A Weak Messianic Power

Figures of a Time to Come in Benjamin, Derrida, and Celan

Michael G. Levine

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780823255122
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria ebraica

In his famous theses on the philosophy of history, Benjamin writes: "We have been endowed with a weak messianic power to which the past has a claim." This claim addresses us not just from the past but from what will have belonged to it only as a missed possibility and unrealized potential. For Benajmin, as for Celan and Derrida, what has never been actualized remains with us, not as a lingering echo but as a secretly insistent appeal. Because such appeals do not pass through normal channels of communication, they require a special attunement, perhaps even a mode of unconscious receptivity. Levine examines the ways in which this attunement is cultivated in Benjamin's philosophical, autobiographical, and photohistorical writings; Celan's poetry and poetological addresses; and Derrida's writings on Celan.

ONE

A Time to Come: Hunchbacked Theology, Post-Freudian Psychoanalysis, and Historical Materialism

Redemption depends on the tiny fissures in the continuous catastrophe.

— WALTER BENJAMIN, Central Park

There is often in writing a secret place around which thoughts—around which what is less than, not yet, and perhaps never to be thought—may gather. Walter Benjamin alludes to such a place in an April 1940 letter to his friend and confidante Gretel Adorno. Referring to the thoughts that would secretly coalesce around the writing of his now-famous theses on the concept of history, he notes, “The war, and the constellation that brought it about, led me to set down some thoughts of which I can say that I kept them to myself—kept them indeed from myself—for some twenty years.” (Der Krieg und die Konstellation, die ihn mit sich brachte, hat mich dazu geführt, einige Gedanken niederzulegen, von denen ich sagen kann, dass ich sie an die zwanzig Jahre bei mir verwahrt, ja, verwahrt vor mir selber gehalten habe.)¹ The pressures of the war and of being made to flee first from his homeland and then, in turn, from his second home in Paris (which he would be forced to abandon shortly after this letter was sent) give the theses a tremendous sense of urgency. Under such pressures, thoughts that had heretofore been held back and kept apart began to find their way to each other, coming together with and against Benjamin’s knowledge in a kind of clandestine rendezvous.

That the theses are themselves the place where thoughts held incommunicado for some twenty years would begin to converse, engaging in a secret colloquy whose codes and protocols would have to be learned sur place from indications provided by the text itself, is suggested not only in the letter to Gretel Adorno but also in a key passage of the second thesis. The passage appears in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, volume 4 as follows:

The past carries with it a hidden index [führt einen heimlichen Index mit] by which it is referred to redemption. Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? In the voices we hear isn’t there an echo of now silent ones? Don’t the women we court have sisters they no longer recognize? If this is so, then there is a secret agreement [eine geheime Verabredung] between past generations and the present one. Then our coming was expected on earth. Then, like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim.²

This passage will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 2. For the moment I wish only to draw attention to the language of secrets and hidden indications to which Benjamin has recourse, noting in particular the phrase eine geheime Verabredung, which is rendered as “a secret agreement” in both the initial English translation of the theses that appeared in Illuminations and the revised edition of the text published in Selected Writings. What is obscured in this translation is the sense of an “appointment” and, moreover, through the root Rede—from which the term Verabredung is formed—the sense of a call or address. Telling in this regard is the translation of the phrase eine geheime Verabredung that Benjamin himself provides in a French version he composed of the text. There it is rendered as un rendez-vous mystérieux (GS 1.3: 1260).

The secret meeting of which the theses speak is in a sense the one to which Benjamin appears to have felt himself called. Called in secret, called under the pressure of the war and the constellation it brought about, but also perhaps called under the pressure of a rapidly approaching end that would soon overtake him, he set down thoughts about a secret appointment between past generations and the present one. As a closer reading of the theses reveals, what speaks to us out of the past, what summons us to a secret rendezvous with it, is strictly speaking that which will have never belonged to it or that which will have belonged only as a missed possibility and unrealized potential. Evident in the passage cited above is the proximity of the notion of a secret appointment (eine geheime Verabredung) to that of a hidden or secret index (einen heimlichen Index) that the past carries along with it. It is by means of such an index, Benjamin says, that the past is “referred to redemption” (durch den sie auf die Erlösung verwiesen wird).

Yet what does the theologically charged term “redemption” (Erlösung) mean in the context of these secrets? According to Hamacher, the term should be understood “most prosaically”—as Einlösung more than Erlö-sung. Itself a prosaic term, Einlösung is usually associated with the cashing of checks and the redemption of deposits or coupons. Understood in this way, Erlösung, according to Hamacher, would mean,

a redeeming of possibilities which are opened with every life and are missed in every life. If the concept of redemption points towards a theology—and it does so without doubt and a fortiori in the context of the first thesis, which mentions the “little hunchback” of theology—then this is not straightforwardly Judeo-Christian theology, but rather a theology of the missed or distorted—hunchbacked—possibilities, a theology of missed, distorted or hunchbacked time. Each possibility that was missed in the past remains a possibility for the future, precisely because it has not found fulfillment. For the past to have a future merely means that the past’s possibilities have not yet found their fulfillment, that they continue to have an effect and demand their realization from those who feel addressed by them. When past things survive, then it is not lived-out (abgelebte) facts that survive; rather what survives are the unactualized possibilities of that which is past. There is historical time only insofar as there is an excess of the unactualized, the unfinished, failed, thwarted, which leaps beyond its particular Now and demands from another Now its settlement, correction and fulfillment.³

What remains unactualized, Benjamin suggests, stays with us, remaining not merely as a lingering echo but as a secretly insistent appeal. Because such appeals do not pass through normal channels of communication, because they are not transmitted via publically sanctioned, consciously recognized ways of speaking, they seem to require from the addressee a special attunement, perhaps even a certain mode of unconscious receptivity.

Indeed, as Benjamin suggests in A Little History of Photography, the peculiar mode of address in question here speaks both from and to a certain other ness. “It is another nature,” he writes, “which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye [Es ist ja eine andere Natur, welche zur Kamera als welche zum Auge spricht]: ‘other’ above all in the sense that the space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious” (SW 2: 510; GS 2.1: 371).

What does it mean for something to speak to the eye, let alone to the camera? What is this speech of another nature? If it is indeed speech addressed to the unconscious, speech addressed from one unconscious to another, it communicates only to the extent that it speaks through the lapses and slips of another. It speaks to the camera through the aperture of the eye—that is, through openings in the space informed by human consciousness, through blind spots in its field of vision. According to Benjamin, the photographic devices of slow motion and enlargement dilate the space informed by human consciousness, and it is through such dilations that the optical unconscious speaks. Not only does this unconscious speak out of turn—speaking in place of another, speaking where the space informed by human consciousness gives way to it⁴—but it also speaks out of time, speaking, as Benjamin says, from a place where the future nests eloquently in the immediacy of a long-forgotten moment (“im Sosein jener längstvergangenen Minute das Künftige . . . so beredt nistet”).

Just as it is necessary to underscore the root Rede, and with it the element of address implicit in the phrase eine geheime Verabredung, so too is it important to stress the term beredt, which Benjamin uses here to describe the peculiar eloquence of this nesting future, this future that will have found itself in the nest of another time. Benjamin’s remarks are occasioned by his reflection on a picture of the nineteenth-century French photographer Dauthendey and his fiancée taken at the time of their engagement. Viewing the photo while knowing of the woman’s subsequent suicide, Benjamin remarks that her husband-to-be would one day, shortly after the birth of their sixth child, find her lying in the bedroom of their Moscow house with her veins slashed. In the photo, Benjamin says,

He seems to be holding her, but her gaze passes him by, absorbed in an ominous distance [saugend an eine unheilvolle Ferne geheftet]. Immerse yourself in such a picture long enough and you will realize to what extent opposites touch, here too: the most precise technology can give its products a magical value, such as a painted picture can never again have for us. No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has, so to speak, seared the complexion of the image [den Bildcharakter gleichsam durchgesengt hat], to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it. For it is another nature that speaks to the camera [. . .].

(SW 2: 510; GS 2.1: 371)

Like the past of which Benjamin speaks in the theses—which is not so much a past reality as an unrealized possibility—the future in question here will, from the first, have stood out from its immediate surroundings.⁵ Just as the photo is said to be shot through with tiny sparks of contingency, with blind spots seared into the artist’s field of vision, so too is the past riddled with moments that will never have belonged properly to it. What speaks to the beholder of this photo not only addresses him from a locus of contingency but also speaks, as it were, only by accident. Speaking as and from a tiny spark of happenstance, it speaks the language of sparks, a language that sparks. Not only is this the language with which “reality has, so to speak, seared the complexion of the picture,” it is also the language that ignites in the beholder an irresistible urge or unconscious compulsion; the beholder, Benjamin says, “fühlt unwiderstehlich den Zwang.”⁶

As though summoned to a clandestine meeting, the beholder is driven to search the picture for a hidden location, to find “the inconspicuous spot” (die unscheinbare Stelle) where, in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment, the future is said to nest so eloquently. Addressed by this future of the past as though touched by a tiny spark of contingency, the beholder is moved not only to seek out in the picture that moment of blindness with which reality has seared it, that site of an accident (“das winzige Fünkchen Zufall”), but moreover, to locate himself, find himself, and render himself there. The addressee only first comes to be in that place where, in being called out of himself, he is called into another relationship with the past, into what in the theses is called a secret rendezvous.

The temporality of “a time to come” developed in the following chapters, is not merely that of a future time or a coming present, but that of the future anterior, a time in which future and past do not so much come together as come about one another, doing so in a way that circumvents conventional modalities of presence and holds time open to the coming of another. In this regard, it is no doubt telling that Benjamin’s theses themselves draw to a close around a certain opening of time. Their final words thus speak of a second, describing it not as a positive temporal unit but as a narrow aperture—as the strait gate (die kleine Pforte) through which the Messiah might enter. “We know,” Benjamin writes,

that the Jews were prohibited from inquiring into the future; the Torah and the prayers instructed them in remembrance. This disenchanted the future, which holds sway over all those who turn to soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future became homogeneous, empty time. For every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter. [Denn in ihr war jede Sekunde die kleine Pforte, durch die der Messias treten konnte.]

(SW 4: 397; GS 1.2: 704)

What Benjamin proposes in the theses is a way of thinking the present as something other than a bridge, other than a mediating link between past and future presents. Thus, he writes, “The historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition [die nicht Übergang ist], but in which time takes a stand (einsteht) and has come to a standstill (und zum Stillstand gekommen ist)” (SW 4: 396; GS 1.2: 702).

That the new English translation of the theses contained in Selected Writings takes pains to emphasize the element of standing that links the German terms einstehen (taking a stand) and Stillstand (standstill) is telling. For the stand in question is related not only to a pause, suspension, or holding open of time, but also to a spatial shift, a change in orientation from the horizontal axis to the vertical one. That this stand is to be understood as a reworking of familiar temporal-spatial coordinates—and, by extension, as an unsettling of the language to which we have recourse when speaking about the movement and stasis of time—is apparent in Benjamin’s famous definition of an origin (Ursprung) in the first chapter of his Origin of the German Tragic Drama. There, he writes, “the origin stands in the flow of becoming as a maelstrom” (steht im Fluß des Werdens als Strudel). As the ensuing discussion makes clear, this maelstrom interrupts the horizontal flow of time not only as a vertical descent but also, and above all, as a swirling movement of coming-to-be and passing-away.

Origin, although an historical category through and through, has nevertheless nothing in common with emergence [Entstehen]. In origin what is meant is not the becoming of something that has sprung forth [das Werden des Entsprungenen], but rather the springing-forth that emerges out of coming-to-be and passing away [dem Werden und Vergehen Entspringendes]. Origin stands in the flow of becoming as a maelstrom [Strudel] that irresistibly tears [reißt] the stuff of emergence into its rhythm. In the bare manifestation of the factual, the original is never discernible, and its rhythm is accessible only to a dual insight. It is recognizable on the one hand as restoration, as reinstatement, and on the other, precisely therein as incomplete, unfinished.⁷

(GS 1.1: 226)

What stands in the flow of becoming (Werden) stands still only to the extent that “coming-to-be and passing away” (Werden und Vergehen) come about one another, spiraling vertiginously toward one another in the vortex of a present no longer conceived of as a mere transition. This vortex, or Strudel, to which the origin is compared may thus be said to figure a circumvention of presence, a whirling, abyssal movement of return in which past and future circle around one another, without the bridge or mediation of the present, in a temporal relationship most closely associated with the future perfect tense.

As noted above, this temporal dimension of Benjamin’s thought stands in close proximity to his meditations on the unconsciou...