I have argued in this book that the ghost behind the heterogeneous corpus of Benjamin’s writing is his fear of entrapment or capture in ‘form.’ From his earliest essays the image is the cipher for this fear. The image embodies uncertain meaning. Benjamin is wary of the existential effects of looking for authoritative meaning in forms that can only yield ambiguous meanings. How do we propitiate forces whose authority we recognise and fear, but whose commands are unfathomable? Anxiety and guilt ensue when the presumption of punitive authority is coupled with the absence of clarity. The evocative description of the shimmering movement of semblance in his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities encapsulates the tone of Benjamin’s conception of the sensuous forms that have these effects (SW I, 340). Concepts like the ‘expressionless,’ which aim to cut down the false totality of the symbol and reduce it to a ‘torso,’ or the ‘divine violence’ in his ‘Critique of Violence,’ which ‘annihilates’ the ambiguities of myth show that Benjamin’s early thinking pivots on the project of the destruction of mythic forces of totality. The emphasis on the ‘standstill’ in the late conception of the dialectical image, like the mortifying effect of the ‘expressionless’ or the ‘caesura’ that interrupts rhythm and shimmering movement in the early work, can all be placed on the positive side of Benjamin’s system of oppositions.
The intensity of the early opposition between the Revelation and myth and the family of opposing terms that it anchors still leaves its imprint in the late work. It can be used, for instance, to understand how the category of the dialectical image escapes the terms of Benjamin’s early condemnation of the image. The value that Benjamin places on ‘transparency’ and ‘clarity,’ and his appeal to theology as the counter to myth are residual echoes of his early position. The positive status of language in Benjamin’s thought is an indication of the tenacious hold that his early pattern of thinking has on the later. The wishes and ideals that are perceptible in the technological material of the nineteenth century are capable of conversion into revolutionary motivation because they are ‘citations’ that articulate such wishes and ideals. As the schema of oppositions in his 1916 essay on language makes clear, it is the creative word of God that, in the form of divine intention, provides a way out of the entrapment that unfathomable sensuous forms represent. This position on the emancipatory role of the creative word of God makes sense, too, of Benjamin’s claim that the place where the dialectical image is encountered is in language [‘die Sprache’ (GS I, 577)] (A, [N2a, 3], 462)]. Such an image, unlike archaic images, is a ‘genuine’ image [‘Nur dialektische Bilder sind echte (d.h.: nicht archaische) Bilder’ (GS I, 577)] (A, [N2a, 3], 462). In the later as in the earlier work, the articulate word has the capacity to undo the spell of sensuous ‘semblance,’ not because language is a ‘mediating’ vehicle for ‘things,’ but because of the immediate relation between language and knowledge, whether the latter is understood as historical and articulate (the modality for the encounter of the dialectical image in citations in the Arcades) or divine (the creative word of God as this is described in the Language essay) revelation of truth. This experience-ability is the factor that converts the image into the existentially binding ‘truth’ of revolutionary motivation and action.
I have argued that the question of how images embody meaning is one of Benjamin’s most fundamental preoccupations. The ‘demonic’ nature of sensuous forms, so characterised in Benjamin’s early writing because their meaning is ambiguous and existentially binding, describes and inculpates their formative effect insofar as these forms embody the power of nature released from the bond of the transcendent. In his later work Benjamin looks to the same expressive capacity of form in the dialectical image, that is to say, the power to claim the beholder existentially, which he had called demonic. And the question inevitably arises as to whether Benjamin’s opposition of myth and the Revelation should not be explained in a way other than his own, which is more or less followed by his commentators.
Benjamin’s schema of oppositions often seems to be the synonym for its mode of evaluation. The schema does not explain the initial assignment of the Revelation to the positive and Greek myth to the negative pole.1 In this context, the chasm between Benjamin’s initial choice of this schema of evaluation and the conclusions of theoretical work that takes this very opposition as its topic of study is telling. According to Blumenberg and Nietzsche, for instance, it is the monotheistic God of the Revelation that intensifies human guilt, and the plural gods of Greek mythology, which provide outlets for expiation.2
On the basis of the contrast between the symbol, which is the opaque sensuous form that embodies uncertain meaning, and the dialectical image, which is the platform for the revelation of articulate historical truth, the appropriate model of the image, we might say, is one that discourages the subjection (to anxiety and guilt), and encourages (revolutionary) action. These two kinds of images can thus be aligned to two different kinds of life. Still, how is this distinction in the practical meaning or application of the image to be installed? As we saw in the previous chapter, Benjamin explicitly distinguishes the narrative form from the dialectical image when he claims that ‘history decays into images, not into stories’ (A, 476 [N11, 4]). The point he makes here does not refer to the type of meaning embodied in images, but to the primary units that withstand historical decay. Hence in the case of both the negative category of the symbol and the positive category of the dialectical image, Benjamin understands the image to be a form that in its embodiment of meaning also encapsulates narratives. This is why the life lived under the pallid light of the symbol may be characterised as one of anxiety and indecision, and it is also why the dialectical image is a theory that supports revolutionary aspirations, in opposition to the corrosive effects on human life of the symbol. This understanding of the image also allows that the image is a sensuous form that tells a story, is readable, such as historical citation. Benjamin’s theory of the dialectical image can in this sense, despite his evident allergy to the vocabulary, be related to those theories of myth, which treat the applied form of myth as the form that answers vital questions of life.3
In this chapter I would like to give critical consideration to Benjamin’s theory of the image in relation to the practical functions of his conception of the dialectical image, as these can be understood and described using the resources of mythology. In the previous chapter I examined Benjamin’s theory in respect to the recollection of the past wishes the dialectical image embodies. Here I want to consider the way this meaning is cast outward to imprint circumstances. In other words, I would like to consider the formative functions of the dialectical image. My thesis is that the dialectical image is a particular kind of organised form that abbreviates a narrative in the light of which a situation is perceived as amenable to revolutionary action. However, like his early conception of the (spectator’s) ‘hope for the hopeless,’ the effectiveness of this image as a source of motivation depends on the sensitivity of its recipient to discern such meaning. The idea that the meaning experienced in the image is dependent on the feeling of the recipient is important: motivation we might say does not take its measure from the objective features of a situation, but from the way that these features are presented and understood. In this perspective, the subjective experience of sensuous form can be organised for specific meaning effects, such as encouraging revolutionary action. The quality of subjective meaning experienced in the dialectical image has important parallels with Kant’s theory of the disinterested quality of the feeling for aesthetic significance and the encouragement that this provides for the moral life. In Benjamin’s case, this subjective quality limits the scope of the recognition of the truth disclosed in the dialectical image. The tone of urgency in Benjamin’s writing on history indicates that, for him at least, the revolutionary truth revealed in the dialectical image is an immediately meaningful experience.
The use of the term ‘sensible form’ in Kant relates specifically to the ‘organised form.’4 There are two important applications of this notion of the organised form in Kant, each of which has an echo in Benjamin. First, there is the notion of motivation through the appreciation of sensible form that Kant defends in his theory of moral ideas5; and second, there is Kant’s important distinction between individual organised form and form as a whole, which is outlined in his theory of the ‘technic of nature.’6 The latter has its echo in Benjamin’s theory of similitude and more generally in the way a single thing can provide a passage towards an intuition of the whole, as the arcades do, for instance, in the passage they provide for the recognition of the truth of human history. It is the idea that the appreciation of organised form can shape moral motivation, the theory outlined in Kant’s conception of aesthetic form in his Critique of Judgment, that is really significant for Benjamin’s late work given the connection between the experience of the dialectical image and revolutionary motivation. In Kant, the notion of the organised form intends to distinguish the mere appetitive pleasure in the sensual properties of an object (its taste and colour) from the reflective pleasure experienced through reflection on an object’s form. The notion of form refers specifically to the distinction between the representative organisation of form by the powers of the mind (that Kant calls the faculties) and the inchoate data of ‘objects’ not so organised.7
The conception of sensuous form as the embodiment of meaning is fundamental to Kantian and post-Kantian aesthetics. Benjamin, as we saw, calls on this tradition to depict the negative effects of form, specifically the helplessness it induces, in his early theory of the image. Nonetheless, in his conception of the dialectical image aspects of the Kantian theory of motivation through the appreciation of sensible form are mobilised and Benjamin’s theory of the image can thus be usefully placed in relation to the Kantian tradition.
Benjamin’s conception of the ‘dialectical image’ may be understood as one way that an image can imprint a situation with meaning. By ‘meaning’ I intend the experience of material form that immediately resolves the will to a position or action without further reflection. As we saw in chapter 3, meaningfulness can be understood as the hinge that attaches intention to action; insofar as something is a sufficient ground of intentional action, it is already meaningful. The perspective I adopt here is that it is the experience of meaning in certain sensuous forms, which resolves the will to act. The implied justification for action is drawn from the satisfying experience of the meaning of the (sensuous) image, what Kant understands as the sculpting of motivation through reflection on sensible form. We saw in chapter 4 Benjamin’s view of the existential hold of the dialectical image. This existential hold converts what is experienced in and through an image into the grounds for action. I would now like to step outside Benjamin’s chosen framework of the vocabulary of revelation and truth and, with reference to Hans Blumenberg’s study of mythology, consider the question of how the dialectical image builds up such motivational resources for action. In my closing comments I will return to the question of the parallels between Benjamin and Kant.8
The ways that the subjective experience of sensuous form can provide meaning for action can be brought out with reference to Blumenberg’s theory of myth in his magnum opus, Work on Myth. Blumenberg sees the function of myth in its reduction of the ‘absolutism of reality.’9 He calls this function, the ‘work’ of/on myth. As a human construction that fulfils human needs the myth is a ‘work’ that is also ‘worked on.’10 Myth compensates for human helplessness in the face of an alien world. In other essays, Blumenberg assigns this anthropological determination to a biological condition: human helplessness follows from the instinct deficiency that deprives humans of a specific ecological niche.11 Myth is the way that humans make the world habitable for themselves, a world that was not created for them; in other words, myth does not serve a cognitive so much as a practical need, the need to make absolutely strange (and hence hostile) powers only humanly strange. Myth is the human tool that tames the overwhelming scale of inhospitable environments. It is worth noting the stark contrast between this conception and Benjamin’s position on myth. Benjamin intends by ‘myth’ the unapproachable, inscrutable authority that the opaque sensuous form imposes on human life. Hence he specifies that the aura involves the ‘unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be’ (SW IV, 255). In the Motifs in Baudelaire essay he argues that ‘[t]he essentially distant is the unapproachable; and unapproachability is a primary quality of the ritual image’ (SW IV, 338). Blumenberg, in contrast, highlights the human interest served by myth. Through myth alien circumstances and conditions can be rendered approachable and meaningful.
Blumenberg argues that myths are built up from inconspicuous scraps. He also shows that the character of myth is not that of an abstract system of dogma that leaves ‘local and temporal peculiarities behind it. On the contrary, it is oriented specifically toward these.’12 Catering for ‘local and temporal peculiarities’ and drawing on inconspicuous material are features of the work of/on myth. The work of myth on these elements attempts to insulate them as patterns of meaning, which would be able to resist arbitrary forces, such as the effects of diffusion of space and time.13
Blumenberg’s understanding of the work of myth as a way of reducing the ‘absolutism of reality’ has a strong parallel with the socio- political function Benjamin wants to attach to the dialectical image. Viewed in relation to Blumenberg’s schema, we might say that Benjamin’s early work identified the symbol as an ineffective technique of human habitation. The symbol presents ambiguous meaning. In the later work, however, the dialectical image is used to carry ideals that would otherwise perish. Benjamin restricts the signifying power of the dialectical image as to the mode, theoretical basis, and the type of ideals it bears. One can cite in this regard the delimiting functions of his theories of language, epistemological exception, and revolutionary experience.
Beyond these general points relating to the functional status of myth in human life, Blumenberg’s ideas of ‘significance’ and ‘pregnance’ can be used to capture in more detail how Benjamin’s theory of the dialectical image has meaning-effects that shape action. The first is akin to the general quality of aesthetic form: in ‘significance’ something stands out as an attention grabbing form. It does so by ‘intensification’ and by ‘power depletion’:
By intensification, as a supplement to positive facts, to naked data: as the not merely rhetorical enrichment of the facts of the case; and by power depletion as the moderation of something intolerable, the conversion of something unnerving into a source of forward pressure and movement.14
Benjamin credits the 'destructive or critical momentum of materialist historiography' with the 'blasting apart of historical continuity with which the historical object first constitutes itself. . . . Materialist historiography does not choose its objects arbitrarily. It does not fasten on them but rather springs them loose from the order of succession' (A, 475, [NlOa, 1]). The dialectical image carries 'significance' in the sense Blumenberg gives it. It 'intensifies' the bare form of the 'historical object,' which is 'constructed' as a 'significant' form able to bear revolutionary potential. Further, Benjamin's materialist historiography is the moderation of the intolerable weight of history; it converts this weight into a source of 'momentum.' Blumenberg writes that: 'Significance as a defense against indifference, especially indifference in space and time, becomes a resistance to the tendency toward conditions of higher probability, of diffusion, of erosion, of entropy.'15 Benjamin's representation of the asymmetry between the weight of the historical reality of the 'past' and the type of 'remembrance' that, in the energy of the dialectical image, opposes it, is also a mode of this form of 'resistance' to indifference. Blumenberg's account of myth points out the asymmetry between the scale of the features of reality that need to be resisted (in Benjamin's case, history) and the determinate form scripted to resist them (e.g., the 'dialectical image'). '"Significance" is related to finitude. It arises under the imposed requirement that one renounce the 'Vogliamo tutto' [I want everything], which remains the secret drive for the impossible.'16
Blumenberg uses the term ‘pregnance,’ which is a type of ‘significance,’ to describe the mechanics of ‘imprinted form.’ Pregnance is opposed to all those elements that ‘promote diffusion,’ such as the passage of time. In this respect the term is used to explain how sensuous forms can mark out fields with meaning that orients action. Pregnance abbreviates complex and contradictory elements in an image or a word. In the way that it condenses these elements into a recognisable form liable to be transferred between the different contexts that it marks, pregnance captures one of the key aspects of myth. This is ‘the [myth’s] suggestion of repeatability, of a “re-cognition” of elementary stories, which approaches the function of ritual, by which the inviolable regularity of actions that are pleasing to the gods is secured and imprinted on the mind.’17 Pregnance is the meaning that imprints itself on a ‘diffuse surrounding field of probabilities.’ If pregnance is defined as ‘resistance to factors that efface, that promote diffusion,’ especially time, then the ‘difficulty’ or, even the ‘contradiction,’ in the concept is that pregnance can be produced ‘through the process of aging.’18 Benjamin works with precisely this contradiction in the Arcades: the work wagers that the refuse of the nineteenth century becomes legible only insofar as it has aged and lost its phantasmagoric sheen. Similarly, it is not just the particular images that Benjamin treats, which perform this function . Benjamin’s notion of the ‘dialectical image’ is itself a way of stamping a field that would otherwise incur diffusion. This stamp of significance is a spatial extension, a figural image, of what would otherwise be absorbed, that is rendered unnoticed, in the passage of time. Hence Benjamin’s account of the claim that the dialectical image makes on attention eschews the terms ‘past’ and ‘present’ for the ‘now time’ [Jetztzeit], the arresting moment, both past and present. But more than this, what the attention-grabbing image releases is revolutionary hope. The ‘imprinted form’ of the image stamps the diffuse field of experience with meaning and it gathers significance against the factors of diffusion. What it reduces in the way it imprints its meaning on the environment are arbitrary factors; and especially the arbitrariness of its own construction.19 As we saw in the previous chapter, the choice of a particular theme as ‘significant’ in Benjamin’s dossier may be justified in reference to his conception of the dialectical image. The detritus of the nineteenth century contains the truth of human history itself. Nonetheless, it seems difficult to remove the suspicion of arbitrariness from Benjamin’s collection of images. For instance, is there no arbitrariness, after all, in the particular forms of refuse that Benjamin selects and cites in the Arcades? Is there nothing that fits this category that is missing? Is the selection that is incorporated not contingent on the place and the resources of Benjamin’s exile? It is here, I think, that Blumenberg’s functional approach to myth is relevant.
Any circumstance is potentially chaotic. It admits of different possibilities for interpretation. However, when a circumstance is viewed from the perspective of supporting a course of action, when it becomes a ‘situation,’ it is viewed in relation to the way it furnishes motivations and perspectives consistent with such action. Let me be clear: it is not as if the ‘desired’ outcome of the action needs to be mirrored in the way a situation is understood. It is, rather, that a way of sustaining the perspective compatible with action needs to be built up as meaningful. Hence even the dark tone of Benjamin’s account can still feed the plausibility of revolutionary motivation. Indeed in Benjamin’s case this tone is arguably the decisive factor. The idea that there is a ‘strait gate’ through which the messiah may enter at any moment, or the idea that the ‘catastrophe’ is ‘to have missed the opportunity’ ( A, [N 10, 2], 474) is a case in which the ecological niche of the revolutionary is built.20 It is significant, I think, that the way this ‘niche’ is experienced is ‘subjective.’
In Benjamin’s analysis of the image subjective feeling has a positive role, which is akin to aesthetic feeling. We have seen this in the topos of ‘hope for the hopeless’ in his essay on Goethe’s novel. Subjective feeling is the basis for the experience of similitude. And allegory is a subjective experience of meaning. The dialectical image is an experience of truth, but it, too, is subjective in the sense that Kant uses the term in his aesthetics. In Kant the possibility of the flower in nature being looked to as supporting the moral perspective says something about the spectator to the flower as a moral person. It attests to the person’s sensitivity to the moral perspective. There is something to be praised, Kant says, in those who turn away from museums and look to nature.21 Like the perception of truth in the dialectical image, the perspective of the revolutionary also says something about their sensitivity to the revolutionary cause. In the early ‘Critique of Violence’ essay, Benjamin claims that in choosing revolutionary violence, one is alone before God in the moment of the decision. The perspective does not ask for, nor could it deliver, proof. The meaning of revolutionary violence is the obliteration of the personal interests that occurs when one takes the perspective of God. When this condition is met, revolutionary violence warrants its association with ‘divine violence.’ However, the probity of such acts of violence can never be ‘known’ as such (SW I, 252). The perspective is relevant to Benjamin’s reference in the Arcades to ‘the death of the intentio’: ‘Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognisability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time. (This point of explosion, and nothing else, is the death of the intentio, which thus coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth)’ (A [N3, 1], 462–3). The truth of things disclosed in the ‘now’ of ‘a particular recognisability’ relies on the receptivity of someone to perceive this truth. Revolutionary meaning is ‘moral’ in Benjamin’s phrasing (SW I, 236, GS, II, I, 179 ‘sittliche’) because of the clarity with which dominant social and institutional forces are countered. It is arrived at through solitary reflection; its authenticity cannot be demonstrated by proofs. Like Kant’s aesthetic judgment, it is marked as revolutionary (or ‘pure’ for Kant) by the rigor of the attitude that suspends material and other personal interests. It was this rigor that Benjamin had singled out for praise in his early comments on Kant’s moral philosophy (SW I, 299). Just as Kant looks to sensible forms as possible analogical support for the moral point of view, so too Benjamin’s moral view of politics relies on the ‘significance’ of the image. The dialectical image underpins the materialist perspective on history.
The way that Benjamin protects his position on history from the appearance of arbitrariness is analogous to the protection Kant provides for the claims of aesthetic judgment from merely appetitive pleasures. Like Benjamin’s claim regarding the exemplary status of the refuse of the nineteenth century for human history, Kant argues that the independence of aesthetic judgment from venal interests makes its insights exemplary. Indeed it is the quality of sensible form in aesthetic judgment that also credits it with significance for reflection on the technic of nature. Kant’s claim can be understood along the lines of Benjamin’s treatment of the dialectical image: the pleasure in aesthetic judgment is a significant experience that is had through reflection on sensible form. As such, the sensible form that is the occasion for aesthetic pleasure stands out from the background of merely ordinary forms. Further, since the pleasure is distinct from the pursuit of either cognitive ends or personal gratification, it warrants the feeling that it should command the assent of others. It therefore warrants the claim of regulative exemplarity. Although Kant builds in a regulative force for aesthetic judgment that stops short of cognitively testable claims to truth, Benjamin, as we saw, does claim the status of ‘truth’ for the historical insight gained through the dialectical image.
Nonetheless, the relation between the dialectical image and revolutionary action that Benjamin stages becomes a matter of judgment, strictly akin to Kant’s understanding of aesthetic judgment. In this respect, it has the subjective grammar that was common to the feeling of ‘hope for the hopeless,’ the insights of allegory, the probity of ‘revolutionary violence’ (as this is described in the ‘Critique of Violence’) and the integrative experience of the meaningful ‘whole’ in similitude. Of course, Kant and Benjamin share a regulative approach to the vital meanings borne by sensuous forms. This is the basis, in their respective conceptions, of disengaging ‘significant’ images from the chaos of opaque sensations. Benjamin, as we saw, claims epistemological significance for the dialectical image. According to the scruples of his methodology that I have outlined in this book, the dialectical image cannot amount to a merely subjective interpretation. Neither, on the other hand, can its account of revolutionary experience, whatever meaning Benjamin’s epistemology attaches to the word ‘truth,’ be said to reach the standard or have the effects that are ordinarily implied by the concept of truth. This is their pathos and significance. The subjective meaningfulness of such images is the context that allows them to look beyond the seductions of ‘semblance’ and motivate revolutionary action.
Revolutionary hopes and wishes are ‘readable’ in the lacework of the steel and glass arcades. As such, Benjamin’s Arcades can be considered to mould historical data for an aesthetic typology of meaning whose ‘end’ is the reassurance that the revolutionary cause has the reality (the urgency of the reality) on its side. Just as Kant uses nature’s sensuous forms to stage claims regarding moral significance and encourage moral motives, so too the approach to history that frames the Arcades Project brings with it aspects of the grammar of modern aesthetics and it uses this grammar to understand history.
Does this mean that Benjamin’s polemic against the aesthetic form unravels? At times, it seems that the way the polemic is staged raises objections of logical contradiction. In this regard one may cite Benjamin’s strategy of reading Goethe’s novella against his novel in the essay ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities.’ This essay presents Benjamin’s case against the abyss of aesthetic form on the basis of literary characters and stories. Crucially, Benjamin uses a sentence from Goethe’s novel to present his idea of ‘hope for the hopeless.’ The use of this sentence to present the caesura seems to be significant, especially when we consider the important role of language in the cases of allegory and similitude, or the citation model of the Arcades Project. The perception of similitude is tied specifically to the evocation of the lost, authentic experience of things. Benjamin’s wariness regarding the abyssal meaning of the sensuous form is not elicited in the case of the luminous perception of things in similitude. Rather, in the case of similitude words depict the integration of experience (Erfahrung) in a whole, which Benjamin contrasts with the way that de-racinated experience is the outcome of language used as a mere tool of communication. In the Arcades the citation is explicitly linked to the emancipatory conception of language in the early essay on language and the Preface to the Trauerspiel book. The role of the emblem in allegory is the mortification of sensuous form. It would be difficult to compare Benjamin’s use of the sentence from Goethe’s novel to these other cases. The sentence that he cites from the novel is not linked to the emancipatory specifications of his early theological position on naming language. The sentence evokes hope through and in a literary image, the precise form that the essay castigates as the demonic. Moreover, it is used to stimulate a feeling that, as I argued in chapter 1, is akin in important respects to the aesthetic, spectatorial feeling of the sublime. Here again the consistency of important aspects of Benjamin’s general position on the image seem questionable in this early essay.
The polemic against the image unravels in a more fundamental sense in Benjamin’s late work. The position Benjamin takes on history and revolution is explicitly pitted against the perils of the aestheticisation of the past. Nonetheless, the structure of Benjamin’s position is, in fact, compatible with the terms of the Kantian position on aesthetic judgment with all the consequences that such compatibility implies. Benjamin, like Kant, seeks to find contingent forms that can reveal the ‘truth’ (of history), or rather that can bear the historical meaning ascribed to them. The model of aesthetic judgment in which the satisfying arrangement of form (beauty) replaces knowledge counts also for Benjamin’s position on history, which had sought to exclude it. Similarly, the resources of myth are not, as he had insisted, antithetical to his conception of the practical functions of the dialectical image. In fact, the latter can be understood as a species of Blumenberg’s conception of the humanisation that myth provides within an otherwise unapproachable environment. As in Kant, so too in Benjamin, sensuous forms are credited with a formative power, and, despite Benjamin’s early polemic, these forms are not the subject of his censure but a central presupposition of his position on history.
My intention in making these points has not been to note contradictions in Benjamin’s chosen framework of argumentation, but to consider more thoroughly the reasoning that supports the impulse of ‘escape’ from entrapment in form guiding his writing. Above all, my aim has been to distinguish the topos of Benjamin’s writing from the exercise of a vague project of ‘thinking pure immanence,’ which is the theoretical version of the fascination with the capture by sensuous form that Benjamin detested. In the field of Benjamin scholarship, which has often imposed such an unqualified grammar of ‘immanence’ over his texts, the attention to the detail of Benjamin’s project has never been more important.
1. The conceptual hold of Benjamin’s opposition between myth and Revelation is not, despite its formative commitments, reducible to an intra-religious distinction between (Greek) polytheism and (Judaic) monotheism. Amongst the terms that can be grafted onto that primary opposition is the opposition of the religious and the profane. The former is tied to myth and the latter to its dissolution.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Why I am So Wise,’ in Ecce Homo: ‘A god who descends to earth should only do wrong,—it is not divine to take the punishment upon yourself—it is divine to take on the guilt. ’ Section 5, page 80. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, eds. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2005).
3. Walter Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, and London, 1979), see especially pages 1–35.
4. The notion of ‘organised form’ refers specifically to the arrangement by the cognitive powers of ‘sensation.’ See note 7 below.
5. Dieter Henrich discusses the connection between aesthetic judgment and the idea of a motivating, moral image of the world. See D. Henrich, Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World (Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, CA, 1992).
6. See Helmut Müller-Sievers, Self-generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature Around 1800 (Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, CA, 1997), 48–50. See Kant’s ‘Critique of Teleological Judgment’ in his Critique of Judgment, especially, §78 and §83.
7. This is the organising principle of transcendental philosophy. It is outlined in terms of the distinction between merely subjective feeling and a representation related to an object in §3 of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment: ‘If a determination of the feeling of pleasure or displeasure is called sensation, then this expression means something entirely different than if I call the representation of a thing (through sense, as a receptivity belonging to the faculty of cognition) sensation. For in the latter case the representation is related to the object, but in the first case it is related solely to the subject, and does not serve for any cognition at all, not even that by which the subject cognizes itself.’ Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2000), 92.
8. Benjamin explicitly distinguishes the type of motivating experience such politically salient images afford from the space of ‘contemplation’ and ‘meaning.’ In the essay on Surrealism, he writes: ‘nowhere do . . . metaphor and image—collide so drastically and so irreconcilably as in politics. For to organize pessimism means nothing other than to expel moral metaphor from politics and to discover in the space of political action the one hundred percent image space. This image space, however, can no longer be measured out by contemplation’ (SW II, 217, emphasis added). In Surrealism, the image space is a wholly ‘integrated’ space not just opposed to the ‘moral metaphor’ but also to ‘meaning’ and ‘the self’ (SW II, 208): ‘Life seemed worth living only where the threshold between waking and sleeping was worn away in everyone as by the steps of multitudinous images flooding back and forth; language seemed itself only where sound and image, image and sound, interpenetrated with automatic precision and such felicity that no chink was left for the penny-in-the-slot called “meaning”. Image and language take precedence’ (SW II, 208). In chapter 3 I considered the topic of meaning in relation to the theory of similitude. I argued there that the experience of meaning in similitude was akin to the religious experience of subjective integration of a whole. When Benjamin opposes ‘image and language’ to ‘meaning’ in the essay on Surrealism he intends to evoke the immediacy of insight that precedes its reflective or ‘contemplative’ organisation. Meaning is excluded only insofar as it requires no effort, ‘the meaning,’ we might say, is already there. Hence it is redundant to explain the ‘cause’ of action, politics presupposes a total commitment to a cause.
9. Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. R. M. Wallace (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA and London, 1985), ix. See also Work on Myth, page 8: ‘The absolutism of reality is opposed by the absolutism of images and wishes.’
10. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, see for a description of the work on myth, 7 and for the work of myth, 26. The former is the ‘art of living’ that sets up the horizon and categories of a world such that these are tolerable for human existence, and the latter is the ‘setting free of the world’s observer’ that is its result.
11. Hans Blumenberg, ‘Self-preservation and Inertia: On the Constitution of Modern Rationality.’ Contemporary German Philosophy (Pennsylvania State University Press: University Park, 1983), 209–256.
12. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 99.
13. It is worth commenting briefly on the messianic dimensions of Benjamin’s position on history and how certain features of his treatment of messianism inevitably draw the Judaic tradition into the category of myth, as this term is understood in Blumenberg to be a work of and on myth. In Blumenberg’s analysis of Goethe’s ‘citation’ of the saying: ‘only a God against a God’—there is no source for this saying and he concludes that it is the fabricated kernel for Goethe’s own aggrandising self-reflection. Benjamin’s later references to the messianic have their own parallel, not in terms of their purpose, but in relation to the mythicising function the kernel of a fragment of meaning can be made to have. In his 1932 essay, ‘In the Sun,’ he refers to the ‘saying’ of ‘the Hasidim’ ‘about the world to come’: ‘everything there will be arranged just as it is with us. The room we have now will be just the same in the world to come; where our child lies sleeping, it will sleep in the world to come. The clothes we are wearing we shall also wear in the next world. Everything will be the same as here—only a little bit different. Thus it is with imagination. It merely draws a veil over the distance. Everything remains just as it is, but the veil flutters and everything changes imperceptibly beneath it’ (SW II, 664). In a letter to Benjamin in 1934, Scholem states that he, Scholem, was the source of this ‘saying’ [The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem 1932–1940, ed. G. Scholem (Schocken Books: New York, 1989, 123]. In his 1934 essay ‘Franz Kafka,’ Benjamin argues that the ‘great rabbi’ (i.e., Scholem) who is the source of this Hasidic saying about the world to come had anticipated Kafka’s folk song called ‘The Little Hunchback.’ Kafka’s folk song tells the story, according to Benjamin, of a ‘little man . . . [who] is at home in distorted life; he will disappear with the coming of the Messiah, who (a great rabbi once said) will not wish to change the world by force but will merely make a slight adjustment in it’ (SW IV, 811). The attribution of the story to the Hasidim is apocryphal; Benjamin works on this kernel of the messianic perspective as a ‘slight adjustment’ to the world, it is a work of myth. Myth is not just a story, it has cultural significance, and this is what extends to myth the efficacy of binding meanings. See too on this point, Burkert’s Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual. See also Scholem’s letter to Benjamin: ‘And one question: Who is actually the source of all these stories? Does Ernst Bloch have them from you or you from him? The great rabbi with the profound dictum on the messianic kingdom who appears in Bloch is none other than I myself; what a way to achieve fame!! It was one of my first ideas about the Kabbalah.’ Letter from Scholem to Benjamin, July 9, 1934, The Correspondence, 123.
14. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 75.
15. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 109.
16. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 67.
17. Blumberg, Work on Myth, 61, emphasis added.
18. Blumberg, Work on Myth, 69.
19. The coordinates that Blumenberg gives to myth makes some sense of Benjamin’s choice of the word ‘image’ to describe the communication of historical knowledge that is able to shape revolutionary motivations. The vocabulary of the ‘image’ evokes the potency of significant meanings being ‘seen’ in an abbreviated way and of the image bringing with it a discourse. In myth a word can abbreviate the discourse of a myth. Blumenberg argues that Goethe uses the Prometheus myth in just this way: the name Prometheus condenses numerous ideas into an abbreviated form for their communication. The notion of ‘imprinted form’ that Blumenberg uses is a Goethean notion. It is also the key to Goethe’s use of the Prometheus myth. In Goethe’s procedure of selfmythicisation he confects ‘the extraordinary saying,’ which he then cites as a self-appellation in Poetry and Truth: ‘Against a god, only a god.’ In the end, only the name of Prometheus is needed to mark the complex field of functions Goethe has sculpted this particular myth to fulfil.
20. The reference to the ‘strait gate’ is from ‘On the Concept of History,’ SW IV, 397: ‘every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter.’
21. Immanuel Kant, CJ, §42, 166–167.
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