PERSPECTIVES ON WALTER BENJAMIN

Winter 1999
Volume 25, Number 2

The dramatic--and nomadic--circumstances of Walter Benjamin's life are such that it is difficult not to be justly distracted by them: the political background competes with the enormous erudition, the sheer bookishness, of the foreground. Yet the attention of Benjamin the critic to what he reads or analyses, that attention called by Malebranche the natural prayer of the soul, is so strong that he comes across with revisionary perspectives and startling trains of thought that make one stop and wonder at the physiological and mental mechanisms he reveals.

That wonder, at the same time, does not dissolve into either specialized knowledge or philosophy, although the pressure of conceptualization is always there, and philosophy is acknowledged to be a sibling of the work of art, useful in questioning art's strangeness, its combination of intimacy and discretion. Yet while art remains central as a structure of feeling, Benjamin sees it changing according to contemporary social and economic conditions. Art is no longer quite the cultural value it was; he is not tempted to say to it, in its singularity, charm, or in situ monumentality, "Verweile doch, du bist so schön."

With film, especially, distraction (Zerstreuung) and concentration (Sammlung) enter into a new relationship, quite different from what used to characterize the plastic or verbal arts. Indeed, film helps us to become used to a new form of awareness or, rather, unconsciousness, which goes beyond the optic of intense individual contemplation that marks art criticism at its empathic best. The older contemplative attitude, or the capacity for attention I have just praised with words taken from Malebranche, may not be able to resolve dilemmas imposed on our receptive faculties by a fast-changing era. Intimacy and distance are being replaced by shock and diversion; and Benjamin refuses to value them negatively. Signaling an increase in the size of the proletariat and the formation of the masses, they promise a collective achievement, a structure of feeling beyond the concept of experience based on the privileged individual. At the same time, fascism and imperialism exploit the mass spectacle. In different ways they force mankind to enjoy the prospect of war and large-scale destruction by filtering them through the lens of the older contemplative aesthetics. At this crucial point, Benjamin breaks off the essay on art and technology I have been summarizing and cites without comment communism's answer to fascism: don't aestheticize politics; rather, politicize art.1 At the end, then, nothing is clear except that the merging of art and technology has produced an apparatus that penetrates perception more deeply and subliminally so that art graduates from being a cultural object, an objet d'art, to a matter of life and death.

I admire the speculative vigor of the later Benjamin. I have suggested that for him art is not transcended; indeed, it may still be overestimated by him. His worried engagement with the status of art, exploited by politics and altered by technology, could be a desperate gesture of hope, a defense against his own dispersion. What I want to do in this brief comment is to understand his perspective on the past, a perspective that not only persists but counterpoints the future shock he anticipates so uncannily.

After 1936 Benjamin's emphasis is history as much as art, and his paradoxes become more startling. He talks of the historian as "kindling a spark of hope in the past," a sentiment directed against cheap versions of progress.2 He refuses to place hope exclusively in the future, as if the past were transcended--nothing but inert, ruined choirs. He talks less of faith or love than of that more revolutionary virtue, hope, which refuses to leave even the dead undisturbed. Like Scholem, who restored the neglected Kabbalah to high profile, the true historical thinker addresses the past--or has the past address us, like the dead at Thermopylae from whom Demosthenes kindles an eloquent adjuration. Yet, is there not something spooky in resurrecting the dead this way or, conversely, suggesting they could be undone a second time: "even the dead will not be secure, if the enemy wins" ("BG," p. 695)?

Hope, though envious and all too human, is the cardinal virtue for Benjamin, but it is not eudaemonistic. The hope for others competes with the hope for oneself. Missed opportunities for happiness ("women who could have given themselves to us") seem to have an intimate relation to past generations, their missed opportunities, their abortive desires or claims ("BG," p. 693). It is as if the quantity of hope allotted us had already been preempted by this demanding link to the past and the dead. Benjamin praises Goethe's recognition in Elective Affinities that hope (elpis), the last of the Urworte, can only be dramatized in the form of symbols (such as the rising of the stars); it cannot be explicitly transmitted as doctrine or message.3 His concluding sentence on Goethe's novel reverses a saying of Kafka's: "Only for the cause of those who have no hope is hope given us."4 But he fails to give that hope to himself, as if his own message had not gone through.

One would certainly like to know what news the famous angel brought to him: Klee's Angelus Novus, so often reproduced that it has become, retroactively, Benjamin's logo. How could Benjamin think of expressing historical materialism through this childlike and uncertain signifier? It is true that the astonishing ecphrasis describing the angel of history in the famous "Theses on the Philosophy of History" tries to incarnate his message that hope is the revolutionary virtue, however ruinous it may be. But is any one who compares Klee's picture and Benjamin's reading of it convinced? It only adds the enigma of the messenger to that of the message.

What kind of novum, then, does this evangelist bring, with his thick candelabra fingers and heady excrescences, curlers that it is tempting to see as unfolding scrolls, possibly Torah scrolls? I cannot make out extended wings and staring eyes. I see a grotesque being, dissymmetric, demon rather than angel, helplessly reading itself and becoming in this way a symbol after all, a sacred papier-mâché. The image has more expressionless than expressive force, to borrow a Benjaminian category. The angel is, to adapt a phrase of Stanley Cavell's, a European "hobo of thought" or, rather, the caricature of a priest pretending to be a hobo.5

1. See Walter Benjamin, "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit" [The Work of Art in the Era of Its Technical Reproduction] (1936), Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. in 14 (Frankfurt am Main, 1972Ð89), 1:2:431Ð69.

2. Benjamin, "Über den Begriff der Geschichte," Gesammelte Schriften, 1:2:695; hereafter abbreviated "BG."

3. Perhaps Benjamin is thinking that this symbol is really an allegory, as he had exposited the concept in his Trauerspiel book.

4. Benjamin, "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften," Illuminationen: Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Sigfried Unseld (Frankfurt am Main, 1961), p. 147; hereafter abbreviated "GW."

5. I am told that a study of Klee's notebooks at the time the picture was composed reveals that it may have rendered his impression of Hitler, who often passed through Klee's district. But pictures, like books, have their own fate. The New Angel motif, as Scholem knew and communicated to Benjamin, plays a peculiar role in midrash Genesis Rabbah, where a commentator suggests that God creates each dawn a new host of angels to sing his praise, who are then dissolved. The dawn song is their swan song.

Geoffrey H. Hartman is Sterling Professor of English and Comparative Literature Emeritus at Yale University. His recent books include The Fateful Question of Culture (1997) and The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (1996).