In the words of the editor who published Benjamin’s ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ [Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften], the essay is ‘absolutely incomparable’ [schlechthin unvergleichlich].1 The sentiment expressed in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s assessment is widely shared. Nonetheless within the vast field of literature devoted to Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ has not received its due.
Many scholars mention the essay, note Benjamin’s own evaluation of its importance amongst the body of his early work, but then rarely attempt to give a comprehensive account of its labyrinthine circuitry.2 Instead, the essay is received in a highly selective way, as interpreters mine it for material able to be cited to support their treatment of specific themes in Benjamin scholarship. The cumulative effect of this practice of reception is that a distorted picture of the essay’s contents now frames its reputation. If we consider, for instance, the two most prominent modes of its interpretation, that is, as a theory of art criticism and as a supporting text for studies of the ‘Critique of Violence,’ it is easy to see how these piecemeal references create a confusing picture both of the diction and topics dealt with in the essay.3
First of all, it is noticeable that the passages commentators tend to highlight for critical attention deal mainly with art criticism. The scholarship is replete with approving mentions of Benjamin’s opening remarks about the ‘truth content’ of the work of art that is grasped through ‘critique,’ which he distinguishes from the act of merely philological ‘commentary’ on the ‘material content.’ Similarly, there are a number of exegetical treatments of Benjamin’s concept of the ‘expressionless’ [das Ausdruckslose] as a category for art criticism, which, following Hölderlin, would mark out the ‘caesura’ or ‘counter-rhythm’ of the work. In the third section of the essay, Benjamin describes the expressionless in terms of its destructive effects on the semblance of the beautiful, which it ‘shatters into a thing of shards,’ a ‘torso of the symbol.’ Scholars have mobilised impressive rhetorical resources and ingenuity to unpack this section, which also includes Benjamin’s difficult account of beauty as, ‘neither the veil nor the veiled object but the object in its veil’ (SW I, 351).4 These efforts generally aim to contribute more detail to the Benjaminian approach to art and thereby glide past the real polemical target of the essay, which is the negative assessment of aesthetic form understood, as in the case of the symbol, as the material image of false totality. These kinds of commentaries do not have any purchase on the specific problem the essay poses: the pernicious, ambiguous meaning that is carried by sensible forms in the absence of any critical, external perspective on them. The romantic figure of the ‘symbol’ as the sensuous site evocative of a plenitude of ideas is Benjamin’s exemplary model of the ambiguities that stem from such ‘totalising’ sensible forms of meaning. Indeed the selective passages commentators tend to treat from the essay regarding the expressionless risk the misrepresentation of Benjamin’s general indictment of the demonic expressivity of sensuous form, even though that is also the intention of these cited passages. The mortification of semblance and the counterrhythm of the expressionless is a specific mode of countering the seductive effects of sensible form, which is a part of the armour Benjamin’s essay deploys against it.
The general position of the essay pivots on a polemic against the treatment of human life as if it were a work of art. One of the important correlates of this position, which comes through in the passages where Benjamin treats the effects of the waning force of tradition in modern bourgeois society, is the assertion of the inadequacy of a life lived with nothing other than aesthetic criteria to guide it. Such a life—and Benjamin uses the characters in Goethe’s novel as well as Goethe’s own life to make this point—is claimed by mythic forces and condemned to groping in vain for empty ritualistic forms of propitiation. For this reason, one needs to be cautious of those interpretations which effectively present the essay as if its primary concern were the provision of a theory of art, or of further gnomic, Benjaminian insights in art criticism. The readings that superimpose on Benjamin’s opening distinction between the ‘materiality’ and the ‘truth’ of the work of art, a theory of how the art critic draws out the potential of materiality to arrive at truth are especially obtuse in respect of the meaning of the essay. In fact, the essay displays such a consistently critical attitude to aesthetic form understood as the bearer of meaning, that, as Winfried Menninghaus writes, it can plausibly be understood as a defence of the value of the image-less-ness [das Bilderlosigkeit].5 And, I would add, to the extent that Benjamin adopts a critical perspective on the image, this must be understood as a critical perspective on the irresolvable ambiguity of the aesthetically framed sensible form.6 The paradox of the essay is that Benjamin uses aesthetic forms, like the image from Goethe’s novel of the shooting star or the figures of the novella lovers and their selfless actions, to communicate this perspective. Moreover, his use of such images and figures shows that it is not strictly the Bilderlosigkeit, as Menninghaus would have it, which the essay defends. Rather, it is the fundamental value of the Revelation, understood as a specific way of marking the significance and meaning of nature’s forms.
The second prominent feature characterising this essay’s reception is its regular appearance as a footnote for discussions of Benjamin’s contemporaneous ‘Critique of Violence’ essay [Zur Kritik der Gewalt]. This use of the essay on Elective Affinities reinforces its marginal status. It is no exaggeration to state that since Jacques Derrida’s 1989 address on ‘The Force of Law’ at the Cardozo Law School, the somewhat oracular, revolutionary pronouncements of the Violence essay have captivated many in the field. However, the rescue of the latter essay from its erstwhile obscurity has had the undesirable side effect of eclipsing entirely the problems of interpretation raised by Benjamin’s more substantial essay on Goethe’s novel. In the obsessive attention given to the essay on Violence, Benjamin’s essay on Goethe appears merely as supporting evidence for one or another interpretation of ‘divine’ and ‘mythic’ violence in the former. This inverts what in my mind is the proper hermeneutic order of these works: for instance, the opposition between divine and mythic violence in the Violence essay, which Benjamin illustrates with his puzzling insistence on the qualitative difference between God’s destruction of the company of the Korah and the Greek gods’ punishment of Niobe, can really be understood only when placed within the series of oppositions from the essay on Elective Affinities. Benjamin distinguishes between the total annihilation of Korah and his company and Niobe’s punishment: whereas no blood is spilt in the former, and despite the absence of blood in Niobe’s petrifaction, the latter is ‘bloody’; the first expiates guilt, the second only punishes, according to Benjamin.7 These features that ostensibly serve to give substance to the distinction between divine and mythic violence, in fact, pertain to them by definition: the destruction of Korah and his followers is expiatory and bloodless because it is ‘divine violence,’ i.e., perpetrated by the god of the Revelation.8
The essay on Goethe’s novel is one of the most significant of his early writings, and, I think, one of the key works of his entire career. It is the touchstone against which subsequent alterations in Benjamin’s thinking can be measured, and, alongside the essay on Language, the source of elucidation for many obscurities of his early writing, not least those of the essay on Violence. Let me explain this point in further detail.
The conceptual frame of Benjamin’s early thinking rests on the absolute opposition between nature and the Word. His essay on Language identifies the creative word of God as the essence of nature’s forms available to man as knowledge in the naming language. In contrast, the demonic status of expressive nature refers to nature cut off from the transcendent, which Benjamin calls ‘myth.’9 This opposition is the prototype for the adjectives that collect around the contrast between ‘divine’ and ‘mythic’ violence in the essay on Violence, most notably those, respectively, of ‘bloodless’ and ‘bloody’ violence. In the essay on Elective Affinities Benjamin sets out the logic that organises this evaluative stance. In particular, the essay explains the significance of Benjamin’s claim that mythic violence leaves Niobe ‘mute.’ For Benjamin, ethical life breaks apart the ambiguity of selfsufficient sensible form, or myth. It does so through the articulated clarity of the spoken word.
Viewed in terms of the topography of his early thinking, the importance of the relation of nature to the Revelation is its function as an escape from totalising sensuous forms. In his essay on Goethe’s novel, this distinction is the basis for his polemic against the way that the George School styles Goethe aesthetically as a ‘hero.’ It is important to consider the details of Benjamin’s claim that Goethe is constructed ‘aesthetically’ as a ‘hero’ carefully not just because this claim bears on the topic of the existential dimensions of the aesthetic life, which is one of the main concerns of the essay, but also because the logic underpinning the essay’s series of oppositions depends on it. For instance, as many commentators have noted, Benjamin’s essay invokes a tripartite distinction between spoken language, silence, and chatter. Less often mentioned, however, is the way that this hierarchy of language use is partnered at its high end to the ethical life and at its low end to the pathology, which he ascribes to Goethe, of a paralysing ‘fear of responsibility’ (SW I, 319).10 Thus, he criticises members of the George School for their bombastic use of language, which falls into the category of chatter: Gundolf’s Goethe, ‘this ungainly pedestal for his own statuette,’ has the monstrous shape of an ‘esoteric doctrine’: ‘words swing themselves, like chattering monkeys, from branch to branch, from bombast to bombast, in order not to have to touch the ground which betrays the fact that they cannot stand: that is, the ground of logos, where they ought to stand and give an account of themselves. But they avoid this ground with so much show because in the face of every sort of mythic thinking . . . the question of truth comes to naught in it’ (SW I, 326–327).11 This criticism builds on Benjamin’s earlier criticism of Goethe for deliberately misleading critics as to the meaning of his work by portraying it in ‘ambiguous sentences’ as if it were a ‘fable of renunciation’ in which morality somehow triumphs over the sensual.12
Benjamin notes that in ‘so many relations in [Goethe’s] life’ it was ‘not renunciation that was of the first importance . . . but rather his having neglected to do things [Versäumnis]. And when he recognized the irretrievability of what he had thus let slip, the irretrievability of what he had neglected, only then did renunciation offer itself to him, if only as a last attempt still to embrace in feeling what was lost’ (SW I, 313). If Goethe maintains that the struggle of morality with affection is, in his words, ‘“displaced behind the scenes”’ in the novel, since ‘“[m]oral struggles never lend themselves to aesthetic representation”’ (Cites Goethe, SW I, 312), Benjamin describes this position as an ‘evasion’ which is ‘obviously untenable in [its] exclusion of the inner ethical struggle as an object of poetical construction. Indeed, what else would remain of the drama, of the novel itself?’ (SW I, 312). Benjamin inveighs against the image of the novel propagated in Goethe’s statements on the matter. Goethe attempts to protect his pretence that negligence can be converted into ‘moral’ renunciation, and he does so by invoking what Benjamin describes as his ‘inadequate . . . opposition between the sensual and the moral.’ Benjamin argues against Goethe that in the novel the ‘ethical never lives triumphantly but lives only in defeat’ (SW I, 312). His explanation of this position provides another example of the schema in which the clarity of spoken language is related to ethical life. Conversely, in its degraded use in ambiguous chatter or deprivation in silence, ‘language’ comes to signal the ‘defeat’ of ethical life. Hence the characters of the novel are criticised for their ‘mute’ compliance to bourgeois custom. Bourgeois convention is described as ‘mute’ because the silences of the novel’s characters are ways of dissimulating their true feelings. Hence he criticises Eduard and Charlotte not for the dissolution of their marriage but because in their youth they silently entered into loveless, but socially advantageous matches with other partners despite their feelings for each other. In their ‘silences,’ these characters have lost the ethics of the articulated word that is grounded in the truth of the word. They are unfavourably compared to the figures of the lovers in the novella who risk everything for their love and stand on the ground of the logos when they ask for the blessing of their families. The purport of the references to language in the essay, therefore, needs to be understood in relation to the value Benjamin wants to give to the Revelation, understood as the ‘truth’ and clarity of logos, in its opposition to the ‘mysticism’ and ‘ambiguity’ of word use in ‘myth.’ And yet, we may well ask whether the names of the ‘Revelation’ and ‘myth’ that anchor Benjamin’s approach are only different ways of naming, partitioning and evaluating modes of the aesthetic organisation of sensuous forms?
In his essay, Benjamin uses the category of the aesthetic in a particularly negative sense. The aesthetic treatment of Goethe’s life as ‘Olympian’ by the George School is one dimension of this pejorative conception. In addition, aesthetic choices are generally understood and presented as groundless ways of organising the sensible form. The removal of the tombstones of the ancestors from the graveyard for the purposes of creating an aesthetically pleasing path to the church is for Benjamin a culpable disregard of tradition. Bourgeois ‘freedom’ is understood as a life determined by the damaging chaos that such merely aesthetic choices unleash. In the wake of the passing of tradition as the primary context for human life, aesthetic values are seen to be a woeful replacement. Specifically, they open up an existential abyss in which the meaning and value of sensible forms themselves become unfathomable and, since there is no external point of reference to them, a prison for those who inhabit this ‘world’ of total semblance. Hence in Benjamin’s essay the vocabulary of myth and the aesthetically styled life are interchangeable with the negatively marked ‘ambiguity’ of the meaning of the sensible form. Against it he places the clarity of the moral decision in which the claim of material forces to define human life is surmounted. The actions of the novella lovers who risk their lives when they dive into the dangerous current and ask others to bless them is Benjamin’s key counter-example. Is the ‘ethical life’ marked out as such by its relation to the ‘logos’ just another mode of the aesthetic organisation of an image? If the Revelation proves to be simply another way of aesthetically marking sensible forms, then there is no alternative to the aesthetic treatment of materiality as the workshop of meaning, whether in the figure of the ‘hero’ or in the model of the ‘ethical life’ that is Benjamin’s chosen counter-term.13 This hypothesis will guide my account of Benjamin’s ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities.’
I will first give an account of the novel, followed by a brief presentation of Benjamin’s essay and his treatment of the topic of myth, before turning to analysing how Benjamin tackles the question of the novel’s presentation of the feeling of hope for redemption. This feeling testifies to the presence of the transcendent truth in the mythic space of the novel. In the crucial closing pages of his essay, Benjamin argues that Goethe was aware of the significance of this feeling and its relation to his feelings for the character of Ottilie. Is this feeling presented aesthetically? Benjamin’s view that renunciation in feeling is Goethe’s way of claiming after the fact that which he had neglected to do in his emotional and erotic life has particular pertinence for his assessment of the category of aesthetic form. For instance, Goethe’s use of the posture of renunciation is of a piece with the anxiety and paralysis that Benjamin identifies as the feature of the mythic life which is guided by the ambiguous sensible forms presumed to contain meaningful communication. In contrast, he describes the feeling of hope for redemption as akin to a caesura or break with the self-sufficient sensible form. Nonetheless, Benjamin’s treatment of this feeling has striking similarities with the aesthetic feeling of the sublime, as this is described in Kantian aesthetics. As such, the mark of the exit from the captivating semblance is arguably another aesthetic figure, rather than a transcendent breach. The point is admittedly a complicated one, especially if we take into account the fact that the sublime, in its Kantian articulation, is a feeling that does not require sensible presentation. Such a feeling, I will argue, nevertheless carries by virtue of its context and implications, the qualities of the aesthetic that Benjamin’s essay otherwise denounces as grounded in myth.
Goethe’s 1809 novel Elective Affinities [Wahlverwandtschaften] ostensibly treats the breakdown in the marriage between Eduard and Charlotte when Charlotte’s god-daughter, Ottilie, and Eduard’s friend, The Captain, come to stay. In their respective treatments of the topic of love, Goethe’s novel and Benjamin’s essay have a series of pointedly personal references. Benjamin dedicates his essay on the novel to his one-time love interest Jula Cohn. According to Benjamin, the importance of the novel for Goethe is to register his protest against the mythic forces that had entrapped him in marriage. Ottilie stands as a cipher for the erotic interest that bloomed for a young woman following his marriage in 1806 to Christiane Vulpius, a free legal union experienced nonetheless as a capitulation.14
In the novel, the current of primary affinities within the household, sketched against the backdrop of the characters’ self-absorbed activities in remodelling the landscape and the buildings of the estate, are irrevocably altered as Eduard and Charlotte’s feelings of love for each other are redirected, as it were, when the new ‘elements’ are introduced, so that their emotional lives now gravitate, respectively, towards Ottilie and the Captain. In this charged atmosphere Eduard and Charlotte conceive a son whose face takes the features of those his progenitors desire. The climax of the novel occurs following Eduard’s revelation to Ottilie that the Captain will attempt to secure Charlotte’s consent to a divorce thus allowing the lovers to unite. In Ottilie’s nervous haste to return across the lake with the infant to the house, she becomes momentarily unbalanced in the boat and the infant falls from her arms and drowns in the lake. The lovers’ pact for their future, sealed moments before with their first-ever exchange of ‘firm and frank kisses,’ is broken with the infant’s death. A distraught Ottilie tries to escape to an institution to lead a celibate life, but when Eduard, who sees the death of the infant as a blessing that removes the obstacle to their union, follows her and entreaties her for their reunion, she returns to the house where she undergoes what Benjamin describes as a ‘mute’ and ‘vegetative’ decline (SW I, 336–337). Benjamin draws attention to the fact that Ottilie’s death is not the result of a moral resolution or decision. She refuses to speak after her failed attempt to flee Eduard. Further, she takes her meals in private, and gives her food to her devoted serving girl, Nannie. This routine of abstinence is only discovered in the unaware household when she dies. Still, in the scenario of the novel, her death is also presented as the response to a provocation: her decline reaches crisis point when she overhears Charlotte’s guest, Mittler, talk pompously about the sanctity of marriage. Shortly following her death, Eduard, reduced to a state of extreme despondency in which he obsesses over the artefacts that remind him of Ottilie, dies too, his last act, that of coveting a casket of remembrances of his beloved. The lovers are interred beside the infant in the family chapel.
Goethe’s novel contains a novella, which provides Benjamin with the privileged counterpoint for his reading. This novella—‘The curious tale of the childhood sweethearts’ [‘die wunderlichen Nachbarskinder’]—relates the story of two estranged lovers who dive into a dangerous current and are ‘saved.’ In the novel, a traveller tells this ‘curious tale’ to Ottilie and Charlotte, but the story upsets Charlotte because she recognises it as a tale about the Captain’s youth.
Benjamin’s essay attempts to wrest Goethe’s novel from the misunderstandings that coloured its reception by the critics of the George School. In particular, he demonstrates how fundamentally the novel is misunderstood when Ottilie is presented as a ‘saint.’ Benjamin argues that the novel does not deal with marriage per se. Rather, the novel shows the intimate connection between the ‘free choice’ that is the hallmark of the receding hold of traditional institutions such as marriage and the play of ‘fate’ in the combinations and re-arrangements of the intimate ‘affinities’ amongst the characters. Benjamin shows Goethe’s complicity in the misunderstanding of the meaning of the novel by its critics. With its combination of biting scholarly polemic, unforgiving treatment of Goethe’s self-mythicisation as ‘the Olympian’ figure of German letters, and its own striking interpretation of the meaning of the Elective Affinities as Goethe’s personal struggle against mythic forces, Benjamin’s essay is peerless. It strips back the ‘exquisite beauties . . . proffered to the naïve understanding of the reader’ in order to show the dark, mythic life depicted in the bourgeois setting of the novel (SW I, 305). As such, the essay does not just aim to transform the perception of the meaning of Goethe’s novel, but also to raise the stakes of its interpretation. The reasons for the poor and fragmentary reception of Benjamin’s essay on the novel can in part be sought in its prohibitive difficulty, for, as a piece of literary criticism this essay is, even by Benjamin’s standards, extraordinarily complex, if not labyrinthine.
The edition of the essay that was published in 1924/1925 in the Neue Deutsche Beiträge and reproduced in the Stanley Corngold translation in the Harvard edition of Benjamin’s Selected Writings has three sections.15 The first part makes the case for the ‘mythic content’ of Goethe’s novel. Benjamin shows the presence of this mythic content in the overwhelming power of the natural realm over human life, which Goethe’s mythical attitude to nature empowers with demonic force as an autonomous field of meaning. Goethe’s ‘fear of responsibility’ is the case study for the consequences of the domination of human life by natural forces (SW I, 319). The most fundamental expression of fear, says Benjamin, is the fear of death, which in Goethe’s case assumes absurd proportions: ‘It is well known that no one was ever allowed to speak in his presence of anyone’s death,’ writes Benjamin, but ‘less well known that he never came near the deathbed of his wife’ (SW I, 317). Benjamin also cites what he describes as the ‘truly demonic close’ of Goethe’s letter to his friend Carl Friedrich Zelter, in which he communicates the death of his son: ‘And so, onward over graves!’ (SW I, 317). Elective Affinities, Benjamin argues, ‘sheds light on the foundations of [Goethe’s] own life’ (SW I, 319) because in this work and most particularly in the novella it contains Goethe ‘registered his protest’ against the mythic forces (SW I, 328), which his autobiographical work had labelled the ‘demonic’ (SW I, 316).
The second part, which is the shortest of the three, consists in a critical treatment of the cult of the poet-hero and artist-creator that the George School and Goethe’s autobiographical writing cultivate. An adequate understanding of the Elective Affinities, Benjamin argues, ‘depends on the repudiation of [these] attempt[s]’ to ‘portray Goethe’s life as a mythic one’ (SW I, 323). For Benjamin, human life is the work of the Creator and ‘cannot be considered on the analogy of a work of art’ (SW I, 325). It is for this reason that the presentation of Goethe as a hero-type by his acolytes casts a ‘spell’ that ‘separates him 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).
In the final part of the essay Benjamin builds on the critique of myth in the first two parts, to analyse the dominant position given to appearances in mythic life. He describes the semblance of beauty as a ‘false totality,’ which is shattered into shards by the ‘sublime violence’ and ‘truth’ of the expressionless (SW I, 340). By the term ‘semblance’ Benjamin understands the seduction of beautiful appearances. The expressionless is the ‘moral dictum’ that mortifies the shimmering totality of appearances. This part of the essay focuses specifically on the nature of true love, which Benjamin presents as requiring an unconditional faith in God: ‘Love becomes perfect only where, elevated above its nature, it is saved through God’s intervention’ (SW I, 344–345). Love is ‘saved’ when it reaches beyond the attractive forms of physical beauty, that is, beyond mere semblance. He contrasts the novel’s attachment to the image of the beautiful, bourgeois life with the resolute character of the moral decision of the lovers in the novella, and patterns this contrast according to the opposition between the mythic life’s trade in appearances and the moral state grounded in the truth of the Revelation, here described as that of being naked ‘before God’ (SW I, 353). Benjamin presents this opposition through his comparison of the semblance-like existence of the character Ottilie and the lovers of the novella whose naked bodies elicit neither feelings of lust nor adulation. Faith in God is the only protection against the dominance of myth.
The conceptual logic of the essay is made up of a series of oppositions. These oppositions include ethical life/demonic nature, character/fate (or guilt), the expressionless/the semblance, language/silence, and the moral decision/bourgeois choice.16 As I mentioned in my introductory remarks, the series of oppositions that organise the architecture of the essay has its anchor in the bipolar contrast between the truth of the Revelation and myth. It seems that what is really important for Benjamin is not the Revelation (e.g., its content) but its truth (e.g., its having occurred), that is, the truth of the transcendent. The approach Benjamin’s essay takes to the novel is itself organised in the form of an opposition structured around the metaphor of ‘revelation’: Benjamin reads the ‘dark’ world of the novel against the ‘light filled’ novella that the novel contains. The novella is the aperture of revelation: ‘. . . in this novella a brilliant light holds sway. From the outset everything, sharply contoured, is at a peak. It is the day of decision shining into the dusk-filled Hades of the novel’ (SW I, 331). Benjamin’s account of the specific opposition between the truth of the Revelation and semblance, or mythic appearance, underpins and drives each of the pairs.17
Moreover, although this specific opposition can be found in Benjamin’s early essays, such as the much cited and discussed essay on Violence, it is only in the essay on Goethe’s novel that it is clearly articulated. This is because Benjamin’s strategy of reading Goethe’s life through the illumination of the novella his novel contains finds the perfect stage for its articulation in Goethe’s concept of the ‘demonic,’ outlined in his autobiographical writing. With this concept, Benjamin’s essay identifies Goethe’s anxiety that perceptible forms do not just carry meanings but presentiments, and his reading of the novel thus gains its crucial existential hold.18
Maurice Merleau-Ponty thought that human beings ‘are condemned to meaning.’19 When meaning is sought not just in words, but in images and sensible forms, too, we are in the territory of what Benjamin calls, after Goethe, the ‘demonic.’ The main example of such meaning in Benjamin’s early work is the Romantic conception of the symbol. Since no intention is posited behind the ‘symbol’ it is necessarily ‘ambiguous,’ but this ambiguity should not be understood in the salutary hermeneutic sense of a form that admits of different interpretations.20 Rather, it is so in the sense of expressing an inscrutable, capricious power. Humans, then, have to reckon with a whole forest of symbols, an alienated habitat full of forces that are beyond their power to understand and control. Ritual, in Benjamin’s mind, is the program of appeasement of these alien powers that animate nature cut off from the transcendent; myth is the account given of these powers: its anthropomorphism is our way of reassuring ourselves that they can be appeased. For Benjamin, life under the sway of demonic powers is ritualised. Every act may then be a transgression. Benjamin defines fate in this perspective when he calls it ‘the guilt-context of the living’ [Schicksal ist der Schuldzusammenhang des Lebendigen].21
The clarity of a creative intention is the only way out of submission to fate. When Benjamin says in his essay on Elective Affinities that ‘true reconciliation’ is possible ‘only with God,’ he means that man has no way of defeating the hold of demonic powers other than aligning himself with God (SW I, 342). The clarity of spoken language is the agent of this reconciliation.22 Benjamin’s essay shows that Goethe’s life is under the sway of demonic powers. He also shows that Goethe is dimly aware that his feeling of hope for Ottilie’s redemption offers to him a way out of their grasp. I will turn to the potential exit that this feeling offers from mythic forces in the next section. First, I would like to highlight briefly the points of intersection between Benjamin’s conception of myth and his presentation of Goethe’s life as a submission to the ambiguous meaning of images.
Benjamin gives a prominent position in his essay to the passage in Goethe’s autobiographical work Poetry and Truth in which Goethe expresses his persistent sense of the demonic. It is especially noticeable, given the importance Benjamin ascribes to the clarity of language, how the undisciplined mass of contradictions defies conceptual and discursive articulation:
He believed that he perceived something in nature (whether living or lifeless, animate or inanimate) that manifested itself only in contradictions and therefore could not be expressed in any concept, much less in any word. It was not divine, for it seemed irrational; not human, for it had no intelligence; not diabolical, for it was beneficent; and not angelic, for it often betrayed malice. . . . It seemed only to accept the impossible and scornfully to reject the possible.—This essence, which appeared to infiltrate all the others, separating and combining them, I called ‘daemonic,’ after the example of the ancients and others who had perceived something similar. I tried to save myself from this fearful thing, by taking refuge, as usual, behind an Image.23
Benjamin identifies a similar logic of submission to alien forces of nature that defy any principle of organisation in Goethe’s notion of the ur- phenomena. Benjamin presents this notion, which commentators often cite as the key idea for Benjamin’s thinking, in explicitly negative terms, as the ‘chaos of symbols’ [das Chaos der Symbole].24 Goethe’s ur-phenomena are, Benjamin writes, an ‘abundance of . . . forms [that] presents itself to his spirit no differently than the confused universe of sounds presents itself to the ear’ (SW I, 315). The sense of hearing is a passive sense, which must submit to the sounds of the environment, more readily than the eye, which can turn away from a spectacle. In his Anthropology Kant postulates a series of moral analogies to the different senses based on their capacity to exercise autonomy. Hearing is below vision on account of its unavoidable submission to the immediate environment of sound.25 Whatever points could be made about the purpose and the accuracy of Kant’s schema, the passivity of the sense of hearing is also significant for Benjamin’s perspective on Goethe. Benjamin points out that in his Scientific Studies Goethe uses the analogy of hearing the voice of nature, which Benjamin says ‘reveals so clearly the spirit in which he regards nature’ (SW I, 315). Goethe writes:
Let us shut our eyes, let us open our ears and sharpen our sense of hearing. From the softest breath to the most savage noise, from the simplest tone to the most sublime harmony, from the fiercest cry of passion to the gentlest word of reason, it is nature alone that speaks, revealing its existence, energy, life, and circumstances, so that a blind man to whom the vast world of the visible is denied may seize hold of an infinite living realm through what he can hear.
(Cites Goethe, SW I, 315, emphasis added)
Finally, that the complete abdication of all responsibility is the outcome of the transference of even the power of speech to nature is shown in Goethe’s fragment ‘Nature,’ which concludes: ‘She has brought me here; she will lead me away. I trust myself to her. She may do as she wants with me. She will not hate her work. It is not I who has spoken of her. No, what is true and what is false – all this she has spoken. Hers is the blame, hers the glory ’ (Cites Goethe, SW I, 315–316, emphasis added). Benjamin comments: ‘In this world view lies chaos. To that pass at last leads the life of the myth, which, without master or boundaries, imposes itself as the sole power in the domain of existence’ (SW I, 316). 26 The ‘infinite living realm’ opened through listening to the ‘voice’ of nature is an undisciplined mass which Benjamin calls ‘myth.’
Benjamin insists that the mythic life premised on this empowering of nature is driven by fear: ‘No feeling is richer in variations than fear. Anxiety in the face of death is accompanied by anxiety in the face of life, as is a fundamental tone by its countless overtones.’ The tradition of scholarship on Goethe ‘neglects, passes over in silence, the baroque play of fear in the face of life’ (SW I, 318). For Benjamin fear is what drives Goethe, late in his life, to adopt an indiscriminate attitude to the significance of things, which he loads with the depth of indeterminate spiritual meaning.27 Benjamin cites Georg Gottfried Gervinus as the first to ‘intuit’ the ‘importance’ of Goethe’s ‘taciturn withdrawal into himself during the later period’ and the ‘concern,’ exaggerated to the point of a paradox, ‘for the material contents of his own life’ (SW I, 318). Benjamin identifies in both these features ‘the fear of life: from reflection speaks the fear of its power and breadth—the fear of its flight from the embrace that would contain it’ (SW I, 318). This turn coincides with the accent given to moods and feelings, which in fact dwarfs their material vessels. As Gervinus writes, ‘"if the object is to signify something to him, [it] is much less the object itself than the soul [Gemüt]”’ (Cites Gervinus, SW I, 319). Gervinus complains that Goethe comes to ‘“consider . . . the most miserable thing with the pathetic mien of the wisdom seeker” ’ and that as he grows older his ‘“mental disposition”' is ‘“to admire everything, to find everything ‘significant, marvelous, incalculable’”’ (Cites Gervinus, SW I, 319). Like Goethe’s fascination with nature, his indiscriminate attention in his later years to the ‘significant’ things around him is in fact a screen that hides the failure to act that is the cause, Benjamin says, of ‘the missed opportunities in his erotic life’ (SW I, 319).
It is possible to sketch from these references to Goethe’s life the general features of the mythic world, which Benjamin also sees displayed in the novel. Benjamin understands myth as a human account (a ‘traditional tale’28) of what is vital in human life, which only draws on forms and forces of nature. In myth natural forms and forces are given human significance and a human face so that they become approachable for human beings.29 As Goethe’s overly attentive relation to the things around him shows, however, the cost of this approachability is the transfer to alien and unfathomable forces authority over human life. The ambiguity of myth stems from the potentially infinite meanings that arise once mute nature is given expressive powers. This is a distinctive sense of ‘ambiguity’ which describes the existential effects of looking to sensuous forms for the meaning of human life. It is Benjamin’s view that the experience of sensuous forms as containing ambiguous meanings determines a fateful existence.
Myth, according to the essay on Goethe’s novel, does not make nature approachable but hands over human life to unfathomable, hence threatening, tyrannical forces. It is not natural elements per se that exercise this power but their insertion into the system of myth. Thus the element of water can both destroy human life and be an instrument of salvation. In the novel, Charlotte’s infant drowns in the still waters of the lake. On the other hand, the willingness of the lovers in the novella to risk their lives when they throw themselves into the dangerous current seals the truth of their love, which, ‘because it risks life for the sake of true reconciliation, achieves this reconciliation and with it the peace in which their bond of love endures’ (SW I, 342).30 Benjamin opposes to the supposed freedom of ‘bourgeois choice’ paraded by the characters of the novel the ‘moral decision’ of the lovers of the novella. Salvation through faith can only be attained on the other side of uncompromising defiance of the merely natural life. ‘Because true reconciliation with God is achieved by no one who does not thereby destroy everything—or as much as he possesses—in order only then, before God’s reconciled countenance, to find it resurrected’ (SW I, 342). Faith in the transcendent source of life reconstitutes nature as responsive to human interests, no longer cut off from the transcendent. Humans are at home in nature only through the knowledge of the intention behind its creation, that is, the Revelation. The novella provides a vantage point that allows the destructive effects of mythic nature behind the beautiful semblances of the novel to be recognised. ‘If the ambiguity thus leads into the novel’s center, still it points back again to the mythic origin of the novel’s image of the beautiful life’ (SW I, 341–342). What is thereby illuminated is how the still waters of the novel embody the ‘power of ambiguity’: a bottomless pit of ‘primeval’ forces that are seemingly ‘contained’ in a pleasurable, calm, aesthetic reflection (SW I, 341):
Water as the chaotic element of life does not threaten here in desolate waves that sink a man; rather, it threatens in the enigmatic calm that lets him go to his ruin. To the extent that fate governs, the[y] . . . go to their ruin. Where they spurn the blessing of firm ground, they succumb to the unfathomable, which in stagnant water appears as something primeval. . . . In all this it is nature itself which, in the hands of human beings, grows superhumanly active.
(SW I, 303, emphasis added)
When there is no anchor point outside their insertion into the system of myth, natural forms become demonically potent; they dominate human life. The lovers in the novella do not take their bearings from nature. In fact, when the lovers decide to jump, he says, they make this decision each ‘alone with God’ [‘ein jeder ganz für sich allein vor Gott’] (SW I, 343, GS I, 184). For Benjamin the mythic life is one in which natural forms overwhelm human life. The Revelation, in contrast, is the ‘firm ground’ of an escape route from the demonic expressivity of nature. However, I think it can be shown that Benjamin treats the counter-perspective of the Revelation in aesthetic terms. If so, the opposition between ‘myth,’ as Goethe’s ‘aesthetic’ approach to life, and the Revelation, as its antidote, would unravel.
In Benjamin’s essay faith in God annihilates the proliferating ambiguities of expressive materiality.31 It can be treated from the perspective of this function. The germane or parallel terms, such as the expressionless, the moral decision, and language, each have a comparable function. But, at the same time, if we look at the detail of Benjamin’s argument that Goethe’s novel can be read as an attempt to find redemption, then it is significant that he describes this attempt in terms evocative of sublime ‘feeling.’
It is clear that Goethe’s novel is for Benjamin the key that deciphers Goethe’s life, or the meaning of Goethe’s life. The same anxiety, lack of decisiveness, and shirking of responsibility that define the world of the characters in the novel also characterises Goethe’s existence. But how do we understand this connection? The perspective that Benjamin adopts on the novel and Goethe’s life is not alien to Goethe. Goethe is full of sorrow for Ottilie, for her fate, for the fact that her existence unfolds inexorably towards the looming catastrophe. Goethe expresses all this to Sulpiz Boisserée on their way to Heidelberg:
During the journey, we came to speak of Elective Affinities. He emphasized how rapidly and irresistibly he had brought on the catastrophe. The stars had risen; he spoke of his relation to Ottilie, of how he had loved her and how she had made him unhappy. At the end, his speeches became almost mysteriously full of foreboding.—In between he would recite light-hearted verse. Thus, weary, stimulated, half-full of foreboding, half-asleep, we arrived in Heidelberg in the most beautiful starlight.
(Cites Boisserée, SW I, 354)
As Benjamin comments:
If it did not escape this reporter how, with the rising of the stars, Goethe’s thoughts steered themselves toward his work, Goethe himself was quite probably hardly aware—a fact to which his language attests—how sublime beyond measure the moment was and how clear the warning of the stars.
(SW I, 354)
The ‘sublime moment’ finds a Goethe not just full of regrets but also moved by genuine love. Vaguely, he understands the meaning of a life alienated from the saving power of God. The spell cast over his life by the ‘fear of responsibility,’ which Benjamin claims had even determined Goethe’s interpretation of Elective Affinities, is momentarily broken here. If true love, as the most intimate human relation, is possible only through reconciliation with God, it must also be the sign of the latter. Benjamin calls the interruption that faith introduces in a life ruled by the demonic powers the ‘caesura.’ It is a breach, and opening in nature as the forest of symbols (SW I, 319), the most characteristic expression of which is hope, the hope of redemption. What seems to be important to Benjamin is not really the possibility of an objective determination of the transcendent, an objective testimony to the existence of God. The certainty of the break itself is important.
In this respect it is possible to compare the experience of the feeling of hope as Benjamin presents it here with Kant’s conception of the subjective validity of aesthetic judgments. For Kant an aesthetic judgment involves a relation between a subject and an object, but one in which the subject’s reflection on form alone provides satisfaction.32 The material existence of the object is irrelevant; indeed a liking for it would impair the purity of the judgment. It is because the judgment only concerns the form that it calls for the assent of others, an assent that its subjective validity is insufficient to compel. Finally, this judgment does not support any knowledge claim but instead stimulates the mind to conceive ideas, and these go beyond what is given to the senses. In this elevation above sensory forms, aesthetic judgment can be seen as analogous to morality and, even further, as a type of training for morality.
The structure of what Benjamin presents as hope for redemption is specifically akin to the structure of the aesthetic judgment of the sublime. This is because the core of the sublime, the feature that makes it in Kant’s eyes less significant in its implications than the beautiful (CJ, §23, 100), is that it no longer concerns any object at all.33 Rather, the sublime is the feeling of the power of reason in the face of nature’s might or scale.34 In this respect, the aesthetic category of the sublime is strictly akin to Benjamin’s description of hope because the experience of hope involves a defiant feeling in the face of natural forces. The certainty of this feeling of defiance cannot command the assent of others. Nor, it seems, on the evidence of the essay, would it want to issue such a command.
The hope must remain a hope, and in fact purified of all that might compromise it. The expression ‘hope for the hopeless’ is in part intended to guarantee that purity. In this way it is also close to Kant’s demand for the purity of moral action. For Kant conformity to the moral law must be the sole motive of moral action. This alone secures its moral status; but it also makes it impossible to know when an act is truly moral.35 According to Benjamin, the redemptive moment of hope is present as well in Goethe’s novel. The ‘caesura’ that interrupts in the novel the semblance of bourgeois life is in fact a sentence: ‘hope shot across the sky above their heads like a falling star’ (SW I, 354–355). With it, Benjamin thinks, Goethe ‘conceived,’ perhaps without knowing it, the hope, presumably, of a different life, a different fate, ‘while the embracing lovers seal their fate’ (SW I, 354).
Although, in this essay, the hope of redemption seems to be tied to the afterlife and the idea of immortality,36 the later work shows that hope may be detached from such ideas. Its later incarnations may be found in the ‘dialectical image’ or the ‘weak messianic power,’ or even in the wish of the child and in the remaining child-like of the adult.37 Even if it is debatable whether these ideas are without any theological lining (one is reminded, for instance, of Benjamin’s parable of the chess player in his theses ‘On the Concept of History’), what is important is that in the later work the structuring sense of the opposition between the perspective of God and man, of the light of the Revelation and the darkness of myth, of the clarity of language and the obfuscations of merely aesthetic forms, has receded as a principle of organisation.38 I will look at some of the ideas from Benjamin’s later thought, and how they relate to his early series of oppositions, in later chapters. In any case, Benjamin’s presentation of hope in his essay on ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ raises a number of interesting questions for the perspective his essay seeks to defend. To conclude I will briefly discuss two of these. First, what is the sense of the ‘likeness’ of the hope of redemption to the shooting star?39 The starry sky, as we saw, is also present in the scene where Goethe expresses his feelings about the fate of Ottilie. Second, what can we make of the entanglement of Goethe’s life in the novel and of the novel in Goethe’s life? What exactly is this relation according to Benjamin? What does Benjamin think of Goethe’s love for Ottilie? Is there any contradiction between his analysis of this issue and his general position in the essay that a life cannot be understood in analogy with the work of art?
The most straightforward sense of the likeness of the shooting star and the hope (of the lovers for a different life) is in their transitory nature. The beautiful moment makes the passing of time all the more pathos-laden. It is not just the cherished moment that is transient but also the hope that it raises. This must be the perspective of the lovers. But, according to Benjamin, the spectator, the reader, has a different relation to their hope. Their hopelessness moves the reader to ‘conceive’ for them a chance of fulfilment, of another life, another kind of life. Benjamin calls it the ‘blessed life’ [‘Toten nach, die, wenn je, nicht in einer schönen Welt wir erwachen hoffen, sondern in einer seligen’] (SW I, 355, GS I, 200). The experience of the hope of redemption is only possible for the spectator. As such, despite the polemic of the essay against the aesthetic treatment of life, the structure of aesthetic judgment in Kant is relevant for the analysis of the genesis and significance of the experience of hope as Benjamin describes it. Benjamin maintains that ‘[t]his hope is the sole justification of the faith in immortality, which must never be kindled from one’s own existence’ (SW I, 355). The topic of self-interest is important for Kant. He uses its absence as the criterion of aesthetic judgment. In Kant the significance of the beautiful in nature is that it seems to provide ‘independent’ confirmation of the moral vocation of man (CJ, §42, 167). Singular natural beauties are suitable forms for such confirmation because they do not appear to be working for this or any other end (CJ, §33, 148). Thus the tulip provides a material presentation of the idea of morality insofar as its form conveys organisation without apparent function, what Kant terms purposiveness without purpose. The flower thereby becomes formally analogous to the idea of moral freedom, according to this idea our specific ends are not determined but our capacity to determine them is. Aesthetic judgment establishes this harmony between beauty and the moral vocation subjectively and this is why the relation between the singular, material form and the idea of freedom is qualified in Kant as analogical. Similarly, Benjamin’s idea of hope of redemption is essentially an ‘aesthetic’ idea: it is produced from the aesthetic relation to a situation with all that is involved in such a relation; it is the feeling had by spectators in relation to a scene which furnishes them with subjective certainty in their judgment of the significance of this scene.
It is in the aesthetic reflection on the lovers that the spectator is attuned to ideas that reach beyond the bare features of the situation. These ideas have no objective claim, but they do provide the spectator with a satisfaction that, as in Kant’s account of the susceptibility for the liking of beauty in nature, demonstrates a moral sensitivity and capacity (CJ, §42, 166–167). In Kant, this claim regarding beauty is if anything strengthened in the case of the sublime—according to him, the very capacity for judgments of the sublime requires moral culture, which is able to cultivate aesthetic experience so that it is attuned to the experience of sublime feeling (CJ, §29, 124–125).
Viewed this way, the certainty of the hope of redemption and with it the ‘subjective necessity’ of immortal life is structurally indistinguishable from aesthetic judgment and the experience that accompanies it. Thus it is not coincidentally that the ‘caesura’ of Goethe’s life takes place in the novel or in relation to a character of his novel; again, the hope for the hopeless the way Benjamin understands it must be based in an aesthetic relation. We might consider here, too, the significance of Benjamin’s diction of the sublime to describe the ‘moment’ that Goethe confesses his regrets to Boisserée as well as his characterisation of the lovers never having ‘reached for the body’ as a ‘sublime irony’ (SW I, 356). In both cases the spectator’s metaphysical hope is won in the face of objective hopelessness—in Benjamin’s own words, neither Goethe, as a person, nor the lovers, as literary characters, are or can be ‘aware of’ this meaning. Goethe’s love for Ottilie, which Benjamin understands as the caesura in his awareness of his true feelings, has a few parallels with Benjamin’s own understanding of the significance of the lovers of the novella. These parallels, I think, place Benjamin’s essay at odds with his attempt to split morality off from ‘every mode of imagistic portrayal (Abbildbarkeit).’40
In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin claims that ‘the human figure in reality . . . has its true meaning as a perceptible expression of moral seclusion with God.’41 This ‘true meaning’ cannot be represented in an image of the human body because there is no image that could give access to the totality of the moral relation between the human being and God. ‘Everything moral is bound to life in its extreme sense, that is to say, where it fulfils itself in death’ (U, 105). He goes on to claim that the meaning of the prohibition against graven images relates specifically to the impossibility of the reproduction of ‘the moral essence of man.’ There cannot be an aesthetic presentation of the core of the moral relation to God without a breach of the extremity and the purity of this relation. It is hard to square Benjamin’s use of the novella with his account of the meaning of the prohibition on graven images. The discussion of the lovers emphasises that they are ‘each alone with God’ when they decide to risk their lives. The lovers build on this moral seclusion the conviction of bliss in the afterlife. These lovers are the link by which Benjamin connects the image of the falling star to Goethe’s hope for Ottilie. In the Trauerspiel book, however, precisely this use of literary figures for the presentation of moral ideas is prohibited. He is especially scathing in this study, as he is in his essay on Goethe’s novel, of the way that ‘the work of art is unhesitatingly accepted as the exemplary copy of moral phenomena without any consideration of how susceptible such phenomena are to representation’ (U, 104; SW I, 304).42 Yet in describing the lovers’ moral seclusion with God as the context for their decision, he seems to allow the exact relation to God that he had claimed was impossible to represent in an image, let alone in a character of a novel. More than this, if in fact the hope that Goethe conceives for the lovers of the novel is stimulated by his feelings for Ottilie and ultimately grounded in the blessing that the characters of the novella enjoy through their faith in God, the existential caesura itself is precipitated by aesthetic representations. As we have seen, such feelings have a structure that is identical with the structure of aesthetic judgment. The aesthetic dimension of Benjamin’s discussion of hope is, however, not acknowledged in his essay. Indeed its presence there would compromise the purity he wishes to preserve for the feeling of hope. Hence his explicit categorisation of the aesthetic modes of treatment of human life as forms of ‘mythic’ life.
In Goethe’s novel, Charlotte is upset when the travellers tell her and Ottilie the story of ‘The Curious Tale of the Childhood Sweethearts.’ She knew, says the narrator, that
[t]he event described had actually happened and had involved the Captain and a woman neighbor of his; it is true it had not happened exactly as the Englishman had told it, but its main features were intact and only individual details had been developed and embellished, as tends to happen with tales of this sort when they have passed firstly through mouths of the crowd and subsequently through the fantasy of an imaginative and stylish narrator. For the most part everything and nothing remains in the end as it was.43
When Benjamin uses the novella to stage the moral qualification of genuine love against the rapacious, mythic idolatry of beauty in the novel, and to decipher Goethe’s life in the light of that opposition, he is in fact working with a twofold fiction. For the moral qualification of the novella in its opposition to the world of the novel is a fiction, but perhaps in a different sense.44 What should we make of the fact that the lover who represents genuine love in the novella (the love Benjamin describes as the kind that ‘endures’) is also one of the friends under the sway of demonic powers in the novel? Whatever one concludes about the contradictory figure of the Captain in Benjamin’s presentation of Goethe’s work, it is more than a little ironic that Benjamin’s stunning argument against the use of the work of art as an analogy for human life takes the form of a literary analysis that relies on using literary characters to ‘represent’ the moral seclusion of the human being in its relation to God.
I have argued in this chapter that the problems treated in Benjamin’s ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ essay have been largely overlooked in Benjamin scholarship. The key point of the essay is Benjamin’s critical account of the irresolvable ambiguity of the aesthetically presented sensible form. The essay identifies two opposed ways of marking the significance and meaning of nature’s forms: those, respectively, of myth and the Revelation. Humans are at home in nature only through knowledge of the intention behind its creation, that is, the Revelation. Only knowledge of the Revelation saves humans from the empty, ritualised existence, which defines human life when it looks to the demonic expressivity of sensuous forms for orientating meaning. The conceptual frame of this opposition is taken from the opposition between nature and the Word. The Revelation as the articulated clarity of a perspective on nature’s forms offers an escape from the totalising forms of materiality that Benjamin calls ‘myth.’ However, Benjamin’s essay uses images such as the shooting star or the figures of the novella lovers to convey this position. The terms he uses to conduct his analysis leaves the impression that the feeling of ‘hope for the hopeless’ is in fact an aesthetically framed feeling. On the basis of Benjamin’s essay it can be argued that the value of the Revelation in its opposition to myth is reducible to two different ways of naming how sensuous forms are imprinted with meaning. The first defines the feeling of hope of redemption through the use of literary characters and potent images from a novel. It also characterises ambiguity as the signature of sensuous forms and condemns the use of art to define human life. The second defines an immanent sphere of self-sufficient forms that communicates meaning. Finding a way to securely establish the ‘difference’ that grounds the terms of this opposition is one of the central problems of Benjamin’s early work.
1. Cited in Hannah Arendt, ‘Walter Benjamin 1892–1940,’ Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. H. Zohn, ed. H. Arendt (Schocken Books: New York, 1968), 1–59, 3.
2. See Gershom Scholem’s account of the essay’s importance for Benjamin. G. Scholem, Walter Benjamin: Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (New York Review of Books: New York, 1981), 125, 137–138, 184.
3. In general, references to the essay on Elective Affinities stress the critical apparatus put forward there for the discussion of art works. See Peter Osborne’s ‘Philosophizing Beyond Philosophy: Walter Benjamin Reviewed,’ in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, eds. A. Benjamin and P. Osborne (Clinamen Press: London, 2000) 286–304. The point to which this apparatus is used in the essay is hardly ever raised. On the use of the essay to fill out discussions of the ‘Critique of Violence’ see Werner Hamacher’s brief mention of it in his ‘Afformative, Strike: Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,”’ trans. Dana Hollander, Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, 108–136, 111–112.
4. Walter Benjamin, ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities,’ trans. Stanley Corngold, SW I, 297–361.
5. Winfried Menninghaus, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Variations of Imagelessness,’ trans. T. Bahti and D. Hensely, For Walter Benjamin, eds. Ingrid and Konrad Scheurmann (Askl: Bonn, 1993), 166–179.
6. Against one of the prevailing currents of Benjamin scholarship we need to insist on this point: the ambiguity of sensible form is, in the ‘Critique of Violence’ no less than the ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ essay, the target of Benjamin’s polemic. Some of the alterations that occur in his late work to his early position on ambiguity—for instance, the ambiguity of the dialectical image— will be mentioned in chapter 4.
7. Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence,’ SW I, 236–253.
8. This is odd, not least because despite its current status as a work that elicits constant treatment, the essay on Violence offers a confused presentation of the claim that divine violence is akin to revolutionary violence, and mythic violence to legal violence. There is no better indication of this than the obscure contrast Benjamin draws between the punishment of Niobe and God’s punishment of the company of Korah as if the former were ‘ambiguous’ and the latter ‘expiatory.’ I have argued elsewhere that one needs to consult the broader framework of argumentation concerning myth in ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ in order to understand his ‘Critique of Violence.’ It is true that their contemporaneity results in conceptual traffic between these essays. However, the more substantial essay on Goethe’s novel is able to explain the significance of the oppositions, and the adjectives used to signal them, in the Violence essay. See 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.
9. Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,’ SW I, 62–74, 70: ‘The translation of the language of things into that of man is not only a translation of the mute into the sonic; it is also the translation of the nameless into name. It is therefore the translation of an imperfect language into a more perfect one, and cannot but add something to it, namely knowledge. The objectivity of this translation is, however, guaranteed by God. For God created things; the creative word in them is the germ of the cognizing name, just as God, too, finally named each thing after it was created. But obviously this naming is only an expression of the identity of the creative word and the cognizing name in God, not the prior solution of the task that God expressly assigns to man himself: that of naming things. In receiving the unspoken nameless language of things and converting it by name into sounds, man performs this task. It would be insoluble, were not the name-language of man and the nameless language of things related in God and released from the same creative word, which in things became the communication of matter in magic communion, and in man the language of knowledge and name in blissful mind', emphasis added. I will take up this thesis of the clarity and knowledge of things in divine and naming language in more detail in chapter 4.
10. 'Fear of responsibility is the most spiritual of all those kinds of fear to which Goethe's nature subjected him. It is a foundation of the conservative position that he brought to the political, the social, and in his old age probably the literary too. It is the root of the missed opportunities in his erotic life. That it also determined his interpretation of Elective Affinities is certain. For it is this work of art that sheds light on the foundations of his own life—foundations which, because his confession does not betray them, also remain concealed from a tradition that has not yet freed itself from the spell of that life' (SW I, 319-320). Note the description of Goethe's life as a 'spell.'
11. The word Bombast, which Benjamin uses contains the word Ast, which means 'branch.' Hence in his translator's note Stanley Gorngold comments that Benjamin's 'rhetorical monkey business is untranslatable, unless these monkey-figures can be thought of as swinging from one tropical bombranch to another,' SW I, N. 24, 358-359.
12. 'All mythic meaning strives for secrecy,' writes Benjamin. And in addition to 'ambiguous' use of language he indicts the shelter of silence and taciturn withdrawal Goethe uses to protect such meaning: 'the dark, deeply self-absorbed, mythic nature that, in speechless rigidity, indwells Goethean artistry. As olympian, he laid the foundation of the work and with scant words rounded out the dome' (SW I, 314).
13. Benjamin, I think, is inevitably committed to an aesthetic presentation of the Revelation. This makes his criticisms of the vicious circle of Nietzsche's aestheticism in The Origin of German Tragic Drama a telling indication of the purpose of the value of the Revelation in his early thought. I will return to this point in the next chapter.
14. Ottilie is also the name of Goethe's daughter-in-law. Ottilie von Goethe married Goethe's only surviving child by Christiane Vulpius, Auguste von Goethe, in 1817. The marriage, which Goethe senior favoured, was unhappy since Ottilie greatly admired her husband's father. As Benjamin points out the name itself means a 'consolation for the eyes'—further proof, he claims, of the way that the novel emphasises semblance (SW I, 344). On Ottilie von Goethe, see H. and M. Garland, The Oxford Companion to German Literature (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1976), 292.
15. This was the version that Benjamin had approved for publication in the journal. However, in his Gesammelte Schriften the subtitles of the different sections of the essay, which were part of the original essay and later restored by Benjamin in his copy, are kept. See for the complete version of the subtitles that punctuate the essay, Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, eds. R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhauser (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt a.M., 1972-1989), Vol. 1.3, 835-837.
16. In her essay 'The Artwork as Breach of a Beyond: On the Dialectic of Divine and Human Order in Walter Benjamin's "Goethe's Elective Affinities,"' Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, eds. B. Hanssen and A. Benjamin (Continuum: London, 2002), Sigrid Weigel has pointed out some of the pairs in this series. However, she maintains that the oppositional pairs 'jut' into each other. Her account of the essay thus diminishes the intensity of their opposition. Weigel's position generously allows Benjamin to paper over the problem we are identifying here, see Weigel, 197-206.
17. Aside from its oppositional structure, the Revelation for Benjamin is almost like what Kant understands by the 'favor' nature shows us in the case of the beautiful. I will return to this point in the final section of the chapter.
18. There are numerous examples in Goethe’s writing of his fear of the demonic power of images. One especially apposite example can be cited from his autobiography, From my Life: Poetry and Truth. Goethe recounts how he rails against the poor choice of subject matter depicted in the tapestries to welcome the recently married Marie-Antoinette on a trip to Paris: Jason, Medea and Creusa. Goethe deplores the use of such figures who portend ‘unhappy nuptials,’ asking, ‘Is there not one French architect, decorator or tapestry hanger who realizes that pictures depict something, that pictures have an effect on sense and feeling, that they make impressions, that they arouse presentiments?’ On his account, his companions attempt to calm him down and insist to him that ‘not everyone was prone to look for meaning in pictures.’ J. W. von Goethe, From my Life: Poetry and Truth, Parts 1–3, trans. R. R. Heitner, eds. T. P. Saine and J. L. Sammons (Suhrkamp: New York, 1987), 271.
19. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Preface to Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (Routledge Classics: London and New York, 2002), xxii.
20. See Tvetan Todorov’s discussion of the symbol as a hermeneutic category. T. Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, trans. Catherine Porter (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY, 1982). I discuss the symbol in more detail in the following chapter.
21. Walter Benjamin, ‘Fate and Character,’ SW I, 201–207, 204. ‘Schicksal und Charakter, ’ GS II, I (Suhrkamp Verlag: Frankfurt a.M., 1977), 175.
22. In the novel, the death of the infant and Ottilie are understood as attempts to propitiate the monstrous powers of nature through ‘sacrifice.’ The sacrifices are ultimately futile because they remain within the demonic perspective on nature: nature is the source of its own meaning and this meaning is inscrutable for human beings; its ritual propitiation is blind. Benjamin’s epigraph to the essay is from Klopstock: ‘Whoever chooses blindly is struck in the eyes by the smoke of sacrifice’ (SW I, 297). The problem for which the Revelation is the solution is therefore faith in a point beyond nature as expressive, autonomous sensuous forms. The novella lovers stage this faith in their willingness to risk their lives by diving into the dangerous current. I will examine Benjamin’s treatment of the topic of rituals of propitiation in Goethe’s novel in detail in the next chapter. It is worth noting here his condemnation of the manner of Ottilie’s ‘sacrifice.’ He emphasises the difficulty of any meaningful comparison between the ‘desperate actions of the unrequited’ (i.e., the novella lovers) and ‘the sacrifice of Ottilie—a sacrifice that puts in God’s hand not the most precious good but the most difficult burden, and anticipates his decree’ (SW I, 343).
23. Benjamin cites this description of the demonic from Poetry and Truth but he excises the last phrase from his citation: ‘by taking refuge, as usual, behind an Image.’ See SW I, 316.
24. The most famous exponent of this thesis is Hannah Arendt. In her Introduction to Illuminations she goes as far as to insist that the Goethean notion of the ur-phenomenon is the only idea that ever had any influence on Benjamin. I discuss the need to qualify this interpretation of Benjamin in more detail in the following chapter. Suffice it to note here his unambiguously critical stance on this Goethean idea. Goethe’s idea of the ur-phenomenon comes from his Gott und Welt. See Walter Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften,’ GS I, 148: ‘Scheint bereits in dieser Kontamination des reinen und empirischen Bereichs die sinnliche Natur den höschsten Ort zu fordern, so triumphiert ihr mythisches Gesicht in der Gesamterscheinung ihres Seins. Es ist für Goethe nur das Chaos der Symbole.’
25. See Kant’s comments on music: ‘Music has a certain lack of urbanity about it. For, depending mainly on the character of its instruments, it extends its influence (on the neighborhood) farther than people wish, and so, as it were, imposes itself on others and hence impairs the freedom of those outside of the musical party. The arts that address themselves to the eye do not do this; for if we wish to keep out their impressions, we need merely turn our eyes away. The situation here is almost the same as with the enjoyment [Ergötzung] produced by an odor that spreads far. Someone who pulls his perfumed handkerchief from his pocket gives all those next to and around him a treat whether they want it or not, and compels them, if they want to breathe, to enjoy [genießen] at the same time, which is also why this habit has gone out of fashion.’ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. W. S. Pluhar (Hackett: Indianapolis, 1987), §53, 200. Hereafter cited as CJ. In his Anthropology Kant places hearing under sight and the latter under touch in the category of senses of the first class, but above smell, which along with taste is in the second class. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2006), 46–47.
26. ‘In dieser Weltbetrachtung ist das Chaos. Denn darein mündet zuletzt das Leben des Mythos, welches ohne Herrscher oder Grenzen sich selbst als die einzige Macht im Bereiche des Seienden einsetzt.’ Walter Benjamin, ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften,’ GS I, 149.
27. ‘The human being petrifies in the chaos of symbols and loses the freedom unknown to the ancients. In taking action, he lands among signs and oracles. They were not lacking in Goethe’s life. Such a sign showed him the way to Weimar: indeed, in Poetry and Truth, he recounted how, while on a walk, torn between his calling to poetry and his calling to painting, he set up an oracle’ (SW I, 319).
28. See Walter Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and History (University of California Press: Los Angeles, 1979).
29. This can be compared with Hans Blumenberg’s treatment of this topic in his Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1985). Contra Benjamin, Blumenberg sees myth as an effective way of managing anthropological deficits. Further, Part IV, of Work on Myth, ‘Against a God, Only a God’ is devoted to the analysis of Goethe’s work on the figure of Prometheus to fashion his self-image. In this regard, Blumenberg makes much of what he understands to be Goethe’s own confection of the ‘extraordinary saying’: ‘Only a god can stand against a god’ (‘Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse’) Blumenberg, 524. See too, Goethe’s Poetry and Truth, 598. Despite ignoring Benjamin’s essay, Blumenberg’s analysis of Goethe’s ‘work’ on myth has interesting points of overlap with Benjamin’s strategy of reading Goethe’s life against his novel. Further, the critical treatment Blumenberg gives of readers of Goethe on the topic of the relation between gods and men seems especially pertinent as a frame for the analysis of Benjamin’s essay, since Blumenberg does not mark the Greek gods negatively, as Benjamin does. I discuss Blumenberg’s relevance as a critical perspective for the analysis of Benjamin’s work in further detail in chapter 5.
30. Such ‘true reconciliation’ is explicitly described as ‘reconciliation with God.’ Hence the contrast Benjamin draws between ‘true reconciliation’ and ‘semblance- like reconciliation’ maps onto the opposition between the novella and the novel: ‘In fact, true reconciliation exists only with God. Whereas in true reconciliation the individual reconciles himself with God and only in this way conciliates other human beings, it is peculiar to semblance-like reconciliation that the individual wants others to make their peace with one another and only in this way become reconciled with God. This relation of semblance-like reconciliation to true reconciliation again evokes the opposition between novel and novella. For it is to this point that the bizarre quarrel which perplexes the lovers in their youth finally intends to reach: the point at which their love, because it risks life for the sake of true reconciliation, achieves this reconciliation and with it the peace in which their bond of love endures. Because true reconciliation with God is achieved by no one who does not thereby destroy everything - or as much as he possesses - in order only then, before God's reconciled countenance, to find it resurrected. It follows that a death defying leap marks that moment when—each one wholly alone for himself before God—they make every effort for the sake of reconciliation. And only in such readiness for reconciliation, having made their peace, do they gain each other.' SW I, 342-343, emphasis added.
31. It is for this reason that those readings of the essay on Violence, which muddy the purpose of these oppositions, end up defending the type of ambiguous chaos of myth that Benjamin conscripts 'divine violence' to destroy. See for an example Werner Hamacher's conceptual melange of terms: 'Deposing could not be the means to an end, yet it would be nothing but means. It would be violence, and pure violence, but therefore entirely non-violent. As these aporias belong to the structure of deposing itself they do not allow for resolution.' Hamacher, 'Afformative, Strike: Benjamin's "Critique of Violence,'" Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, eds. A. Benjamin and P. Osborne (Clinamen Press: London, 2000), 108-136, 114.
32. CJ, §9, 61-64.
33. 'Hence sublimity is contained not in any thing of nature, but only in our mind, insofar as we can become conscious of our superiority to nature within us, and thereby also to nature outside us (as far as it influences us). Whatever arouses this feeling in us, and this includes the might of nature that challenges our forces, is then (although improperly) called sublime. And it is only by presupposing this idea within us, and by referring to it, that we can arrive at the idea of the sublimity of that being who arouses deep respect in us, not just by his might as demonstrated in nature, but even more by the ability, with which we have been endowed, to judge nature without fear and to think of our vocation as being sublimely above nature' (CJ, §28, 123).
34. As such, the feeling of the sublime has a specific claim to present ideas of moral significance in Kant's third Critique. Unlike the beautiful, which in judgments of taste support a symbolic and analogical presentation of the moral idea of freedom, the sublime gives a direct, but negative presentation of morality. The core of this presentation is that the ideas of reason dominate mere sensibility: the feeling therefore arouses the type of respect that the intellectual liking for the moral good, which disdains merely sensible inclinations, instils (CJ, 129-130). Kant emphasises that the feeling occurs in the spectatorial relation to the force and magnitude of nature. In such a relation, the 'thrill' and 'terror' of nature's might is enjoyed because the spectator 'knows he is safe' (CJ, 129). Kant continues: 'this is not actual fear: it is merely our attempt to incur it with our imagination in order that we may feel that very power's might and connect the mental agitation this arouses with the mind's state of rest. In this way we [feel] our superiority to nature within ourselves, and hence also to nature outside us insofar as it can influence our feeling of well-being' (CJ, 129). Properly speaking, the feeling is negative in relation to sensuous form: the sublime surpasses the imagination's capacity to present sensible form and refers this task to the ideas of reason.
35. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck, Third Edition (Macmillan: New York, 1996), 84. Hereafter cited in the text as CPrR.
36. The concluding words of the first section of Benjamin's essay are: 'And so what counts for [Goethe's] life, as for every human life, is not the freedom of the tragic hero in death but rather redemption in eternal life' (SW I, 320).
37. See for a discussion of the ‘dialectical image,’ Walter Benjamin, ‘Exposé of 1935,’ The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA and London, 1999), 3–14, 10; and for other formulations of the clash of images see Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History,’ SW IV, 389–401, Theses XII and XIV, pages 394 and 395; for the ‘weak messianic power,’ see Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History,’ SW IV, page 390; and on the wishes of children and the remaining child-like of the adult, see Amir Ahmadi’s ‘On the Indispensability of Youth for Experience: Time and Experience in Paul Valéry and Walter Benjamin,’ Time and Society 10.2–3 (2002): 191–212. I will discuss the dialectical image in chapter 4 and the importance of childhood for experience in chapter 3.
38. Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History,’ SW IV, page 389: ‘There was once, we know, an automaton constructed in such a way that it could respond to every move by a chess-player with a counter-move that would ensure the winning of the game. A puppet wearing Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent on all sides. Actually, a hunchbacked dwarf—a master at chess—sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophic counterpart to this apparatus. The puppet, called “historical materialism,” is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is small and ugly and has to be kept out of sight.’
39. J. W. von Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1971), Book 2, Chapter 13, 261: ‘Hope soared away over their heads like a star falling from the sky.’ The quote continues: ‘They fancied, they believed they belonged to one another; for the first time they exchanged firm, frank kisses, and when they parted they had to tear themselves away from one another.’ The German text reads: ‘Die Hoffnung fuhr wie ein Stern, der vom Himmel fällt, über ihre Häupter weg. Sie wähnten, sie glaubten einander anzugehören; sie wechselten zum erstenmal entschiedene, freie Küsse und trennten sich gewaltsam und schmerzlich.’ Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag: Munchen, 1961, 188). In Stanley Corngold’s English translation of Benjamin’s essay in Selected Writings the crucial sentence is rendered: ‘Hope shot across the sky above their heads like a falling star’ (SW I, 354–355).
40. Winfried Menninghaus, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Variations of Imagelessness,’ For Walter Benjamin, trans. T. Bahti and D. Hensley, eds. I. and K. Scheurmann (Askl: Bonn, 1993), 166–179, 169.
41. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels), trans. J. Osborne (Verso: London and New York, 1998), 105. Hereafter cited in the text as U.
42. ‘The characters in a fiction can never be subject to ethical judgment. And, to be sure, not because such judgment, like that passed on human beings, would surpass all human discernment. Rather, the grounds of such judgment already forbid, incontrovertibly, its application to fictional characters. . . . And what is crucial in the case of fictional characters is not to make ethical findings but rather to understand morally what happens. The enterprise of a Solger, and later, too, of a Bielschowsky, remains foolish: to produce a confused moral judgment of taste—which should never have dared to make an appearance— at the first place it can snatch applause’ (SW I, 304). Cf. U, 104–106 where he criticises the way that ‘the work of art is unhesitatingly accepted as the exemplary copy of moral phenomena without any consideration of how susceptible such phenomena are to representation’ (U, 104). Specifically, he objects to the presupposition that literature can represent moral ideas when ‘fictional characters exist only in literature. They are woven so tightly into the totality of the literary work . . . so that they cannot be removed from it as individuals. In this respect, the human figure in literature, indeed in art as such, differs from the human figure in reality, where physical isolation, which in so many ways is only apparent isolation, has its true meaning as a perceptible expression of moral seclusion with God’ (U, 105). See also on this topic his reservation in the essay on ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ that a novel could provide a ‘concrete depiction’ of reconciliation since the latter is ‘entirely supermundane’ (SW I, 343).
43. J. W. von Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books: London, 1971), 245.
44. The horizon of Benjamin’s analysis of hope is the circumstances of a novel written in 1809 and, in particular, the sentence in this novel regarding hope being ‘like’ a falling star. The context of meaning for Benjamin’s claims is literary and it is so in a fundamental sense. Jacques Rancière makes a similar point in his essay ‘The Politics of Literature’ when he claims that Benjamin’s analysis of the commodity as a fetish ‘stems from the Balzacian shop.’ He continues: ‘And the analysis of fetishism can account for Baudelaire’s poetry, since Baudelaire’s loitering takes place not so much in the passages of the Parisian boulevards as it does in the same Balzacian shop or workshop.’ Rancière’s specific point is that Benjamin’s explanation of ‘the structure of Baudelaire’s imagery’ only ‘makes sense on the ground of a definite model of intelligibility—the model of deciphering the unconscious hieroglyph, framed by nineteenth-century literature, re-elaborated by Proust, and borrowed from him by Benjamin.’ See Rancière, ‘The Politics of Literature,’ SubStance 33.1 (2004): 10–24, 20–21.
The second ‘fiction’ at work in Benjamin’s essay is the morally qualified opposition between the novella and the novel. We may cite in this regard Aristotle’s statement regarding fiction [plasmatōdēs] in his Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1923): ‘by a fiction I mean a forced statement made to suit a hypothesis,’ Book XIII, 7, 109: emphasis added.
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