Talk at seminar on Intensität in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy, April 2018, at Forschungsinstitut für Philosophie, Hannover, Germany.
I.
I want to ask three short but complicated questions. But more than this I want to address them not merely with regard to the history of of philosophy, but also with regard to their theologico-theatrico-political implications (as an ongoing concern). They are to be addressed not only in terms of a closed logic completed by the pastness of the past, as mere dead fact to be unpacked, but also as centres of necessary contemplation and arenas of action.
- What is the weight – or intensity – implicit in the predicative copula?
- In what relation does the epistemo-critical prologue stand to the rest of the Trauerspiel book?
- What do the answers to these questions tell us about our historical condition?
These problems mights seem, at least at first, unrelated, but they might also touch on some tensions in these texts.
II.
What do I mean by the weight implicit in the predicative copula? Here I simply want to indicate that the being that is spoken of in the “is” of a judgment is historically unstable, variable, and excessive. Excessive in particular in the sense that predicative judgements do not simply function to bring phenomena into understanding by subsuming their particularity under the universality of the concept. While they may indeed do this, at the same time, the language of judgement constitutes the relation between knower and known, consitutes the objectivity of the object and the subjectivity of the subject. And those constitutions are themselves historical, and charged or weighted into the “being” that is spoken of by the “is”.
The purpose of making this relatively schematic point about the nature of judgements is that – if we are going to try to understand not only what Benjamin has to say about the relations of truth, to intention, to knowledge; but also why these might be important things to speak about – we need to get to grips with some of what he thought about that historical instability, that variation, and that excess. In short, this schematic point leads to a conclusion that can be anything but schematic.
In particular it seems that for Benjamin this excess in the “being” of the “is” migrates into the object itself, and can be considered with regard to a weak power within that objectivity – that of symbolisation. And to recognise this symbol is the task of philosophy. He writes in the prologue to the Trauerspiel book:
It is the task of the philosopher to restore, by representation, the primacy of the symbolic character of the word, in which the idea is given self-consciousness, and that is the opposite of all outwardly-directed communication.
And while here this question is not couched in “objectivity”, the very lack of such terminology will lead us to conclusions about what happens to the Symbol in that book.
III
A set of a schemata drafted in 1920 or 1921 is marked at its head by two crosses. This image is perhaps incidental, if not accidental, to the ‘konfusionsschema’ that is presented. Yet in the attempt to invoke clarity, in the drawing of a diagram that hopes to display relations between language and truth, between knowledge and vision, between truth and simplicity, between perception and multiplicity, so too do we witness a double crucifixion of two phrases: firstly of the ‘imaginary object’ and secondly of ‘objective intention.’ (This ‘objective intention’ has to do with an intention not of the judgement that subjectively cast the object as its object, but instead the intention that the object has towards God, a ‘symbolic intention’. Hence Benjamin writes also,“Certain material objects can be fulfilled only in an ascribed objective intention, and they then point to God.”)
What are the movement of the cross? Should we read it as a sign of splitting and decision, as in a crossroads, in which one must judge and choose a path, knowing full well that the other lies perpendicular? Or is it, contrarywise, a site and sign of mixing, of fusing together, the necessary reconjunction of something already divided? Benjamin’s schemata suggests both. And what is split, and crucified here? It is the word, which divides into concept and essence – the one associated with knowledge and the other with truth. But in the dialectical motion, just as the word is split, so too must these lines transect through the ‘objective intension’ that is produced in this splitting. We might ask how they were split apart to begin with, and the answer in turn would be in the decisive judgement that chose a path. To borrow the phrase from the history of scientific modernity, the splitting is itself the consequence of an experimentum crucis, in which the path of knowledge is chosen while the path of truth is not. And yet knowledge remains con-fused with truth at the point of this meeting, if not in the knowing subject.
To focus on these diagramatic lines might seem capricious, were this not a text about crosses. I want to ask the question of these crucifixions in relation to the famous passage in the prologue to the Trauerspiel book
The object of knowledge, determined as it is by the intention inherent in the concept, is not the truth. Truth is the intentionless state of being, made up of ideas. The proper approach to it is not therefore one of intention and knowledge, but rather a total immersion and absorption in it [in sie eingehen und verschwinden]. Truth is the death of intention. (36)
My sense is that one can’t be just as schematic as the prologue suggests, and that some historical consequences of such a thought can be read elsewhere in the book. Meanwhile, within the schemata I want to know if objective intension dies there on the cross, under the excruciating tension between truth and knowledge; or whether it has merely been marked by the cross as a sign or seal of salvation, by some crusador, some backward-looking baroque crucisignatus.
These two aspects of crucifixion – the torment and pain of the passion of the body, and the symbolic mark of salvation – are proximate to many of the themes of this book. And yet despite this, in quite a profound sense, the Trauerspiel book is a book without crosses. Benjamin describes a historical process, whereby the cross of the martyred Jesus of the passion play had been supplanted by the crown of a prince. The passion of Christ, in a religious sense, has been supplanted by the secular play of political intrigue (albeit in a century of relative piety). “if the tyrant falls, not simply in his own names, as an individual, but as a ruler and in the name of mankind and history, then his fall has the quality of a judgment, in which the subject too is implicated”. This is the history of bloody politics placed upon a stage, shown and technized, if not exalted.
It is perhaps worth remarking too, that this question of the body, and of the word, is the central questions of early modern theology. When, in ‘The Task of the Translator’ Benjamin talks about the relationship of of the German Brot to the French pain, there is a distinctively doctrinal connotation. For the translation of the Latin hostia into the vernacular for the bread of the Eucharist, is accompanied by the greatest of theological struggles. Can I not hear behind each of these words the shadowy echoes of Calvin, and the great translator Luther? Does Benjamin perhaps want to resolve the problem of transsubstantition politically, as translation, through an account of its coterminous consequences of national sovereignty? And are we not dealing now with the word made flesh (pace John) rather than the body made bread? Is not the dreadful history of the reformation to which every counter-reformation baroque allegorist responds the actuality of the word made flesh, now crucified, once the every word has become nothing but concept.
To draw these all too brief digressions together, I want to briefly mention the results of this thinking in the Trauerspiel book, a book in which there is no account of “objective intention” in the way that we find in the schemata and fragments from the very early 1920s; and of how Benjamin might at once think through these word-crucifixions with regard to a theory of symbols. To state the theory briefly, the earlier theory of “objective intention” founded in the object has been replaced with a theory of death and its display. As is well known, Benjamin gives, in the Trauerspiel book, an epochal history of the symbol, – regarding firstly it’s classical aspect (as a type of internally oriented humanism), its romantic aspect (where it dwells in a miraculous nature and instantaneously reveals itself) before turning to its baroque moment, and to the allegorical view of things. This “allegorical way of seeing, of the baroque secular explanation of history as the Passion of the world.”
It is in the world of allegory that the Trauerspiel book is truly without crosses. Instead, its concern is with how these aspects of crucifixion – as excruciations and marks of salvation, indwell in the body of the word itself as script. One might note here that in the finale of the book the concern is with the image of Golgotha – the site of the crucifixion. But it is not the crucifixion of Jesus that is important, but instead now the writhing physionomics of a profusion of baroque engravings, of a scriptal landscape or inscribed languagescape. It is the scene of not only worldly but wordly suffering – of words made gods, and suffering gods too, which may harbour, in their objectivity, some symbolic form that marks them for salvation. The symbol’s migration into allegory transforms each and every word into a site of bodily suffering, with truth straining internal to it, in the rhythm of catastrophe.
The allegorical then, has a particular mode of providing a setting into which we might enter and into which we – with our own bodily suffering – might disappear. This is the natural-historical setting of a bloody world-theatre devoid as much of eschatology as of doxology beyond a certain type of fragile crisis nationalism. But here as a means of attaining if not truth then redemption, this setting seems historically limited to the world of pious secularism. And we are left asking what of the symbols of today? And how do they strain towards or away from the cross, through the word made matter?