The image embodies meaning in sensuous form. In his discussion of allegory and symbol Benjamin approaches the topic of the image in relation to two crucial sets of terms: first, he deals with the general distinction between the ordinary and the significant image. Then, he treats the distinction that constitutes the subset of the category of the ‘significant’: namely, the difference between the symbol-type and allegory-type. The symbol and the allegory are each coded as ‘significant,’ but one is deceptive because in it the form as such pretends to convey the meaning, which perforce remains ambiguous. In contrast, in the allegory the form is ‘mortified.’ Hence, as we saw in the previous chapter, allegory is the ‘good’ aesthetic form that annihilates the ambiguities of mythic, sensuous form. In his writing from the time of the mid-1920s Benjamin tries to find ways of conceptualising the image other than through the category of ‘myth.’ I will argue in this chapter that in his theory of ‘similitude,’ Benjamin moves away from his early condemnation of the hermeneutics of the sensuous form on the grounds that it does not involve the annihilation of the form (i.e., the symbol), to another way of dealing with the relation between meaning and the sensuous form that is presumed to embody it. ‘Similitude’ is for Benjamin a quasi-theological incarnation of meaning in sensuous form because it possesses the clarity of linguistic expression. Similitude communicates meaning in the same way as authentic verbal expression.
The chapter is divided into four main parts. In the first three parts, I consider how Benjamin’s notion of similitude puts forward a conception of expressive form that draws on his earlier theological conception of the language of the name, as this conception is outlined in the Language essay. In his theories of similitude and the language of the name, I will argue, Benjamin intends to set up an image of the ‘whole.’ I first set out the background to this point with reference to Benjamin’s writing on experience [Erfahrung], which, I suggest, is homologous to his theory of similitude. In the third section, I contend that similitude is Benjamin’s theory of the communication of things ‘in words.’ Finally, with reference to writing in the field of the history of religion, I defend the thesis that Benjamin’s notions of the naming language of man and similitude are forms of integrative experience, akin to the functions of religious meaning. We find in modern philosophy a number of attempts to account for the shaping power of certain forms of experience. For instance, such an experience is given formal articulation in Kantian aesthetics with the ‘feeling’ of subjectively universal pleasure in the aesthetic judgment of taste. In Kant this feeling allows for a perception of the affirmative significance of nature’s singular forms for the moral vocation that cannot be had in any other way, and which is moreover an education to moral sensibility. Similarly, religious experience transcends empirical knowledge towards the ultimate meaning of the whole. My aim here is not to demonstrate, however, that Benjamin’s schema of a meaningful whole is ‘aesthetic’ or ‘religious.’ Rather, I want to examine how in building up an image of the whole in his accounts of Erfahrung, similitude and naming language, the expression of meaning in sensuous forms is seen in a positive light, and no longer as demonic. According to Benjamin’s theory of similitude, a certain type of experience of sensuous forms is able to express the meaning of the ‘whole.’ Scholarship dealing with the impact of writing on religious practices in the history of religions can provide a useful perspective on the components of Benjamin’s position.
In an essay dealing with the impact on tradition of written culture in ancient Israel and early Judaism, Jan Assmann highlights the implications of the canon-formative practice of writing. He examines within an historical approach the external stimuli that shaped the process of the canonisation of the Torah. A canon inverts the normal fate of writing, which typically requires supplementation and eventually replacement. Canonisation is a final and definitive closure of texts and a ban on any further change whatsoever. The words of the canon cannot be supplemented by another text or continued at a later stage. Further, there are no degrees of authority within the canon: each word has equal authority and commands equally vigilant attention. Amongst the stimuli he examines in the process of the Torah’s canonisation is the shift away from the authority of the person of the king, as the living personification of the law [nomos empsychos], to the prescriptive status of the written law. Canonisation, in other words, underpins the authority of the Torah as a code of laws. This process relies on the manner in which it incorporates and supersedes the functions of law and time previously incarnated in the king. The king’s living personification of the law was the way that time had been marked in the ancient Oriental world. Periods of interregnum were periods when time was not measured, and time commenced again with the law-giving acts of each new ruler. In contrast, the Torah describes time in the frame of God’s creation of the world. It does not expect blind obedience to its laws, but compliance on the basis of historical justification:
the question ‘Why?’ is answered with the words: ‘Because you were a slave in Egypt.’ The exodus from Egypt constitutes the normative past and founding history that frames and determines the law, so that it may unfold its authority once and for all, out of time and history, simply by virtue of its written character, sola scriptura. . . . To observe the laws and remember the history are one and the same thing.1
In short, the law is no longer embodied in a king, but grounded in history. As such, the written canon claims an authority that is ‘out of time and history’ because this canon has fixed the meaning of history as the memory of slavery and exile. Hence Assmann emphasises the distinction between the canonisation of law in the Torah’s statutes [Gesetzbuch] and the law books [Rechtsbücher] developed in Mesopotamia. Unlike the latter, which embody knowledge regarding the law and provide the principles that assist with legal judgments, the Torah is an absolutely binding, prescriptive source of law.2
Amongst the important consequences of the emergence of the written text as the canon of religious authority is the denigration of the image as ‘illusory.’3 This point has particular significance for understanding the background of Benjamin’s evaluative schema and his opposition between the Revelation and myth, and especially, as we will see, for the status of language and writing vis-à-vis the image. Assmann argues that the ban on graven images in the second commandment was originally a prohibition of images per se rather than the images of God. In its anathematisation of idolatry Judaism engages in ‘a polemical act of self-definition.’4 The ban on idolatry separates Judaism ‘from everything that is now constructed and excluded as “paganism”, [and it does so] for the first time in the history of religion.’5 Once again it is the written form of the canon that is crucial. The ban on images needs to be understood as a restriction of the modes of expression suitable for the relation with God. Condemnation of idolatry does not apply to the anthropomorphic references to God in biblical texts. ‘As long as the images are couched in language there is no objection to them.’6 The exclusion of the image from the expression of the divine, however, does not adequately account for the new status of language and writing in religious experience. With the second commandment the distinction between truth and falsehood is ‘introduced into religion for the first time.’ And through this distinction it is ‘writing’ that ‘acquires the character of a codification of truth as opposed to which all other representations of the godly are dismissed as the expressions of lies, errors, or ignorance.’7 The very notion of ‘illusory’ forms entails that there is an authoritative ‘truth’ to combat them, which Assmann suggests is the role of the ‘revelation’ of the written canon of the Torah. The arrival at this position of the revelation as the embodiment of truth comprises a few steps. Images are not denounced because they cannot convey the nature of God. Instead they are cast negatively because images themselves are seen to bear a ‘dangerous, seductive potency’ that renders them liable to become objects of worship. However, in the path from ‘“mono-Yahwism”, the exclusive worship of Yahweh’ in which the existence of other gods is acknowledged (as can be seen in the commandment that requires fidelity to God, presupposing other gods), e.g., idolatry, to the pure monotheism in which the existence of other gods is denied, the image comes to signify a different problem. It is no longer the difference between one’s own god and other gods but that of truth and falsehood that is at stake. Images are now disparaged as illusory and false in the precise sense that they are not images ‘of’ anything. They do not portray anything; rather, they express delusions that become false idols of worship.8
The point Assmann makes regarding writing as the factor that intensifies the hostility to images is not limited, I think, to the history of early Judaism and its ban on graven images (although, as we will see, the exemption of images in language from this ban is significant for understanding the influence of theology on Benjamin’s thinking). If ‘truth’ is not sensuously perceptible, an ‘image’ of it can certainly be built up in words. Thus Nietzsche has described how philosophers claim for their ‘moral’ images of the world the status of truth. Plato, for instance, disturbed at how the flourishing of the wicked and the persecution of the just deprives moral conduct of its ‘reality,’ develops his notion of the Good as the supreme reality. Similarly, in his idea of the moral law as a ‘fact of reason,’ Kant tries to give moral conduct a basis in ‘reality,’ even if the moral world he constructs ultimately depends on the metaphysical postulates of God, immortality, and freedom.9 These are different moral images of the world that rely on their philosophical articulation to gain a foothold in ‘reality.’ Do Benjamin’s theories of similitude and the language of the name also stand as philosophical constructions of meaning contexts able to embed an ‘image’ of the world? These theories certainly bring into play the binary evaluation of ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ that Assmann ascribes to canon formation. Similitude is the authorised relation to sensuous form because it fixes such relations in language. Moreover, Benjamin uses his notions of similitude and naming language to explore the capacity of language to build liveable images.10
The image, as we have seen, is hermeneutic in the peculiar sense that while it demands to be interpreted, the ‘meaning’ it offers remains opaque. As such, the activity of interpretation, which presumes that the image it studies bears important precepts, is fraught with guilt and anxiety for its hapless interpreter. However, according to Benjamin, the opacity of sensuous form (that is, the consequence of the Fall) is in some sense pierced through in the flashes of transparent illumination of things in the experience of similitude. The pre-lapsarian Adamic naming language of man and the transparent relation to things that it entails is the pivot of the theory of similitude. Similitude recalls but cannot restore this pre-lapsarian state. Similitude is the exit point from the hermeneutics of the image to another experience of the sensuously embodied meaning, one that in the post-lapsarian condition is only available in the ‘flashes’ of ‘recognition.’11 In allegorical knowledge the image as sensuous form is mortified. Similarly, similitude provides Benjamin with an alternative conception of the ‘image’ in which a theological exemption is granted thanks to its being expressed in language.
The notion of experience [Erfahrung] is one of the most resonant and distinctive ideas in Benjamin’s writing. Arguably, Benjamin does not have a comprehensive theory of art, or of modernity, or of childhood memory or time. He has a conception of experience that could form the basis of such a theory. Like the drive to escape from forces of totalisation which is a pulse one can detect almost everywhere in his otherwise heterogeneous corpus, the main elements of his conception of experience are found throughout his writing. Admittedly, the specific claim that the capacity for experience undergoes degradation in modern life is not articulated as such until the essays of the late 1920s. Nonetheless, the concern about the loosening hold of tradition in modern life from which that claim is fashioned is a theme in earlier essays, such as ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities . ’ Here Benjamin worries about what replaces the direction previously provided by tradition in lives now conducted solely according to the value of bourgeois freedom and choice. As we have seen in earlier chapters, he is particularly concerned in the essay on Goethe’s novel about the existential damage that a life organised by aesthetic categories inflicts, where authoritative meaning, as in the case of the symbol, is ambiguous and inscrutable. Placed in the compass of his theory of experience as recollection, this worry about a life governed entirely by aesthetic criteria translates into a concern as to where the orientation for living will come from now that the meaning context provided by tradition is lost.
Benjamin develops his theory of experience as ‘recollection’ (e.g., of childhood) whose touchstone is the ‘wish fulfilled’ in the essay which he worked on throughout the 1930s, ‘Memoirs of a Berlin Childhood Around 1900,’ and in his 1940 essay ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.’ The topic is treated in relation to the historical waning of the figure of the storyteller, in his 1936 piece ‘Nikolai Leskov: The Storyteller’ and in relation to Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu in the 1929 essay ‘The Image of Proust.’ In each of these essays he identifies as symptomatic of the modern loss of collective experience the rise of the novel. He contrasts the force carried by the living efficacy of the storyteller’s words with the modern novel, which, he says, is the only form of prose literature completely cut off from the oral tradition. The ‘birthplace of the novel is the individual in his isolation,’ and it addresses another isolated individual, the reader.12 The significance of Proust’s extraordinary autobiographical novel can be located here: on the one hand, Proust’s writing attempts to evoke the conditions for the ‘recollection’ of his childhood; on the other, his novel synthetically constructs the conditions necessary for experience, which is manifest in the picture he provides for the reader of an epoch in which those conditions are unravelling. As we will see, the recollection of childhood is, for Benjamin, the exemplary way in which experience occurs in modern life. This status derives in no small part from the vivid, tactile relationships the child establishes to the things of its material environment.
The problem Proust grapples with is the ‘fundamental’ one, Benjamin says, of ‘reporting on his own childhood.’ 13 Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu recognises the eviscerating gaze of consciousness on experience, and aims to circumvent it. Proust’s use of the term mémoire involontaire is a challenge to Bergson’s mémoire pure, which supposes that access to the past is a matter of attention. The first volume of Proust’s ‘great novel’ describes the indistinct memory the narrator has of the town of Combray where part of his childhood had been spent. When he tastes a kind of pastry called madeleine he is taken back to the past, ‘whereas before then he had been limited to the promptings of a memory which obeyed the call of conscious attention.’14 For Proust the ‘signal characteristic’ of willed remembrance (mémoire volontaire) ‘is that the information it gives about the past retains no trace of that past.’15 Proust comments that:
It is the same with our own past. In vain we try to conjure it up again; the efforts of our intellect are futile. . . . [the past is] somewhere beyond the reach of the intellect and its field of operations, in some material object . . . though we have no idea which one it is. And whether we come upon this object before we die, or whether we never encounter it, depends entirely on chance.16
Proust’s mémoire involontaire is ‘much closer,’ Benjamin thinks, ‘to forgetting than what is usually called memory.’17 For this reason, Benjamin likens the fragile topos of spontaneous recollection to the ‘intricate arabeseques’ of the night that are extinguished in the harsh daylight of purposive reflection: ‘When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the carpet of lived existence, as woven into us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering, each day unravels the web, the ornaments of forgetting.’18 Benjamin’s discussion emphasises that Proust’s view ‘that it was a matter of chance whether the problem could be solved’ was a clear indication that ‘he took the measure of its difficulty.’ Proust’s coining of the phrase mémoire involontaire, Benjamin writes:
bears the traces of the situation that engendered it; it is part of the inventory of the individual who is isolated in various ways. Where there is experience [Erfahrung] in the strict sense of the word, certain contents of the individual past combine in the memory [Gedächtnis] with material from the collective past. Rituals, with their ceremonies and their festivals (probably nowhere recalled in Proust’s work), kept producing the amalgamation of these two elements of memory over and over again. They triggered recollection at certain times and remained available to memory throughout people’s lives. In this way, voluntary and involuntary recollection cease to be mutually exclusive.19
In contrast to the features of communal life that draw on and enable recollection of the collective past, Proust’s notion of mémoire involontaire is crafted in response to the situation of the isolated individual who has no collective past to draw on, whose voluntary will is the symptom of this condition of isolation and whose recollection consequently has to be involuntary and therefore left to ‘chance.’
Proust’s account of mémoire involontaire dramatically foregrounds the difficulties of the recollection of experience in modern life. Benjamin emphasises in this respect the knowing remarks about the futility of a willed relation to one’s past in the opening pages of À la Recherche du temps perdu. The futility of such a willed relation is contrasted with the significance of the scope of recollection that occurs unbidden, as it were, in the presence of the aroma and taste of the madeleine.20 Thus it is the encounter with the ‘material object’ that bears the encrypted traces of the past that provides access to the past, ‘though we have no idea which one it is.’21 In a passage that foreshadows the terminology he later uses in ‘The Storyteller’ essay, Benjamin credits Proust with the capacity to evoke the ‘boredom’ able to turn ‘waking dreams’ into ‘idle stories.’22 In an especially evocative metaphor, Benjamin compares the ‘weight’ of Proust’s ‘involuntary remembrance’ to the catch at the bottom of a fishing net: in this ‘stratum’
the materials of memory no longer appear singly, as images, but tell us about a whole, amorphously and formlessly, indefinitely and weightily, in the same way the weight of the fishing net tells a fisherman about his catch.23
Proust’s sentences are described as ‘the entire muscular activity’ that is required to raise this ‘catch.’ And the sense of smell that is one of the privileged figures of the corporeal index of involuntary recollection is itself cast as ‘the sense of weight experienced by someone who casts his nets into the sea of the temps perdu.’24 The idea of an authentic sensuous experience that can disclose the ‘whole’ is the theme that unites Benjamin’s theories of experience and similitude.
Benjamin likens the faltering communal life that depletes the possibilities for experience in modern life with what he calls homesickness for the state of ‘similarity,’ ‘similitude,’ or, after Baudelaire, ‘correspondences.’ In the essay ‘The Image of Proust,’ Benjamin writes that Proust:
lay on his bed racked with homesickness, homesick for the world distorted in the state of similarity, a world in which the true surrealist face of existence breaks through. To this world belongs what happens in Proust, as well as the deliberate and fastidious way in which it appears. It is never isolated, rhetorical, or visionary; carefully heralded and securely supported, it bears a fragile, precious reality: the image. It detaches itself from the structure of Proust’s sentences just as that summer at Balbec—old, immemorial, mummified—emerged from the lace curtains under Françoise’s hands.25
Benjamin’s 1929 essay on Surrealism together with the references to ‘similarity’ in this essay on Proust precede by a few years a suite of small pieces written by him on the topic of ‘similitude’ and the ‘mimetic faculty.’ In a fragment from 1931/1932 entitled ‘Experience’ Benjamin writes: ‘Experiences are lived similarities. . . . What is decisive here is not the causal connections established over the course of time, but the similarities that have been lived.’26 The notion of similarity is further developed in two essays from 1933, ‘The Doctrine of the Similar’ and ‘On the Mimetic Faculty.'27 His characterisation of the perception of similitude in these essays emphasises that similitude ‘is in every case bound to a flashing up. It flits past, can possibly be won again, but cannot really be held fast as can other perceptions.’28 Benjamin laments that ‘the perceptual world [Merkwelt] of modern human beings seems to contain far fewer of those magical correspondences than did that of the ancients or even that of primitive peoples.’29 The ideas that perception of similitude is bound ‘to a moment in time’ and that it ‘cannot really be held fast’30 echo the fragility and importance of the capacity to experience happiness that Benjamin discovers in children (it is the state of being open to the experience of momentary pleasures and the manifold possibilities of material things), as well as the approach to the significance of memory in the case of Proust (in which the past is retrieved and amplified through the experience of involuntary recollection). The rarity of ‘magical correspondence’ and the merely fleeting relation to similitude that defines the modern condition leaves Proust, in Benjamin’s gloss, in a state of ‘homesickness.’
Benjamin assumes that the resilience of our capacity for the perception of similitude in the face of the historical forces that transform it provides an access point to a pre-lapsarian past. It is for this reason that his plan for the essay ‘On the Mimetic Faculty,’ published as the 1933 fragment ‘Antitheses Concerning Word and Name,’ proceeds point by point as a consideration of the intersection between his thesis on mimesis and the early essay, ‘On Language as Such and On the Language of Man.’ I will discuss the significance of this essay for the theory of similitude shortly.
For our topic of the image, it is the narrative structure that contrasts the ways needs are interpreted and met on either side of the Fall that is especially interesting. Like his treatment of the declining power of storytelling and the depleted capacity for experience that this decline signals, Benjamin’s treatment of the process of the decay of the mimetic faculty raises the question of how the needs it once met are satisfied and discharged. Specifically, the key issue in Benjamin’s analysis of the mimetic faculty is how to rescue the semantic resources that he thinks are placed at risk once its powers begin to dissipate. Since Benjamin maintains that these resources are retained in language these essays provide an important perspective on how the language of name ‘canonises,’ to use Assmann’s terminology, Benjamin’s conception of the ‘true’ image.
In ‘Antitheses Concerning Word and Name,’ Benjamin puts forward the idea that the pre-lapsarian condition was one in which ‘matter’ communicates in ‘magical community’ in an ‘undivided whole.’31 This communication, which evidently precedes the division between a mute object world, at the disposal of our manipulative disposition, and a world of inter- subjective communication, ‘takes place through similarity.’32 In earlier essays from the late 1920s Benjamin had referred to surrealism as a practice, and Proust’s writing as an instance, of such ‘similarity.’ In the essays and fragments devoted to the topic from the early 1930s Benjamin wishes to document the historical transformation that the capacity to perceive similarity and to behave mimetically undergoes and this interest determines his choice of examples. Thus Benjamin refers to the ‘mimetic character’ of the stars as one such example of the sensuous shape-giving that ‘we are today no longer capable even of suspecting.’33 ‘Dance’ and ‘sculpture’ are forms of the ‘earliest mimesis of objects,’ which were ‘based on imitation of the performances through which primitive man established relations with these objects.’34 And the ‘incomparable drawings of the elk’ by Stone Age man were possible ‘only because the hand guiding the implement still remembered the bow with which it had felled the beast.’35
On the other side of the Fall, the now ‘lost’ similarity can be found in ‘the Adamite spirit of language.’ ‘Song’ also ‘holds fast to the image of such a past.’36 This ‘lost’ past was one in which similarity was ‘free from the tendency to become dissipated.’37 To explain the transformations that the mimetic faculty has undergone Benjamin introduces the concept of ‘nonsensuous similarity.’ This concept is, he contends, ‘a relative one: it indicates that we no longer possess in our perception whatever once made it possible to speak of a similarity which might exist between a constellation of stars and a human.’38 The example of the imitation of the astrological sphere provides Benjamin with an initial anchor point for explaining what he means by nonsensuous similarity.39
The word ‘nonsensuous’ draws attention to the fact that ‘similarity’ is not determined by perceptual ‘evidence’ of ‘similarity’ as such, but rather that it consists in a ‘gift for producing’ and ‘recognizing’ cosmic similarities.40 'n this respect, the reference to the ‘Adamite spirit of language’ is significant since it points to the preservation of the ‘past’ capacity for recognizing similarity; through it, Benjamin can invoke the ‘canon’ of language as a resource ‘according to which the meaning of nonsensuous similarity can be . . . partly clarified.’41 There are a number of ways that the perception of similarity makes a ‘fleeting appearance’ post-Fall; in each case, it ‘has the character of an anamnesis—that is to say, of a lost similarity.’42 In contrast to the symbol, which Benjamin states ‘is definable as a sign by means of which no similarity can appear’ there is, he claims, a ‘determinate empirical similarity’ in ‘the sign character of the word.’43 For instance, in reading [lesen] ‘the magical function of the alphabet’ is restored as selection [herauslesen] on the basis of similarity. The German language retains the Latin root for reading [Lectio] with the sense it conveys of the ‘picking out’ or ‘selection’ of letters.44 Such selection operates on the basis of similarity. Benjamin likens the selection of letters in reading to ‘runes,’ which themselves are the mode of ‘transition’ ‘between treetops, clouds, entrails, on the one hand, and letters, on the other.’45
For Benjamin, the perception of similitude offers a limited resurgence of Adamic naming: it gives the ‘fleeting appearance’ of the paradisiacal similarity of the sign character of the word with meaning, and of the similarity in sound that ‘corresponds to the fleeting appearance of a similarity in the object.’46 In the early essay on language, naming language was the fabric that bound ‘man to the language of things.’47 In that essay Benjamin describes ‘the communicating muteness of things (animals) toward the word-language of man, which receives them in name.’48 The capacity for producing and naming similarities in the name is what has been lost with the Fall.
It is worth noting how the ‘Adamite spirit of language’ is a ‘canon’ in the sense that Assmann specifies: it is complete and admits no variations in the status of its components. I will return to this point in a moment. For now I would like to focus on the way Benjamin’s thesis regarding similarity identifies needs and resources that exceed an exclusively evolutionary determination of human life. The imperative of evolutionary survival is itself understood by Benjamin in terms of compulsion, to be a way of enforcing similarity, or having to ‘become’ similar. The needs and resources that exceed this imperative are the in-eliminable remnants that Benjamin opposes to Hegel’s conception of the modern separation of spheres, in which needs are met in identifiable spheres of activity, including religious and aesthetic practices. When Benjamin asks whether the mimetic faculty is in decay or transformation,49 he is also asking whether, and if so where, the existential needs it met can still be satisfied.50
In Benjamin’s account there seems to be an interaction between the phylogenetic basis of the drive to make things similar and the way this drive collects a reservoir of ‘similarity’ that the mimetic relations with things establishes over time. On each of these levels we can identify the needs and practices that in Hegel’s account are, if not extinguished, managed and discharged within the functionally differentiated spheres of modern institutions. For Benjamin, in contrast, the gift of producing and perceiving similarities testifies to the animal legacy of ‘the once-violent compulsion to become similar, to be forced into adaptation.’51 In respect to this rudimentary animal legacy, our mimetic faculty provided resources for the management of our dependence on the violent forces of nature. Such dependence was given ‘expression’ in different outlets, such as magical practices, and it persists ‘in the primal anxiety of animistic world views, and is preserved in myth.’52 The mimetic capacity has its second layer of significance here in the power of expression, which releases it from animal servitude to nature: as expressive force the mimetic capacity stands as ‘the source of the wealth of meaning that human needs’ pour over a world that thereby becomes humanised.53 In Benjamin’s understanding, the meaning-invested world that is preserved in myth can be transformed, but this reservoir of meaning cannot be replenished. It is for this reason that he practices critique, in Habermas’s terms, in the mode of ‘rescuing’ what remains of this past resource from forgetfulness and decay.54
The core of the idea of similitude is the claim that there is a distinctly mimetic faculty, evidence of which is found in all kinds of expressive behaviour. This faculty finds readable meaning and patterns that reach beyond immediate perceptual limits and embrace the inanimate. Language is ‘the highest level’ of such mimetic behaviour because it dispels the hold over human beings of the mythic relation to nature.55 The perception and reproduction of these ‘similarities’ is the satisfaction of the human need for meaning, whose results are projected outwards over sensuous things in this process.
The physiognomical gaze of Proust, like the gaze of the child, rests on these ‘similarities.’ Proust finds them in the madeleine or the lace curtains; the child finds them and reproduces them in play. Children’s play ‘is everywhere permeated by mimetic modes of behavior.’ Furthermore, their play is ‘by no means limited to what one person can imitate in another. The child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher, but also a windmill and a train.’56 The way Benjamin introduces the notion of profane illumination in his 1929 essay on Surrealism also draws attention to the sheer variety of instances amenable to mimetic play. He praises the Surrealists for exchanging, ‘the play of human features for the face of an alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds.’57 In his discussions of Proust, the profane illumination of surrealism, and children’s play, Benjamin highlights the unlimited number of occasions and objects in which one can find ‘similarities.’ The choice of these examples also emphasises how the body, which, he contends, was the first material on which the mimetic faculty was tested, sustains ‘the past’ practice of similarity in modern life. In the case of the Surrealists he cues this point more explicitly to the theme of the recollection of the lost power of tradition that is adapted to new revolutionary exigencies when he refers to the respects in which ‘the collective’ is also a body.58 Just like the role of aromas as a trigger for mémoire involontaire, the detection of similarities relies on our corporeal relation to our environment. In this respect, ‘similarity’ bypasses the purposive habit of reflection that undermines the specific kind of ‘forgetting’ that his essays on Baudelaire and Proust claim to be involved in ‘memory.’ Similarity also supersedes the modern categories of ‘art’ and ‘literature.’ In a sense, the attempt to bridge art and life in surrealism can be understood as an artificial way of reaching behind the historical installation of these modern categories. After all, the split that they formalise is arguably the target of Benjamin’s observations regarding the ‘isolation’ that is the condition of the modern novel. Similarity is now only available, in Proust’s words, in ‘flashes’ of perception; in the pre-lapsarian condition, as Benjamin’s essay ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ claims, similarity was the mode of perception. Seemingly, although post-lapsarian similarity revives the feeling of being at home in the world it does so through the inverted path that mimetic behaviour takes postFall. The Adamic language of the name was the pre-lapsarian condition of similarity. The post-lapsarian experience of mimetic behaviour, in contrast, arrives at language as the medium for similarity as its end point.
In the last extended account of his views on mimesis and similarity, the 1933 essay ‘On the Mimetic Faculty,’ Benjamin has removed some of the diverse themes covered in the ‘Doctrine of Similarity’ so that his focus falls more squarely on language as the canon for non-sensuous similarity. To be specific, it is in this essay that he claims that earlier forms of mimetic behaviour were ‘stages’ from which the ‘mimetic gift’ gains ‘admittance to writing and language.’ With the entry of mimetic behaviour into this medium ‘the earlier powers of mimetic production and comprehension have passed without residue, to the point where they have liquidated those of magic.’59 Magic is now seen as an imposition or enslavement, which the transfer of the mimetic gift to language loosens. And language, as a corollary, is not, as it had been in the early Language essay, seen to be a repository of magic and divided according to the ‘good’ magic of immanent material communication and the ‘bad’ one of an indifferent sign providing merely external representation for a thing. I will return to this point shortly. Before doing so I would like to note briefly the points of overlap between Benjamin’s theory of similitude and his conception of the existential significance of the past in his treatment of the topic of ‘experience.’
In ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ Benjamin describes the structure of experience as an ‘afterimage.’60 But it may be more accurate to describe ‘experience’ as a ‘negative afterimage’ given the way that feelings and expectations later flesh out the fleeting traces of the past. In this sense the experience is never ‘there’ at all. Its kernel is a fleeting impression from the past, later ‘recollected’ and built on according to the vicissitudes of an individual’s life and the meaning these impressions can be made to carry.61 One of the clearest examples of this structure of experience as a negative afterimage comes from Benjamin’s treatment of his own childhood. In his 1938 essay ‘A Berlin Childhood Around 1900’ Benjamin remembers the mood and feelings of his earliest memories and the stories from his childhood that evoke them. In this essay, as in his references to Proust in his essays of the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, childhood is the time in which the material that later stimulates recollection is marked out.62 Although the capacity for experience is present in the child, its fulfilment requires the remembrance of specific episodes and the wishes that accompanied them in the adult. Thus Benjamin refers to his repeated childhood wish to have his fill of sleep. ‘The fairy in whose presence we are granted a wish is there for each of us. But few of us know how to remember the wish we have made; and so, few of us recognize its fulfilment later in our lives.’63 Later Benjamin’s childhood wish is ‘fulfilled’; but ‘it was a long time,’ Benjamin writes, ‘before I recognized its fulfilment in the fact that all my cherished hopes for a position and proper livelihood had been in vain.’64 In contrast, the happiness of the child depends on and seeks forms of temporally compact satisfaction: this is what attunes children to the possibility of experiencing happiness in the momentary things of life, like the aromas of the baked apple that eased Benjamin out of bed in winter.65
If, as Habermas has argued, within the Marxist tradition ‘Benjamin was one of the first to emphasize a further moment in the concepts of exploitation and progress: besides hunger and oppression, failure; besides prosperity and liberty, happiness,’66 then the importance of Benjamin’s treatment of the happiness of the child cannot be overstated. It is the child’s experience of happiness that lends a distinctive hue to his practice of ‘rescuing critique.’ The experience of the child does not just authenticate the possibility of happiness, it also attaches its realisation to a particular conception of the semantic potential of the things of prosaic life. What is really distinctive about the child’s experience is the manner in which it condenses and concentrates existential time, that is to say, in the child’s experience time is fulfilled. The child’s world is the world ‘distorted in a state of similarity,’ to which Proust’s mémoire involontaire, and the ‘true face of existence’ disclosed in surrealist acts also point.67 In his discussions of experience [Erfahrung], Proust, surrealism, the storyteller, and the figure of the child, Benjamin re-iterates the key feature of his conception of similitude: things are stripped of their opaque, ‘hermeneutic’ sensuous form and become ‘indexes’ of meaning; to use the phraseology of the Language essay, under the gaze of similitude things embody their names. The point is significant: the clarity of the albeit fleeting appearance of similitude, in which the Adamite spirit of language is active, provides an alternative conception to the opacity of myth for Benjamin’s analysis of the way sensuous form embodies meaning. It seems to me that the concept of experience in Benjamin’s writing is more or less structurally interchangeable with his concept of similitude. Experience [Erfahrung], we might say, is the ‘historical’ version of the claim Benjamin makes regarding the ‘phylogenetic’ mimetic faculty, whose objects he refers to by the term ‘similitude.’ The positive status Benjamin ascribes to each of these terms is weighed against the negative meaning he ascribes to the post-lapsarian condition of ‘man’ according to the Biblical structure of the Fall in the early theological essay from 1916: ‘On Language as Such and On the Language of Man.’ In his new terminology, ‘experience’ and ‘similitude’ confirm the positive, theological evaluation of things in the 1916 essay. As such, they belong to the system of oppositions that characterises Benjamin’s earliest thinking. They bring to the foreground a conception of ‘things’ as embodying a ‘luminous’ meaning that is opposed to the hermeneutic opacity that grounds Benjamin’s complaints about the ‘image.’ Crucially, it is the understanding of similitude as ‘things in words’ that provides Benjamin with the possibility of outlining a positive, or ‘true,’ conception of the image.
Experience [Erfahrung] is arrayed against the alienated ‘experience’ of modern life called Erlebnis, and similitude against the merely external relation to things. In his 1916 essay on language this merely ‘external’ relation is characterised as the ‘parody’ that ‘marks the birth of the human word, in which name no longer lives intact and which has stepped out of name-language, the language of knowledge, from what we may call its own immanent magic, in order to become expressly, as it were externally, magic.’68 I will come back to this formulation, whose manner of specification of the distinction between the naming language of man (itself a derivative of God’s creative word) and the mere ‘human word’ in terms of the distinction between immanent magic and external magic warrants further scrutiny.
For now I would like to mention the terms of his contrast between the pre- and post-lapsarian condition of nature in the essay on language. This contrast, whose character rests on the positive concept of expressive nature in the pre-lapsarian condition, encapsulates the difficulty Benjamin faces in distinguishing what are ultimately two aspects of the image. On one side, there is the internal luminosity of things in their state of ‘material community’ (SW I, 67) [‘stoffliche Gemeinschaft einander mitteilen’ (GS II, I, 147)]. This luminosity comes about through their relation to the creative word of God. On the other, there is what Benjamin refers to as the merely external relation of things to fallen words as the means for their manipulation by men. The terms of this contrast mirror the difference between the state of similarity and the modern de-racinated life in which ‘things’ are grasped only in their opaque externality: the later essays specify that the material community of communication, which precedes the split between the world of mute objects and inter-subjective communication, ‘takes place through similarity.’69 The fleeting grasp of similarity post-Fall has value because it is the remnant of the original state worn away by modern life. In this respect, like the material community it evokes, the condemnation of the merely external relation to things implied in the concept of ‘similarity’ also references the temporal priority of the paradisiacal state over the Fall.
In the Language essay, Benjamin holds that there is a pre-lapsarian relation to things, in which their meaning is transparent to man. Things embody meaning accessible to man in the naming language. This distinction between mute nature and nature named by man and amenable to knowing is fundamental for Benjamin. It belongs to his tripartite distinction between the creative word of God; the naming word of man; and the magic materiality of nature. According to ‘mystical linguistic theory,’ which Benjamin intends to distinguish from his ‘rigorous’ ‘metaphysical’ approach to language, ‘the word is simply the essence of the thing.’ ‘That is incorrect,’ he writes, ‘because the thing in itself has no word, being created from God’s word and known in its name by a human word.’70 The thing, in Benjamin’s ‘metaphysical’ theory stands for the name it receives from man. In effect, Benjamin’s theory of language, presented in his commentary on the Book of Genesis, posits that in naming language
the word of God has not remained creative; it has become in one part receptive, even if receptive to language. Thus fertilized, it aims to give birth to the language of things themselves, from which in turn, soundlessly, in the mute magic of nature, the word of God shines forth.71
This ‘mute magic of nature’ from which God’s word ‘shines forth’ is the guarantee of univocity of meaning and genuine knowledge. ‘The proper name is the communion of man with the creative word of God’ but it is ‘not the only one.’ ‘Man knows a further linguistic communion with God’s word.’ This ‘further communion’ is the knowledge of nature enabled by the name. Naming language is distinguished from the ‘bourgeois,’ conventional theory of language. Benjamin writes:
Through the word, man is bound to the language of things. The human word is the name of things. Hence, it is no longer conceivable, as the bourgeois view of language maintains, that the word has an accidental relation to its object, that it is a sign for things (or knowledge of them) agreed by some convention. Language never gives mere signs.72
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.73
In contrast to the creative word of God and the naming language of man stands the ‘human word,’ It is the ‘true Fall of the spirit of language.’ In it the ‘expressly mediate’ and ‘externally communicating’ language is born. This language severs the ties of words to things; it communicates something ‘other than itself.’74
What is stripped back in the flashes of similitude as the recollection of the paradisiacal state is the external shell, the opaque form. Put in the terms of the essay on language, the Fall is the lowering over things of this external opacity. It results in confusion and enslavement to things. The contrasting positions of communicative intimacy with mute things in the language of the name and the confused and mediate state of externality are represented by the different modalities of language and crucially of the ‘name’ prior and after the Fall. The Language essay presents the merely external relation to sensuous form as a consequence of the Fall, when ‘God’s word curses the ground’ and language is ‘enslaved in prattle’ and ‘things are enslaved in folly.’ ‘Signs must become confused where things are entangled.’75 More specifically, Benjamin describes the condition as a ‘turning away from things, which was enslavement.’
I have argued in this book that the central impulse of Benjamin’s thought is his fear of the entrapment in sensuous form. One instance of this fear is Benjamin’s aversion to the totalising grasp of a merely sensuous life. It is myth that in Benjamin’s view elevates merely sensuous life to a matter of principle and thereby enslaves human beings to the reign of ‘external’ forms. In the essay on language, enslavement, a condition evoked in his later treatment of the topic of similitude, is asserted to date from when ‘the plan for the Tower of Babel came into being, and linguistic confusion with it.’76 Whereas ‘use’ and ‘knowledge’ were part of the earlier immanently magical community of things, now words and things are entangled in arbitrariness and confused. The descent of language into the merely human word sets the tone; things are only known through the mediation of words that designate arbitrary meaning through signs.
One of the themes in the essays that deal with the depleted capacity for experience under modern conditions is the way that events are brought near, but without breaking down the externality of things to meaning. In his Storyteller essay, for instance, Benjamin complains that in the modern mode of news communication events are brought close but in a way that retains their externality. ‘Information,’ which is the mode of news communication, deals with an anonymous event that is entirely external to the individual’s concerns. Information cultivates a dependence on a form of communication that is ‘already shot through with explanations’ and it does so because its criterion of ready verifiability privileges and encourages an interest in the communication of what is close. In its obedience to information able to supply ‘a handle for what is nearest,’ ‘news’ forms a part of the fundamental assault on the type of traditional life that sustained the story form.77 The story had communicated ‘[i]ntelligence that came from afar—whether over spatial distance (from foreign countries) or temporal (from tradition).’78 Such intelligence had ‘possessed an authority, which gave it validity, even when it was not subject to verification.’79 Whereas the storyteller describes events in a way that is bereft of ‘explanations’ but of practical interest to the listener, the communication of ‘information’ in the news is indifferent to the concerns of an individual.
These points in the Storyteller essay are made in a different idiom in the essay on language. For instance, Benjamin argues that onomatopoeia is evidence of the earlier naming language insofar as the sounds of words give access to the things themselves. Onomatopoeia does not bring things near, but it strips them of the character of externality that envelops things when they are invoked through human words. Nonetheless the main terms of the contrast between, on one side, a confused field of things and persons inaccessible to one another and in need of the support of intricate explanation to be understood; and, on the other, the integral sense of a whole characterised by mutual communicative accessibility, is indicative of the pattern of thinking that is common to both the Language essay and the later pieces dealing with experience and similitude. Within the paradisiacal conception, the Proustian distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory common to modern life would be null and void because there would be no need to get through the facade that blocks access to the meaning of things and that would therefore need to be pierced through. Equally, in the Language essay man’s ‘naming’ language signals the ‘fully cognizant’ status of language in paradise.80 There is no distorting will, which needs to be suspended in order to recover the pristine state of intimacy with the world. Benjamin’s conception of naming language installs the distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’ images as a distinction between two distinct modes of existence. On the one hand, there is the transparent experience of sensuous form according to naming language, on the other, the opacity of sensuous forms tangled up in mere signs. To use Assmann’s terminology, the first has the priority attributed to the written ‘canon.’ And it also has the virtue of ‘truth.’ Like the polemical act of self-definition that Assmann identifies in early Judaism, naming language requires this virtue to identify and perforate the (false) opacity of form that has descended over things. As such, the meaning it embodies has a ready answer to the question, ‘why’?
The experience of similitude is different from the categories of the allegory and the symbol because it places the experience of sensuous form under the sign of embodied meaning. Allegory mortifies form in order to point beyond it; the symbol embodies an irreducibly ambiguous meaning; ‘similitude’ is the authentic experience of the sensuously embodied meaning. And the connection of similitude to the articulate clarity of language vouchsafes this authenticity. In the next chapter I will consider in detail the significance of the image as it occurs in language for Benjamin’s thinking. To conclude this chapter, I would like to examine Benjamin’s positive account of the sensuous form of the image in similitude in relation to the references to meaning or significance [Bedeutung] that lace their way through Benjamin’s writing. As I mentioned in my introductory remarks to this chapter, the theories of similitude and naming language are ways of building up a certain conception of liveable meaning. My model for the analysis of the topos of meaning comes not from what Benjamin says, since he nowhere provides a systematic account of the term. Rather, I will draw on the three-tier model of meaning set forth in Roy Rappaport’s study of ritual and religion. To my mind, these three tiers can be usefully understood in relation to the three levels of significance in Kantian philosophy. The Kantian inflection of these terms provides a scale against which the functions of certain categories and their meaning-effects across Benjamin’s corpus can be analysed. In particular, this way of analysing the stakes of meaning in Benjamin’s thinking can be used to chart his use of the binary oppositional scheme to evoke and sustain an ‘image of the whole.’
Rappaport outlines three levels of meaning, which span the simple to the complex.81 The scale is not a hierarchy of values per se but of meaning and what he calls ‘subjectivity’ and ‘integration.’82 In this regard, the scale designates the complexity of the environment, which requires greater involvement and integration to be effectively managed. What is important for our purposes is that the schema does not entail that the different kinds of meaning designate functions in discrete or mutually exclusive ways; it is presupposed that these levels interact and combine, despite the evident presence of tension between the lowest and two higher orders. At the simplest level meaning is marked as distinction. The meaning of a cat in the simple semantic sense of everyday functional communication is defined by the distinction of the cat from the dog, from the elephant and the ant, and so on. Readily apparent differences in the field of experience are marked and registered as semantic properties through distinction.
At the middle level, meaning is not just an execution of rationally drawn distinctions, but also an integration of such meaning with value. It engages and involves the subject in the process of meaning formation. This second level is not satisfied with establishing clarity of semantic designation through distinction; it expects an answer to the question of what any such meaning could be. It asks after the meaningfulness of distinction. In this respect, its mode of operation is not distinction or separation, but the detection of similarities beyond apparent differences. This level of meaning engages with greater complexity in the environment. Rappaport suggests that when ‘confronted’ with a ‘complex mass of information’ one does not respond by ‘further distinction’ but by a reduction of their ‘number and import by discovering similarities among apparently disparate phenomena.’ These similarities, which are discovered under the surfaces of distinct phenomena may, Rappaport writes, ‘become more significant than the distinctions themselves. They may, indeed, when illuminated or discovered, strike us with the force of revelation.’83 Rappaport defines the modality of this level of meaning in terms of metaphor. In doing so, he highlights how metaphor imparts connotative resonance to the elements used in the communication of meaning; it ‘enriches the world’s meaningfulness, for the significance of every term that participates in a metaphor is transformed into more than itself, into an icon of other things as well.’84
Finally, the highest level of meaning invokes an experiential rather than an intellectual disposition. Its functioning consists in neither separation nor assimilation, but in unification. It is the experience of radical identity or union of self with the other. ‘It may be experienced through art, or in the acts of love, but is, perhaps, most often felt in ritual and other religious devotions.’85 The middle order of meaning reduces the distinctions of the lower order, but the experience of unification involved in higher order meaning annihilates the distinctions that typify the lower level. Further, in this highest level of meaning the requirement of subjective participation distinguishes this level from the taxonomic and metaphoric organisation, each of which retain the schema of a characterisation of forms that are external to the one who characterises them, in the lower orders.86
According to Rappaport, the low-order meaning is discursive, whereas what is experienced as ultimately meaningful in the experience of unification is ‘largely, if not entirely, non-discursive.’87 The hierarchy the schema implies is one of meaningfulness, rather than knowledge or insight. As such, the movement towards higher order meaning would be one that breaks down the referential link of a cognitive operation of identification of objects that distinguishes the lower order and which presupposes the separation of subject and object. The hierarchy of meaningfulness is a ‘hierarchy of subjectivity’88 because it patterns increasing affect-laden involvement in the detection of similarities (middle order) right up to the utterly subjective idiom of unification with its signature criterion of participation in meaning (higher order). The hierarchy is also one of integration. The significance of this point may be explained in relation to the lessening hold of knowledge claims and the decrease in feelings of alienation (from the world) as the hierarchy is ascended. Hence the low-order meaning makes distinctions that are specified in language and whose purpose is the division of the world into discretely identifiable objects. In contrast, in middle and high order meaning there is, respectively (1) a recognition of the connections among these objects, and (2) finally a unification of the world itself into a whole.89
Rappaport’s schema as I have presented it corresponds with some of the functions and effects that the Kantian philosophy allocates respectively to the faculties of the imagination, understanding, and reason. Imagination deals with the apprehension of a manifold of intuition; it provides the manifold with singular forms (i.e., distinction). Understanding is a faculty that executes more complex operations; it is able to locate forms under categories, thereby performing the function of cognition (i.e., the identification of similarities in the sense Rappaport allocates as the metaphor function of second-order meaning). Finally, reason is the faculty of ideas of freedom, world, and God. It is the highest faculty of integration. It supplies the ideas under which the diversity of the objects can be unified into a world. Kant specifies that the ideas are ‘subjective ideas of reason.’ However, the Kantian model of integration, which also measures the shift in gears from simple apprehension to the complex field dealt with under an idea of reason, departs from Rappaport’s characterisation of higher-order meaning as nondiscursive. This point of difference can be explained by analysing the sense Kant allocates to the specification that the ideas of reason are ‘subjective’; Kant intends to highlight the regulative rather than substantive function of the ideas. Because this specification intends to restrict the application of these ideas pointing to the ways they aid knowledge and moral judgment, he provides something like a second-order standpoint on Rappaport’s systematisation of meaning. For Kant, we might say, functions of integration and subjective meaning have a discursive mode precisely so they don’t overstep the limitations their subjective status entails. The Kantian limitation of higher modes of integration to the discursive mode allows for a critical perspective on the unstated functions of the schema of ascending meaning that is identifiable but not stated and defended as such in Benjamin’s work.
There are two different ways to formulate the claim of meaning in Benjamin’s thought. On the one hand, there are the different ways of identifying the singular form or the fragment as the locus of significance. According to the influential modelling of his thinking on the Goethean ur-phenomenon, most notably put forward by Hannah Arendt, Benjamin finds meaning and significance in the small objects of the grain of wheat engraved with the Shema Israel in the Musée Cluny or the miniature handwriting in the exercise book. I have noted in earlier chapters that this understanding of Benjamin overlooks his critical comments on the Goethean conception, and the specific way he proposes to amend it. It is also clear that Arendt’s discussion downplays the significance of the writing in these examples; instead, she emphasises that they are examples of miniature ‘things.’ In doing so she overlooks the way that words mark out the exit from anxious entrapment in the symbol. Nonetheless, this type of reading can account for Benjamin’s Proustian treatment of the material object as the occasion for mémoire involontaire. These material objects are the things described according to the vocabulary of significance— Bedeutung. Others have used the vocabulary of the monad to point to the same tendencies in his thinking. Such readings are compelling because they work with the image of Benjamin as a thinker whose idiom is the fragment; he attempts to find the material object able to evoke the whole. I have argued here that it is in reference to the role of the ‘whole’ that one can identify the second way that claims of meaning are made in Benjamin’s work.
Benjamin often refers to the experience of the ‘whole’ as a fleeting perception of what is now lost, or as the kind of perception accessible to the child, or as the experience of the paradisiacal state. He describes the muscular sense of Proust’s sentences to make palpable, not multiple single images, but the weight of a whole. It is important to consider the function of such themes, as critics credit his use of the ‘fragment’ as a profound insight into the modern condition as well as a tacit methodological program. I will discuss some representative versions of this thesis in the following chapter. In the context of such interpretations it is striking that from the Language essay through ‘The Image of Proust’ to the various pieces on similitude, Benjamin invokes the image of the ‘world as a whole.’90 He appeals in such contexts to a form of meaning that is integrative and participatory. Benjamin distinguishes the ‘world as a whole’ from modern alienation, or from the oppressive ordinariness not transfigured by similitude; in this respect the approach to meaning in Benjamin’s thinking can be grasped along the ascending model that Rapapport proposes. In the next two chapters I will consider the way that this conception of meaning is put to practical use in a way that extends the scope of the fleeting experience described in similitude. The dialectical image, I will argue, is an experience of meaning that converts the will to paths of action. In chapter 5 I will argue that in the dialectical image, an experience of sensuous form is that which immediately resolves the will to an action without the need for further reflection. The hinge between this experience of form and action is the emphatic experience of meaning that is sketched out in Benjamin’s theory of similitude.
I have suggested in earlier chapters that the kernel of Benjamin’s early work is the opposition between the Revelation and myth. This opposition underpins the key distinction in the essay on language between merely external relations to things as these are mediated by arbitrary human words, and the luminous state of knowledge, which is predicated on a transparent relation to God’s creative intention, as this is forged through the language of the name. In his theory of similitude Benjamin moves from his condemnation of the hermeneutic understanding of the sensuous form that does not involve annihilation of the form to other ways of dealing with the relation between meaning and the sensuous form that embodies it. However distinctive Benjamin’s approach to the image in his theory of similitude, this theory, like his theory of experience [Erfahrung], still turns on his early theological account of the language of the name. As such, it installs a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ modalities of the image. The good image forms part of the canon of the revelation. To use Assmann’s terminology, writing saves it from the pejorative status of idolatrous images. Its attributes of transparent, unequivocal meaning are the counter to the figure of the opaque and ambiguous demonic expressivity of myth.
In the next chapter I examine the last main version of Benjamin’s consideration of the manner in which the sensuous form is related to meaning. My focus falls on his major, but incomplete work, The Arcades Project. Some of the problems Benjamin grapples with when he considers the topic of the meaning of the sensuous form are constant, even if the terms in which they are presented alter and these alterations affect his conclusions. One constant problem is the issue of the relation between the sensuous form of the image and emancipation. In some early works the emancipatory key is less precise than in the later where it is given an historical index. The key problem of The Arcades is how to rescue an ultimate meaning from the things of the past, which, in respect to the meaning it seeks, is akin to the role that ‘creation’ plays in the early works. In his approach to this problem the ghost of enslavement to things broached in the Language essay remains a major concern.
At the end of Benjamin’s career his denunciation in ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ of the image has undergone substantial modification. The way that his last works treat sensuous forms as possible paths to liberation requires, as we will see, a revision of his early schema of oppositions. The absolute valorisation of transparent meaning and knowledge in the early essays, a position that forms the backdrop to the theory of similitude, is modified now that Benjamin’s focus falls on a specifically historical problem. The transition is foreshadowed in the nuances that connect the theory of similitude with Adamic language. In Benjamin’s account similitude can be understood as a sensuous ‘index’ that is a bit like allegory: the sensuous form in similitude expresses a meaning that, once it becomes accessible in verbal articulation, points beyond the form. Of course, similitude does not ‘mortify’ the form, and its peculiar endorsement of transparent meaning in sensuous form therefore constitutes a transition in Benjamin’s thinking on the image. In a further shift, in Benjamin’s late theory of the dialectical image, the experience-ability of meaning in the form does not, unlike similitude, allow the form to be transcended. In particular, the importance The Arcades places on the detritus of material culture is framed in relation to the revolutionary task of providing a basis for the prospects of political emancipation. Accordingly, the conception of sensuous form in Benjamin’s late work can be treated in relation to the problem of providing access to the meaningful emancipatory motivation, which is supposed to be present in lost ideals and dreams as these can be ‘read’ in the detritus of everyday life.
1. J. Assmann, ‘Five Stages on the Road to the Canon: Tradition and Written Culture in Ancient Israel and Early Judaism,’ Religion and Cultural Memory, trans. R. Livingstone (Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, CA, 2006), 63–81, 67–68.
2. Assmann, ‘Five Stages,’ 65.
3. Assmann, ‘Five Stages,’ 77.
4. Assmann, ‘Five Stages,’ 77.
5. Assmann, ‘Five Stages,’ 77.
6. Assmann, ‘Five Stages,’ 78. As Assmann concludes: ‘language replaces not just the king, but also the temple. The canon transforms the temple into writing. In the synagogues . . . the scrolls of the Torah replace the cultic image that in ancient Egypt remains in a shrine until it is brought out to the public gaze’ (Assmann, ‘Five Stages,’ 78). Instead of the pagan worship of the cosmos, Judaism worships the ‘scriptures that have been elevated into a canon’ (Assmann, ‘Five Stages,’ 79).
7. Assmann, ‘Five Stages,’ 78.
8. Assmann, ‘Five Stages,’ 77–78.
9. See my discussion of this point in A. Ross, ‘What is the “Force” of Moral Law in Kant’s Practical Philosophy?’, Parallax 51 (April–May, 2009): 27–41. See also D. Henrich’s Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World, Stanford Studies in Kant and German Idealism (Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, CA, 1992), esp. 12–13, 23.
10. The idea of liveable images is outlined in Hans Blumenberg’s theory of ‘significance’ as a ‘work’ on myth in his Work on Myth, trans. R. M. Wallace (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1985). I will treat the significance of Blumenberg’s theory for the analysis of Benjamin’s thinking in chapter 5.
11. In this chapter I will refer to the cited essays of Benjamin by name in the notes, followed by the volume number from Selected Writings, using the abbreviation SW. Unlike my use of particular works of Benjamin’s to anchor the discussion in the other main chapters, this chapter will range across a wide variety of his essays. The vocabulary of the ‘flash’ is used in Walter Benjamin, ‘Doctrine of Similarity,’ SW II, 695; and the term ‘recognition’ in Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty,’ SW II, 720.
12. Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller,’ SW III, 147.
13. Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’ SW IV, 316.
14. Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’ SW IV, 315.
15. Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’ SW IV, 315.
16. Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’ SW IV, 315, cites Marcel Proust, À la Recherche du temps perdu (Pléïade: Paris, 1962), vol. 1 (Du côté de chez Swann), 44.
17. Benjamin, ‘The Image of Proust,’ SW II, 238.
18. Benjamin, ‘The Image of Proust,’ SW II, 238.
19. Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’ SW IV, 316, emphasis added. Benjamin here uses ‘ritual’ in the sense of festival, communal events that filled up the calendar.
20. It is striking how close these formulations are to Benjamin’s position in his Artwork essay. This latter essay is, however, encumbered by its attempt to find a satisfactory resolution to the ‘fascist aestheticisation of politics.’ It does so by defending the unwieldy thesis that film promises a new mass art that would inculcate a distracted, collective relation to non-auratic form. This relation would supposedly amount to an effective riposte to the fascists’ ‘aestheticisation of politics’ with its ‘politicization of art.’ If the overall thesis of this essay is unconvincing, the specific points Benjamin makes are insightful. The essay cites as exemplary the tactile and optical relations that determine our relation to architectural forms; and the distracted rather than contemplative state that, through these sensory and habitual modes of engagement, structures our use of buildings. It sees in these relations to architectural form evidence of the type of destruction of the auratic atmosphere of authority in art that Benjamin wants to find in the technologically reproducible art form of film. In this regard, he specifically highlights the type of work of evaluation a film requires of its audience as well as its episodic mode of construction, which does not record its scenes in narrative sequence and accordingly deconstructs the mechanisms that build up the aura around the presence of the actor in theatre: ‘for the first time—and this is the effect of film—the human being is placed in a position where he must operate with his whole living person, while forgoing its aura. For the aura is bound to his presence in the here and now. There is no facsimile of the aura. The aura surrounding Macbeth on the stage cannot be divorced from the aura which, for the living spectators, surrounds the actor who plays him.’ In this respect there is inauthenticity in the mechanisms of theatrical representation that is not so pressing in the case of film. In film, ‘the fact that the actor represents someone else before the audience matters much less than the fact that he represents himself before the apparatus.’ ‘What distinguishes the shot in the film studio, however, is that the camera is substituted for the audience. As a result, the aura surrounding the actor is dispelled—and, with it, the aura of the figure he portrays’ (SW IV, 260). On the topic of distraction, the essay proposes a type of resolution to the modern problem of collective experience identified in his essays on the Storyteller, Proust, and Motifs in Baudelaire. Particularly notable is Benjamin’s illuminating discussion of the way that film allows closer, qualitatively different scrutiny of phenomena than ever before: the painter obtains ‘a total image, whereas that of the cinematographer is piecemeal, its manifold parts being assembled according to a new law. Hence, the presentation of reality in film is incomparably the more significant for people of today, since it provides the equipment-free aspect of reality they are entitled to demand from a work of art, and does so precisely on the basis of the most intensive interpenetration of reality with equipment’ (SW IV, 263–264, his emphasis). Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ (Third Version), SW IV, 251–283.
21. Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’ SW IV, 315.
22. Benjamin, ‘On the Image of Proust,’ SW II, 239. This effect has its basis in communication: ‘“all ordinary dreams turn into idle stories as soon as one tells them to someone”’ (Benjamin cites Unold, ‘Image of Proust,’ SW II, 239.) Cf. Benjamin’s comment in the ‘Storyteller’ essay that: ‘Boredom is the dreambird of experience. A slight rustling in the leaves drives him away.’ ‘The Storyteller,’ SW III, 149.
23. Benjamin, ‘On the Image of Proust,’ SW II, 247.
24. Benjamin, ‘On the Image of Proust,’ SW II, 247.
25. Benjamin, ‘On the Image of Proust,’ SW II, 240. Emphasis added.
26. Benjamin, ‘Experience,’ SW II, 553.
27. There is also a sketch for the essay ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ in which Benjamin contemplates the relation between the position he will defend in that essay and his significant early essay ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’: ‘Antitheses Concerning Word and Name,’ SW II, 717–719. See also the 1936 fragment, ‘The Knowledge that the First Material on which the Mimetic Faculty Tested itself’, SW III, 253. In this fragment, Benjamin argues for a more fruitful use in the study of the primal history [Urgeschichte] of the arts of the fact that the ‘first material’ used to test the mimetic faculty was the human body: ‘We should ask whether the earliest mimesis of objects through dance and sculpture was not largely based on imitation of the performances through which primitive man established relations with these objects. Perhaps Stone Age man produced such incomparable drawings of the elk only because the hand guiding the implement still remembered the bow with which it had felled the beast,’ SW III, 253. Cf. the reference to Stone Age drawings of the elk in ‘The Artwork in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,’ SW IV, 257. In the Artwork essay Benjamin uses the example to elucidate the distinction between cult and exhibition value: ‘The elk depicted by Stone Age man on the walls of his cave is an instrument of magic. He exhibits it to his fellow men, to be sure, but in the main it is meant for the spirits.’
28. Benjamin, ‘Doctrine of Similarity,’ SW II, 695.
29. Benjamin, ‘Doctrine of Similarity,’ SW II, 695.
30. Benjamin, ‘Doctrine of Similarity,’ SW II, 696.
31. Benjamin, ‘Antitheses Concerning Word and Name,’ SW II, 718. The passage directly recalls the passage in the Language essay: ‘die material Gemeinsamkeit der Dinge in ihrer Mitteilung zu denken. . . . die Welt überhaupt als ein ungeschiedenes Ganzes befaßt.’ (GS II I, 156). (SW I, I73).
32. Benjamin, ‘Antitheses Concerning Word and Name,’ SW II, 717.
33. Benjamin, ‘Doctrine of the Similar,’ SW II, 695.
34. Benjamin, ‘The Knowledge that the First Material on which the Mimetic Faculty Tested itself,’ SW III, 253.
35. Benjamin, ‘The Knowledge that the First Material on which the Mimetic Faculty Tested itself,’ SW III, 253.
36. Benjamin, ‘Antitheses Concerning Word and Name,’ SW II, 718. Cf. Benjamin’s position on communication through song in the early ‘Language as Such’ essay. The essay puts forward irreconcilable theses regarding the relation of sound to language and ‘dumb’ things. It is because ‘language as such is the mental being of man’ that ‘the mental being of man, alone among all mental entities, [is] communicable without residue. On this is founded the difference between human language and the language of things. . . . Man is the namer; by this we recognize that through him pure language speaks. All nature, insofar as it communicates itself, communicates itself in language, and so finally in man. Hence, he is the lord of nature and can give names to things. Only through the linguistic being of things can he get beyond himself and attain knowledge of them—in the name’ (his emphasis, SW I, 65). Despite this function of revelation of the naming language, Benjamin insists that ‘[l]anguage itself is not perfectly expressed in things themselves’ (SW I, 67). At a metaphorical level this is because ‘the languages of things are imperfect’; at a literal level, however, this is because ‘things are denied the pure formal principle of language—namely, sound. They can communicate to one another only through a more or less material community. This community is immediate and infinite, like every linguistic communication; it is magical (for there is also a magic of matter). The incomparable feature of human language is that its magical community with things is immaterial and purely mental, and the symbol of this is sound. The Bible expresses this symbolic fact when it says that God breathes his breath into man: this is at once life and mind and language’ (SW I, 67). On the other hand, towards the end of the essay when he considers how his position on language relates to the languages of the arts, he distinguishes the language of poetry as ‘partly, if not solely, founded on the name language of man’ from the ‘language of sculpture or painting’ which he says ‘is founded on certain kinds of thing-languages, that in them we find a translation of the language of things into an infinitely higher language, which may still be of the same sphere. We are concerned here with nameless, nonacoustic languages, languages issuing from matter; here we should recall the material community of things in their communication’ (SW I, 73). It is not clear why if ‘things’ are literally ‘dumb’ and restricted therefore to ‘communicate to one another only through a more or less material community’ Benjamin thinks that it is useful for the understanding of artistic values, such as sculpture and painting, which he has designated as ‘thing-languages,’ to treat them as if they were languages and to ‘seek their connection with natural languages.’ Such languages are presumably outside the name language of man. Moreover, he selects as the ‘appropriate’ example for this exercise, ‘because it is derived from the acoustic sphere . . . the kinship between song and the language of birds’ (SW I, 73). Clearly, this example goes against his contention that ‘sound’ is the ‘incomparable feature of human language’ (SW I, 73). But it is also difficult to coordinate with the paradisiacal conception of the phylogenetic value of similarity in dance and painting in the later essays on similarity. Hence there are two different paradisiacal conceptions across Benjamin’s oeuvre: the naming language of man and the phylogenetic expressivity of similarity through the arts of the human body.
37. Benjamin, ‘Antitheses Concerning Word and Name,’ SW II, 718.
38. Benjamin, ‘The Doctrine of the Similar,’ SW II, 696.
39. Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty,’ SW II, 721.
40. Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty,’ SW II, 720.
41. Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty,’ SW II, 720.
42. Benjamin, ‘Antitheses Concerning Word and Name,’ SW II, 718.
43. Benjamin, ‘Antitheses Concerning Word and Name,’ SW II, 718.
44. Benjamin, ‘Antitheses Concerning Word and Name,’ SW II, 718 and N. 3, 719.
45. Benjamin, ‘Antitheses Concerning Word and Name,’ SW II, 718.
46. Benjamin, ‘Antitheses Concerning Word and Name,’ SW II, 718.
47. Benjamin, ‘Language as Such,’ SW I, 69.
48. Benjamin, ‘Language as Such,’ SW I, 70.
49. Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty,’ SW II, 721.
50. The idea that Benjamin’s mimetic faculty aims at is the wish of being at home in the world. This world would be fully transparent and responsive. The wish could be critically described therefore as a childish dream.
51. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Walter Benjamin: Consciousness Raising or Rescuing Critique?’, trans. F. Lawrence, ed. G. Smith, On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA and London, 1991), 90–129, 112.
52. Habermas, ‘Walter Benjamin: Consciousness Raising or Rescuing Critique?’, 112.
53. Habermas, ‘Walter Benjamin: Consciousness Raising or Rescuing Critique?’, 112.
54. Habermas, ‘Walter Benjamin: Consciousness Raising or Rescuing Critique?’, 112: ‘The vocation of the human species, then, is to liquidate that dependence without sealing off the powers of mimesis and the streams of semantic energies, for that would be to lose the poetic capacity to interpret the world in the light of human needs. This is the profane content of the messianic promise. Benjamin has conceived the history of art, from the cultic to the postauratic, as the history of the attempts to represent in images these insensible similarities or correspondences but at the same time to loose the spell that once rested on this mimesis. Benjamin called these attempts divine, because they break myth while preserving and setting free its richness.’ In the following chapter I will examine the way the opposition of the Revelation and myth is adapted in Benjamin’s conception of the ‘dialectical image.’
55. Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty,’ SW II, 722.
56. Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty,’ SW II, 720.
57. Benjamin, ‘Surrealism,’ SW II, 218.
58. Benjamin, ‘Surrealism,’ SW II, 217. His less than satisfactory crib on the Marxist problem of the base-superstructure relation as one of ‘expression’ in the Arcades is one of the many examples that could be cited of his attempt to transfer key elements of his doctrine of similarity to the unsuited territory of historical materialism. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA and London, 1999). Hereafter cited as A. I will focus on this conception of expressive materiality and the place of the Arcades in it in the next chapter. The following passages from the N convolute give a taste of the problem: ‘Marx lays bare the causal connection between economy and culture. For us, what matters is the thread of expression. It is not the economic origins of culture that will be presented, but the expression of the economy in its culture. At issue, in other words, is the attempt to grasp an economic process as perceptible Ur-phenomenon, from out of which proceed all manifestations of life in the arcades (and, accordingly, in the nineteenth century).’ A, [N1a, 6], 460. And: ‘This research—which deals fundamentally with the expressive character of the earliest industrial products, the earliest industrial architecture, the earliest machines, but also the earliest department stores, advertisements, and so on—thus becomes important for Marxism in two ways. First, it will demonstrate how the milieu in which Marx’s doctrine arose affected that doctrine through its expressive character (which is to say, not only through causal connections); but, second, it will also show in what respects Marxism, too, shares the expressive character of the material products contemporary with it’ A, [N1a, 7], 460.
59. Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty,’ SW II, 722.
60. Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’ SW IV, 314.
61. There are obvious connections between this type of position and Freud’s conception of the ‘work’ of memory. See, for instance, Freud’s questioning of the notion of memory as having an expressive relation to the patient’s past. The patient, he writes, ‘is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past.’ Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Volume 18, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis: London, 1975), 18.
62. It is noticeable that certain motifs used in the essay on Proust and Baudelaire are, according to the Berlin Childhood essay, in fact impressions from his own childhood. For instance, he refers to the experience of the empty stocking as being a ‘bag’ and a ‘present’ at the same time (Proust, SW II, 240) in both essays. The multiple meanings of the stocking are used in the essay on Proust to depict the deep similarity of the ‘dream world’ in which there is an ‘opaquely similar’ guise of things to one another (Proust, SW II, 239).
63. Benjamin, ‘Berlin Childhood,’ SW III, 357.
64. Benjamin, ‘Berlin Childhood,’ SW III, 357–358.
65. Benjamin, ‘Berlin Childhood,’ SW III, 357.
66. Habermas, ‘Rescuing Critique,’ 121.
67. See for an account of the specifications Benjamin introduces into the Marxist narrative of awakening, Jacques Rancière, ‘The Archaeomodern Turn,’ Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, ed. M. P. Steinberg (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY, 1996), 24–41. The territory of the child is a dream territory. Benjamin’s references to surrealism show that there is no awakening as such from the dream. Rather, surrealism shows that the state of being awake is the illusion.
68. Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and the Language of Man,’ SW I, 71.
69. Benjamin, ‘Antitheses Concerning Word and Name,’ SW II, 717.
70. Benjamin, ‘Language as Such,’ SW I, 69.
71. Benjamin, ‘Language as Such,’ SW I, 69.
72. Benjamin, ‘Language as Such,’ SW I, 69, his emphasis.
73. Benjamin, ‘Language as Such,’ SW I, 70.
74. Benjamin, ‘Language as Such,’ SW I, 71.
75. Benjamin, ‘Language as Such,’ SW I, 72.
76. Benjamin, ‘Language as Such,’ SW I, 72.
77. Benjamin, ‘Storyteller,’ SW III, 147.
78. Benjamin, ‘Storyteller,’ SW III, 147.
79. Benjamin, ‘Storyteller,’ SW III, 147. In the French version of this essay Benjamin also claims that the storyteller possessed an aura that impressed his words more emphatically on the listener. The following sentence is added after the penultimate sentence about the ‘incomparable aura of the storyteller’ in the final section XIX of the French version: ‘If one keeps silent, it is not only to listen to [the storyteller] but also, in some measure, because this aura [ce halo] is there’ (Cited in the Translator’s Note to ‘The Storyteller,’ SW III, N.28, 166).
80. Benjamin, ‘Language as Such,’ SW I, 71.
81. Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999), 70–74.
82. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 73. Rappaport’s schema aims to explain the integration of otherwise diffuse components of complex environments. In this respect it is related to the approach to the problem of religious meaning in Niklas Luhmann and the treatment of religious institutions as mechanisms of order in Jan Assmann. See Luhmann’s A Systems Theory of Religion, trans. David A. Brenner with Adrian Hermann (Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, CA, 2013), especially chapters 1 and 2. And Assmann’s Religion and Cultural Memory, trans. R. Livingstone (Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, CA, 2006), 33–34.
83. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 71.
84. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 71.
85. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 71.
86. Rappaport connects this schema of meaning to Peirce’s tripartite classification of signs: ‘Low-order meaning, based on the semantic distinctions of language, relies upon symbols in Peirce’s sense, that is signs “associated by law,” as he put it, with their significata. Middle-order meaning, which is derived from the recognition of formal (or perhaps other) similarities among disparate phenomena, is conveyed icononically. High-order meaning, founded upon unification, may be experienced as indexical, that is, as effects of or as parts of, that which they signify’ (Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 72).
87. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 72.
88. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 73.
89. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 73.
90. See the passage in ‘On Language as Such’ where he discusses the ‘material community of things in their communication’ and adds that: ‘the communication of things is certainly communal in a way that grasps the world as such as an undivided whole’ (Benjamin, SW I, 73). [‘Übrigens ist die Mitteilung der Dinge gewiß von einer solchen Art von Gemeinschaftlichkeit, daß sie die Welt überhaupt als ein ungeschiedenes Ganzes befaßt.’ (GS II, I, 156)].
Assmann, Jan. Religion and Cultural Memory. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, CA, 2006.
Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt a.M., 1972–1989. Vols. I–III. (Abbreviation: GS I-III).
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926. Eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA and London, 1996. (Abbreviation: SW I).
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934. Trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. Eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA and London, 1999. (Abbreviation: SW II).
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935–1938. Trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, et al. Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA and London, 2002. (Abbreviation: SW III).
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940. Trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA and London, 2003. (Abbreviation: SW IV).
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Belknap Press: Cambridge, MA, 1999. (Abbreviation: A).
Blumenberg, Hans. Work on Myth. Trans. Robert M. Wallace. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1985.
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Volume 18. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and Ed. James Strachey. Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis: London, 1975.
Habermas, Jürgen. ‘Walter Benjamin: Consciousness Raising or Rescuing Critique.’ On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Reflections. Ed. Gary Smith. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1991. 90–129.
Henrich, Dieter. Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World. Stanford Studies in Kant and German Idealism. Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, CA, 1992.
Luhmann, Niklas. A Systems Theory of Religion. Trans. David A. Brenner with Adrian Hermann. Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, CA, 2013.
Rancière, Jacques. ‘The Archaeomodern Turn.’ Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History. Ed. Michael P. Steinberg. Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY, 1996. 24–41.
Rappaport, Roy A. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999.
Ross, Alison. ‘What is the “Force” of Moral Law in Kant’s Practical Philosophy?’ Parallax 51 (April–May, 2009): 27–41.