The Messianic Reduction

Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time

Peter Fenves

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780804777285
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Criticism

The Messianic Reduction is a groundbreaking study of Walter Benjamin's thought. Fenves places Benjamin's early writings in the context of contemporaneous philosophy, with particular attention to the work of Bergson, Cohen, Husserl, Frege, and Heidegger. By concentrating on a neglected dimension of Benjamin's friendship with Gershom Scholem, who was a student of mathematics before he became a scholar of Jewish mysticism, Fenves shows how mathematical research informs Benjamin's reflections on the problem of historical time. In order to capture the character of Benjamin's "entrance" into the phenomenological school, the book includes a thorough analysis of two early texts he wrote under the title of "The Rainbow, " translated here for the first time. In its final chapters, the book works out Benjamin's deep and abiding engagement with Kantian critique, including Benjamin's discovery of the political counterpart to the categorical imperative in the idea of "pure violence."

§1 Substance Poem Versus Function Poem

“Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin”

A Technical Term

Benjamin generally shies away from introducing technical terms. Under certain circumstances he uses unfamiliar terms, many of which are derived from the addition of the suffix -barkeit (“ability”) to a common noun. Among terms of this type, which can be found throughout his writings, “translatability,” “criticizability,” and “knowability” are particularly prominent.¹ But none of these terms is technical in a strict sense: they do not owe their origin to authorial fiat. A typical formula for the creation of a technical term runs as follows: “Terminologically, I will call such-and-such x.” The advantage of a sentence of this kind lies in its capacity to disambiguate the term in view of future use. The disadvantage lies in the prominence of the “I” who presumes that it has a right to dispose over language. In his Berliner Chronik (Berlin chronicle) Benjamin formulates a stylistic imperative his work has hitherto obeyed: “Never use the word ‘I’ except in letters” (6: 475). The imperative corresponds to the requirement that technical terms be avoided whenever possible. In the “Epistemo-Critical Preface” to his Origin of the German Mourning Play Benjamin explains the rationale for the imperative that gives shape to his work: “The introduction of new terminologies, as long as they are not intended solely for the domain of concepts, is therefore worrisome within the philosophical domain. Such terminologies—a misfortunate naming, in which intention [Meinen] takes a greater share than language—betrays the objectivity that history has given the principal coinages of philosophical reflection” (1: 217).

On perhaps no other point is Benjamin more consistent. In all his writing, from beginning to end, he generally declines to introduce technical terms, for wherever they occur they are evidence of a certain disorder, in which the intention of the subject takes precedence over the historically canonized objectivity of philosophical terminology. In some of his later works, Benjamin draws attention to certain terms that are unknown to Greek, Latin, French, and German philosophical traditions; but these terms, including aura and flânerie, are neither newly devised nor defined solely for the sake of the subsequent discussion. They retain their aura, so to speak, and—to the consternation of many commentators—meander in their meaning. The exercise in category construction that characterizes the kind of philosophical project Heidegger undertakes in Sein und Zeit (Being and time) is altogether foreign to Benjamin’s work, both early and late. The sense that his work is unsystematic and should thus be classified as “unphilosophical” stems in no small part from his refusal to construct a table of categories, even if only in the mode of its negation. For this reason, however, it comes as something of a surprise that an essay from late 1914 and early 1915, entitled “Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin”—which he would later characterize as his “first major work” (GB, 3: 157)—introduces a technical term in its opening paragraph, das Gedichtete, which will henceforth be translated as “the poetized.”

In Einbahnstraβe (One-way street), Benjamin proposes a series of recommendations for the production of “thick books.” One of these tips corresponds to the disavowal of technical terms that finds expression in the previously quoted passage from “Epistemo-Critical Preface”: “Terms for concepts are to be introduced that never appear in the entire book except in those places where they are defined” (4: 104). If “Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin” can indeed be called Benjamin’s “first major work,” then the proposal for producing “thick books” applies to his literary corpus as a whole. A newly devised term, the poetized, is laboriously defined, only to be abandoned in everything that follows. Stranger still is the fact that, around the time of Benjamin’s death at the beginning of World War II, the term he invented at the start of World War I returns in its original context—as a way to capture the singular character of Hölderlin’s late poetry. Benjamin is not responsible for this term when it returns, however; in his last major work, he explicitly sets himself against the one who takes over the idea of “the poetized,” namely Martin Heidegger.²

In retrospect, then, it is apparent that the poetized is like very few others terms in Benjamin’s carefully crafted lexicon. And yet, the point of introducing the term is entirely in line with the stylistic imperative it violates: to the extent that commentary is concerned solely with the poetized, it disregards the empirical circumstances of an artistic production. By introducing the poetized, Benjamin seeks to solve the problem Nietzsche posed in the fifth section of Die Geburt der Tragödie (The birth of tragedy), which radicalizes and transforms Schopenhauer’s aesthetics by demonstrating that there is nothing subjective about any work of art, including lyric productivity: “How is the ‘lyric poet’ possible as an artist,” Nietzsche asks, appropriating a Kantian formulation, and immediately adds: “[the lyric poet] who, according to the experience of all times, always says ‘I’ and sings before us the entire chromatic scale of his passions and desires.”³ In order to establish the context in which a solution can be found, Nietzsche draws on the authority of Schiller, who identifies “musical mood” as the poetic equivalent to the Kantian a priori. When Benjamin concludes the penultimate paragraph of “Two Poems” with a quotation from Schiller (2: 125), he may be drawing an implicit distinction between his solution to the problem and that of Nietzsche, which makes every lyric poem into the objectification of a certain mood. With the introduction of term poetized into aesthetics, Benjamin in any case seeks to solve the problem Nietzsche posed in his first major work. And in so doing, he likewise advances a cause espoused by a wide variety of philosophical movements of the period: the critique of psychologism.⁴

Just as the idea of “pure knowledge,” for Hermann Cohen, and “pure logic,” for Edmund Husserl, have nothing in common with the empirical inquiries into the minds of scientists or logicians, so, for Benjamin, does “pure aesthetics” (2: 105) remain unconcerned with the moods of artists and audiences alike. In the case of lyric poetry, the aesthetic counterpart to pure knowledge and pure logic identifies the artistic task that any given poem is meant to solve, regardless of what its author wished to say or how its audiences may have felt. Once the spheres of logic and mathematics are liberated from psychologism, the same can be done with aesthetics, beginning with the form of fine art that is most susceptible to psychological speculation by virtue of, in Nietzsche’s words, the “little word ‘I’” for which it provides an expressive vehicle. Unlike the advocates of the New Criticism, who will also dispense with psychological and biographical considerations, the program Benjamin sketches in “Two Poems” is less concerned with grasping the verbal artifact by means of close reading than with approaching the methodological ideal of the “pure poetized” (2: 108), which, according to Benjamin, is either itself a poem or identical to life itself.

Antipsychologism

The sheer density of “Two Poems,” which rigorously follows the stylistic imperative formulated in Berlin Chronicle and makes no reference to an “I,” invites its readers to speculate about the psychological or biographical conditions of its author, as if it were a second-order lyric poem that opens up its secrets as soon as the interpreter gains insight into what the author was experiencing when it was written. And if one wanted to discern Benjamin’s state of mind at the time, one need look no further than the paragraph of Berliner Chronicle that begins with a reflection on his stylistic imperative. After noting that, for a long time, he refrained from using “I” outside of letters, Benjamin enigmatically discloses his relation to a poet, namely Fritz Heinle, who killed himself in the early days of World War I (6: 475–80). The fact that Friedrich Heinle and Friedrich Hölderlin share the same initials lends credence to the following line of interpretation: “Two Poems of F … H … ” is a prose elegy in memory of a poet whom Benjamin encountered “not in ‘life’ but, rather, only in his poetry” (6: 477).⁵ An interpretation of this kind betrays the methodological stipulations of Benjamin’s essay and at the same time ironically fulfills them: the betrayal consists in disregarding Benjamin’s effort to develop a mode of “aesthetic commentary” (2: 105) that makes no mention of the psychological state or empirical condition of the author; the fulfillment consists in respecting the premise on which this effort rests—that commentary not be based on speculation into what the author wants to say. But this fulfillment by way of betrayal moves in precisely the opposite direction from the one Benjamin sketches in “Two Poems.” Instead of aiming for the truth of the work, it concerns itself with the psychological state of its author. And this concern can be amplified by means of further psychological speculation: the reason commentators on Benjamin’s essay want to disregard its guiding intention lies in their own discomfort with its density, which can be interpreted as sign of psychological distress.

Instead of further discussing the psychological state of commentators who seek to understand commentators on Benjamin’s commentary as an expression of his psychological state—and thereby risking a perpetuation of this potentially endless series of remarks by inducing other commentators to discuss the motivations for my own attempt to do away with this line of interpretation—I want to interrupt this process and pose a question: what is truth? Or, more in keeping with the problem at hand, in what way can a lyric poem be true? The second question can be formulated in another manner as well: how can a lyric poem transcend the poetic subjectivity it apparently expresses and thus achieve its own specific mode of objectivity? The methodological remarks with which Benjamin prefaces his analysis of Hölderlin’s poetry are directed at questions of this kind:

An aesthetic commentary on two lyrical poems is going to be attempted, and this intention demands a few preliminary remarks on method. The inner form, which Goethe designates as content [Gehalt], should appear among these poems. The poetic task, as a presupposition of an evaluation of the poem, is to be identified…. Nothing about the process of poetic creation will be discussed, nothing about the person or Weltanschauung of the creator; on the contrary, only the particular and unique sphere in which the task and presupposition of the poem reside will emerge. This sphere is at once the product and object of the investigation. It can no longer be compared with the poem but is, rather, the only thing that is ascertainable [das einzig Feststellbare] in the investigation. This sphere, which for every poem has a particular shape [Gestalt], will be designated as the poetized [das Gedichtete]. In this sphere a peculiar region should be disclosed—the region that contains the truth of poetry. This “truth,” which is precisely what the most serious artists so urgently claim for their creations, is to be understood as the objectivity [Gegenständlichkeit] of their creative activity, as the fulfillment of any given artistic task. “Every artwork has an ideal a priori, an inner necessity to exist” (Novalis). (2: 105–6)

The quotations from Goethe and Novalis with which Benjamin punctuates the opening paragraph of “Two Poems” demonstrate that the goal of his study is not altogether unprecedented. Certain poets have demanded of poetry that it be understood in terms of an “inner” structure that precedes rather than expresses their psychological states. But neither “content” (Goethe) nor “inner necessity” (Novalis) suggests a particular method through which the structure in question can be identified. Benjamin seeks to develop such a method without relying on the sterile distinctions between inner and outer or content and form. As a first approximation, he defines “the poetized” as both the “product and object” of the very investigation he is about to conduct—which means at the very least that the existence of the poetized is predicated on there being an investigation of its existence. This is not to say that the poetized is a fantasy of the investigator’s making; but Benjamin is obviously aware of this danger, so much so that his further exposition of the poetized is meant to thwart it. Insofar as the object of the investigation is finite yet unbounded, it lends itself to the image of a sphere. The sphere under construction is not, however, homogeneous; the point of generating a sphere lies in describing the region that, while lying on the sphere, transcends it as well. This region, which the investigation does not so much generate as disclose, is the “truth” of poetry, where “truth” is not understood as the correspondence between thinking and being or between subject and object but, rather, in terms of “fulfillment” (Erfüllung), on the one hand, and “objectivity” (Gegenständlichkeit), on the other. In 1901 Husserl had launched the phenomenological movement by explicating the phenomenon of truth as the intuitive “fulfillment” of a certain mode of signifying intention (Hu, 19, 2: 590), and in the following passage from the manifesto he published under the title “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” which Benjamin read in the summer of 1913 (GB, 1: 144), Husserl presents the task of phenomenology as the disclosure of those “objectivities” whose “being” is immanent to the structure of consciousness and therefore owes nothing to transcendent objects:

If the theory of knowledge wants to investigate the problems of the relation between consciousness and being, it can have being only as a correlative of consciousness before its eyes—as an “intended” [Gemeintes] on the order of consciousness: as a perceived, remembered, expected, represented through an image, supposed, valued, and so forth…. For the essence-analysis of consciousness, the clarification of all fundamental kinds of objectivities [Gegenständlichkeiten] is unavoidable and is indeed contained in this analysis; still, however, only in an epistemological analysis that sees its task in the investigation of correlations. For this reason, we conceive of all such studies, even if they are relatively separate from one another, under the title of phenomenology. (Hu, 25: 15–16)

Benjamin adds a term to the list of “accomplishments” Husserl compiles: in addition to perceiving, remembering, expecting, representing through an image, supposing, and valuing, there is also the act of poetizing, whose objective intention is categorically different from any other act. Regardless of what particular poets may be thinking when they create their poems, to the extent that they are poets, they poetize, and the “intended” of their poetizing can be called, without further qualification, “the poetized.” The goal of “aesthetic commentary” lies in so isolating the poetized that nothing of the corresponding act of poetizing remains. In this way, the “sphere” generated by the investigation is reduced to the “region” that represents the “truth of poetry,” regardless of what shape the poetized takes in any given instance. Described in these terms, however, “aesthetic commentary” both accords with and parts ways with what Husserl calls “phenomenology” in the preceding passage. The “intended” of the accomplishments he catalogs—perceiving, remembering, expecting, and so forth—can be brought to consciousness. There doubtless remains a question as to the specific character of the consciousness to which “objectivities” thus appear; but there is no question, for Husserl, that the appearance of such things is bound up with the coming philosophy. For Benjamin, by contrast, the isolation of the poetized has nothing to do with psychic acts. Least of all can the poetized, as an eidos of sorts, be “seen” in accordance with the governing idea of Wesensschau (intuition of essence). “Truth,” for Benjamin, as for Husserl, lies in the fulfillment of a certain mode of signifying intention; but the fulfillment is precisely not “intuitive,” for Benjamin. For this reason, he makes no mention of the act-side of the accomplishment; that is, he says nothing about poetizing in his exposition of what is meant by “the poetized.” The operative opposition in “Two Poems” does not reside in the distinction between the act- and object-side of the total accomplishment but, rather, in the tension internal to the object-side: the poetized in its particular shape, understood as the particular poetic intention that the poem under consideration fulfills, contrasts with the “pure poetized,” which is only a methodological ideal.

Limit Concept and Function

By making the poetized radically unavailable to intuition, the methodological program for “pure aesthetics” decisively distances itself from the phenomenological program laid out in both Logical Investigations and “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” while simultaneously entering into close proximity with the principles of the Marburg school. Nowhere is the “Marburgian” character of Benjamin’s undertaking more readily apparent than in the exposition of the poetized as a “limit concept [Grenzbegriff]” (2: 107). In a sense, Benjamin has no choice but to describe the poetized in these terms, given the exclusion of intuition. To say of the poetized that it is a limit concept means, in Kantian terms, that no intuition corresponds to it—but it is not therefore empty. Rather, it functions as a methodological principle that guides the investigation in which it is generated. Only once in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of pure reason) does Kant use the term limit concept: “the concept of the noumenon is merely a limit concept, used for the purpose of limiting the pretensions of sensibility, and is therefore only of negative use” (K, A 255; B 310–11). The program of the Marburg school consists, to a certain extent, in a massive expansion of this remark, which provides a clue for resolving the basic problem of Kantian epistemology: the “thing-in-itself” is supposed to “affect” our cognitive faculties, and yet it cannot be an object of knowledge. To the extent that the thing-in-itself can be interpreted as the limit concept of a scientific enterprise, the problem is resolvable in the following way: every science generates its own limit concept, through which its object is progressively constructed as an immanent thought-object. What Benjamin says of the “pure poetized” then applies verbatim to the object of the sciences in general: it is the “absolute task” and, for this reason, it “must … remain the purely methodological, ideal goal” (2: 108). The principle under which the object of knowledge is generated, for Kant, is the “transcendental unity of apperception” (K, A 108, B 139), whereas, for Cohen—who removes consciousness from epistemology and plants it unambiguously in the science of psychology—the object is generated on the basis of its inner “lawfulness” (C, 55). And for Benjamin, who closely follows Cohen in this regard, the principle of the poetized lies in “the law of identity,” which assumes the central function that Kant accords to the identity of self-consciousness without representing identity in terms of consciousness: “The law, according to which all apparent elements of sensibility and ideas show themselves as a complex of essentially, in principle, infinite functions, is called the law of identity. The synthetic unity of the functions is thereby designated. It is known in its particular shape [Gestalt] as an a priori of the poem” (2: 108).

The “law of identity” opposes a basic thesis of Kantian critique and accords with the founding principle of the Marburg school. The Critique of Pure Reason begins with a “Doctrine of Elements” that identifies two irreducible sources of knowledge: sensibility, which is itself divided into the “pure intuitions” of space and time, and the understanding, which consists in the discursive faculty of concept-construction. By the time Cohen writes Logic of Pure Knowledge, he had identified only a single source of knowledge: “pure thinking” (C, 90). By formulating the poetized in terms of a “law of identity,” Benjamin follows Cohen to the letter: not only are spatial, temporal, and spiritual elements supposed to interpenetrate each other; the result of this “spatio-temporal permeation of all shapes” is a purely “intellectual complex” (2: 112) that can be understood as the aesthetic counterpart to what Cohen calls “pure knowledge.” The poetized is a synthetic a priori, but the synthesis is not that of sensibility and conceptuality;...