History, Literature and the Text: The Case of Walter Benjamin hi 1g Wohifarth MLN, Vol. 96, No. 5, Comparative Literature, (Dec., 1981), pp. 1002-1014, Stable URL http: flinks.jstor-org/sici?sici=0026-79 10% 28198 1 12%2996%3A5%3C 1002% 3AHLATIT%3E2.0,CO%3B2-5 MLN is currently published by The John Hopkins University Press. Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at bhupulwww.jstororg/about/terms.hunl. JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of « journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial us. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at butpy/www jstor.org/journaljhup html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission, JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to ereating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @jstor.org, bhupslhvwwjstororg/ Wed Oct 18 15:27:04 2006History, Literature and the Text: The Case of Walter Benjamin é Irving Wohlfarth If one wants to consider history as a text, then what a recent author says about literary texts also holds true for it. The past, he writes, has deposited images in them comparable to those retained by a photo- sensitive plate. “Only the future has at its disposal developers strong enough to bring out the image in full detail. ...” (Mong- lond) ...“To read what was never written,” says Hofmannsthal. The reader in question is the true historian, ‘One might... speak ofan unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten it If the nature of such a life or moment required that it be unforgotten, that predicate would not imply a falsehood but merely a claim not fulfilled by man, and probably also a reference to a realm in which ii fulfilled: God's remembrance." “Any examination ofa given epic form,” writes Walter Benjamin in The Storyteller, “is concerned with the relationship of this form to historiography. In fact, one may go further and raise the question whether historiography does not constitute the common ground of all forms of the epic.”* Epic forms and historiography are thus inextricably related. But the interdependence is not a symmetrical one. Historiography is not itself another epic form, but rather the “creative matrix [Indiffeenz} of the various epic forms (as great prose isthe creative matrix of the various metrical forms)" (J, 97) It MAN Vol 96 Pp. 1002-1014 (0026-79r01810968-1002 $01.00. @ 198% by The Johns Hopkine Uiveriy ProsMLN 1003, is to these forms as “white light” is to “the colors of the spectrum” (, 95). Historiography would thus be the medium of all epic forms—and not the reverse. But itis only through one of the colors of the spectrum—ideally, the most neutral one—that historiography can be recounted. ‘The essay from which the above quotations are taken itself tells the history of one particular epic form, Itself a historical narrative, it tells the story of the storyteller. As the medium of all epic forms, historiography does not operate from some transcendent or underlying vantage-point beyond them. It is, rather, contained within them. Itis, no doubr, only contained; only there, however, is it contained. As a “point of creative indifference,” it exists neither wholly inside nor entirely outside the spectrum of epic forms. Nor is such indifference a matter of positivstic neutrality. “Creative” indifference connotes an informing energy that is at once mystical and sober. It is the white light of Messianic “prose.”* The Storyteller tells the story/history of the storyteller. But it cannot tell tin the same way that he tells hs stories. For the point of Benjamin’s story is, precisely, that the age of storytelling is rapidly nearing its end—and this for precise historical reasons. No one can spin yarns anymore, because there is no more yarn to be spun. The storyteller's craft is vanishing, because it was rooted in a pre-industrial economy ‘The decline and fall of an epic form is a story that can be told in various ways. The uninhibited nostalgia with which, for exampl the young Lukics invokes the golden age of the Homeric epi well-known: “Blessed are the times when..." No such simple sentiment colors Benjamin’s account of the storyteller. True, a melancholy sense of “the world we have lost” (Peter Laslett) also pervades his story. But ifit has become “possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing,” it is because he is vanishing that the storyteller’s beauty is now so significantly enhanced. The aura he radiates is a product of his eclipse. Benjamin does not therefore wax elegiac about an idealized past. He sees the widening gap that separates the storyteller’s world from ours not asa misfortune to be lamented but as an opportunity to be seized. “Something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions” has been “taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences” (J, 83). But that loss also clears the way for new gains. The twilight of the storyteller is, as it were, the darkroom in which his image can be historically developed. In maintaining the “proper distance and1004 IRVING WOHLFARTH angle of vision” (I, 88) towards its subject, Benjamin's narrative splices the art of storytelling with quasi-photographic techniques. ‘The storyteller is in the process of disappearing: Benjamin’s essay exploits that moment of transition. And no doubt because its subject is historically doomed, it opts for “soft, historical”—rather than “harsh, political” —lighting.” But however critical the distance between that narrative and the tradition to which it bids farewel, isn't the story itself an entirely traditional one? Once upon a time when tradition was sill vital and ‘experience cumulative, so runs the familiar tale, the storyteller was the spokesman of an organic community. But then came the fall into modernity, bourgeois society, information, and with it the inevitable decline of the storyteller. We can even extrapolate the ‘end of the story from scattered hints contained in certain other of Benjamin's writings. An “end” in a double sense, it will coincide with the return of the storyteller, who will then be able to tell the story in its entirety. Resurrected as the “history-tller” (/, 95) or “chronicler,” he would come to tell history with the same effortlessness with which he once narrated his life. This should not at present even be attempted; but one day it may come to pass. Then the teller of tales (Er-2dhler) will e-count everything that ever was in epie detail. He will be o the Last Judgment what Adam was to Creation. Benjamin singles out the chronicle as the form of this final reckoning. It remains an epic form—but an epic form to end all pie forms. Ivis that part of the spectrum which approximates most closely the white light that informs it. OF all epic forms “there is not bone whose incidence in the pure, colorless light of written history is more certain than the chronicle” (J, 95). OF all the colors of the spectrum itis the most transparent translation of their source. Even in its final form, then, historiography does not exceed the bounds of epic genre. Perhaps this implies that in practice mortal historia can no more than approach the white godhead of pure historiography:® A chronicler who recites events distinguishing between major and minor ‘ones act in accordance with the following trth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fulness of its past—which isto say, only Fora redeemed mankind has its past become fully citable inal ts moments. Each moment it as ive becomes ‘A clation & ondre dt jour-—and that day is Judgment Day. 4. 258) Benjamin's story about the storyteller is thus not merely a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. It is the story of theMLN 105 beginning, the middle and the end. It grafts the modern story of, meinschaft und Gesellschaft (Tonnies) onto the deep structure of Jewish Messianism, The story to end all stories, it isa story with a double end. On the one hand, it announces the storyteller’s, approaching demise. Storytelling has become a dead end. To that, extent its history cannot be told in the traditional way. On the other hand, the storyteller still remains the teleological end of the narrative. While no artificial resuscitation can presently revive him, the story of his decline is nevertheless secretly structured by a millennial narrative that promises his resurrection. Indeed, he emerges, in the guise of the history-teller, as the very agent of redemption. With his re-emergence, the Messianic destination will finally have been reached, his utopian promise fulfilled, our debt redeemed. Our “secret agreement” (1, 254) with the past will no longer be esoteric or haphazard. The relationship will have been consummated. Mankind will have come into its own. To say that this story is a deeply conservative one is thus, if anything, to understate the case. Conservation is both its deepest desire and its categorical imperative. Historiography, thus conceived, is not merely a profession; it is pre-eminently a vocation." And, like all Messianic callings, the task is as ineluctable as it is impossible: “Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.” The historian’s vocation is to attend to the voices of the past, present and future, especially the inaudible ‘ones, and to settle their claims. The justice he stands for is more Catholic than Catholicism. For the theology implemented by the ighteous” (gerecht) storyteller harks back to “Origen’s speculation about apokatastasis—the entry of all souls into Paradise—which was rejected by the Roman Church” (1, 103). The Last Judgment Gericht) would not, in this version, separate the saved from the damned; it would signify universal redemption. Itis by suspending. judgment, by reciting events “without distinguishing between major and minor ones,” that the chronicler bears paradoxical witness to the Last Judgment. His testimony will be all the more authoritative for being indiscriminate. The story to end all stories would thus culminate in a form of judgment that passes all judgment, But this to0 will come to pass only in the fullness of time. Redemption is, until further notice, inseparable from destruction: “The Messiah comes not only as the Redeemer, he comes as the subduer of the Antichrist” , 255). Only in the last instance could a final Court of Appeal waive the earlier decisions of the lower courts, The history-teller is an officer of that Supreme Court But what use, today’s historian may impatiently ask, is a106 IRVING WOHLFARTH, theological conception of the historian’s calling, however rousing, to the professional activity of historical research? And how can so archetypal a narrative produce new insight into the relation between history and literature? The answer lies in the way the narrative comes to terms with the critical situation out of which it rearises, It accounts for that situation in terms of the crisis of experience, tradition and theology. Its own present, in other words, constitutes the second stage of the three-part story. “Every concept of the present participates in that of the Last Judgment” (GS, 1, 1245), Thus Benjamin's narrative contains its own crisis. But here too containment carries a double connotation. Ifthe present crisis is in principle accommodated within an overarching theological scheme, the very conservatism of that scheme thereby becomes capable of generating an unprecedentedly modernist version of materialist historiography Storytelling is “coming to an end” (J, 83). Correlatively, traditional narrative history must be considered obsolete. To tel history nowadays is already tote a lie—a lie of the most insidious kind, since it marks the ideological exploitation of a utopian potential. That potential is kept alive today by its destroyers rather than its presetvers. History-telling has degenerated into a reactionary enterprise, a reactive bid to deny its own impossibility Just as the poet in Baudelaire’s prose pocm Perle dAuréole confidently predicts that X and Z will pick up his lost halo and proudly wear it, so today only historians who had best remain Anonymous still presume to tell history as if it were a story Benjamin summarily lumps them under the anonymous rubric of “historicism,” which he defines as a corrupt form of storytelling “The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon atime’ in historicism’s bordello” (, 262). The erstshile virtues ofthe storyteller have meanwhile turned into so many vices. The marvelous indiscriminateness of the epic chronicle has become the easy availabilty of a prostitute. Where once the storyteller “plumbed the depths" of Creation as the “advocate” of God's humblest creatures (1, 104), historicism is reduced to an “indolence of the heart” capable of “cmpathizing” only with the powers that be. Epic breadth now merely distracts from the straitened circumstances and narrowing choices of the present, and obscures the abstract economics of capital. The panorama that historicism contemplates, the “perspectives” it opens up, the survey courses it offers, are of the order of aMLN 1007 phantasmagoria—criminally innocent or disingenuous entertain- 1 for which the materialist historian cannot afford the time." Benjamin's indictment of historicism was o be corroborated over thirty years later by the German literary historian Hans Robert Jauss. Jauss has demonstrated* that the claim to historical objectivity made by the founding father of modern historicism turns out in practice to be governed by an identifiable set of narrative conventions. The poetics of Rankean historiography converge with those of Scott's historical novels. Far from transcending all man-made conventions, the God's eye view is merely an optical illusion produced by another literary fiction; and to want to tell “how it actually was” (wie es eigentlich gewesen) is to assume “how” to be synonymous with “what. If, then, a certain homology obtains in the nineteenth century between literature and historiography, what of the twentieth? The logic of Jauss’ demonstration forces him into a bold but inescapable conclusion. If contemporary historiography is not to be molded by the narrative conventions of yesteryear, it must attune itself to the poetics of modern literature. But no sooner has Jauss advanced this claim than he beats an unobtrusive retreat. For his account of the shift from a “classical” to a “modern” paradigm of literary narration clearly exempts itself from the developments it imperturbably describes—one indication among many that his own position is but an updated version of the historicism it criticizes. Nor is Jauss’ case an isolated one. Towards the end of Mimesis, Erich Auerbach describes the same narrative shift as follows: ‘There is greater confidence in syntheses gained through full exploitation of an everyday occurrence than in a chronologically well-ordered total treatment which accompanies the subject from beginning to end, attempts not to omit anything externally important, and emphasizes the great turning points of destiny. He then goes on: Is possible to compare this technique of modern writers with that of certain modern philologists who hold that the interpretation of a few passages from Hamlet, Phédre, or Faust can be made to tell more, and more decisive, information about Shakespeare, Racine, or Goethe and their times than would a systematic and chronological treatment of their lives and works." Profound though the hidden affinities between his own inner11008 IRVING WOHLFARTH emigration, his “inner history of Western consciousness” and the “inward turn of narrative” (Erich Kahler) could be shown to be, Auerbach’s parallel between his critical method and the technique of the modern novel does not bear scrutiny. That his modernist canon may retrospectively seem relatively harmless is the least of the problems. That Jauss’ account should further conventionalize the canon by rehearsing, practically unchanged, Auerbach’s descriptive categories of thirty years before is already less defensible. But most crucial of all is the fact that neither literary historian, despite an evident attraction, can allow himself to be drawn into more than a brief flirtation with the object of his methodological desire. Mimesis broke new ground by eliciting liter- ary history from a series of explications de texte. But itis still a long, way from the renewal of established philological procedures to the experimental probings of modern literature. Both Auerbach and Jauss seem to sense that any genuinely contemporary form of literary history cannot remain unaffected by modern literary developments. An independent posture would be an anachronistic one. Claiming not to be implicated, one would be secretly aspiring to the transcendent status of yesterday's ‘omniscient narrator. But itis readily understandable that historians should shrink from such implication(s). Would not the descent into the arena deprive historiography of its constitutive vantage-point? Would not the distinction between history and literature get lost in the process? How, given a less hierarchical relation, could a method still reat its object? Who would be localizing whom? Can we even begin to visualize a form of literary history that, instead of paradi modern writers before us as the latest installment in the ongoi saga of World Lit, actually took its cue from them? Isn't the whole idea merely another example of the kind of fly-by-night literary speculation that the historian must justifiably suspect of lacking any steady commitment to the real? Had he been able to complete it, Benjamin's own most extended venture into historiography—the so-called Passagenarbeit—might have quelled these questions. For its ambition was to write the prehistory of the present through the medium of that present. But can historians ever do otherwise? “They don’t know it,” remarked Marx in a not unrelated context, “but they do it.” Doing it blindly, they do it badly. The task Benjamin set himself was that of bringing to bear the “presence of mind,” indeed the expertise, of the twentieth century on the nineteenth, the better to awaken from it.MLN 1009 This is far from being a “progressist” program opposing past and present in terms of dark and light: “It isn't that the past casts its light on the present or the present its light on the past 1, 1242), IMumination is generated rather by their fleet constellation—a conjunction glimpsed in the white light of Messianic redemption. The past is ultimately to speak for itself; the historian is to enable it to do so. The narrator is, at least in principle, to be dispensed with. Like the theological dwarf (1, 253), he disappears under the table to become an organizer. Rearranged according to notions derived from Mallarmé’s poetics, surrealist ‘montage, and photographic technique, the materials he assembles, are, through kaleidoscopic juxtaposition and reciprocal reflection, to provide a running commentary on one another. Only by quoting them against their corrupt context can the historian cite them before the Last Judgment ‘The validity of such operations rests on the rigorous interaction of historical research and literary techniques largely adapted from the practice of a certain avant-garde. Thus, while historicism “empathizes” with the “victors.” the “cautious detachment” (J, 256) with which the materialist historian observes the spectacle closely parallels the relation of Brechtian theater to Aristotelian drama. ‘The reigning historiography is by no means unliterary; itis all (oo literary. Its “willing suspension of disbelief™ (Coleridge) is itself to be suspended. And the suspension of all worldly interests that Schiller defined as distinctive of the aesthetic mode is here reinvested with a politico-mystical potential. It becomes the dynamite that is to explode the continuum of history. Standard narrative forms are, whatever their contents, part of that mainstream. They mark its time—the clock-time of spleen and progress." If “the medium is the message,” then the message of, conventional historiography is "business as usual.” The materialist historian responds with prose whose discontinuous rhythms and revolutionary punctuation are sensitive to the ever-present potential of a General Strike. While the historicist overview of Western history has only “voluntary memory” at its disposal, the privileged medium of materialist historiography is definable as a collective form of Proustian “involuntary memory.” Such remembrance is no longer motivated by the private nostalgia of an isolated individual but by the revolutionary energies of an oppressed class; and where Proust had described its occurrence as a matter of chance, Benjamin010 IRVING WOHLFARTH redefines it asa response 10a historical emergency. The “dialectical images” that it akes “presence of mind” to seize as they “flit by” , 255) resemble the images of one’s own past which are mobilized at moments of danger. As is well known, these images come involuntarily... The historian’s qualifications hinge on his sharpened awareness of the criss into which the subject of history has entered at any given time. This subject is by no means a transcendental subject but rather the militant ‘oppressed class in its most exposed situation, Historical insight exists for icalone, and fort only in the historical moment. ‘This confirms the need {or the liquidation of the epic clement in the representation of history What occurs to involuntary ... memory is never course of events but only an image. (Hence the “disordes” of the space in which these images ‘occur.) (65,1, 1248) 1 is easy to quarrel with such a statement at a time when the temperature of the class struggle has dropped to a record low. But ‘what historian has confronted the disturbing questions it raises? How to supplant the “homogeneous, empty time” (J, 261) of inert historicist chronology with a surrealist “disorder” shot through by a far more compelling logic? Can its images be written down, or only shot—as film-makers from Eisenstein to Alexander Kluge (Die Patriotin) have done? How to develop free association into the historian’s essential research tool? Is the idea that historical insight ‘exists only for the oppressed merely another glorification of proletarian consciousness? Isnt it rather a Nietzschean recognition that suffering is the substructure of all knowledge? “To: brush history against the grain” (7, 257) then means “to read what was never written” (Hofmannsthal), "to lend voice to the silences of history” (Michelet), the way the storyteller speaks for a mute nature. If involuntary memory is the medium of that advocacy, then historical knowledge is not, as historicists like Jauss and Auerbach assume, something that can be progressively accumu- lated. Rather, each present has privileged access to one particular past. The revolutionary opportunity that each moment offers alo finds confirmation in the power that moment has to unlock a particular, hitherto locked chamber of the past. Entry into that chamber strictly coincides with political action, (6S, 1, 1281)MLN wow It would follow that politically inert periods offer move time but that much less opportunity for genuine historical insight Fed by “sources” that “flow to one’s heart's content,” writes Benjamin of literary history, ‘the mainstream of tradition flows ever onwards between neatly laid out ‘embankments, as far as the eye can see. Critical theory does not abandon itself to the contemplation of this spectacle. It doesn’t look for the image fof the clouds in the stream. It asks whose mills it keeps going, whose freight it transports, and who is fishing in it... Social tradition is a camera. It constitutes an indispensable tool of critical theory. The ‘materialist dialectician operates with it. He may choose a wider or narrower angle, harsher (politcal) or softer (historical lighting—but he ‘cannot function without the camera. Conversely, he isthe only one who knows how to use it. Unlike the bourgeois theoretician, he doesn’t remain glued to the delicately tinted little pictures that Succeed one another upside down in the viewfinder. His task is to arrest the image TThe materialist dialectcian presses the button, and carries off an image of the object's insertion into the social tradition, Naturally, this image isa negative. Iti produced by an apparatus that can only translate light by shade, and shade by ight... . Once he has carried off the photographic plate, concepts enter in and he “develops” it.® ‘This account of the materialist dialectician as eameraman—and the bourgeois historian as TV-watcher—makes an instructive comparison with Marx's celebrated account of ideology as the product of a camera obscura according to which reality gets dark- ened, inverted and systematically distorted as it enters the minds of almost windowless monads. Such inversion is the fundamental mech- anism of all idealism; materialism thus defines itself as the inver- sion of inversion. Marx's metaphor of acamera obscura has. literary counterpart in a scene that Flaubert wrote for Madame Bovary Wandering at dawn in the garden of a chateau, Emma stumbles ‘upon a secret lover's haunt. “Looking in from without, one could see nothing of the interior.” And from within she gazes through colored window panes that function like a Rorschach test."* The “white sunlight” shining “through the window with transparent panes” is the only way out of the hothouse of the bourgeois-Ro- ‘mantic imagination. Correlatively, the only alternative to the dark ling immanence of bourgeois ideology is the clear light of day. In “developing” Marx's metaphor, Benjamin does not “deconstruct” the simple opposition on which itis grounded. He does, however, complicate it. The light of day here becomes a Messianie prospect,oz IRVING WOHLFARTH fone which already illuminates the present, but, like Baudelaire’s possante, only in lightning ashes. One cannot simply step out of the Cave into the sunlight, where Truth need but be contemplated. ‘The Platonic Ideas are themselves merely the shadow of the clouds in the stream. But if there is no immediate alternative to the Cave, the camera obscura is nevertheless to be turned into a darkroom, a laboratory where the images can be developed. The “operative” historian is thus confronted with a series of technical decisions: what object, what angle, what lighting, etc. He has the same tools and materials at his disposal as everyone else. But he must know how to expropriate them. Only that know-how can save the day. For there are no privileged “sources” (except Messianism itself). Sources, mainstreams, events that naturally take their course— these are, on the contrary, the alibi of bourgeois historiography. Its hard facts enclose, brick-like, a collective phantasmagoria governed by laws of inversion. ‘The task is to awaken from the stark night- mare without and the reactive daydream within, to see through their obscure complicity. Only then will the day begin to dawn Now we see through a glass darkly; but then we shall see the truth face to face. And just as the materialist historian, who “changes the picture of the landscape” by “naming the social forces at work in it," thereby intends ultimately to change the landscape itself (GS, 1,'1164), so the improved use of the camera is aimed at dismantling it. To produce a new order out ofa kaleidoscope, notes Benjamin, is still to play the game—a warning, this, to all “Benjaminians”’ ‘The concepts of the rulers have always been the mirror through which the image of an “order” came about, That kaleidoscope must be smashed. (GS, 1, 660) Whereupon we will emerge out of the darkroom—not into Platonic contemplation but into revolutionary praxis. It is by (over-?) exposure to that Messianic light that the image of history will be finally developed. All this will hardly impress the die-hard quantitative historian, who long since banished all types of narrative, old and new, from the “field.” Rather then recount, he counts; and instead of listening, he audits. But does not he too start telling stories the moment he stops not doing so—stories that are all the cruder for going unacknowledged? Isn't quantitative history merely a new,MLN 1013 more inarticulate form of historicism? Benjamin already saw an earlier positivism as lacking any “constructive principle”: “Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to filla homogeneous, empty time” (, 262). Such exhaustiveness is too exhausted to grasp. the essential. “All reification,” wrote Adorno/Horkheimer, “is a forgetting,” and Benjamin defined remembrance as the “quintessence” of a Jewish theology of history (GS, 1, 1252). Positivist historiography thus sacrifices the “original purpose” (GS, 1, 1231) of all history on the altar of a false god. Its storyless accountancy is, moreover, the obverse side of son et lumiére: “The false animation with which past history is actualized, and all traces of ‘lament’ [‘Klage’] removed, marks its final capitulation to the modern concept of science” (GS, 1, 1231). Benjamin is not here tilting at science in the name of the Wailing Wall. He is evoking an alternative science. Responsive though it is to a Messianic promesse de bonheur, it is not Nietzsche's “joyful science.” Still less is it to be confused with the sad historicist science that was theit common target. Proust and Kafka epitomize it better than do conventional historians. But how, finally, do science and theology interact? That is itself a historical matter. Benjamin began by placing his “research” firmly under the aegis of theology. But a late note defines the experience Of remembrance as one that forbids us ether to conceive history in an “atheological” perspective or to write it in theological terms (GS, 1, 1285). That may sound like a stalemate. Benjamin's parable of the dwarf and the puppet (J, 253) suggests that it could be a winning combination, University of Oregon NOTES 1 The text of a talk given to a section devoted to History, Li at the annual meeting of the Western Society of French Oregon, 1980. 2 Mluminations (hereafter referred to as ), New York, 1969, p. 95. The collected edition (Gesammele Schriften, ed. R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppeahiuser, Frankfurt, 1974 wil be referred to as GS. 8 Cf. on the concept of prose my “The Politics of Prose and the Art of Awakening.” in Ghph, 7 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), isis, 41, p. 87 tales mine. 5 The Messianic Idea of such historiography coincides with that of a restoredow IRVING WOHLFARTH universal language. Its alo, on Benjamins version of early German Romantic theory, the Hletof art But art finds consummation inks anniation. Te ‘clipe by eral prose: "The binding ilumination [Blend] of such ser ight extinguishes the mikphty of words of art tis the Idea", 1119). The ‘liinaion sats Brought to bear on arta, however, produced from within art ial ibid 10. 6 GE. Lionet Gossman's “History ax Vocation and Profession.” But neither ean the genuine philology, forall is Nori allegiances. The ‘ote on which Erich Averbacts Miners (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 196) loses isthe rage hope that may help reute those "whore love for our western history has tremely persevered” (87). But it began by signalling 4 lover’ apprehension Marelfs-Had we but word enough and Gime = CE "Geschichte der Kunst und der Historie," inLieraturgechiche als Provadatin (Grane 197), pp. 20831 2 Mines, pp. 547-8, 10 The ninth ofthe Ths on he Phlsnphy of History (I, 257-58), which reads Klee’s faling Angels Novus a Kafkacuu allegory of hoy. brings to bear @ Brecht allenationcefece om the very category of progress 11 Allthat could be consolidated would be, ater, the sacks owned by the powers that be: Al ulers are the els of owe who ruled conquered before them” tr, 256) 12 G5, 1, 16865, CF ako Waker Benjamin, Chars Bader: A Eyre Pe in the Bra of High Capital (London: NER, 1973) pp. 10804 18 CF. on this metaphor Sra Kofman, Camera obscura de Vidéoegie (Pars icons Cate. 1979) 14 CE. the Norton elon of Madame Bova, ed, Pail de Man (New York: Nor 1968) pp. 268-70. 15 Dialectic of Enlighenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 250 ‘Tramlaton modified, 16, Brigfe, Vol. ed. T.W. Adorno and G. Scholem (Frankfurt, 196), p. 524