Illuminations, p.5
Illuminations, page 5
As early as 1913 Benjamin weighed the position of Zionism ‘as a possibility and thus perhaps a necessary commitment’ (Briefe I, 44) in the sense of this dual rebellion against the parental home and German-Jewish literary life. Two years later he met Gerhard Scholem, encountering in him for the first and only time ‘Judaism in living form’; soon afterwards came the beginning of that curious, endless consideration, extending over a period of almost twenty years, of emigration to Palestine. ‘Under certain, by no means impossible conditions I am ready if not determined [to go to Palestine]. Here in Austria the Jews (the decent ones, those who are not making money) talk of nothing else.’ So he wrote in 1919 (Briefe I, 222), but at the same time he regarded such a plan as an ‘act of violence’ (Briefe I, 208), unfeasible unless it turned out to be necessary. Whenever such financial or political necessity arose, he reconsidered the project and did not go. It is hard to say whether he was still serious about it after the separation from his wife, who had come from a Zionist milieu. But it is certain that even during his Paris exile he announced that he might go ‘to Jerusalem in October or November, after a more or less definitive conclusion of my studies’ (Briefe II, 655). What strikes one as indecision in the letters, as though he were vacillating between Zionism and Marxism, in truth was probably due to the bitter insight that all solutions were not only objectively false and inappropriate to reality, but would lead him personally to a false salvation, no matter whether that salvation was labelled Moscow or Jerusalem. He felt that he would deprive himself of the positive cognitive chances of his own position – ‘on the top of a mast that is already crumbling’ or ‘dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor’ among the ruins. He had settled down in the desperate conditions which corresponded to reality; there he wanted to remain in order to ‘denature’ his own writings ‘like methylated spirits … at the risk of making them unfit for consumption’ by anyone then alive but with the chance of being preserved all the more reliably for an unknown future.
For the insolubility of the Jewish question for that generatiion by no means consisted only in their speaking and writing German or in the fact that their ‘production plant’ was located in Europe – in Benjamin’s case, in Berlin West or in Paris, something about which he did ‘not have the slightest illusions’ (Briefe II, 531). What was decisive was that these men did not wish to ‘return’ either to the ranks of the Jewish people or to Judaism, and could not desire to do so – not because they believed in ‘progress’ and an automatic disappearance of anti-Semitism or because they were too ‘assimilated’ and too alienated from their Jewish heritage, but because all traditions and cultures as well as all ‘belonging’ had become equally questionable to them. This is what they felt was wrong with the ‘return’ to the Jewish fold as proposed by the Zionists; they could all have said what Kafka once said about being a member of the Jewish people: ‘… My people, provided that I have one.’23
No doubt, the Jewish question was of great importance for this generation of Jewish writers and explains much of the personal despair so prominent in nearly everything they wrote. But the most clear-sighted among them were led by their personal conflicts to a much more general and more radical problem, namely, to questioning the relevance of the Western tradition as a whole. Not just Marxism as a doctrine but the Communist revolutionary movement exerted a powerful attraction on them because it implied more than a criticism of existing social and political conditions and took into account the totality of political and spiritual traditions. For Benjamin, at any rate, this question of the past and of tradition as such was decisive, and precisely in the sense in which Scholem, warning his friend against the dangers to his thinking inherent in Marxism, posed it, albeit without being aware of the problem. Benjamin, he wrote, was running the risk of forfeiting the chance of becoming ‘the legitimate continuer of the most fruitful and most genuine traditions of a Hamann and a Humboldt’ (Briefe II, 526). What he did not understand was that such a return to and continuation of the past was the very thing which ‘the morality of [his] insights,’ to which Scholem appealed, was bound to rule out for Benjamin.24
It seems tempting to believe, and would indeed be a comforting thought, that those few who ventured out onto the most exposed positions of the time and paid the full price of isolation at least thought of themselves as the precursors of a new age. That certainly was not the case. In his essay on Karl Kraus, Benjamin brought up this question: Does Kraus stand ‘at the threshold of a new age?’ ‘Alas, by no means. He stands at the threshold of the Last Judgment’ (Schriften II, 174). And at this threshold there really stood all those who later became the masters of the ‘new age’; they looked upon the dawn of a new age basically as a decline and viewed history along with the traditions which led up to this decline as a field of ruins.25 No one has expressed this more clearly than Benjamin in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ and nowhere has he said it more unequivocally than in a letter from Paris dated 1935: ‘Actually, I hardly feel constrained to try to make head or tail of this condition of the world. On this planet a great number of civilizations have perished in blood and horror. Naturally, one must wish for the planet that one day it will experience a civilization that has abandoned blood and horror; in fact, I am … inclined to assume that our planet is waiting for this. But it is terribly doubtful whether we can bring such a present to its hundred- or four-hundred-millionth birthday party. And if we don’t, the planet will finally punish us, its unthoughtful well-wishers, by presenting us with the Last Judgment’fn4 (Briefe II, 698).
Well, in this respect the last thirty years have hardly brought much that could be called new.
III. THE PEARL DIVER
Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
– The Tempest, I, 2
Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority; insofar as authority presents itself historically, it becomes tradition. Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past. In this he became a master when he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by its citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of ‘peace of mind,’ the mindless peace of complacency. ‘Quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions’ (Schriften I, 571). This discovery of the modern function of quotations, according to Benjamin, who exemplified it by Karl Kraus, was born out of despair – not the despair of a past that refuses ‘to throw its light on the future’ and lets the human mind ‘wander in darkness’ as in Tocqueville, but out of the despair of the present and the desire to destroy it; hence their power is ‘not the strength to preserve but to cleanse, to tear out of context, to destroy’ (Schriften II, 192). Still, the discoverers and lovers of this destructive power originally were inspired by an entirely different intention, the intention to preserve; and only because they did not let themselves be fooled by the professional ‘preservers’ all around them did they finally discover that the destructive power of quotations was ‘the only one which still contains the hope that something from this period will survive – for no other reason than that it was torn out of it.’ In this form of ‘thought fragments,’ quotations have the double task of interrupting the flow of the presentation with ‘transcendent force’ (Schriften I, 142–43) and at the same time of concentrating within themselves that which is presented. As to their weight in Benjamin’s writings, quotations are comparable only to the very dissimilar Biblical citations which so often replace the immanent consistency of argumentation in medieval treatises.
I have already mentioned that collecting was Benjamin’s central passion. It started early with what he himself called his ‘bibliomania’ but soon extended into something far more characteristic, not so much of the person as of his work: the collecting of quotations. (Not that he ever stopped collecting books. Shortly before the fall of France he seriously considered exchanging his edition of the Collected Works of Kafka, which had recently appeared in five volumes, for a few first editions of Kafka’s early writings – an undertaking which naturally was bound to remain incomprehensible to any nonbibliophile.) The ‘inner need to own a library’ (Briefe I, 193) asserted itself around 1916, at the time when Benjamin turned in his studies to Romanticism as the ‘last movement that once more saved tradition’ (Briefe I, 138). That a certain destructive force was active even in this passion for the past, so characteristic of heirs and late-comers, Benjamin did not discover until much later, when he had already lost his faith in tradition and in the indestructibility of the world. (This will be discussed presently.) In those days, encouraged by Scholem, he still believed that his own estrangement from tradition was probably due to his Jewishness and that there might be a way back for him as there was for his friend, who was preparing to emigrate to Jerusalem. (As early as 1920, when he was not yet seriously beset by financial worries, he thought of learning Hebrew.) He never went as far on this road as did Kafka, who after all his efforts stated bluntly that he had no use for anything Jewish except the Hasidic tales which Buber had just prepared for modern usage – ‘into everything else I just drift, and another current of air carries me away again.’26 Was he, then, despite all doubts, to go back to the German or European past and help with the tradition of its literature?
Presumably this is the form in which the problem presented itself to him in the early twenties, before he turned to Marxism. That is when he chose the German Baroque Age as a subject for his Habilitation thesis, a choice that is very characteristic of the ambiguity of this entire, still unresolved cluster of problems. For in the German literary and poetic tradition the Baroque has, with the exception of the great church chorales of the time, never really been alive. Goethe rightly said that when he was eighteen years old, German literature was no older. And Benjamin’s choice, baroque in a double sense, has an exact counterpart in Scholem’s strange decision to approach Judaism via the cabbala, that is, that part of Hebrew literature which is untransmitted and untransmissible in terms of Jewish tradition, in which it has always had the odour of something downright disreputable. Nothing showed more clearly – so one is inclined to say today – that there was no such thing as a ‘return’ either to the German or the European or the Jewish tradition than the choice of these fields of study. It was an implicit admission that the past spoke directly only through things that had not been handed down, whose seeming closeness to the present was thus due precisely to their exotic character, which ruled out all claims to a binding authority. Obligative truths were replaced by what was in some sense significant or interesting, and this of course meant – as no one knew better than Benjamin – that the ‘consistence of truth … has been lost’ (Briefe II, 763). Outstanding among the properties that formed this ‘consistence of truth’ was, at least for Benjamin, whose early philosophical interest was theologically inspired, that truth concerned a secret and that the revelation of this secret had authority. Truth, so Benjamin said shortly before he became fully aware of the irreparable break in tradition and the loss of authority, is not ‘an unveiling which destroys the secret, but the revelation which does it justice’ (Schriften I, 146). Once this truth had come into the human world at the appropriate moment in history – be it as the Greek a-letheia, visually perceptible to the eyes of the mind and comprehended by us as ‘un-concealment’ (‘Unverborgenheit’ – Heidegger), or as the acoustically perceptible word of God as we know it from the European religions of revelation – it was this ‘consistence’ peculiar to it which made it tangible, as it were, so that it could be handed down by tradition. Tradition transforms truth into wisdom, and wisdom is the consistence of transmissible truth. In other words, even if truth should appear in our world, it could not lead to wisdom, because it would no longer have the characteristics which it could acquire only through universal recognition of its validity. Benjamin discusses these matters in connection with Kafka and says that of course ‘Kafka was far from being the first to face this situation. Many had accommodated themselves to it, adhering to truth or whatever they regarded as truth at any given time and, with a more or less heavy heart, forgoing its transmissibility. Kafka’s real genius was that he tried something entirely new: he sacrificed truth for the sake of clinging to the transmissibility’ (Briefe II, 763). He did so by making decisive changes in traditional parables or inventing new ones in traditional style;27 however, these ‘do not modestly lie at the feet of the doctrine,’ as do the haggadic tales in the Talmud, but ‘unexpectedly raise a heavy claw’ against it. Even Kafka’s reaching down to the sea bottom of the past had this peculiar duality of wanting to preserve and wanting to destroy. He wanted to preserve it even though it was not truth, if only for the sake of this ‘new beauty in what is vanishing’ (see Benjamin’s essay on Leskov); and he knew, on the other hand, that there is no more effective way to break the spell of tradition than to cut out the ‘rich and strange,’ coral and pearls, from what had been handed down in one solid piece.
Benjamin exemplified this ambiguity of gesture in regard to the past by analyzing the collector’s passion which was his own. Collecting springs from a variety of motives which are not easily understood. As Benjamin was probably the first to emphasize, collecting is the passion of children, for whom things are not yet commodities and are not valued according to their usefulness, and it is also the hobby of the rich, who own enough not to need anything useful and hence can afford to make ‘the transfiguration of objects’ (Schriften I, 416) their business. In this they must of necessity discover the beautiful, which needs ‘disinterested delight’ (Kant) to be recognized. At any rate, a collected object possesses only an amateur value and no use value whatsoever. (Benjamin was not yet aware of the fact that collecting can also be an eminently sound and often highly profitable form of investment.) And inasmuch as collecting can fasten on any category of objects (not just art objects, which are in any case removed from the everyday world of use objects because they are ‘good’ for nothing) and thus, as it were, redeem the object as a thing since it now is no longer a means to an end but has its intrinsic worth, Benjamin could understand the collector’s passion as an attitude akin to that of the revolutionary. Like the revolutionary, the collector ‘dreams his way not only into a remote or bygone world, but at the same time into a better one in which, to be sure, people are not provided with what they need any more than they are in the everyday world, but in which things are liberated from the drudgery of usefulness’ (Schriften I, 416). Collecting is the redemption of things which is to complement the redemption of man. Even the reading of his books is something questionable to a true bibliophile: ‘“And you have read all these?” Anatole France is said to have been asked by an admirer of his library. “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?”’ (‘Unpacking My Library’). (In Benjamin’s library there were collections of rare children’s books and of books by mentally deranged authors; since he was interested neither in child psychology nor in psychiatry, these books, like many others among his treasures, literally were not good for anything, serving neither to divert nor to instruct.) Closely connected with this is the fetish character which Benjamin explicitly claimed for collected objects. The value of genuineness which is decisive for the collector as well as for the market determined by him has replaced the ‘cult value’ and is its secularization.
