Benjamin Walter - Benjamins passages: dreaming, awakening

Benjamins Passages

Benjamins Passages

Dreaming, Awakening

Alexander Gelley

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK 2015

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gelley, Alexander.

Benjamins passages : dreaming, awakening / Alexander Gelley. First edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-6256-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8232-6257-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Benjamin, Walter, 18921940Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

PT2603.E455Z6732 2015

838'.91209dc23

2014029447

Printed in the United States of America

17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

For Mieke, first of all, and Ora, Mira, Andrew, Reuben, and Levi

CONTENTS

Benjamins Passages: Dreaming, Awakening is focused on Benjamins work of the 1930s, though it reaches back to earlier writings, too (for example, The Task of the Translator, the study of Goethes novel The Elective Affinities), in order to establish certain continuities. The introduction and the seven chapters are intended to deal with central issues of Benjamins later work: the interplay of aesthetics and politics in his criticism ().

Many (but not all) of Benjamins principal writings of the later period are discussed in these chapters: the essay on Goethes The Elective Affinities and The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (). But my intention is not to cover a period of Benjamins writings but rather to trace a limited number of issues.

The has a number of aims: to situate Benjamins place in the current field of theory, to lay out elements of the biographical context of some of the writings, and to give a preview of some of the arguments of the subsequent chapters. A section on The Storyteller highlights one aspect of Benjamins major accomplishment as a literary theorist, a topic that this book has not tried to address.

The title alludes to the Passagen (arcades) of the project, of course, but it also refers to Benjamins effort to negotiate the labyrinth of his work and thought in this period. And it is intended to foreground the figurative status of awakening within the allegorical structure of The Arcades Project.

In transposing the Freudian dream work from the individual subject to the collective, Benjamin projected a macrocosmic journey of the individual sleeper to the dreaming collective, which, through the arcades, communes with its own insides. He credited the Surrealists with being the first to offer a means of deciphering the nineteenth centurys narcotic historicism, its passion for masks. He was well aware of Marxs early remark that reform of consciousness will come when people will see that the world has long possessed the dream of a thingand that it only needs to possess the consciousness of this thing in order really to possess it. But any such invocation of a past cannot draw on some form of conscious recollection or antiquarian recovery. Rather, the dialecticalthe Copernicanturn of remembrance [Eingedenken] functions as a solicitation, a call to a collectivity to come. This is linked to the motif of awakening, put forth in some entries of The Arcades Project and in On the Concept of History, and it conveys, I will argue, a qualified performative intent, a reaching out to a virtual collective to be constituted by awakening. The realization of dream elements in the course of waking up is the canon of dialectics. It is paradigmatic for the thinker and binding for the historian, he wrote in The Arcades Project. Benjamins effort to transpose the dream phenomenon to the history of a collective remained fragmentary, but it underlies the principle of retrograde temporality, which, I argue, is central to his idea of history.

Over almost two decades, I have received encouragement and advice from many quarters: first, from colleagues in the Critical Theory Institute (CTI) and the Comparative Literature Department at the University of California, Irvine, and especially Jane Newman. In addition, I am deeply grateful for a Guggenheim Fellowship in 199394, which was important in the first stage of my work. Finally, Ackbar Abbas, Michael Levine, and, most of all, Erin Obodiac have proved invaluable in advising me more recently.

Earlier versions of some of the chapters appeared in the following publications: Thematics and Historical Construction: The Example of Benjamins Passagen-Werk, Strumenti Critici, n.s. IV, 2 (May 1989), 2543; Contexts of the Aesthetic in Walter Benjamin, MLN 114.5 (December 1999): 93361; Epigones in the House of Language: Benjamin on Kraus, Partial Answers 5, 1 (January 2007): 1732; and Benjamin and Atget: Empty Streets and the Fading of Aura, Annals of Scholarship, forthcoming, 2014.

Irvine, California, December 2013

... the conviction guiding me in my literary endeavors... That is to say, the conviction that every truth has its home, its ancestral palace, in language; and that this palace is constructed out of the oldest logoi; and that insights of individual bodies of knowledge remain subordinate to truth grounded in this way, insofar as, somewhat like nomads, they draw here and there on the domains of language, caught up in that signifying character of language that stamps its terminology with the most irresponsible arbitrariness.

TO HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL, January 13, 1924 (GB 2: 409)

You know that I have always written in accordance with my convictions, but have seldom, and never otherwise than in conversation, made the attempt to express the whole contradictory fundament from which they, in their specific manifestations, derive.

TO GERSHOM SCHOLEM, May 6, 1934 (GB 4: 408)

Posthumous Fame

Walter Benjamins reputation emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, well after his death in 1940, and to a degree that was hardly conceivable in his lifetime. As his writings became known, they assumed a place alongside those of other thinkers of the centuryfor example, Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Foucaultwho may be characterized as, in Foucaults words, initiators of discursive practices, authors who produced not only their own work, but the possibility and the rules of formation of other texts. He enunciated the underlying issue in The Arcades Project