraction as site of
the political and not to identify the political nature of art with content. As such the
246 Walter Benjamin and History
image must always be secondary. What matters therefore is not an image but an under-
standing of techniques within which (and with which) the future is produced. It is in
this regard that it becomes possible to link the political in art to abstraction where the
latter is understood as a site of potential.
12 See in this regard Werner Hamacher, ‘Afformative, strike: Benjamin’s “Critique
of Violence” ’, in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds), Walter Benjamin’s
Philosophy. 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 of
engagement.
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 gigantic
sideboards distended with carvings, the sunless corners where potted palms sit, the
balcony embattled behind its balustrade, and the long corridors with their singing
gas flames – fittingly houses only the corpse. “On this sofa the aunt cannot but be
murdered.” The soulless luxury of the furnishings becomes true comfort only in the
presence of a dead body. (SW 1: 447)
2 Mario Praz, An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration from Pompeii to Art Nouveau,
trans. William Weaver (London: Thames & Hudson, 1964), pp. 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 “bringing
to light” ’. McLaughlin, ‘Virtual Paris: Benjamin’s Arcade Project’, in ed. Gerhard
Richter (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 the
past, but the act of understanding the past as a recovery, construction based on the
memories of the past and the demands of the present. For a critique of ‘archaeology’
as an approach to the past see Barry Bergdol, ‘Archaeology vs. History: Heinrich
Hübsch’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 ‘thesis
on history’ see O.K. Werckmeister, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, or the
Transfiguration 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’s
discourse on history, see Andrew Benjamin, ‘Being Roman Now: The Time of
Fashion: 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 the
monument from its anthropological dimension in pre-Renaissance time through
Alberti’s discourse on monument as a work of art, to the nineteenth century when the
purpose of the Latin monumentum gave way to the historic monument.
6 I am using ‘image’ in interchange with the phenomenon of building as discussed by
Fritz Brethaupt. According to him, ‘within the phenomenon there is something non-
phenomenal that does not appear, and within the event there is something that does
not take place’. And he continues, ‘history comes into play by delaying the appearance
of this nucleus within the phenomenon’ (‘History as the Delayed Disintegration of
Phenomena’ in Richter, Benjamin’s Ghosts, p. 191).
7 According to Wolfgang Schivelbusch, ‘Pre-industrial traffic is mimetic of natural
phenomena . . . Only during a transitional period did the travellers who transferred from
the stagecoach to the railway carriage experience a sense of loss due to the mechani-
sation of travel: it did not take long for the industrialisation of the means of transport
to alter the consciousness of the passengers: they developed a new set of perceptions’.
Schiverblusch, Railway Journey: The Industrialisation of Time and Space in the 19th
Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), p. 15. See also Sigfired
Giedion, 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.
248 Walter Benjamin and History
11 Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in the East
and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 119.
12 Giedion, Building in France, p. 87. Giedion’s statement in part stimulated Walter
Benjamin to invest in technology as the source of new collective needs. After receiving
a 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 radical
knowledge that refresh the heart. You possess the latter, and therefore you are able
to illustrate, or rather to uncover, the tradition by observing the present’ (quoted in
Building in France, p. 53). In Convolute N of the Arcades Project Benjamin returns to
Giedion criticizing his inclination for historicism: ‘just as Giedion teaches us to read
off the basic features of 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 apparently
secondary, 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 dialectic
between physiological processes and phantasmagoric dreams, Benjamin pointed to the
immanence of truth within the expression of bodily labours and the physiognomy of
historical event’ (‘Walter Benjamin’s Glimpses of the Unconscious: New Architecture
and New Optics’, History of Photography, 22 (1998): 118.
13 On this subject see Buck-Morss, Dreamworld, especially Ch. 2, ‘On Time’,
pp. 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 claims
based 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 modern
architects, specially Le Corbusier and Scheerbart, see Detlef Mertins, ‘The Enticing
and Threatening Face of Prehistory: Walter Benjamin and the Utopia of Glass’,
Assemblage, 29 (1996).
19 Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1988), pp. 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 and
Kenneth Frampton. For Tafuri, architecture’s ideology unfolds itself in a stressful
search for a space beyond the domain that is already occupied, or will be occupied,
by capitalist forces of production and consumption. Every aspect of the everyday life
which in one way or another relates to the art of building has either already been in-
ternalized into the representational realm of capitalism or would be part of it through
architecture. See Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development
(Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1976). Important to Frampton’s discussion of modern archi-
tecture are dichotomies such as tradition and innovation, métier and technology, but
also site and material. Frampton reads these dichotomies through Walter Benjamin’s
ideas 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 historical
impossibility of retaining such a unity even through mechanical reproduction of the
object. 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 a
totalizing force but as declension of an articulate sensibility’. See Frampton, ‘Place,
Production and Architecture’, in Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London:
Thames & Hudson, 1980), p. 297.
24 Briefly, what makes these two figures important, however, is the difference involved in
their emphasis on architectural praxis. While Tafuri expands one’s understanding of the
problematic of the project of modernity, exploring the work of architects who attempt
to 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 that
of 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 analysing
a building, Frampton tries to understand, as much as possible, how the architect had
sought an architectonic solution for the given situation.
25 This is not the rule: the classificatory means employed by historians who are influenced
by post-structuralist theories is different: instead of discussing the work in reference
to the project of modernity, an attempt is made to write the history of modern archi-
tecture based on themes central to the development of modernism. See, for example,
Alan Colquhoun, Modern Architecture (London: Oxford University Press, 2003). His
vision of history differs from that of Kenneth Frampton and Manfredo Tafuri. While
Frampton sees modernity as an incomplete project, for Tafuri it represents a historical
project with its own modalities of closure.
26 On 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: Yale
University Press, 1982), pp. 98-110.
27 On this subject see Harry Francis Mallgrave, ‘Epilogue, The Semper Legacy: Semper
and Riegl’, in Gottfried Semper (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp.
355–81. Also Debra Schafter, The Order of Ornament, The Structure of Style: The
Theoretical Foundations of Modern Art and Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), especially pp. 32–59.
28 Alois Riegl, ‘The Dutch Group Portrait’, October, 74 (1995): 3–35. Analysing
Rembrandt’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 him
as the lecturer, and, second, between the crowning surgeon and the beholder, the
latter subordinated to the former and indirectly through him to Tulp in turn.
Such a perception of the beholder and painting remains, according to Rigel, ‘closely
dependent upon the works of his direct predecessors . . . and one becomes convinced
that Rembrandt, too, was primarily merely an executor of the artistic volition of his
people and his time’ (p. 4).
29 According to Margaret Iversen, ‘for Riegl, different stylistic types, understood as expression
of a varying Kunstwollen, are read as different ideals of perception or as different ways of
regarding the 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 Relationship
Between the Arts from Wölfflin to Le Corbusier’, in Karen Koehler (ed.), The Built
Surface (Burlington: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 54–72.
250 Walter Benjamin and History
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 Kenneth
Frampton in particular, to theorize history according to the problematic relation of
architecture to capital, technique, land and institutions of capitalism. An argument
could be made that there are other historians who were also inspired by architects. The
obvious examples could be Zevi’s inspiration from Frank L. Wright, or Le Corbusier’s
influence on Giedion. In these two latter cases, the issue was not reconstruction of the
history, but construction of a future based on a normative practice. While one sought
to perpetuate the Zeitgeist, the other opted for a holistic practice inspired by Wright.
33 Quoted in Ann-Marie Sankovitch, ‘Structure/Ornament and the Modern Figuration
of Architecture’, The Art Bulletin 80 (1998): 715.
34 Peter Osborne, ‘Small-scale Victories, Large-scale Defeats: Walter Benjamin’s Politics
of 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 Cambridge
Companion to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
p. 149. Discussing interruption in Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities and
rhe Arcades Project, Andrew Benjamin associates the very understanding of modernity
with Benjamin’s discourse on the ‘caesura’, an essential concept for understanding
modernity’s departure from the past and thus the interruption of historical continuum
so 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 by
the clock, the calendar suggests a notion of present in ‘which time stands still’, and this
is also the time in which a historical materialist ‘is writing history’ (SW 4: 395).
37 ‘When historical references are called “natural” in uncritical affirmation, identifying
the empirical course of their development as progress, the result is myth; when prehis-
toric nature is evoked in the act of naming the historically modern, the effect is to
mystify’. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1989), p. 68. For Peter Osborne’s critique of Buck-Morss’s reading of the ‘dialectical
images’, 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 be
understood within the conventions of images’ (‘Benjamin’s Modernity’, p. 111).
38 Carlo Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric, and Proof (London: University Press of New
England, 1999), p. 24.
39 According to Andrew Benjamin, this passage is historical. Noting the difference
between time and the object, he writes: ‘Poesis involves a different relationship than the
one at work in art defined as techne. Indeed, it is because the relationship is formulated
in this way that the temporal considerations at work in the latter – the conception
of the work of art determined by techne – are such that they open up as historical’
(‘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 Concept
of 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 Walter
Benjamin, for whom ‘the ancient temple no longer had any place. From now on, it
could exist only as a ruin’. Hanssen, Benjamin’s Other History, p. 78.
Notes 251
CHAPTER 12
Translations from the German texts by Benjamin and Rosenzweig are mine, although
I have provided reference to the available English translations.
1 Most helpful have been: Rebecca Comay, ‘Benjamin’s Endgame’, in Walter Benjamin’s
Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne
(Manchester: Clinamen, 1994), pp. 251–91. Irving Wohlfarth ‘On the Messianic
Structure of Walter Benjamin’s Last Reflections’, in Glyph 5 (1978): 148–212, and the
more recent Eric Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane (New York: Columbia University
Press, 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: Gesammelte
Schriften, Vol. 2 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976); The Star of Redemption, trans.
William W. Hallo (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971).
CHAPTER 13
1 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons
(London: Unwin, 1968).
2 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans.
George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
3 Max Weber, Hauptprobleme der Soziologie: Erinnerungsgabe für Max Weber, ed.
Melchior Palyi (Munich: Duncker and Humblot, 1923).
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CONTRIBUTORS
Andrew Benjamin has taught philosophy and architectural theory in
both Europe and the USA. He is Professor of Critical Theory in Design
and Architecture, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, in the
University of Technology, Sydney, and Adjunct Professor of Critical Theory
at Monash University. His previous books include: The Plural Event (1993),
Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism (1997); Philosophy’s Literature
(2001) and Disclosing Spaces: On Painting (2004).
(2000). His ongoing project focuses on ethics and laws, and he is completing
a book, Commands and Laws: Ethics and Laws in Contemporary Jewish
Philosophy, that explores the different interpretations of law in twentieth-
century Jewish philosophers.