Benjamin’s “Theologico-Political Fragment” (written 1920–21), a striking statement of the Messianism prevalent in his thought for a long time, connects his early meditations about language, knowledge, and the world with his “Critique of Violence” (1921), in which his experience of changing German society in the age of the Spartakus uprisings and his readings of Sorel’s anarchist theories combine with his unshaken belief in a postlapsarian world crying for sudden eschatological change. In his “Fragment,” he wants to cope, at least by suggestion, with the seeming incompatibility of the profane (or historical) and the Messianic (or divine) order; and he bravely demands that a new philosophy of history (his own) try to relate the distinct forces in some way to one another. These forces do not move in a consonant rhythm, and yet, “if one arrow points to the goal toward which the profane dynamic acts, and another marks the direction of Messianic intensity, then certainly the quest of free humanity for happiness runs counter to the Messianic direction; but just as a force can, through acting, increase another that is acting in the opposite direction, so the order of the profane assists, through being profane, the coming of the Messianic Kingdom.” Benjamin suggests that in the profane urge for being happy the most tender coming of the divine order announces itself, and we are left with hope in fragile and painful abeyance.
Benjamin’s fragment “Fate and Character,” like many of his earlier essays, compresses far-reaching suggestions into a few pages, and it would be foolish to separate the strains of anthropology, autobiographical implication, and genre criticism too neatly. It is an impressive and tortuous example of how Benjamin brings together and divides again in a new and radical way what more traditional minds have related in superficial fashion. His concern with guilt, the law, and the gods, and his separation of the moral and the divine order, indicate that (though questions of characterology and the poetic predominate) we are still moving in a universe of metaphysical consistence. In the early passages, the fragment suggests why Benjamin, in search of a sign system of human experience, is far less ashamed of his intense interest in graphology (of which he was a gifted practitioner), chiromancy, and physiognomy than his critics. Later he argues that our concepts of fate and character have been mistaken, because we put these concepts in the wrong contexts—ethics and religion. But fate relates to guilt and misfortune (rather than to happiness, which would be a way of escaping fate) and belongs therefore to the world of the law, which is but a relic of the demonic stage in human development; and it is in tragedy that the genius of man first arises above the “mist of guilt”—not, as Hegel and his many disciples would suggest, restoring the disturbed order of the universe, but manifesting human resistance “by shaking up [the] tormented world.” Similarly, the concept of character should be removed from the realm of ethics and related to “nature in man”; and if tragedy seeks to go beyond the “guilt context of the living,” comedy shows character (for instance, in Molière’s plays) “like a sun, in the brilliance of its single trait, which allows no other to remain visible in its proximity.” We do not judge in moral terms but feel “high amusement,” and far from presenting to us a monstrous puppet that is totally unfree, comedy—with its commitment to an emancipated physiognomy—introduces a new age of the genius of humanity.
The “Critique of Violence” hides its paradoxes and disturbing self-subversion in a deceptively tight structure of arguments in which, as if he were a lawyer or a legal philosopher, Benjamin proposes to develop, with an almost merciless power of deduction, a close sequence of professional distinctions; and yet, on the later pages of the essay, the entire system of initial reasoning, if not an entire world of preliminary values, is pushed aside, and the expert lawyer changes into an enthusiastic chiliast who rhapsodically praises the violence of divine intervention, which will put a sudden end to our lives of insufficiency and dearth (the essay subverts its own fundaments in order to enact something of the ontological “break” in which the old world is abruptly transformed into a new). As in his other essays of the time (1916–21), Benjamin first wants to separate his own philosophical perspective from that of other traditional approaches, and in a technical argument of high sophistication he reviews the manner in which the “natural law” and the “positive law” have been dealing with the problems of violence. He shows that the one conceives of violence as a product of unchangeable nature, whereas the other deals with violence as a result of historical becoming (Gewordenheit). Both, however, are constantly concerned with the close interrelationships of means and ends within the legal system, and both fail to ask the question (central to his own interest) of how certain means of violence might be paradoxically justified totally outside the law. Benjamin surveys the legal implications of strikes, wars, and capital punishment and concludes that all violence in the human realm functions so that it is either constituting or sustaining the law (rechtssetzend/rechtserhaltend); and in a passage certain to challenge the liberal reader, he suggests that legal institutions forgetful of the latent presence of violence inevitably decay, that parliaments (ignoring the dignity of violence) err in trying to reach compromises, and that anarchists and Bolsheviks are right in fiercely attacking parliamentary systems. Fortunately, there is still a private sphere in which a “cultured heart,” politesse, and trust in our fellow beings may come to subjective but nonviolent accords.
But here we are suddenly elevated from the profane to the mythical and divine orders, and violence, of a more radical kind, turns into an eschatological necessity. Not only is it difficult, Benjamin asserts, to think about solving any problems in the human world in a nonviolent way, but it is completely inconceivable that man’s salvation from all historical modes of existence should ever occur without violence. We are compelled to postulate another kind of violence, one that operates outside the realm of legal principles, violence not as a means of legality but as a manifestation of Olympian power: “Niobe’s arrogance calls down fate upon itself not because her arrogance offends against the law but because it challenges fate—to a fight in which fate must triumph, and can bring to light a law only in its triumph.” Yet in his thirst for purity, plenitude, and otherness, Benjamin again relegates the violence of myth or the “manifestation of the Gods” to a dubious state of wordliness, because even mythical violence cannot finally escape an involvement with, or, rather, a definition of, profane legalities. True otherness is only in God, who asserts himself in a third and absolute type of violence completely alien to the order of profanity and myth; “if mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood.” The anarchist mystic Benjamin sees the coming of the Messiah as abrupt, sudden, destructive, ending all human history and its barrenness by freeing pure, glorious, divine violence from contagion with myth or the regions below. Once again we have moved through all the strata of creation, but Benjamin does not tell us how we are to live after God’s violent lightning has struck, when a timeless and crystalline space of terrible perfection, as in paradise, surrounds us again.
We cannot speak about anybody’s Marxism in a general and abstract way any more, and to approach productively those of Benjamin’s essays in which Marxist ideas predominate is to define the particular implications of these ideas and to describe their specific function in an individual moment of Central European politics and intellectual history. Whatever can be said about Benjamin as melancholy Marxist, I would stress above all that he, in his rather unobtrusive way, sided with those artists and critics on the radical left who were arguing against the growing traditionalism of the Soviet establishment and, often in close combat with the defenders of an ossifying party line, continued to believe that Marxists should not participate in construing a totally closed world, but should spontaneously respond to new technological changes in c
ontemporary civilization. There are few indications that Benjamin, who was a secretive and studious man, often attended political mass meetings or marched under red banners through the streets of Berlin. His Marxism was a library affair (more Lenin and Trotsky than Marx, and more early Lukács than Engels), and the challenging way in which he speaks of Surrealism, Sergei Tretiakov, and Bertolt Brecht suggests that he was, in the concrete context of the late twenties and thirties, attracted by the impressive power of the Communist Party and inclined toward increasing opposition to the Stalinists, the dogma of Socialist Realism (after 1934), and the revolutionary decree from above.
His report from Moscow, published immediately after his return from the Soviet Union in 1927, shows the self-styled convert in the initial moments of his first encounter with a revolutionary world that claims his instinctive sympathies and yet does not assuage the strong doubts of the middle-class introvert. He bravely declares at the outset that the only guarantee of true insight is that he took sides before going to Russia, and yet, while doing his best to understand and to sympathize, he continues to walk through the streets of Moscow in the manner of a Baudelairean flâneur, simultaneously very close to and very distant from what he hears and sees. Of the twenty sections of the report, more than half offer impressions of streets, squares, parks, and public buildings; and although he can show enthusiasm about the public quality of revolutionary life, he is also able without effort to keep his mind cool and unendangered by the compassionate transports of too much empathy. In contrast to the Prussian cleanliness and the order of Berlin, Moscow nearly overwhelms Benjamin with an aesthetic surfeit of colors, disorganization, and teeming humanity. Against the snow and the gray winter sky, reds and greens glow with Mediterranean intensity, and the streets are filled with children, beggars (sketched with Dickensian flair), and ordinary citizens, hastening to offices, markets, and meetings. Modern technology and old-fashioned ways of life hurtle against one another; occasionally subverting his own ideological resolutions, Benjamin speaks of the “Asiatic” time sense of the Russians, of the rough quality of daily life, which suggests a gold miners’ camp in the Klondike, or describes the female ticket collectors in the rickety streetcars as “Samoyed women.” Something obsolete and yet essential survives in the inexorable transformations of the city; and in a moving moment Benjamin reveals his exquisite tactile pleasures when, riding in a sleigh, he tenderly and quickly brushes against people, horses, and stones and feels a touch of life on his skin.
I suspect that Benjamin was puzzled by the social realities of the Moscow winter of 1926–27. Armed with bookish and radical notions about the Revolution, he finds himself confronted with the attempt of the Soviet bureaucracy to increase the efficiency of commerce and the public services by creating a new middle class (of a hypothetical kind) and to push economic productivity by granting new privileges to technical experts; in literature, the staunchest revolutionaries agree to an armistice with productive and traditionalist “fellow travelers,” discussions about problems of writing are dominated by a crude interest in ideological content, the graphic experiments of the futurists and constructivists have disappeared from public view, and in a few theaters are staged performances that would horrify the progressive Berlin audiences. As one committed to believe, Benjamin is rather naive about the government and active opposition, but he is not willing to disregard what he sees with his own eyes when he describes daily life as a great laboratory (which does not change the inventive language of simple people) or when he, with good reason, praises public efforts to educate the waifs of the civil war and the inarticulate peasants by means of museums, movies, and a didactic theater (Asja Lacis’s particular field of work). Benjamin anticipates Milovan Djilas’s later analyses when he remarks that the Soviet system represents a “state of castes” in which the life of each individual citizen is fully determined by his relationship to the ruling Party; a “reliable viewpoint” constitutes the only guarantee that goods may be enjoyed. I find it difficult to decide in which way to read the concluding passages of section 14, where Benjamin speaks of the inevitable disappearance of the free homme de lettres, who is bound to the fate of the withering middle classes. He seems to record Soviet developments with the undisturbed voice of the historian, and yet it is impossible to believe that he does not speak about his own concerns when he describes how the revolutionary artist has turned into a functionary, working for the departments of censorship, justice, or finance, and finds himself a member of the new ruling class. If his friend Asja had read these pages more carefully, she would have discovered the answer to her perpetual question why Walter did not join the Communist Party, as had his brother the physician.
I would include Benjamin’s essay “Surrealism,” originally published as three installments in Die Literarische Welt in the late winter of 1929, among his most cryptic and important texts. Written from the distance of the German observer at a time of growing conflicts within the French Surrealist group, the essay offers a panoramic view of what the Surrealist poets had done since 1919 and, perhaps more essentially, reveals personal ideas that were to obsess Benjamin for the rest of his life. A consciousness in crisis seizes on the crisis of a poetic movement to define itself; and it is important to see how Benjamin characterizes the pressing problems of a “humanist concept of freedom” for one disenchanted with “eternal discussions” and longing for vital decisions to go beyond the alternatives of the “anarchist fronde” (close to his sensibilities) and “revolutionary discipline” (demanded by the organized Communists). He describes how the Surrealists have exploded traditional poetry from within by pushing the idea of “poetic life” to the utter limits of the possible; inevitably they have reached a tortuous moment of transition in which the heroic period of Surrealism, or the intimate years of the “inspiring wave of dreams,” have to give way to a public struggle for power, political commitment, and involvement with revolutionary action. Yet the key concept of the “profane illumination,” which emerges here to characterize Surrealist vision, suggests Benjamin’s own way of unveiling, in his materialist hermeneutics, how history resides in some of the things of the world and institutions of society; and by attributing to the Surrealists the virtue of “seeing” and “freeing” revolutionary energies in things nearly obsolete, Benjamin describes what he is actually going to do in his later essays on Paris and French society. The Surrealists (who may not always have been equal to their task) have discovered revolutionary forces in particular objects and everyday use (e.g., the first iron constructions, early photographs, dresses almost out of fashion); André Breton and his beloved Nadja change into revolutionary resolution, if not action, what others have felt in uncertain and frustrated moods when taking a trip in a sad railway carriage or looking, from a new apartment, out through the window and the rain. But Benjamin does not want to tolerate any irrational romantic, or intoxicating element in that secularized epiphany or the overwhelming moment of “profane illumination”; in spite of his hashish experiments (or, rather, because of them), he asserts that it is not productive to accentuate the mystical element in the mystery of discovering hidden forces and meanings, “for histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.” There are few lines in which Benjamin reveals the intent of his late writings more clearly and openly.
Hannah Arendt speaks about the importance of the Svendborg conversations between the critic Benjamin and the playwright Brecht, but I have to confess that I feel both exhilarated and depressed by these dialogues in exile, which show much intellectual brilliance and a good deal of constitutional inability to see, in the age of Dachau and the Gulag Archipelago, the political realities hidden behind a fine veil of self-created illusions about the alternatives to fascism (less Hegel and more common sense would have been useful). The trouble
is that Benjamin, who recorded these conversations without any intent to publish his notes, does not care to indicate his own views and arguments in more than fleeting detail, and what we have is an interesting document of Brecht’s intelligent and foolish utterances about a wide range of questions, including Kafka and the political and literary situation in the Stalinist Soviet Union. On approaching Kafka, the friends clearly disagree; Benjamin likes to explore the far corners of a metaphysical universe, but Brecht thinks above all of grist for his theatrical mill. With almost boyish charm, Brecht admits (against his theories) that an artist should have the privilege of playing games; he has witty things to say about Kafka’s Prague milieu, and he does not avoid ideological simplification when he declares Kafka to be a prophet of terrible bureaucracies (a view generally expressed at the East European Kafka Conference near Prague in 1963) or asks what usable elements (Brauchbares) Kafka has to offer to his left-wing readers. Later conversations briefly touch on internal problems of Communist cultural policies; and whereas Benjamin refuses to speak up, Brecht rants against Georg Lukács and other adversaries and suggests that the Soviet Union shows signs of being run by a “personal regiment” that has created a “dictatorship over the proletariat” or a “worker’s monarchy” as monstrous as a fish with horns. Not so long before, the playwright Brecht had publicly admonished his audiences to “embrace the butcher” in the interest of world revolution, but here in private conclave he recites the names of friends arrested during the purges and puts the blame for these heinous deeds on a “criminal clique.” He reminds me of the German petits bourgeois who at approximately the same time busily told one another that a small group of SA men were responsible for all Nazi atrocities, but that the system was entirely innocent of any transgressions against humanity.
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