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INTRODUCTION TO N 7a, 7 BY WALTER BENJAMIN
Elisa Santucci (2005)
Biographical statement:
Elisa Santucci (di madre Merlin). Nata in Livorno e a Livorno il 23 di Febbraio 1977. I have often travelled to Florence; chosen Bologna; few months in Rome; then Manchester; Berlin jetzt 22. September 2006. I have studied with Anna Maria Bartolini, Roberto Dionigi, Barnaba Maj, Joanna Hodge; Cristina Capocchini, Moutassem Salha and Chiara Guarducci as well. Scrivo e leggo (I write and read; ich schreibe und lese, und schreite). Anche ora, cerco una bella parola.
Table of Contents
1. Preface
3. Part Two: On Proust, Language and Distortion
4. Part Three: On Kafka, History and Distortion:
5. Notes
6. Bibliography
How unfortunate it is to preface an introduction without the work which might come after it, and how much more so if, on the threshold of the fabric into which the intro-duction is to proceed, there lies an extended labyrinth on the plain. There might be a few rules to orient oneself in a maze, but they will not be instructive on the secrets of the labyrinth if its force is perdre.
The following work is divided into three sections. The first is a preamble, and where the second could be entitled 'Distortion and Language,' the third might be headed 'Distortion and History.' Yet, as the patterns in a carpet - Benjamin says - contain a fault which alerts the expert, so these labyrinthine patterns - Benjamin's thinking - have their defect. Is this what is hopeful about them? Is this the Kafkaesque failure?
So far as this dissertation is concerned, the fault will be a mutual overlapping of the themes from one section to another. If historical material pervades the second section more than linguistic material does in the third, this is due to the implicit dependence that their succession imposes, where the last section is indebted even in the dictionary (hence rebalancing the scales).
Indeed, the distinction is only artificial. Briefly, the dissertation will attempt to elaborate this apparent demarcation, between language and history. After all, this preface, as a pre-face, is just the other face, and should not be blindly trusted.
The aim of the work is to introduce Benjamin's note: N 7a, 7. It does not mean that the dissertation follows a path or a way that leads where the three sentences that constitute N 7a, 7 might appear clear and explained, but rather that it savours the power of the note in its reign in Benjamin's thinking.
In a space reserved for acknowledgments, only a few apologies are provided. The most urgent of these is addressed to that reader who will search for something, a hold at least. We apologise, there is nothing to be found here. The second is due to the reader who needs a few lines for guidance; we apologise, but they were cut on the day one was born. The third is for the reader who expects a conclusion, for here there is nothing that wants to be consumed. And yet, all this, is for the reader - if only she or he could be caught in here: the labyrinth's hunger.
INTRODUCTION TO N 7a, 7 BY WALTER BENJAMIN
I
July 15, 1910
Dear Herbart,
Why don't I write you once? Why not? That's easy. I haven't yet received a single line from you in response to my many postcards. Nevertheless, out of the boundless goodness of my heart and since I want to consecrate the first day of the new year of my life with a good deed, I intend to find it in my heart to write a timely, precise, long, and real letter. And to begin, I hereby give notice that I want an answer to this letter, sent general delivery to: St. Moritz (Dorf). For on Sunday I intend to leave Vaduz, where I have spent many a beautiful day, walking in the cool valley and climbing to the mountain peak. Now my feet, and perhaps the smoky train, will transplant me from here to Ragaz, whence a few hours' journey will bring me to St. Moritz. It is still uncertain whether from there I might travel to Italy or return soon to Germany. So much for the actual facts. As far as my spirit is concerned, today it received bounteous nourishment to celebrate my eighteenth birthday. I would like to tell you about it in more detail, but this kind of subject matter will not tolerate the constraints of the strict cadences in which I write. And thus the technical limitations of my creative writing compel me to conclude this letter against my will. [1]
The eighteen year old is travelling in the mountains and has already begun his own mimesis within the words. The writer is Walter Benjamin, and this additional information might lure us into interpreting every single comma in this scrap. But, as "reading is only one of a hundred ways of gaining access to a book," [2] this piece of paper multiplies the traces on the mountains, on the irony, on the birthday, on the abrupt conclusion.
More than for a theoretical assumption, the pages that follow try to respect the voyage, as the most perfect dimension, or landscape, by and through which to read Benjamin's letters as they rise to the surface. And we know from experience whilst travelling that the points of reference are subject to unforeseen displacements, jolts, jerks, smooth apparitions, slow metamorphoses (much depends on the transport, and there is quite a difference between a bike and a plane). We need only think about railway stations. "On departure, their openings," the adult recollects, "were a panorama, the frame of a fata morgana. No distance was more remote than the place where the rails converged in the mist." [3] But also the disposition of our soul is determinant, and the tracks are discriminating in the directions they follow. The child is now looking for a refuge "from the parental dwelling," and his eyes are finally captured by everything in flight. This is why the pages of this dissertation respect the space of the mountains, the sea, Marseilles and Naples, as the indication is precise: "On the return home, however, all was different." [4] 'Thus it was that I always returned from holidays an exile." [5] There is not any trace of homesickness but a mutual pact with the movement. Referring to Franz Kafka, Benjamin observes that it is no accident that his first 'Meditation' "was conceived on a swing." [6] Kafka once noted: "I have an experience and I am not joking when I say that it is a seasickness on dry land." [7] Travelling home, the child saw from the window of the train vistas that made him sad, for within parents and sons, "still burned the melancholy lamps that had shone in isolation from courtyard windows often without curtains, from staircases bristling with filth, from cellar windows hung with rags." [8] And yet these all are the last chances the child has to subtract himself from his "darkened house in the West End." [9] "Those few spare minutes preceding our exit from the train are still before my eyes. Many a gaze has perhaps touched on them, as if from those windows which look out of dilapidated walls in courtyards and in which a lamp is burning." [10]
In A Berlin Chronicle, Walter Benjamin affirms that "those five last fearful minutes of the journey before everyone got out of the train have been converted" [11] into the gaze of his eyes, and there are "those perhaps who look into them as into courtyard windows in damaged walls, in which at early evening a lamp stands." [12] In early 1933 he returned on the theme of the lamp, with a fragment which was to be incorporated late in Berlin Childhood around 1900. The title of the note is The Lamp. It reads:
What is certain is that childhood chains us to things in this way; indeed, it may be that in childhood we wander through the world of things like the stations of a journey of whose extent we can form no conception. Couldn't it be the case that childhood makes a start with the most remote things? At first, at the moment of birth, it makes itself similar to the most distant things in the deepest, most unconscious stratum of its own existence, so as subsequently to enable objects of the world around to accrete, layer by layer. [13]
"The most remote things," "the most distant things," are the main concern of the current dissertation; Benjamin would prefer: 'treatise.' Therefore, as was previously mentioned, travelling into the figures which imprint their shades on the eyes is the subject matter of the work. But travelling is a hard task. It requires the ability to lose oneself, to lend your eyes to other signs. It follows that the first hints of straying are not the inablity of making sense or the losing of one's thread, but rather the fall into a sort of distortions, the emergence of new configurations, new perceptions, new things. Benjamin is in Moscow when he observes: "In the first phase, the city still has barriers at a hundred frontiers. Yet one day the gate and the church that were the boundary of a district become without warning its centre. Now the city turns into a labyrinth for the newcomer. Streets that he had located far apart are yoked together by a corner, like a pair of horses reined in a coachman's fist," [14] and the traveller is lost. To characterise this special, more than specific, penchant, Benjamin returns to a short thesis. It is the fourth guide. He writes: "Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - this calls for quite a different schooling." [15] In A Berlin Chronicle, he continues: "Paris taught me this art of straying; it fulfilled a dream that had shown its first traces in the labyrinths of the blotting pages [Löschblättern] of my school exercise books." [16] Thus, here we are close to the most distant things: the old books with the blotting paper. There he would sit painting with watercolours. "The colours I mixed would colour me." [17] Otherwise, before meeting the books, he would train his awkward hand on the reading box:
...my entire childhood, as concentrated in the movement by which my hand slid the letters into the groove, where they would be arranged to form words. My hand can still dream of this movement, but it can no longer awaken so as actually to perform it. By the same token, I can dream of the way I once learned to walk. But that doesn't help. I now know how to walk; there is no more learning to walk. [18]
In 1938, reassembling and reordering the chapters for Berlin Childhood around 1900, Benjamin slightly modifies his previous note, about the schooling needed in the art of losing oneself. "This art I acquired late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks." [19] Now he adds: "No, not the first, for there was one earlier that has outlasted the others. The way into this labyrinth, which was not without its Ariadne, led over the Bendler Bridge, whose gentle arch became my first hillside." [20]
The Bendler Bridge led and still leads to the Tiergarten, the park which gives the name to the very same area, in Berlin.
I, 2
The task of an introduction should now be directly addressed. Principally, it is the task of writing a letter, or a word, which, intended to be the first, is not also the last. Much has been said about the task of an introduction: it must intro-ducere, lead- into. Consequently, this introduction will lead away. The latter is not a step that is directly, etymologically derived, but a bit of a flight if you follow the movement, proceeding into something implies that you are also leaving something else: sometimes that you are fleeing.
Writing to Max Horkheimer, in the winter 1936-1937, Benjamin "somewhat frivolously touched on a subject that, in the first instance," [21] he "should have brought up only in personal conversation." [22] The difficult matter is an evaluation of the extent to which the dismantling of philosophical terminology might be considered a side effect of dialectical-materialistic thinking. In a previous letter to Horkheimer, he had complimented him on the sober resolution "to call a spade a spade." [23] Replying to the horrified response of his correspondent, Benjamin hurries to correct his misleading comments. "I mean," he makes clear, "that there is a way of using philosophical terminology to feign a nonexistent richness. This is an uncritical use of technical terms. Concrete dialectical analysis of the particular subject being studied, on the other hand, includes a critique of the categories in which it was apprehended at an earlier level of reality and thought." [24] As a measure, "general intelligibility surely cannot be a criterion. But it is likely that a certain transparency in details is inherent in concrete dialectical analysis. The general intelligibility of the whole is of course another story altogether." [25]
The transparency in details must be apprehended along the way; without taking a rest, "looking neither left nor right" [26] as the vista opens only at the summit, but only because of the dusty colours one might have glimpsed and dragged along the way. "The fact that in the morning the pupil knows by heart the contents of the book he has put under his pillow the night before, that the Lord inspires His own in their sleep ( ... ) to make space for such things to happen is the alpha and omega of all mastery, its hallmark." [27] After all, "the realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking," [28] Benjamin notes as he is concluding the exposé, Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century. And whether it uses the language of dream or the silent practice of the hands, it is the same talent for travelling one finds when out of the window of the train, or that Valéry registers for artistic observation, but Benjamin transposes into the storytelling practise of Leskov: there is "a certain accord of the soul, eye, and hand." [29]
Perception may be defective. If this term ('defection') can be taken to imply a fragmentation of experience, a narcotic experience or phantasmagoria, it is most urgent to substitute for it the term 'distortion' and its correlates. In German the common verb is often 'entstellen.' In Franz Kafka, a recapitulating paragraph reads: "Odradek is the form which things assume in oblivion. They are distorted. The 'cares of a family man,' which no one can identify, are distorted; the bug, which we know all too well represents Gregor Samsa, is distorted; the big animal, half-lamb, half-kitten, for which 'the butcher's knife' might be 'a release,' is distorted. . ." [30] Distortion also comes to interfere heaviliy in Benjamin's life. It might be said that Kafka and Benjamin, the two children photographed at the beginning of the century, are distorted. Berlin Childhood around 1900 reads:
Thus, on one occasion, chance willed that Kupferstichen [copperplate
engravings] were discussed in my presence. The next day, I stuck my head
out from under a chair; that was a Kopf-verstich [a head-stickout].
If, in this way, I distorted both myself and the word, I did only what
I had to do to gain a foothold in life. Early on, I learned to disguise
myself in words...[31]
With these last phrases the panoramic circumnavigation of the subject matter of the present treatise has been concluded, returning to the original 'disguise in words' on the piece of paper of the eighteen year old boy. In fact, paper and cities are the themes. Thus, the works of Benjamin that are at the centre of this tratise are the three versions of Berlin Childhood (A Berlin Chronicle, Berlin Childhood around 1900, 1934 Version, Berlin Childhood around 1900, Final Version), the essay on Franz Kafka (Franz Kafka) and - in transparency - the exposé for Paris, Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century.
The genesis and compositional history of these works is protracted; the drafts, compositions, reflections and variations on each are composed between 1932-1938 and beyond. Yet even this relatively imprecise dating is insufficient since these works can be neither detached nor singled out from earlier and subsequent texts.
In the 18th of November 1927, Benjamin was in bed reading The Trial by Franz Kafka. On that occasion he sketched down a short story. [32] The work on Paris, if contextualised in the core of the Arcades, [33] is still unfinished and will never be finished. The three versions on Berlin childhood testify to the struggle.
If the theme is travelling through paper and cities, the vertical dimension
is not to be sacrificed. Indeed the reply given in this circumstance should
calk the dialogue between Benjamin and Bertold Brecht in the occasion of
a harsh dispute on Franz Kafka. The dramatist urged: "'It is nonsense.
You must ignore it. You cannot make progress with depth. Depth is simply
a dimension; it is just depth - in which nothing can be seen.' I end up
telling Brecht that descending into the depths is my way of journeying
to the antipodes." [34]
Thus, given the texts, the aim in what follows is to search through the pages for the trajectory of this voyage in all its temporal and spatial variations. We cannot afford the plumb which leads into the deep direction, as it is confiscated, glimmering plumb, into the dark blue eyes of the author, in which we know 'a lamp is burning.' And yet the present treatise is moved by the glistening of an annotation, as it is reflected, grows dense, comes into relief and slides away across the pages. The task involves searching for its shades on the above mentioned texts, as a codex, or a suggestion.
The indicated passage (with which we are ultimately concerned) belongs to Convolute N of the Arcades Project. The translator of an English edition tries to unravel the "hundreds of 22x28 centimetre sheets of yellowish paper." [35] The annotations in Convolute N range from late 1928 to mid-1940. The observations from N4 through N7a were "largely written between 1935 and late 1937." [36]Whilst the date of composition of the passage, N 7a, 7, is not certain, it is most probable that the note belongs to the same years. It reads:
My thinking relates to theology the way a blotter does to ink. It is
soaked through with it. If one were to go by the blotter, though, nothing
of what has been written would remain.[37]
I, 3
As an introduction, this introduction will run. I proceed by describing the place from which this short treatise comes, flees; the reasons for the actual hurry may appear there.
As he was composing the Dithyrambs of Dyonisus, Friedrich Nietzsche searched for a poem in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He had entitled it Among the Daughters of the Desert and the piece summed up the reasons and the results of another text he would later write during the time: completed in the Summer of 1887, in Sils-Maria, Alta Engadina, On the Genealogy of Morality. In Among the Daughters of the Desert, quite differently from the 'Zuordnung' in which Benjamin will display "the arrangement of concrete elements in the concepts: as the configuration of these elements" [38] to represent the ideas, Nietzsche introduces us here to a sole dance, of a single dancer who twirls desperately around herself. She has lost one leg, perhaps it has been devoured, and, rid of it, she dance madly.
"Dance annihilates the direction of walking. Every direction
is perfect, for movement has neither aim nor a particular way. (...) Chant
and cry give voice to a body that the deprivation of soul made light,
homeless, duty-less and rebel - thus devoid of the need to talk. As Zarathustra
says: 'are not the words all to suit the grave ones?'"[39]
The steps are therefore annulled, where language and tradition (or history), their roots extirpated, are themselves thrown into a dance which does not follow (from anything) and is not followed. Trying to read the characters of this dance stamped and imprinted on On the Genealogy of Morality, there are the signs of noble morality, which might perhaps dance, whereas slave morality still 'depends on' - it depends on the previous and the next steps. The French word is ressentiment, which describes a force unable to express itself without relation to a temporal continuum, without being reactive and finalised.
It is also the trap of the reduction to logos (where the 'pluralisation' of the concept could do nothing but represent the same, albeit miniaturised, dynamic) when man is asked for a first word out of tradition (here and subsequently it should be considered that 'tradition' stands for a particular historical view and should perhaps be thought of as a synonym for 'history' - although surely for a specific history). In noble morality a force is inscribed that strives to escape - healthily escape - out of tradition and language, since it does not reply but affirms the first word through its logocentric, interpretative power. But the first word must also consume the power in itself without producing heirs, without engendering a new tradition. The circularity of the eternal return of the same is guarantor here for the necessarily unchangeable, mute and un-transmissible.
And yet the reduction to logos cannot be produced without ultimately leading into the aporetic. The other leg could not have been raised aloft for ever. The dancer on her sole leg - poor creature - is the metaphor for such a blackout, where logos can only turn back on itself, return home, annul itself on the same line where it utters itself. Slave morality is the natural outcome of noble morality, when the latter puts down its other leg in order to walk.
As soon as a dwelling place has been searched for behind the Nietzschean forces, the first step of the dance has been articulated preserving inside the twirl and the step, the grounding of tradition and tradition (tradition as grounding), therefore: the non-grounding of tradition and tradition itself (be it either Heideggerian unconcealment or Derridean pas). The outlaw origins of law are merely an example of the offspring.
Thus it comes about that conformity or refusal, belonging or strangeness, ineluctably appear as positions that must be asserted in relation to tradition and language. The moral imperative of refusing and of asserting the difference reflects the impossibility of absolving such a task, and the defeat is doubly crowned by the existential failure of saying the first word (which refuses tradition in order to found it), of being God, and the moral failure of accepting a tradition and the violence preserved in it. The total refusal of tradition cannot be asserted without dismay whilst the passive acceptance of it is aware of the violence it perseveres. A suspicious observer might detect a deep connection here.
An ulterior analysis inside the core-motif distinguishes a tight knot which associates language and tradition (history), the will to refuse and the necessity of yielding, dismay and necessity, and clears the perspective toward possible impossibilities and impossible possibilities.
The ambivalence and ambiguity of this double-faced relation with tradition
(history) and language, captured in the impossible and necessary exiting
from them, which in other ways admirably reconciles megalomania and impotence,
has annihilated, reducing to logos, words and things. The bars of
the cage are what remain of the space of meaning: a space either borrowed
or conquered. In other terms: bars and cages are what can be made of the
space of words. The beast has fled.
From the initial Nietzschean forces there emerges a field of forces where language is the web which, made by the spider, caught (in a virtuous gesture common to both the web and the spider) it. [40] It caught it as soon as language and tradition (history) became webs, as soon as the logocentric character of the spoken or written text prevailed over the spoken or written text (moreover: the read and reading text). Hence, whenever reduction of the text operated in favour of an interpretative exegesis, which distinguishing the medium, the mechanism, the forces, submitted the words to it, we were and are reintroduced into the field of forces which can easily articulate possibility and necessity, impossibility and actuality, on the same level.
Disguised or revised, the first step is still imbued with the conscious twirl of the palm-tree dancer, who attracts to herself the whole energetic field. If, through interpretation and tradition, the transcendental is historical, the decision on the point of the graft is absorbed in the politics of power. The aporetic must be the last outcome to secure for such an historical actor his own independent action and dominant position in the historical field of forces. And yet his action (which is above all else interpretative) cannot be asserted without the implication of its dependence on a previous (presumed) 'independent' action. The aporetic, as such, is based on and owes its character to a field of forces which is still the Nietzschean twirl (and field).
Thus do I sit here, you
Dearest maidens,
And regard the palm-tree,
And watch how, like a dancer,
It bends and bows and sways at the hips,
if one watches long one follows suit!
Like a dancer who, it would seem,
Has stood long, dangerously long,
Always on one little leg?
so that she has forgotten, it would seem,
Her other leg?
(....)
She has lost it!
It has gone!
Gone for ever!
That other leg!
Oh, what a shame about that other dear leg!
Where can it now be, sorrowing forsaken?
That lonely leg? [41]
In 1929, Walter Benjamin might have observed the impasse of the palm-dancer. Language and tradition (history) were and would be amongst his primary interests for the previous and following years as everything he wrote - from his works to the CVs - testifies. He could have called for the exactness which would exclude both steps and shadows around the one-leg. But no field of forces can have surrounded the stage where the palm-tree dancer was bowing, bending and swaying.
Toward noon, shadows are no more than the sharp, black edges at the feet of things, preparing to retreat silently, unnoticed, into their burrow, their secret being. Then, in its compressed, cowering fullness, comes the hour of Zarathustra the thinker in 'the noon of life,' in 'the summer garden.' For it is knowledge that gives things their sharpest outlines, like the sun at its zenith. [42]
Indeed, the line is subtle but neat. Whether it is 'the temporal plasticity of form' [43] or 'the coloured border to. . . crystalline simultaneity,' [44] the drawn line (which is a dialectical line) moves within an imaginative gesture, and distortion. The dialectic is also in the sign of the line, if it is to be valued in the proper context. The slight adjustment the Messiah will make must come to touch the distorted with an even greater distortion if it is going to set the things right; it must share in the language of distortion and play in it. With any distortion the touch is brief, infinitesimal. A 'great rabbi,' [45] or a 'truly kabbalistic rabbi' [46] (be it either Scholem, or Bloch, or Benjamin), envisioned, from the past, that 'Alles wird sein wie hier - nur ein klein wenig anders.' [47] The distorted is the Messiah's reign, and he is the master. Not for any compromise of the creation with the negative forms of distortion - "our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his" [48] - but as the distortion is the effect and affection that the North Pole - the theological - exercises on the earth. In fact - and we can evince the dialectics ruling - amongst the clan of the hunchbacks (symbol of the distorted life), which will disappear as the Messiah comes, also belongs the hunchbacked dwarf, 'master at chess' [49] and representing theology, which is to let historical materialism win all the time. The latter consideration reintroduces us into the bosom of the blotter, into N 7a, 7 and whatever might be drawn in here.
The drawn line moves and re-distorts maybe just one of the pieces of the puzzle, but it is sufficient to leave the field of forces switched off. The web you are weaving undergoes a strange 'Verwandlung' indeed, a dialectical Verwandlung (metamorphosis). One of the threads appears red all at once, another three centimetres bigger, one slides, the other melts You were trapped in the logos-web, but you are now freed by the threads you touch. As the threads of logos become bounded and released, they resemble more and more the strings which, secretly covered by a system of mirrors (while the field of forces is on display on the chessboard), are in the tight fist of the little hunchback.
In fact, when Benjamin describes 'everyone' who is hired by the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, referring to the standards of admission (that is the ability to 'play themselves') he notes: "It is no longer within the realm of possibility that they could, if necessary, be what they claim to be." [50] In such a short sentence, between 'could' and 'possibility,' the logical game of continuity in logos is raptly abolished, and, as a distortion interferes in the flux, such a distortion is also raised on the realm of language, loosening its power, breaking with the self-referentiality of logos (as the answer cannot be achieved there inside) - reflecting on higher spheres. A bad literal translation could also read: "It is switched off from the realm of possibility that. . ." The sentence recurs where Benjamin presents salvation not as "a premium on existence, but the last way out." [51]
However it might be, every line has to be drawn (read) again and again, where dimensions, concepts, can never be firmly assessed and trod upon. "Only from the outside does a dialectical treatise have one and only one method." [52] As a beast, the line crouches down, impotent, mute, it waits. "Its pinions resemble those of the angel: they need but a few movements to hold it stationary." [53]
A dimension that is always missing, or a form that is distorted, a word displaced, gestures freely added - all traces of the hunchback - are immediately next to the dream-images that, to follow the line, coming from the new, looking back into the past, do not know either fields of forces or entireties in general. Their majestic fragments, their relief at their own essence, are touched on fleetingly by the same line which, distinguishing, reading the deformed, adjusts.
I, 4
In his characterisation of slave morality in On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche defines a note in the Jewish, but not only Jewish, attitude: "This Jewish, not just Jewish pawing and muzzling impertinence towards God!..." [54] With muzzles and paws we are indeed in the Kafkaesque world, although not, Benjamin says, in theology - as the description needs to be precise, leaving to others rough enterprises. It is a consistent precision, and would have the same effect as that of a child who deliberately substituted a gum-gun-comma into an otherwise ordered paragraph. The philosophical, dialectical language must be exact, describing movements with precision, paying extremely close attention to details and - of course distortions. The latter is indeed the privilege. In fact, "materialistic dialectics might, for a certain period of time, very likely have the advantage of a procedure that for its part ma y be determined by tactics." [55]
Thus, Kafka's parables "don't simply lie down at the feet of doctrine,
the way Haggadah lies down at the feet of Halakhah. Having crouched down,
they unexpectedly cuff doctrine with a weighty paw." [56]
Part Two: On Proust, Language and Distortion
II, 1
As an introduction, this introduction will try entering again and again from slightly different angles into the various differentiations of Benjamin's texts. The task is neither a comment on the material content nor a critique of the truth content (in the unity of the work) but the open exposition of/to the currents and dialectical tensions at work. We might be moved and displaced several times by them, as an unavoidable effect. Their range of action is boundless in the Benjaminian oeuvre as this might have been his major concern. To what extent his historical materialism is imbued with theology must be clear from the theses On the Concept of History (and within the dialectical role theology plays in historical materialism); probably less obvious are the dialectics integral to the very concept of theology, and the extent to which the latter relation is the indispensable key to visualise the former is the task of this treatise to point out - insofar as the aim is an introduction to N 7a, 7.
Another way of suggesting this, referring to the author's words, might be to say that the strictest interest is in the dialectical tensions which move and keep taut the lines, the texts, the data by which, where others fail, he proceeds. Whether he could make his way through the non-adverted distortions on others' pages and directions; whether he could manage to catch a glimpse of the strings tricking under the table the ordinary movements of legein and the forces on the chessboard; whether he recognised that "every piece of knowledge (. . .) contains a dash of nonsense;" [57] he accumulated material which would have just needed a little touch in order to crystallise.
Writing to Adorno on the 31st of May 1935, about his Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century, Benjamin refers precisely to a parallel principle of work in progress. He received an external impulse to write down a piece from the Passagenwerk (the Paris essay), and hence violate the truly cherished Arcades ground. "For this very reason," he notes, "it was able to shake up a mass of material that I had been carefully protecting from outside influences for so many years. And that shock made crystallization possible." [58] In a letter sent to Gretel Adorno a few days later, on the 16th of August 1935, he repeats: "This much is certain: the constructive moment means for this book what the philosophers' stone means for alchemy." [59]
And yet, the material that waits to be composed, passed through by a flash which, in an ephemeral light, could reveal "the sharpest outline,' 'the single ray of light breaking into an artificially darkened room," [60] closely resembles material distorted in a state of similarity. "Every piece of knowledge (. . .) contains a dash of nonsense, just as in ancient carpet patterns or ornamental friezes it was always possible to find somewhere or other a minute deviation from the regular pattern." [61] The sameness of standardised products nullifies this perspective. But it is this view of the carpets which leads back to the labyrinth and Ariadne's thread, and to the voyage, too.
The principle of dialectical tensions at play in Benjamin's texts is never made clearer than in one of the first notes in N. The power of the little hunchback, of the epoch, as it enters the dialectical image, is manifest there. It might be read in terms of distortions transposed in the Passagenwerk and Paris. It reads:
Comparison of others' attempts to setting off on a sea voyage in which
the ships are drawn off course by the magnetic north pole. Discover that
North Pole. What for others are deviations, for me are data by which to
set my course. I base my reckoning on the differentia of time that disturb
the 'main lines' of the investigation for others.[62]
II, 2
"The Latin word textum means 'web.' No one's text is more of a web or more tightly woven than is that of Marcel Proust; to him nothing was tight or durable enough." [63] The description, inserted in 'a Penelope work of forgetting,' is followed by the proofreading habits of the French writer, when the pages would have been as deep and tense as the impression of dreams on the night. No white space would remain where the pen posed, line after line, piece after piece, nights and then days, to recover what has been forgotten. In the rooted immobility of the pen pasted on itself, the threshold towards the dream is just a soft passage. "Enough inconspicuous gates lead into it - Proust's frenetic study, his impassioned cult of similarity." [64] The similarity with which Benjamin is here concerned is other than the one we are used to in a wakeful state. The latter "reflects only vaguely the deeper similarity of the dream world in which everything that happens appears not in identical but in similar guise, opaquely similar to itself." [65]
Ähnlichkeit (similarity) might be considered the counterpart to the concept of sameness, one of the most powerful phantasmagorias to be detected since the second half of the nineteenth century. If a trace is discerned in Don Quixote ('chivalric romances have gone to his head. He can encounter the most diverse phenomena and see them all as the same thing: an adventure awaiting the knight errant'), [66] it is in Baudelaire that "artificial assistance to the historical hallucination of sameness which had taken root with the commodity economy" [67] is given. In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility Benjamin refers to "the signature of a perception whose 'sense of sameness in the world' has so increased that, by means of reproduction, it extracts sameness even from what is unique." [68] He concludes associating the phenomenon with the increasing relevance of statistics, while the presence of the crowd is a consistent reality. During his hashish sessions, Benjamin notes a few times the predominance of the perception while his "ravenous hunger to taste what is the same in all places and countries" [69] increases.
Although the concept of similarity and the concept of sameness are on
completely different levels (not reciprocally conflicting levels), the
emergence of the latter since the age of Baudelaire might have advantaged
theories of language in which, either explicitly or implicitly, a reduction
was active and where the logos would always prevail over the Proustian
textum. The web which Benjamin starts describing returns in delight
at the end of the essay, where, behind the correspondances ("It
is the world in a state of similarity, and in it the correspondances
rule"), [70] he pursues the givens of smell:
"Smell - this is the sense of weight experienced by someone who casts
his nets into the sea of the temps perdu. And his sentences are
the entire muscular activity of the intelligible body; they contain the
whole enormous effort to raise this catch." [71]
So it happens that the "fragile, precious reality: the image, (. .
.) detaches itself from the structure of Proust's sentences." [72]
It appears clear that the recollection embodied in the body of the sentences, must model the catch, and if the literary styles are different, they do not extend the potentiality of logos (which is parasitical towards itself), rather, fracturing the legein, as texta, or membra disjecta, they silently resemble and swiftly enter the subject matter. They also release it. They likely dispel. "Proust's most accurate, most conclusive insights fasten on their objects the way insects fasten on leaves, blossoms, branches, betraying nothing of their existence until a leap, a beating of wings, a vault, show the startled observer that some incalculable individual life has imperceptibly crept into an alien world." [73] Mimicry, as a strategy of survival and the rule of the textum, is so shortly and brilliantly revised. Proust "fell back on the bosom of nature - not to suckle from it, but to dream to its heartbeat." [74]
In these last words Hannah Arendt detects the clear traces of a few overlapping imaginary spaces in the biographies of Marcel Proust and Walter Benjamin, for they both suffered - she observes - from the little hunchback, stumbling on their feet each time the most common affair was to be settled. [75] Despite the fact that the previous interpretation cannot fail to evoke sympathy, it fails to recognise the much deeper connections between the authors and the truly wider significance of the hunchback, and much more so, since, ultimately, Benjamin made evident what a high position the figure of the hunchback has. Listing the causes for the death of Proust - "He died because he did not know how to make a fire or open a window," [76] Benjamin concludes, "And, to be sure, of his neurasthenic asthma."[77]
Remaining in an area of biographical considerations, it might be noted that a central paragraph in On the Image of Proust is retained in integrum and proposed again in Berlin Childhood around 1900. Before confronting it directly, it is worth recalling that, in A Berlin Chronicle, if Paris was considered the fourth guide, it was in no minimal part due to the magnificent form it presented in the works of Proust. There, "remembrance progresses from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever mightier." [78] Proust was elected as model for any dive into childhood memories. His mimetic gift was a primary reason for this preference.
Indeed, the paragraph at the core of Proust's essay, which is trascribed in different guises in the two versions of Berlin Childhood around 1900, returns to the theme of similarity. It is devolved to a symbol of the dream world, a symbol known to children: the stocking. "The stocking which has the structure of this dream world when, rolled up in the laundry hamper, it is a 'bag' and a 'present' at the same time." The passage then reads:
And just as children do not tire of quickly changing the bag and its contents into a third thing - namely, a stocking - Proust could not get his fill of emptying the dummy, his self, at one stroke in order to keep garnering that third thing, the image which satisfied his curiosity - indeed assuaged his homesickness. He lay on his bed racked with homesickness, homesick for the world distorted in the state of similarity [im Stand der Ähnlichkeit entstellten].[79]
The concept of distortion is thus strictly associated with the state of similarity. What might here appear as a single recurrence will constitute a great part of Benjamin's works on Berlin childhood and - as he stresses writing to Scholem - [80] definitively the short piece On the Mimetic Faculty, perhaps The Doctrine of the Similar, and consequently The Lamp and On Astrology. All of them ought to be considered part of the identical material of thought from which the major works emerge. Benjamin himself remarks the connection between the Tiergarten, the first section of Berlin Childhood around 1900, and his new theories of language.
In Berlin Childhood around 1900, the piece referring to the socks continues:
I drew it ever nearer to me until something rather disconcerting was accomplished: the 'present' was wholly wrested from its pocket, but the latter itself was no longer around. I could not put this enigmatic truth to the test often enough: the truth, namely, that form and content, veil and what is veiled, 'the present' and the pocket, were one. [81]
Whereas in the 1934 version Benjamin adds: "They were one - and, to be sure, a third thing too: the sock into which they had been transformed," [82] in the final version he concludes that it "led me to draw truth from works of literature as warily as the child's hand retrieved the sock from 'the pocket.'' [83] Far from proposing any solution to a riddle that accompanied Benjamin thorugh childhood, and of which he never got his fill even in later years, what should be stressed more than any result (the sock which received him uncomfortably at the end) is the attention to the movement of emptying the dummy, and the way such a metamorphosis is connected to the world distorted in a state of similarity. Thus there is a chain of concomitant tensions: between form and content; between the truth of the work of literature and the work of literature itself.
II, 3
The first pages of Goethe's Elective Affinities directly confront the plausible and fruitful distinction between the truth content (the object of the critique) and the material content (the object of a commentary) of a work of art. [84] This distinction replaces for the abolition of the old demarcation between form and content, which would respect neither the reality of the socks nor that of the work of art. "The relation between the two is determined by the basic law of literature according to which the more significant the work, the more inconspicuously and intimately its truth content is bound up with its material content." In The Task of the Translator, written as a forword to the translation of Charles Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens, Benjamin specifies the character of essentially translatable texts: in them "the relationship between content and language" [85] would allow a similar depiction: the more significant the works, the more inconspicuously and intimately their language is bound up with their content (as sense, [Sinn]). In both cases the definition aims to stress neiter the relevance of the material content nor the sense. Instead, it is where sense has ceased to be an obstacle that a text is 'unconditionally translatable,'[86] with clear reference to the Holy Writ. In it, "the literal quality of the text takes part directly, without any mediating sense, in true language, in the Truth, or in doctrine [Lehre]." [87] In any other text sense remains determinant if a translation must wage the task of translation, despite "the higher the level of a work, the more it remains translatable even if its meaning [Sinn] is touched upon only fleetingly." [88]
As with the socks, the inconspicuous and intimate bond, threaten with the disappearance of the 'present,' which, in the respective cases, is the material content and the sense. The latter is indeed the task of both the critic and of the translator of which the child and the adult never tire: the task of drawing truth from works of literature. "The great motif of integrating many tongues into one true language informs" [89] the work of the translator, while the seal which presents the matter yields accessibility to the material content: "it is graspable only in the philosophical experience of its divine imprint, evident only to the blissful vision of the divine name. (. . .) The truth content emerges as that of the material content." [90.] And yet, the distinction must be preserved.
Where the dissolution of sense into its infinitesimal point allows translatability to extend in all its breadth, the material content needs the seal of the name not to disappear but to be authenticated as an incidence in the truth content. A passage in The Task of the Translator reads: "Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point establishing, with this touch rather than with a point, the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense." [91] Such an infinitesimal point anchors language to its embodiment as meaning, Sinn. "The word must communicate something (other than itself). In that fact lies the true Fall of the spirit of language." [92] To this alteration corresponds a 'turning away [Abkehr] from things,' [93] when human knowledge becomes "a knowledge from outside." [94]
As matter needs the seal of the divine imprint in order to achieve the status of material content, so too must translation return to the things and to the symbolised, in order to rescue language (the true language) and with it "the only perfection for which a philosopher can hope." [95] It is, in other words, the same principle that allows "the translation of the language of things into that of man." [96] "There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language." [97] To anticipate the concluding words of On Language as Such and on the Language of Man: "All higher language is a translation of lower ones, until in ultimate clarity the word of God unfolds, which is the unity of this movement made up of language." [98]
The seal of the content matter, as the dissolution of the symbolising into the symbolised, ultimately refers to the true language - the silent language "depository of the ultimate secrets for which all thought strives," [99] or still: the "expressionless and creative Word." Nothing in it symbolises (since what symbolises, symbolises something other than itself; it is charged with meaning). Indeed, a monadological view which embodied the graduation familiar to Scholasticism might clarify this vision.
The seal on the material content is its own recognisability; to a certain
extent, its own translatability. "In the word, creation took place,
and God's linguistic being is the word. All human language is only the
reflection of the word in name. The name is no closer to the word than
knowledge is to creation." [100] The 'being
translatable' of languages and the 'being recognisable' of material contents
is based on the true language where "in name, the word of God has
not remained creative; it has become in one part receptive, even if receptive
to language. Thus fertilised, it aims to give birth to the language of
things themselves." [101] To the "tremendous
and only capacity of translation" belongs the atonement of the languages
of man, and a similar power could be ascribed to the tremendous and only
capacity of critique. In its relation to the material content it might
be wondered if an higher translation from the language of things is not
at stake here. "The uninterrupted flow of this communication runs
through the whole of nature, from the lowest forms of existence to man
and from man to God." [102]
If meaning [Sinn] must be dispelled to obtain a divine seal (the truth content) on the material content, the alchemists who can accomplish the operation are the critic and the translator whose task is the rescue of language and things from their referential use. The instruments are (apart from literalness and philology) attention and observation.
If "no knowledge is possible without the self-knowledge of what is to be known,"[103] through observation what is to be known "can be called into wakefulness by one centre of reflection (the observer) in another (the thing) only insofar as the first, through repeated reflections, intensifies itself to the point of encompassing the second."[104] Benjamin repeats with Novalis that "perceptibility [is] an attentiveness." [105]
In The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, the portage
of the introduction of a straightforward monadological view into the Scholastic
graduation is first visible. Indeed, the work will culminate with an esoteric
afterword where, opening a final brief area for Goethe, Benjamin will define
the counterpart to the idea as the a priori of a method in the ideal in
Goethe, that is "the a priori of a correlative content," [106] or: 'the unity of the content.' [107] The latter "manifests itself in a limited, harmonic
discontinuum of pure contents." [108] It
is precisely in describing the ideal, or Ur-phenomenon, that Benjamin
refers to intuitability and perceptibility.
The 'being intuitable and perceptible' of the unity of the content - we might add: translatable and (through the seal) recognisable - clearly leads back to both the names and things of the true language: the language of things and the language of man.
A new conception of experience developed thereafter would dwell close to the true language and would not stop itself from entrapment within external meanings (hence with the referentiality of languages). Thus, despite Benjamin's acknowledgement of Kant, 'the bare woods of reality' [109], that the latter sketched and which are to be identified with what objects are in Kant, suffer from a hypostatisation of space and time, all the categories, the schematism, subject and object themselves, of Newtonian physics, and, finally - to synthesise: from a language, or logos, which is referential and deeply imbued with alien meanings. Space and time, the categories, the transcendental schematism, subject and object, in fact, fall out from the true language as hypostatised, the symbolised of a Kantian symbolising language. Therefore, Benjamin suggests replacing 'mathematical-mechanical lines' [110] with language; it can be read as the substitution of the true language, or the doctrine, for a fallen language.
The aim, prefigured at the end of On the Program of the Coming Philosophy,
is "to create on the basis of the Kantian system a concept of knowledge
to which a concept of experience corresponds, of which the knowledge is
the teachings [or doctrine, Lehre]." [111]
If it is delineated here the 'usual' relation between a form of knowledge
and a form of experience to which the former refers, ultimately a third
term, Lehre, is introduced in order to determine such reference
and, at once, in order to dismantle any prefigured, fixed, relation either
in the (hypostatised) 'nature' of experience or in the (hypostatised) 'given'
language.
Just as one of the main points of attention in The Task of the Translator iss the evolution of languages to the point where the nucleus of the true language could be detected, so too is the continuum of languages a focus in the earlier On Language as Such and on the Language of Man. Benjamin's attention here is foucsed on "the continuity in the nature of experience," [112] the experience of which knowledge is the doctrine, that experience which strives to rescue things and names with the power of the translator and the critic. Following Goethe, and therefore transposing the same power in the hands of the investigator, it is observed: "The highest thing would be to understand that everything factual is already theory. The blue of the sky reveals to us the fundamental law of chromatics. Only one must not look for anything behind the phenomena; they are themselves the doctrine." [113]
With the Passagenwerk, instead, the very same task will fall
into the hands of the historical materialist; the task of grasping through
dialectical images names and things (as truth content, true language, content,
ideal and Ur-phenomenon) in the Now of Recognisability, [114] in "the Jewish context of history." [115]
If the last direction emerges clearly beginning with the first lines of The Origin of German Tragic Drama, in 1938 the proper philological attitude towards the written texts was still the first step before what was then called a historical (dialectical) attitude. Thus, in both the Arcades' work and in the shorter texts that sometimes came from it, all attention was philological, if, it must be said, "- only dialectical images are genuine (i.e., not archaic) images; and the place one happens upon them is language." [116] Arguing over (protecting) The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, Benjamin vaunted to Adorno the praises of a 'proper philological attitude.'[117] Recalling the seal of the name, translated into the dialectical image, and still of the original principle, it is no surprise to read there: "the appearance of self-contained facticity that emanates from philological study and casts its spell on the scholar is dispelled according to the degree to which the object is constructed in historical perspective. The lines of perspective in this construction, receding to the vanishing point, converge in our own historical experience. In this way, the object is constituted as a monad." [118]
But the last direction clearly had already emerged in the first lines
of The Origin of German Tragic Drama, where, after a significant
quotation from Goethe, the prologue reads: "It is characteristic of
philosophical writing that it must continually confront the question of
representation [Darstellung]. [119] In
its finished form philosophy will, it is true, assume the quality of doctrine,
but it does not lie within the power of mere thought to confer such a form.
Philosophical doctrine is based on historical codification." [120] Thus, where "the multiplicity of 'histories'
is closely related, if not identical, to the multiplicity of languages,"
[121] it can be asserted that "only in
the messianic realm does a universal history exist. (. . .) Its language
is liberated prose - prose which has burst the fetters of script."
[122] So reads the New Theses K and also
The Dialectical Image.
Far from determining a difference between form and content, the action of retrieving the sock from the 'pocket' involves the task of capturing the translatability and recognisability of the truth in the work and, in the depth of the continuity of languages, in their monadological gradation: "the lifework is both preserved and sublated in the work, the era in the lifework, and the entire course of history in the era." [123]
On Language as Such and on the Language of Man gets next to the
end with an almost Haggadic note: "The language of nature is comparable
to a secret password that each sentry passes to the next in his own language,
but the meaning of the password is the sentry's language itself."
[124]
II, 4
Indefatigably Benjamin and Proust did "not tire of quickly changing the bag and its contents into a third thing - namely, a stocking - Proust could not get his fill of emptying the dummy (. . .) in order to keep garnering that third thing, the image which satisfied his curiosity - (. . .) He lay on his bed racked with homesickness, homesick for the world distorted in the state of similarity." [125] In a fragment written in 1931 or 1932, Benjamin strengthens the old thesis that "experience and observation are identical." [126] However, he now adds: "Experiences are lived similarities." [127] If the passage on the world distorted in a state of similarity is deleted in the subsequent versions of Berlin Childhood around 1900 in order to privilege the consideration of the truth and the artwork, the theme of similarity pervades all the various texts. Benjamin asked to have the juvenile work on language in order to confront his own old positions on the matter, now that he was working on another theory of language.
The year 1931 was far from being the happiest year in Benjamin's life.
He later sketched down: "It is likely that no one ever masters anything
in which he has not known impotence; and if you agree, you will also see
that his impotence comes not at the beginning of or before the struggle
with the subject, but in the heart of it." [128]
Thus it was that the first half of 1932 witnessed the composition of A
Berlin Chronicle, from which the previous sentence has been extracted.
"The older you get as a writer," he noted in his new attempt
to write a diary," "the more you're struck from time to time
by a word that you've never written. (. . .) This openness to the glossy
stamp of words comes only in later years, the more frequently you encounter
worn-out words, indeed words that have become worn out by your own use."
[129] Prey of consumption, he was led to follow
the layers of impotence that time had left stratum after stratum. The greatest
ability of the critic becomes 'the ability to forget.' [130]
It is the way to pass the judgment onto the unconscious. "This explains
why the true critic often has waking dreams about a book even before he
comes to know it." [131] Parallel to this,
what is most ineradicably embedded in a person is so in his dreams. [132] Practice achieves highest esteem, as it excludes
the subject from the dominion of control, as in ball-games, where neither
the body nor the ball is under the power of the athlete, but the two have
reached 'an understanding behind his back.' [133] The piece continues:
"To weary the master to the point of exhaustion through diligence
and hard work, so that at long last his body and each of his limbs can
act in accordance with their own rationality: that is what is called 'practice.'''
[134]
Many of the passages written in the period between 1931 and the beginning of 1933 (then enveloped in the hard construction of Berlin Childhood around 1900), impinge on what was previously described as the Proustian virtue of mimicry. Do not Forget the Best is titled one of the short pieces in Ibizan Sequence. It tells of a man who was "at the unhappiest period of his life." [135] At that time "he forgot nothing." [136] "Then circumstances brought about a change in his life. It began with his getting rid of his watch. He practised arriving late. . ." [137] It follows a list of imaginable similar behaviours. His dwarfing corresponded to the increased mess all around him, deposing him from his realm. Confusion took over.
When he sat down at his desk, it looked as if someone had been living in it. But it was he himself who was building his nest in the ruins. Whatever he did, he made a little house out of it, as children do when they play. Similarly, just as children keep coming across things they have hidden away and then forgotten - in their pockets, in the sand, in a drawer - so it was with his mind, with his entire life. [138]
Needless to say, his life improved wondrously. Everything began to turn out regularly and precisely as it never had whilst he wore a watch around his wrist. It appeared as if "he had the paths of heaven in his hands." [139] His life obeyed the title sentence 'Do not forget the best!' which Benjamin failed to recall, he had read in Kafka. [140] The recollection of the original author - which will be accomplished in Franz Kafka - brings about an ulterior insight in the interpretation; and this is also the very area that the treatise is seeking. The variations depend on the different perspectives on the concept of forgiveness, of similarity and distortion.
Habit and Attentiveness, which follows in the Ibizan Sequence,
continues elaborating life-long loved concepts. "Foremost among the
human capacities, according to Goethe, is attention." [141] The cut of the new insight is revealed in the immediately
successive sentence: "But it shares this primacy with habit."
"Habit, " it was already observed in Toys and Plays, "enters
life as a game." [142] There play was not
a "doing as if" but a "doing the same thing over and over
again.'' [143] The most concentrated form of
attentiveness originates (in pain) almost spontaneously by habit. And to
the attentiveness of the dreams the habits in fact return. "Everyday
experiences, hackneyed expressions, the vestiges that remain in a glance,
the pulsating of one's own blood - all this, hitherto unnoticed and in
a distorted [verstellt] and overly sharp form, makes up the stuff
of dreams." [144] As in a dream also anyone
who, exhausted, walks, "pushes on through the rubble of the moment."
[145] "Who knows whether it is his thoughts
that shatter him, or the roughness of the way?" [146]
The passages that have been mentioned gain their sharpest outline only if viewed from the sunken area of the works on Benjamin´s Berlin childhood . Not only are the insights radically close to each other, but a few motifs are also faithfully proposed again in the major texts. However, a light high above is shining on the pages. It is a light that we have long been after: the light of the moon. Though Adorno may have found it fitting for the concept of phantasmagoria to match the rings of Saturn Benjamin could not yield so easily. [147] Whether the man in Do not Forget the Best happened to think that someone might have been living there, on his desk, someone uncannily resembling himself, or his shadow (which Peter Schlemihl sold), [148] the child (Benjamin in The Moon) drew near his bed "gripped by the fear of finding myself," he notes, "already stretched out upon it," [149] in the nights of full moon. It might have been the forgotten past swelling into the dark or the child's intrusion into those secrets - the potent addiction beating in the Proustian nights - whatever it might have been, Benjamin had sketched down a few lines previously on the matter. In relation to the metamorphosis of the mimetic faculty, an ancient power, Benjamin writes in The Lamp: "Modern man can be touched by a pale shadow of this when he looks through a mask, or when, on southern moonlit nights, he feels mimetic forces alive in himself that he had thought long since dead, while nature, which possesses them all, transforms itself to resemble the moon. But he is transported into this very force field by his memories of childhood." [150]
In The Moon (the penultimate section of Berlin Childhood around 1900 - 1934 and final versions) many possible interpretations are left open.
The light streaming down from the moon has no part in the theatre of our daily existence. The terrain it illuminates so equivocally seems to belong to some counter-earth or alternate earth. It is an earth different from that to which the moon is subject as satellite, for it is itself transformed into a satellite of the moon. Its broad bosom, whose breath was time, stirs no longer; the creation has finally made its way back home. . .[151]
Back home the child strives to receive from his nocturnal "surroundings a sign of life - be it only the echo of my own -" [152] Yet the signs, the sounds, are really his own: all struck his ear "as repetition. For every spot on this alternate earth to which I was transported appeared wholly occupied by what once had been. Thus, each sound and each moment came toward me as the double of itself." [153] News of a Death describes other similar recurrences of filled time, such as the déjà vu and its still nameless counterpart. The latter leads into Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century where "the realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking." [154] Indeed, "ambiguity is the appearance of dialectic in images, the law of dialectics at a standstill." [155]
Despite the fact that methodologies of Berlin Childhood around 1900 and Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century cannot really be compared, [156] it is hard to pass by without mentioning the last words in News of a Death, where the child realises that the new has forgotten something in his own place. The unnoticed, which could not rise over the soil of perception, descended on the silence's child, likely in his dreams, surely into the filling of time. The seal of a dream fell, as a distortion, onto an ordinary evening, tracing it, marking it, as - it is said, "the Egyptians whose first-born were destined to die" [157] learned through a finger's mark of the Angel of Death. Or - "like a muff," Benjamin observes, "that someone has forgotten in our room. Just as the latter points us to a stranger who was on the premises, so there are words or pauses pointing us to that invisible stranger - the future - which forgot them at our place." [158] So, because the child did not pay any attention to the signs of the new event, he was to fall prey to them: indeed a dialectical and ambiguous image was in gestation. Before the father, who narrated the new event, Benjamin can say: "I did not absorb much of what he said. But I did take special note, that evening, of my room and my bed, just as a person pays closer attention to a place when he has a presentment that, one day, he will have to retrieve from it something forgotten." [159]
In the Tiergarten:
. . . This dead corner of the Zoological Garden was an image of what was to come, a prophesying place. It must be considered certain that there are such places; indeed, just as there are plants that primitive people claim confer the power of clairvoyance, so there are places endowed with such power: they may be deserted promenades, or treetops, particularly in towns, seen against walls, railway crossings, and above all the thresholds that mysteriously divide the districts of a town. The Lichtenstein gate was really such a threshold, between the two West End parks. It was as if in both, at the point where they were nearest, life paused. [160]
Past and future deform perception with the power of dreams, of the moon, of distortions. Time itself deforms as it is deformed into the dialectical image. Traces of the past and signs of the future melt - for the seal of originality - into the distortions of the moon. It is the hard task of the dialectical image to lead through a flash (the flash from burning magnesium powder, or ecrasite), [161] to a standstill, to crystallise and, in making a work out of hundreds of pages of the Passagenwerk, also to release and bring into relief an original constellation. It is the brief touch, the weak messianic power with which the historian, in the Now, is endowed. After all, it was in Paris, "I tell myself it had to be in Paris, where the walls and quays, the asphalt surfaces, the collections and the rubbish, the railings and the squares, the arcades and the kiosks, teach a language so singular that our relations to people attain, in the solitude encompassing us in our immersion in that world of things, the depths of a sleep in which the dream image waits to show the people their true faces." [162]- "What kind of regimen cities keep over imagination. . ." [163]
There are also words, particular words which are not forgotten. They are still alive under endless layers of deposited memory. They have been left there. Thus, they still might be significant, "for everything else," he writes, "that came within my visual field sooner or later became of use to me, became associated with a thought or a notion that swept it along into the sea of oblivion." [164] In other words: "There are memories that are especially well preserved because, although not themselves affected, they are isolated by a shock from all that followed. They have not been worn away by contact with their successors and remain detached, self-sufficient." [165]
Whether the last quotations introduce respectively the memory of the moulding in the classroom and the story of a ghost, the same or even stronger suppositions can be applied to a few words, as Brauhausberg, [166] Kupferstichen, [167] or the Mummerehlen. [168] In A Berlin Chronicle it was written that "a certain kind of significant dream survives in the form of words though all the rest of the dream-content has vanished." [169] One might even imagine a word game in which the players would "think of a sentence as if it had been constructed according to these rules." [170] Rather than form a meaningful sentence from a few disconnected words, one is given the meaningful sentence and extracts the words from it. Indeed, the latter is an accredited practice: "It is not just ordinary people who read novels in this way - that is to say, for the names of formulas that leap out of the text at the reader. The educated person, too, is constantly on the lookout for turns of phrase or striking expressions, and the meaning is merely the background on which rests the shadow that they cast, like figures in relief." [171] Benjamin concludes noticing that it is above all the commentaries designed to serve the sacred texts that "fix on particular words, as if they had been chosen according to the rules of the game and assigned to the reader as a task."[172]
With a transfer from the texts to reality (and consequently from philology to theology, since the latter is in charge of the reality whereas the former focuses on the texts), [173] we might imagine a similar process at work in Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century. But what an attraction paragraphs' titles as 'Fourier, or the Arcades,' 'Daguerre, or the Panoramas,' 'Grandville, or the World Exhibitions,' 'Louis-Philippe, or the Interior,' 'Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris,' 'Haussmann, or the Barricades,' must have exercised on the 'never-got-his-fill-of-emptying-the-dummy-Walter Benjamin' may be hardly imagined.
To different extents, mimetic material - the world distorted in a state
of similarity - was heaped on the Passagenwerk - waiting to be named.
Benjamin affirmed that those materials "could only be wrung from the
sphere of madness." [174] Man, as was written
in On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, can only overname.
The themes are reintroduced in The Origin of German Tragic Drama.
After the Fall overnaming corresponds to the muteness of nature.
"There is, in the relation of human languages to that of things, something
that can be approximately described as 'overnaming' - the deepest linguistic
reason for all melancholy and (from the point of view of the thing) for
all deliberate muteness." [175] The moon
redoubles the world.
The dialectical attitude walks on the threshold, over the clouds of dream-materials, to grasp - between the traces of the past and the signs of the new - the seal of the original in phenomena. Again, it is the little touch on the distortions. Between the 'one' and the 'two' there is a line, the line of multiplicity. Between dream and consciousness, there is the awakening, the feeble touch. Indeed, in N, several times Benjamin works on fore- and after-history, which could be read as déjà vu and forgotten new, where observation and attentiveness are dedicated to the space - filled with time. The Now of Recognisability can open such a space; it cannot keep it open. Either acknowledged or missed, the constellation passes away, into the very distortions it dialectically is (in the best hypothesis) or in consciousness - and therefore into universal history, progress, historicism . . . (in the worst). The Passagenwerk might be considered a collection of distortions of the Nineteenth Century.
Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century represents a constructive attempt - the catch of the fire, the sudden flash, the lucky day into the deep perseverance in the alchemist's cell: [176] maybe the Now when the material content has reached a secret agreement behind the philosopher's back.
In this optics the above mentioned titles (Fourier, or the Arcades.
. .), which extremely annoyed Adorno, ought to be focused upon. Therefore,
not the meaning of the Nineteenth Century but the key-accesses to it: from
the material of dreams (and many years of indefatigable toil; 'a temporising,
dilatory manner of work'), [177] the constellation
of awakening: from scrabble, ruins, torsos, fragments, all distorted remains,
the weak touch: from lapse of sheet, the constructive moment. [178]
II, 5
Another riddle, the moon and her light ('his' in German: der Mond), was not solved but, with the socks, left apart. The Moon had his share in the world distorted in a state of similarity that Proust's stockings first introduced. Benjamin needed his early work, On the Language as Such and on the Language of Man, which, as ardently as he asked for Bialik's Halachah and Aggadah when writing Kafka's essay, now he demanded back. "All higher language is a translation of lower ones, until in ultimate clarity the word of God unfolds, which is the unity of this movement made up of language." [179] With these words the text concluded.
The laws of the lower languages - where, "because she is mute,
nature mourns," [180] but where also "the
sadness of nature makes her mute" [181] -
reflect the name in man. Whether, in relation to nature, "the name
is the translation of the mute into sound and of the nameless into name,"
[182] the name has also "stepped out of.
. . its own immanent magic, in order to become expressly, as it were externally,
magic." [183] Thus, Benjamin concludes,
the foundation of the name is the "communication of matter in its
magic community." [184] Through such a
short sketch, the points on which the new theory of language will concentrate
might be discerned. In 1933 he adds: "The communication of matter
in its magical community takes place through similarity." [185] In a note on his own critical standpoint is outlined:
"Such an understanding is of course related in the most intimate way
to mystical or theological theories of language, without, however, being
alien to empirical philology." [186]
Once more, theology (directly or, as more often, within the name of doctrine [Lehre], where it should never be forgotten that "God's linguistic being is the word") [187] enters the spheres of language where the latter is only a last form of theological reading. Reading, or studying, is the reversal of languages - the origin of languages - the selection of similarity from the residual semiotic ground.
It might be hypothesised to extract, bring over, and free irresponsibly in all madness on the Berlin childhood's works the following sketch:
Selection [herauslesen] - on the basis of similarity - as the primal form of reading [lesen]. Runes as a transitional form between treetops, clouds, entrails, on the one hand, and letters, on the other. The magical function of the alphabet: to provide the nonsensuous similarity with the enduring semiotic ground on which it can appear. [188]
The paragraph might wander endlessly there on every step, getting lost
in Berlin's buildings, as it would later in the streets of Paris.
Similarity and semiotic grounds decisively appear under the looking glass of the alchemist. They enter spaces left unexplored in On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, left suspended as 'external magic' (semiotic ground) and 'magical communion' (similarity). And yet, both of them - magic - are extinguished in the language of man - where "the earlier powers of mimetic production and comprehension have passed without residue, to the point where they have liquidated those of magic." [189] In it, "language now represents the medium in which objects encounter and come into relation with one another. No longer directly, as they once did in the mind of the augur or priest, but in their essences." [190]
"Nature produces similarities - one need only think of mimicry. The very greatest capacity for the generation of similarities, however, belongs to human beings." [191] Such a power could have been considered boundless, where, in old times, the new-born had the power of a "perfect adaptation to the form of cosmic being." [192] And "what the state of the stars - millennia ago, at the moment of their birth - wrought with one human existence was woven there on the basis of similarity." [193] Lastly we are dealing, Benjamin observes, more than "with a dying out of the mimetic faculty," [194] with its own transformation. And yet, our unconscious remains an infinite reservoir of unconscious similarities. After all, "the schoolboy reads his ABC book, and the astrologer reads the future in the stars." [195] Man, indeed, can create "for itself in language and writing the most perfect archive of nonsensuous similarity. In this way, language is the highest application of the mimetic faculty." [196]
In Berlin Childhood around 1900 - when experiences of similarity
are listed following a first draft in One-Way Street and the sketch
in Doctrine of the Similar, experiences of the child, as whatever
takes part in the realm of play, like never getting one's fill of emptying
the dummy, where "the child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or
teacher but also a windmill and a train" [197]
- in Berlin Childhood around 1900, the gift of perceiving similarity
is described as ''nothing but a weak remnant of the old compulsion to become
similar and to behave mimetically." [198]Where
the following sentence closed précising: "In me, however, this
compulsion acted through words," [199]
the previous phrases referred to a typical experience of perception of
similarities, exactly in relation with a word.
Thus, on one occasion, chance willed that Kupferstichen [copperplate engravings] were discussed in my presence. The next day, I stuck my head out from under a chair; that was a Kopf-verstich [a head-stickout]. If, in this way, I distorted both myself and the word, I did only what I had to do to gain a foothold in life. Early on, I learned to disguise myself in words, which really were clouds.[200]
Similarity and distortion as we are used to since Proust's stockings ponderously melt. The child distorted Muhme Rehlen, 'Old Mother Rehlen', of the adage into a fanciful verb, mummerehlen (where the German 'mummen' means also 'to mask'), the colours; he recognises: "I (. . .) am distorted by similarity to all that surrounds me here." [201] Here, in the widest breadth, is Berlin, Berlin around 1900. 'Thus, like a mollusk in its shell, I had my abode in the nineteenth century, which now lies hollow before me like an empty shell. I hold it to my ear." [202]
Traces and signs there abandoned re-emerge. Mummerehlen "the line is distorted yet it contains the whole distorted world of childhood." [203] The child searched hopelessly for a trace or sign of the Mummerehlen. He recollects:
Sometimes I suspected it was lurking in the monkey that swam in the steam of barley groats or tapioca at the bottom of my dish. I ate the soup to bring out the mummerehlen's image. (. . .) Mute, porous, flaky, it formed a cloud at the core of things, like the snow flurry in a glass paperweight. From time to time, I was whirled around in it. This would happen as I sat painting with watercolours. The colours I mixed would colour me. Even before I applied them to the drawing, I found myself disguised by them. [204]
The search for the foothold in life space of distortion was never exhausted, behind doors, in the mute depth of the otter's cage, on the reading box, the sewing box, or on one of the many 'well-thumbed volumes.' [205] Books which "to open one would have landed me in the lap of the storm, in the very womb, where a brooding and changeable text a text pregnant with colours formed a cloud." [206] Books it might happen that in one of them, "hanging on its pages, however, like Indian summer on the branches of the trees, were sometimes fragile threads of a net in which I had once become tangled when learning to read." [207]
The book lay on the table that was much too high. While reading, I would cover my ears. Hadn't I already listened to stories in silence like this? (. . .). . . sometimes in winter, when I stood by the window in the warm little room, the snowstorm outside told me stories no less mutely. (. . .) . . .now the moment had come to follow, in the flurry of letters, the stories that had eluded me at the window. The distant lands I encountered in these stories played familiarity among themselves, like the snowflakes. [208]
The light of the moon, behind the mimetic forces that wearing a mask can evoke, still exercises distortions and, mingling into the memories of childhood -- in memory - -, might reawaken a tension as ambiguous as the power of reading.
Into distortions and similarity Benjamin plunges towards the objects he recollects, 'chairs, stairwells, cupboards, net curtains, and even a lamp.' [209] 'Here the lamp is fixed in position. Yet it was portable.' [210] "When I bring the lamp close to my ear, I do not hear the noise of field artillery, or the sound of Offenbach's gala music, or factory sirens. Now the nineteenth century is empty. It lies there like a large, dead, cold seashell. I pick it up and hold it up to my ear. What do I hear?" [211] Different texts give different replies to the question. The Lamp continues:
. . .what I hear when I put the shell up to my ear is something else: it is the rattling noise of the anthracite that is emptied from the coal scuttle into the furnace; it is the dull pop with which the flame lights up the gas mantle; it is the jangling of my mother's keys in her basket, the clatter of the tube in its casing, the clink of the glass globe on its metal ring when the lamp is carried from one room to another. [212]
Berlin Childhood around 1900, 1934 version, suggests the same and something more: "And other sounds as well, like the jingling of the basket of keys, or the ringing of the two bells at the front and back steps. And, finally, there is a little nursery rhyme. Listen to my tale of the mummerehlen.'' [213] Berlin Childhood around 1900 substitutes for it, in the end, another always brief, impossible, gaze, like the mummerehlen's, and another rhyme about a little hunchback. It is his voice, "like the hum of the gas burner," which whispers "over the threshold of the century." [214] A similar voice also bubbled from the boundless mole of the Passagenwerk, in Paris, through experiences - experiences (lived similarities) of which the knowledge is the doctrine - doctrine of which the tempo is the historical codification, or whose historical codification has a tempo.
Indeed, keeping in mind the lamp and the little hunchback, it ought
to be considered that "the perception of similarity is in every case
bound to a flashing up. It flits past, can possibly be won again, but cannot
really be held fast as can other perceptions. It offers itself to the eye
as fleetingly and transitorily as a constellation of stars." [215]
It is also all a riddle of rapidity if from the meaningful semiotic aspect of a sentence, or from the continuum of history, the whispers of the hunchback, the humming of the lamp, may be recognised; if the distortion can be acknowledged and - as a torso, ruins and abandon - distinct and redeemed. "The nexus of meaning which resides in the sounds of the sentence is the basis from which something similar can become apparent out of a sound, flashing up in an instant." [216]
Tempo is the light touch of memory, a silent agreement, a far call.
Tempo is the beat of the sentence in us, the leap of the present into the
past - where similarity glances at the child, where the hunchback dictated
the law of distortion, the law of the firm and misguiding attraction of
the North Pole - not in, not there, where the journey was settled for:
the century which grew in the body-face of the child in order to be recognised:
"Its gaze [mummerehlen's] spilled out from the irresolute flakes of
the first snow. Had that gaze fallen on me a single time, I would have
remained comforted my whole life long." [217]
So tempo, that swiftness in reading or writing which can scarcely be separated from this process, would then become, as it were, the effort, or gift, or mind to participate in that measure of time in which similarities flash up fleetingly out of the stream of things only in order to sink down once more. Thus, even profane reading, if it is not to forsake understanding altogether, shares this with magical reading: that it is subject to a necessary tempo, or rather a critical moment, which the reader must not forget at any cost lest he go away empty-handed. [218]
It is the proper context to interpret the dialectic of rhyme and name
(similarity and recognition) in the destructive action of quoting - like
quoting the lamp - quoting the fragment - crystallising (the constructive
root of destruction) - when it was said in and of the Passagenwerk:
"This project must raise the art of quoting without quotation marks
to the very highest level." [219] It might
be also recalled N 2a, 3, which reads: "- only dialectical
images are genuine (i.e., not archaic) images; and the place one happens
upon them is language." [220]
It is in describing Karl Kraus' works that Benjamin writes - and it can be seen as the dialectics, into the distortion (as the mold for the dialectical image), between similarity and touch; rhyme and name:
In the quotation that both saves and punishes, language proves the matrix of justice. It summons the word by its name, wrenches it destructively from its context, but precisely thereby calls it back its origin. It appears, now with rhyme and reason, sonorously, congruously, in the structure of a new text. As rhyme, it gathers the similar into its aura; as name, it stands alone and expressionless. [221]
In the whispered voice of the hunchback all the mimetic powers are gathered
- the same powers which in language have passed without residues. Hearing
it, the sound of the humming lamp, or filling the section in Paris,
the Capital of the Nineteenth Century under the title of Fourier, or
the Arcades, would mean to have caught fire in the meaning, let it
burn and, like the alchemist, admire the flames. "In it - after all
- is mirrored the angelic tongue in which all words, startled from the
idyllic context of meaning, have become mottoes in the book of Creation."
[222] The great motif of reading is at work
here, as in the alchemist's cell; the period lies on the table: "A
period that, constructed metrically, afterward has its rhythm upset at
a single point yields the finest prose sentence imaginable. In this way
a ray of light falls through a chink in the wall of the alchemist's cell,
to light up gleaming crystals, spheres, and triangles." [223]
Kafka, though, cannot be considered as successful as Kraus. 'Once,' 'at least once,' is not a great achievement for a writer. For him, "the gate of justice is study." [224] This is true, he found the law of his journey; "on at least one occasion, he succeeded in bringing its [horse's, which should have accompanied him on an untrammelled, happy journey] breathtaking speed in line with the slow narrative pace that he presumably sought all his life." [225] 'On at least one occasion' no it is not a great achievement for a writer.
Franz Kafka, indeed, "regarded his efforts as failure;" [226] "Kafka insists on his failure;" [227] "one should never lose sight of one thing: it is the figure of a failure;" [228] "insight into his work is, among other things, bound up with the simple realisation that he failed" . . .[229] . . . "the inevitable failure;" [230] "perhaps one might say that once he was sure of ultimate failure, then everything on the way to it succeeded for him as if in a dream." [231]
Indeed, cosmic ages must be moved, cosmic burdens be thrown off, [232] to flash up the tempo, the Messiah's gait, over blotting pages of old school exercise books, where the art of straying was apprehended till the far-away streets of Paris through "distant and, above all, long journeys." [233]
Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling. (. . .) This art I acquired rather late in life. [234] Paris taught me this art of straying. [235] It fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks. No, not the first, for there was one earlier that has outlived the others. The way into this labyrinth, which was not without its Ariadne, led over the Bendler Bridge. . . [236]
In Hashish in Marseilles Benjamin observes: "one ought to meditate on Ariadne's thread. What a joy in the mere act of unrolling a ball of thread!" [237] He continues: "We go forward; but in so doing, we not only discover the twists and turns of the cave, but also enjoy this pleasure of discovery against the background of the other, rhythmic bliss of unwinding the thread. The certainty of unrolling an artfully wound skein isn't that the joy of all productivity, at least in prose?" [238]
Like in Paris the arcades, caryatids, "from the heights of their loggias, preside over the courtyards of Berlin's West End." [239] The same grasp the blotting papers and the ABC books had on the child might be felt weighing there, where, Benjamin writes, "the rhythm of the metropolitan railway and of carpet-beating rocked me to sleep. It was the mould in which my dreams took shape - first the unformed ones, traversed perhaps by the sound of running water or the smell of milk, then the long-spun ones: travel dreams and dreams of rain." [240] Among arcades, loggias and courtyards, where every morning caryatids stand, he knows he writes that "it is precisely this air that sustains the images and allegories which preside over my thinking." [241]
It was just sometime between 1935 and 1937 it might be recalled that Benjamin noted:
My thinking relates to theology the way a blotter does to ink. It is soaked through with it. If one were to go by the blotter, though, nothing of what has been written would remain. [242]
Part Three: On Kafka, History and Distortion
III, 1
Prague, around 1900:
When I think about it, I must say that my education has done me great harm in some respect. I was not, as a matter of fact, educated in any out-of-the-way place, in a ruin, say, in the mountains something against which in fact I could not have brought myself to say a word of reproach. In spite of the risk of all my former teachers not understanding this, I should prefer most of all to have been such a little dweller in the ruins, burnt by the sun. . .[243]
The writer is a young man, Franz Kafka, in 1910. His first recollections do not differ much from the experiences of a nearly coetaneous Berliner, Walter Benjamin. The two men did not meet, though the chances were offered a few times: surely in Munich where Kafka went for a reading, and later in Berlin where again the writer from Prague happened to spend some time. The fact that neither one nor the other of the hypothetical meetings took place during Benjamin's journeys might already suffice to explain what remains a sorrow. Neither did they meet in Jerusalem.
Thus Benjamin: "Only today, it seems to me, am I able to appreciate how much hatefulness and humiliation lay in the obligation to raise my cap to teachers. The necessity of admitting them by this gesture into the sphere of my private existence seemed presumptuous. I would have no objection to a less intimate and in some way military display of respect. But to greet a teacher as one would a relation or a friend seemed inordinately unfitting, as if they wanted to hold classes in my home. . ." [244] The Berlin child was enduring his resistance, notwithstanding the daily nightmarish visions, of school, or the horrors of corridors and classrooms. [245] Greater Berlin´s annual school competition systematically won the first prize for most hated event in the child's life. "On those days," he remembers, "the feeling never left me that if I relaxed my vigilance for only a moment, permitted myself only the briefest well-being in the shade of a tree or before a sausage vendor's stand, I would fall in ten years' time irredeemably into the power of this place: I would have to become a soldier." [246] It is still in a school-day recollection that Benjamin associates "climbing the stairs in this fashion, with nothing before me but boots and calves, and the scraping of hundreds of feet" [247] with the walks in the city beside (almost beside) his mother. The child "always kept half a step behind her;" [248] thereafter, he concludes, there he learned and rooted "the stubborn refusal under any circumstances to form a united front, be it even with my own mother." [249]
III, 2
Prague, around 1900:
When I think about it, I must say that my education has done me great harm in some respects. This reproach applies to a multitude of people that is to say, my parents, several relatives, individual visitors to our house, various writers, a certain particular cook who took me to school for a year, a crowd of teachers (whom I must press tightly together in my memory, otherwise one would drop out here and there but since I have pressed them together so, the whole mass crumbles away bit by bit anyhow), a school inspector, slowly walking passers-by. . . [250]
It happened that sabotage was one of the first themes of the Berlin child. Benjamin writes: "I'm thinking here of a little piece of writing, perhaps the first I composed entirely for myself. It had to do with a man who distributes leaflets, and with the humiliations he suffers on encountering a public that has no interest in his literature." [251] The result comes next; he decides to secretely jettison the whole pack of leaflets. "At that time," Benjamin considers, "I could imagine no other form of revolt than sabotage - something rooted, naturally, in my own personal experience . . ." [252] Whether he ever overcame this phase or whether it never was sabotage remained inscribed (and transcribed) in him alone and, subsequently, in the critical efforts of others.
However, that in a few years such sabotage should become the idea of revolution was surely an outcome unpleasing for parents, several relatives, individual visitors, various writers, a certain particular cook. . ., a crowd of teachers, a school inspector, slowly walking passers-by. . . Unpleasant, too, that the Janus face [253] eventually never resolved either to elect Moscow or for Jerusalem - but for Paris, in the Nineteenth Century.
The first clear revolutionary traces emerge in the Critique of Violence, written in 1921; the Messianic motif already had been at the centre of attention in the 1919 doctoral thesis The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism; the controversial (for a matter of dating) Theological-Political Fragment could have been written between 1920 and 1921, and it probably was.
In the latter, the Messianic fracture overwhelms the world, while a
soft touch acts in the inner core. The revolution, as the Kingdom of God,
"is not the telos of the historical dynamic; it cannot be established
as a goal. From the standpoint of history, it is not the goal but the terminus
[Ende]." [254] How much for Benjamin
the idea of classless society should coincide with the secularised idea
of messianic time appears evident in XVIIa, (1940): "Classless
society is not the final goal of historical progress but its frequently
miscarried, ultimately [endlich] achieved interruption." [255]
In Franz Kafka, about fourteen years after the composition of the Fragment, Benjamin writes, "Salvation is not a premium on existence, but the last way out for a man whose path, as Kafka puts it in Er, is 'blocked by his own frontal bone.'' [256] Fourteen or fifteen years previously the blocked path could have been thought of as happiness. Before ruins had piled up toward the sky (progress)[257], all that is earthly in happiness could seek its downfall. [258] In the Theological-Political Fragment Benjamin thus asserts that "the secular order should be erected on the idea of happiness. The relation of this order to the messianic is one of the essential teachings of the philosophy of history." [259]Happiness preserves a revolutionary potential. Indeed, the geometrical explanation follows. "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." [260] Then the coming of the Messiah brings about a Standrecht, Martial Court, or summary justice which shortens the distance to the revolution: "every moment is a moment of judgment concerning certain moments that preceded it." [261] Yet, only for a redeemed humanity, "each moment it has lived becomes a citation à l'ordre du jour." [262] Be it an apocryphal gospel "Where I meet someone, there will I judge him" [263]- or Kafka himself - "The Last Judgment is a kind of summary justice" - the weak Messianic power with which the Now of Recognisability is endowed must not be deaf, not be blind, indeed, "we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim." [264]
In On the Concept of History (1940), the above-mentioned claim is mutely described. It is the demand for happiness; in 1920 or 1921, Benjamin still considered happiness to be the idea upon which the secular order should be based: one of the arrows that- still flits. "The image of happiness we cherish is thoroughly coloured by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us." [265] A dialectical parallel is therefore opened: "There is happiness - such as could arouse envy in us - only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. (. . .) Doesn't a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? In the voices we hear, isn't there an echo of now silent ones? Don't the women we court have sisters they no longer recognise?" [266]
In the reign of what might have been, in the realm of the demand for happiness, generations of downtrodden are still screaming. Our own happiness is made of such mute words. It is happiness that ever failed. On this ground might surely be found the treasures of the collector Eduard Fuchs, to whom Benjamin at long last succeeded in devoting a study. Foremost, however, would be found the treasures, the childhood belongings of Benjamin's himself. "Every stone I discovered, every flower I picked, every butterfly I captured was for me the beginning of a collection.(. . .) It was thus that the things of childhood multiplied themselves in drawers, chests, and boxes." [267] The child, like a cabbalist, must rebuild out of endless postcards 'an inventory of dates for an entire century;' [268] there, "stamps bristle with tiny numbers, minute letters, diminutive leaves and eyes. They are graphic cellular tissue;" [269] "then there are small stamps without perforations, without any indication of currency or country. In a tightly woven spider's web, they bear only a number. These things are perhaps truly without a fate." [270]
Material never ceased to be accumulated endlessly in the Passagenwerk, as was the case for the Baroque writers; [271] heaped up on yellowish pages, so to speak, before recieving an eventual seal; almost, say, before being signed: arcades, panoramas, world exhibitions, interiors, streets, barricades. . .
In the way of travel, quest of happiness, and flight, Benjamin searches
through the past two hundreds years ahead of Kafka for a story "like
a herald." [272] He finds it in Pushkin
who narrates a tale about Potemkin, chief favourite of the Empress Catherine.
An obliging clerk, Shuvalkin, offers his services to resolve a difficult
situation in which Potemkin, miserably depressed, cannot sign any more
documents, which have been piling for too long. Shuvalkin enters the dark
and heavy labyrinths of the palace's corridors, finally emerged in Potemkin's
room. He gets all his documents signed only to realise after he has returned
that all the papers bear the same signature, his own. [273]
Relational structures are everywhere in Kafka´s work. Within them, as here, the conclusion of the pieces is far from any conclusiveness; in truth, "what Kafka enjoys about these interminable reflections is the very fear that they might come to an end." [274] "His prose may prove nothing; but it is so constructed that it can be inserted into passages of argument at any time." [275] In this context their function would be dilatory: a matter of space, time, a matter of distortion (be it even of a logically endless form), which deforms by reason of a call for happiness, on/in behalf of happiness, before the Messiah. Thus Kafka:
"Walking home with my sister, I was passing the gate of a great house. I don't remember whether she knocked on the gate out of mischief or in a fit of absentmindedness, or merely shook her fist at it and did not knock at all." The very possibility of the third alternative puts the other two, which at first seemed harmless, in a different light.[276]
Hence, his reflections, Benjamin writes, are"'a Haggadah that constantly
pauses, luxuriating in the most detailed descriptions, in the simultaneous
hope and fear that it might encounter the halachic order, the doctrine
itself, en route." [277] Hope and
fear represent the contrasting feelings in dialectical tension, for the
animals, the fathers, all the clerks and all the members of the family
(all of Kafka's creatures) belong to the same world of distortion. They
are threatened with the little adjustment, the little touch, which would
set the things right, and Kafka's reflections, as the thoughts of the mole,
would then be annihilated. Is not anxiety the "only hopeful thing"
[278] about the mole's thoughts? Benjamin establishes
a rule: "what corruption is in the law, anxiety is in their thinking."
[279] This could happen because anxiety represents
the never stronger hope which beats into fear, so strongly that it can
break apart fear's constrictions and give access to the Messiah's touch.
Writing to Scholem, Benjamin clarifies: "I take as my starting point
the small, nonsensical hope, as well as the creatures for whom this hope
is intended and yet who on the other hand are also the creatures in which
this absurdity is mirrored." [280]
Thus, in the nest of this world of distortion, there is a particular configuration of creatures, at once more and less distorted than any other: they might touch the point where the borderline of redemption becomes confining, the limit of distortion, the distorted dialectic inside the dialectical distortion, or still, the very essence of distortion where theology does not serve dialectics anymore but we cannot distinguish anymore the dialectical root of theology from the theological root of dialectic - they are the assistants; Benjamin will specify: the students. These creature might be defined purely; they might be defined as more distorted than distortion. -However it might be with them, "it is no longer within the realm of possibility that they could, if necessary, be what they claim to be." [281] It was said in the beginning: "it is switched off from the realm of possibility that" they are "mist-bound creatures, beings in an unfinished state"; [282] "they have not yet been completely released from the womb of nature"; [283] they are the matrix-origin of distortion, distortion at a standstill. "It is for them and their kind, the unfinished and hapless [Ungeschickten], that there is hope." [284]
In this light, within the hapless and fate-less, Kafka's reflections can be viewed in a completely different perspective; the perspective of their failure. Indeed, of all that was part of the "famous testamentary instructions prescribing the destruction of his posthumous papers,"[285] the greatest part were uncompleted works, if even Der Prozeß and Das Schloß are ultimately anything but fragments. Benjamin never tires of repeating that this testamentary will is at the centre of Kafka's failure, where the latter is in the core of Kafka's works. Despite what Benjamin never did, it might be imagined that the fate of Kafka's writings had to occupy a primary point inside the dialectic among the fate-less for whom we are given hope (fate should be read in the mythical law of distortion).
The fragment, as the origin of distortion, the seal of distortion, well resembles the creatures amongst whose rows rank the assistants, the students the fate-less. Keeping in mind that the law of Kafka's world, the law in Kafka's world, is distortion, in Franz Kafka: Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer we find written: "it is the fact that his books are incomplete which shows the true working of grace in his writings. The fact that the Law never finds expression as such this and nothing else is the gracious dispensation of the fragment." [286] And yet, each of these fragments needs the seal on it.
It might be a form of obsessiveness - that Potemkin might sign. But it is the search for this signature which passes and counter-passes through and through-out pieces, notes, reflections, and works, without terminus. The law, instead, is a sham. Or it is the law of distortion. It is the magma of Kafka's material, Shuvalkin's papers and Benjamin's notes. Writing to Scholem, Benjamin clarified: "I consider Kafka's constant insistence on the Law to be the point where his work comes to a standstill, which only means to say that it seems to me that the work cannot be moved in any interpretative direction whatsoever from there." [287]
Benjamin needs to dispense with the Law that might open the relation Law-Doctrine. To Werner Kraft he explains: "At some later time, I will attempt to demonstrate why the concept of the 'laws' in Kafka - as opposed to the concept of 'doctrine' - has a predominantly illusory character and is actually a sham." [288] The aim, instead, is to express the dialectic inside the doctrine. It is a dialectic of distortion and adjustment in which the one borders with the other on the dialectical line.
The law, the law of distortion is the matter Kafka is given. Indeed, "Kafka's fixation on the sole topic of his work namely, the distortion of existence may appear to the reader like obsessiveness." [289]
Thus, the creatures in Kafka's works, their bodies, the unjustified events, the answers and delays and the infinite gestures collect traces and signs of distortions. "Kafka's writing," as - Benjamin conjures, "is simply full of configurations of forgetting - of silent pleas to recall things to mind;" [290] demands, distorted, for happiness. The Proustian night-world distorted into forgetting looms not from afar, if Proust himself might be imagined amongst the Kafkaesque students, or assistants, there, where "he lay on his bed racked with homesickness, homesick for the world distorted in the state of similarity." [291] The assistants "settled down on two old skirts on the floor in a corner. It was. . . their ambition. . . to use up as little space as possible." [292] The students do not sleep. One of them comes from the. . .
. . . "city in the south. . . of which it was said: 'People live there who imagine! don't sleep!' 'And why not?' 'Because they don't get tired.' 'Why don't they?' 'Because they are fools.' 'Don't fools get tired?' 'How could fools get tired? " [293]
They stand awake, for an urge within them mutely sounds; it is still a demand for happiness. "Cocteau," Benjamin notes, "recognised Proust's blind, senseless, obsessive quest for happiness. It shone from h