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 Benjamin’s Passages

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F6448.indb ii 11/10/14 12:09:57 PM
 Benjamin’s Passages
Dreaming, Awakening

Alexander Gelley

fordham university press

new york 2015

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 Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be repro-

duced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or
by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording,
or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews,
without the prior permission of the publisher.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persis-

tence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet
websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee
that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or
appropriate.

Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of

electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not
be available in electronic books.

Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gelley, Alexander.
Benjamin’s passages : dreaming, awakening / Alexander Gelley.
— First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8232-6256-4 (cloth : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-0-8232-6257-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940 — Criticism and
interpretation. I. Title.
PT2603.E455Z6732 2015
838′.91209— dc23
2014029447

Printed in the United States of America

17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1
First edition

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 For Mieke, first of all, and Ora, Mira,
Andrew, Reuben, and Levi

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F6448.indb vi 11/10/14 12:09:57 PM
 contents

List of Abbreviations ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 1
1. Contexts of the Aesthetic 42
2. Epigones in the House of Language: Benjamin and Kraus 69
3. Benjamin on Atget: Empty Streets and the Fading of Aura 87
4. Entering the Passagen 102
5. Citation as Incitation: The Political Agenda of the Passagenarbeit 127
6. Messianism, “Weak” and Otherwise 147
7. Forgetting, Dreaming, Awakening 174

Works Cited 197

Index 207

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F6448.indb viii 11/10/14 12:09:57 PM
 abbreviat ions

GB Gesammelte Briefe, 6 vols., ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frank-
furt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995–2000).
GS Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols., ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schwep-
penhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974 –89).
SW Selected Writings, 4 vols., ed. Michael W. Jennings, et al. (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 1996 –2003).
TAP The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

ix

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F6448.indb x 11/10/14 12:09:57 PM
 preface

Benjamin’s Passages: Dreaming, Awakening is focused on Benjamin’s work of

the 1930s, though it reaches back to earlier writings, too (for example, “The
Task of the Translator,” the study of Goethe’s novel The Elective Affinities),
in order to establish certain continuities. The introduction and the seven
chapters are intended to deal with central issues of Benjamin’s later work:
the interplay of aesthetics and politics in his criticism (Chapter 1); the con-
ception of language (Chapter 2); aura and its relation to image (Chapter 3);
the genre of The Arcades Project (Chapter 4); citation as the key structural
principle of The Arcades Project (Chapter 5); the status of “messianism” in
his thought (Chapter 6); the motifs of memory, the crowd, and awakening
(Chapter 7).
Many (but not all) of Benjamin’s principal writings of the later period are
discussed in these chapters: the essay on Goethe’s The Elective Affinities and
“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (Chap-
ter 1); “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” “The Task of
the Translator,” and the essay on Karl Kraus (Chapter 2); “Little History
of Photography” (Chapter 3); the materials published as Das Passagen-Werk
(The Arcades Project) (Chapters 4, 5); “On the Concept of History” (Chap-
ters 6, 7). But my intention is not to “cover” a period of Benjamin’s writings
but rather to trace a limited number of issues.
The Introduction has a number of aims: to situate Benjamin’s place in the
current field of “theory,” to lay out elements of the biographical context of
some of the writings, and to give a preview of some of the arguments of the
subsequent chapters. A section on “The Storyteller” highlights one aspect
of Benjamin’s major accomplishment as a literary theorist, a topic that this
book has not tried to address.
xi

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 xii Preface
The title alludes to the Passagen (arcades) of the project, of course, but it
also refers to Benjamin’s effort to negotiate the “labyrinth” of his work and
thought in this period. And it is intended to foreground the figurative status
of awakening within the allegorical structure of The Arcades Project.
In transposing the Freudian dream work from the individual subject to
the collective, Benjamin projected a “macrocosmic journey” of the indi-
vidual sleeper to “the dreaming collective, which, through the arcades, com-
munes with its own insides.” He credited the Surrealists with being the first
to offer a means of deciphering the nineteenth century’s “narcotic histori-
cism, its passion for masks.” He was well aware of Marx’s early remark that
“reform of consciousness” will come when “people will see that the world
has long possessed the dream of a thing—and that it only needs to possess
the consciousness of this thing in order really to possess it.” But any such
invocation of a past cannot draw on some form of conscious recollection
or antiquarian recovery. Rather, “the dialectical—the Copernican—turn
of remembrance [Eingedenken]” functions as a solicitation, a call to a col-
lectivity to come. This is linked to the motif of awakening, put forth in
some entries of The Arcades Project and in “On the Concept of History,” and
it conveys, I will argue, a qualified performative intent, a reaching out to a
virtual collective to be constituted by awakening. “The realization of dream
elements in the course of waking up is the canon of dialectics. It is paradig-
matic for the thinker and binding for the historian,” he wrote in The Arcades
Project. Benjamin’s effort to transpose the dream phenomenon to the history
of a collective remained fragmentary, but it underlies the principle of retro-
grade temporality, which, I argue, is central to his idea of history.

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 acknowledgments

Over almost two decades, I have received encouragement and advice from
many quarters: first, from colleagues in the Critical Theory Institute (CTI)
and the Comparative Literature Department at the University of California,
Irvine, and especially Jane Newman. In addition, I am deeply grateful for a
Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993–94, which was important in the first stage
of my work. Finally, Ackbar Abbas, Michael Levine, and, most of all, Erin
Obodiac have proved invaluable in advising me more recently.

Earlier versions of some of the chapters appeared in the following publica-

tions: “Thematics and Historical Construction: The Example of Benjamin’s
Passagen-Werk,” Strumenti Critici, n.s. IV, 2 (May 1989), 25– 43; “Contexts of
the Aesthetic in Walter Benjamin,” MLN 114.5 (December 1999): 933–61;
“Epigones in the House of Language: Benjamin on Kraus,” Partial An-
swers 5, 1 ( January 2007): 17–32; and “Benjamin and Atget: Empty Streets
and the Fading of Aura,” Annals of Scholarship, forthcoming, 2014.

Irvine, California, December 2013

xiii

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F6448.indb xiv 11/10/14 12:09:58 PM
 . . . the conviction guiding me in my literary endeavors . . . That is to
say, the conviction that every truth has its home, its ancestral palace, in
language; and that this palace is constructed out of the oldest logoi; and
that insights of individual bodies of knowledge remain subordinate to
truth grounded in this way, insofar as, somewhat like nomads, they draw
here and there on the domains of language, caught up in that signifying
character of language that stamps its terminology with the most
irresponsible arbitrariness.
—to hugo von hofmannsthal,
January 13, 1924 (GB 2: 409)

You know that I have always written in accordance with my convictions,

but have seldom, and never otherwise than in conversation, made the
attempt to express the whole contradictory fundament from which they,
in their specific manifestations, derive.
— t o g e r s h o m s c h o l e m , May 6, 1934 (GB 4: 408)

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F6448.indb xvi 11/10/14 12:09:58 PM
 Introduction

Posthumous Fame

Walter Benjamin’s reputation emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, well after his
death in 1940, and to a degree that was hardly conceivable in his lifetime. As
his writings became known, they assumed a place alongside those of other
thinkers of the century—for example, Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger,
Foucault—who may be characterized as, in Foucault’s words, “initiators of
discursive practices,” authors who “produced not only their own work, but
the possibility and the rules of formation of other texts.”1 What is more,
Benjamin’s reputation has been singularly colored by a legendary “afterlife.”
Undoubtedly, his writings have been subject to scrupulous hermeneutic la-
bor, but the meanings drawn from them have been conditioned to a con-

1. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice,

ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 131.

F6448.indb 1 11/10/14 12:09:58 PM

 2 Introduction
siderable degree by circumstances relative to his biography and the context
of reception. Benjamin himself was keenly alert to this phenomenon, as is
evident in his treatment of Baudelaire.2 He enunciated the underlying issue
in The Arcades Project:
Historical “understanding” is to be grasped, in principle, as an afterlife
[Nachleben] of that which is understood; and what has been recognized in
the analysis of the “afterlife of works,” in the analysis of “fame” [Ruhm], is
therefore to be considered the foundation of history in general. (GS 5: 574f
[N 2, 3]; TAP 460)3

The “legend” of a writer should not supersede the interpretation of the

works, of course, but neither may it be ignored in evaluating their historical
impact. It represents an indispensable index of cultural-political currents at a
given moment. Benjamin was certainly sensitive to the “afterlife” of his own
writings, which is hardly surprising in view of his belief in the transformative
potential embedded in the “oppressed past” (unterdrückte Vergangenheit).
Detlev Schöttker goes so far as to speak of “strategies” and “calculation” on
Benjamin’s part in preparing his posthumous reputation.4
It is not accidental that Benjamin has been so eagerly received in recent
decades, that his works have enjoyed an almost instant canonization, that he
is cited, often for opposed ends, by the most diverse writers. There may be
a sense of delayed justice, an effort to pay restitution to an individual who
was ignored or misunderstood in his lifetime. The forms of the neglect and

2. “The figure of Baudelaire plays a decisive part in his fame [Ruhm]. . . . No

study of Baudelaire can fully explore the vitality of its subject without dealing with
the image [das Bild] of his life.” Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4 vols., ed. Mi-
chael W. Jennings, et al (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996 –2003), vol. 4:
168. In German, Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols., ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann
Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974 –89), vol. 1: 665.
Citations from these editions are identified henceforth as, respectively, SW and GS.
On Baudelaire, see also “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” GS 4: 12–13.
3. Citations from Das Passagen-Werk (in English as The Arcades Project) will hence-
forth be identified with the page number in the GS, vol. 5 and the designation that
Benjamin used within that work (for example, [N, 3, 1]), followed by TAP and the
page of The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
4. Detlev Schöttker provides an illuminating discussion of this issue in his Kon-
struktiver Fragmentariusmus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1999), 92–142.

F6448.indb 2 11/10/14 12:09:58 PM

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