Anatomy

Benjamin writes this faculty of Kraus: “He imitates his subjects in order to insert the crowbar of his hate into the finest joints of their posture. This quibbler, probing between syllables, digs out the grubs of humbug. The grubs of venality and garrulity, ignominy and bonhomie, childishness and covetousness, gluttony and dishonesty. Indeed, the exposure of inauthenticity – more difficult than that of wickedness – is here performed behavioristically. The quotations in Die Fackel are more than documentary proof: they are masks stripped off mimetically by the quoter.” (Reflections 252) What was inauthentic other than the nemesis of mankind, here posed as the press, always projecting truth and hope in corrupted faculties. What other way was there than to confront them with their own failure, imitating the subject, reflecting their own voice into itself, annihilating them so that something new would be allowed to ameliorate. “If he does not see his reflection in himself, he sees it in the adversary at his feet. His polemics have been from the first the most intimate intermingling of a technique of unmasking that works with the most advanced means, and a self-expressive art operating with the most archaic. In this zone, too, however, ambiguity, the demon, is manifest: self-expression and unmasking emerge in it as self-unmasking.” (Reflections 250-251) Presumably the archaic indicated is the primeval state of the world, where mankind is free from history. But being free from history is in itself a problem, for mankind can never truly be free from his guilt. “That to him the fit state of man appears not as the destiny and fulfillment of nature liberated through revolutionary change, but as an element of nature per se, of an archaic nature without history, in its pristine, primeval state, throws uncertain, disquieting reflections even on his idea of freedom and of humanity. It is not removed from the realm of guilt that he has traversed from pole to pole: from mind to sexuality.” (Reflections 259) The guilt of Kraus is his polemics, a guilt that he felt being a member of a society that disregard history, running away from the truth or meaning that it intends to reveal. “I share the guilt. …” Because this has the ring of the manifestoes of an intelligentsia seeking to call to mind the memory of an epoch that seemed to be turning away from it, there is something to be said about this guilt feeling in which private and historical consciousness so vividly meet. This guilt will always lead to Expressionism, from which his mature work was nourished by roots that cracked open their soil.” (Reflections 256) The act of self-unmasking in the guise of guilt by Kraus is both general and particular in that it is fragmented, slivers of broken pieces of a universal truth (whole) constellated within conditions of his society. “That Kraus attacks people less for what they are than for what they do, more for what they say than for what they write, and least of all for their books, is the precondition of his polemical authority, which is able to lift the intellectual universe of an author – all more surely the more worthless it is, in confidence of a truly prestabilized, reconciling harmony – whole and intact from a single fragment of sentence, a single word, a single information.” (Reflections 248)

If polemics of inauthenticity paint the guilt of Kraus, then the parables that are non-human color the shame of Kafka; shame of sin, from the father condemned to the son. It is perhaps a desire prehistoric in nature, as or to Kraus, free of history to escape this guilt, this shame. “… prehistoric forces that dominated Kafka’s creativeness, forces which, to be sure, may justifiably be regarded as belonging to our world as well. … Only this much is certain: he did not know them and failed to get his bearings among them. In the mirror which the prehistoric world held before him in the form of guilt he merely saw the future emerging in the form of judgment.” (Illuminations 128) And as to Kraus, Kafka fails, for the past is inescapable. Judgment here acts in the same way of the desire of the public as in Kraus, the judging public, and shameful Kafka is the condemned. In the ancient world, one’s capture is his misfortune. And Kafka’s misfortune is his shame. “The fact that it is now forgotten does not mean that it does not extend into the present. On the contrary: it is actual by virtue of this very oblivion. An experience deeper than that of an average person can make contact with it. … And Kafka does not tire of expressing himself on the fluctuating nature of experiences. Each gives way and mingles with its opposite.” (Illuminations 130) In the form of parables, in the world of animals (nature, primal) as reflection, then perhaps the shame is lifted (hope in the shame, hope but not for us). Kafka’s parables are staged in a theater, the World and Nature Theater. Staged in acts of gestures. Again as he wrote in Kraus, the gesture plays a significant role for Benjamin in excavating meaning and intelligibility. Like the parable, the gesture of the staged world of Kafka sees their full light when they are put on as acts. Acts, each movement in their didactic expresses a meaning. “Each gesture is an event – one might even say, a drama – in itself. The stage on which this drama takes place is the World Theater which opens up toward heaven. On the other hand, this heaven is only background; to explore it according to its own laws would be like framing the painted backdrop of the stage and hanging it in a picture gallery. Like El Greco, Kafka tears open the sky behind every gesture; but as El Greco – who was the patron saint of Expressionists – the gesture remains the decisive thing, the center of the event.” (Illuminations 121) Kafka’s society is reflected unto himself, and he is reflected unto his society in fragments. “… Experiments have proved that a man does not recognize his own walk on the screen or his own voice on the phonograph. The situation of the subject in such experiments is Kafka’s situation; this is what directs him to learning, where he may encounter fragments of his own existence, fragments that are still within the context of the role.” (Illuminations 137)

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are starring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history: His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to say, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Walter Benjamin has been misconceived as the philosopher of history, when in fact he is the philosopher of the future. This was the central point in his criticism toward Marxism in his time so warped in historicism. His take on the past is to seek the emancipatory potential so that it would function for the present. It does not mean bringing the past to present to the future (and vice versa), but:

“… rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: Image is dialectics in a standstill.” [Benjamin, Convolute N, The Arcades Project, 463]

The present accumulates the past, its potential and possibilities of what it could have been. It concerns the issue of the present containing its own actuality as well as the past’s “what were” and “potentials.” Benjamin is then interested in the future — what does the future of the past contain? He seeks in redeeming the potential of the past. It is partly Benjamin’s attempt to legitimate the present by recovering the potentials of the past. Therefore, Benjamin’s philosophy is the philosophy of the present as determined.

How can new meaning happen? How can the past attain meaning? How can the past have future? For Benjamin, the past can gain recurrence (see Nietzche), it can have an afterlife.

In the Angelus Novus passage, the angel of history is propelled by the storm of progress. The angel as an entity beyond nature is the force that man cannot apprehend. As such man cannot apprehend history in its entirety, thus only the angel can. Even so it is propelled by progress. Progress then happens, but it does not need to happen.

Man can only recover the past in flases, involuntarily (see Bergson and Proust).

If for Benjamin the 19th century becomes available for his present then history is in service of the present. The past acts as function of the present, the past convoluted in the present. Historicism should then be in service of the existence of the present. Paraphrasing Nietzche: “the past is infinitely mineable — history is infinite, which amounts to the paralysis of the present.” This statement paralels the Angelus Novus passage:

By conjuring an omen of syphilis – a dubious way to end the chronicle – he gives a clue as to why he wrote his Berlin chronicle. He seems to rejoice in historical accounts that live in his present melancholia. It is as a critique of society, a certain class, his own and others, and the prospect of that reflected in the present, where it seems to Benjamin, imminently bleak. He wrote this in 1932. Germany having endured the First World War and its own revolution, faces a grim omen. The country was ridden with unemployment, monetary crisis, poverty reigns, chaos plagues Berlin, and Marxism was considered a threat. In 1932, Hitler runs for presidency. Although he and his Nazi party didn’t win, the elected government of Hindenburg is a regime rotten with scandals. Reading “A Berlin Chronicle,” one assumes that Benjamin’s associations with Marxism, and his pessimism of the present conditions in Germany and Europe in general are the reasons to write this account.

His accounts certainly resonate Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,” but does not duplicate it. Like Proust, he does not compose a story, but it weaves a history. He seems to be fascinated by the city of Berlin, not its generalities, but the particulars (acute details) that make up after conjuration complete the former. Its images and characters, the people that interrelate to his childhood and youth, his interactions with them, his social activities that form his attitude, the details of jewelry, architecture, furniture, his collection of books, and the some details of the books itself, intrigue him. It is clearly not composed like a chronology – it purposely contradicts the title – instead it is made of bits and pieces, slivers of memories jump at once in the body of writing, to his present.

As a translator of Proust’s writing, Benjamin continues his method, an attempt by Proust to synthesize the memoir, historical writing, theoretical discourse, and social criticism. It is an attempt to methodically acknowledge and deploy his melancholia, using constellations of events, having no ‘apparent’ connection to one another to enrich the subject to act. The melancholic dwells involuntarily in the unconscious. Benjamin’s manner of writing is much like the unconscious that Proust scrutinizes to identify his lost ego, by drawing out from “stars” – nodes of memories past, that, if focused into a funnel, will generate action, perhaps salvation for his present, which Benjamin curiously ends with “syphilis.”

Benjamin recognizes Proust’s autobiography-novel as a self-criticism of the Bourgeoisie, in which [for whom] the melancholia is characteristic. With Freud, the melancholic cannot see what they have lost, in this case an inability to recollect the ego unconsciously: “… by perceiving that the self reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted onto the patient’s own ego.” It is a misdirection of the libido to the ego – the ego established as the abandoned object: narcissism. Proust was melancholic, characterized by his withdrawal from daylight, living in the ambivalent darkness, he retreats from his friends, his social circle, and drowns in his sickness, living in the prospect of death, which he views as being imminent. Death is the drive to bring the past to the present: a desire to heal, to replace his lost ego. Benjamin was similarly melancholic. His account of hating school, having to raise his cap to his teachers, being fooled by his father, which he wrote as the greatest disappointment of his life, and the ominous syphilis all describe such a symptom, a loss of “something” that preoccupies him to the present, a “thing” he cannot shake off.

Benjamin’s melancholia reflects his society’s melancholia. One recognizes this with his preoccupation with images of the past that figure in the present. He describes them by writing about his postcards (Benjamin, 40-44), and, in his bleak account of despising authority in school there is perhaps a critic of the present regimes policy in controlling its citizens (Benjamin, 48-52). He described his first memory of sexual urge in the prospect of missing a religious event he was obligated to attend (Benjamin, 52-53), perhaps as a reflection on the strict illogical regulations that bound citizens. He wrote about disappointments in his life such as not finding peacock feathers, as his father insinuated that he would (Benjamin, 56-57), as a critic of “spins” and lies presented by the state to fool and coerce the public. To Benjamin, society’s melancholia is caused by the failure to recover its lost ego, therefore losing direction and meaning in the progress of life. It is this loss that is reflective of the Bourgeois, the German upper middle class so caught up in the nonsensical of life that it does not recognize and so cannot recover what is lost, wrought by havocs of war, by poverty, by corruption, by loss of authority. Writing the past in the present is a way to methodically interrupt the past, open with numerous possibilities, placing into the present, perhaps to recover such consciousness, to emancipate the content of the melancholia.

Having to have lived in a state (Indonesia) that tends to dictate and persuade its people to forgive and forget the state’s past sins, reading into this autobiographical-historical-critical theory account is both a treat, as well as strenuously insightful. With Benjamin, drawing from the past and bringing it to the present exists a possibility to give an agency for the human subject to act. How so? Recollection to Benjamin is more than learning the lessons of the past. It is the past living in and through the present, in forms of echoes, and of retrospections that form more than mere introspection. It causes action for the future, perhaps to start anew. The past exists, therefore it must be acknowledged by the subject in order to recollect, or replace their lost ego. In this case Proust’s writing is important, as it documents that one can indeed “live” in the past but for the future. The action that takes place as a result is the richness of details, a hybrid and synthesis that stream from the unconscious to reconstruct the present and future. Melancholia, then, is the key. In Proust, his recollections as his melancholia were his re-invention of the novel form that overtakes the reader as the subject, and claim it as their own (or Proust’s) own subjectivity. It is his own tool to create an art, to master oneself, to master the subject. His autobiography is to point out the follies that his society projects, a failure that if carried out further, empty to be dwelled upon, will end in destruction.

Sources

Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Collected Papers [NY: Basic Books, 1959], vol. 5: 152-170.