Benjamin's Urgency

Nieland, Justus. Juengel, Scott.

CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 5, Number 2, Fall 2005, pp. 189-213 (Article) Published by Michigan State University Press DOI: 10.1353/ncr.2005.0045

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Benjamins Urgency
JUSTUS NIELAND and SCOTT JUENGEL
Michigan State University, East Lansing

Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience By Howard Caygill. London: Routledge, 1998 Walter Benjamins Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels By Beatrice Hanssen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998 Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power By Lutz Koepnick. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1999 Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography By Gerhard Richter. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 2000 The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event By Krzysztof Ziarek. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. 2001

In WALTER BENJAMIN AND THE CORPUS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY (2000), Gerhard Richter tells a rather remarkable story about his remarkable subject:
[I]n September 1939on the eve of the Vichy regimeBenjamin, along with thousands of other Parisian exiles of German and Austrian descent,
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was forced by the French authorities to report to one of the local collecting stations. He was subsequently transported to the gruesome French internment camp at Vernuche near Nerves. Within a few days of his arrival at the camp, which made few concessions to its prisoners human dignity, Benjamin began to hold an outdoor seminar for advanced students, charging a tuition fee of three cigarettes, or alternatively, one button. Along with a small group of interested inmates, he convened regular meetings on straw-covered ground beneath a suspended blanket in order to launch an academic camp journal. Drinking contraband schnapps from a thimble, Benjamin, to the amazement of the other prisoners, conducted these editorial meetings with a ceremonious rigor that stood in marked contrast to the camps macabre living conditions. (1920)

Benjamins phantasmatic seminar testies in rather heart-wrenching ways to the necessity of theory in a crisis, as well as to the perseverance of Benjamins thought well after he took his own exiled life on the border between France and Spain almost exactly a year later. In the famous nal Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin insists that the state of emergency is not the exception but the rule, for [t]he current amazement that the things we are experiencing are still possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical (Benjamin 1968b, 256). Indeed, what is philosophical for Benjamin is the restless pursuit of philosophy itself, the rescue that comes with Thought. Neither a state of cessation or exception, the internment camp is here what Giorgio Agamben calls in some sense . . . the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we still live, the space out of which Benjamin came to understand more intimately the barbarism undergirding both law and history (Agamben 2000, 37). But the tableau also bears witness to Benjamins assertion in One-Way Street that work is the death mask of its conception, a cryptic formulation which signals not political nihilism or philosophical solipsism, but a recognition of a future responsibility disconnected from the myth of origins, of work performed in the name of something else and to come (Benjamin 1996a, 459). If Benjamins lifelong commitment to unmasking historicisms

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self-condence in favor of a theory of radically open-ended and immanent experience became more urgent with the rise of fascism in Europe, then perhaps we can view Benjamins uncanny discipline at Vernuche as a summons to think with Benjamin again, now, as certain political imperatives in our own time urge us to linger over his example. It is by now a critical commonplace to observe and bemoan the Benjamin industry that has delivered dozens of scholarly monographs, essay collections, special issues of journals, multivolume translations of the selected writings, and literally hundreds of critical articles since the early eighties. Indeed, it might be argued that it is increasingly difcult to think modernity, or visual culture, or historical materialism apart from Benjamins shaping, if always elusive, inuence: moreover, the breathtaking range, lyricism, and esoteric nature of his thought tempts readers from an array of disciplines to nd elective afnities with Benjamin, all emboldened perhaps by Benjamins own central concept of Jetztzeit, the now-time of the past ashing up in the dangerous present.1 In his Afterword to a recent special volume of boundary 2 (Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with The Arcades Project), Kevin McLaughlin revisits Benjamins doctoral dissertation, The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism (1920), to retrieve the concept of criticizability, the potential for immanent critique that completes or represents (Darstellung: also performs) the work of art; or as Benjamin avers, if there is present in the work a reection that can unfold itself, absolutize itself, and resolve itself in the medium of artthen it is a work of art (quoted in McLaughlin 2003, 195). That Benjamin saw in the program of a coming philosophy of art the necessity of critical prose, McLaughlin argues, suggests our ongoing reective encounter that puts the work to work and, in the indispensability of doing so, exceeds the limits of a classic concept of the work as a self-contained entity (197). The inexhaustibility of reectionholding open even as it is animating the act of judgmentintimates something of the always unnished work of Benjamins reader.2 In what follows, we have surveyed a wide range of recent Benjaminian interventions in the hopes of understanding both the urgency of Benjamins thought, and our persistent contemporary reclamation of his

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philosophical improvisations. As the makeshift seminar at Vernuche illustrates all too starkly, criticism and totalitarianism are never-ending and perhaps mutually dening projects, each venturing to foreclose the other: just as it is imperative that we not think of fascism as an aberration of history, as ever fully present, so is it vital that criticism continue to provide a general deconstruction of the history in which our own provenance lies (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1990, 312). In the spirit of this perpetual inquiry, and ever mindful of our own more contemporary catastrophes, we sought out the political and ethical stakes of thinking with Benjamin in an(other) age of terror, hoping to reect nally on the exigencies of experience, history, and the lingering promise of a deconstructive humanism.

The question of politics in Benjamin is intimately bound to his understanding of the nature of experience. And because Benjamins varied meditations on experience are so complexly embedded in this categorys Romantic heritage and its historical transformations, all rigorous reckonings with Benjamins concept of the political must perforce grapple with its experiential contours and their pesky metaphysical trappings. In many ways, it is this fraught conceptual imbrication in Benjamins thought of the political with the historical contours of modern experience that connects the otherwise diverse critical and theoretical labors of Howard Caygills Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (1998), Lutz Koepnicks Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (1999), and Krzysztof Ziareks The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event (2001). Whereas Koepnick implicitly values experiential congurations that would remove the political from a state of exception and embed it within a bourgeois realm of facts, norms, and values, Caygill and Ziarek use Benjamin to think the politics of a transformational mode of experience irreducible to normative and cognitive closure. Koepnicks lucid and carefully-argued studythe most thorough examination to date of Benjamins understanding of aesthetic politicslocates the specic strength of Benjamins critique of German fascism rst in the

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realization that fascism ferociously nalizes what capitalist modernity ever since the middle of the nineteenth century has done all along. It mobilizes technological and economic rationalization against the normative substance of political modernity, against post-Enlightenment values of political justice, equality, freedom, and democracy (Koepnick 1999, 12). Second, because Benjamin understands fascist aestheticization primarily as the political orchestration of experienceas the total mobilization of sensory perceptionhis historical critique of fascism is necessarily bound to a materialist history of individual and collective experience (12). Thus, Koepnick consistently underscores Benjamins critique of the anesthetizing of experience that accompanies fascisms attempts to drive the political beyond all facts, norms, and values (31). Through this critique, Koepnick hopes to revise critical accounts of the aesthetic politics of the Third Reich, accounts that understand fascist politics as a full-blown attack on modern differentiation, as the supplanting of political values with aesthetic experiences in order to do away with what Kant, Weber, Habermas, or Luhmann, each in his own way, understands as the hallmark of the modern conditionnamely cognitive, normative, and functional differentiation (1999, 2). For Koepnick, Benjamins arguments about aesthetic politics are best understood as a critique of the autonomy of the political, as a deep suspicion about the way aesthetic politics aim to redene the political as an autonomous realm of absolute self-referentiality privileging cultic forms over ethical norms (3). As a result, the political becomes the site of existential self-assertion, at which nothing less than authenticity comes into being (3). In this sense, Koepnick turns to Benjamin to describe fascist politics as an engine of radical difference, one that pursues its own project of differentiation, autonomization, and modernization by severing political action from normative debates, moving the state beyond bourgeois-democratic codes of legality, morality, and political emancipation (3). Koepnick pursues this argument by carefully tracking three versions of Benjamins aestheticization thesis. The rst incarnation, Koepnick argues, emerges in the Trauerspiels metaphysical examination of power in the context of Baroque drama, and the tacit critique Benjamin offers of his

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contemporary Carl Schmitts political existentialism (1999, 37). Here, Koepnick compellingly juxtaposes the deployment of the aesthetic in Baroque drama against the formulation of aesthetic autonomy Benjamin offers in the Goethes Elective Afnities essay, in which what is ethical about aesthetic artifacts lies solely in their limitation of the range of art . . . art constitutes itself by means of its very separation from the spheres of politics and morality, through difference rather than totalization (39). The rulers of Baroque drama, by contrast, draw on aesthetic spectacle to naturalize their authority and thereby conceal the very fragility of their power. As such, Baroque drama testies to the origin of modern, secularized conceptions of power and realpolitik, echoing Schmitts construction of sovereignty, similarly dependent upon the spectacular enactment of leadership in the public realm, on the total visibility of power (45, 44). Schmitts decisionism, like Baroque drama, betrays its own attempt to secure the autonomy of the political and foils the ethical self-limitation of art, thus pushing politics towards the abyss of aestheticism (45).3 The second version of the aestheticization thesis hinges on the materialist account of history and experience Benjamin renders in the Artwork essay, in which fascisms aesthetic politics depends on its instrumentalization of industrial culture: its falsication of premodern community in auratic, cultic spectacles that colonize and anesthetize peculiarly modern structures of seeing, perception, and experience (5). In its third iteration, which Koepnick unearths in the Arcades Project, the aestheticization thesis connects fascist spectacles particular combination of industry and aura, progress and cultism, to the visual dynamics of the capitalist phantasmagoria, an expansive form of commodity fetishism that wraps the technological trappings of capitalist progress in a mystifying and compensatory aura. Caygill and Ziarek, on the other hand, are less specically interested in Benjamins critique of National Socialisms colonization of experience than they are in offering more rigorous accounts of Benjamins concept of experienceaccounts that consistently work within a political eld of implication. Taking as his point of departure Benjamins encounter with the Kantian system in The Programme of the Coming Philosophy, Caygill offers nothing less than a systematic review of Benjamins oeuvre as

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sustained attempt to articulate a speculative concept of experience, a program that thus lends philosophical continuity to the critical bifurcation of Benjamins thought into two cycles: what Benjamin called the Germanistic phase ending in the Trauerspiel study, and the One-Way Street phase, culminating in the unnished Passagen Werk (Caygill 1998, xixii). By a speculative concept of experience, Caygill means experience that accommodates an immanent Absolute and thus remains resolutely futural, contingent, and open to innite transformation (4). Thus, whereas Kant demarcates the parameters of experience in a fashion that excludes the Absolute from the faculties of intuition (space and time) and all but moral experience, Benjamin counters with an intensive metaphysics in which space and time are informed by an immanent totality (6), an Absolute manifest in the very distortions, warps, and complex patterning of space-time. At rst glance, Ziareks resolutely deconstructive approach to the category of experience would seem to have very little truck with the metaphysical Benjamin that Caygill so trenchantly defamiliarizes. While not a study of Benjamin per se, The Historicity of Experience draws extensively on the formulation of experience in Benjamin and Heidegger to offer a profound reappraisal of the nature of the twentieth-century avant-garde as primarily a critique and redenition of the concept of experience itself. Turning to an exhilarating range of avant-gardists (not just the historical avant-garde of Dada, but also Gertrude Stein, the Russian futurist Velimir Khlebnikov, and the language poets Miron Bialoszewski and Susan Howe), Ziarek argues that the political radicality of the avant-garde should be understood primarily as an attempt to recongure experience as an event. By the event-structure of experience, Ziarek means an experience imbued with historicity, an experience that is, like the propriative event (Ereignis) in Heideggers phenomenological formulation, always a simultaneous coming into presence and withdrawal in which what is becomes measurable and representable only at the expense of suppressing historicity (Ziarek 2001, 13). Because Ziareks Heidegger is deconstructions HeideggerNancys Heidegger Ziareks event-structured or historicized experience is never a self-identical temporal punctuality or an instant of presence, but instead, a dynamic and open-ended eld of forces, whose historicity prevents experience from

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closing into representational constructs, psychic spaces, or lived instants (14). As a result, event-structured experience, sharing the temporal dislocation and radical de-essentialization of happening itself, is always open to the future and to transformation (4). The critical thrust of this historicized formulation of experienceone that, for Ziarek, links Benjamin to otherwise disparate philosophical projects of both Heidegger and Irigaray and, beyond them, to the broader project of the avant-gardelies in its challenge to three alternative formulations of experience in modernity: 1) the privatized, subjectivized, isolated experience of aestheticism; 2) the metaphysical understanding of experience in terms of presence; and 3) the ruthless, technological determination and instrumentalization of experience in technoscientic modes of perception (6). Thus, both Ziarek and Caygill pin the hopes of Benjaminian experience on its futural and transformative capacity. But where Ziarek asserts that experience can only be open-ended and excessive so long as it remains anti-metaphysical, for Caygill, the futural dimension of experience inheres in Benjamins intensive metaphysics, in the historicityor in Caygills terms, the spatio-temporal distortionsof an immanent Absolute. Benjamins politics of experience begin to emerge as Caygill notes a crucial discrepancy between Benjamins two ways of understanding this immanent totality: The rst stresses complexity, and looks to the ways in which an immanent totality may manifest itself in the complex patterns and distortions of spatio-temporal experience. The other dissolves space and time into totality, and threatens to collapse the complexity of spatiotemporal patterning into a closed redemptive immanence (Caygill 1998, 6). For Ziarek, it is this second notion of totality that is in fact the chief antagonist of historicity, linked in his account to the twin threats technological reproduction poses towards experience, dangers that materialize most pressingly in the artwork: on the one hand, the artwork becomes aestheticized and thus follows the broader reduction of the human sensorium to the lived moment (Erlebnis), becoming inconsequential and dangerously isolated from historical and political memory (Erfahrung); on the other hand, the artworks perceived isolation from the everyday sparks the transformation of art into a recuperative, totalizing mode of experience,

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the redemptive immanence of totalitarian myth. Both of these orders threaten to collapse the complexity of historicity in the self-presence of the present, now steeled against alterity: Invested with authenticity and power, the present can either authorize itself as its own ground in the punctuality of shock experience absent historical memory, or transfer this authority onto a prehistoric, mythical origin, thereby making possible a totalization of experience at the expense of otherness and difference. In either case, the discursive and political effects of the erasure of alterity in the wake of the collapse of Erfahrung into Erlebnis become apparent (Ziarek 2001, 47). It is to Caygills credit that he countenances the moments in Benjamins own writing that veer towards the dissolution of historicitys complexity into an absolute immanent purity, those moments of pure spirit which abolish any trace of externality or remainder (here Caygill names the formulations of voice in On Language as Such and the Language of Man, divine violence in Critique of Violence, and pure language in On the Mimetic Faculty [Caygill 1998, 6]). More impressive, though, is the way Caygill connects the politics of experience to Benjamins transcendental but speculative philosophy, and the two kinds of innities it mobilizes: one, a transcendental, Kantian innity that consists of an innity of possible marks on a given surface (or perceptions within a given framework of possible experience); the other, a speculative innity that understands any given surface, or framework of experience, as but one of an innite set of possible surfaces or conditions of experience (4). This formulationone of an innite setis one of Caygills favorites. For example, in a fascinating reading of Benjamins seldom-mentioned early writings on painting, Caygill describes colour as a trope for precisely this speculative innity of experiential conguration; having no xed value, colors innite varietyits manifold complexitycan only be reduced to a graphic mark on a singular surface with certain violence. So, because Benjamins speculative concept of experience remains always open to colorto the emergence of alternative experiential surfacesthe experiential decay of modernity must perforce produce ashing glimpses of (or porous passages to) other potential frameworks for experience. It is here, for Caygill, that a speculative concept of freedom emerges, but it is a freedom that is less a

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programme than the occasion of an unexpected transition made possible by one of the gaps, warps, or breaks in the continuity of experience (2627). Such tenuous freedom appears, for example, in the experiential potential of the modern city, which Benjamin repeatedly thinks through non-Kantian concepts like porosity, threshold, and shock, concepts which show the space and time of the Paris arcades to be not xed and continuous forms of intuition, but rather in the process of continual but discontinuous transformation, opening speculative moments of excess within reied experience (124). If freedom, in Caygills account, is the name of the moment when experience reveals itself to be colorful, then violence is the antagonist of colors complexitythe black-and-white reduction of conguration to an impoverished surface. One of the great strengths of Caygills book is its ability to track Benjamins critique of this violence in a variety of texts with seemingly disparate concerns: in the early language and translation essays, in his metacritical texts, in the Artwork essay, and in his writings on the city. So, in his brilliant discussion of Benjamins language and translation essays, Caygill notes that Benjamins noninstrumental account of languages dignity depends upon its role as a sphere of speechlessness, which is to say, a space of the Absolute immanent in language, conveying at once meaning and the limits of meaning, the sayable and the unsayable (1998, 14). Applying the transcendental/speculative distinction to language, Caygill argues that the transcendental view understands language as an innitely extended eld of possible utterances, while a speculative view of language would see it as a mode of designation and intention capable of generating an innite number of languages (15). For Benjamin, the true speculative condition of the discrete languages is the creative word of God (19). And violence is the name for the usurpation of this speculative condition in translation, when one language surface arrogates the role of the divine word and considers itself to be the source and measure of all the others (22).4 Nonviolent translation, by contrast, refuses translations penchant to reduce the other to the same; instead, the word in translation would be colorful, having no xed meaning but existing in a state of continual transformation according to its relationship with other languages. Nonviolent

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translation thus names the encounter between incompatible innities, in which each language is transformed by and transforms the others (20). This kind of mutually transformative mode of ethical translation reappears in Benjamins notion of critique, which is for Caygill a speculative critique whose operation he traces from the early Benjamins thesis on German Romanticism to the late Benjamins interest in the modern epic. In the speculative critical mode (a more precise mode of immanent critique), critique and its object are in a continual process of speculative transformation. The political contours of this critical strategy emerge in Benjamins critique of Romantic epistemology. If experience is innite conguration, then, Benjamin adduces, the critical work of Romantic reection is troubled insofar as all reection is innitely mediated by more reection. Critiques task, then, is to avoid the twin dangers of dogmatic nitude on the one hand (stating all the formal possibilities in the work, thus transforming them into timeless necessities) and skeptical innity on the other (dissolving the formal constitution of the given work by the potentially endless invention of contingent, counterfactual formal possibilities) (Caygill 1998, 45). What Caygill calls speculative critiques middle ground is a kind of compromise between considerations of the artworks form as immanent potential or as mere contingency: Critique becomes the introduction of contingency into the form of the work . . . critique disturbs the identity of the work by opening it to future possibilities, but it does so without transforming its immanent possibilities into necessities nor by dissolving them into contingencies (46). The critical task, in other words, is to keep the artwork open to the future, as one of a number of possible congurations of experience. Indeed, the recurrence of formulations like thisone of an innite number of possible congurationsthroughout The Colour of Experience suggests that for Caygill, as for Agamben, Benjamin is primarily a theorist of potential. Thus, the politics of art, and of criticism, are determined by the artworks relationship to its experiential borders: If the borders of the work of art are impermeable and closed, then the work is immutable, defying time and change; if they are permeable and open, then the work is constantly in the process of transformation, becoming other than itself

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(Caygill 1998, 93). For Caygill, it is the contraction or expansion of the aesthetics experiential parameters with which Benjamin demarcates the political in the Artwork essay: fascism, like aestheticism, is a regressive mode of experiential border-patrolling that seeks to monumentalize the phantasm of a present and authentic identity and model of experience, while communism . . . afrms the ux of identity and the permanent revolution of the organization of experience (103). The ambivalent politics of the artwork, Caygill argues, inhere in the deployment of its technological reproducibility to either resist the change in experience, to monumentalize the present, or . . . to promote the transformation of experience that anti-auratic cinematic technology itself abetshere, specically, by destroying the intuitive conditions of experience in Kants formulation (space and time), dissolving auratic spatio-temporal borders of objects, and through the optical unconscious, revealing the more expansive experiential possibilities of technological second nature (95). In Caygills model, then, the optical unconscious is yet another manifestation of an absolute which is immanent to experience but which manifests itself in inconspicuous and indirect ways (112). Koepnicks and Ziareks meditations on the Artwork essay dichotomize the progressive or reactionary politics of the aesthetic through a related constellation of oppositions: monumental identity and ux, stasis and transformation, closure and rupture. Koepnicks insightful chapter Aesthetic Dictatorship establishes the terms of Benjamins attack on fascisms presentation of political action as the culmination of artistic originality (Koepnick 1999, 86) through a conceptual triad of productive modesthe forces of creation, formation, and conjurationthat Benjamin delineates in the Goethe essay in order to discriminate between incompatible forms of action and [to] delimit quasi-autonomous spheres of knowledge and ethical responsibility (87). Creation, the sphere of life, brings forth a world from nothingness, while formationthe mode of production of autonomous artnames the energy with which artists endow the chaos of the given world with form, the production of Schoein that interrupts the ow of time and the metamorphoses of space (87).

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Conjuration, by contrast, presents life as art and art as life, claiming falsely that it can bring forth a world out of nothing, thus falsely appropriating the ethics of origin and continuity inherent to creation (87). The Artwork essays critique of the claims for autonomy made by aestheticism and fascism and its related celebration of technical reproducibility are thus predicated on Benjamins sense that any appeal to the principle of formation . . . has become potentially complicit with conjuration, whereby war itself emerges as a self-referential work that resists discursive questioning, calling for awe and submission, not for normative debates or moral criticism (90, 97). And thus, Koepnick explains, Benjamin turns to a postaesthetic theory of production and experience and, beyond that, to postbourgeois concepts of rupture, openness, and collective authorship or reception modeled in the work of Brecht, Valry, and Eisenstein (91). For Ziarek, on the other hand, the politics of Benjamins newly postaesthetic work of art lie in the artworks ability to unfold the historicity of experienceits event-structurethat frustrates both punctuality of experience [Erlebnis] and the temptation of a totalizing, mytho-poetic recuperation of being (Ziarek 2001, 84). Here, the other side of fascist spectacles monumental self-referentiality is not discursive questioning and normative debates, but rather the dislocating singularity of the event enacted in the artworks structure of reproducibility, in the self-disjunctive shock of what Samuel Weber has dubbed reproducibility as a mode of being.5 Because the reproducible artwork, operating on the model of the linguistic event, guards against the erasure of otherness in the totality of history by interrupting, to paraphrase Nancy, its myth of unity, such postaesthetic work also deploys the singularity of the event historically (84). Thus, this interruptive singularity points not to a stable discursive realm of norms, fact, and value, but rather brings about the recognition of how the discursive formulations of experience are liable to continuous reinvention and reinscription in light of their historicity (84). Insofar as Ziarek links the event-structure of the reproducible artwork to the eventful temporality of the dialectical image, his account may be considered the extrapolation to the domain of experience of David Ferriss useful formulation that for

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Benjamin, the political is the advent of a present, a now that disarticulates the continuity of the past and, in so doing heralds a politics that will be known as revolution (Ferris 1996, 19).6 Koepnick, by contrast, understands Benjamins anti-evolutionary and catastrophic conception of history as Habermas doesas the very suspension of any meaningful notion of political action (Koepnick 1999, 169, 170).7 At this point, it is worth lingering a bit on the language of alterity, ethics, and violence that surfaces in these accounts. To what extent, we might ask, are these reckonings with Benjamins politics of experience suspicious of similar violences? And what do they suggest about the relationship in Benjamins work between experience and ethical responsibility? Here, we might notice how the dubious move that Caygill calls becoming the source of conguration (that which attens the color of experience) is quite close to what Ziarek identies as the self-authorization and self-grounding of the present (that which erases the historicity of experience). Both moves would lay claim to the forces of creation that posit origin and continuity, and that, in Koepnicks account, are falsely appropriated by fascist spectacles politics of conjuration. Consistently posed against alterityvariously understood in these accounts as color (Caygill), historicity (Ziarek), and those peculiarly modern structures of seeing, perception, and experience fascist spectacle would domesticate (Koepnick)these instantiations of origin recall the pure violence that Benjamin, in his Critique of Violence, associates with the divine and the messianic.8 Taken together, these studies locate Benjamins political relevance in his thinking of expansive forms of experience resistant to closure, continuity, and origin, and in his sensitivity to the ethico-political violences attending experiential reduction. It is really only Caygill, though, who underscores Benjamins dialectical approach to experiential decaythe way his trenchant analysis of the destruction of traditional forms of community and their relations to nature by the development of capitalist social relations and technology is inseparable from his assessment of the chances for an active, even religious nihilism which nests within the decay of experience, manifesting itself above all in the experience of destitution (Caygill 1998, xiii). Benjamins urgency thus lies in his attempt to think together both the terms of enriched experience and the potential of

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experiential poverty by turning his attention to the destroyed subject of experience and to the ethical imperatives of new human physisimmanent, embodied, thinglyemerging in the wake of Gods remotion.9 It is Beatrice Hanssen who perhaps provides the most comprehensive and vital account of the logic of decay that follows from modern secularization, a logic left in the wake of the excision of the transcendent and rooted in the natural history that/of remains (Hanssen 1998, 11). Unlike Susan Buck-Morsss conception of a natural history discoverable in the fossilized surfaces of capitalisms vanishing, Hanssens Walter Benjamins Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels voices an ethico-theological call within Benjamins materialist historiography that recalls more primordial forms of responsibility and justice that antedate the hegemony of the Greek ontophilosophical tradition (5).10 Beginning from Benjamins and Adornos oft-noted recoil from Heideggers ontologization of historywhich devalued, among other things, the crucial notion of transienceHanssen seeks to outline a version of natural history that at once radically undermines Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment historicity, and decenters, if not dismantles, the human subject that organizes its meaning (Sinn). Her argument foregrounds decay and transience as dialectical principles, thus following Adornos 1932 lecture The Idea of Natural History in countering an ahistorical or prehistorical arche with the coinherence of nature and history, and the subsequent material processes of decline. But where Adorno focused attention on Benjamins Trauerspiel and its anti-idealist concept of history, Hanssen projects that texts melancholic, anti-humanist disposition over the whole of the Benjaminian canon and teases out a consistent, if sometimes understated, ethical imperative, one that allows her to read, say, Benjamins essay on Goethes Elective Afnities as a Kierkegaardian ethics of decision (Entscheidung) and an existential embrace of death, as well as a notable attempt to think through the categories of salvation and redemption (83). Hanssens Benjamin is thus a Benjamin in dialogue with Levinas, the later Derrida, and Adornoa Benjamin not unlike the Heidegger he consistently, if problematically, opposed, striving to overcome the shortfalls of humanism even as he barely skirts the fascist orientation he fears.

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Hanssens study is divided into two sections, with the rst detailing the vicissitudes of Benjamins mourning play thesis and his strategic dialectical oscillations between sacred and natural history, especially as they coalesce in the gure of allegory, which Hanssen reimagines as not only a radically new antisystematic gure for the disruptive force of history, but an excess of signication that destabilizes the gures of self and interiority, symptomatic of the philosophy of consciousness (1998, 4). Consequently, the latter half of Walter Benjamins Other History turns to the great literary essays of the 1930son Kraus, Kafka, Leskov, and othersand the gathering recognition of an extra- or infrahuman nature, signaled by the prevalence of stones, animals, and angels in Benjamins metaphorics. This, the realm of the creaturely, is at once the domain of the passions, mythical guilt, wanton melancholia, and animality, and yet, beginning as early as Benjamins 1916 language essay, a more pronounced and expressive [vehicle] of an ethical call for an all-inclusive turn toward nature (104). Consistent with contemporary theoretical explorations of animality that challenge the legacy of Western humanism (for instance, Agambens recent The Open: Man and Animal with its own millennial preoccupations), Benjamins ethicopolitical project seeks to awaken a responsibility to human creatureliness, a shrugging-off of anthropomorphic subjectivity in favor of a redemptive, if eeting Judaic singularity. Hanssen illustrates how the model of progressive human creation must be replaced by that of violent destruction: Only in this way, [Benjamin] suggested, could the grounds for the coming of a new humankind be laida humanity that, paradoxically, would realize itself through destruction (118). At the center of this new humanity is the gure of the Unmensch, the inhuman, born of a politics of destruction articulated in two 1931 essays, Karl Kraus and The Destructive Character. If, to quote Benjamin, the destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable distrust of the course of things (Benjamin 1999, 542) and whose promise is seeing potential in every obstacle (What exists he reduces to rubblenot for the sake of the rubble, but for that of the way leading through it [542]), the Unmensch is the ruined human left behind, stripped by violence of his metaphysical privilege, and yet redeemable in the name of a broader, nonexclusive humanism.

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Hanssen is quick to note Benjamins penchant for embrac[ing] dangerously conservative gures of thought while promoting a coming politics, and she offers a corrective in the form of Deutsche Menschen (German People), a curious and little-noted compendium of letters and commentary that Benjamin collected and published during his exile from National Socialism. Written mostly by prominent German intellectuals between 1783 and 1883, the montage of lettersincluding correspondence to and from Lichtenberg, Kant, Georg Forster, Goethe, Hlderlin, Jean Paul, and othersis designed to awaken an exemplary but nearly lost German humanism tremulous beneath the work of forces that noisily and brutally denied it public effectiveness (quoted in Hanssen 1998, 108). Thus, against the Nazi refashioning of the national Bildung, Benjamin hoped to archive another, silent, silenced, and secret Germany, easy in its heterogeneity, democratic in spirit, and possible only in the private everyday deliberations of singular individuals (110). In the inscriptions he wrote in gift copies of Deutsche Menschen, Benjamin referred to the volume as this ark, built according to Jewish example, a gesture which points not only to the elements of difference and alterity within Benjamins German-Jewish identity, but to the promise of a replenished humanism after National Socialism, founded in the unresolved potential of an unremarked past. Signicantly, after the Holocaust, Adorno viewed Deutsche Menschen as Benjamins utopian attempt to naively recover an otherwise unassimilable German collectivity under the erroneous belief that spirit and cunning could achieve something against a power that no longer acknowledged the spirit as something independent but only as a means to its ends (quoted in Hanssen 1998, 111). The mundane practicality of many of the letters, their everydayness, signaled the last vestiges of a Kantian ethics pitted against the totalizing instrumentality of hypernationalism; but, as Hanssen demonstrates, Adorno is himself susceptible to a similar romantic yearning, justifying his eventual German return to his fondness for the German idiom, which exhibits an elective afnity to philosophy, as well as a metaphysical speculative surplus (berschu) of meaning (113). The seemingly gravitational pull of a natural/national language on these gures highlights the nonsubjective, linguistic nature of truth beneath Benjamins

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nature: for, as Benjamin asks in the famous translation essay, is not the continued life of works of art far easier to recognize than the continual life of animal species? (Benjamin 1968a, 71). The question acknowledges the deep murmuring language of things that preexists things themselves, a language in and from which Benjamin and Hanssen hear an ethical summons. Where Caygill rightly remains uncomfortable with this betrayal of complex historicity in the name of redemptive immanence, Hanssens keen ear for the transcendence looming in bersetzen (translation) means that individual, singular translations were said to point proleptically to and anticipate revelation (Hanssen 1998, 34); as a result, the history of the work and its translations was an objective, nonhuman, nonhumanistic history, for it was distinguished by relational concepts (Relationsbegriffe) and by relations, which, as Benjamin wrote, would guard their most central signicance only when they are not in advance exclusively related to humans (36). Much like Edward Saids late call for a return to philology as a resource for a new humanismto Spitzer and Auerbach, as well as to the tradition of ijtihadHanssens often brilliant recovery of Benjamins broad ethical project depends upon a renewed commitment to a nearly forgotten creatural language, which, like the language of translation, gives voice to the intentio of the original not as reproduction but as harmony (Benjamin 1968a, 79). Fittingly, then, [i]n this pure languagewhich no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that which is meant in all languagesall information, all sense, and all intention nally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to extinction (Benjamin 1968a, 80). Released from the din of twentieth-century political life, the stratum of pure language represents an emancipation from communication, the dying-off of sense, and the possibility of generative silence. In a 1999 special issue of Critical Inquiry in honor of the rst volume of the Harvard Selected Writings, Shoshana Felman binds Benjamins sense of blasted experience and the potentiality of languages dead-end under the sign of war and its relentless self-referentiality, within which silence functions as event. Felmans Benjamin is war-haunted, a historian whose entire theory of historical transmission is bound up in the silence that anticipates

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and follows cultural trauma: where The Storyteller (1936) looks back to the incommunicability of experience and resulting erosion of community following World War I, the Theses on the Philosophy of History four years later diagnoses the double silenceboth the speechlessness of the oppressed and the silence of ofcial history with respect to itat the heart of historiography before World War II (Felman 1999, 213). The exigency of the latter moment aligns this silence with ideological collaboration, and insists that the rational continuity of historical narrative be arrested, the voice of the dead and the vanquished heard in what Benjamin calls a Messianic cessation of happening (Benjamin 1968b, 263). However, Felmans account is more intimate, as she traces the source of this profound speechlessness to the August 1914 double suicide of Benjamins best friend Fritz Heinle and his girlfriend, and their fateful last letter to Benjamin instructing him where to nd the bodies. Read as a symbolic gesture of protest against the war, this event, its letter, and its afterlife linger as the material gure of articulated, even revolutionary silence. Or, as Benjamin remarks in the 1916 On Language as Such, In all mourning there is the deepest inclination to speechlessness, which is innitely more than the inability or disinclination to communicate (Benjamin 1996b, 73). The shock of these two familiar yet lifeless bodies calling to be discovered consolidates and privatizes the mass trauma of the battleeld, and when Benjamin tries to come to terms with the meaning of Heinles suicide in the autobiographical A Berlin Chronicle, he posits it as a form of living outside experience. Indeed, for Felman, suicide functions within Benjamins oeuvre as a refusal to compromise with life. . . . [an] absolute commitment to a youth that the subject refuses to survive (1999, 221). In and through Heinles self-silencing, Benjamin found an arrested but still vibrant language: strangely, then, in suicide there is insurgent life. It is useful to conclude with Gerhard Richters Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography, in part because Richters expansive treatment of Benjamins frequent autobiographical wagers understands that the desiccated subject left behind after the violent attenuation of experience is still perhaps the last best point of departure. As such, Richters book serves as a valuable case study in how we might proceed with Benjamin when the

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political is both a horizon of possibility and legible only in the deepest soundings of the gurative. Benjamins frequent ventures in memoir including the Moscow Diary (192627), the Berlin Chronicle (1932), and the Berlin Childhood around 1900 (193238)are urgent and intimate enactments of his theoretical writings, registering always a profound skepticism toward the canonical privileges of the modern autobiographical subject while insisting that memory is the very scene of thinking itself (Richter 2000, 43). Resistant to the imbricated lies of chronology and narrative, memory must, in Benjamins words, assay its spade, epically and rhapsodically in the most rigorous sense, creating an archaeological mnemonics whereby each of his autobiographical texts is more topography than chronicle, more ruin than record, with temporality looming not as the vital trajectory of bios, but as a strange gure of both ephemerality and eternity. Richters project is an excavation of this gure, especially as it is materialized in Benjamins corpus, a trope designed to capture at once the inscriptive surfaces of experience that Caygill privileges, the archive of Benjamins autobiographical improvisations, and the body in language at the moment of remembering. Adorno was among the rst to remark Benjamins broad rejection of inwardness as not merely the seat of torpor and dull complacency but the phantasm which distorts the potential image of the human being, and his characterization of the empirical Benjamin as hardly the person but rather the scene of the movement of the subject matter that pushed through him toward language provides Richter with a dynamic starting point for thinking the body in thought (quoted in Richter 2000, 58, 51). Sensitive then to the simultaneity of a historically recognizable physical subjectivity (and, by extension, the revolutionary potential this recognition may engender), but also to the moment of uncontainable excess, or even destruction, that mars this prospect, Richter wants to conjure a body that privileges openness, discontinuity, and dispersal, without forsaking the creaturely call of Hanssens natural history (58). Richters reading of the Moscow Diary, for instance, turns in part on Benjamins diagnosis of the [w]eakening of the symbolic and communicative power in the skeleton of the word, an atrophic gure meant to signal the impending collapse of both the house of language and the subjects

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internal consistency, portending the deep, abiding anonymity on which the ethical depends. The retreat from transparency into a post-mimetic stratum is a retreat into the theologically suffused environment where language has no human speaker (only God). In order to think this delimitation politically, Richter begins his study by way of Benjamins appeal to a conceptual apparatus completely useless for the purposes of fascism, the details of which Benjamin famously fails to specify. This seemingly political foreclosure is for Richter an invitation to read the politics of concepts that have never been written, and a responsibility to, in Benjamins words, the Now of recognizability [which] bears to the highest degree the stamp of that critical, dangerous moment that lies at the ground of all reading (quoted in Richter 2000, 13). For Richter, reading Benjamins autobiographical corpus emplots in miniature the intricate interruptions of teleologymoments that give us politics to think again and againrather than the instances of its mimetic execution (234), whereby the dispersion (rather than the consolidation) of the self aligns autobiography with Benjamins politics of language, with the pure language that wrestles with its own inability to transmit a stable content and that recognizes its status as a vital supplement to any performance of signication (30). Obviously, the rejection of naive functionality, transparency, and self-identity is intended to elude the instrumental appropriations of fascism, and it follows then that the counter to the myth of the closed communal subject in history is the unusable body, a provisional subject faltering between solidity and diffusion, unity and difference. Richters long opening chapter on Benjamins corporeality traces the arc of the disaggregated subject from the mutilated, suffering body of the baroque Trauerspiel to the self-alienation experienced by the twentieth-centurys mass-mediated subjects (or, as Benjamin writes, In a lm, the human being cannot recognize his own walk or his own voice in the gramophone), in order to suggest how Benjamins body has always already been something else, caught in the instant of its transformation. Not surprisingly, Richter turns to de Mans theory of prosopopeia to suggest how autobiography is always concerned, in de Mans idiom, with the giving and taking away of faces, with face and deface, gure, guration, and disguration. Much like

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the work of Carol Jacobs, whose three decades of Benjamin scholarship is the quintessence of writing with Benjamin,11 Richters deconstructive sympathies are less avowed than performed, as he repeatedly stages the violent diffusion of Benjamins bodily gures in order make them irreducible to other modes of violence. That Benjamins gural politics have nally become a site for reimagining and rematerializing the stakes of deconstruction measures the ethical turn in critical theory, in which the theosophical nature of pure language and natural history ironically becomes the motor of an unworking, after which, always, we can begin anew. Adorno famously said of Benjamin, In all his phases, Benjamin thought the demise of the subject and the salvation of humanity as one thing, a formulation that would seem to underwrite the deconstructive spirit with which Benjamin is continually taken up by his contemporary readers: what Benjamin calls the destructive character, and the eventfulness of Gods word, is deconstruction for theorists like Ziarek, Hanssen, and Richter. It is hard to know at times whether this is precisely the methodological point, whether contemporary theory has found in Benjamins politics a measure of the redemption that Benjamin himself awaited: out of the rubble something potentiating, eventful, to come.

I
NOTES
1. This penchant for sundry and often cavalier Benjaminian readings probably reaches its apotheosis with Lisa Patts edited collection, Benjamins Blind Spot: Walter Benjamin and the Premature Death of Aura (2001), which includes essays putting Benjamin in conversation with the early Elvis, Wallace Stevens, the industrial music group Coil, Georges Bataille, and others. For exemplary work on Benjamins early engagement with Jena Romanticism and the attempts to resolve the Kantian problem of consciousnesss representation of itself to itself, see the inaugural volume in the Walter Benjamin Studies series, Beatrice Hanssen and Andrew Benjamins (eds.), Walter Benjamin and Romanticism (2002), edited by Beatrice Hanssen and Andrew Benjamin, especially Winfried Menninghauss Walter Benjamins Exposition of the Romantic Theory of Reection, Rodolphe Gaschs The Sober Absolute: On Benjamin and the Early Romantics, and Josh Cohens Unfolding: Reading After Romanticism.

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For a different account of Benjamins uneasy afnities with Schmitt in the context of the Trauerspiel, see Horst Bredekamp, From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt via Thomas Hobbes (1999). Linking Benjamin and Schmitt primarily through the value they attribute to a form of political time posited beyond the continuum of normality, Bredekamp insists that Benjaminin his critique of the baroque rulers failure to govern the state of exceptionviews the absence of true decisionism, true sovereignty, as catastrophic, and thus remains rmly within the Schmittian framework (258, 261). Here, we might observe that what Benjamin calls the pure language of Gods word, which Caygill understands as the potential for innitive conguration of experience, is quite like what Heidegger, according to Ziarek, calls languages function to unfold phenomenality itself through the double movement of guring and unworking that it shares with the artwork: because art works like and as a languageit unfolds the world by transposing it into discourseartworks stage being in its historial character, rendering legible the historicity of the discursive constitution of experience (Ziarek 2001, 36). What Heidegger calls the event-structure of languagethe unfolding of all that is through the sayableis Gods word for Benjamin. See Samuel Webers Theater, Technics, and Writing (quoted in Ziarek 2001, 77). See also Webers formulation that the artworks politics lie in its ability to frustrate fascist organization, which it achieves through the different taking place of the time of reproducibility, a non-self present, shocked, temporality (Weber 1996, 34). For Ferris, as for Ziarek, the political force of the dialectical images historicizing interruption nds its aesthetic counterpart in a concept, technical reproducibility, that would mark the end of historical continuity represented by the aura of the work of art and, at the same time, resist political organization in the name of politics that arises in and out of the dialectical image (Ferris 1996, 18). However, Ferris and Ziarek make these similar claims by articulating very different relationships between Benjamin and Heidegger: for Ferris, Benjamins discontinuous phenomenology is posed against Heideggers phenomenological essentialism, whereas for Ziarek, because Heidegger is already anti-essentialist, his formulation of the artworks historicity is easier to see in dialogue with Benjamin. Here, Koepnick quotes approvingly and at length Habermass skeptical critique of Benjamin as a thinker of revolution in his well-known 1972 essay Consciousness Raising or Rescuing Critique (Koepnick 1999, 170). Insofar as such reductions are boundin these accountsto the instantiation of origin they are, of course, reminiscent of the mythical violence that Derrida, following Benjamin, locates at the founding of the law (Derrida 1990). For superb readings of Benjamins Critique of Violence, see Alexander Garca Dttman, The Violence of Destruction, and Tom McCall, Momentary Violence, both in Ferriss Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions (1996), as well as Beatrice Hanssens reading of Benjamins utopian attempt to formulate a non-instrumental politics of pure means in Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (2000). The best accounts of the role of lm in Benjamins attempt to think the experiential

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B e n j a m i ns U r g e n c y potential of a technologized second natureone still imbued with mimetic modes of cognition, temporality, and intersubjectivityremain those of Miriam Hansen. See, for example, Benjamin, Cinema, and Experience: The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology (1987) and, more recently, Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street (1999). See Susan Buck-Morsss The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1991), especially 58-77. These writings were recently collected in Jacobss In the Language of Walter Benjamin (1999).

10. 11.

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Questions, edited by David S. Ferris, 126. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Gasch, Rodolphe. 2003. The Sober Absolute: On Benjamin and the Early Romantics. In Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, edited by Beatrice Hanssen and Andrew Benjamin, 5168. New York: Continuum. Habermas, Jrgen. 1988. Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique. In On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, edited by Gary Smith. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hansen, Miriam. 1987. Benjamin, Cinema, and Experience: The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology. New German Critique 40: 179224. . 1999. Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street. Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2: 30643. Hanssen, Beatrice. 2000. Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory. London: Routledge. Hanssen, Beatrice; and Andrew Benjamin, eds. 2002. Walter Benjamin and Romanticism. New York: Continuum. Jacobs, Carol. 1999. In the Language of Walter Benjamin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe; and Jean-Luc Nancy. 1990. The Nazi Myth. Translated by Brian Holmes. Critical Inquiry 16, no. 2: 291312. McCall, Tom. 1996. Momentary Violence. In Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions, edited by David S. Ferris, 185209. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. McLaughlin, Kevin. 2003. Benjamin Now: Afterthoughts on The Arcades Project. boundary 2 30, no. 1: 19197. Menninghaus, Winifred. 2003. Walter Benjamins Exposition of the Romantic Theory of Reection. In Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, edited by Beatrice Hanssen and Andrew Benjamin, 1950. New York: Continuum. Patt, Lisa, ed. 2001. Benjamins Blind Spot: Walter Benjamin and the Premature Death of Aura. Topanga, Calif.: Institute of Cultural Inquiry. Weber, Samuel. 1996. Mass Mediauras; or, Art, Aura, and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin. In Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions, edited by David S. Farris, 2749. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.