PERSPECTIVES ON WALTER BENJAMIN

Winter 1999
Volume 25, Number 2

Nothing more desolating than his acolytes, nothing more godforsaken than his adversaries. No name that would be more fittingly honored by silence.

Walter Benjamin, "One-Way Street" 1

"Expect from me no word of my own. Nor should I be capable of saying anything new; for in the room where someone writes the noise is so great.... Let him who has something to say step forward and be silent!"

Karl Kraus, quoted by Walter Benjamin 2

Conversation strives toward silence, and the listener is really the silent partner. The speaker receives meaning from him; the silent one is the unappropriated source of meaning.

Walter Benjamin, "The Metaphysics of Youth" 3

I propose here to address--and listen to--that element in Benjamin's language and writing that specifically, decisively remains beyond communication. "In all language and linguistic creations," Benjamin has said, "there remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated . . . It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is exiled among alien tongues, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work." In Benjamin's own work, in his abbreviated, cryptic style and in the essentially elliptical articulation of his thought, a surcharge of meaning is quite literally imprisoned in instances of silence. It is the task of the translator of Benjamin's own work to listen to these instances of silence, whose implications, I will try to show, are at once stylistic, philosophical, historical, and autobiographical. "Midway between poetry and theory," my critical amplification and interpretation of this silence--my own translation of the language that is still "imprisoned" in Benjamin's work--will thus focus on what Benjamin himself has underscored but what remains unheard, unheeded in the critically repetitive mechanical reproduction of his work: "that element in a translation which goes beyond transmittal of subject matter." 4

1

It is customary to view Benjamin essentially as an abstract philosopher, a critic and a thinker of modernity (and/or of postmodernity) in culture and in art. In contradistinction to this dominant approach, I propose to look at Benjamin far more specifically and more concretely as a thinker, a philosopher, and a narrator of the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century. "Wars and revolutions," writes Hannah Arendt, "have thus far determined the physiognomy of the twentieth century. And as distinguished from the nineteenth-century ideologies--such as nationalism and internationalism, capitalism and imperialism, socialism and communism, which, though still invoked by many as justifying causes, have lost contact with the major realities of our world-war and revolution . . . have outlived all their ideological justifications." 5

The seeds of total war developed as early as the First World War, when the distinction between soldiers and civilians was no longer respected because it was inconsistent with the new weapons then used . . . The magnitude of the violence let loose in the First World War might indeed have been enough to cause revolutions in its aftermath even without any revolutionary tradition and even if no revolution had ever occurred before.

To be sure, not even wars, let alone revolutions, are ever completely determined by violence. Where violence rules absolutely, . . . everything and everybody must fall silent. [OR, pp. 14, 18]

Theory and Autobiography
Silence can be either the outside of language or a position inside language, a state of noiselessness or wordlessness. Falling silent is, however, not a state but an event. It is the significance of the event that I will try to understand and think through in the present essay. What does it mean that culture--in the voice of its most profound witness--must fall silent? What does it mean for culture? What does it mean for Benjamin? How does Benjamin come to represent and to incorporate concretely, personally, the physiognomy of the twentieth century? And how in turn is this physiognomy reflected, concretized, in Benjamin's own face? In searching for answers to these questions, I will juxtapose and grasp together theoretical and autobiographical texts. Benjamin's own work includes a singular record of an autobiographical event that, to my mind, is crucial to the author's theories as much as to his destiny (although critics usually neglect it). Benjamin narrates this event in one of his rare moments of personal directness, in the (lyrical) autobiographical text entitled "A Berlin Chronicle." I will interpret this event together with, and through, two central theoretical essays that constitute the cornerstones of Benjamin's late work: "The Storyteller" and "Theses on the Philosophy of History." In reading the most personal, the most idiosyncratic autobiographical notations through the most far reaching, groundbreaking theoretical constructions, my effort will be to give Benjamin's theory a face. 6 The conceptual question that will override and guide this effort will be, What is the relation between the theory and the event (and what, in general, is the relationship between events and theories)? How does the theory arise out of the concrete drama of an event? How does the concrete drama of an event become theory? And how do both event and theory relate to silence (and to Benjamin's embodiment of silence)?

2

Because my sense is that in Benjamin, the theory is (paradoxically) far less obscure than the autobiography, I will start by reflecting on the two theoretical essays--perhaps Benjamin's best known abstract texts--of which I propose to underscore the common theoretical stakes. I will argue that both "The Storyteller" and "Theses on the Philosophy of History" can be construed as two theories of silence derived from, and related to, the two world wars: "the Storyteller," written in 1936, is retrospectively, explicitly connected with the First World War; "Theses on the Philosophy of History," written shortly before BenjaminÕs death in 1940, represent his ultimate rethinking of the nature of historical events and of the task of historiography in the face of the developments of the beginning of the Second World War.

I will suggest that these two texts are in effect tied up together. I propose to read them one against the other and one through the other, as two stages in a larger philosophical and existential picture, and as two variations of a global Benjaminian theory of wars and silence. I argue therefore that "The Storyteller" and "Theses" can be viewed as two theoretical variations of the same profound underlying text. My methodology is here inspired by the way in which Benjamin himself discusses--in his youth--Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin," in analyzing in the two texts (as he puts it) "not . . . their likeness which is nonexistent" but their "'comparativeness,'" and in treating them--despite their distance--as two "versions" (or two transformations) of the same profound text.7

1. Walter Benjamin, "One-Way Street," trans. Edmund Jephcott, Selected Writings, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), p. 469, from a section written in commemoration of Karl Kraus entitled "Monument to a Warrior."

2. Benjamin, "Karl Kraus," Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York, 1986), p. 243.

3. Benjamin, "The Metaphysics of Youth," trans. Rodney Livingstone, Selected Writings, p. 6; hereafter abbreviated "MY."

4. Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator," trans. Harry Zohn, Selected Writings, pp. 261, 259, 257.

5. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1990), p. 11; hereafter abbreviated OR.

6. This textual juxtaposition of the theory and the autobiography will be illuminated, in its turn, by Benjamin's work as a literary critic, especially in the early literary essays on Hölderlin, on Dostoyevsky, and on Goethe's Elective Affinities. I will thus borrow metaphors from Benjamin's own literary criticism and will in turn use them as interpretive tools and as evocative stylistic echoes. My methodology will be attentive, therefore, to three distinct levels of the text that the analysis will grasp together: the conceptual level of the theory, the narrative level of the autobiography, and the figurative level of the literary criticism.

7. Benjamin, "Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin," trans. Stanley Corngold, Selected Writings, p. 33.

 Shoshana Felman is the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale University. She is the author of The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (1984), Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis (1985), Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight (1987), and What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference (1993). She is also the editor of Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading-Otherwise (1982) and coauthor, with Dori Laub, of Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992).