Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas claims, is one of ‘those thinkers on whom it is not possible to gain a purchase.’1 Eloquent testimony to this point can be assembled by a cursory glance through the preoccupations and topics covered in the enormous publishing industry devoted to his thought. It would not be possible to extract from this field even the most basic criteria for an agreement on any of the following key issues: Benjamin’s important texts, the major themes or problems of his writing, its important intellectual influences, or its contemporary relevance. Still, Benjamin scholarship is rarely conducted dispassionately. Many Benjamin commentators write on their topic with the objectivity of a fervent believer intent on deriving meaning from the pronouncements of an oracle.
At the same time, and in no small part due to the absence of positions that the scattered population of this field of admirers would be willing to accept as authoritative, a number of erroneous and highly impressionistic readings of Benjamin have taken hold and stamped the recent reception of his writing.2 These readings can be loosely termed ‘deconstructive’ in the sense that the image they propagate of Benjamin is of a thinker whose ideas can be grasped through obsessive readings trained on particular words and phrases in selected, often fragmentary and idiosyncratic texts. Although its practitioners’ avowed mantra is ‘the close reading of texts,’ a sacralising approach to criticism is their normal practice; Benjamin’s words are insulated from robust interrogation, since criticism of him would be ‘irreverent.’ It is assumed that his entire oeuvre is faultless; the only difficulty is, as in the reading of a sacred text, endorsing in some form what Benjamin’s phrasing ‘conveys’ to its initiate reader.
Amongst the oddities such readings have produced one can cite the wilful re-interpretation of Benjamin’s references to God in his early work as references by which he, supposedly, intends to mean ‘infinite language’ or the ‘caesura’ instead; and the related avoidance of any critical evaluation of the manner in which Benjamin’s early writing puts in play an evaluative schema that sides with the Jewish God of the Old Testament and parries Greek mythology into the role of the ‘mythic demonic.’3 In Benjamin’s early writing, these two poles collect around each of them a family of terms and adjectives that are weighted by the primary opposition between the Revelation and myth. These oppositions include ethical life/demonic nature, character/fate (or guilt), the expressionless/the semblance, language/silence, divine violence/mythic violence, and the moral decision/bourgeois choice.
What this system of oppositions means; how its criteria could be justified; what it does; and with what implications Benjamin seems to abandon it by the mid-1930s are questions that are rarely asked in Benjamin scholarship. The recent flurry of attention that is given to his 1921 essay ‘The Critique of Violence’ is a case in point.4 Although Benjamin did not number it amongst his important early essays, its afterlife in contemporary criticism defies Benjamin’s stated view and identifies it as one of the key essays of his career.5 The very topic of the essay is, however, erased in the practice of ‘close reading’ when it is posited that Benjamin defends a thesis of non-violence; a thesis that is nowhere stated in the essay. Benjamin’s essay grapples with the problem that revolutionary ‘ends’ are traduced when they are reached through the ‘means’ of human violence. On the recent deconstructive account, Benjamin poses an amorphous conception of language in which the ‘ends’ of communication are ‘deposed.’ This conception of indeterminate communication is supposedly Benjamin’s answer to the problem of violence. The link Benjamin attempts to make between revolutionary violence and divine violence as a way out of the means-end problem of violence is thus suppressed. The view he defends in the essay that in pure revolutionary violence human actors are purified of their own venal interests and act instead in the perspective of the divine is not accessible to these critics because the thesis that God is outside the chain of means-end reasoning conflicts with their attachment to a conception of ‘immanence,’ whose grammar they project onto Benjamin’s text. Nor, correlatively, are any of the problems in this text, such as Benjamin’s view that identifying when such acts of pure violence occur is ‘not possible for men,’ raised and discussed.6
Benjamin’s essay cites approvingly God’s destruction of the company of Korah as an exercise in ‘bloodless,’ guilt-expiating divine violence.7 He contrasts this act of divine annihilation to the punishment of Niobe in Greek myth; this latter, he contends, leaves Niobe ‘more guilty than before.’8 It is difficult to assess the cogency of Benjamin’s account of Greek myth as a guilty mode of living. In what ways does his account address the persuasive reasoning behind the reverse schema of evaluation posited by thinkers like Nietzsche and Blumenberg for whom monotheism is guilt intensifying and polytheism guilt releasing? Such a question is ruled out in advance by an approach that presumes Benjamin’s position is cogent. Crucially, this allows the significant problems with the way Benjamin sets up the topic of violence to go unremarked and the architecture of the text that opposes destructive violence from a monotheistic god against the violence of the Greek pantheon unchallenged. The sediment such readings leave behind, on the other hand, is the plausibility of these critics’ view that Benjamin wishes to defend the implied radicalism of the doctrine of the inexhaustible potentiality of meanings in linguistic forms. The thesis thereby attributed to this text has more in common with deconstructive doxa than any of Walter Benjamin’s concerns. But the number of readings that confirm it and the insistence with which it is made has succeeded in creating a parallel text, which overlays the original. As I will explain below, this position regarding the potentiality of meaning is not restricted to the recent deconstructive appropriation of Benjamin’s 1921 text. In fact, it is a widespread view in Benjamin scholarship, which does not pay sufficient attention to the variations in Benjamin’s views from his early to his later work regarding the topic of materiality and how it is that meaning is attached to the perception of sensuous forms. The difficulty of identifying the nuances in Benjamin’s position on this crucial question is intimately related to the difficulty scholars in this field have in dealing with the controversial issue of what it is that Benjamin understands by his invocation of the figure of God. Here too it is noticeable that scholarship often projects onto Benjamin’s texts the views of the critic rather than treating ideas, unpalatable to contemporary tastes, of Benjamin’s. To cite Benjamin: ‘Let no Prince Charming clad in the shining armor of modern scholarship venture too close. For as he embraces his bride, she will bite him.’9
Some of the recent attempts to impose order in this area have come from those readers who invoke the discipline of ‘philosophy’ as if it were an authoritative arbiter able to settle once and for all what is important in Benjamin’s work, or perhaps to locate the material out of which its disparate threads are fashioned.10 Unfortunately, some of the recent impressionistic trends in Benjamin interpretation, such as the presumed cogency of his ‘opposition’ between the annihilation of the Korah and the punishment of Niobe, are endorsed in this literature too.11 Whether they think that Benjamin’s project was cut short and contains in nuce a philosophy left to his heirs, depending on their evaluation of his project’s maturity, to develop or apply; or whether they think the way to protect his legacy is to extract and defend the philosophical infrastructure of his thinking or the philosophical influences on it, such efforts are stranded in their attempts to coral a writer whose wide scope of interests and matching diversity of readership belies the rectifying order of a specific discipline. The very label ‘philosophy’ acts in such writers as a positively coded term that could weed out the errors in emphasis and interpretation that claim their figure for other fields, or indeed the non-field of ‘inter-disciplinary’ reading. Most worryingly, the posture of such works is still exegetical. Despite its philosophical mantle, it treats Benjamin’s words as sacred relics, requiring patient unpacking for the profundities they are presumed to offer the deserving reader. These philosophical reclamations of Benjamin, although capable of producing interesting interpretations of specific points in his thought, risk overstating their case. They assume a systematicity that is not present in their chosen subject. As Habermas states, this lack of systematicity is precisely the source of the difficulty for readers of Benjamin. Benjamin’s writing has neither the rigour nor consistency of systematic treatment of a specific topic that, I think, would need to be accepted as the minimal standard for works of philosophy. This is not of course to suggest that his writing is not insightful or extremely suggestive, nor that in places, it contains astute commentary. It often fails to take reflective distance towards its intellectual commitments. The evaluative schema of the early works that pits Judaism against Greek myth, and does so without seeing the need for any explicit, reasoned defence of this position, for instance, can be cited as abundant testimony for this proposition. On the other hand, it is not clear why the category of philosophy would be the appropriate label to capture the sheer diversity and inventiveness of his essays, e.g., ‘The Storyteller,’ the style of ‘A Berlin Childhood’ or ‘One Way Street,’ not to mention the conceptual architecture of The Arcades or the insightful treatments of Proust, Baudelaire, and Surrealism in his essays of the late 1920s and 1930s. At what point does the early interest of Benjamin in aspects of neo-Kantian philosophy stop exerting a claim on works he writes decades later, especially as the one constant across the oeuvre from the perspective of a ‘canon’ seems to be the treatment of literary works as well as a literary approach to topics, such as the montage technique of the treatment of capitalism in the Arcades? Here, I think, the interrogative question of Michel Foucault’s essay ‘What is an author?’ is pertinent. Foucault’s essay highlights how the partition of writing into canonical and non-canonical works has an effect on the definition of an ‘author,’ since it enforces a principle of semantic ‘thrift.’12 In studies of Benjamin such ‘thrift’ has entailed substantial distortions of the kind of writer he was.
The notion that there are underlying philosophical theses that drive Benjamin’s diverse writings and provide some kind of key to them is problematic. In fact, it would be more plausible to say that Benjamin’s writing is driven by commitments that are neither forged through the reflection on philosophical questions, nor openly considered as such in his writing. These commitments are inaccessible to an approach that is already convinced that Benjamin’s writing adheres to a philosophical code. There are, I think, important consequences that follow from seriously considering how to locate Benjamin’s singular voice and prose. For instance, one of the strange features of the usual discussion of his work is the way that the literary horizon of his claims, which, it is true, have the existential reach not typically associated with the practice of literary criticism, often goes unconsidered and unremarked. This is particularly noticeable, as in his important essay on ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities,’ where his stated position impugns the status of literary works or literary characters, but is made and defended in the context of the discussion of these. It is no more clear that an affirmation of the seemingly straightforward position that Benjamin’s writing has interdisciplinary ‘range’ is able to gauge the extent to which this literary horizon impacts on the types of claims made for the significance of his work, especially because the nature of his reception of the literary canon is so singular and stands apart from what is conventionally understood as literary criticism.
I will argue in this book for a critical treatment of Benjamin’s writing. The field of Benjamin studies abounds with hagiographic works. Such work has succeeded in obscuring some of the real issues and key problems in his body of work. If, as Habermas contends, it is not possible to gain ‘purchase’ on Benjamin, this does not mean we should abandon the field to impressionistic readings. It is crucial for critically minded readers of this singularly difficult writer to consider how to coordinate the ideas he puts forward in different periods of his writing, and in doing so to consider seriously how to rank the relative importance of the works published, many of them posthumously, under his name. In particular, we need to re-consider Benjamin’s work in light of the fact that some of the established and highly influential accounts of his work are not commensurate with his stated positions as these are presented in works which he considered to be his most significant.
I will argue that the impulse behind Benjamin’s work is his fear of forces of totalisation. Its cipher is his polemic against the aesthetic field and its ways of crystallising meaning in the figure of the image. The references to the strait-gate through which the Messiah may enter, and the idea that each generation has a ‘weak messianic power’ in his theses ‘On the Concept of History,’ as well as his advocacy for cutting down the power of fascination exercised by images in the ‘Artwork in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ are all different versions in the late work of his thesis related to the demonic power of the image.13 Specifically, my hypothesis is that the main shifts and problems of Benjamin’s thinking, including the gradual erosion of the system of oppositions that had characterised his early writing, can be grasped by an analysis of his writing on the topic of the image. Furthermore, this approach will be used to show that despite his attack on the ‘demonic’ expressivity of certain kinds of sensuous forms, Benjamin’s major ideas also require and can be shown to avail themselves of an aesthetic mode of presentation in images.
This book is a critical treatment of Benjamin’s position on the image across some of the signature works of his career. By the term ‘image’ I refer to the material or sensuous presentation of meaning. The specification that the image is aesthetic is important; so much of Benjamin’s work is a critique of the seductions exercised by the semblance effects of the image. Is the conception of meaning Benjamin’s writing defends free of the features that he repudiates as ‘aesthetic’? The book covers this topic as it is treated in some of Benjamin’s most important works: the 1916 essay on language; his essay on ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’; the study of the German Trauerspiel; a collection of his essays from the late 1920s and 1930s including ‘The Storyteller,’ ‘The Image of Proust,’ and ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’ along with his crucial works on the mimetic faculty and the doctrine of similitude; and, finally, his Arcades Project. We can get a sense of the significance of this topic if we consider the differences in Benjamin’s treatment of it in his major essay of the early 1920s, ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities,’ and then in the work he was doing from 1927 up until the time of his death in 1940 on The Arcades Project.
In the words of Hugo von Hofmannstahl, the editor of the Neue Deutsche Beitrage who, in 1924/1925, published Walter Benjamin's essay 'Goethe's Elective Affinities,' this essay is 'absolutely incomparable' [sckleckthin unvergleichlich].14 Benjamin had composed the essay between 1919-1921 and it thus overlaps with the composition of the currently most commented upon essay of his early work, the 'Critique of Violence.' Even in the oeuvre of a figure like Walter Benjamin, which includes several quite extraordinary pieces of work, his essay on Elective Affinities stands apart from the rest. As an essay in literary criticism it is peerless; Goethe's novel is used to stage the labyrinthine concerns of Benjamin's thinking, and, in the process, the meaning of the component elements of the novel are opened up to unprecedented dissection and re-arrangement. It is without question one of the most substantial and important works of Benjamin's entire career and certainly the central essay of his early writing. It is strange, then, that beyond the brief references it contains to the problem of art criticism it is rare to find any detailed treatment of it in the vast field of Benjamin scholarship.15 The fragmentary reception of the essay is especially striking because the emphasis on art criticism that emerges from the essay's reception tends to distort the central point of the essay.
Benjamin’s introductory comments to the essay contain the first mention of his famous distinction between the ‘material’ and ‘truth’ content of the art work, a distinction subsequently of great importance to Theodor Adorno. However, in the essay this distinction is invoked as the basis for Benjamin’s substantial re-arrangement of Elective Affinities around his contrast between the ‘novel’ and the ‘novella’ it contains. This strategy is the basis for Benjamin’s presentation of the world depicted in the novel as a false semblance world, which the ‘truth’ and ‘light’ of the novella, supposedly, opposes. Further, against the thrust of the reading of Benjamin as practicing a formal style of criticism for which the artist’s life pales into deserved insignificance in comparison with the critic’s concern with the work, the essay’s main point contests the parameters of such a position: it treats the perils of an inflated use of art to frame human life. In this respect, the way the essay opposes the revelation of the novella and the mythic, semblance world of the novel may be read as an opposition between two modes of life. The exemplar for this thesis is Goethe’s self-mythicisation as the Olympian figure of German letters. The novella is presented by Benjamin as evidence of Goethe’s insight into the perils of his self-elevation as a god-like figure. Self-mythicisation ends in a fateful existence. The point picks up on the refrain of Benjamin’s critical comments throughout his career that Nietzsche was stuck in the vicious circle of aestheticism, but the point has a specific inflection in the case of Goethe.16 Goethe’s life is ‘aesthetic’ just as the lives of the characters in his novel are: they lead their lives under the ‘pallid light’ of merely aesthetic considerations. For Benjamin, human life is the work of the Creator and, as he states emphatically in the essay, it ‘cannot be considered on the analogy of a work of art.’17 The point relates to the historical context of modern bourgeois life in which the waning hold of tradition raises the question of where and how to find meaning. Benjamin argues that aesthetic resources do not provide a satisfactory answer to this question. To shun the light of the Revelation, what is beyond the merely natural life, is, as he contends the novella shows Goethe knew, to abandon oneself to the demonic, what Benjamin terms in this early period, ‘myth’ and basically aligns with Greek mythology. Myth is a human account of what is vital in human life, which, in Benjamin’s view, only draws on forms and forces of nature. In myth natural forms and forces are given a human face so that they become approachable for human beings.18 The ambiguity of myth stems from the potentially infinite meanings that arise once mute nature is given expressive powers. Mythic ‘ambiguity’ is understood pejoratively as unlimited possibility of meaning: Benjamin’s essay identifies the destructive existential effects of looking to sensuous forms with their indeterminate meaning as a way to guide human life. This entrapment in myth is the totalising force of the aesthetic. Against it, Benjamin argues that ‘ethical life’ and the ‘moral decision’ stand outside the presumed value of the merely natural life; they defy the presumed pertinence of material conditions to define life in their preparedness to act against material self-interest. The implications of this position are incompatible with the currently prevailing interpretation of Benjamin as a thinker of ‘pure immanence.’ God and the Revelation are the terms Benjamin uses to define transcendent exit points from sensuous totalities.
Benjamin’s account of the novel emphasises how the aesthetic criteria of life has crowded out all other considerations. He cites the way that the names of the characters are chosen by them for aesthetic reasons such as their sound; he draws our attention to the excessive preoccupation that the characters have with arranging the features of their natural and built environment in which even the graveyard of the ancestors is dug up in order to ‘beautify’ the funeral grounds; and he concludes that the way the characters invest trinkets such as lockets and engraved cups with overblown feelings and meanings shows that in the novel the forms of sensuous life are deified. In their new freedom from tradition the characters are prey to an anxietyridden existence because the things around them come to bear demonically potent meaning; the proliferating array of potential meanings that dominates their lives is a trap from which, without faith in a transcendent power, there is no means of escape. The point is made by contrasting the space of the preoccupation with sensuous forms in the novel with the ‘moral decision’ made by the lovers in the novella. These lovers are willing to risk everything, even life itself. As such, they step outside the circuit of the false deification of merely natural life, and shatter the bourgeois consecration of life’s material trappings. They make this decision, Benjamin says, when ‘each is alone with God’ [ein jeder ganz für sich allein vor Gott] (SW I, 343, GS I, 184).
What, then, are we to make of the divergence between the thesis of this essay on Goethe’s novel in which, through the contrast between the space of the novel and the novella, the power of the image is opposed to the Revelation and the ‘project’ of his Arcades? The Arcades Project identifies in specific material instances of outmoded commodity forms and in the steel and glass of the nineteenth-century Paris arcades the graphic perceptibility that is missing from conventional Marxist accounts of history. In Benjamin’s view these forms offer a scenography of ruins able to bear redemptive intentions. How should we understand the significance of this shift in Benjamin’s thinking about sensuous forms? Does something fundamental alter in his thinking from the period of his excoriation of Goethe’s aestheticisation of life in the essay on the Elective Affinities to the project he commences in the late 1920s in which he selects and compiles discarded material from the nineteenth century in order to catch a glimpse through this refuse of what he terms the ‘lightening flash’ of the ‘dialectical image’?19 What is particularly striking in the juxtaposition of these two works is the way that The Arcades presupposes the idea, as the basis of its methodology no less, that there is a meaning potential lodged in things that is able to redeem the past. Such meaning potential can be contrasted with the ambiguity that fosters fateful or demonic attachments to the uncertain meanings of sensuous forms of prosaic life in the essay from 1924. The former is emancipatory, the latter a cipher for a life captured in anxiety and ritual. The contrast between these two positions, which in respect to their orientation towards prosaic images seem irreconcilable, will be one of the main puzzles grappled with here. If it is true, despite the evident differences in Benjamin’s position across his career, that he maintains a consistently critical stance against the category of the ‘aesthetic,’ this must mean that his later work divides up the meaning potential of material forms from ‘semblance’ in a way that his earlier work does not.20 There is, he claims in the materials for the 1935 Exposé of The Arcades, a redemptive power of the ‘kitsch’;21 a position at odds in every respect with the tenor of his early thinking. This seeming shift in the significance he allocates to the image or sensuous form that bears a meaning has not, I argue, been adequately treated in the important texts of Benjamin scholarship. In fact, it is often skated over in favour of the presupposition of the continuity of his position.
It is a well-established view, for instance, that Benjamin’s thought identified the diagnostic value of small things in respect of larger constellations to which they belong. Hence Hannah Arendt claims in her Introduction to the volume Illuminations, which was the first edition of Benjamin’s works published in English and which included the first publication in English of his famous, subsequently much anthologised, essay on the ‘Artwork in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,’ that the Goethean notion of the ur-phenomenon provided an insight and a model to which Benjamin’s diverse writing adheres. Arendt claims that Benjamin’s ‘passion for small, even minute things’ was by no means ‘a whim,’ but that it:
derived directly from the only world view that ever had a decisive influence on him, from Goethe’s conviction of the factual existence of an Urphänomen, an archetypal phenomenon, a concrete thing to be discovered in the world of appearances in which ‘significance’ (Bedeutung, the most Goethean of words, keeps recurring in Benjamin’s writings) and appearance, word and thing, idea and experience, would coincide.22
Although Arendt here refers to the scope of Benjamin’s important doctrine of similitude as the coincidence of ‘word’ and ‘thing,’ the claim that Benjamin’s ‘passion for small . . . things’ registers the positive influence on him of Goethe’s Urphänomen cannot be reconciled with Benjamin’s critical position on what he describes as Goethe’s ‘pseudo-scientific’ world view. In the ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ essay Benjamin argues that this notion has neither ‘empirical evidence’ nor conceptual precision behind it. With it, he says, the ‘mythic face’ of ‘sensuous nature . . . triumphs in the comprehensive totality of its appearances’ (SW I, 315). For Benjamin, Goethe’s unacceptably idolatrous attitude towards nature is of a piece with the terms of his positive evaluation of the aesthetic category of the symbol. Thus he claims that the Urphänomen ‘is, for Goethe, only the chaos of symbols’ [das Chaos der Symbole] (SW I, 315, GS I, 148).23
In his Introduction to the English translation of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book George Steiner puts forward the idea that it is a version of Leibniz’s monadology that contains the key to Benjamin’s use of particular forms as the picture that contains in miniature, the ‘truth’ of large and complex patterns.24 Like the clarifying reference Arendt gives to Goethe’s ur-phenomenon, Steiner’s reference to the monadology is a constant refrain in Benjamin reception. In both cases the position ascribed to Benjamin is attractive because it seems to cover so much of his writing. Like the Goethean ur-phenomenon, the references to the monad do not just recur throughout Benjamin’s writing; they are often cited as an organising conceptual vocabulary. Both ideas seem to contain the framework for his distinctive approach to ‘truth’ no less than his methodology in the Arcades: it is in small, concrete things that the truth of the whole can be ascertained. It is striking how fragile these well-accepted interpretations of the pulse of Benjamin’s thought are when they are considered alongside what Benjamin says in his essay on Goethe’s novel about the ur-phenomenon. It is not the tenor of the references to Leibniz’s monad or Goethe’s Urphänomen, however radically these are impugned in the earlier or qualified in Benjamin’s later work, to which I wish to draw attention.25 What is significant is the way the essay on ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ views the presupposition of the monadological approach to epistemology as problematic: the implied connection between the ur-phenomenon and the monadology is that a small concrete thing can tell us about the truth of a whole. For Benjamin, in contrast, the sensuous forms of life carry demonically potent meanings that dominate human life because they are cut off from the truth that he understands as the standpoint of the Revelation.26
Indeed it would not be going too far to suggest that the understanding and positive emphasis given in Benjamin scholarship to the meaning potentials of particular sensuous things is ruled out by the explicit position of the significant works of his early writing. In fact, the way such meaning potential is understood in the field to be a virtue is a specific feature of Benjamin’s writing after 1929, and must be understood as a departure from, or at least a modification of the view, defended in his early essays, which identifies and condemns in the very conception of the perception of ambiguous meaning, a ‘demonic’ and ‘mythic’ force. In each of these respects an image of Benjamin has been propagated which overlooks the consistent critical references in his writing to what might be termed the demonic expressivity of sensuous forms. Clarifying how Benjamin’s early critical understanding of the way such forms impose on human beings a futile stance of interpretation towards them can be related to his view that the ‘dialectical image’ is an emancipatory experience of meaning is the project of this book.
My analysis of the conceptualisation of the image across Benjamin’s writings will draw on hermeneutic studies of meaning, the categories of modern philosophical aesthetics, as well as work in the history of religions on the topics of ritual and language. One of the consistent points of comparison I will use to unlock and foreground Benjamin’s different positions on the image will be the aesthetic vocabulary of Kant’s philosophy. It seemed to me that Kant was a useful perspective to take on Benjamin: not in the guise of detecting Kant’s ‘influence,’ as sympathetic readings of Benjamin on other topics emphasise.27 Rather, I saw that Kant could be used to throw light on Benjamin’s failed attempt to escape aesthetic form, precisely because in key texts and moments Benjamin has not, as he intends, expelled the aesthetic perspective of Kantian philosophy. In fact, he pursues an agenda whose constituent elements and implications are best understood in relation to the perspective of Kant’s aesthetics, and especially Kant’s attempt to reconcile sensuous form with vital (moral) meaning. My choice of the vocabulary of ‘sensuous form’ to capture Benjamin’s complex understanding of the relation between meaning and materiality thus intends to draw on the associations of the specific understanding of this terminology in Kant’s philosophy, which, it should be noted, exceeds the place it is given in his aesthetics.
Kant’s aesthetics puts forward a grammar for organising and understanding how the subjective experience of sensuous form in ‘aesthetic judgments’ gives rise to the dual expectation that there is meaning beyond such forms and that such meaning has more than merely subjective significance. At its core the Kantian conception of aesthetic judgment is a theory of how the formal organisation of subjective sense experience can occasion a heightened feeling, which he calls aesthetic pleasure. Such pleasure for Kant is won in the disinterest of the attitude that occasions it and it is distinguished thereby from the mere pleasures of appetite, which, he contends, depend on the object for their satisfaction. Aesthetic judgment relates to the subject’s presentation of sensuous form, rather than the sensuousness of the object. The significance of the complicated architecture of Kant’s position is that it establishes a theory of sensuous form that is neither reducible to the coercive effects of the materiality of the object, nor to the inclinations of the subject. This double dislocation is the mechanism Kant uses to attach the expectation of extra-aesthetic meanings, such as moral significance, to the aesthetic judgment of sensuous forms.
To mention just two examples: in his account of the sublime, it is the excess of a sensuous form to the subject’s capacity for formal presentation that leads directly to the idea that the human subject is capable, through its faculty of reason, to think the idea of infinity that exceeds any sensuous form. In the Kantian conception of beauty the experience of sensuous form leads indirectly to moral ideas and thus inverts the position of sensuous form in the case of the sublime. It is the reflection on ordered forms of nature whose order seems to be without a specific purpose (i.e., what Kant terms ‘formal purposiveness’ and for which his key example is the form of a wild flower) that stimulates the chain of reflection that nature is receptive to our moral vocation, which is a capacity for freedom whose specific ends are undetermined. The notion that the judgment of sensuous form supports the expectation of vitally significant meaning, regardless of the technical specifications this notion is given in Kant, is useful as an abbreviated grammar for how complex meanings are attached to materiality. However, it is Kant’s technical stipulations on the precise point of how a sensuous form communicates more than mere form and in fact articulates moral significance that offers a useful perspective on some of the reasoning on the topic of sensuous form in Benjamin’s texts.28 These features of Kant’s aesthetics will figure in each of the chapters.
The first four chapters are devoted to examining the different ways in which the ‘image’ as a form of ‘expressive materiality’ is deployed in Benjamin’s thinking. These chapters are organised, respectively, around the themes of feeling, form, similitude, and history. The sequence of the chapters moves chronologically through important phases of Benjamin’s work: the first two chapters deal with the essays and studies from the early 1920s, predominantly his ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ essay and the Trauerspiel book. The next two examine, respectively, a selection of essays from the latter part of the 1920s and early 1930s—‘The Image of Proust,’ the essays on Surrealism, the Storyteller, and ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ and the conceptually important pieces on mimesis and similitude—and then, from his very last period of writing, some of the folders from the Arcades as well as his theses ‘On the Concept of History.’ Sustained reference is made throughout to the 1916 essay, ‘On Language as Such and the Language of Man.’ The general principle used to organise each chapter is that despite Benjamin’s explicit invocation of his opposition to the traditional categories of Kantian aesthetics, these categories have direct and formative significance for the shape of his own position. Hence in the first chapter the pivot of Benjamin’s reading of Goethe’s awareness of a life not in thrall to the demonic, aesthetic forces of myth is compared to the Kantian articulation of the aesthetic feeling of the sublime. I argue that the ‘caesura’ Benjamin refers to in order to adduce ‘hope for the hopeless’ is in fact an aesthetic feeling, in Kant’s sense of the term.
The second and third chapters attempt to identify some of the key problems that arise from Benjamin’s position on the sensuous form. In particular, I argue that the use of the names ‘demonic’ and ‘pallid’ for myth, and ‘transparency’ and ‘clarity’ for the Revelation obscures from view whether the anchoring opposition of the Revelation and myth has any real purchase. Is the Revelation a transcendent bond with truth, or just another name for a certain kind of perception of sensuous forms? In other words, Benjamin’s schema of oppositions is a machinery of evaluation whose stakes and mechanisms need careful study. In the second chapter I explore the hypothesis that the Revelation could be another name for the perception of sensuous form, through a comparison of how Benjamin evaluates ‘symbolic’ and ‘allegorical’ forms of meaning. It is well known that for Benjamin the ‘symbol’ is a ‘bad’ and the ‘allegory’ a good form. Using J. Z. Smith’s historical approach to ritual, I ask what is the space these respective forms enter in order to earn their evaluations? Referring again to Kant, I ask whether or not the space they enter is an aesthetic space of meaning in which certain expectations greet and shape these material forms that are, on the basis of such expectations, understood to signify in particular ways.
In the third chapter, I look at the interaction between the different ways that Benjamin has of marking positive and negative forms of meaning. The previous chapter considered this contrast in relation to two categories of aesthetic form. In this chapter, I consider the phylogenetic (in the doctrine of similitude), historical (in the notion of Erfahrung), and personal (in the Proustian conception of involuntary memory) dimensions of this contrast. Here there is no use of the contrast between two forms of vital meaning, one of which makes its claims invalidly (i.e., the demonic expressivity of the symbol), rather the reference is to a vivid, crystalline experience of meaning whose occasions become more infrequent and which needs to break through the opaque indifference of routinised, modern life to be felt at all. The texts of Benjamin I consider here are those of the middle period of his writing, including the important works on the mimetic faculty and similitude, as well as his early essay on language and his writing on Proust and Baudelaire. Drawing on studies of the category of religious meaning in religious and ritual theory (Roy A. Rappaport, Niklas Luhmann, and Jan Assmann), I argue that Benjamin’s way of invoking the transparent space of ‘belonging’ against the opaque space of ‘alienation’ draws on an integrative pattern of meaning that is akin to religious meaning.
The fourth chapter takes stock of the way that the sequence of oppositions that had characterised Benjamin’s early thinking (chapters 1 and 2) and which had formed a schema of meaning for him (chapter 3) has seemingly lost its coherence in The Arcades Project. This ambitious, unfinished work pivots on the category of the ‘dialectical image.’ If, as I argue in the early chapters, the hermeneutic perception of meaning in sensuous forms is on the side of the demonic, what explains the revolutionary significance attached to the category of the image in the Arcades? The literature on the category of the ‘dialectical image’ skates over this problem. Its resolution, I will show, requires an understanding of the manner in which Benjamin’s early use of the opposition between the Revelation and myth is transformed. Ultimately, the way he uses the ‘dialectical image’ in the Arcades as an experience of vital, revolutionary significance can only be explained as a strategic bringing together of the terms his earliest work had opposed.
In chapter 5 I step back from the detailed treatment of Benjamin’s texts to consider how to characterise the scene of Benjamin’s thinking in relation to the theme of the ‘image.’ There are a few different fields in which modern philosophy identifies vital forms of meaning: these include moral dilemmas, and aesthetic and religious forms of experience. I have argued that certain of Benjamin’s categories are homologous, despite his intentions, to aesthetic (chapters 1 and 2) and religious (chapter 3) forms of experience of meaning. In chapter 5, I use the work of Hans Blumenberg on myth to consider the interaction between moral and aesthetic techniques of meaning in Benjamin’s Arcades. I argue that across the different periods of Benjamin’s writing he puts forward a conception of the image as a potent force able to provide a frame of existential meaning. In the earlier period this function attracts Benjamin’s critical attention, whereas in the later he mobilises it for revolutionary outcomes. Finally, I ask whether the specifications that can be given to Benjamin’s understanding of ‘truth’ in the case of revolutionary motivation are akin to the subjectively universal calibre of Kantian aesthetic judgment.
1. J. Habermas, ‘Walter Benjamin: Consciousness Raising or Rescuing Critique?’ On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Reflections, ed. G. Smith (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1991), 90–128, 92.
2. Axel Honneth characterises Benjamin scholarship as both frenetic and largely irrelevant: ‘not only the advocates of Critical Theory, of Marxism, and of Jewish mysticism compete for an appropriate understanding, but also the proponents of deconstruction and postmodernism as well as supporters of a conservative theory of politics.’ For Honneth this scholarship is the ‘only’ and the ‘trivial sense’ in which ‘Walter Benjamin seems to be still contemporaneous today’ since, according to Honneth, ‘his theory has no recognizable effect on the advancement of philosophical and sociological research.’ If Habermas thinks that despite the unsystematisability of Benjamin’s work it still has its impact in ‘flashes’ of relevance, Honneth’s assessment is considerably less generous. He finds the fault in Benjamin’s writings, which, he claims ‘resist every kind of theory formation so strictly that, though they continually require new interpretations like a literary text, they cannot really enter the field of scientific debate.’ This book will contest this verdict as well as the various impressionistic theses in the Benjamin literature that, due to their mutual irreconcilability, seem to confirm that Benjamin’s writing resists ‘theory formation.’ The treatment of Benjamin’s writing according to the model of a literary text that requires perpetual re-readings will be shown to depend on the untenable exclusion of major works, such as ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities,’ from appropriate consideration. Equally, the temptation to oversystematise his thinking as if it did yield a coherent philosophy will be shown to wilfully overlook the contradictions in his writing as well as its literary horizon and sources. A. Honneth, ‘A Communicative Disclosure of the Past: On the Relation Between Anthropology and Philosophy of History in Walter Benjamin,’ The Actuality of Walter Benjamin, ed. L. Marcus and L. Nead, New Formations, No. 20, Summer 1993 (Lawrence and Wishart: London), 83–94, 83. Habermas, ‘Rescuing Critique,’ 92.
3. For the representative deconstructive approach to Benjamin see W. Hamacher, ‘Afformative, Strike: Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” ’ Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. A. Benjamin and P. Osborne (Clinamen Press: London, 2000), 108–136, 111–112. Hamacher’s essay was originally published in Cardozo Law Review 13.4 (December 1991), trans. D. Hollander, 1133–1157.
4. The interest in Benjamin’s 1921 ‘Critique of Violence’ essay can serve as a measure of how much his thinking has been re-cast in a mold that relates to his writing in an arbitrary and highly impressionistic manner. See my critique of the recent style of the interpretation of violence as non-violence in A. Ross, ‘The Distinction Between Mythic and Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” from the perspective of “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” ’ New German Critique 41.1 (2014): 93–120.
5. Citing correspondence between the two in 1928, Gershom Scholem recounts that in Benjamin’s opinion his ‘best essays’ were ‘the ones on Keller, children’s books, Elective Affinities, and the task of the translator.’ G. Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (New York Review of Books: New York, 1981), 184. References to Benjamin’s ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ essay are hereafter given in the text and the notes by the abbreviation of Selected Writings to SW, followed by the volume and page number. The essay is published in Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, London, 1996), 297–361. See the emphasis given in H. Eiland and M. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA, London, 2014) to the fact that the title of Benjamin’s essay is ‘ “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” not “Goethe’s Elective Affinities, ” ’ 164.
6. Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence,’ SW I, 236–252, 252.
7. Benjamin, SW I, 250.
8. Benjamin, SW I, 248.
9. The comment is made in the new Preface Benjamin had written for his study of the German Trauerspiel after he had been persuaded to withdraw this text from consideration as Habilitation thesis from the University of Frankfurt. Although he had addressed this new Preface to the Habilitation committee at the university, he sent it instead to Scholem. Walter Benjamin, Briefe, 418, cited in Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, London, 1991), 22. A further set of associations that are difficult to smooth over is found in Benjamin’s use of the term ‘moral.’ To some current readers of Benjamin, the word ‘moral’ is often confounded with a moralising posture and opposed thereby to the more palatable term ‘ethics.’ In his important essay on ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ Benjamin uses the two interchangeably: ethical life and the moral decision are both opposed to the failure to take responsibility for one’s words and acts. He identifies a precise cause for this failure in the case of Goethe. Goethe’s self-mythicisation is reinforced in the deifying readings of Goethe by the critics of the George School who, he writes, ‘separates [Goethe] from the moral uniqueness of responsibility. For [on their reading] he is not alone before his god; rather, he is the representative of mankind before its gods’ (SW I, 322). On this topic too a strange inversion is applied to Benjamin’s texts. Benjamin contrasts the force of the ‘moral decision’ to ‘bourgeois choice’ and ‘ethical life’ to ‘demonic nature.’ However, the fashion for seeing in the word ‘moral’ the outlines of a Kantian set of moral rules, rather than, as Benjamin intends it, the comportment of decisive responsibility undertaken ‘alone with God’ in defiance of the reified demands of social etiquette leads critics to the view that Benjamin is opposed to ‘morality.’ Just as in the superimposition of non-violence to his examination of revolutionary violence, so too this reading overlooks the sense of the claims that the stringent sets of oppositions so dominant in his early work is supposed to carry. The moral decision he defends has nothing to do with categories like rule-governed ‘morality,’ but it doesn’t help to pretend that Benjamin does not use the term as a positive one in some of his writing, despite the fact that in some circles it is out of fashion. This tendency to avoid the word ‘moral’ is a feature of the post-structuralist styles of reading Benjamin. It is especially noticeable in the Agamben-influenced readings of his thinking. I will discuss the schema of Benjamin’s oppositions further below and the Agambenian inflection of Benjamin, which aims to do away with the cogency of the notion of a moral will, in the Conclusion.
10. Howard Caygill’s Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (Routledge: London and New York, 1998) is, despite its admirable sensitivity to Benjamin’s range, one such work. Caygill’s key thesis is that Benjamin radically adapts the Kantian concept of experience. His argument is that Benjamin’s particular re-conceptualisation of experience away from transcendental and speculative models prompts his transformation of philosophy into cultural history, and that it does so according to a model of experience that is based on the visual rather than the linguistic field, 3–7. The emphasis on the visual common to projects of reading Benjamin in ‘cultural history’ will be shown in this book to require appropriate qualification given Benjamin’s critical attitude towards the expressivity of non-articulate, sensuous forms. I develop this point in further detail in chapter 4 and set out its background in Benjamin’s thinking in chapter 1.
11. Eli Friedlander’s otherwise impressive Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2011) endorses the thesis of non-violence as a plausible reading of Benjamin’s Violence essay as well as the dependence of this thesis on Benjamin’s question begging description of the annihilation of Korah as ‘bloodless,’ 132–133. Rather than taking this description at face value, I think it needs to be recognised that Benjamin is assembling all the positive adjectives he can on the side of ‘divine violence’ in order to make palpable a distinction between divine and mythic violence that his essay acknowledges is in fact ‘invisible to men,’ Benjamin, SW I, 252. The term ‘bloody’ is a synonym for ‘mythic violence’ and thus ‘bloodless’ is the synonym for ‘divine violence.’ See my discussion of this point in Ross, ‘The Distinction Between Mythic and Divine Violence,’ 100–102 and in chapter 1.
12. Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?,’ Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (The New Press: New York, 1998), 205–223, 221.
13. For the reference to the ‘small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter’ and the ‘weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim’ see Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History,’ SW IV, 397, 390; for the reference to the auratic power of the image, see Walter Benjamin, ‘The Artwork in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility: Third Version,’ SW IV, 255.
14. Cited in Hannah Arendt, ‘Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940,’ Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. H. Arendt, trans. H. Zohn (Shocken Books: New York, 1968), 1–59, 3. Arendt notes that this was ‘the trouble with everything Benjamin wrote.’ Arendt’s Introduction to Illuminations gives an account of how the publication of the essay with its polemic against the uncritical attitude to Goethe in the influential George School, and Gundolf in particular, had been seen by Benjamin as a great triumph, but, in fact, in offending the very people that could have helped him, effectively ended any hopes he might have had of an income from scholarly activity.
15. Typically Benjamin scholars mention its prohibitive difficulty, comment on its remarks on the art work, and then move onto other texts. Two important exceptions are works by Sigrid Weigel and Winfried Menninghaus. Menninghaus discusses Benjamin’s position in the essay in detail in his topic-driven essay on the image, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Variations of Imagelessness,’ trans. T. Bahti and D. Hensley, eds. I. and K. Scheurmann, For Walter Benjamin (Askl: Bonn, 1993), 166–179. A slightly revised version of Menninghaus’s essay has been published in eds. A. Benjamin and A. Ross, The Image, Special Issue: Critical Horizons 14.3 (2013): 407–428. Weigel has discussed the essay in a number of her publications. See especially Weigel’s ‘The Artwork as Breach of a Beyond: On the Dialectic of Divine and Human Order in Walter Benjamin’s “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” eds. B. Hanssen and A. Benjamin, Walter Benjamin and Romanticism (Continuum: London, 2002), 197–206.
16. See for instance the discussion of Nietzsche in Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (Verso: London and New York, 2009), 103.
17. Walter Benjamin, SW I, 325.
18. This can be compared with Hans Blumenberg’s treatment of this topic in his Work on Myth, trans. R. M. Wallace (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1985). Contra Benjamin, Blumenberg sees myth as an effective way of managing anthropological deficits. It is significant, I think, that Blumenberg’s detailed treatment of Goethe’s self-mythicisation in Part IV of Work on Myth, which includes an otherwise comprehensive survey of literary-theoretical discussions of this topic, leaves out Benjamin’s essay on the Elective Affinities.
19. Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History,’ SW IV, 403.
20. For this reason the division proposed in Stéphane Mosès’s book on Benjamin of three different approaches to history whose second form is called ‘the aesthetic model’ is an unfortunate choice of terminology. Stéphane Mosès, The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem, trans. B. Harshav (Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, CA, 2009).
21. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ‘Materials for the Exposé of 1935,’ 909: ‘{Cite a remark of Aragon’s that lies at the centre of these questions: the arcades are what they are for us here through the fact that they no longer are (in themselves).} Removal of accents is characteristic of the dreamworld. An affinity with kitsch.’ Emphasis added.
22. H. Arendt, ‘Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940,’ 12.
23. Walter Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften,’ GS I, 148.
24. Benjamin’s pretention to sketch from these literary-philosophical notions an epistemology capable of presenting an alternative conception of ‘truth’ is generally unchallenged. Instead, most commentators lament the error of the university examiners and query the judgment of figures like Erwin Panofsky on whom the Trauerspiel book did not have the desired effect of opening the path for an intellectual exchange. In his Introduction to the English translation, George Steiner queries whether Panofsky had in fact read the work, but he also acknowledges that the writing in the Preface failed to attain the standards of clarity expected of academic work. He writes: ‘Benjamin was not, in any technical sense, a philosopher. Like other lyric thinkers, he chose from philosophy those metaphors, dramas of argument and intimations of systematic totality— whether Platonic, Leibnizian or Crocean—which best served, or rather which most suggestively dignified and complicated his own purpose.’ George Steiner, ‘Introduction,’ Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne (Verso: London and New York, 2009), 22–23. Many recent works on Benjamin rail against this verdict, insisting that his ‘oeuvre is more philosophically articulate, and bears deeper, more rigorous philosophical markings, than some would admit’ (Ilit Ferber, Philosophy and Melancholy: Benjamin’s Early Reflections on Theatre and Language (Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, CA, 2013), 8). See for Steiner’s remarks on Panofsky’s ‘dismissive’ view of the Trauerspiel book, 19. See also Sigrid Weigel’s Appendix to her Walter Benjamin: Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy, trans. Chadwick Truscott Smith (Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, CA, 2013) which collects the correspondence relevant to the reception of the Trauerspiel book by Warburg’s School and Benjamin’s attempts to elicit their interest in it. Panofsky writes in correspondence that he found it ‘too clever, yet nevertheless . . . learned a great deal from it.’ Panofsky cited in Weigel, 272. I think that what Benjamin meant by ‘truth’ can be better understood if we locate it in the context of his sequence of early oppositions through which he attaches to language an eminently cognitive sense and capacity. His conception of ‘truth’ is theological: there is the creative word of God and the naming word of man. The word comports knowledge (the ‘truth’) of that which they create/name. This theological understanding of language certainly doesn’t meet the requirements of a valid epistemology as this term is usually understood in philosophy. I discuss this point in further detail in chapters 2 and 4 and briefly in chapter 5 and the Conclusion.
25. Hence the passages in The Arcades Project in which Benjamin specifies the changes that would need to be made to the Goethean articulation of the urphenomenon to align it to the requirement of his thinking: amongst them, that it would refer to historical rather than natural phenomena: A, 462 [N2a, 4].
26. Here we can cite the relevance of size in ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ for the description of the ‘fully life-sized’ characters from the novel ‘in the gaze of the reader.’ These characters ‘linger more weakly and more mutely’ than the ‘united couple of the novella [who] disappear . . . under the arch of a final rhetorical question, in the perspective, so to speak, of infinite distance. In the readiness for withdrawal and disappearance, is it not bliss that is hinted at, bliss in small things, which Goethe later made the sole motif of “The New Melusine”?’ ( SW I, 333, emphasis added). The relevance of size and perspective needs to be understood here in relation to the nature of the perspective on size, i.e., that of ‘bliss.’
27. Whether this ‘influence’ is described as negative or positive. For the first version, see Howard Caygill’s treatment of Benjamin on the topic of transcendental experience, The Colour of Experience, 1–3. For the second, see the significance that Peter Fenves gives to the evidence of Benjamin’s participation in a class in his student days on Kant’s Critique of Judgment. P. Fenves, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, CA, 2011), 7. I discuss Fenves’s book in more detail in the Conclusion.
28. There are ambiguities in Kant’s account of the criteria needed for pure aesthetic judgments of sensuous form. For example, he states that certain colours like ‘white’ have a close association with moral ideas, despite his injunction against colour, as a seductive component of an object’s materiality, forming the basis for judgments of taste, which should properly be concerned with form alone. I treat some of the ambiguities in Kant’s account of the purity of aesthetic judgment in A. Ross, The Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy: Presentation in Kant, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, CA, 2007). See especially, chapter 1, pages 32–37.
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