Andrew Benjamin
Arendt’s relation to Walter Benjamin has an important series of biographical determinations. In a letter to Scholem Gershom sent from New York on October 17, 1941, she recounts the events of the last months of his life. In the same letter, she also proposes that the manuscript of what has recently come to be called On the Concept of History be published as a stand-alone volume by Schocken.1 According to Young-Bruehl, this was the text whose “Theses” she and Heinrich Blücher read aloud to each other as refugees on the pier in Lisbon while waiting for a boat to New York.2 Her oversight of the publication into English of Illuminations and her preliminary work on the subsequent English language publication Reflections (work truncated by her death in 1975) attest to the nature of her commitment: a commitment, it should be added, that was as much personal as it was intellectual.
The recently published correspondence between Arendt and Scholem underscores both her closeness to Benjamin and her dedication to making his work more readily available.3 Arendt refers to Benjamin a number of times throughout her published writings, often in the context of discussions of Kafka. Her one text on him, while originally written in German, served as the Introduction—obviously in translation—to the English edition of Illuminations. The aim here is to concentrate on Arendt’s stated engagement with Benjamin. That there is a more subliminal registration is a possible conjecture. It could be argued, for example, that the project of distinguishing between power and violence that informs a great deal of her work and finds its most exact formulation in the 1969 text “On Violence” could be interpreted as an attempt to engage the complex argumentation of Benjamin’s Zur Kritik der Gewalt. The latter is a text in which while there are at least two modalities of Gewalt present, neither has any automatic identification with the English word “violence.” Arendt’s conception of “power” and aspects of Benjamin’s conception of Gewalt are linked to what might best be described as operativity.4 Namely, both can be defined in terms of the creation of possibilities. There is an interesting set of connections therefore between concepts such as the “caesura” and “divine violence” in Benjamin and Arendt’s conception of “natality,” understood as a general creative force and then more specifically the way in which the “pardon” and the “promise” work in The Human Condition.5 Tracing that weave of connections is an important project in its own right. Here, however, the text to be considered is the introduction to the English translation of Illuminations now published in Men in Dark Times.6
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The introduction to Illuminations needs to be understood as the introduction of Walter Benjamin to an American audience. It was first published in 1968 in Harry Zohn’s translation. (The text has been readily available in the original German since the 1989 publication of Menschen in finsteren Zeiten.7 ) Arendt’s concern is the reception of Benjamin in America. Hence, there is the creation of portrait, an image of one of the “men” who were later grouped as those who existed in “dark times.” Walter Benjamin figures within this setting. And yet, in addition to the creation of that figure, the only other thinker to appear as a sustained named presence within this introductory text is Heidegger. Arendt is concerned to establish at the end of her text what might be described as a distanced affinity. There are clear biographical determinations that could account for the attempt to construct this connection; however, the project here is to resist the full import of the biographical and stay with what might have been at stake, in addition, in the continuity of reference to Heidegger.8 Between Heidegger and Benjamin, for Arendt, there is a relation of sorts.
For the most part, Benjamin is presented as a singular figure. For Arendt, he “t hought poetically, but was neither a poet nor a philosopher.”9 This is a curious judgment. In part, it is there to establish what, for Arendt, he shares with Kafka, namely, an Einzigartigkeit. And yet there is a significance that comes to be attached to Benjamin’s work that makes it more important than that of a mere philosopher. On Arendt’s part, there are two elements that orientate her introduction. The first is to continue to demonstrate the way in which not only Benjamin was singular insofar as both his written work and his biography placed him outside the tradition, but also singularity has a further quality since it evinces what she takes to be the break in tradition. This the break that for Arendt defines the current predicament. It emerges in what she diagnoses elsewhere as the collapse of authority or the “crisis in culture.”10 The interplay of singularity and this break are central elements in her introduction to Benjamin. Though it should be noted that the way that tradition figures has a doubled presence. While it furthers her own work on tradition, her misconstrual of the radicality of the claims made by both Benjamin and Heidegger simultaneously exposes the limitation of that work.
Prior to the final pages of the text in which Heidegger features prominently, there is a sustained attempt, as noted, to secure the singularity of Benjamin. She deploys the objects of his own concerns, for example ruins and flannerie, to account both for his mode of working and for what amounts to the non-exemplary status of that work.11 He was followed by bad luck, forms of failure, and a pervasive hopelessness. The difficulty is that the discussion of hope is initially bound up with biographical concerns. While reference is made to the trope of fortune and thus to the predominating role played by fortuna in the Renaissance (with its allusion to melancholia), the question of hope is not given the philosophical edge that it had already acquired in Benjamin’s work, let alone in the work of Ernst Bloch.12 As with Kafka, these tropes not only traversed his life but also played a defining role, for Arendt, in the direction and in the form of his writing. His separateness becomes important because while it allows for a form of separation from the immediacy of biography, this separation is not given, by Arendt, a genuine philosophical significance.
Benjamin is understood as one for whom both tradition and thus the authority within it have come undone. This is the major link to Heidegger. If there is a fundamental point at which they connect—a point that sets in play the other connections—then it occurs when both Benjamin and Heidegger are identified as working within a specific and unalterable breach. Their writings can be situated within that specific call on thought that was “initiated by those who were most aware of the irreparability of the break in tradition (der Unheilbarkeit des Traditionsbruchs).”13 This breach, or rather Arendt’s construction of the breach, comes to have a structuring force both in her interpretation of Benjamin and then in the way the relation to Heidegger is secured. Consistent with arguments advanced in her detailed considerations of authority, the failure of the past to be “transmitted as tradition,” which is how the past attains authority, is central to an understanding of the loss of authority that has occurred as the result of that specific “break in tradition” (Traditionsbruch) that defines the locus of writing insofar as it defines the predicament of thought, its place within and as the contemporary.14
In order to locate this point within Benjamin writings, she quotes from the final pages of his 1931 paper on Karl Kraus. Benjamin wrote of Kraus:
Only when despairing did he discover in citation the power (die Kraft) not to preserve but to purify, to tear from context, to destroy; the only power in which hope will still reside that something might survive this age—because it is wrenched from it.15
Prior to commenting on Arendt’s selective use of this passage, it should be noted that Benjamin continues with the claim that the singularity of Kraus, and thus the potentialities carried by his project, that is, their “necessity,” are no longer “recognized” (zu erkennen). What had been there has been absorbed back into the flow of what always will have been. Of the passage noted earlier Arendt only cites the following—“not to preserve but to purify, to tear from context, to destroy.” Hence, what is lost is not just the link between destruction and hope, but more significantly what does not figure is the possibility that while there might be such a link, it is no longer recognized as such. Of the possible affinities between Benjamin and Heidegger, what is clear is that one of the most decisive would be the claim of nonrecognition at the present of the possibilities that the present contains to be other than it is. For Benjamin, citation opens that possibility—in a sense it actualizes a potential—and does so by linking destruction to hope. The hope in question is not empty. What is hoped is “that something might survive this age.” The problem of survival has already been given its due when sh e quotes, but does not really comment on, a letter written to Werner Kraft on October 28, 1935. In the letter—indeed in the passage cited by Arendt—Benjamin wants the “planet” to experience a civilization that has abandoned “blood and horror.” If this were not to occur then, in Benjamin’s words, “the planet will finally punish us, its unthoughtful well-wishers, by presenting us with the Last Judgement.”16 It is not simply the evocation of the Last Judgment that is important; there is the intimation of another possibility, namely, overcoming the continuity of barbarism. However, such a possibility is predicated on a preliminary movement, another overcoming. In this case, it would be the projected overcoming of that naturalization of barbarism in which horrors are incorporated into the flow of both time and events, which would then comprise the “homogeneous course of history.”17 That flow, more emphatically its interruption, would occur in its linkage of survival and liberation. This is the destruction that Benjamin is after. In terms of the possibility of freedom or liberation, it is not by chance that Benjamin contrasts “enslaved ancestors” and “liberated grandchild”; both are subject positions as well as temporal designators.18 What Arendt is overlooking in Benjamin, and this point will become more telling, is that if there is a break in tradition, it exists as a potentiality and thus the appearances of breaks and the concomitant undoing of authority need to be understood as epiphenomenal and not as a genuine destruction of tradition. (Here is the most telling affinity between Benjamin and Heidegger.) Arendt misses the force of the reiteration of continuities occurring within and as the naturalization of historical time; it is as though they just occur. The reiteration of progress and indeed its chronological determinations—that is, time as continuity—makes the setting of natality an important area of discussion in its own right.
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The final section of the text on Benjamin is the most important as well as the most problematic. What is striking about this section is not just the reappearance of Heidegger, but the extent to which both are further identified as thinkers whose work occurs within a setting created by the breakdown of tradition, and thus the attendant breakdown in the structures and institutions of authority that tradition brought with it. While there is an argument that can be advanced that would be based almost exclusively on Benjamin’s interpretation of Leskov, in which he (Benjamin) emerges as a thinker of the breakdown of tradition, to center on the position advanced solely in that text would be to miss what is at stake within Benjamin’s more general encounter with tradition.19 Even if a consideration of the terminological distinction between die Tradition and die Überlieferung is left to one side, what is at stake for both Benjamin and Heidegger is the interplay of historical time and how the present is understood. The present is the given locus of thought and activity and, as a result, it is the present that demands to be thought. Hence, the question to be addressed is the following: Is the mode of thought that pertains at the present able to think the present? That question—and it is clear that Benjamin and Heidegger would have formulated it in importantly different ways—has to endure.
Arendt’s engagement with tradition takes on a particular formation, though it is not Benjamin’s. As part of a change in the transmission of tradition, there is a related change in the nature of truth. What she terms “obligative truth”—namely a conception of truth that entail certain actions—has been “replaced.” Its replacement resulted in a repositioning of authority. Truth is now linked to forms of presentation that have the quality of secrets, and the secret conveys authority. To establish this point, Arendt quotes a short passage from The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Its concern is truth. However, it is a conception that resists any standard propositional form. Moreover, as a version of truth, it is not one within which truth is identified with the process of an “unveiling” that might destroy a “secret.” Rather truth is “the revelation that does justice to it (the secret).” She goes on to argue that truth has become “perceptible” and thus worldly, and then “comprehended by us as ‘un-concealement’ (Unverborgenheit—Heidegger),”20 as though what Heidegger’s means by “unconcealment” is to be understood in these terms. What then follows is a further set of arguments that develop from the claim that what is coming undone is the interrelationship between truth, tradition, and wisdom. The most significant addition to the argument is that if truth appeared—and this is the possibility she is attributing to Benjamin and Heidegger—it “could no longer lead to wisdom.” What is of interest is neither the viability nor the veracity of the interpretation in any direct sense. Rather what is of concern is that which is presupposed within it.
The passage cited by Arendt from The Origin of German Tragic Drama needs to be set in the context of the engagement with the object as a secret that occurs in Benjamin’s study of Goethe’s Elective Affinities. In that context, Benjamin argues:
Art criticism is not the lifting of the veil but rather, through the most precise knowledge of it as veil (durch deren genaueste Erkenntnis als Hülle), to raise itself for the first time to the true view of the beautiful (zur wahren Anschauung des Schönen). To the view that will never open itself up to so-called empathy and will only imperfectly open itself up to a purer contemplation of the naïve; to the view of the beautiful of that which is secret. Never yet has a true work of art (ein wahres Kunstwerk) been grasped other than when it is ineluctably presented as a secret (als Geheimnis sich darstellte).21
What should be noted is that the question of truth is li nked here to the process of knowing. Truth cannot be separated therefore from knowledge. Distanced in the process are both empathy and the contemplation of the naïve (Schiller), as if the world were simply given within poetry or given to the poetic project. In other words, what is distanced with an untrammeled insistence is the aesthetic, were the latter to be positioned in opposition to knowledge. The claim, as a result, is that rather than a concern with either the impossibility or the possibility of the presence in the world of the truth, as though the true could be merely free standing (this is empiricism’s fantasy), Benjamin’s strategy has a twofold determination. First, it is the undoing of the opposition between surface and depth, and, second, there is a reconfiguration both of the nature of appearance and of what appears. Appearing and semblance acquire therefore a philosophical exigency that they had not had before, an exigency, moreover, that far exceeds a concern with worldly presence whether positively or negatively construed. In regards to what appears, the significant aspect here is that this relation has been moved from the domain of the aesthetic—in which what matters is givenness of and within experience—to the domain of knowledge. Here the immediacy of experience gives way to the centrality of the object. Just to be clear, this is not what Heidegger meant by “unconcealment.” The latter, while positioned in terms of truth—hence the supposition that unconcealment is present as the translation of the Greek alētheia—has a very specific configuration. Here truth is to be understood, to use the formulation provided in On the Essence of Truth, as a letting come to presence of things as they are, and thus to the “disclosedness and disclosure of beings.”22
In the realm of art, neither is what is disclosed the material object as simple giveness nor is it that which represents. Rather, the work of art takes on the quality of a riddle. Heidegger writes in “The Origin of the Work of Art” that his “reflections” on art “are far from claiming to solve the riddle.” On the contrary, “the task is to see the riddle (Zur Aufgabe steht, das Rätsel zu sehen).”23 It is important to note here that Heidegger writes both of seeing the riddle and that seeing it delimits the “task” (Aufgabe) at hand. While there are different ways of interpreting what is meant by this “seeing,” it is nonetheless possible to argue that there is an important affinity between the presence of the work of art in terms of veiling and its presence as a riddle. It is that connection that calls into question Arendt’s claim that what is at stake is the worldly nature of truth. For Heidegger, unconcealment works in relation to concealment, hence the question of presence is fundamentally reconfigured as a result; for Benjamin criticism as a form of knowledge is equally an undoing of that conception of presentation in which presentation is thought in terms of surface and depth.
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Arendt positions Benjamin’s concerns with collecting as inextricably bound up with the break in tradition. The collecting of the past—indeed the emphasis on a relation to the past—evidences the break. Heidegger is implicated in this relation to the past. Indeed, Arendt makes the claim that his early “success” (Erfolg) arose as a result. This occurs because he “listened” to the past. Arendt cites a line from Heidegger’s Kants These über das Sein. Again, the citation is partial and misses the point of what Heidegger is actually arguing. As the argumentation is developing in the text on Kant, Heidegger is questioning the extent to which what describes as “present-day thought” (das heutige Denken) is able to engage Kant’s thinking of Being. As a result of both the demand made by Kant’s thought in this regard and the concomitant limitations of contemporary thought, a new “task” then arises. At this point Heidegger states the nature of the task that emerges. (The following passage also contains the line cited by Arendt.)
The tasks of thought here with designated to go beyond (überschreiten) the possibilities of a first delineation, go beyond (überschreiten) even the capacity of the thinking still customary today (des heute). All the more pressing is the need for a reflective listening to the tradition (ein nachdenkendes Hören auf die Überlieferung) a listening that does not devote itself to what is past but rather thinks the present (sondern das Gegenwärtige bedenkt).24
Arendt runs two lines together—and Zohn’s translation is itself slightly different. Heidegger’s “success” stems, Arendt claims, from a “listening to the tradition that does not give itself up to the past but thinks of the present.” This “listening” is taken by Arendt to be no more than a relation to the past. And that thinking the present does not entail a refusal of the way the present is currently construed in order that it be thought again. That thinking again—the task of thinking—is inherently destructive, insofar as the possibility of thinking the present is premised by undoing—destroying—the way the present things itself “today.” Inauguration—what Heidegger will continue to insist on thinking in terms of a preparation for a “new beginning”—depends upon destruction.25 What is left out of Arendt’s engagement with Heidegger is its destructive character, and hence the fundamentally radical nature of Heidegger’s claim. The insistence of destruction is the elective affinity between Benjamin and Heidegger and therefore is for both the perceived inadequacy of that which occurs in the present. It is not as though tradition has come undone. On the contrary, the claim has to be that despite the apparent strength of present—that is, contemporary philosophical thought—it is unable to think that which it is called upon to think. That is why rather than mere listening there h as to be a “reflective listening” (ein nachdenkendes Hören). Thus this is a hearing that is already another thinking. Hence, rather than there being an already-present breakdown in tradition, such a breakdown needs to occur and has to be brought about. It should be added here that the very nature of what constitutes a break, and thus the destruction of tradition, would themselves have to be rethought as part of this particular undertaking. Heidegger’s invocation of “concealing” and “unconcealing” forms part of that process. The task of philosophy has to be destructive in order that such openings—“other beginnings”—are in fact possible. To continue this overall point, it is essential to note that Arendt is correct to identify Benjamin’s continual refusal of the concept of “empathy.” However, the necessity to think interruption and thus to allow for the productive power of destruction, and thus to bring about the breakdown in tradition, necessitates the sustained refusal of empathy. Again, the reason for such an undertaking is not serendipitous. On the contrary. Empathy establishes relations in ways that obviate the need to recognize that relations are structured, now at the present, by the ineliminability of disequilibria of power. Given the naturalization of those relations, the necessity for destruction becomes even more insistent.
Arendt engages another possible point of connection between Heidegger and Benjamin in the final section of her text. In this instance, it concerns language. There is an important project linking Benjamin’s conception of “pure language”—that is, language beyond its reduction to either “idle talk” (Gerede) or simple utility—which he develops in a number of places, though most notably in his discussion of translation, and Heidegger’s own thinking of language. The difficulty once again would be assimilating possible points of connection between the way language figures in their respective projects to a setting created almost exclusively by what continues to be identified by Arendt as a breakdown in tradition. The engagement with language rather than the focus on genuine points of contact between Heidegger and Benjamin allows Arendt to return to the position advanced at the beginning of text, namely, that for Benjamin language is essentially poetic. And thus, what he has is the “gift of thinking poetically.”26 Were the same claim to be made of Heidegger, as it could be given the way the connection between Heidegger and Benjamin on language is established, it would be premised on a systematic failure to take into consideration the consistent engagement with the problematic of poetry throughout his philosophical corpus, and the specific link between poetry and truth that occurs in the final section of “The Origin of the Work of Art.”
While there is a great deal in Arendt’s engagement with Benjamin that is of real value, and the image of Benjamin as a pearl diver has a compelling eloquence, key aspects of his thought are overlooked. The pearl, on the one hand, is the “monad” that appears in the extraordinary Vorrede in the Origin of German Tragic Drama and then, on the other, is the element that begins to inform the structure of the dialectical image that appears in later works. Perhaps more importantly, the pearl as that which is recovered, brought to the surface from the depths of the past, is clearly already implicated in the claim that is made in On the Concept of History that “nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history.”27 Recovery brings about destruction; it does not presuppose it. In sum, therefore, Arendt’s engagement with Benjamin’s work, while introducing it to an American audience, does so by muting its force as a political philosophy by attempt to exclude it—along with Heidegger—from the domain of the philosophical itself.
Notes
1 This text, which was initially known in English as “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” is found in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
2 Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 162.
3 Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem, The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem, ed. Mary Luise Knott and trans. Anthony David (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2017).
4 I have argued for this position in considerable detail in my Working with Walter Benjamin. Recovering a Political Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 94–143.
5 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 236–47.
6 Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968).
7 Hannah Arendt, Menschen in finsteren Zeiten (Munich: Piper, 1989).
8 On the relationship between Arendt and Heidegger that explores both biographical and philosophical considerations, see Antonia Grunenberg, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger : History of a Love, ed. and trans. Peg Birmingham, Kristina Lebedeva, and Elizabeth von Witzke Birmingham (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017). I have with Dimitris Vardoulakis edited a volume of essays on the relationship between Heidegger and Benjamin, Sparks Will Fly: Benjamin and Heidegger (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2016).
9 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 156.
10 A state of affairs discussed by Arendt in “What Is Authority?” and “The Crisis in Culture,” both of which can be found in her Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).
11 The ruin has an important history that is as much cross cultural as it is a fundamental figure in Western art and thought. See Alain Schnapp, Ruines. Essai de perspective compare (Brussels: Les presses du reél, 2015).
12 On the complex figure of fortuna in the Renaissance context, see Aby Warburg’s exemplary discussion in his “Franco Sassettis Letztwillige Verfügung,” in Werke in Einem Band (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 234–80. For Ernst Bloch, see his monumental study The Principle of Hope: Volumes 1–3 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995).
13 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 201.
14 There is a necessity to think the present as having a determining effect on how the philosophical task is understood. For a direct engagement with the “contemporary” as a philosophical topos, see Giorgio Agamben, Che cos’è il contemporaneo? (Rome: Nottetempo, 2008).
15 Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 455.
16 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 192.
17 Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 396.
18 Ibid., 394.
19 This occurs in Benjamin’s “The Story Teller: Observations on the Work of Nikloai Leskov,” in Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 143–66.
20 Mark Rathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
21 Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 351.
22 See Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993), 25.
23 See “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Heidegger, Basic Writings, 204.
24 Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken, Gesamtausgabe: Band 9 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), 248.
25 While there is an extensive literature on this topic of particular relevance, here is the engagement with both the possibility and the quality of beginnings as taken up in Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 191.
26 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 205.
27 Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 390.