7  The Forty-nine Steps

By nature, Walter Benjamin was just the opposite of a philosopher: He was an exegete. The shameless boast of the individual who says “I think such-and-such” seemed basically foreign to him. Instead, from the beginning, we see in him the disguised determination of the exegete, the gesture of hiding behind piles of material to be commented on. We know that his dream was to disappear, at the height of his work, behind an insuperable flow of quotations. And so far I have not mentioned the premise that constitutes the first and crucial transgression of such a commentator: to relinquish the sacred text with hypocritical modesty, but at the same time to treat any other text or object of discussion with the same devotion and care traditionally required by the sacred text. One has no hesitation in saying that nothing essential changes in Benjamin from the clandestine theology of his early writings to the Marxism of his last years, except that the vice of the commentator becomes increasingly perverse, urging him toward ever more refractory material, as he himself reveals in a rare and marvelous moment of confession in a letter to Max Rychner in 1931: “I’ve never been able to study and think except in the theological sense, if I may put it that way, that is, in accordance with the Talmudic doctrine of the forty-nine steps of meaning in every passage in the Torah. Now, my experience tells me that the most worn-out Marxist platitude holds more hierarchies of meaning than everyday bourgeois profundity, which always has only one meaning, namely apology.” Certainly those Marxists who, born to adore Georg Lukács, now struggle to come to grips with Benjamin are not equipped to face such meaningful stairways. Were they capable of ascending even the first steps of his work, they would already have dismissed him as an example of the most superstitious depravity.

The pompous and mournful triumphal arch that introduces Benjamin’s work is Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, or The Origin of German Sorrowful Plays, to translate literally the ambiguous title of the study that Benjamin, with a touch of pure romantic irony, was bold enough to offer as part of his application for a university teaching post. The irony, as one might expect, was not understood, and the post was denied him; indeed, this is a book likely to throw anyone, not just professors, into confusion and dismay. It can be read on at least three levels: as the most important study ever written on the rich theatrical literature of seventeenth-century Germany; next, as a dissertation on the history of allegory, in which Benjamin, with perfect instinct, bases his arguments primarily on the early iconological analyses by the Giehlow-Warburg-Panofsky-Saxl school (that is, the most knowing eyes in this century to read the images of our past); and finally, secretly and in a play of mirrors, as allegory in action in Benjamin’s thought, which here justifies his own predilection for the allegorical form. But how did Benjamin come by this form? Let us try to tell it as a kind of imaginary biography.

Picture Benjamin as a cabalist shipwrecked in the vision of a nature wholly entangled, to its ruin, in the chain of sin, a nature that no longer offers illuminating letters, written on things, such as only Adam might have read, but a Babelic tangle of signs, a text forever corrupt. Having abandoned the Scriptures and clandestinely emerged from the ghetto, he joins a group of the most radical romantics a few centuries later, keeping quiet about his origin and observing to himself, with a hidden smile, how these youngsters go wild in their disorderly search for certain themes and notions long familiar to him from the Cabala. What attracts him in the romantics is rather the lightness with which they move amid the sinews of form, their capacity to dismiss any consistent totality, as though they too had recognized the disfigured character of nature. But Benjamin soon observes in them an ever clearer tendency to exalt the powers of the symbolic, to seek a language of images implicit in things. The saturnine cabalist incognito accordingly turns his back, slightly disgusted by these foolish ambitions, and retires to a spent crater in the shelter of buttresses built with heaps of books: the seventeenth century. There, under the “Soleil noir de la Mélancholie” [black sun of melancholy], his grandiose meditation is finally fulfilled; there Benjamin meets a dark Beatrice, allegory, so often misunderstood by her romantic companions, and discovers in her the only device proportionate to the abrupt, maimed, and perennially forlorn essence of history as a natural process and of nature as the history of the chain of sin. And this is precisely because of the violent arbitrariness of the allegorical connection between the image and its meaning, which reveals the unbridgeable distance between the two orders, similar, Benjamin suggests, to the example of alphabetic writing, the first brutal imposition of meaning on a letter that does not want to accept it. In short, for the very reasons that drove Goethe to reject allegory and devote himself instead to the blessed immediacy and totality of the symbol, Benjamin reclaims it, because only in allegory can one recognize what classicism was never able to grasp: “the facies hippocratica of history as an unrelenting primordial landscape.” There is no sharp distinction between symbol and allegory, since allegory is the symbolic itself in disarray, dead from hypertrophy. But this decomposition of the symbol liberates a vast power, the cold algebraic meaning, and it is this that makes it possible to decree conventions with sovereign will and insist that anything can stand for anything else. “Seventeenth-century allegory is not the convention of expression but the expression of convention”: This is likewise the basis of the myth of writing, a perennial feast of death, given over to the “sensual pleasure with which the meaning rules, like a grim sultan, over the harem of things.” Uninhibited allegory, now remote from any living order of meaning, the pure compulsion to marshal images and repeatedly construct their meaning through distorted combinations, above all causes the images themselves to overflow. Just as objects obsessively invade the stage of the baroque theater until they become the true protagonists, so pictures erupt like threats in the emblem books, to celebrate the growing gap between image and meaning. Who, opening Andrea Alciati’s Emblemata and seeing an amputated hand with an eye on the palm, planted in the middle of the sky over a rural landscape, would ever think of prudence, as the text for the emblem requires? Instead, he will recognize that a human body has been mutilated, a silent allusion to the state of nature as rubble and an unconscious establishment of the fragment as the prevailing aesthetic category. By the accumulation of these materials, the stage is being set for the modern. The history of that time prefigures the real history of today: These images, which then emerged into the world like wild beasts from their cages, are still at large. Kafka described them: “Leopards break into the temple and empty the sacrificial vessels; this is repeated time and again; in the end it can be foreseen and becomes part of the ceremony.” In allegory, a writer is the witness of this scene.