Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin
John Rundell
University of Melbourne
Danielle Petherbridge
University of Melbourne
Jeremy Smith
Ballarat University
Jean-Philippe Deranty
Macquarie University
Robert Sinnerbrink
Macquarie University
VOLUME 14
By
Stéphane Symons
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2013
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012948097
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Volume Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Bibliographical Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv
Willem van Reijen
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Index of Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
VOLUME FOREWORD
The Social and Critical Theory Book Series welcomes Stéphane Symons’ new
major study on the work of Walter Benjamin. Stéphane Symons illuminates
the great richness and depth of Walter Benjamin’s work. His book is a
comprehensive assessment of Benjamin’s major themes of time, history,
experience and redemption. By presenting such a comprehensive study, as
well as tying it to current debates and assessments of Benjamin’s work, the
volume marks a significant contribution to our understanding of critical
theory.
Il y en a qui ont le cœur si large qu’on en voit que la moitié, Jacques Brel once
sang.
I am fortunate enough to know such people and to count them among
my friends. If it were not for them, I would never have been able to start nor
finish this book.
The love, friendship and support of Marlies De Munck, Roland Breeur,
Margherita Tonon, Paul Cruysberghs, Steven Spileers, Andreas De Block and
Tomek Kitlinski have meant more to me than I can possibly convey.
For their kindness, company and inspiration, I would like to thank every-
one at the Institute of Philosophy of the KULeuven, especially Arnold
Burms, Paul Cortois, Paul Moyaert, Rob Devos, Tomas Geyskens, Pieter
Adriaens, Stein De Cuyper, Rudolf Bernet, Toon Vandevelde, Ines Van Hout-
te, Gerbert Faure, Dries Simons and everyone at the Department of Philoso-
phy of Lingnan University, Hong Kong, especially Paisley Livingston, Mette
Hjort, Thomas Tam, Josh Law, Kaye Wong and Vinnie Cheung.
Thanks are also due to everyone at the Department of Liberal Studies of
the New School for Social Research, especially Jim Miller, and to Willem
van Reijen (1938–2012), Rudi Laermans, Masakatsu Kaneko, Noriaki Kuwata,
Mikiro Kato, Sigrid Weigel and Bernard Chappuzeau.
Thanks to the support of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), the
Commission for Educational Exchange between the USA, Belgium and Lux-
embourg (Fulbright), the Belgian American Educational Foundation
(BAEF), the New School for Social Research, the University of Electro-Com-
munications, Komazawa University, the University of Kyoto, Lingnan Uni-
versity, the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung and the University
of Buenos Aires, chapters of this book were written in New York City, Tokyo,
Hong Kong, Berlin and Buenos Aires.
Last but not at all least, I would like to thank those people who mean
everything to me: my parents, sister, brother, brother-in-law, family and
friends. Their unceasing and limitless dedication and encouragement are
truly exceptional and more than I can ever return.
I dedicate this book, with all the love in my heart, to my grandfather René
Redig (1919–2011).
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
It takes courage these days to publish a new book about Walter Benjamin.
The number of publications that takes up his work has grown exponentially
and this seems to have turned the project of reaching an overview of the
sometimes controversial interpretations of Benjamin’s philosophy into an
illusory endeavor. This is also the case, perhaps even pre-eminently so, when
one turns to a topic that is as tricky as the enigmatic relationship between
messianism and historical materialism—perhaps even the most tricky topic
in Benjamin’s considerations.
Stéphane Symons is very well aware of the risks that come with the
attempt to illuminate Benjamin’s ‘conceptual framework’ in which a ‘rec-
onciliation’ of logically exclusive extremities is sought. The effort of finding
a solution to this problem is not made any easier by the fact that Benjamin
never left behind even a mere outline of a possible philosophical system, let
alone a more extensive elaboration of the way these extremities relate to
each other.
It is laudable that Stéphane Symons did not allow these obstacles to
dissuade him from his purpose since his analysis has managed to contribute
to the discussion of Benjamin’s key insights in an illuminating and, unless
my assessment of the immensity of the secondary literature is too naïve,
innovative manner.
The purpose of this analysis is, first of all, to show that the moment of
a ‘dialectics at a standstill’ (Benjamin’s term for the shock-like experience
of truth in the midst of relations that are drastically distorted by power
and capitalist economy) bears a most intimate connection with the end of
history, with redemption and the coming of the messiah. This is what now
needs to be clarified.
Benjamin believed an important philosophical view of time, and thus
of history, to be false, that is, the position that understands time as a con-
tinuous succession of multiple instants. This quantitative understanding in
which the governing course of time or history is thought to be devoid of
content is misleading in that time and history can only be understood in a
qualitative way. According to Benjamin the ‘empty’ understanding of time
leads to the idea, central to historicism (Ranke), that all historical periods
are ‘equally close to God.’ However, this view ignores that in some peri-
ods humanity stands closer to redemption than in other ones. Benjamin
xvi preface
1 SW: 3, 325.
2 SW: 3, 305.
xviii preface
1 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past. Volume 2, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and
off, one after another, the different human characters with which she had deceived me ever
since the day when I had first made her acquaintance.”
2 introduction
5 Ibid., 426.
6 For the most canonical references see Sigmund Freud’s characterization of the ‘lumi-
nous shine’ of the fetish which is “a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the
little boy once believed in and … does not want to give up” in “On Fetishism” in The Stan-
dard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XXI, trans. James
Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1978), 152–153.
7 O, 182.
melancholy, hope, redemption 3
8 See AP, 471. See also Benjamin’s famous dictum that his “thinking is related to theology
as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to go by the blotter, however,
nothing of what is written would remain.” (AP, 471).
9 Though a large part of his essays is influenced by either Jewish messianism or historical
materialism, Benjamin did never devote an entire text to a systematic elaboration of his
views on either system of thought, something he did do for German Romanticism, for
example, as well as surrealism, Goethe and Brecht. See also Susan Sontag’s claim that
Benjamin “barely looked into Marx until the later 1930s” in “The Last Intellectual,” The New
York Times, October 12, 1978.
4 introduction
10 For a similar viewpoint, see for instance Andrew Benjamin’s statement that Benjamin’s
rated—neither ineffable nor merely mystically intuitable, it cannot crystallize into an object
of experience or intention. For an illuminating discussion of these matters, see Eli Fried-
lander, Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London,
melancholy, hope, redemption 5
The place where Benjamin’s Jewish messianism and his historical material-
ism meet is not a philosophical insight in the true sense of the word but
the urgent moral feeling that it is necessary to side with the weak. It is
England: Harvard University Press, 2012), 12, and the claims that “insofar as the presenta-
tion of truth is concerned, there is no element of intention, nothing that allows us to aim
at [a] consistency of meaning” and that “methodical digression reflects, for Benjamin, the
understanding that truth is unapproachable, not that it is ever receding and reaching an end
infinitely deferred.”
12 SW: 4, 396.
6 introduction
this stance that will be explored in the first chapter, focusing on Benjamin’s
philosophy of history. From the standpoint of Benjamin’s historical materi-
alism, the weak party is, of course, the proletariat. If the revolution should
be proclaimed—and this, in Benjamin’s opinion, is not even an issue—it
is in the name of the economically deprived, the politically powerless and
the socially oppressed. It is their material conditions that need to be rad-
ically improved and it is, most obviously, the dream of a classless society
which should continue to inspire our social goals and political action. How-
ever, the weak whose side Benjamin has so clearly chosen do not just wear
the mask of one particular social class. For Benjamin weakness remains,
first and foremost, messianic: if it deserves our continuous attention and
unceasing support, it is not only because it reveals the discontents that mark
modernity or the aberrations that characterize industrial capitalism but, in
the first instance, because it is in its features that comes to expression the
lack of fulfillment of history in toto. If Benjamin’s philosophy is indeed an
attempt to think through a concept of hope of fulfillment, it is developed
from the perspective of those who most obviously lack it because they have
lost access to anything truly absolute or divine.
The second chapter, therefore, places the ‘failure’ to comprehend truth as
an object of knowledge and the subsequent confrontation with the limits of
human understanding at the heart of Benjamin’s interpretation of the work
of Franz Kafka and the Trauerspiel. In his account, these texts are not just
about a fundamental inaccessibility of absolute truth or doctrine [Lehre] but
they become expressions [Ausdrücke] of it: it is by virtue of their capacity to
expose the failure to truly know that is central to the human condition that
these literary texts can be considered messianic.
Building on the concept of allegory that is crucial in this context, the
third chapter focuses on the view of art that underlies this discussion and
brings Benjamin’s project in the vicinity of the iconographic approach of
his near-contemporaries Alois Riegl (1858–1905) and Aby Warburg (1866–
1929). Alongside the views on the truth-content and the material content
of artworks that are laid out in the essays on German Romanticism and
Goethe, an alternative interpretation of the power of art can be found in
Benjamin’s oeuvre. This chapter will look at the way in which he, in certain
places of his writings, does not just regard works of art as expressions of
an idea but rather understands them as concrete instantiations of a neces-
sity on the part of human beings to come to terms with the universe that
surrounds them. In this sense, the concept of a ‘will to allegory’ refers to
the ability to hold out a profound failure to know while neither repressing
it nor modifying it into a more fundamental docta ignorantia. Benjamin’s
melancholy, hope, redemption 7
Sixty years after his death, the complexity of Benjamin’s philosophy has
been matched by an ever-increasing industry of secondary literature. Hav-
ing already exceeded the number of two thousand books and articles fif-
teen years ago, it has become impossible for anyone with a normal set of
brains and a not unlimited amount of time to maintain a clear overview of
everything that has been and is being published.13 The aims of this book,
however, are to understand the relevance and consistency of some of Ben-
jamin’s key insights and not to render a definitive or systematic presentation
of his entire philosophy, nor a summary of all the secondary literature that
can currently be found about this philosophy. For these aims a complete
overview of all the secondary literature did not prove to be as indispens-
able as a close reading of Benjamin’s own texts; the enormous amount of
secondary material, therefore, did not pose an unsurpassable problem.14
It might come as a surprise, however, to find that one of the major names
in twentieth-century philosophy and arguably the most important figure of
the Frankfurt School is all but absent in this book: Theodor Adorno. The
reason for this is first of all that other people, most notably Susan Buck-
Morss and Richard Wolin, have done a tremendous job in outlining both the
personal relationship that once existed between the two philosophers and
the intellectual connection that continues to exist between their works.15 It
13 See Reinhard Markner and Thomas Weber, Literatur über Benjamin: kommentierte
Benjamin have been very influential to my own interpretations: Samuel Weber’s Benjamin’s
-abilities (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2008)
and Friedlander’s Walter Benjamin. In my opinion, the conceptual brilliance and philosoph-
ical range of the ideas presented in those two books are such that calling them ‘secondary’
would do them injustice.
15 See Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter
Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, 1979) and Richard Wolin,
Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1994), esp. 163–212.
8 introduction
16 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XIV, trans. James Strachey (London: The
Hogarth Press, 1978), 246.
17 Ibid., 246.
18 Ibid., 246.
melancholy, hope, redemption 9
19 Ibid., 246.
20 SW: 3, 305.
10 introduction
not at all opposed to one another but they have, on the contrary, become
one. His philosophy is rooted in the awareness that the feeling of love for
an object need not necessarily disappear when this object itself ceases to
be immediately accessible. For him, moreover, the expression of the loss of
the loved object is capable of turning this feeling of love into something
that cannot any longer be filled and, in this manner precisely, maintains
itself. Striking a fragile balance between melancholy and hope, Benjamin
never turned away from the absence of any systematic truth-revelation in
our world nor from our inability to truly grasp anything divine from the
standpoint of history because he understood that a genuine attachment
to and a continuous longing for transcendence never did presuppose the
completeness of its presence.
In a short autobiographical fragment Agesilaus Santander (1933), Ben-
jamin denotes the ‘forces of life’ [Lebenskräfte] that are ‘bound together’ in
his person as a ‘secret name’ that should be “protected against outsiders.”21
These ‘forces of life’ are invoked as angels that, as the Kabbalah relates, are
created by God at every instant, not to protect and guard the human beings
they name but, rather, “to appear before (God’s) throne for a moment and
sing His praises … before they return to the void.”22 In this text, Benjamin
claims to have been able to turn the activity of this secret alter ego and
dark companion back against itself and thus to have succeeded in exploit-
ing it for his own use. He maintains that the very manner in which his angel
wanted to trouble him, that is, by not immediately granting him his wishes
and satisfying his desires, has become beneficial to him: “He [the angel]
may have been unaware that … he brought out the strength of the man
against whom he was proceeding—namely his ability to wait.”23 This ‘ability
dessen, den er so treffen wollte, derart am besten zeigen konnte: nämlich wartend.” (GS:
VI, 522). The structure of this experience, and the way in which one is sometimes capable
of modifying reactive forces into active ones by using the very strategies that are developed
to be harmful as strategies of resistance, underlie Benjamin’s reading of Kafka’s The Truth
about Sancho Panza. See, for example, the following phrase quoted by Benjamin: “Without
ever boasting of it, Sancho Panza succeeded over the years, by supplying a lot of romances of
chivalry and adventure for the evening and night hours, in so diverting from him his demon,
whom he later called Don Quixote, that his demon thereupon freely performed the maddest
exploits—which, however, lacking a preordained object, which Sancho Panza himself was
supposed to have been, did no one any harm.” (Kafka quoted in SW: 2, 815–816) See also the
final statement of the Kafka-essay that “Sancho Panza, a sedate fool and a clumsy assistant,
sent his rider on ahead; Bucephalus outlived his. Whether it is a man or a horse is no longer
melancholy, hope, redemption 11
to wait’ and “the fact that [Benjamin] was born under the sign of Saturn—
the planet of the slowest revolution, the star of hesitation and delay” do
constitute Benjamin’s particular strength and the most fundamental fea-
tures of his philosophical intuition.24 His thinking is motivated by the idea
that the absolute cannot yet be fully appropriated but that an active waiting
for its revelation and a presence of mind [Aufmerksamkeit, Geistesgegen-
wart] might nevertheless make it possible to already discover fragments of
something divine and prefigurations of fulfillment within our most imme-
diate surroundings. It is for this reason that Benjamin’s gaze has at all times
opposed the fetishist’s attempt to repress absence: in his writings he seeks
to preserve absence as such and even cherishes it because he understands
that it is only through a continuous openness and a profound attentiveness
that a glimpse might be caught of the redemption that is still to come. The
fetishist’s ‘I know but still …’ (‘Je sais bien mais quand même …’) has here
become ‘I do not know, and thus maybe …’ (‘Je ne sais pas et alors peut-être
…’). The mourning of and longing for a paradisiacal condition that history
has never even truly experienced and the waiting for its ultimate restora-
tion come together in a heightened awareness of the present. For Benjamin,
it is precisely from what is most nearby that a sudden truth-revelation can
go out like his secret angel who “looks him steadily in the eye, for a long
time, and then retreats—in a series of spasms, but inexorably [dann weicht
er stoßweis, aber unerbittlich zurück]” because he feels that the time of his
ultimate coming has not yet arrived.25
so important, if only the burden is taken off the back.” (SW: 2, 816) For a beautiful analysis of
this reading of Don Quixote, see Samuel Weber, “Violence and Gesture: Agamben Reading
Benjamin Reading Kafka Reading Cervantes ….” Benjamin’s -abilities, 195–210.
24 SW: 2, 715.
25 SW: 2, 715; GS: VI, 523.
chapter one
Introduction
1 SW: 4, 389.
2 See, for example, Bertolt Brecht, Arbeitsjournal. Erster Band 1938 bis 1942, ed. Werner
Hecht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkam Verlag, 1974), 14: “[With Benjamin everything is] [m]ys-
ticism in spite of an anti-mystical attitude. In such a form is the materialist conception of
14 chapter one
history adapted! It is rather appalling” (my translation) and Gershom Scholem, Walter Ben-
jamin, The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 169:
“[Benjamin’s] later work proved that he was incapable of making a decision between meta-
physics and materialism (as he conceived of the latter). Benjamin’s attitude toward dialec-
tical materialism as a heuristic principle rather than as a dogma (his position from 1931 on)
left the way clear for the continuing development of a metaphysical, intellectual wellspring
that had little, and frequently enough nothing, to do with the categories of materialism. In
keeping with this there was also his enduring attachment to Jewish categories, which may
be discerned in his writings to the end.”
3 SW: 4, 390; GS: I-2, 694.
benjamin’s philosophy of history: the messianic is now 15
profane and the divine—the historical and the a-historical—as realms that
are reciprocally intensifying instead of antithetical to each other. Michael
Löwy is right in calling such an interpretation a ‘fourth approach,’ that is, an
alternative to what he calls the ‘materialist school’ the ‘theological school’
and the ‘school of contradiction.’4 Löwy rightfully describes the relation
between Benjamin’s political views and his religious beliefs as one of ‘com-
municating vessels,’ ‘reciprocal reversibility’ and ‘mutual translation.’5 The
first part of this chapter retraces some of the basic characteristics of the
concept of ‘weak messianic power’ as it was introduced in On the Concept
of History. The second part will go beyond the context of that essay and
explores the notion of the messianic from the perspective of some of Ben-
jamin’s other texts.
4 Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (London, New
active messianism (“What we must emphasize, first of all, is that it is not a matter of awaiting
the Messiah … but of bringing about his coming. … Benjamin belongs to the dissident
tradition of those who were known of the dohakei haketz, those who ‘hasten the end of
time.’ ” in ibid., 104) are at odds with my own reading of Benjamin’s messianism as, along
with the discovery of the revolutionary kairos, a confrontation with a structural inadequacy
of human acting and thinking (see below). For the stakes of this discussion see, for example,
Anson Rabinbach’s claim that “[t]he chasm that separates the historical quotidian from
redemption is too wide to be bridged by determined action or profane events” and his
references to a “dilemma in the ethics of Messianism between the idea of liberation and
the absolute superfluity of any action that is often difficult to sustain.” in Anson Rabinbach,
“Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish
Messianism.” New German Critique 34 (1985), 87.
6 SW: 4, 390; GS: I-2, 695.
7 SW: 4, 391.
16 chapter one
thus characterized as the revelation, first, that a moment from the past has
somehow lived on and, second, that this moment, for that reason precisely,
can be brought back to and by the present. Hence Benjamin’s specification
of the task of the chronicler to “act in accord with the following truth:
nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history.”8 In
his theses lies contained, on the eve of the Second World War, a virulent
diagnosis of the inadequacy of the belief in universal progress, which, in his
words, “bore little relation to reality but made dogmatic claims.”9 The belief
in universal progress, that is, as a progress not simply of the capacities and
knowledge of human beings but of history and mankind as such cannot
according to Benjamin “be sundered from the concept of its progression
through a homogeneous, empty time.”10 Irresistibly drawn to the future
while keeping their backs firmly turned to what has gone by, those people
who believe in infinite progress remain blind to the possibility that certain
events from the past can somehow return to the present. By contrast, the
true historian, that is, the historical materialist, understands history to be
“the subject of a construction whose site is not homogeneous, empty time,
but time filled full by now-time [von Jetztzeit erfüllte].”11 This ‘now-time’ is
the true abode of messianic power.
The concept of ‘messianic power’ is to be analyzed from the point of view
of the moment of its revelation because of the following reason: this moment
of the messianic ‘now’ is not merely a temporal unit but a ‘constellation.’
It is not just a specific instance in history but a ‘force field’ in which the
continuous flow of time is interrupted by a power that is irreducible to it.
It is for these moments that the historical materialist is to remain perma-
nently on the lookout. His task is to replace the ideal of an empty chrono-
logy with the revenant of a past that is renewed: “The historical materialist
cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but
in which time takes a stand [einsteht] and has come to a standstill.”12 The
messianic moment does away with the idea that time proceeds without
interruption from past to present and thus onwards to the future. Annihilat-
ing the experience of a linear time that can be grasped as one homogenous
whole, it makes manifest that there is no unified logos that underlies the
historical realm. Comprehending and affirming this lack of historical unity,
8 SW: 4, 390.
9 SW: 4, 394.
10 SW: 4, 395.
11 SW: 4, 395; GS: I-2, 701.
12 SW: 4, 396; GS: I-2, 702.
benjamin’s philosophy of history: the messianic is now 17
13 SW: 4, 396.
14 SW: 4, 396; GS: I-2, 702–703.
15 SW: 4, 390.
16 SW: 4, 396; GS: I-2, 703.
17 SW: 4, 390 (my emphasis).
18 chapter one
former reveals itself as a power that remains beyond the grasp of all human
categories. The becoming-now of the past does not allow for a firmer grasp
or comprehension of the meaning of what has taken place: it does not teach
us a lesson about history but it turns it into a power that becomes active in
the present and destabilizes the unity of our sphere of thinking and acting.
For this reason the messianic moment is—like a symptom—to be consid-
ered as a displacement but—unlike a symptom—not as a displacement of
a singular moment in time but as a displacement of time as such. In its ces-
sation of ‘the movement of thoughts’ and its ‘arrest of happening’ it does not
merely involve a specific historical instant from the past which is brought
back to the present, but it is a brief suspension of the homogeneous course
of history in its totality. Thus Benjamin is able to write in the more politi-
cal context of his fifteenth thesis that “[w]hat characterizes revolutionary
classes at their moment of action is the awareness that they are about to
make the continuum of history explode [aufzusprengen].”18 The power of
the messianic is in his mind no simple translation of certain moments of
the past to the present but a dislocation of the historical realm as such
which empties out the contexts of meaning and the instrumental rational-
ity that help guide our beliefs and orient our actions. Its Nachträglichkeit
(deferred action) does not stem from a specific event from the past that was
not adequately responded to (trauma) but it affects the entire realm of his-
tory, thereby revealing current categories to be inadequate and to require
an urgent re-thinking. In Benjamin’s view, the messianic makes manifest
not a delayed response to an event from the past but a profound shortcom-
ing of our normal intentional behavior in general. It has confined us not just
to a moment experienced in delay but, as Scholem will later put it, to a “life
lived in deferment, in which nothing can be done definitively, nothing can
be irrevocably accomplished.”19
“The historian is the herald who invites the dead to the table.”20
2.1. Introduction
Benjamin makes a case for the existence of a past that cannot be reduced
to the present it has been: “Articulating the past historically does not mean
recognizing it ‘the way it really was.’ [<wie es denn eigentlich gewesen ist>]”21
This difference between a ‘pure’ past and its having-been-present is in his
mind not the token of the deficit of historiography but that of its authentic-
ity. According to Benjamin, the historiographer needs to let go of the aim
to depict as accurately as possible what it is exactly that has occurred in the
past:
Addressing himself to the historian who wishes to relive an era, Fustel de
Coulanges [a French, reactionary, positivist historian] recommends that he
blot out everything he knows about the later course of history. There is no
better way of characterizing the method which historical materialism has
broken with.22
The genuine historical attitude picks up where all empathy [Einfühlung]
ends.23 Unlike historicism, which strives to bracket the present situation
in order to visit a supposedly uncontaminated past and ‘become one’ with
it, historical materialism turns to what has gone by precisely because it
understands that it cannot be fully recovered or made whole again. Rather
than seeking immediate accessibility to the past by (re)collecting as many
facts as possible and striving to ‘enter into it’ or ‘become one with it,’ it
should pay heed to the very distance that separates it from the present. “[N]o
state of affairs having causal significance is for that very reason historical,”
writes Benjamin. “It became historical posthumously, as it were through
events that may be separated from it by thousands of years.”24 A genuine
historical attitude is thus not motivated by the desire for empty, that is,
factual knowledge but it, instead, strives for a true understanding of a
certain period: “Historicism offers the ‘eternal’ image of the past; historical
20 AP, 481.
21 SW: 4, 391; GS: I-2, 695.
22 SW: 4, 391.
23 For a very interesting discussion of the concept of empathy in the context of Benjamin’s
25 SW: 4, 396.
26 Friedlander, Walter Benjamin, 164. See also Benjamin’s claim that the “true method of
making things present is to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their
space).” (AP, 206).
27 AP, 460.
28 Ibid., 63.
29 See the statement that “Historical ‘understanding’ is to be grasped, in principle, as an
in which things that normally just fade and slumber are consumed in a
flash, is called rejuvenation [Verjüngung].”30 It reflects the past not in a
mere resemblance but “in the dewy fresh ‘instant’.”31 It is in this sense that
Benjamin starts from the awareness that a genuine renewal of the past
only comes forth from what was never truly present in the first place. The
‘rejuvenation’ of the past is for Proust not a mere return of what had been
forgotten but a first surfacing of what has never been lived before:
[Proust] is filled with the insight that none of us has time to live the true
dramas of the life that we are destined for. This is what ages us—this and
nothing else. The wrinkles and creases in our faces are the registration of the
great passions, vices, insights that called on us; but we, the masters, were not
home.32
Proust’s method, therefore, is termed by Benjamin an “actualization, not [a]
reflection.”33 The revenant does not repeat a moment from the past but it
allows it to be expressed for the first time.
plation, the recognition of the image is at the same time the manifestation of a force in history
(or of history as a force).”
benjamin’s philosophy of history: the messianic is now 23
39 Weber, “Violence and Gesture. Agamben Reading Benjamin Reading Kafka Reading
112. See also Deleuze’s discussion of the “being-in-itself of the past” [l’être en soi du passé] in
Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), for example, p. 72.
41 See Deleuze’s interpretation of the relation between Nietzsche’s views on time, the
eternal return and the active nature of forces in Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 48: “The eternal return is … an
answer to the problem of passage [of time]. And in this sense it must not be interpreted as the
return of something that is, that is ‘one’ or the ‘same’. We misinterpret the expression ‘eternal
return’ if we understand it as ‘return of the same’. … It is not some one thing which returns
but rather returning itself is the one thing which is affirmed of diversity or multiplicity. In
other words, identity in the eternal return does not describe the nature of that which returns
but, on the contrary, the fact of returning for that which differs.” On the becoming-active
of the past, on account of the difference that is produced by its mere coming-back to the
present, see ibid., 71: “[T]he eternal return produces becoming-active. … However far they
go, however dee the becoming-reactive of forces, reactive forces will not return. … In and
through the eternal return negation as a quality of the will to power transmutes itself into
affirmation, it becomes an affirmation of negation itself, it becomes a power of affirming, an
affirmative power.”
42 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the
New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 10.
24 chapter one
43 AP, 463.
44 AP, 473.
45 SW: 4, 396.
46 AP, 462; GS: V-1, 577.
benjamin’s philosophy of history: the messianic is now 25
concentrated held for him the key to a ‘not yet conscious knowledge of the
past [das Gewesene]’ without which a full consciousness of certain crucial fea-
tures of the present moment is unattainable.47
It is in this sense that the concepts of messianic now and dialectical image
cast light on Benjamin’s dealings with historical materialism. They serve
to both criticize the Marxist philosophy of history and save some of its
most important categories. Benjamin’s philosophy of history constitutes, as
Michael Löwy puts it, “a heterodox form of the narrative of emancipation:
taking its inspiration from Marxist and messianic sources, it uses nostalgia
for the past and a revolutionary method for the critique of the present”48 and
can therefore be termed “Gothic”49 or “heretical, idiosyncratic, uncategoriz-
able.”50 Insofar as classic Marxism, primarily on account of its dialectical
view on history, was still dependent on naïve beliefs in absolute knowledge
and universal teleology it does not survive Benjamin’s vehement criticism
of the ‘dogmatic claims’ of the modern myth of progress.51 No doubt, the
famous interpretation of Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus (1920), which
Benjamin acquired in 1921, remains the strongest illustration of the intrin-
sic link he perceived between the modern belief in progress on the one
hand and a past filled with misery or a “tradition of the oppressed” [Tra-
dition der Unterdrückten] on the other.52 Angelus Novus depicts in his view
the angel of history who is driven “irresistibly into the future” by “a storm …
blowing from Paradise … so strong that the angel can no longer close [his
wings].”53 This storm which both expels the angel from Paradise and propels
productive forces” (my emphasis) and the “world-historical” existence of the proletariat and
communism in The German Ideology (1845–1846) and the claim there that “[c]ommunism is
… not … an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real
movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement
result from the now existing premise” (in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German
Ideology, Collected Works. Volume 5 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), 49). For another
example of what, from Benjamin’s perspective, can only be a dogmatic and naïve statement,
see the claim that the “fall [of the bourgeoisie] and the victory of the proletariat are equally
inevitable” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Manifesto of the Communist Party.”
Collected Works. Volume 6 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), 496 (my emphasis).
52 SW 4: 392; GS: I-2, 697.
53 SW: 4, 392.
26 chapter one
him into the future, prevents him to redeem the past that piles up before
him like “debris … grow[ing] toward the sky.”54 “Where a chain of events
appears before us,” writes Benjamin, “he [that is, the angel] sees one single
catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his
feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what
has been smashed.”55 Benjamin’s own endorsement of historical material-
ism thus burns all bridges with the belief in universal progress (“What we
call progress is this storm.”) and a teleological course of history, regardless
of whether it is Marxist in nature or not.56 In this context, he writes about a
“vulgar Marxist-conception of the nature of labor” that “recognizes only the
progress in mastering nature, not the retrogression of society” and hence
“already displays the technocratic features that later emerge in fascism.”57
Likewise, his harsh criticism of social democracy revolves around its blind
endorsement of the modern dream of progress:
The Social Democrats preferred to cast the working class in the role of a
redeemer of future generations [Erlöserin künftiger Generationen], in this
way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This indoctrination made the
working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are
nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than by the ideal of
liberated grandchildren.58
Benjamin’s own historical materialism starts from the idea that the spirit of
a revolution only remains uncontaminated by illusory beliefs when it directs
a distinct presence of mind towards what happened in the past. As such, his
political philosophy is at all times determined by his philosophy of history.
Both are steeped in the awareness that the past needs to be innovated and
brought to a renewed ‘legibility’ in and by the present. What Benjamin
has in mind with this ‘renewed legibility’ is, on the ethical-political level,
recognition of the suffering of the past by the generations that came after
54 SW: 4, 392.
55 SW: 4, 392.
56 SW: 4, 392.
57 SW: 4, 393. For a similar analysis of the “gaping discrepancy between the gigantic
means of technology and the miniscule moral illumination it affords” (SW: 2, 312), see
Benjamin’s Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays ‘War and Warriors’, edited
by Ernst Jünger (1930) and Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian (1937) (“Technology … is
obviously not a purely scientific development. It is at the same time a historical one. … In the
development of technology, [positivism] was able to see only the progress of natural science,
not the concomitant retrogression of society. … The [energies that technology develops]
advance the technology of war and its propagandistic preparation.” (SW: 3, 266)).
58 SW: 4, 394; GS: I-2, 700.
benjamin’s philosophy of history: the messianic is now 27
it. Revolutionary beliefs should in his mind not be built on a desire to take
on a leading role in the future. It is, rather, the acknowledgment of the need
to side with those who have been oppressed in the past which allows to
cherish hopes for the present that are untouched by the myth of universal
progress:
The subject of historical knowledge is the struggling, oppressed class itself.
Marx presents it as the last enslaved class—the avenger that completes [zu
Ende führt] the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrod-
den [im Namen von Generationen Geschlagener].59
Class struggle … is a fight for the crude and material things without which
no refined and spiritual things could exist. … [These refined and spiritual
things] are alive in this struggle as confidence, courage, humor, cunning and
fortitude, and have effects that reach far back into the past. They constantly
call into question every victory, past and present, of the rulers.60
For this reason, no revolutionary awareness can do without a move away
from historicism. The ideal of the latter to bring back history ‘the way
it really was’ is not at all an objective one. What creeps up beneath an
empathic attitude towards the past is a hidden alliance with the winners
that preside over it. Referring to the melancholic sadness of who fails to
recognize the true rejuvenation of the past that is engendered in the mes-
sianic ‘now,’ Benjamin writes that “[its] nature … becomes clearer if we ask:
With whom does historicism actually sympathize? The answer is inevitable:
with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of prior conquerors.”61 For Ben-
jamin, the place where history can be perceived as a continuous whole is
only reached by who is willing to take side with the forces that rule. It is for
this reason that his demand for the necessity to “blast open the continuum
of history” can be considered as a plea to render a voice to those who were
made mute by the course of it.62 It is a disruption of what he calls “the tri-
umphal procession in which [w]hoever has emerged victorious participates
to this day … [and] [in which] current rulers step over those who are lying
prostrate.”63 The historical materialist, by contrast, succeeds in standing by
the “tradition of the oppressed” that “brush[es] history against the grain”
and thus turns it into the foundation of hope.64 His recognition of the “sign
65 SW: 4, 396.
66 SW: 4, 390; GS: I-2, 693–694.
benjamin’s philosophy of history: the messianic is now 29
ble. The justice practiced, the joys, the works, have a different relation to
time, for their positive character is largely negated by the transience of things
[Vergänglichkeit].67
The fragment that Benjamin devotes to Horkheimer’s remarks reads like a
very clear articulation of the problems that were raised in his On the Con-
cept of History. There is for him indeed a relation between the nature of
events (positive or negative) and their qualification as completed or uncom-
pleted but its vector, that is, the direction of this relation, runs counter to the
one suggested by Horkheimer. Benjamin believes neither the positive to be
incomplete nor the negative to be complete because there is an attitude
towards the past which succeeds in reversing precisely these two qualifica-
tions. This attitude is what he names ‘remembrance’ [Eingedenken]:
The corrective to [Horkheimer’s] line of thinking may be found in the con-
sideration that history is not simply a science but also and not least a form of
remembrance. What science has ‘determined,’ [<festgestellt>] remembrance
can modify [modifizieren]. Such mindfulness can make the incomplete (hap-
piness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into some-
thing incomplete.68
What is redeeming about an authentic attitude toward history is, therefore,
nothing less than a capacity to modify events from previous times by way of
their remembrance. It is in remembrance that the most profound meaning
of Benjamin’s notion of the ‘arrest’ of the ‘continuum of historical time’ is
to be sought, that is, in a reversal of the relation between the complete and
the incomplete. When Benjamin described in On the Concept of History a
“barbarism [that] taints the manner in which [the past] was transmitted
from one hand to another,”69 it was to highlight the task of the historian to
“fan the spark of hope in the past … [by remaining] firmly convinced that
even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.”70 Similarly,
in The Arcades Project he defends the viewpoint that, by the sheer power of
remembrance, the past is perceived as no longer passed and, hence, that
a ‘spark of hope’ can be distilled from even the most negative of events:
“[T]he genuine conception of historical time rests entirely upon the image
of redemption.”71 Through remembrance it becomes possible, not of course
to undo the injustices from previous times or to reawaken the dead, but
to annihilate the inability to testify to their suffering. Remembrance is for
Benjamin a way to modify past injustice from within by making it incom-
plete again. By granting it a voice in the present, remembrance succeeds in
disrupting the homogeneous course of time and releases the past from the
historical form of forgetfulness that yet aggravated the suffering of its vic-
tims.
This potential of remembrance to undo what science had thought to
have ascertained is in Benjamin’s words “theology; … in remembrance we
have an experience that forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally
atheological.”72 This notion of remembrance is seen as ‘not atheological’
because it succeeds in releasing an event from the past from its closure
in historical time and thus refers to a realm that lies beyond its empty
homogeneity. In this way, the messianic now in which one moment from
the past briefly flashes up to be rejuvenated in the present is not just
‘untimely’ [unzeitgemäß] in the Nietzschean sense of the word (that is, a
plastic force that cannot properly fit into the linear succession of historical
time) but it is also a prefiguration of the final stage of history, that is, of the
event through which the whole of humanity will be redeemed. “Of course,”
writes Benjamin in On the Concept of History, “only a redeemed mankind
is granted the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed
mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it
has lived becomes a citation à l’ordre du jour. And that day is Judgment
Day.”73 The messianic moment therefore does not just renew the past: this
becoming-‘now’ of what has gone by comes together with a reference to
the future. In a short and early essay entitled The Life of Students (1914–
1915), an illustration of how Benjamin’s ideas on the philosophy of history
have remained on his mind from the very start of his intellectual life on, he
describes it as follows:
[T]he elements of the ultimate condition [Endzustandes] do not manifest
themselves as formless progressive tendencies, but are deeply rooted [einge-
bettet] in every present in the form of the most endangered, excoriated, and
ridiculed ideas and products of the creative mind. The historical task is to
disclose this immanent state of perfection [immanenten Zustand der Vollkom-
menheit] and make it absolute, to make it visible and dominant in the present
[sichtbar und herrschend in der Gegenwart zu machen].74
72 AP, 471. The original formula is: “[I]m Eingedenken machen wir eine Erfahrung, die uns
75 See Scholem, “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism.” The Mes-
sianic Idea in Judaism, 3–4: “Both tendencies are deeply intertwined and yet at the same time
of a contradictory nature; the Messianic idea crystallizes only out of the two of them together.
… Sometimes the one tendency appears with maximal emphasis while the other is reduced
to a minimum, but we never find a ‘pure case’ of exclusive influence or crystallization of one
of these tendencies. The reason for this is clear: even the restorative force has a utopian fac-
tor, and in utopianism restorative factors are at work.”
76 SW: 1, 255; GS: IV-1, 12.
77 SW: 4, 397; GS: I-2, 704.
32 chapter one
2.4. The Relation between Benjamin’s Materialism and His Jewish Messian-
ism
The ethical-political significance of Benjamin’s philosophy of history and
the theological one, however, are not just two different levels of inter-
pretation that may be seen as independent from each other, little as it
is permitted—despite the attempts of minds as brilliant as Brecht’s and
Scholem’s—to perceive Benjamin’s historical-materialist beliefs as irrel-
evant to his Jewish messianic ones and vice versa.80 In this sense, On
78
SW: 1, 55; GS: II-1, 134.
79
SW: 1, 55–56.
80 Jürgen Habermas, too, remains blind to the intrinsic relation between Benjamin’s his-
torical materialism and his Jewish messianism. See his “Consciousness-Raising or Redemp-
benjamin’s philosophy of history: the messianic is now 33
the Concept of History, written near the end of his lifetime, is not merely
to be read as a conceptualization of the two main vectors of Benjamin’s
thought but also as a depiction of the intrinsic relation between both.81 The
tive Criticism: The Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin.” New German Critique 17 (1979),
30–59. Though Habermas writes there that Benjamin “had to bring [his reception of histor-
ical materialism] together with the messianic interpretation of history he developed on the
model of redemptive criticism” and makes mention of a “domesticated historical materialism
[which] was supposed to provide an answer for the open question concerning the subject of
the history of art and culture, an answer which was to be materialist and yet compatible with
Benjamin’s own theory of experience,” (50) these were in his mind but unsuccessful attempts
of reconciliation between two incompatible intellectual frameworks. “This attempt must
fail,” writes Habermas, “because the materialist theory of social development cannot be sim-
ply fitted into the anarchistic conception of Jetztzeiten which intermittently come crashing
through fate as if from above. An anti-evolutionary conception of history cannot be tacked
onto historical materialism as if it were a monk’s cowl—tacked onto a historical materialism,
which takes account of progress not only in the dimension of the forces of production, but
in that of domination too. My thesis is that Benjamin did not realize his intention to bring
together enlightenment and mysticism, because the theologian in him could not accept the
idea of making his messianic theory of experience serviceable to historical materialism.” (51)
Habermas thus remains blind to the fact that Benjamin’s interpretation of historical mate-
rialism was itself “an anti-evolutionary” one without any “account of progress” and that, as
will be expounded later on, “the theologian in him” needed precisely a historical material-
ist framework to analyze how the lack of redemption of history in toto manifests itself in a
specific historical era (modernity).
81 In this way, our view of the relation between Benjamin’s historical materialism and
his Jewish messianism differs from the one put forward by the prominent Benjamin scholar
Irving Wohlfarth in his essay “Re-Fusing Theology: Some First Responses to Walter Ben-
jamin’s Arcades Project.” In that essay, Wohlfarth asks himself the question whether “the
concomitant inconsistencies in Benjamin’s thinking should … be considered avoidable inter-
nal contradictions, or whether, on the contrary, they correspond to unavoidable, external
ones” (Wohlfarth, “Re-Fusing Theology: Some First Responses to Walter Benjamin’s Arcades
Project.” New German Critique 39 (1986), 10). Wohlfarth’s view is the latter one, since he makes
the claim that the underlying goal of Benjamin’s philosophy was to do without all theol-
ogy whatsoever but that it was compelled to “enlist its services” on account of the historical
conditions, that is, the failure of the communist revolution to take place and the growing
popularity of fascism. “Only if the revolution had materialized,” writes Wohlfarth, “could his-
torical materialism have finally come into its own. … It was under the impact of historical
reversals that Benjamin, even as he sought to progress towards historical materialism, found
himself intermittently reverting to Jewish theology. … Benjamin’s re-emerging Messianism
was a response to the emerging fascist ‘Antichrist.’ ” (ibid., 12–13) Our own view starts from the
idea that the apparent inconsistencies in Benjamin’s thinking are to be considered precisely
as unavoidable, internal tensions. Our claim is that, regardless of the historical circumstances
in which they were conceived, Benjamin’s materialist ideas could not do away with their
underlying, theological beliefs and vice versa. It may be remarked that, in other essays, Wohl-
farth does seem willing to endorse this idea of an intrinsic connection between both, see, for
example, his “No Man’s Land: On Walter Benjamin’s ‘Destructive Character’.” Diacritics, 8:2
(1978), 47–65 and his statement there that “the interplay between the two poles [of political
pragmatism and theology] is also interior to each.” (57).
34 chapter one
84 Giorgio Agamben, Le temps qui reste. Un commentaire de l’Épître aux Romains (Paris:
see also Wolin, Walter Benjamin, for example, pp. 116–117, about Benjamin’s endorsement
of communist ideals: “[I]n the last analysis, he views ‘Communist goals’—like all merely
‘political goals’—as meaningless. Indeed it can be inferred that, for Benjamin, the only
ultimately worthwhile goals are still the Messianic ends that were the focal point of his earlier
days, in comparison with which all merely temporal goals must necessarily ring hollow.
Nevertheless, historical man remains separated from these higher ends by an unbridgeable
abyss. He is condemned to dwell in the profane, godless continuum of history. Thus historical
man can never act immediately on these ultimate ends.”
36 chapter one
reference to the messianic power of the weak: the weakness of the victims
of past injustice, that is, their incapacity to testify to what was done to
them, becomes sign of the (historical) condition that is in need of (divine)
redemption.89
The messianic kingdom, however, is in Benjamin’s mind never merely
a mirror-image of history—the projected realm where the last have finally
come to be first and the first end up to be last. Redeeming the past does
not mean that victims of the past are turned into posthumous victors when
their suffering is recognized. “The interest which the materialist historian
takes in the past,” writes Benjamin in The Arcades Project, “is always, in
part, a vital interest in its being past—in its having ceased to exist, its being
essentially dead.”90 It is on account of and not in spite of their weakness
that the oppressed become token of the messianic; it is their (historically
conditioned) powerlessness itself which determines their messianic power.
Benjamin’s notion of a ‘weak messianic power’ is thus in fact a tautology:
there is no messianic power that is not perceived as weak. As the medium
of renewal and redemption of past injustice the dialectical image is to be
seen both as a sign that final fulfillment might arrive in the future and as an
indication that it has not yet arrived in the present. From the perspective
of the messianic now, Judgment Day is seen as possible and, for this reason
precisely, as still to come.
It is for this reason that the difference between, on the one hand, the
redemption of a specific moment of the past (the messianic now, the dialec-
tical image) and, on the other, the ultimate redemption that will only be
brought about at the end of history (Judgment Day) should be seen, how-
ever subtle it may be, as crucial to Benjamin’s own Jewish messianic beliefs.
These beliefs are characterized by the paradox that the appearance of the
former testifies precisely to the absence of the latter: the movement in
which past suffering is redeemed cannot but reveal that the moment of final
redemption has not yet arrived. At the exact moment when the dialectical
image brings the fulfillment of one specific moment in time (“the image in
the now of its recognizability”),91 it lays bare that history as a whole remains,
in the words of Benjamin’s essay Trauerspiel and Tragedy “infinite in every
89 This idea was borrowed from A. Deuber-Mankowsky’s lecture The Image of Happiness
We Harbor: The Messianic Power of Weakness in Hermann Cohen, Walter Benjamin and Paul,
delivered on May 12, 2006 at the University of Antwerp on the occasion of the conference
“Messianism and the Law.”
90 AP, 363.
91 AP, 463.
benjamin’s philosophy of history: the messianic is now 37
direction and unfulfilled at every moment.”92 Such images thus both confirm
and transcend the Bilderverbot in that they represent precisely, as Samuel
Weber puts it, “the dislocation of the logic of representation.”93 They are Vex-
ierbilder, that “vex as much as [they] satisf[y]” and resemble those angels
that Benjamin holds so dear because they are “prevented from fulfilling
[their] destiny, but also … from disappearing. … The work of the angel has
been interrupted, but its suspension holds out another possibility: that of
a certain kind of survival.” Such images “survive” precisely as “interrupted
images.”94 The ‘flash of renewed recognizability’ rendered by the messianic
moment is therefore, to paraphrase Maurice Blanchot’s characterization of
the paradoxical structure of the image, an “affirm[ation] [of] things in their
disappearance”95—both a sudden appearance and a sudden disappearance
of the moment of ultimate fulfillment.96
This is at stake when Benjamin characterizes remembrance as an expe-
rience that “forbids us,” not only—as has been explained above—“to con-
ceive of history as fundamentally atheological,” but also “to try to write it
with immediately theological concepts.”97 There cannot be talk of a direct
connection between history and theology as long as the empirical world
continues to exist in its unredeemed state. The distance that separates the
past and the present from the possibility of final fulfillment makes it impos-
sible to perceive the historical realm as an immediate expression of any
divine or transcendent will. There will, moreover, never be a direct connec-
tion between history and theology since, as Scholem points out, in Jewish
messianic thought Judgment Day is not so much a moment in history as the
one that ends it:
Jewish Messianism is in its origins and by its nature—this cannot be suf-
ficiently emphasized—a theory of catastrophe. This theory stresses the
92 SW: 1, 55.
93 Samuel Weber, “Song and Glance.” Benjamin’s -abilities, 222.
94 Ibid. 222.
95 Maurice Blanchot, “Two Versions of the Imaginary.” Blanchot Reader. Fiction and Lit-
erary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis, Paul Auster and Robert Lamberton, ed. George Quasha
(Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1999), 417.
96 See also the statement in a draft version of the Epistemo-Critical Prologue that “[e]very-
Idea in Judaism, 7. See also the excellent account of Benjamin’s “new Jewish spirit” in Rabin-
bach, “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse,” 78–124. Benjamin’s intellectual attitude is
there described as a “product of the ‘post-assimilatory Renaissance,’” and as the illustration
of “a modern Jewish Messianism: radical, uncompromising, and comprised of an esoteric
intellectualism that is as uncomfortable with the Enlightenment as it is enamored of apoc-
alyptic visions—whether revolutionary or purely redemptive in the spiritual sense.” (ibid.,
80).
99 See also Willem van Reijen, “Innerlichkeit oder Begriffsarbeit? Die Barockrezeption
W. Benjamins und Th.W. Adornos.” Allegorie und Melancholie, ed. Willem van Reijen (Frank-
furt am Main: Suhrkam Verlag, 1992), 21 and Willem van Reijen and Norbert Bolz, Walter
Benjamin, trans. Hubert van den Berg (Kampen: Kok Agora, 1991), 13.
100 SW: 1, 55.
101 Jennings, Dialectical Images, 58–59.
benjamin’s philosophy of history: the messianic is now 39
Benjamin’s historical materialism is, as Willem van Reijen and Norbert Bolz
put it, “the incognito of his theology” and results from a “plea for an expan-
sion of the historical experience in the light of theology.”109 This theology,
moreover, is according to the same authors most accurately described as
an “inverse theology” (Adorno), that is, as a set of concepts that “holds
on to metaphysical and theological motives” only because it “places them
squarely within the realm of the profane.”110 Benjamin’s version of historical
materialism, which makes use of concepts like ‘messianic now,’ ‘redemp-
tion’ and ‘dialectical images’ does allow for the discovery of sudden glimpses
of the absolute within the historical but it at the same time severely prob-
lematizes the relation between both. As such, only the historical materialist
grasps the historical realm as an anticipation of divine fulfillment, that is,
as something that refers to the end of history by being historical. In the
framework of historical materialism the ‘tradition of the oppressed’ remains
an incarnation of a weak messianic power and thus reveals as much the
absence of ultimate fulfillment as the possibility of its advent.
Only in this way are the opening lines of On the Concept of History fully
understandable. The introduction of theology as a little hunchback who
is to be kept hidden behind the wooden puppet of historical materialism
serves Benjamin as an illustration of the prohibition to use immediately
theological categories—a prohibition that, paradoxically, originates in his
Jewish messianic beliefs. Since in a non-redeemed world the divine only
finds expression in a non-immediate way, the little hunchback’s activities
are nowhere visible but in the movements of the wooden puppet. As a
consequence, the brief and sudden appearances of what transcends history
will only be grasped by a presence of mind that is directed towards history
itself (as will become clear later on, Benjamin’s concept of Aufmerksamkeit
is crucial here). The historical materialist understands that it is not until the
final stage of history will be achieved that the little hunchback will come out
into the open, though not any longer to give hints of his existence through
the game of chess that is history but to deliver its fulfillment by clearing the
board with a single stroke of his arm.
Age [which] falls squarely on human beings” (235) that seem hard to match with Benjamin’s
own views of politics as either a ‘politics of waiting’ or a nihilistic, destructive anarchism (see
Benjamin’s Critique of Violence (1921)).
109 Van Reijen and Bolz, Walter Benjamin, 42 (my translation).
110 Ibid., 32.
benjamin’s philosophy of history: the messianic is now 43
Conclusion
It is clear that Benjamin understands the categories that make up the crux of
his philosophy of history, that is, the messianic now and dialectical image,
as not immediately theological in nature. His philosophy of history cannot
be reduced to the theological presuppositions on which it is built because
of the following reason: Benjamin categorically rejects any principle that
underlies the course of history and brings it univocally to the moment of
its redemption.111 The images of weakness, that is, the images of “enslaved
ancestors,” which nourish his historical materialism and, in fact, turn his
entire oeuvre into an edifice of remembrance, deconstruct the ideal of an
“ ‘eternal’ image of the past” and are deeply marked by the transitory and
unstable material that is called history.112 As a consequence, these renewals
of past suffering in the present do stand out as souvenirs du futur (pre-
figurations of the divine moment of final fulfillment) but they pass judg-
ment, in first instance, on history: they do not fail, first and foremost, to
disclose the distance that separates history from its redemption and they
thus reveal how the very notion of Heilsgeschichte links up two terms that,
from the standpoint of history that is our own, are mutually exclusive. In
the first lines of his brief but crucial Theological-Political Fragment (1920–
1921 or 1937–1938) he writes that “the Kingdom of God is not the telos of
the historical dynamic; it cannot be established as a goal [Ziel]. From the
standpoint of history, it is not the goal but the terminus [Ende].”113 Never-
theless, it is from nowhere but this same ‘standpoint of history’ that it does
become possible to experience a sudden glimpse of the divine: however pro-
found the separation between both may be, it is within the very core of
the Geschichte that brief flashes of the possibility of Heil can be perceived.
111 In this sense Benjamin’s criticism of the immediately theological notion of Heils-
geschichte does not essentially differ from his resolute disavowal of the secularized concept
of universal progress. For him, it does not ultimately make a difference whether the principle
that supposedly underlies history as a whole and renders it homogeneous is of a transcen-
dent (divine Providence) or an immanent nature (human reason) since the very belief in the
redeeming force of such a principle is, in his mind, built on an illusion. See also Rabinbach,
“Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse,” 86–87: “In Jewish Messianism the cataclysmic
element is explicit and consequently makes redemption independent of either any imma-
nent historical ‘forces’ or personal experience of liberation. … Freedom may occur in history,
but it is not brought about by historical forces or individual acts. Messianism therefore can-
cels out the possibility of an optimistic and evolutionary conception of history, of progress,
without of course foreclosing the possibility of freedom.”
112 SW: 4, 396.
113 SW: 3, 305; GS: II-1, 203.
44 chapter one
the past which is preserved: distinct and yet indiscernible, and all the more
indiscernible because distinct, because we do not know which is one and
which is the other. … What we see in the crystal is therefore a dividing in
two that the crystal itself constantly causes to turn on itself, that it prevents
from reaching completion, because it is a perpetual self-distinguishing, a
distinction in the process of being produced; which always resumes the
distinct terms in itself, in order constantly to relaunch them.119 … What we
see in the crystal is always the bursting forth of life, of time, in its dividing in
two or differentiation120 … As a dimension of time, [the ‘too late’] is, through
the crystal, the one which is opposed to the static dimension of the past as
this survives and weighs in the interior of the crystal. It is a sublime clarity
which is opposed to the opaque, but it has the property of arriving too late,
dynamically.121
The messianic moment is not to be likened to a ‘mystical now’ in which
human imagination discovers the firm ground of a revelation of absolute
truth and it divests immanence and history from all sense of self-identity.
Benjamin’s Jewish messianism is for this reason not at all irreconcilable with
an experience of immanence but it presupposes it: the expression of the
non-empirical in and through the empirical is but the discovery that the
latter partakes in an untimely process in which repetition entails difference
and actualization brings about a renewed potentiality. This process is the
absolute. The empirical im-parts, to borrow the term introduced by Samuel
Weber in his brilliant analysis of Benjamin’s work, to the exact extent
that it parts with itself.122 It is in this sense that the genuinely historical
image (the messianic now) is dialectical: though always an expression of
what transcends and interrupts it, it is perceived within time and thereby
registers the impact of a ‘weak messianic power’ within the realm of history.
119 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
To fully understand this line of thinking and to grasp the possibility that
a moment in time denotes the existence of an absolute force, Benjamin’s
essay on Proust and his use there of the very same concepts (Eingedenken,
Erinnerung, Erlebnis, schwach) and formulas (wie es gewesen ist) is illumi-
nating. As mentioned above, Benjamin believes Proust’s views on human
memory to be dependent on the awareness that a moment of the past which
has itself never been fully present has survived in time. His analysis under-
stands the involuntary memory as the sign of what cannot be adequately
remembered because it was not even part of any lived experience [Erleb-
nis] in the first place:
We know that in his work Proust described not a life as it actually was [wie
es gewesen ist] but a life as it was remembered by the one who had lived it.
Yet even this statement is imprecise and far too crude. For the important
thing to the remembering author is not what he experienced [erlebt hat], but
the weaving of his memory [Erinnerung], the Penelope work of recollection
[Eingedenken]. Or should one call it, rather, a Penelope work of forgetting? Is
not the involuntary recollection, Proust’s mémoire involontaire, much closer
to forgetting than what is usually called memory?123
The well-known shock that comes along with involuntary memory denotes
according to Benjamin that a moment of the past has renewed or, in his
terms, ‘rejuvenated’ itself in relation to the ‘present it has been.’ It is a mark
of the difference that lies in the scope of a process of genuine repetition and
of the ‘dividual’ (Deleuze) nature that distinguishes an authentic singularity
from what would otherwise have remained a mere (self-identical) individ-
uality. Of decisive importance to Proust’s work, however, is the awareness
that what is brought back by the revenant is in fact hardly worth remember-
ing. The past that it carries with does not consist of heroic acts or climactic
events that are entitled to an afterlife of continuous commemoration. It is
most often precisely the contrast between the nullity of the event that is
remembered and the force with which remembrance delivers it back to the
present which accounts for the latter’s disturbing effect. For this reason Ben-
jamin wonders
[w]hat … it [was] that Proust sought so frenetically. What was at the bottom
of these infinite efforts? Can we say that all lives, works, and deeds that matter
were never anything but the undisturbed unfolding of the most banal, most
fleeting, most sentimental, weakest [schwächsten] hour in the life of the one
to whom they pertain?124
This search for lost time springs forth from what, according to Benjamin,
is seldom recognized in Proust’s endeavors though it denotes their very
essence: a quest for happiness.
By submitting to these laws, Proust conquered the hopeless sadness within
him (what he once called “l’imperfection incurable dans l’essence même du
present”), and from the honeycombs of memory he built a house for the
swarm of his thoughts. Cocteau recognized what really should be the major
concern of all readers of Proust. He recognized Proust’s blind, senseless,
obsessive quest for happiness.125
It is, of course, no coincidence that these lines on Proust are constructed
around the relation between ‘weakness’ and ‘happiness’ that is so central to
Benjamin’s philosophy of history. The interpretation of Proust is important
to illuminate the significance of the messianic moment in that it shows
that the authentically historical image does not lift one’s spirits by virtue
of its content but solely through its potentiality to turn the course of history
back on itself and, as it were, brush it against the grain. Because it reaches
us from the depths of what was believed to be irredeemably lost it shows
the past to have not really passed.126 It is the sheer faculty of remembering
which is so enlivening to Proust and not so much the nature of what is being
remembered. It is the mere return of the past which renders the memory-
image an, in Benjamin’s words, ‘rejuvenating’ force and not the importance
of the resurfacing past. For this reason Benjamin goes on to describe the ‘first
happiness’ [ersten Glücks] that originates in “eternal repetition, the eternal
restoration of the original [die ewige Restauration des ursprünglichen].”127 In
his mind it is the pure renewal of the past within the present which renders
Proust the happiness he longed for.128 It is a happiness that can therefore
of the unique, the new, the yet unborn is combined with that bliss of experiencing something
once more, of possessing once again, of having lived” (SW: 2, 715) in Agesilaus Santander
(second version) and, of course, the quintessential Theological-Political Fragment: “If one
arrow points to the goal toward which the secular dynamic acts, and another marks the
direction of messianic intensity, then certainly the quest of free humanity for happiness runs
counter to the messianic direction. But just as a force, by virtue of the path it is moving
along, can augment another force on the opposite path, so the secular order—because of
its nature as secular—promotes the coming of the Messianic Kingdom.” (SW: 3, 305) For a
more elaborate account of Benjamin’s use of the term ‘happiness,’ see Friedlander, Walter
Benjamin, 195–200.
benjamin’s philosophy of history: the messianic is now 49
Introduction
1 B: 2, 617.
2 SW: 1, 37 (my emphasis).
52 chapter two
1.1. Introduction
In his moving account of his lifelong relation with Benjamin, Gershom
Scholem mentions that his friend characterized his own philosophy as
Janus-faced.3 Responsible for this ambiguity is, as was brought to the fore
in the discussion of Benjamin’s philosophy of history in the first chapter,
his singular blend of materialism and messianism. For this reason Scholem
is right in claiming that “[o]ne side [of Benjamin’s Janus face] was offered
to Brecht, the other to me [that is, Scholem himself].”4 Benjamin’s ideas on
Kafka will be the focal point of this chapter since they are a clear illustration
of this Janus face. In November 1927, when he read The Trial while in
bed with jaundice (“As an angel of illness I have Kafka at my bedside.”)5
Benjamin started to discuss Kafka’s work and relevance with Scholem. As
becomes clear from their correspondence, the side of Benjamin’s Janus face
that was turned to Scholem really was a most religious one. For Scholem’s
own interpretation of Kafka, to be sure, is nothing less than immediately
theological and, from start to end, steeped in his Jewish beliefs. On August
1, 1931, he sends Benjamin the following remarks:
[My] “individual thoughts” about Kafka … do not concern Kafka’s position in
the continuum of German literature (in which he has no position of any sort,
something that he himself did not have the least doubt about; as you probably
know, he was a Zionist), but his position in the continuum of Jewish literature.
I advise you [that is, Benjamin] to begin any inquiry into Kafka with the Book
of Job, or at least with a discussion of the possibility of divine judgment, which
I regard as the sole subject of Kafka’s production [worthy of] being treated in
a work of literature. These, you see, are in my opinion also the vantage points
from which one can describe Kafka’s linguistic world, which with its affinity
to the language of the Last Judgment probably represents the prosaic in its
most canonical form. … It would be an enigma to me how you as a critic would
go about saying something about this man’s [that is, Kafka’s] world without
placing the Lehre [teaching], called Gesetz [law] in Kafka’s work, at the center.
I suppose this is what the moral reflection—if it were possible (and this is the
hypothesis of presumptuousness!)—of a halakhist who attempted a linguistic
paraphrase of a divine judgment would have to be like. Here, for once, a world
is expressed in which redemption cannot be anticipated—go and explain
this to the goyim! I believe that at this point your critique will become just
as esoteric as its subject; the light of revelation never burned as unmercifully
as it does here. The overwhelming statement that the Last Judgment is, rather,
a martial law was made, unless I am mistaken, by Kafka himself.6
Elsewhere, Scholem even goes as far as to write that he told his students
that “in order to understand the Kabbalah, nowadays one had to read Franz
Kafka’s writings first, particularly The Trial.”7
The other side of the spectrum is personified by Bertolt Brecht, with
whom Benjamin discussed the writings of Kafka in June 1931. According to
Benjamin’s notes of these discussions, Brecht considered Kafka to be “the
only truly Bolshevist writer.”8
Scholem, always preoccupied by the desire to show that messianic in-
sights were ultimately of far more significance for Benjamin than materialist
ones, makes the assertion that his essay on Kafka (written in 1934) bears
evidence of the fact that even at this later stage of his work Benjamin’s
Marxism was outweighed by his Jewish beliefs. With this purpose in mind,
he describes Benjamin’s ideas on Kafka as “certainly not in line with [his]
work [for the Institute of Social Research]” and as “diametrically opposed
to those of Brecht.”9 There is indeed, in Benjamin’s letters, ample proof to
be found that Scholem’s insights on Kafka had an enormous influence on
his own reading and writing. In May 1934 Benjamin writes the following to
Scholem: “Your particular views of Kafka emanating from Jewish insights
[would be] of the greatest importance to me in this undertaking [of writing
an essay on Kafka]—not to say virtually indispensable.”10 It should therefore
be clear from the outset that for Benjamin no interpretation of Kafka can be
meaningful if it is unable to confront the theological side of his thinking.
However, there are obvious differences between Benjamin’s interpreta-
tion of Kafka and Scholem’s, which seem to be strategically overlooked in
6 Ibid., 170–171.
7 Ibid., 125.
8 Benjamin’s notes on a conversation with Brecht of June 6, 1931, quoted by Scholem in
ibid., 175.
9 Ibid. 197–198.
10 Ibid. 198.
54 chapter two
the latter’s attempts to ward off an in his opinion overly materialist read-
ing of his friend’s philosophy. Benjamin’s acknowledgment of the ‘failure’
[Gescheiterten] that he deems central to Kafka’s work is indispensable here.11
On August 11, 1934, for instance, Benjamin writes to Scholem that “[t]he
Work of the Thora … is—when we occupy us with Kafka’s presentation
of it—thwarted.”12 In the Kafka-essay itself, moreover, it is stated in one of
the most essential paragraphs that “he did fail [gescheitert] in his grandiose
attempt to convert poetry into teachings [Lehre, doctrine], to turn it into
a parable and restore to it that stability and unpretentiousness which, in
the face of reason, seemed to him the only appropriate thing for it.”13 With
the central place that is allocated to Kafka’s failure to “convert poetry into
teachings” Benjamin takes a clear step back from Scholem’s interpretation,
however much he took over from the latter’s theological framework. For
Kafka’s prose is in Benjamin’s opinion not at all written from the ideal stand-
point of the “halakhist who attempted a linguistic paraphrase of a divine
judgment.”14 The causes of Kafka’s failure to ‘convert poetry into teach-
ings’ are rather to be sought in precisely the human incapacity to make
the halakhist’s standpoint our own. In Benjamin’s essay Kafka’s writing is
sketched out as a careful analysis of the impossibility to access divine truth
(teachings, doctrine). Benjamin defends the viewpoint that Kafka expresses
nothing less than the condition of being deprived of the “language of the
Last Judgment.”15 For Benjamin, as Peter Osborne points out, Kafka’s genius
consists in having given up the halakhist’s position and his attempts to con-
vert Halakah (the divine law, doctrine of rules) into Haggadah (the set of
traditions and stories that are meant to transmit the Halakah) and in sub-
stituting it for a description of the ongoing efforts of a haggadhist who,
vice versa, seeks to “convert Haggadah into Halakah.”16 Since immediate
access to the doctrine of the divine has been lost to mankind, however, these
attempts are doomed to fail.
itics of Time.” Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Ben-
jamin and Peter Osborne (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 74: “Kafka’s reflections
are … not the reflections of a halakhist. Their indeterminacy does not derive from the
unbridgeable gap between the divinity of law and its human interpretation. They are those
of a haggadhist, seeking to fill the gap created by the loss of law (Halakah), seeking to convert
Haggadah into Halakah.”
the kafka-essays and the origin of german tragic drama 55
17 Ibid., 70.
18 SW: 2, 806; GS: II-2, 4 25.
56 chapter two
lies in-between immediate theology and a-theology makes one think that
the universe that is according to Benjamin being depicted in Kafka’s nov-
els and stories is the very one that supports his own philosophical writings.
It is for this reason that the choice was made to pay so much attention to
Benjamin’s Kafka-essay: nowhere in his work has it been made more clear
what it means to live in a world that cannot comprehend the absolute as a
unified object of experience or relate to truth as an object of intention. Ben-
jamin’s understanding of Kafka brings out how the inaccessibility of what
he calls ‘doctrine’ (divine teachings, Lehre) seems to have condemned us to
a disenchanted universe. Moreover, it is in the Kafka-essay that Benjamin
introduces the idea that even a truly fallen universe should not cast aside
the hope for redemption.
19 SW: 2, 807.
20 Haas, quoted in SW: 2, 807; GS: II-2, 426.
21 SW: 2, 807; GS: II-2, 426.
the kafka-essays and the origin of german tragic drama 57
infinite deferral and unceasing retreat that is central to The Castle should
not be confused with the inapproachability of the absolute or the inacces-
sibility of divine teaching since this inapproachability and inaccessibility,
of such crucial importance to both Kafka and Benjamin, are not at all to
be regarded as signs that genuine truth is forever receding and wrapped up
in a mythical fog or that the absolute can only be presented in a negative
way. As we will see further on, the world of Kafka and Benjamin is charac-
terized neither by a feeling that divine forces are entirely absent nor by an
experience of sublime non-representability but by the awareness that the
absolute suddenly asserts itself in the here and now and therefore cannot
be approached at will. Crucial to Kafka’s writings is therefore the idea that
a presentation of absolute truth can occur in our immediate surroundings
but that it cannot be actively brought about and is no object of knowledge
or intention.22
To make this double point in a first, simple way Benjamin contrasts
Haas’s view with a sentence in The Castle that literally forecloses the link
between the Kafkaesque authorities and divine forgiveness (“[E]ven [the
supreme authorities] can probably not forgive but only judge.”)23 and with a
statement that he does seem to endorse, borrowed from the Swiss writer
Denis de Rougement: “All this … is not the wretched situation of man
without a god, but the wretched state of a man who is bound to a god
he does not know [einem Gott verhaftet ist, den er nicht kennt], because
does not just reject both the idea that the absolute is absent and the idea that it is embodied
in (political and juridical) authorities but also the idea—only seemingly close to his own—
that it is revealed in a gradual way. As Friedlander writes, Benjamin criticizes Scholem’s
formal account of the realization of meaning (shared by the Romantics) that deems it
possible (and even essential) to distinguish between a sign of the existence of the divine
on the one hand and the content of its revelation on the other. In this view, revelation
evolves from a first recognition that the absolute is present (but undecipherable) to an
ever-increasing ability to ‘read’ more and more of its content. Benjamin, however, criticizes
this view by maintaining that the presentation of absolute truth always already entails a
distinct articulation of content and an actualization of meaning. For this reason, “a sign
without content cannot be revelation. Benjamin would thus argue that the condition in
which scripture is lost and the one in which it cannot be deciphered come to the same
thing.” (Friedlander, Walter Benjamin, 213–214). This explains, as we will see later on, why
the universe of Kafka is marked by a dualism between, on the one hand, a dynamics of
the postponement of truth-revelation and, on the other, the sudden discovery of something
absolute or the abrupt arrival of moments of truth-revelation (the gestus). The former does
bring about an openness for or an attentiveness towards the latter but it always entails a
confrontation with the absence of truth-presentation and it does not contain any (not even
a gradual) actualization of meaning.
23 SW: 2, 807.
58 chapter two
Talmudic legend recounted above] blows about Kafka, and that is why he was not tempted
to found a religion.” … “He was neither mantic nor the founder of a religion. How was he able
to survive in this air [of the village at the foot of the castle]?” (SW: 2, 806).
the kafka-essays and the origin of german tragic drama 59
and states that “[n]o other writer has obeyed the commandment ‘Thou shalt
not make unto thee a graven image’ so faithfully.”29 It is this inability to
gain knowledge of the absolute that marks Kafka’s work with the above
mentioned ‘failure’ vis-à-vis the Work of the Thora and the inability “to
convert poetry into teachings.”30 It is crucial in this regard that for Benjamin
Kafka’s genius was closely connected to his own acknowledgment of this
failure. Kafka’s relation to his own artistic work is steeped in an awareness
of the limits of his understanding: “Kafka wished to be numbered among
ordinary men. He was pushed to the limits of understanding at every turn
[Die Grenze des Verstehens hat sich ihm auf Schritt und Tritt aufgedrängt],
and he liked to push others to them as well.”31
29 SW: 2, 808.
30 SW: 2, 808.
31 SW: 2, 804; GS: II-2, 422.
32 SW: 2, 808; GS: II-2, 427.
33 SW: 2, 804.
60 chapter two
contains his review of Max Brod’s biography of Kafka he includes the sen-
tence that “Kafka presumably had to entrust his literary remains to someone
who would not comply with his last request.”34 He thus hints at the possi-
bility that Kafka knew very well that Max Brod would in the end fail his
friend’s last will to have his unpublished writings burnt. In that case Kafka’s
wish to have his writings destroyed after his death would not prove that he
considered them unworthy to be preserved. This distinction is significant
because it would mean, first, that, despite the content of his last will, Kafka
did want to leave behind a legacy and, second, that an important element
of this legacy that he wanted to leave behind is precisely the idea that he
did not consider himself worthy to leave one behind. In other words, Kafka
wanted to bring on display the very failure that is central to his thinking
and he could only do so by way of an unheeded last will to have his work
destroyed. A confrontation with the limits of understanding and the feeling
that nothing that is profoundly truthful can be aimed at in an intentional
way thus become not just central characteristics of his writings but even
conditions of possibility of genuine authorship.35
It is in this same context that Benjamin hints at Kafka’s feeling of shame.
He writes that “[s]hame … is Kafka’s strongest gesture [Die Scham … ist die
stärkste Gebärde Kafkas]”36 and goes on to derive, from the sentence in The
Trial that “[i]t was as if the shame of it were to outlive him,” a notion of
shame that is not to be equated with an individual property: “Shame is not
only shame in the presence of others, but can also be shame one feels for
others.”37 Kafka’s shame is to be termed ‘singular’ or ‘dividual’ rather than
individual because it is of both a particular and a universal nature at the
same time: it is a shame experienced within the heart of the Self but for
the Other. In shame, the ego is opened up from within and thus affected
by an alterity that it cannot take distance from.38 In shame the I is forced
34 SW: 3, 323.
35 For an extensive exploration of this ‘aesthetics of silence’ in literature, see Susan
Sontag’s beautiful essay “The Aesthetics of Silence” in Styles of Radical Will (New York:
Picador, 2002), 3–34 and Enrique Vila-Matas’s novel Bartleby & Co, trans. Jonathan Dunne
(New York: New Directions, 2004).
36 SW: 2, 808; GS: II-2, 428.
37 SW: 2, 808.
38 See, for example, Rudi Visker, “Dis-possessed: How to Remain Silent ‘after’ Levinas.”
Truth and Singularity: Taking Foucault into Phenomenology (Dordrecht, Boston, London:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), 116–117: “[The subject] is not without a centre, but
caught in the unbreakable spell of something from which it derives its singularity. Accord-
ingly, what is most ‘proper’ to the subject, what lies at the basis of its irreplacability, of its
the kafka-essays and the origin of german tragic drama 61
to suffer in the place of the Other and it brings on display a life that it can
neither make fully into its own nor differentiate itself from: it is “an intimate
human reaction, but at the same time it has social claims.”39 Benjamin’s
concept of shame thus runs counter to a commonly held viewpoint that
associates it with an awareness of guilt and the possibility of atonement.
Though Benjamin contends, albeit for entirely different reasons, that guilt
is an equally important element in Kafka’s writings, it is not in guilt that
their Grundgefühl lies: the opinion that guilt and atonement are Kafka’s
most basic themes, namely, would restore both the immediately theological
interpretation that Benjamin so violently criticizes (that is, the idea that
his writing originates in the feeling of being “in the wrong before God”)
and the belief in the possibility of a recovered sense of autonomy or a fully
individualized Self.40 What Benjamin has in mind for Kafka, rather, is not
at all a shame that originates in a feeling of being individually responsible
for a committed wrongdoing or in a longing for a restored innocence but a
shame that follows from a never resolved feeling of not being responsible
for one’s very being. It allows us to experience a layer of being that belongs
to the essence of humanity (an “elemental purity of feeling”) but does refer
to something beyond it and it denotes a life which does separate us from
the absolute but does not fully suspend our relation to it.41 In a similar vein
Emmanuel Lévinas will write only one year later that “[s]hame does not
depend … on the limitations of our being, in so far as it is susceptible to
sin, but on the being of our being itself, and its incapacity to release it from
itself [son incapacité de rompre avec soi-même].”42 The shame that stands out
in Kafka’s stories and self-reflections is caused by the awareness that it is
being human itself, and not the act of committing a sin, which condemns
us to the “wretched state of [being] bound to a God [we] do not know.”43
Because the life contained within the feeling of shame is singular and
non-individual, it needs the mediation of artistic practice and writing to be
translation).
43 SW: 2, 807.
62 chapter two
expressed. The shame that Benjamin endows Kafka with instills an inability
to comprehend and to grasp truth as an object of knowledge or intention but
it can be taken up in literary contexts that, on account of their artistic char-
acter, do not presuppose the aim of knowledge or systematic meaning. The
shame that is central to Kafka’s writing denotes a layer of being that cannot
be aimed at or brought into a context of knowledge but it can be expressed
in an artistic medium where it is obvious that the actions, thoughts and
feelings that are described are neither to be immediately identified with
those of the author nor for that reason to be regarded as entirely unreal-
istic. For this reason, though the dividual and singular character of the feel-
ing of shame precludes it from finding an adequate medium of expression
in ordinary experiences (where emotions are immediately identified with
individual properties), it can be brought to visibility in that realm where
truth and semblance meet without fully merging with each other, that is, in
art. Such strategies of writing are neither magical nor realistic, and they do
not turn Kafka into a modern-day Socrates who draws on the very aware-
ness that knowledge is lacking in order to gain a more profound knowledge.
Shame cannot be aufgehoben into a Socratic docta ignorantia because it
draws attention to an incapacity that cannot be overcome: what is remark-
able with shame is that it exemplifies how the incapacity of human beings
to intentionally express an essential layer of their being does not prevent
this layer to be expressed on its own account and as if in an involuntary
way. Shame, in the words of Lévinas, “relates to all one wants to conceal
but cannot escape from.”44 The expression of shame that Benjamin refers
to can therefore never be directly aimed at and Kafka was only capable of
bringing it to expression through the intervention of a third party who went
against his will (in both a literal and figurative way, that is, it is only because
Brod did not do what Kafka had asked him to do that his writings are able to
express the power that is contained within them). In other words, even the
most significant elements of his writings, that is, the very feelings of failure
and shame and the awareness that they do not gain knowledge of truth, are
expressed as failures.
44 Ibid., 112. See also Lévinas’s discussion of the scene in Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights
(1931) where the Tramp attends a concert of a chamber-orchestra but, having swallowed a
whistle earlier that day, constantly disrupts the performance with his hiccup. These hiccups
are in Lévinas’s opinion exemplifications of the experience of shame. According to Lévinas,
namely, the Tramp is not ashamed on account of a previous event or act but merely because
something that is part of his inner core does not let itself be contained and expresses itself
in an involuntary way.
the kafka-essays and the origin of german tragic drama 63
45 SW: 3, 325.
46 SW: 3, 327; B: 2, 764.
47 SW: 3, 326; B: 2, 763.
48 SW: 3, 326; B: 2, 763.
49 SW: 3, 325; B: 2, 760–762.
64 chapter two
What Benjamin has in mind with this description of life under the sign of
modernity is in the Kafka-letter itself only very briefly hinted at. The whole
question of the loss of the legitimacy of tradition, however, is one of the most
important themes in his work in the late thirties and needs to be regarded as
nothing less than the foundation of a large number of his most well-known
essays. In essays like The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai
Leskov (1936) and On Some Motifs in Baudelaire (1939), for instance, Ben-
jamin sheds light on the process through which tradition takes shape and
builds on the assertion that it can be interpreted as a passing on [tradere] of
experience [Erfahrung]. Benjamin’s concept of tradition denotes precisely
a sphere of existence that mediates, by way of a so-called ‘true’ experience,
between the individual and the community to which he belongs.50 “Expe-
rience,” writes Benjamin in On Some Motifs in Baudelaire “is … a matter of
tradition, in collective existence as well as private life. It is the product less
of facts firmly anchored in memory [Erinnerung] than of accumulated and
frequently unconscious data that flow together in memory [Gedächtnis].”51
He reads Baudelaire’s concept of correspondances as an instance of such an
experience which goes beyond the individual’s conscious memory: “Corre-
spondances are the data of remembrance [Eingedenkens]—not historical
data, but data of prehistory. What makes festive days great and significant is
the encounter with an earlier life [früheren Leben].”52 To the inner structure
of experience, therefore, belongs an intimate connection between a purely
individual past and a past that precedes that individual: “What is past mur-
murs in the correspondences, and the canonical experience of them has its
place in a previous life.”53 Experience brings about the sense of belonging
that is indispensable to overcome the barriers that separate an individual
from the other members of a community. Benjamin goes on to describe sto-
rytelling as an activity that gives rise to such an experience of continuity: the
story, and the actual moment when it is being narrated, allow the individual
to experience a past that stretches out beyond his own limited existence. It
is by way of storytelling that an individual learns that he is a member of a
larger community: “A story does not aim to convey an event per se, which
is the purpose of information; rather, it embeds the event in the life of the
storyteller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening.”54
50 SW: 4, 314.
51 SW: 4, 314; GS: I-2, 608.
52 SW: 4, 334; GS: I-2, 639 (translation modified).
53 SW: 4, 334.
54 SW: 4, 316.
the kafka-essays and the origin of german tragic drama 65
55 SW: 3, 143.
56 SW: 3, 146.
57 SW: 3, 162.
58 SW: 3, 154; GS: II-2, 453–454.
66 chapter two
history. Experience grants the storyteller a claim to a truth that for its
part endows him with a sense of authority. “[The story],” writes Benjamin
“contains, openly or covertly, something useful. In one case, the usefulness
may lie in a moral; in another, in some practical advice; in a third, in a
proverb or maxim.”59 Even though some stories do advocate a practical
advice Benjamin’s notion of usefulness does not here refer to the logic of
pragmatism and problem-solving: being useful means in this context that,
in the story, storyteller and listener are granted access to a deeper form of
wisdom:
[T]he storyteller joins the ranks of the teachers and sages. He has counsel
[weiß Rat]—not for a few situations, as the proverb does, but for many,
like the sage.60 … [C]ounsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal
concerning the continuation of a story which is in the process of unfolding. To
seek this counsel, one would first have to be able to tell the story. … Counsel
woven into the fabric of real life [gelebten Lebens] is wisdom.61
It is only in this sense that the story can turn into the receptacle of ‘the epic
side of truth’: to the extent that it conveys wisdom, it is not directed towards
a context of verifiable knowledge, an accuracy of meaning or a psychological
explanation of certain events but it delivers a deeper understanding of their
inner structure.62 Benjamin thus presupposes the very same dualism that
will underlie his philosophy of history (see Chapter I): the story does not
concern itself with facts and the way in which certain events have occurred
in history (the positivist ideal of the ‘wie es gewesen ist’) but with a truth
or absolute force that can be discovered in life as such (which is why one
story is never an autonomous whole but usually leads to another). It does
not refer to elements that can be verified and causes that can be determined
once and for all but it embodies a broader view and a more dynamic context
of meaning. Seeing the chronicler as an instance of the storyteller and
opposing him to the type of historian who is merely concerned with the
verification and comprehensibility of the events depicted, Benjamin writes
that
[t]he historian’s task is to explain in one way or another the happenings with
which he deals; under no circumstances can he content himself with simply
displaying them as models of the course of the world. But this is precisely
what the chronicler does … By basing [his] historical tales on a divine—
and inscrutable—plan of salvation [den göttlichen Heilsplan … der ein uner-
59 SW: 3, 145.
60 SW: 3, 162; GS: II-2, 464.
61 SW: 3, 145–146; GS: II-2, 442.
62 SW: 3, 326.
the kafka-essays and the origin of german tragic drama 67
forschlicher ist], at the very outset [he has] lifted the burden of demonstrable
explanation from [his] own shoulders. Its place is taken by interpretation,
which is concerned not with an accurate concatenation of definite events,
but with the way these are embedded in the great inscrutable course of the
world [den großen unerforschlichen Weltlauf ].63
If, in the story, both the storyteller and the listeners grow intuitively aware
of how they belong to a greater whole, it is therefore only because both
understand that the events themselves that are conveyed in the story bear
the mark of a larger, not verifiable but all-encompassing force. The wisdom
that lies contained within the story cannot be taken as an object of intention
nor be aimed at as the source of knowledge and for that reason precisely it
is believed to convey a truth that is absolute.
Benjamin devotes so much attention to the storyteller’s task to mould
experience into its communicable form because it has become so endan-
gered that by now we can only turn to the shattered pieces that are left
behind. The very concept of experience, namely, seems to be the only rem-
nant of a world that is no longer there—a past in which the actual ability
to have and share these experiences had not yet been so drastically impov-
erished. The essay The Storyteller is in first instance to be read as a careful
description of a phenomenon on the verge of disappearance. In the very first
lines of the essay, Benjamin writes:
Familiar though his name may be to us, the storyteller in his living efficacy is
by no means a force today. He has already become something remote from
us and is moving ever further away. … This distance and this angle of vision
are prescribed for us by an experience which we may have almost every day.
It teaches us that the art of storytelling is coming to an end. One meets with
fewer and fewer people who know how to tell a tale properly.64
Underlying the entire essay is an awareness that the level of experience that
the story presented us with has moved beyond our reach: “It is as if a capa-
bility that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions,
has been taken from us. … [E]xperience has fallen in value. And it looks as
if it may fall into bottomlessness.”65 In Benjamin’s opinion, the advent of
the novel was one of the first moments when experience disclosed its fallen
state. In line with Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel (1916), he sees the
novel as “the form of transcendental homelessness [of the idea].”66 As such,
what lies at the origin of the novel is not the “[c]ounsel woven into the fab-
ric of real life” that is wisdom but, on the contrary, nothing less than the
very gap between meaning and life itself.67 The novelist is continuously on
the lookout for what lies concealed beneath the surface of his life and impa-
tiently aims at what is capable of turning this sheer multiplicity of events
into a coherent lifespan. Benjamin writes that
[t]he earliest indication of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling
is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times. … The birthplace
of the novel is the individual in his isolation, the individual who can no
longer speak of his concerns in exemplary fashion, who himself lacks counsel
and can give none. To write a novel is to take to the extreme that which is
incommensurable in the representation of human existence. In the midst of
life’s fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives
evidence of the profound perplexity [Ratlosigkeit] of the living.68
While the novelist is thus ceaselessly trying to overcome the gap between
meaning and life, it is precisely here that he deprives himself of every
true form of experience: the novel locks up writer and reader alike in the
particularity of their own existence and essentially diverts attention away
from any notion of an all-encompassing and ‘inscrutable’ force that can
be presented as a model for a larger context of meaning.69 The sphere of
existence which is explored in the novel is purely individual, never belongs
to any form of community and nowhere transcends the specific period in
history in which it is set:
The “meaning of life” is really the center around which the novel moves. But
the quest for it is no more than the initial expression of perplexity with which
its reader sees himself living this written life. “Meaning of life” versus “moral
of the story”: with these slogans novel and story confront each other, and
from them the totally different historical coordinates of these art forms can be
discerned. … A man listening to a story is in the company of the storyteller;
even a man reading one shares this companionship. The reader of a novel,
however, is isolated, more so than any other reader.70
The novel, though perhaps the ‘earliest,’ is merely an ‘indication’ [Anze-
ichen] or ‘symptom’ of a more profound malaise.71 In The Storyteller it is
Benjamin’s aim to explore a more widespread decline of experience that
72 SW: 3, 143.
73 See SW: 3, 146; GS: II-2, 442: “The art of storytelling is nearing its end because the epic
side of truth—wisdom—is dying out. This … is a process that has been going on for a long
time. And nothing would be more fatuous than to wish to see it as merely a ‘symptom of
decay,’ [Verfallserscheinung] let alone a ‘modern symptom.’ It is, rather, only a concomitant
of the secular productive forces of history—a symptom that has quite gradually removed
narrative from the realm of living speech …”
74 SW: 3, 147.
70 chapter two
more exact than the intelligence of earlier centuries. But while the latter was
inclined to borrow from the miraculous, information must absolutely sound
plausible.75
The decline of experience that is here understood as an outcome of the
desire for information has profound psychological consequences. Accord-
ing to Benjamin, the modern mania with comprehensibility brings along
with it a leveling down of our consciousness. From a psychological perspec-
tive, the higher forms of experience are characterized by their simplicity
and the trace they leave behind in the inner core of our psyche. Storytelling,
for instance, “submerges the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order
to bring it out of him again. Thus, traces of the storyteller cling to a story
the way the handprints of the potter cling to a clay vessel.”76 A condition for
absorbing the wisdom embodied by the story is therefore a state of mental
relaxation and boredom: “If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, bore-
dom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that
hatches the egg of experience.”77 The experience that is brought about by
information, on the other hand, is more complex and needs to be processed
by our consciousness: it comes together with a ‘must’ (it requires us to verify
the data that is presented and to comprehend it as knowledge) and cannot
for that reason reach the deeper layers of our psyches. While information
needs to be consumed by the reader and thus detaches the events that are
being reported from his most inner psyche, the story makes a simple point
that is characterized by the multiplicity of possible meanings that is neces-
sary to set our minds and imagination in motion.78 “Every morning,” writes
Benjamin
brings us the news from across the globe, yet we are poor in noteworthy
stories. This is because nowadays no event comes to us without already
75 SW: 3, 147.
76 SW: 3, 149.
77 SW: 3, 149. For a detailed and profound account of the connection between the concept
of wisdom that is conveyed by the story (the unity and simplicity of the point made and the
cunning that is involved) and the specific type of experience that allows one to absorb it
(the dialectics between boredom and prompt thinking), see Friedlander, Walter Benjamin,
180–189.
78 See ibid., 186: “[T]he constitution of the meaning of life as a plurality of stories provides
a way to conceive experience so that essential limits disappear or are dissolved. A funda-
mental teaching of stories is the possibility of dissolving every sense of ‘must’ in experience.
There is, always another way, even if it appears as postponement. Or more precisely, since we
are speaking here of remembrance, there is no necessity to understand things in an already
determined way, according to an unavoidable progression, or caught in a nexus of causality
or explanatory justification.”
the kafka-essays and the origin of german tragic drama 71
being shot through with explanations. … [I]t is half the art of storytelling to
keep a story free from explanation as one recounts it. … [In Leskov], [t]he
most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest
accuracy, but the psychological connections among the events are not forced
on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands
them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.79
79 SW: 3, 147–148.
80 GS: I-2, 614.
81 SW: 4, 317.
82 SW: 4, 314.
83 GS: I-2, 608.
84 Freud quoted in SW: 4, 317.
72 chapter two
91 SW: 4, 317.
92 SW: 4, 392; GS: I-2, 697.
93 For an interesting analysis of Benjamin’s concept of modern experience (and his theory
of art from the thirties) that goes beyond the stakes of this discussion, see Susan Buck-Morss,
“Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered.” October 62
(1992), 3–41.
74 chapter two
[T]his much is clear: experience has fallen in value, amid a generation which
from 1914 to 1918 had to experience some of the most monstrous events in
the history of the world. … [N]ever has experience been contradicted more
thoroughly: strategic experience has been contravened by positional warfare;
economic experience, by the inflation; physical experience, by hunger; moral
experiences, by the ruling powers. A generation that had gone to school in
horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, amid a landscape in which
nothing was the same except the clouds and, at its center, in a force field
of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body. With
this tremendous development of technology, a completely new poverty [ganz
neue Armseligkeit] has descended on mankind.94
In Benjamin’s account, the horror of war and the political chaos and social
upheaval of the interwar-period have penetrated so deeply into the bodies
and minds of his contemporaries that they ended up damaging their very
ability to, as he put it in the Storyteller-essay, “share experiences.”95 Like the
Baudelaire-essay and the Storyteller-essay, Experience and Poverty sets up
a connection between the rise of technology and the increase of rational-
ization on the one hand and the loss of the legitimacy of trans-individual,
shared experiences on the other: “[W]hat is the value of all our culture if it
is divorced from experience? … Indeed (let’s admit it), our poverty of expe-
rience is not merely poverty on the personal level, but poverty of human
experience in general. Hence, a new kind of barbarism [eine Art von neuem
Barbarentum].”96
Benjamin’s critique of modernity is marked by both an awareness of the
loss of the authority of the past and a profound feeling of anxiety about
the future. It is developed from the standpoint of a generation that has
somewhere along the way both closed itself off from its historical roots and
lost the ability to dream about the future: having foreclosed the immediate
legitimacy of traditional beliefs no less than the ideal of universal progress,
the interwar period ended up locking itself in with a despair that could only
become more and more unbearable. Though most explicit in the essays
of the thirties, this causal link between modernity and the loss of ‘true’
experience had already been prepared by Benjamin at a very early stage of
his work, that is, in an essay called On the Program of the Coming Philosophy
(1917–1918), written at the age of twenty-five. This text mainly deals with
what Benjamin calls “the experience … of the Enlightenment” and, more
importantly so, with the necessity to escape from it, but it proves to be
of great value as the conceptual background of his views on modernity as
such.97 Benjamin retraces Kant’s concept of experience to his desire “to take
the principles of experience from the sciences—in particular, mathematical
physics” and, for that reason, considers it as “a view of the world … of the
lowest order.”98 In the course of the essay Kant’s system will be deemed
fruitful to the coming philosophy but Benjamin does vehemently criticize
the spirit of the Enlightenment in general for confusing experience with
scientific knowledge and the quest for comprehension—a move in which
physics is granted the sole right to certitude, thereby inevitably banning
religion to the realm of the vague and uncertain. According to Benjamin,
the Enlightenment has deprived what is given in time of its metaphysical
weight while it, vice versa, maintained that metaphysical truth cannot in
any way stem from the material of natural experience:
The very fact that Kant was able to commence his immense work under the
constellation of the Enlightenment indicates that he undertook his work on
the basis of an experience virtually reduced to a nadir, to a minimum of
significance. … For the Enlightenment there were no authorities, in the sense
not only of authorities to whom one would have to submit unconditionally,
but also of intellectual forces who might have managed to give a higher
context to experience [geistige Mächte die der Erfahrung einen großen Inhalt
zu geben vermocht hätten].99
The instability by which the present situation so sadly characterizes itself
is thus to be seen as a consequence of the enduring influence of an all-too-
ardent form of rationalism. In Benjamin’s mind the move towards moder-
nity has equaled nothing less than a continuous effort to replace religious
belief by a purely rational understanding and the ideal of positivistic knowl-
edge. Benjamin recognizes the hopelessness and despair of the interwar
period as proof that centuries of Enlightenment have not at all discov-
ered human reason to be the stable foundation for truth and the fertile
ground for progress that Descartes and Kant took it to be. On the con-
trary, thirty years prior to the analyses of Adorno and Horkheimer, Ben-
jamin discloses not merely a specifically modern set of problems but the
fact, precisely, that it is modernity itself which is to be considered as the
problem.
97 SW: 1, 101.
98 SW: 1, 101.
99 SW: 1, 101; GS: II-1, 159.
76 chapter two
sibility’ of absolute truth that will have become so important four years later
in the Kafka-letter as the “different view [that is] more or less independent
of [Benjamin’s] earlier reflections.”102 The formula of being “bound to a
God [which] [man] does not know” is in the Kafka-essay not to be read as
the outcome of modern phenomena and developments like technology or
excessive rationalization, but it expresses the situation of mankind as such:
it is no statement about any historical era in specific but a description of the
historical realm in general and it refers, rather than to la vie moderne, to la
condition humaine.103
For a clarification of this difference between, on the one hand, the theme
of the specifically modern context of the inaccessibility of what is genuinely
truthful and, on the other, the idea that it is essentially history as such and
not some historical age in particular which has lost its immediate connec-
tion with the absolute, the entirety of Benjamin’s work needs to be taken
into account. Just like the Kafka-letter cannot be fully understood outside
of the context of Benjamin’s critique of the ideal of the Enlightenment, the
presentation of the themes of the unknowability of the divine in the Kafka-
essay and the unredeemed state of history as such in his On the Concept of
History demand to be read against the background of some of his earlier
writings. It is, to be precise, Benjamin’s Habilitationsschrift, titled The Ori-
gin of German Tragic Drama, which renders the most extensive discussion of
the universe marked by the inaccessibility of absolute truth which will later
characterize his reading of Kafka and his texts on history. In that quintessen-
tial text some of the categories that Benjamin deems indispensable for both
an understanding of Kafka’s work and a philosophy of history are introduced
in a wholly different context, albeit not without the very same set of philo-
sophical associations. The protagonists of the Trauerspiele, that is to say,
are equally characterized by failure and indecisiveness and the events in
which they partake are read by Benjamin as a similarly critical exposure of
an inability to aim for truth as an object of intention. Moreover, what singles
out the German playwrights of the baroque era from their contemporaries
is the same ongoing attempt to bring to expression the human inability to
comprehend and to bring what is absolutely true or worthwhile into a con-
text of knowledge. The literary mode of allegory comes, as will be explained,
with a particular relevance in this context in that it plays a role that can be
likened to the one that was assigned to Kafka’s last will, that is, it brings to
expression the very limits of human understanding and bears out a fragile
balance between knowing and not knowing that is neither repressed nor
overcome.
104 O, 69.
105 O, 65.
the kafka-essays and the origin of german tragic drama 79
of one disastrous event after another, it is to show how in the eyes of the
playwrights of the baroque the worldly realm has lost its underlying order:
“[I]f the tyrant falls, not simply in his own name, as an individual, but as a
ruler and in the name of mankind and history, then his fall has the quality
of a judgment, in which the subject too is implicated.”110 The judgment that
is exemplified by the failure of the sovereign is the harshest of all possible
verdicts: the baroque world is ‘out of joint’ and all powers that used to govern
it have gone down along with it.
This is the first reason why Benjamin is at pains to make clear that the
world of the German Trauerspiel of the baroque era is in no way compa-
rable to that of Greek tragedy: the former, namely, relates to the latter as
history relates to myth. Whereas Greek tragedy aspires to universal valid-
ity and often leaves the time and location of the events undetermined, the
Trauerspiel is marked by sufficient details to at least conjure up a historical
background for the enacted events:
Historical life, as it was conceived at that time, is its content, its true object.
In this it is different from tragedy. For the object of the latter is not history,
but myth, and the tragic stature of the dramatis personae does not derive
from rank—the absolute monarchy—but from the pre-historic epoch of their
existence—the past age of heroes.111
These historical data set up the baroque framework which ultimately iso-
lates the enacted events from a broader context of meaning. One of the
paradoxes that Benjamin deems essential to the German Trauerspiel is the
following: it is the very particularity of their historical setting which makes
the events on stage stand out as an exemplification of the course of history
in general.112 The Trauerspiel expresses history as such because history is, in
essence, nothing less than a Trauerspiel: “The Trauerspiel, it was believed,
110 O, 72.
111 O, 62.
112 The Trauerspiele are therefore to be called “paradigmatic” for the baroque view on
history in the way that Giorgio Agamben understands that term: “[T]he paradigm is a singular
case that is isolated from its context only insofar as, by exhibiting its own singularity, it makes
intelligible a new ensemble, whose homogeneity it itself constitutes.” in Giorgio Agamben,
“What is a Paradigm?” The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. Luca D’Isanto and Kevin
Attell (New York: Zone Books, 2009), 18. The baroque Trauerspiel is marked by a specific
historical setting and thus cannot be taken for a mere individual case illustrating a general
rule that can be stated a priori. It is only because it stands apart in its singularity that it is
able to exhibit a more general rule. See ibid., 24: “[T]he example is excluded from the rule
not because it does not belong to the normal case but, on the contrary, because it exhibits
its belonging to it.”
the kafka-essays and the origin of german tragic drama 81
could be directly grasped in the events of history itself; it was only a ques-
tion of finding the right words.”113
At stake in this discussion of the Trauerspiel as the expression of the
baroque view on history is an analysis of the radical separation between the
profane and the divine. If it is impossible to discover a logos that underlies
the course of history, it is because the here-and-now has been divested of its
view on the beyond:
The hereafter is emptied of everything which contains the slightest breath of
this world, and from it the baroque extracts a profusion of things which …, at
its high point, brings them violently into the light of day, in order to clear an
ultimate heaven, enabling it, as a vacuum, one day to destroy the world with
catastrophic violence.114
Benjamin’s interpretation of the Trauerspiel is supported by his view of the
baroque as a heir to both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, unable
to reconcile the former’s religious aspirations with the latter’s secularized
ideals. The baroque mindset that the Trauerspiel testifies to is torn between
a longing for the divine on the one hand and the incapacity to achieve it on
the other:
[R]eligious aspirations did not lose their importance: it was just that this
century denied them a religious fulfillment, demanding of them, or imposing
upon them, a secular solution instead. … [T]he Counter-Reformation sees the
hierarchical strain of the middle ages assume authority in a world which was
denied direct access to a beyond.115
What thus disappears from sight is, of course, a dynamics of salvation. The
universe of catastrophe and chaos depicted in the baroque Trauerspiel is
most obviously lacking in transcendence and for that reason comes across
as an endless series of catastrophes and, indeed, as the ‘tradition of the
oppressed’ that will be central to Benjamin’s philosophy of history.116 The
events that are brought on the baroque stage are not just part of a world
that is as yet unredeemed but they exemplify a suffering that seems as
irredeemable as it is widespread:
[W]hereas the Christian mystery-play and the Christian chronicle present
the entire course of world history as a story of redemption [heilsgeschichtli-
chen], the Haupt- und Staatsaktion deals with only a part of pragmatic events.
113 O, 63.
114 O, 66.
115 O, 79.
116 SW 4: 392.
82 chapter two
form of theatre, the drama of fate, which just as well accorded salvation a
crucial place in the play, though now no longer a salvation of a religious
nature but one that was disguised as reflective thought having become infi-
nite. “[T]hanks to [reflection],” Benjamin writes about romantic theatre—
in line with the ideas presented in his doctoral thesis—“heroes are always
able to turn the order of fate around like a ball in their hands, and contem-
plate it now from one side, now from the other.”121 This romantic drama of
fate is, for its part, the immediate successor of the Spanish baroque tragic
drama, as exemplified by Calderón. Characteristic to these drama’s, con-
temporaries to the German Trauerspiel though not at all sharing in the same
significance,122 is their cheerfulness. It is through mockery and play that the
absolute is here injected into the events on stage, thus lifting the weight of
their seriousness: “The very precision with which the ‘mourning’ [Trauer]
and the ‘play’ [Spiel] can harmonize with one another gives [Calderón’s dra-
mas] [their] exemplary validity.”123
None of this applies to the Trauerspiele that were produced in the same
period in Germany: contrary to the Spanish baroque drama, they fail to take
on exemplary value, they preclude the view of salvation and they derive
their unique character precisely from the way in which they never allow
the element of play to dissolve the movement of mourning. The German
baroque is, according to Benjamin, historically singular in that it rejects the
hope for redemption inherent to both the medieval form of spirituality and
its ‘profane complement,’ that is, the later ideal of a romantic, secularized
will to freedom.124
Benjamin’s discussion of the baroque image of an unredeemed and irre-
deemable earthly life centers around the essence of both man and world.
The main characters of the German Trauerspiel are the most obvious exem-
plifications of the ‘creaturely’ condition of all human beings. The baroque
monarch, for instance, is “[h]owever highly he is enthroned over subject and
state, … confined to the world of creation; he is the lord of creatures, but he
121 O, 84.
122 Benjamin describes Calderón’s drama’s as incarnations of the “perfect form of the
baroque Trauerspiel” with “conclusion[s] which [are] superior to [those] of the German
Trauerspiel.” (O, 81) As we will see later on, however, it is precisely on account of the
superiority of these Spanish drama’s and the ease with which they resolve “the conflicts of
a state of creation without grace” that they are ultimately of much less interest to Benjamin
than the German Trauerspiele.
123 O, 81.
124 O, 84.
84 chapter two
remains a creature.”125 The intriguer or schemer, for his part, who is out to
overthrow the authority of the sovereign, is no more decisive than his adver-
sary and equally unfit to engage in meaningful activity. The protagonists of
the German Trauerspiel are in the end marked by an a-moral attitude that
is even more shocking than the immoral acts they present us with. They do
not so much transgress the standards of a ‘good’ life as remain oblivious to
them and are thus brought on stage as mere ‘forces of nature’ governed by
passions that are as unbendable and devoid of virtue as the physical laws of
the universe:
Baroque drama knows no other historical activity than the corrupt energy of
schemers. In none of the countless rebels who confront a monarch frozen in
the attitudes of the Christian martyr, is there any trace of revolutionary con-
viction. Discontent is the classic motive. … [I]n the terms of [such] martyr-
drama[s] it is not moral transgression but the very estate of man as creature
which provides the reason for the catastrophe.126
The a-moral nature of politics and the base personality of who partakes in it
affect, in Benjamin’s mind, the significance of the story that is staged in the
Trauerspiel and relentlessly lay bare the lack of transcendence that marks all
things earthly. With the disappearance of moral standards and the absence
of higher causes for the actions of the protagonists, the entire world of the
baroque is disenchanted and turned into a chain of pointless events. With
the term ‘creaturely’ condition, Benjamin refers to a state in which both man
and history have become drained of all meaning, the rhythm of the latter
having grown no less empty than the minds and actions of the former. “The
creature,” Benjamin summarizes,
is the mirror within whose frame alone the moral world was revealed to the
baroque. … Since it was the view of the age that all historical life was lacking
in virtue [alles historische Leben der Tugend abging], virtue was also of no
significance for the inner constitution of the dramatis personae themselves.127
What gets lost with the advent of a-moral man is the historical signifi-
cance of history proper: under the creaturely condition history has turned
into nature. Like the ongoing cycle of nature, condemned to the law of the
always-the-same, history has here fallen sway to the rhythm of empty repe-
tition and never attains a proper fulfillment on its own account:
125 O, 85.
126 O, 88–89.
127 O, 91; GS: I-1, 270.
the kafka-essays and the origin of german tragic drama 85
[J]ust as the inner life of the person has to attain mystical fulfillment in
the creaturely condition, even in mortal pain, so do the authors attempt
to impose the same restriction on the events of history. The sequence of
dramatic actions unfolds as in the days of creation, when it was not history
which was taking place.
The main characteristic of this so-called natural history is ‘transience’ with
an irresolvable lack of closure, making it impossible to discover anything
absolute or truly worthwhile in the midst of what goes on. The course of
history, rather, is as disconsolate as the clock’s moving hand which “is, as
Bergson has shown, essential to the representation of the non-qualitative,
repeatable time of the mathematical science.”128 The difference between
Greek tragedy and the German Trauerspiel is most relevant in this context:
unlike the baroque monarch the protagonist of Greek tragedy does provide
evidence of both the will and the ability to overcome the fundamental lack
of meaning that resounds throughout the universe. Tragic figures are, unlike
martyrized tyrants, heroes who are capable of an action that is so full of
significance and determination that it cannot ever be repeated nor even be
expressed through language: sacrifice. Quoting from his own earlier essay
Fate and Character (1919), Benjamin writes that
in tragedy the hold of demonic fate is broken … [,] in [it] pagan man realizes
that he is better than his gods, but this realization strikes him dumb, and it
remains unarticulated. … [I]t is the attempt of moral man, still dumb, still
inarticulate—as such he bears the name of hero—to raise himself up amid
the agitation of that painful world. The paradox of the birth of the genius in
moral speechlessness, moral infantility, constitutes the sublime element in
tragedy.129
Tragic heroes are, in Benjamin’s opinion, demigods whose death always
goes accompanied with the delivery of something new. A tragic death is,
in truth, an act of decisive reconciliation with the divine that might indeed
bring the end of the life of an individual but never without giving birth to a
hitherto non-existent community: “The tragic death has a dual significance:
it invalidates the ancient rights of the Olympians, and it offers up the hero
to the unknown god as the first fruits of a new harvest of humanity.”130
In sharp contrast to a heroic, meaningful death stands the downfall
of the baroque martyr in the Trauerspiel. The latter fully belongs to the
endless repetition of history-become-nature and does not rise up against
128 O, 97.
129 O, 109–110.
130 O, 107.
86 chapter two
it. In the Trauerspiel, death does not entail any form of redemption, closure
or determination, let alone the meaningful installment of a new order. The
ends of the lives of baroque characters, rather, are without any consequence
for the community and, perceived from the perspective of the individual,
often condemn them to an existence as a specter or ghost:
Whereas the tragic hero, in his “immortality,” does not save his life but only
his name [as the word which will found a new community], in death the
characters of the Trauerspiel lose only the name-bearing individuality, and
not the vitality of their role. This survives undiminished in the spirit world.131
The martyrs of the baroque drama are despairing in the Kierkegaardian
sense of the term; their lives do not so much end with death as with a failure
to die. Rather than rising from the depths of a sorrowful existence, theirs is
the hopelessness of those who cannot die because they are sick unto death:
“[T]o be sick unto death is to be unable to die, yet not as if there were hope
of life; no, the hopelessness is that there is not even the ultimate hope,
death.”132
This failure to die brings to the surface a more profound failure to act
and to know on the part of the characters of the Trauerspiel: their actions
are described as ‘mere spectacle,’ enclosed in the framework of individuality
and, unlike the hero’s decisive behavior, as closer to the sphere of comedy
than to the tragic.133 Opposed to the sacrificial act of the tragic hero are,
therefore, the lethargic pensiveness and feelings of melancholy that mark
baroque characters. For the playwrights of the baroque, melancholy is no
mere emotive quality of an individual but an expression of the dynamic of
natural history itself (“[In Calderón’s drama] Herod does not kill his wife
out of jealousy; rather is it through jealousy that she loses her life. Through
jealousy Herod is subject to fate.”)134 and thus rather to be taken as an
ontological category than as a psychological one:
If the laws which govern the Trauerspiel are to be found, partly explicit, partly
implicit, at the heart of mourning, the representation of these laws does not
concern itself with the emotional condition of the poet or his public, but with
a feeling which is released from any empirical subject and is intimately bound
to the fullness of an object.135
131 O, 136.
132 Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for
Upbuilding and Awakening, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980), 18.
133 O, 121.
134 O, 133.
135 O, 139.
the kafka-essays and the origin of german tragic drama 87
136 O, 139.
137 O, 146; GS: I-1, 324.
138 O, 145.
139 O, 148.
88 chapter two
This shared status of man and world that is revealed in the melancholic
feelings of the characters involves an important paradox. That human
beings take part in the same condition as the universe in general, namely,
is made manifest precisely by the gap that separates both: the lack of tran-
scendence that marks man and world alike is revealed by the inability of
the former to gain knowledge of the latter and, vice versa, by the stubborn-
ness with which the universe defies the categories of human understanding
and intention. “The deadening of the emotions,” writes Benjamin, “and the
ebbing away of the waves of life which are the source of these emotions
in the body, can increase the distance between the self and the surround-
ing world to the point of alienation from the body.”140 The relation between
subject and object, constitutive for the Grundgefühl of melancholy, is set up
through the very feeling that there is no true relation between them. The
clearest illustration of this non-relation between man and the surround-
ing world can be found in Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving Melencolia I
(1514). The sitting figure who is surrounded by utensils that were cast aside
as an illustration of their uselessness does here not only stand for the inabil-
ity to engage in meaningful action but it anticipates, by way of the specific
gesture with which it leans its reclining head on its left hand, to the atti-
tude of pensiveness and the failure to truly know that Benjamin deems
essential to the Trauerspiel. For Benjamin, Dürer’s figure exemplifies the
baroque scholar as someone who is constantly drawn to the universe to dis-
cover its secrets but ends up being confronted with the inability to do so.
In this context he writes about the “pathological state, in which the most
simple object appears to be a symbol of some enigmatic wisdom because it
lacks any natural, creative relationship to us”141 and, a couple of pages later,
about the “hopeless loyalty to the creaturely” [hoffnungslosen Treue zum
Kreatürlichen]142 and “irredeemability of things” [inaptitude des choses]143
that characterize the detachment of the melancholiac: “[A]ll the wisdom of
the melancholic is subject to the nether world; it is secured by immersion in
the life of creaturely things, and it hears nothing of the voice of revelation.”144
140 O, 140.
141 O, 140.
142 O, 156; GS: I-1, 333.
143 Daniel Halévy quoted in O, 157; GS: I-1, 334.
144 O, 152.
the kafka-essays and the origin of german tragic drama 89
145 O, 160.
146 O, 165.
147 O, 29.
148 O, 36. Important and helpful texts in this regard—and sources of inspiration for the
remainder of this chapter and the interpretation of the literary mode of allegory—are,
amongst others, the chapter “Myth” in Friedlander, Walter Benjamin, 112–138 and Samuel
Weber, “Storming the Work: Allegory and Theatricality in Benjamin’s Origin of the German
Mourning Play.” Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 160–
180.
149 O, 166.
90 chapter two
it lays claim to a language that forms a natural bond with what it denotes
(fusei) but it only delivers what is merely arbitrary (thesei). The disappointed
quest for knowledge, in other words, makes itself felt first and foremost as
a confrontation with the inability to grasp absolute truth or to aim for it
as an object of intention. The allegorical gaze looks out for the enigmatic
knowledge that would grant possession of the world but ends up as a dis-
enchantment of the entire universe: it promises meaning but hits in the
face with contingency. “The intention which underlies allegory,” writes Ben-
jamin, “is so opposed to that which is concerned with the discovery of truth
that it reveals more clearly than anything else the identity of the pure curios-
ity which is aimed at mere knowledge with the proud isolation of man.”154
In its stubborn resistance to truth, allegory is interpreted by Benjamin as
a fragmentation and as an extinction of the life and beauty that are ren-
dered by the symbol. Allegory disrupts the “false appearance of totality”
[falsche Schein der Totalität] by way of which the symbol succeeds in rec-
onciling materiality and transcendence.155 Looking for the major patterns of
allegory, what comes to Benjamin’s mind is “lack of freedom, the imperfec-
tion, the collapse of the physical, beautiful, nature”:156 “In the field of alle-
gorical intuition the image is a fragment [Bruchstück], a rune.”157 The alle-
gorist therefore belongs to the dynamic of the history-become-nature which
tuned the baroque world to a rhythm of empty repetition and transience
(“[T]he movement from history to nature … is the basis of allegory.”).158 In
the gaze of the allegorist, moreover, it is the entire universe, not just history
but also nature, which is disenchanted from within: similar to how history
is turned into an ongoing process of ruination and a ceaseless “pil[ing] up
[of] fragments … without any strict idea of a goal,” nature is emptied of all
154 O, 229.
155 O, 176; GS: I-1, 352. As we will see later on, it is this shattering of the supposed unity of a
material object and a transcendent meaning that will ultimately save allegory from its nega-
tivity and will endow it with a redemptive potential that is fully its own. Benjamin explores
and problematizes the concept of such a supposed unity in numerous places throughout
his work, for example, in his doctoral thesis on the Romantics (Benjamin criticizes them
for considering “art [to be] the region … [for] the immediate reconciliation [unmittelbare
Versöhnung] of the conditioned with the unconditioned.” (SW: 1, 181; GS: I-1, 114)) and the
Goethe-essay (the “false, errant totality—the absolute totality [die falsche, irrende, Totalität—
die absolute]” of semblance [Schein] that is shattered by the expressionless [Ausdruckslose]
(SW: 1, 340; GS: I-1, 181)).
156 O, 176.
157 O, 176; GS: I-1, 352.
158 O, 182.
92 chapter two
meaning:159 “[I]t is fallen nature which bears the imprint of the progression
of history. … Never does their transcendence come from within.”160 What
makes the disconsolateness of the baroque universe complete, hence, is just
as much a history-become-nature as a nature-become-history: “The word
‘history’ stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of
transience.”161
The concept of allegory is crucial to understand Benjamin’s interpreta-
tion of the German Trauerspiel for at least two reasons. The first has to do
with the subject matter of the baroque drama. In its naturization of history
and historization of nature, allegory serves to express the two sides of what
Benjamin considers to be a specifically baroque world-view. Allegory is to be
seen as a translation into language of the ‘creaturely’ condition of man and
universe alike: it is just as well the former’s self-enclosed situation as the irre-
ducible immanence of the latter that makes up the content of allegory. The
allegorical attitude is conditioned by the melancholic one in that it serves
as an expression of the gap that separates the protagonists of the Trauer-
spiel from the world in which they live. It is by drawing attention to man’s
inability to derive any meaning from his environment that Benjamin paints
a picture of the world that he will later re-introduce in On the Concept of His-
tory, that is, an Unheilsgeschichte (Weber) in which history as such sheds its
significance and partakes in the disconsolate repetition that characterizes
the laws of nature: “[T]he dramatic incident is not conceived as an isolated
catastrophe, but rather as one that is necessary by nature and inherent in
the way of the world.”162 In a similar way, allegory disenchants nature itself
because it brings to the fore the baroque world’s absence of transcendence
and thus blocks the way for any idealization, be it a medieval/early renais-
sance divinization or a romantic Vergeistlichung: “[N]ature was not seen by
[the baroque] in bud and bloom, but in the over-ripeness and decay of her
creations. In nature [the allegorists] saw eternal transience [ewige Vergäng-
nis], and here alone did the saturnine vision of this generation recognize
history.”163
A profound inability to know and a melancholic confrontation with
the inapproachability of anything absolute, however, inevitably turn back
on themselves: it is impossible to adequately express an impossibility to
159 O, 178.
160 O, 180.
161 O, 177.
162 O, 192.
163 O, 179; GS: I-1, 355.
the kafka-essays and the origin of german tragic drama 93
express itself. For this reason, melancholy is marked by the same dynam-
ics that characterizes the feeling of shame in Kafka’s writings. Melancholy
is to allegory what shame is to Kafka’s last will: since it denotes the very
irreducibility of an Otherness and an alterity that cannot be transferred to
a systematic context of meaning or knowledge, the melancholy that lies
at the heart of allegory cannot itself be intentionally expressed or aimed
at. The second reason why allegory is of such importance to Benjamin’s
interpretation of the German baroque drama has therefore to do, not with
what it describes but with how this is being done. With his discussion of
the use of allegories in the Trauerspiel, Benjamin does not only cast light
on the absence of revelation and the emptiness that marks the world that
is described by the baroque playwrights but also on the necessarily indi-
rect manner in which such absence and emptiness are to be expressed. If
allegories are the main building blocks of the Trauerspiel and if they do
indeed amount to a confrontation with a fundamental lack of knowledge
and a failure to comprehend, it follows that the activity of reading and study-
ing German baroque dramas renders nothing less than an experience of the
very limits of human understanding themselves. Just as Kafka’s writings can
be read as, so to say, involuntary expressions of his inability to truly know
(that is, they express this inability literally and figuratively against his—
last—will) the allegories in the Trauerspiel do not just denote the human
inability to grasp truth as an object of knowledge but they are themselves
(indirect) expressions of it. In allegory, German baroque drama exposes the
limits of understanding without, however, overcoming them: the failure to
comprehend that stares out from allegory never crystallises into the foun-
dation of a more profound form of knowledge.
chapter three
Introduction
In the very first and last paragraphs of his study, Benjamin goes through
pains to illustrate that his research is in no way aimed at an ‘essentialization’
of the Trauerspiel:
Given the by no means excessive quantity of dramatic production, the task
of such research must not look for schools of poets, epochs of the oeuvre,
or strata of individual works, as the literary historian quite properly might.
Rather will it be guided by the assumption that what seems diffuse and
disparate will be found to be linked in the adequate concepts as elements
of a synthesis.1
Benjamin puts emphasis on the claim that the ‘synthesis’ rendered by his
research does not aim for the so-called unity behind the multiplicity of
different Trauerspiele. His attention neither goes out to a list of elements
shared by all of the Trauerspiele that have survived, nor to the most ‘typical’
of them, that is, to the one specific work which is supposed to most clearly
illustrate the general themes and motives of the genre. His focus shifts to
those plays that seem to suffer from a lack of profundity. It seems, in other
words, that only works of a lesser significance allow Benjamin, and this
precisely by reason of their inferior quality, to catch a glimpse of what he
is really looking for. “The life of the form,” writes Benjamin at the beginning
of the first part of his study,
is not identical with that of the works which are determined by it, indeed the
clarity with which it is expressed can sometimes be in inverse proportion to
the perfection of a literary work; and the form itself becomes evident pre-
cisely in the lean body of the inferior work [schmächtigen Leib der dürftigen
Dichtung], as its skeleton so to speak.2
1 O, 57–58.
2 O, 58; GS: I-1, 238.
96 chapter three
as he himself hinted on, be mobilized for twentieth-century issues, see Jane O. Newman,
Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University
Press and Cornell University Library, 2011).
6 Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance
even raises the hope that a clear understanding of the most important ele-
ments of the baroque drama could suffice to grant the twentieth-century
researcher knowledge of essential patterns of thinking and characteristic
themes of the seventeenth century. In his curriculum vitae from 1928, for
instance, he characterizes his own view on art criticism as an “analysis [that]
would regard the work of art as an integral expression of the religious, meta-
physical, political and economic tendencies of its age, unconstrained in any
way by territorial concepts.”7 From this perspective, the characters of the
sovereign and the intriguer, the feeling of melancholy and the literary mode
of allegory as an expression of the creaturely state of man and world are
interpreted as epistemological tools to comprehend an underlying world-
view that was marked by an inability to truly know and an emptiness of
revelation. However, this very inability and emptiness undermine Panof-
sky’s historicist ideals and framework. Allegory, that is to say, does not just
refer to the subject matter of the Trauerspiel but it is a ‘distinctive mode of
signification’ (Weber) affecting the very way of referring to this subject mat-
ter: because allegory amounts to a confrontation with the limits of human
understanding, it instils a gap between the baroque world of experience on
the one hand and the representation of this world by an artwork on the
other. Benjamin’s emphasis on the structural ‘inadequacy’ of the German
mourning play and his devotion to it as a fragment, ruin or extremity pre-
clude the (positivistic) idea that it can first adequately capture and then
convey a unified historical context. Allegories make it impossible to estab-
lish what Panofsky calls the ‘intrinsic meaning or content’ of the Trauerspiel:
the baroque drama can never be seen as a ‘method’ for historical truth that
leads straight into this final stratum of subject matter, that is, the ‘time-
less’ essence of the era in which it was produced.8 In the Trauerspiele the
7 SW: 2, 78.
8 See Benjamin’s important statement in the introduction to the Trauerspiel-book that
“[m]ethod is a digression. Representation as digression—such is the methodological nature
of the treatise. The absence of an uninterrupted purposeful structure is its primary charac-
teristic.” (O, 28) That Panofsky never understood to what extent his own manner of thinking
ran counter to Benjamin’s most profound intuitions on the relationship between images
and meaning becomes painfully clear from the following excerpt from a letter to Fritz Saxl
in which he describes his reaction to the Trauerspiel-book: “[I] have also already read Ben-
jamin’s book and it is also too witty for me, but in any case I learnt a lot from it. … Whatever
way you throw a cat [into the air], it will always land on its familiar, iconological feet.”
(Panofsky, quoted in Sigrid Weigel, “Bildwissenschaft aus dem Geiste wahrer Philologie. Zur
Odyssee des Trauerspielbuchs in der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg.” Walter
Benjamin. Die Kreatur, das Heilige, die Bilder (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Ver-
lag, 2008), 253 (my translation)).
98 chapter three
distance between language and meaning is laid bare, thus preventing sin-
gular artworks and literary texts to be mapped out in a discursive field of
knowledge: they are images that do not allow to be translated into knowl-
edge—icons that constantly defy their logos.
1. Benjamin’s Iconography
9 SW: 2, 666.
10 Sedlmayr quoted at SW: 2, 667.
11 Pächt quoted in SW: 2, 667; GS: III, 365.
12 Pächt quoted in SW: 2, 667.
13 Pächt quoted in SW: 2, 668; GS: III, 366 (my emphasis).
the ‘will to allegory’ and the ‘distortion’ of truth 99
(SW: 4, 314) and his statement in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility
that “[j]ust as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical
periods, so too does their mode of perception.” (SW: 4, 255).
15 SW: 4, 668.
16 GS: III, 169–171.
17 SW: 4, 381. See also the following statement in A Berlin Chronicle (1932): “I remember
distinctly the engrossment with which, under the impression of Alois Riegl’s Die spätrömis-
che Kunst-Industrie, which I had recently studied, I contemplated the sheet-gold breastplates
and garnet-studded bracelets.” (SW: 2, 615).
18 SW: 2, 278.
19 SW: 2, 78.
100 chapter three
20 Alois Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, trans. Rolf Winkes (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider
1.2. Benjamin and Aby Warburg: The Survival of Ancient Gods in ‘an
Unsuitable, Indeed Hostile, Environment’
It is with this concept of the Kunstwollen in mind, that is, as a ‘regulation’
of the relation between man and world, that Benjamin’s notion of the ‘will
to allegory’ needs to be understood.24 While rejecting the increasingly influ-
ential Panofskyan reduction of art to an expression of unified meaning or
an object of knowledge, Benjamin’s project adheres to the iconographi-
cal approach as it was, somewhat earlier, being developed by Riegl and,
even more important perhaps, by Panofsky’s mentor, Aby Warburg.25 In The
Origin of German Tragic Drama Benjamin quotes from Warburg’s by now
famous essay Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of
Luther (1920) and derives from him the insight that even during the Renais-
sance and up to the Baroque the gods of ancient Greece continued to hold
a mysterious influence over the hearts and minds of man. Benjamin joins
Warburg in claiming that the Christian dominance of the Middle Ages did
not succeed in fully uprooting the pagan belief in the power of the ancient
gods. Moreover, in the essay that is quoted from in Benjamin’s Habilita-
tionsschrift, Warburg retraces the origins of certain astrological supersti-
tions that were still heavily clung to during the Reformation to a quasi-tacit
endorsement of key elements from Hellenistic cosmology. The sixteenth-
century attempts to derive knowledge of a person’s individual fate from the
astral sign under which he is born find their origin, according to Warburg,
in the pagan, Hellenistic belief that specific planets are being controlled by
personalized gods:
24 O, 192.
25 Some interesting research on the relation between Benjamin and Warburg has already
been done; see, for example, Weigel, “Bildwissenschaft aus dem Geiste wahrer Philologie,”
228–264, Newman, Benjamin’s Library, 138–184, Jochen Becker, “Ursprung so wie Zerstörung:
Sinnbild und Sinngebung bei Warburg und Benjamin.” Allegorie und Melancholie, ed. Willem
van Reijen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkam Verlag, 1992), 64–89, Beatrice Hanssen, “Portrait
of Melancholy (Benjamin, Warburg, Panofsky).” MLN, vol. 114, no. 5, 1999, 991–1013 and
especially the chapter “Trauerspiel and Melancholy Subjectivity” in Pensky, Melancholy
Dialectics. These texts provided useful background information for this subchapter without,
however, having had a determining influence on its content. In what follows I render my
own account of what is at stake in the connection between Benjamin and Warburg, that
is, an attempt to cope with the feeling that man is isolated from the surrounding world
and a failure to truly know. From Benjamin and Warburg’s texts, as we shall see, a theory
can be derived that allows this feeling of isolation to be suspended from within; neither
Benjamin nor Warburg cherish the hope that this feeling of isolation will, in this world, be
fully subsumed by a more profound realm of experience or knowledge nor do they seek to
repress it through illusory and mythic forms of reconciliation (see below).
102 chapter three
Only when we bring ourselves to consider the figures of the pagan gods—
as resurrected [wiederauferstehen] in early Renaissance Europe, North and
South—not merely as artistic phenomena but as religious entities, do we
begin to sense the power of the determinism of the Hellenistic cosmology,
even in Germany, even in the age of the Reformation. … Ever since the passing
of the antiquity, the ancient gods had lived on in Christian Europe as cosmic
spirits, religious forces with a strong influence in practical affairs: indeed,
the cosmology of the ancient world—notably in the form of astrology—
undeniably survived as a parallel system, tacitly tolerated by the Christian
Church.26
Warburg thus contends that sixteenth-century astrology is to be seen as
an attempt to determine through reason, that is, by way of the meticulous
observation and calculation of locations and movements, the volition of the
gods who are irrationally believed to rule over the planets and stars.27
The crucial point that Benjamin agrees with is that the ancient gods have
indeed lived on until the age of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
Allegory, namely, is to Benjamin precisely what sixteenth-century astrology
is to Warburg: a “survival [Fortleben] [of theological essences] in an unsuit-
able, indeed hostile, environment.”28 Moving beyond Hermann Usener’s
claim that allegory is to be considered as a mere vaporization of theological
notions, Benjamin summarizes it as follows: “In the course of such a litera-
ture [that is, Usener’s] the world of the ancient gods would have had to die
out, and it is precisely allegory which preserved it.”29 In its enigmatic capac-
ity to draw the attention of those who seek to take possession of its secrets,
allegorized nature is to be disclosed as an heir to ancient, pagan forms of
26 Aby Warburg, “Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther.” The
Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance,
trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the
Humanities, 1999), 598. For the original text see Aby Warburg, “Heidnisch-antike Weissagung
in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten.” Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen, ed. Dieter
Wuttke (Baden-Baden: Verlag Valentin Koerner, 1992), 199–304 (the quote is from 201–202).
27 For a similar argument, see also Aby Warburg, “Italian Art and International Astrology
in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara.” The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the
Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research
Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 563–591, for example at 564: “It was
believed that the seven planets governed the solar year in all its subdivisions—the months,
days, and hours of human destiny—in accordance with pseudomathematical laws. The most
accessible of these doctrines, that of their rule of the months, guaranteed the exiled gods a
safe haven in the medieval illuminated almanacs, as painted by Southern German artists at
the beginning of the fifteenth century.”
28 O, 223; GS: I-1, 397.
29 O, 223.
the ‘will to allegory’ and the ‘distortion’ of truth 103
conditions their dislocation from within. For the enigmatic call, springing
forth from nature, to be possessed in its essence is, as was mentioned
above, never granted to find fulfilment. However powerful its promise of
secret knowledge may be, it is transience, decay and the inapproachability
of absolute truth that stare out from an allegorized world. According to
Benjamin, the allegorist may indeed first be drawn to capture nature’s secret
essence but, no less important, he inevitably goes away empty-handed.
Allegory always connects the feeling that knowledge can be gained from
nature with a confrontation of the inaccessibility of anything absolute. For
Benjamin it is Christianity which is to be held accountable for this ultimate
disenchantment of the universe. “Allegorical exegesis,” he writes, “tended
above all in two directions: it was designed to establish, from a Christian
point of view, the true, demonic nature of the ancient gods, and it also served
the pious mortification of the flesh.”32 For Benjamin, and it is here that he
comes closest to Warburg, allegory reveals the Baroque to be influenced
by two different systems of belief that run counter to each other: a pagan
belief that the ancient gods are somehow immediately present in nature
on the one hand and, on the other, the Christian conviction of the former’s
demonic character and the latter’s transience. Pagan gods did live on in the
Baroque but they were expelled to the realm of allegorized nature: “If the
church had not been able quite simply to banish the gods from the memory
of the faithful, allegorical language would never have come into being.”33
The stakes of these insights go beyond the historian’s fascination with
a specific period of the past and extend to the roots of the philosophical
discussion about the nature of art and expression. The importance of War-
burg’s oeuvre does not merely lie in his discovery that pagan beliefs man-
aged to live through the Christian Middle Ages but in the idea—a truly revo-
lutionary one—that the work of art is a combination of forces that can never
be contained in a discursive field of knowledge or a systematic context of
meaning. For him, as for Riegl, the work of art ceases to be a re-presentation
of meaning, in order to become a presentation of psychic, primordial drives.
In Warburg’s research, a work of art is never reduced to an illustration
a specific period, and its meaning is never detachable from its ‘imagistic’
nature. Warburg contends that an art historian should not endeavor to dis-
close the ‘intrinsic content’ of the work of art and subsequently translate
it into language, as Panofsky will later think, but that he is instead, like
32 O, 222.
33 O, 223.
the ‘will to allegory’ and the ‘distortion’ of truth 105
a seismograph,34 to register the psychic energy that flows through the set
of beliefs and desires that seek expression. For Warburg, this combination
of irrational and oftentimes contradictory ideas, drives and superstitions is
actually present in the work of art, rather than that it would merely underlie
it as the expression of a Zeitgeist. The Nachleben35 of irrational beliefs that
Warburg discloses in the words and images of the Reformation is, in con-
trast to the title of the English translation of his collected essays, not to be
seen as a “renewal of pagan antiquity”36 unless this renewal is understood as
a ‘rejuvenation’ in the sense that was earlier considered: it does not amount
to a mere return of unchanged motives and meanings but it draws attention
to a survival of fears and desires that, like all psychic entities, are endowed
with a dynamic of their own.37 The psychic energy that Warburg discovers
in works of art is a middle term between the ‘plastic power’ that Nietzsche
describes in On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (1874)38 and the
drives that make up Freud’s concept of the Id: they are as much historical
as they are psychic and, like Nietzsche and Freud’s concepts, untimely and
unhistorical precisely because they have a temporality of their own.39 “The
history of the influence of antiquity,” writes Warburg, “[is] observed through
the transmission, disappearance, and rediscovery of its gods,” thereby not
failing to reveal how, as we have explained above, the gods that were ini-
tially transmitted by the Greeks had undergone drastic changes before they
were rediscovered in the era of the Reformation.40
34 For a beautiful development of the metaphor of the seismograph and a very interesting
study of Warburg’s work in general, see Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante. Histoire
de l’ art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2002),
esp. 117–125.
35 Warburg’s term (inspired by Anton Springer, though with different connotations),
most often translated in English as ‘survival.’ For one of many examples see Warburg,
Ausgewählte Schriften und Würdigungen, 181.
36 For an account of the difficulties in translating Warburg’s notion of Nachleben, see
E.H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: The Warburg Institute,
1970), 16. For an account of Gombrich’s (and Panofsky’s) own inability to grasp the true
stakes of the notion of Nachleben and his (their) reduction of it to the positivistic concept of
‘revival,’ that is, to a purely chronological ‘repetition of the same’ that obliterates its impure
and anachronistic temporality, see Didi-Huberman, L’ image survivante, 93–94 and idem.,
“Artistic Survival: Panofsky vs. Warburg and the Exorcism of Impure Time,” trans. Vivian
Rehberg and Boris Belay, Common Knowledge 9:2 (2003), 273–285.
37 See Chapter I.
38 See, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,
Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983),
62.
39 For an excellent analysis of this topic, see Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante, 320–321.
40 Warburg, “Pagan-Antique Prophecy,” 644.
106 chapter three
1.3. Conflicts and Compromises: The Timeless ‘Hybridity’ of Logos and Magic
Warburg frees these “vibrant, primordial psychic state[s]”41 from their reduc-
tion to content and meaning because he wants to explore how art can help
human beings to come to terms with the universe in which they live. In his
Lecture on the Snake-ritual (1923), for instance, in which he talks about the
art and rituals of the Pueblo Indians, Warburg’s overall aim is described as
follows:
I shall be satisfied if these images from the everyday and festive lives of the
Pueblo Indians have convinced you that their masked dances are not child’s
play, but rather the primary pagan mode of answering the largest and most
pressing questions of the Why of things.42
The main claim of this lecture is that the snake is to be seen as a symbol
that mediates between the Indians and the universe that surrounds them.
During his visit to the United States in 1895–1896 Warburg noticed how the
native population of New Mexico and Arizona derived from the serpent’s
resemblance to lightning a belief in the possibility to influence the weather-
conditions by way of so-called snake rituals, that is, dances that at times
even involved real serpents. Those snake rituals, however, are not regarded
as instances of purely irrational superstition but as transitions from such a
primitive stage of believing to a rationalized stage of understanding:
The synchrony [Nebeneinander] of logical civilization and fantastic, magical
causation shows the Pueblo Indians’ peculiar condition of hybridity and
transition. They are clearly no longer primitives dependent on their senses,
for whom no action directed toward the future can exist; but neither are they
technologically secure Europeans, for whom future events are expected to be
organically or mechanically determined.43
The serpent ritual is not entirely devoid of rationality because it testifies to
the ability to engage in means-end thinking: the Indians are, unlike ‘primi-
tives’ and animals, capable of substituting a purely passive and immediate
response to their environment by actions that have the aim of modifying it.
Warburg sees the serpent ritual as an embodiment of the process of cause-
putting: if the Pueblo Indians gain a feeling of mastery over the world in
which they live, claims Warburg, it is because they set up an intrinsic con-
41 Ibid., 599.
42 Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, trans.
Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 48.
43 Ibid., 17.
the ‘will to allegory’ and the ‘distortion’ of truth 107
44 Ibid., 48.
45 Ibid., 17.
46 See also ibid., 2: “To us, this synchrony of fantastic magic and sober purposiveness
appears as a symptom of a cleavage; for the Indian this is not schizoid but, rather, a liberating
experience of the boundless communicability between man and environment.”
108 chapter three
47 Warburg, “Pagan-Antique Prophecy,” 599. For the original terminology, see Warburg,
that the universe cannot in its entirety become an object of knowledge and
that the absolute force that underlies it (‘the Why of things’) can never be
aimed at as an object of consistent meaning. This is why he mentions the
necessity to “critique … a historiography that rests on a purely chronological
theory of development”:49 whatever progress lies await for science, the blend
between magic and logos cannot be overcome. In short, Warburg contends
that a failure to know is as irreducible now as it was for the Greek pagans,
the German reformers or the Pueblo Indians at the turn of the century. The
criterion to determine the success of a strategy of understanding or a set
of practices can therefore from Warburg’s point of view neither be their
consistency or rationality nor the sheer accumulation of factual knowledge
about the outside world but only the degree in which they are able to release
human beings from their primal fears.
From this perspective, the final paragraphs of the Lecture on the Snake-
ritual are particularly revealing. Warburg’s claim here is that modern sci-
ence and technology do not, however rational they may be, entail a funda-
mental improvement over the mythological world-view of the Indians: the
invention of electricity, for instance, has annihilated precisely the longed-
for distance between man and world that allows human beings to overcome
their anxiety:
The American of today is no longer afraid of the rattlesnake. He kills it; in
any case, he does not worship it. It now faces extermination. The lightning
imprisoned in wire—captured electricity—has produced a culture with no
use for paganism. What has replaced it? Natural forces are no longer seen in
anthropomorphic or biomorphic guise, but rather as infinite waves obedient
to human touch. With these waves, the culture of the machine age destroys
what the natural sciences, born of myth, so arduously achieved: the space
for devotion, which evolved in turn into the space required for reflection.
The modern Prometheus and the modern Icarus, Franklin and the Wright
brothers, who invented the dirigible airplane, are precisely those ominous
destroyers of the sense of distance, who threaten to lead the planet back into
chaos.50
On account of the primal fear that conditions them, the images that War-
burg brings under research are, like Georges Didi-Huberman claims, to
be seen as symptoms. “The ‘psychological history of expression’ that was
dreamt of by Warburg,” writes Didi-Huberman in the chapter Symptom-
image of his book on Warburg,
Francesco Sassetti’s burial chapel in the Santa Trinita church in Florence: “They form part
of the symbolism of energy, synthesis, and balance; but they are confined to a shadowy
existence, beneath the sphere of the sacred, where they can never disrupt Ghirlandaio’s
serene realism by introducing the gestural eloquence of their Roman virtus.” In Aby Warburg,
“Francesco Sassetti’s Last Injunctions to His Sons.” The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contribu-
tions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty
Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 247.
54 Didi-Huberman, L’ image survivante, 281 (my translation).
the ‘will to allegory’ and the ‘distortion’ of truth 111
55 See, for example, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: The Athlone
Press, 1984) and their statement that “the sign of desire is never a sign of the law, it is a sign
of strength [puissance].” (11).
56 Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, 231.
57 Warburg, “Pagan-Antique Prophecy,” 644. For the original terminology see Warburg,
however, lies precisely in the discovery that these irrational responses to the
failure to fully comprehend the surrounding universe could just as well be
part of the solution rather than of the problem: it is because it depicts the
absurd belief in Jupiter’s beneficial influence that Melencolia I succeeds, like
the serpent-ritual of the Indians, in transforming the despair that triggers
such superstitions into a feeling of mastery. If Dürer releases human beings
from their feeling of isolation it is therefore not by repressing it, nor by
surpassing the “inherently timeless” polarity of magic and logic62 in a purely
rational system of knowledge but by turning the harmful effects of the
feeling of despair back against itself. Melencolia I is an attempt to ward
off the discomfort about the failure to know without repressing it: it is a
symptom that uses the very energy of its underlying cause as a means to
shake off the latter’s pathogenic effects.
62 Ibid., 599.
63 O, 165.
64 SW: 2, 808.
114 chapter three
Warburg’s claims about the anxiety of Pueblo Indians and the contempla-
tive reaction of Dürer’s winged figure, Benjamin contends that Kafka’s char-
acters respond to this failure to know with shame, whereas the protagonists
of the baroque drama are overcome by melancholy. In addition to this, as
we have seen, Benjamin’s interpretations show that this lack of knowledge is
not just a theme of the Trauerspiel and Kafka’s writings alike, but that these
texts are, themselves, (necessarily indirect) expressions of it. Hence his anal-
ysis of Kafka’s last will and the claim that “[n]o other writer has obeyed the
commandment ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image’ so faith-
fully” and, in the Trauerspiel-book, the extensive discussion of allegory as
a confrontation with the limits of human comprehension.65 Just as Kafka’s
desire to have his writings destroyed is to be seen as an expression of shame
that does not overcome it, the use of allegories in the Trauerspiel is to be
seen as the only way to express melancholy without suspending it. In Kafka’s
writings and the baroque drama alike, the failure to know is expressed as a
failure, not giving rise to a more profound ‘knowledge of not-knowing’ or
docta ignorantia.
If Benjamin is thus, like Warburg, not concerned with overcoming the
limits of human understanding in a system of knowledge it is because he is
concerned with finding a way to deal with them—and this in no other way
than by bringing them on display. He joins Warburg in assessing the irre-
ducibility of a lack of knowledge because he understands that the very quest
for knowledge is to be replaced by an attempt to make its failure bearable.
The shame that is expressed in and by Kafka’s writings and the melancholy
that is expressed in and by the Trauerspiel are, like the anxiety of the Indians
and the ‘positive’ melancholy of Dürer’s winged angel, not just the result of
the awareness of a meaningless world but also a reaction to it. Moreover, like
Warburg, Benjamin does not only maintain the incapacity to explain away
the entire universe in a fully rational system of understanding but also—
and most important of all—the possibility to avert the negative effects of
this incapacity.66 Benjamin reads Kafka and the Trauerspiel-authors the way
65 SW: 2, 808.
66 It would be worthwhile to render a detailed analysis of Benjamin’s early essay on
Hölderlin (1914–1915) from the perspective of this same, Warburgian interest. In Benjamin’s
opinion, Hölderlin’s poems express an inner suspension of the power of the Greek gods
and attack them with their own means, that is, form: “Even the god must in the end give
his utmost in service to the poem and execute [vollstrecken] its law … The structuring, the
inwardly plastic principle, is so intensified that the fate of the dead form breaks over the
god, so that—to remain within the image—the plastic dimension is turned inside out, and
the ‘will to allegory’ and the ‘distortion’ of truth 115
now the god becomes wholly an object. … The heavenly one is brought [wird gebracht]. …
[T]he Greek god has entirely fallen prey to his own principle, the form.” (SW: 1, 32; GS: II-1,
121).
67 Andrew Benjamin’s essay “Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity” con-
tains very interesting ideas that zoom in on these same issues albeit from a different per-
spective. Andrew Benjamin’s analysis focuses on the Artwork-essay and the Arcades Project,
rather than on the Trauerspiel-book and the Kafka-essay and his attention goes out to the
feelings of boredom and distraction rather than to those of melancholy and shame but cru-
cial parallels between those four texts and concepts need to be pointed out. All four of these
feelings are “moods” in Andrew Benjamin’s meaning of the term, that is, “not conditions
of the subject [but] [o]n the contrary … conditions of the world. And yet they are neither
arbitrary conditions, nor are they historically random.” (Andrew Benjamin, “Boredom and
Distraction: The Moods of Modernity.” Walter Benjamin and History, ed. Andrew Benjamin
(London, New York: Continuum, 2005), 156) Though without referring to Warburg’s works,
Andrew Benjamin makes mention of an “ambivalence” that is to be seen as an “ontological
condition” (Ibid., 169) and emphasizes Benjamin’s intuition that the moods of boredom and
distraction will only be overcome by a dynamic that is inherent to them (“Boredom works as
a threshold precisely because the move away from boredom is carried by it as a potentiality.
The site of potentiality is the present.” (Ibid., 168)). The notions of play and habit, as realms
and strategies in which an alterity and lack of full comprehensibility can be borne out with-
out being repressed, are crucial here (“Play allows an originating 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 struc-
ture 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 transformative moment that is its
own construction.” (Ibid., 169)).
68 O, 152.
116 chapter three
the statement that “the German Trauerspiel is taken up entirely with the
hopelessness of the earthly condition” is immediately followed by the claim
that “[s]uch redemption as it knows resides in the depths of this destiny
itself rather than in the fulfillment of a divine plane of salvation.”69 The
Trauerspiel-authors not only unveil the void behind what was believed to
be a possession of divine knowledge but they equally understand that it is in
the very awareness of this irreducible immanence that hope for redemption
originates: “Never does their transcendence come from within. Hence their
illumination by the artificial light of apotheosis.”70 In the Trauerspiel, in
other words, the very awareness that transcendence cannot come from
within clears the path for the hope that it might come from without.71
This fundamental awareness underlies the dialectical reversal in the last
pages of the Trauerspiel-book, where allegory itself is allegorized and thus
divested of its most alienating features. In Benjamin’s interpretation, the
transience of the profane world and the inaccessibility of absolute truth
in history are in the baroque Trauerspiele not just expressed in and by
allegory but ultimately disclosed and sublated as instances of allegory. In
this way, since all instances of allegory are illustrations of a failure to know,
the continuous disappointment of this ideal installs an affinity for its very
opposite, that is, for the experience of something absolute. As Weber puts
it,
[A]llegory is the traditional means of investing a manifestation with a sig-
nification that it cannot possibly have in terms of a purely immanent, self-
contained structure. It thereby brings the signifying potential traditionally
associated with a generalized transcendence to bear upon the claims of a
localizable and individualizable secular immanence.72
Through their unceasing disenchantment of history and nature alike, alle-
gories empty out the ideal of knowledge and in precisely this way clear the
path for the possibility of an absolute truth-experience. The allegorist quite
obviously falls short vis-à-vis his ideal and thus inevitably ends by discred-
69 O, 81.
70 O, 180.
71 It is in this sense that Willem van Reijen, in the context of his analysis of Benjamin’s
Trauerspiel-book, rightfully claims that “antithesis and the lack of transcendence” do not
only “unceasingly represent the possibility of complete catastrophe” but just as much its
antithesis: “The experience of the absolute depravity [Hinfälligkeit] of our life and its mean-
ing becomes the starting point of the idea of salvation.” see Van Reijen, “Innerlichkeit oder
Begriffsarbeit?” 19 (my translation).
72 Weber, “Storming the Work,” 174.
the ‘will to allegory’ and the ‘distortion’ of truth 117
iting or exhausting this very ideal itself. “[T]he mortification brought about
by allegory,” writes Friedlander, “is [thus] not the last word in the journey of
meaning. Allegory, one might say, contains the possibility of its own rever-
sal.”73 By making the active and excessive quest for knowledge (‘possession
of its object’) work against itself allegory thus prepares the way for a presen-
tation of what cannot but remain outside its grasp: the ‘intentionless’ state
of genuine truth. “[T]ransitoriness,” writes Benjamin,
is not signified or allegorically represented, so much as, in its own signifi-
cance, displayed as allegory. As the allegory of resurrection [Auferstehung].
Ultimately in the death-signs of the baroque the direction of allegorical reflec-
tion is reversed; on the second part of its wide arc it returns, to redeem. The
seven years of its immersion are but a day. For even this time of hell is secu-
larized in space, and that world, which abandoned itself to the deep spirit of
Satan and betrayed itself, is God’s world. In God’s world the allegorist awak-
ens. … Allegory, of course, thereby loses everything that was most peculiar
to it; the secret, privileged knowledge, the arbitrary rule in the realm of dead
objects, the supposed infinity of a world without hope. All this vanishes with
this one about-turn [mit jenem einen Umschwung].74
The same ‘about-turn’ underlies Benjamin’s essay on Kafka. There too the
hopelessness that comes together with the awareness of the inability to
grasp the world as an object of knowledge (the failure to ‘convert poetry
into teachings’) is not granted the final word; and there too the possibility
of maintaining hope remains tied to nothing less than the unceasing expres-
sion of this awareness and this inability themselves.75 Returning to the same
categories that made up the philosophical framework of the Trauerspiel-
book a decade earlier, Benjamin describes the world of Kafka’s protagonists
as “nature” and those protagonists themselves as “creatures.”76 Hardly sur-
prising, then, that Benjamin sees hopelessness as a fundamental feature of
Kafka’s characters. According to Benjamin, it “may be this hopelessness that
brings out the beauty in [the accused].”77 Kafka’s universe is as disconso-
late as the baroque one and suffers from a heaviness that weighs down on
its inhabitants like the heavens on Atlas’s shoulders. This is what Benjamin
has in mind when he writes, in the beginning of the essay, that “Kafka thinks
in terms of cosmic epochs,” and postpones a clarification of this phrase for
almost fifteen pages:78
[Kafka] moves the mass of historical happenings the way Sisyphus rolled the
stone. As he does so, its nether side comes to light: it is not a pleasant sight,
but Kafka is capable of bearing it: “To believe in progress is not to believe that
progress has already taken place. That would be no belief.”79
The second part of this statement is most significant. Kafka is deemed
‘capable of bearing’ the ‘nether side’ of history, that is, the absence of a
dynamic of salvation at work within the world, and this, moreover, for
the reason that he is deemed capable of bringing it to expression. In his
writings, no less than in the Trauerspiel, it is the relentless depiction of
hopelessness itself which allows hope to survive. In Benjamin’s mind, the
protagonists of Kafka’s stories can only recover hope when they have lost
the expectation of salvation. The despair of the characters in The Trial,
for instance, is despite everything not complete, not at all because “they
have hopes of being acquitted” but precisely because they manage to live
without them:80 “In Der Prozeß, postponement is the hope of the accused
man.”81 Kafka’s protagonists understand that they ought to be saved not by
the judicial system but from it and thus maintain hope only to the extent
that their verdict is postponed: “Salvation is not a premium on existence,
but the last way out for a man whose path, as Kafka puts it … is ‘blocked …
by his own frontal bone.’”82 If the possibility is to become visible that the
world might perhaps be saved it must first cast aside the hope of saving
itself.83
It is crucial to note that the hope of fulfilment and the attitude of actively
waiting for an experience of absolute truth do not at all presuppose, let alone
bring about, the reality of such a fulfilment or experience. On the contrary,
even though the dynamic of postponement does allow for an openness
towards the absolute it always entails a confrontation with the lack of
78 SW: 2, 795.
79 SW: 2, 808.
80 SW: 2, 798.
81 SW: 2, 807.
82 SW: 2, 804.
83 For a brilliant and moving account of this logic of postponement, the possibility of a
“hope without revelation” and the connection with the theme of storytelling, see Friedlander,
Walter Benjamin, 212–221. This subchapter has been of vital importance to the remainder of
this chapter.
the ‘will to allegory’ and the ‘distortion’ of truth 119
still possessed in the highest degree what Malebranche called ‘the natural prayer of the soul’:
120 chapter three
attentiveness. And in this attentiveness he included all creatures, as saints include them in
their prayers.”
89 O, p. 156.
90 SW: 2, 799. See also Samuel Weber’s excellent analysis of the role of the students in
Kafka’s stories: “They are always chasing off after something. It is in such unpredictable spas-
modic and interruptive ‘gestures’ that the students, in their own peculiar way … ‘reckon
with’ a time that is always in danger of running out. The gestures of the students com-
bine the most extreme concentration with the most hectic exertion bordering on loss of
control.” in Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities, 204. This “combin[ation] [of] the most extreme con-
centration with the most hectic exertion bordering on loss of control” is a striking definition
of both Benjamin’s concept of attentiveness and one that is, despite its obvious connota-
tions, very closely linked to it, namely that of ‘distraction’ [Zerstreuung] in the Artwork-
essay.
91 SW: 2, 801.
92 SW: 2, 802.
93 SW: 2, 802; GS: II-2, 419.
the ‘will to allegory’ and the ‘distortion’ of truth 121
94 Roland Barthes, “On Bunraku.” The Drama Review, 15:2 (1971), 77 (also included in
Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (London: Cape, 1983)).
95 The concept of gestus [the quotable gesture] will be an important element in Benjamin’s
discussion of Brecht (see The Author as Producer (1934) and, primarily, What is Epic Theater?
(1939)) where it comes together with the same set of associations (a sudden disruption
of homogeneity and unity that suspends the semblance of totality). In linking the sudden
revelation of truth with the violence that shatters the unity of a representation or the
homogeneity of classical narrative (plot) gestus belongs in a continuum of other concepts
in Benjamin’s oeuvre like the caesura (Hölderlin), the expressionless [das Ausdruckslose] or
the optical unconscious and montage.
96 SW: 2, 812.
97 SW: 2, 802.
98 SW: 2, 802.
99 For a brief but clear discussion of this difference between Benjamin and Heidegger,
see Rolf Tiedemann, Studien zur Philosophie Walter Benjamins (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkam
Verlag, 1973), 90–91 and his statement that Benjamin’s thinking is “irreconcilable with such
[Heidegger’s] flowing back into the originary, [irreconcilable] with the retreat into being,
into ‘the’ event [<das> Ereignis].” (90).
122 chapter three
100 Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre,” trans. Thomas G. Neumiller. The
Drama Review, 16:3 (1972), 22 (translation modified). For the original German see idem., “Über
das Marionettentheater.” Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Helmut Sembdner (München:
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001), 339.
101 Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre,” 24.
102 B: 2, 618; my translation.
103 SW: 2, 812; GS: II-2, 433.
104 SW: 4, 390.
the ‘will to allegory’ and the ‘distortion’ of truth 123
all history, in the sense that he alone redeems, completes, creates its relation
to the messianic. For this reason, nothing that is historical can relate itself,
from its own ground, to anything messianic.”105 In line with the earlier
quoted lines that history is “infinite in every direction and unfulfilled at
every moment,” Benjamin contends that true redemption can only come
from outside of history.106 “[T]he secular order,” writes Benjamin, “cannot
be built on the idea of the Divine Kingdom” and is therefore marked by
a dynamic that is entirely its own: the quest for happiness [Glück].107 On
account of this quest for happiness, humanity is to be seen as moving in the
opposite direction of the messianic. Benjamin does not refrain from calling
it a “seek[ing] [of] downfall,” a “rhythm of [the] eternally transient worldly
existence, transient in its totality, in its spatial but also in its temporal
totality.”108
However, the absence of redemption and hopelessness that mark the
realm of the profane are here not in contradiction with the possibility of
fulfilment that will ultimately be realized by the Messiah. For it is, according
to Benjamin, only an affirmation of this disconsolate rhythm of the profane
which allows the hope of redemption to subsist:
If one arrow points to the goal toward which the secular dynamic acts, and
another marks the direction of messianic intensity, then certainly the quest of
free humanity for happiness runs counter to the messianic direction. But just
as a force, by virtue of the path it is moving along, can augment another force
on the opposite path, so the secular order—because of its nature as secular—
promotes the coming of the Messianic Kingdom.109
For Benjamin it is precisely the ceaseless confrontation with the downfall
of everything secular which keeps alive the awareness that it remains as yet
incomplete; the possibility of redemption is only revealed in the heart of
what has so far remained unredeemed: “The secular … though not itself a
category of this kingdom [that is, the messianic one], is a decisive category
of its most unobtrusive approach. … For nature is messianic by reason of its
eternal and total passing away.”110
points out, in the letter to Scholem, not only that Kafka shows “the consis-
tency of truth [to be] lost” but also that he understands that it cannot be
regained:115
Many had come to terms with it [that is, this loss of the consistency of truth]
in their own way—clinging to truth, or what they believed to be truth, and,
heavyhearted or not, renouncing its transmissibility [Tradierbarkeit]. Kafka’s
genius lay in the fact that he tried something altogether new: he gave up truth
so that he could hold on to its transmissibility, the hagaddic element.116
On account of this unsurpassable inaccessibility of doctrine there is, inher-
ent to messianic writing, a necessity to deconstruct/distort itself: the claim
that messianic truth can be directly expressed would contradict its own very
assessment of the inapproachability of the absolute. Since all messianic rev-
elations are distorted, the concept of a ‘distorted messianic revelation’ is in
fact, like that of a ‘weak messianic power,’ a tautology.
There is a second possible meaning to this essential distortion that makes
up the messianic undertone of Kafka’s writings. From a purely messianic
perspective on the surrounding world merely the assessment that knowl-
edge of the absolute is lacking can be derived but no understanding of how
this lack is experienced. A messianic insight entails the idea that truth is
no object of knowledge or intention but it is in need of a different, not-
immediately-theological framework if it wants to penetrate into the histor-
ically dependent set of problems in which this inaccessibility makes itself
felt. It is in this sense that the Kafka-letter is to be seen as a complement
to the Kafka-essay just as much as it was the case the other way around.
For Benjamin, namely, Kafka’s world does not just include the theologi-
cal assessment of such a universal failure to truly know but also “the exact
complement of his age, which is preparing to do away with considerable
segments of this planet’s population.”117 The Kafka-letter sketches out the
historical context and the oftentimes fatal consequences of the limits of
human understanding that are, themselves, not historically determined. For
Benjamin, Kafka’s descriptions of the alienation of the big-city dweller and
the technology of modern warfare, for example, illustrate that he not only
understood that truth in history remains distorted but also that the manner
in which these distortions are experienced and the sometimes dangerous
beliefs they lead to depend on the place and time in which one lives.
120 The first version of this essay is from 1935. The following quotes come from the canonic,
the very distinction between both. Benjamin maintains that, unlike origi-
nal paintings or sculptures, photographs or film-reels do not have a unique
existence and hence cannot rightfully lay claim to a higher status than their
so-called reproductions. Mechanically produced art is thus believed to fore-
close the right of being an original work of art with a unique existence in
space and time, not because it has the status of a mere copy but because
there has never existed an original in the first place.
The “authority” that Benjamin endows an original artwork with, how-
ever, is not only tied up with the uniqueness of its existence but also with
a remarkable legitimacy that he claims can be encountered in it.126 Auratic
works of art belong to the same category as the story: similar to how, in the
story, events are “embed[ded] … in the life of the storyteller in order to pass
it on as experience [Erfahrung] to those listening,” the manually produced
work of art serves as a medium between the artist and the spectator on the
one hand and the community that transcends both of them on the other.127
The elements of aura, authority and authenticity make up the structure of a
work of art that functions as a vehicle for the ‘true’ or ‘genuine’ experience
that Benjamin was in the process of analyzing in other essays written in the
same period: it is “identical to its embeddedness in the context of tradition
[Eingebettetsein in den Zusammenhang der Tradition]. … [T]his tradition
itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable.”128 In an auratic work
of art tradition is passed on from one spectator to another, thus allowing
both of them to gain a sense of belonging: “[I]t is highly significant that the
artwork’s auratic mode of existence is never entirely severed from its rit-
ual function. In other words: the unique value of the ‘authentic’ [<echten>]
work of art has its basis in ritual, the source of its original use value.”129 It is
for this reason that the nature of the auratic artwork cannot be understood
outside the (messianic) framework that also underlies texts like The Origin
of German Tragic Drama and the Kafka-essay. An auratic artwork, that is to
say, is associated with all the qualities that Benjamin endows the presenta-
tion of something absolute with: an intentionless state of being, a unique
and non-repeatable truth that is experienced in an involuntary, mentally
relaxed and absorbed manner and, to be sure, a distinct resistance to being
transferred to a context of consistent or systematized meaning. The auratic
jamin, it is not so much the newly invented media of photography and film
that are to be held accountable for the decay of the aura135 as a specific
mode of human perception. In a move that expands the philosophical
framework of the phenomenologists of his time, Benjamin endows the
human psyche with a historical vector. Unlike Henri Bergson, for instance,
whose insights in his opinion do not at all have the intention to render the
“historical determination of memory,” Benjamin’s own research rejects the
idea that the structure of our perceptive and mental faculties has remained
the same since time immemorial and strives to determine the impact of
the social-economic elements.136 “Just as the entire mode of existence of
human collectives changes over long historical periods,” writes Benjamin,
“so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception
is organized—the medium in which it occurs—is conditioned not only by
nature but by history.”137 It is this philosophical move that makes up the
nexus of Benjamin’s materialist convictions. It amounts, in fact, to a rather
strict adaptation of the insight which Marx himself had called “the guiding
principle of [his] studies”138 and which he most clearly summarized in his
Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite
relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of produc-
tion appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces
of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the
economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal
and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the gen-
eral process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness
of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that deter-
mines their consciousness.139
Benjamin accepts not only Marx’s suggestion about the twofold structure
of society, with an infrastructure on the one hand (its material life or “eco-
nomic conditions of production”)140 and a superstructure on the other
135 I prefer the English term ‘decay’ to ‘destruction’ since Benjamin’s claim is not that the
auratic experience has disappeared but that it has taken on a new, problematic guise.
136 SW: 4, 314; see above.
137 SW: 4, 255.
138 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya
145 These same ideas are central elements in Benjamin’s essay on Eduard Fuchs. See, for
example, the claims that “historical materialism … is interested in tracing the changes in
artistic vision not so much to a changed ideal of beauty as to more elementary processes—
processes set in motion by economic and technological transformations in production” (SW:
3, 270) and that “[t]he eruptive, the immediate … [are] in this view characteristic of artis-
tic creation.” (SW: 3, 272) For excellent analyses of Benjamin’s discussion of the specifically
modern forms of apperception, revolving around the key-notions of “innervation” [Innerva-
tion] (GS: I-2, 445; first version of the Artwork-essay) and “distraction” [Zerstreuung] (SW:
4, 268; GS: I-2, 504; later versions of the Artwork-essay) and outlining both the negative and
positive sides of these notions, see, for example, Benjamin, “Boredom and Distraction.” 156–
170; Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street.” Critical Inquiry 25:2
(1999), 306–343, Howard Eiland, “Reception in Distraction.” boundary 2, 30:1 (2003), 51–66
and Gertrud Koch, “Cosmos in Film: On the Concept of Space in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Work of
Art’ Essay.” Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin
and Peter Osborne (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 205–215.
146 SW: 4, 267; GS: I-2, 502.
147 SW: 4, 267; GS: I-2, 502.
134 chapter three
Conclusion
1 SW: 1, 482–483.
2 Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities, 196.
3 B: 1, 206.
136 appendix
4 SW: 3, 305.
5 O, 36.
6 For what follows, Friedlander’s very clear elaboration of Benjamin’s “two distinct tele-
ologies” was particularly illuminating and inspirational, see Friedlander, Walter Benjamin,
22–23.
relational ‘purity,’ the collector and the flâneur 137
What matters the most in the context of our discussion of purity is that both
of these distinct frameworks assume that the relation between the absolute
and the immanent is a movement in which they are tied together without
fully merging and that this relation can only be understood when the dis-
tinction between truth and knowledge is taken into account.
In his doctoral thesis, to begin with, Benjamin opposes the genuine
criticism of artworks to “judgment” and identifies it as “on the one hand,
the completion, consummation, and systematization of the work and, on
the other hand, its resolution in the absolute [Auflösung im Absoluten].”7
According to Benjamin’s reading of the Romantics, the work of art is itself
to be perceived as a “center of reflection” [Zentrums der Reflexion]8 which
needs to be completed and not possessed: genuine criticism receives its
impetus from the reflection that lies already contained in the concrete
work of art (its “immanent tendency”9 and “secret” or “hidden intentions”)10
and the criterion of the former is thus internal to a potentiality at work in
the latter (the artwork’s “criticizability” [bloße Kritisierbarkeit]).11 Criticism
takes its cue from the truth-content present in the work of art in order
to fulfil it and has nothing in common with methodologies or quests for
knowledge that meet works of art as external objects to be appropriated
or as enigmas to be decoded. Criticism heeds the secret that is internal to
the work and allows it to shine forth on its own terms, rather than that it
brings artworks into a context of knowledge in which their movement of
self-revelation is brutally dispelled.12 It is responsive rather than active and
starts from the idea that truth shows itself rather than that it is exposed.
Romantic Theory of Reflection.” Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, ed. Beatrice Hanssen and
Andrew Benjamin (New York and London: Continuum, 2002), 24, that “every finite reflection
can only point, in the mode of incompleteness, to the never-to-be-realized project of com-
plete ‘self-penetration’ within the infinite context of reflection.” Menninghaus, however, is
highly critical of Benjamin’s dismissal of this crucial topic as an “axiomatic presupposition”
(SW: 1, 129) or “metaphysical credo” (SW: 1, 149) that cannot be further analyzed. In this regard
see also Rolf Tiedemann’s (deeply Adornion) reading of Benjamin’s philosophy of art, such as
his statement that “in the artwork, truth can only be presented [vorgestellt] as appearing, but
only when it prohibits itself to mistake appearance for being [die Erscheinung mit dem Dasein
zu verwechseln] does it become a criticism of being” in Tiedemann, Studien zur Philosophie
Walter Benjamins, 127.
138 appendix
tent in his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1919–1922): “The relation between the two,”
writes Benjamin at the start of this essay, “is determined by that basic law of literature accord-
ing to which the more significant the work, the more inconspicuously and intimately its truth
content is bound up [gebunden] with its material content.” (SW: 1, 297; GS: I-1, 125).
16 SW: 1, 244; GS: II-1, 191.
17 SW: 1, 244. The concept of ‘pure’ and ‘unalloyed violence’ that is introduced in the
same essay is of a similarly relational nature in that it is both distinct and inseparable from
the realm in which it makes itself felt. In the same way as the purity of unalloyed means,
the purity of such violence shows itself precisely in its capacity to constantly turn that with
which it is caught up, that is, the mythic violence of the law, against itself. “[I]f the existence
of violence outside the law, as pure immediate violence, is assured,” writes Benjamin, “this
furnishes proof that revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence
by man, is possible, and shows by what means. Less possible and also less urgent [than such
revolutionary violence] for humankind, however, is to decide when unalloyed violence has
been realized in particular cases.” (SW: 1, 252).
relational ‘purity,’ the collector and the flâneur 139
aim, nor any supposed Kantian unconditionality but the way in which they
manage to hold themselves apart from precisely the very context in which
they are ceaselessly being deployed. Unalloyed means are thus present
within ordinary or ‘impure’ social actions but they do not merge with them.
For Benjamin, they refer to the possibility that conflicts are resolved in a
non-violent way, thus remaining outside the grasp of the ‘mythic’ violence
that Benjamin (and Jacques Derrida in his scope) associates with the force
of the law. The purity of such means illustrates a form of sociability that is
irreducible to the means-end rationality of our normal social behaviour but
which nevertheless does succeed in resolving interpersonal conflicts. “Is any
nonviolent resolution of conflict possible?” Benjamin asks himself,
Without doubt. The relationships among private persons are full of examples
of this. Nonviolent agreement is possible wherever a civilized outlook allows
the use of unalloyed means of agreement. Legal and illegal means of every
kind that are all the same violent may be confronted with nonviolent ones
as unalloyed means. Courtesy, sympathy, peaceableness, trust, and whatever
else might here be mentioned are their subjective preconditions.18
The sphere of purity is thus inseparable from and can only be found within
the very concreteness of our lives: the purity of unalloyed means consists
precisely in their capacity to ceaselessly alienate the means-end rationality
of our ordinary behaviour from itself and to thus bring out what Benjamin
calls a “proper sphere of understanding.”19 For this reason he sets up a
connection with another of his lifelong fascinations, language. In a letter
to Martin Buber, Benjamin takes pains to vouchsafe the absolute nature
and sacredness of language as a ‘pure’ means, rather than as an instrument
that should immediately inspire to social deeds or political action. Severely
criticizing a language that has been “denigrated to mere means [to an end]”
[zum bloßen Mittel herabgewürdigte],20 Benjamin writes that
[e]very salutary effect of writing (of the word, of language), yes every effect
that is not essentially devastating, rests in its secret. No matter in how many
different forms language can prove itself to be effective, it does not become
so through the mediation of contents, but through the most pure disclosure
[das reinste Erschließen] of its dignity and its essence.21
18 SW: 1, 244.
19 SW: 1, 245.
20 B: 1, 126.
21 B: 1, 126–127; (my translation). For a brief discussion of Benjamin’s refusal to contribute
to Buber’s journal and his underlying view on language, see for example Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe, “Introduction,” 9–18.
140 appendix
These views on language and its ‘pure (or mere) disclosure’ are elabo-
rated in the essays On Language as Such and on the Language of Man (1916)
and The Task of the Translator (1921) and they remain indispensable to an
understanding of Benjamin’s viewpoints on the purity of truth and its rela-
tion to immanence. His philosophy of language is built on the assumption
that human languages are fallen and imperfect vis-à-vis an Adamite lan-
guage of truth [wahre Sprache] that is nevertheless still contained in them.22
Benjamin starts from the idea that “the seed of pure language” [den Samen
reiner Sprache]23 is both distinct and inseparable from human language and
describes the task of the translator as
to release [erlösen] in his own language that pure language which is exiled
[gebannt] among alien tongues, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work
in his re-creation of that work. For the sake of the pure language, he breaks
through decayed barriers of his own language.24
The human or ‘impure’ word ‘imprisons’ a kernel of absolute truth that is
however, unlike the former, “a tensionless and even silent depository of the
ultimate secrets.”25 Pure or mere language therefore does not express any-
thing apart from itself since its sole, singular force consists in disrupting the
expressive, instrumental and communicative powers of ordinary, ‘impure’
human language. The pure is inseparably tied up with the impure but, in
being irreducible to that realm, it breaks it open from within and estranges
it from itself: “In [the] pure language—which no longer means or expresses
anything but is, as expressionless [ausdrucksloses] and creative Word, that
which is meant in all languages—all information, all sense, and all intention
finally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished.”26
The genuine translator, that is to say, “allow[s] his language to be powerfully
affected by the foreign tongue.”27
22 SW: 1, 259; GS: IV-1, 16. This idea of a pure or true language will continue to be present
of empirical reality [im Mittel der Empirie]. For ideas are not represented in themselves,
but solely and exclusively in an arrangement of concrete elements in the concept: as the
configuration of these elements.” (O, 34; GS: I-1, 214) See also the discussion of these matters
in the context of the discussion of art, beauty and the expressionless in the Goethe-text and,
most importantly, the statement that “[t]he expressionless is the critical violence which,
while unable to separate semblance from essence in art, prevents them from mingling
[welche Schein vom Wesen in der Kunst zwar zu trennen nicht vermag, aber ihnen verwehrt,
sich zu mischen].” (SW: 1, 340; GS: I-1, 181).
31 O, 32.
142 appendix
alienation from the body” but also instigates an awareness that the most
unremarkable and simple things can unexpectedly look back as a dislodged
promise of truth.32 What struck Benjamin the most in Dürer’s engraving
Melencolia I, for instance, was that “the utensils of active life are lying around
unused on the floor, as objects of contemplation [Grübelns].”33 In a philo-
sophical move that anticipates some of the key insights of Heidegger’s Being
and Time two years later, the baroque concepts of mourning and melan-
choly denote for Benjamin how it is precisely the distance between man
and world which should make us particularly attentive to the redemptive
potential of the objects that surround us:
As soon as this symptom of depersonalization was seen as an intense degree
of mournfulness, the concept of the pathological state, in which the most
simple object [jedes unscheinbarste Ding] appears to be a symbol of some
enigmatic wisdom [Chiffer einer rätselhaften Weisheit] because it lacks any
natural, creative relationship to us, was set in an incomparably productive
context.34
Near the end of his life, in On the Concept of History, Benjamin would use the
very same concept [unscheinbar] to denote the object of attentiveness of the
historical materialist (“The historical materialist must be aware of this most
inconspicuous of all transformations [unscheinbarste von allen Veränderun-
gen]”),35 revealing once again that the task of historical materialism cannot
be released from a messianic attitude.36 These remarks make clear that the
melancholic confrontation with the failure to truly know or possess is not
to be regarded as the mere opposite of a productive relation with the out-
side world. The experience of the limits of human understanding does not
at all result in the feeling that a presentation of truth is infinitely deferred
but, on the contrary, it instils a presence of mind to and an attitude of active
waiting for the movement and renewal that constitute such a presentation.
Melancholy, that is to say, does not denote a lack of emotional investment
in the concreteness of the outside world nor an attempt to turn away from
it but, quite the opposite, a ceaseless openness, attentiveness and renewed
responsiveness towards it precisely on account of its being experienced as
in which it relates to the work of Aby Warburg, see Weigel, “Bildwissenschaft aus dem Geiste
wahrer Philologie,” 237–250.
relational ‘purity,’ the collector and the flâneur 143
37 To my knowledge, the relationship between the concept of the Unscheinbare and the
concept of Schein (semblance) has not yet been fully explored. It would, however, be very
interesting to analyze how Benjamin in various places presupposes a view on meaningful-
ness that is released from the classical (Aristotelian) assumptions of unity. Human attention
and presence of mind are in his opinion only truly awakened by that which does not fully
shine forth, that which does not appear to be interesting in itself and that which does not
participate in any unity whatsoever. See, for example, the claims in the Artwork-essay that
“the shock effect of film, … like all shock effects, seeks to induce heightened attention” (SW:
4, 267) or in the essay on Eduard Fuchs, that “[t]he concepts through which the bourgeoisie
developed this notion of art no longer plays a role in Fuchs’s work: neither beautiful sem-
blance [der schöne Schein], nor harmony, nor the unity of the manifold is to be found there.”
(SW: 3, 268; GS: II-2, 478).
38 W.G. Sebald, “Introduction, ‘Le Promeneur Solitaire’” in R. Walser, The Tanners,
144 appendix
trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New Directions, 2009), 19. The original text is printed in
W.G. Sebald, Logis in einem Landhaus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbug Verlag, 2000),
149.
39 These same ideas also underlie Benjamin’s positive endorsement of the surrealists
(1929) as messengers of a “profane illumination” (SW: 2, 209), thus showing that “we pene-
trate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a
dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.”
(SW: 2, 216) See also the claim, on the same page, that the “reader, the thinker, the loiterer,
the flâneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic.
And more profane.”
40 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
statement that “[u]niversality is maintained, while the site of investigation and analysis is
relational ‘purity,’ the collector and the flâneur 145
the insistent presence of particulars. Particulars occasion—while being the occasion of—
the universal” in “The Absolute as Translatability,” 122.
42 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 73. Michael Löwy, as well, likens Benjamin’s
experience of the absolute—albeit in the context of his political viewpoints—to the Pas-
calian concept of the “wager,” see his Fire Alarm, 114.
43 In his excellent essay Et Cetera: The Historian as Chiffonnier, Irving Wohlfarth uses a
similar approach to describe Benjamin’s view on another one of those typically modern
personae—the rag-picker: “[T]he figures who are most threatened by exclusion should them-
selves be best placed to end it. … No one has a closer, more mimetic, more materialist relation
to the material world than [the rag-picker]: it takes an unsalvageable existence to salvage the
unsalvageable.” in Irving Wohlfarth, “Et Cetera: The Historian as Chiffonnier.” New German
Critique 39 (1986), 148.
44 In what follows, I lean heavily on ideas put forward—in a different context—by Roland
Breeur. See, for example, his essays on Proust and “Over het voor-en nadeel van het leven
voor de geschiedenis” (“On the Use and Disadvantages of Life for History”), De tijd bestaat
niet. Essays over domheid, vrijheid en emoties (Nijmegen: Uitgeverij Vantilt, 2012), 211–236.
45 AP, 205–206.
146 appendix
Benjamin gives to that term, that is, to freeze the dynamic that seemingly
affects it from without—by immediately securing a designated place for it in
his collection: his passionate discovery, namely, thrives on the very tension
and movement that relates the utterly banal, say a normal bed, to something
that is worthy of our attention, say the famous historical person such as
Napoleon, who once slept in it. If such an experience is striking or even mov-
ing it is precisely on account of the awareness that the bed that Napoleon
once slept in is not different from the one we ourselves sleep in every night.
What marks the attitude of collecting, in other words, is the feeling that the
object of interest is indeed deeply uninteresting (that is, the feeling that it
does not at all differ from another object of the same class) but that it nev-
ertheless captures our attention: the collector clearly feels that the source
of the significance of the collected object cannot but be distinct from that
object itself but he still encounters this—in itself uninteresting—object
as endowed with an irreplaceable and unique existence. If the collector’s
interest goes out to an unremarkable and inconspicuous object, this is on
account of something that resists possession and knowledge but this ‘some-
thing’ does not in any way enrich the object from within: the source of the
significance of the collected object remains external to that object—it is
not fully present within it—and yet the object itself does matter in its irre-
ducible particularity. The example of the collector thus illustrates that the
statement that ‘purity’ is relational and that the absolute is a power to affect
the concrete as if from without entails the awareness that utterly insignifi-
cant objects can both suddenly become pregnant with meaning and retain
their contingency at the same time: the unexpected meaningfulness that
the collector encounters in a specific object does not at all sublate the arbi-
trariness of this object but it even thrives on it. “It must be kept in mind,”
writes Benjamin, “that, for the collector, the world is present, and indeed
ordered, in each of his objects. Ordered, however, according to a surpris-
ing and, for the profane understanding, incomprehensible connection [dem
Profanen unverständlichen Zusammenhange].”46
This same capacity to be affected by an absolute force that is seemingly
at work within one’s immediate surroundings underlies the particular rel-
evance of the figure of the flâneur to Benjamin’s philosophy. In his mind,
the flâneur opens himself up towards public and anonymous spaces but
he thereby manages to develop the presence of mind to read the city like
47 For a beautiful account of the flâneur and a clear discussion of Benjamin’s analysis
of modern urban personae that goes beyond the stakes that are presented here, see Irving
Wohlfarth, “Perte d’ Auréolec: The Emergence of the Dandy.” MLN 85: 4 (1970), 529–571. See
for instance his characterization of the flâneur as someone who “miraculously realizes the
If Only” and “both acknowledges hard realities and, by the style of his acknowledgment,
magically suspends them.” The flâneur “turn[s] the perilous world into his native element.”
(ibid., 553) See also the interesting note at the end of the essay (ibid., 571) on the dialectical
relation between dandy and flâneur with the former being characterized by his composure
and “centralisation” and the latter by his openness to and sensibility for the outside world
(“vaporisation”): “Dandyism … appears to function as the home base from which the flâneur
can attempt to make the city his home.” This notion of being-at-home in the city should,
however, not be overly romanticized. See, for example, Benjamin’s statement in Paris, The
Capital of the Nineteenth Century (1935) that “the way of life [of the flâneur] still conceals
behind a mitigating nimbus the coming desolation of the big-city dweller” and that he is
not “at home” in either the metropolis nor the middle class (SW: 3, 39). For an account of
the social and economic background and changes of the figure of the flâneur, see Susan
Buck-Morss, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering.” New
German Critique 39 (1986), 99–140, particularly her statement that “the flaneur is not the
aristocrat: not leisure [Musse] but loitering [Müssiggang] is his trade. In order to survive
under capitalism he writes about what he sees, and sells the product” (ibid., 111) and that this
image has undergone a serious change with the rise of fascism, converging on the “historical
and conceptual level” with that of the (proletarian) sandwichman but remaining distinct
from it on the “perceptual, existential level, as social extremes. … The difference is between
feeling totally at home on the streets, and being exposed and vulnerable there because one
is totally homeless.” (ibid., 117–118).
48 AP, 416.
49 SW: 2, 262.
148 appendix
the ability to recover one’s own past precisely within the indifference and
exteriority of the city and through a force that can in no way have anything
in common with it. It is for this reason that Benjamin turns to Proust
and to Baudelaire for valuable information on this most modern of all
explorers of an unexpected and inconspicuous significance. From Proust’s
novel Benjamin retains the suddenness with which the most unnoteworthy
phenomena can stare out as affected by a meaningfulness that does not
seem to be their own, thereby revealing for the first time a life that has long
been forgotten:
[W]ithout definite attachment to anything, suddenly a roof, a gleam of sun-
light reflected from a stone, the smell of a road would make me stop still, to
enjoy the special pleasure that each of them gave me, and also because they
appeared to be concealing, beneath what my eyes could see, something which
they invited me to approach and take from them, but which, despite all my
efforts, I never managed to discover.50
From Baudelaire, on the other hand, Benjamin takes over the flâneur’s
capacity to experience a sense of wild freedom in the midst of the hustle and
bustle of the anonymous big city and his ability to expand his consciousness
to such an extent that it is touched by everything that goes on around him:
To be away from home, yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the
world, to be at the center of the world, yet to remain hidden from the world …
The lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense
reservoir of electric energy. We might also liken him to a mirror as vast as the
crowd itself.51
The flâneur submerges himself in the very randomness, arbitrariness and
chaos of the city but he nevertheless meets it as endowed with a relevance
to his own particular existence: such a relevance can therefore be consid-
ered neither as a quality of the city nor as a quality of a ‘private,’ inner Self
but only as a quality of the relation between both. It is not as if the flâneur’s
spirits are lifted by the feeling that he is learning something new about the
city or about himself: he is merely puzzled by the sentiment that the former
has anything to say about the latter. The experience that Benjamin sees as
typical to the flâneur conjures up both ‘more than his childhood and youth’
and ‘more than [the city’s] own history,’ that is, it cannot be released from a
power that is irreducible to either of them and it remains external to them
both. The meaning encountered by the flâneur neither grants knowledge of
the outside world nor allows for a restored possession of the Self: it arises
in the very movement that, despite their utter foreignness to one another,
relates the city to the Self and vice versa and it remains permanently dis-
lodged between both. That is to say, the experience of the flâneur cannot
be the object of intention or of a consistent meaning and it therefore does
not at all restore the sense of a ‘deeper’ or self-identical ego: the flâneur is,
in fact, enraptured and puzzled by the very feeling that his Self seems to be
dispersed and that parts of it are exiled in a realm that is wholly alien to it.52
52 It is this same connection between city and Self, between the public realm and the
private sphere which determines the attitude that underlies Benjamin’s autobiographical
writings. This is already attested to by their titles alone, which each connect a spatial
reference to a temporal one: A Berlin Chronicle (1932) and Berlin Childhood Around 1900 (1932–
1934). These texts number among the most beautiful pages of Benjamin’s entire oeuvre, and
they depict in a Proust-like manner how the memories of his youth are essentially entangled
with his experiences of the city in which he grew up and vice versa. See, for example,
Benjamin’s claim that it was the “urban labyrinth [which] opened [him] up to the sex drive”
(SW: 3, 404; see also SW: 4, 386) and the formulation of his overall aim to set out “the sphere
of life—bios—graphically on a map.” (SW: 2, 596) In this way, Benjamin’s autobiographical
texts also deconstruct the idea that the experiences of our childhood somehow pre-exist the
awareness of social and economic realities and would therefore be more pure or natural
than the ones of our adult life. The paragraphs about beggars and poverty, for instance,
reveal how all souvenirs de jeunesse are already colored by their social-economic context (see,
for example, the passages in which Benjamin recounts his curiosity about the lives of poor
people (for example SW: 2, 612; SW: 3, 404 and SW: 3, 600)). On Benjamin’s spatialization of
memory see also Susan Sontag, “Under the Sign of Saturn.” Under the Sign of Saturn (New
York: Picador USA, 2002), 109–136 and “The Last Intellectual.”
conclusion
On May 27, 1939, the Galician-Austrian author Joseph Roth (1894–1939) col-
lapsed and died in a house for the poor in Paris after years of money prob-
lems and alcohol abuse. Having left his adopted home-country Germany
immediately after the Nazi’s rose to power in 1933, Roth spent the last years
of his life in a manner not unlike that of the downtrodden and outcasts
that he had so often sympathized with in his novels and short stories. In
a flight without end, Roth was moving from hotel to hotel, from bar to bar,
and witnessed the world prepare for one of the most horrible episodes in its
history, how the war-mongers were democratically elected over those who
continued to fight for peace and how, in his own words, the European mind
was “capitulating out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack
of imagination.”1 Among Roth’s papers was found an invitation letter from
the American PEN Club, devoted to granting intellectuals a way out of the
turmoil that was Europe in those days and a safe entrance into the United
States. As Michael Hofmann puts it, however, it is “tantalizing but ultimately
impossible to imagine him taking ship to the New World, and continuing to
live and to write: His world was the old one, and he’d used it all up.”2
Benjamin’s fate was in many ways similar to Roth’s. Carrying the papers
that should have gotten him safely across the border with Spain and thus
onwards to the United States, Benjamin and his fellow travellers were halted
for unclear reasons by the authorities. Exhausted by months of physical and
mental strain, Benjamin took his own life on September 27, 1940, sixteen
months to the day after Roth’s death. Like Roth, he had spent the last
1 Joseph Roth, “The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind.” What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920–1933,
years of his life in exile in Paris and, like Roth, he had grown increasingly
despairing about the world-political situation, writing in the mid-thirties
that “[h]umankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation
for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has
reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme
aesthetic pleasure.”3
In 1927, in a short book with the title The Wandering Jews, Roth had
already analysed the worrisome situation of the Jews in Europe. Visiting
their communities throughout the former Austrian-Hungarian Empire,
Roth travelled to both the shtetls in the East and the ghettos in the West,
recognized the poor conditions in which they lived their lives and foresaw
the tragedy that was yet to come: “There is a historical feeling, based on
plentiful experience, that the Jews will be the first victims in the event of
a bloodbath.”4 If the main difficulty of the Jews in Eastern Europe was that
they had isolated themselves in their villages and thus missed the train of
modernity and progress that could have made their existence less cumber-
some, the dilemma of the Jews who emigrated to Western Europe was that
they adjusted all too gladly to the life of the big city, frequently having to
pay for the discovery of a new abode with the loss of their homeland and
original culture. Those Jews who went to live in the West, that is to say, often
ended up in the outskirts of society and were usually not able to benefit from
the luxury of the modern world. As artisans and shopkeepers, peddlers and
hawkers, instalment sellers and money-changers, they were invariably the
first to be victimized by the inflation of European currency and the rise of
anti-Semitism.
What Roth discovered to have remained intact in the midst of these
pitiable conditions, however, is the quiet sense of determination that marks
those people who manage to maintain a safe distance from the chaos that
surrounds them because they keep their gaze open to the beyond. The
stories that Roth brought back from his own wanderings among the Jews
are, though painful and heavy with suffering, not at all devoid of both
longing for salvation and hope that it will come at some point and thus
testify to what he has elsewhere called ‘the blessing of the eternal Jew’ [der
Segen des ewigen Juden]. In Roth’s mind, “[e]very Jew erects borders around
himself. It would be a shame to give them up. Because however great the
3 SW: 4, 270.
4 Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Granta Books,
2001), 12.
walter benjamin and joseph roth 153
need, the future will bring the most magnificent deliverance.”5 The Jew
whose story Roth has set out to tell does live in particularly harsh conditions
but remains remarkably untouched by them because he feels that they
are merely transient and ultimately without substance. The ‘eternal’ Jew
understands not only that “nothing can happen to him except by God’s will,
and that nothing will shield him from harm as sublimely as God’s will” but,
most important of all, that this will of God cannot be comprehended in
either good things or bad.6 In this way, the Jews whose lives Roth described
do continue to have faith in the divine but in a very paradoxical way, that
is, precisely because they experience the distance that separates our world
from any absolute will: the ‘blessing of the eternal Jew’ that he has in mind
does not refer to an experience of the intimate presence of God but to
the awareness that the truly divine cannot be approached at will and that,
therefore, our universe is awaiting a salvation that is yet to come.
It is this same world which colors Benjamin’s entire oeuvre. For him the
awareness that human beings live their lives at a distance from the divine
need not result in hopelessness or anxiety. From this perspective, on the
contrary, it is the very sentiment that the absolute cannot be brought into a
consistent set of meaning of either a positive nature (divine Providence) or
a negative one (God’s wrath) which should bring human beings to go about
their ways in a relaxed and composed manner, not unlike the flâneur who
aspires to make himself at home in the middle of the very hustle and bus-
tle of the anonymous, modern metropolis. Just as, for Roth, “[t]he apparent
cowardice of the Jew who doesn’t respond to the stone thrown at him by the
child and who seems deaf to the shouted insult is, in fact, the pride of some-
one who knows that he will one day prevail,”7 an endured responsiveness to
the absolute comes together, according to Benjamin, with a succinct pres-
ence of mind for the here and now. At stake in his philosophy is the idea that
the mournful and melancholic feeling that comprehension of the absolute is
lacking does not automatically entail despair and hopelessness since it can
just as well inspire to a sharpened attentiveness and a renewed openness to
what is most nearby. “The persistence which is expressed in the intention
of mourning,” wrote Benjamin in his Trauerspiel-study, “is born of its loyalty
to the world of things.”8
5 Ibid., 29.
6 Ibid., 30.
7 Ibid., 29–30.
8 O, 157.
154 conclusion
9 AP, 462.
10 AP, 456.
11 SW: 1, 471.
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